Remote Control

by Jack Heath

  He fell to his knees and shuffled across the floor of the cell toward the clone, who backed into a corner. Eight months ago, Six had unwittingly stolen this boy’s body parts to save his own life; now he intended to steal more to save Kyntak. A part of him felt like he was no better than Vanish. But he knew that he had run out of options.

  Six held the syringe in his right hand, bracing himself against the floor with the left arm that he would never again think of as his own. The clone stared at the tip of the needle, his breath coming in rattly hisses from the mask that half concealed his deformed face.

  “I’m sorry,” Six whispered. “So sorry.”

  And he lowered the needle to the clone’s skin.

  Kyntak’s chest arched, his arms thrashed, and his whole body shuddered as a cough exploded out of his lungs. Six fell backward onto the floor of the cell as Kyntak gasped for air, hacking and wheezing on the table. Six stared at him, wide-eyed. A part of him had accepted that Kyntak was dead. The logical part, he thought. It’s a miracle!

  Kyntak rolled off the table and fell to the floor beside Six. “That,” he choked, “was the least pleasant experience…I’ve ever had in the line of duty.”

  “All you had to do was lie there.” Six coughed. “I was doing all the work.” He forced himself to think about the potential harm that the heart failure could have done to Kyntak. Brain damage was the most likely. “Do you remember who I am?”

  “I don’t feel brain-damaged, Six of Hearts,” Kyntak said. He stared gloomily at the floor of the cell.

  “It’s not something you feel,” Six replied. “What’s twenty-eight multiplied by seventeen?”

  Kyntak frowned. “Four hundred and seventy-six?” he said after a pause.

  Six nodded. “What color is the bandage around your wrist?”

  Kyntak grimaced. “Orange with red splotches.”

  Six shut his eyes and slumped back against the floor. Kyntak’s memory, sensory, and calculation apparatus all seemed to be okay.

  “Are we safe?” Kyntak asked. He thumped his chest with his fist and coughed again. “Are there guards coming?”

  “The elevator is disabled and all the guards on this floor are unconscious. We’re okay for the moment.”

  The clone in the corner whimpered—a muffled, hissing squeak. Kyntak saw him for the first time. “Who, or what, is that?” he demanded.

  “Our little brother,” Six said. “The clone that Crexe made last year to harvest body parts for me. Vanish stole him and kept him as a test subject.” He kept his eyes closed. “And I took his blood to replace the amount you lost.”

  “Wow,” Kyntak said, staring in horror at the boy’s glass eye, the respirator mask, and the stump where his arm should be. “That sucks.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Six began. “If—”

  “I know,” Kyntak said, cutting him off. “I’d be dead if it weren’t for you. And him. It just sucks, that’s all.”

  Six longed to remain lying on the floor and go to sleep. Every muscle screamed for rest. But there was still more to do.

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing the edge of the tabletop and dragging himself to his feet. “Vanish knows what floor we’re on. Soldiers are probably blocking off the exits as we speak, and since the elevator isn’t working, they’ll be looking for another way down. We have to get out of here.”

  Kyntak stood up slowly. “How? Even if we weren’t weakened and exhausted, we’re still hopelessly outnumbered. There’s no way we’re walking out the front door.”

  Six looked Kyntak in the eye and was frightened by the despair he saw there. He had given up, Six realized. Vanish had wrung the hope out of him like water from a sponge, and now all that was left was sorrow.

  “There’s always a way,” Six said. He wanted to put a reassuring hand on Kyntak’s shoulder, but couldn’t—it would seem too weird. “Always.”

  When they went back to the surgery room Six had passed on his original search, they discovered that some rations were kept in one of the drawers—small, heavy bars of protein, sugar, and vitamins. Six felt better after he had eaten four or five of them; the pain in his muscles died down, his headache disappeared, and he could already feel his body metabolizing the food and replenishing his blood. There were also clean clothes, both hospital scrubs and orange prison garb. Six told Kyntak everything that had happened since waking up in the morgue while Kyntak munched on the bars in silence. Six applied some styptic to Kyntak’s wrist to stop the bleeding properly as he talked, and replaced the torn-up shirt with proper gauze. He treated his own wounds too—the knife cut on his arm and the bruises from the fight with the bot. Then he grabbed a pair of scissors, a razor, and some shaving foam from one of the drawers—a plan was forming in his mind.

  They offered some food to the clone as well, but he wouldn’t touch it. The fear was gone from his gaze, replaced by a heavy-hearted resignation, an acceptance that no one was ever going to help him. They unwrapped the bars and left them on the table in his cell, hoping that he would eat them after they were gone.

  Six considered closing the cell door, so the clone would be safe until they came back for him. But he decided against it. There was a chance they weren’t coming back. If they died trying to escape, he didn’t want the clone left at Vanish’s mercy.

  “We’ll come back for you,” Six said. “We can’t take you with us now, but we’ll be back with help.” The clone stared helplessly down at the floor as Six rolled the door towards the wall, leaving a narrow crack. Hopefully any soldier who happened to look wouldn’t be paying enough attention to notice.

  Someone had called the elevator. The doors were sliding back and forth, starting to close and then backing off when the lasers sensed the gun lying in the way. Six suspected they didn’t have a lot of time. They went back to the sleeping troops.

  He started pulling their helmets off, looking at their faces. This one’s skin was too tan. The next one’s hair was blond—useless. The third was female. He kept looking.

  Kyntak was doing the same thing; he pulled the helmet off a sleeping soldier and held up the body so Six could see—it was a man in his early twenties. “What do you think?” he asked Six.

  Six nodded. “It’ll do.”

  “Give me the scissors,” Kyntak said.

  Six threw them to Kyntak, who started work immediately. Six kept pulling helmets off. Another woman, a guy who was too stocky…There! Perfect.

  “Six,” Kyntak said, pocketing the scissors and prodding his soldier. “This one’s waking up.”

  “Grab their remotes,” Six said. “Hit the SYNCAL button on them; keep them asleep.”

  We’ll have to hurry, he thought. He took a watch off the nearest soldier’s wrist and put it on. 05:27:27.

  There were sixteen soldiers in the room. Two on each side of the elevator door, three on each side of the stairwell entrance, and the remaining six distributed randomly throughout the room, crouching behind the bomb-making chambers, pressed up against the half-constructed vehicles, and standing guard by the glass cube.

  They had been thoroughly briefed on the situation. There were two escaped prisoners on the loose in the lower level. The elevator was the only way up, and the fugitives were expected to try to take it. The orders that the soldiers had been given were very clear. The mission priority was to keep them from getting past; the secondary objective was to leave them undamaged; and the escapees were to be considered dangerous even when unarmed. They had nanomachines in them, but they had jammed the elevator. This meant that there was no point in sending the “sleep” signal to the bottom floor. It would overdose the soldiers who were still down there, and the fugitives would wake up before anyone could get down there to recapture them. So instead, they guarded the elevator. The soldiers down there should wake up soon and take control. But if the escapees tried to come up, they could be taken down with the remotes. And the soldiers had been issued with AM-92s as backup.

  All heads turned and guns were raised as
the elevator doors slid open. There were two soldiers in it. The prisoners were slung over their soldiers, apparently unconscious.

  “Stand down,” the soldier carrying the bald prisoner said, walking forward out of the lift. “Holster your weapons. The situation has been neutralized.”

  “Don’t come any closer,” commanded a soldier standing next to the glass cube, not lowering his weapon. “Our orders state that the fugitives are not to pass this checkpoint. Why did you bring them up here?”

  “The cells have been compromised,” the soldier carrying the dark-haired prisoner said. “The lower level is no longer suitable for holding the prisoners.”

  “That information doesn’t match ours,” said one of the soldiers standing beside the elevator doors.

  The soldier carrying the dark-haired prisoner kept walking. “Then recheck with command. I’m prepping the hostages for transport.”

  “I said no closer!” repeated the one near the cube.

  “Well,” Six muttered under his breath, “it was worth a try.” He threw the orange-clad soldier at the one who’d just spoken and stepped backward, cracking his fist down onto the helmet of one of the door guards. He lunged forward, driving a solid uppercut into the ribs of the other guard beside the elevator, then he ducked. A Syncal dart cracked against the steel doors where his head had been and clinked uselessly against the ground. Six curled into a ball, exposing as little surface area as possible—Kyntak would take care of the threat.

  Kyntak did. He’d just finished wrestling two stunned troops to the ground when his head turned to face the sound of a tranq gun firing. Six watched him fly forward, energized by the transfusions, the rations, and the accelerant, slamming his left foot against the soldier’s right shoulder. The AM-92 went flying, and Kyntak pushed the soldier over backward with his palm.

  Six stood up again. That was six soldiers down, ten to go. He scooped up the AM-92 as he ran to the opposite side of the warehouse. One of the commandos was yelling into his helmet mike, “We need reinforcements at the Basement Two checkpoint,” when Six shot him. The Syncal dart zipped through the air, visible to Six’s accelerant-charged eyes, and slipped into the flesh under the soldier’s chin. He dropped like a stone.

  A dart was fired somewhere to his right—he spun to face the sound, ducking at the same time. The shot had been fired at Kyntak, not him, and Kyntak had dodged it, but there was a second guard taking aim. Six was about to charge forward to help when a gun butt hit him in the back of the head. He collapsed forward in surprise, dropping the tranq gun. The shock of the impact rever-berated around the inside of his helmet. His vision swam and his ears hissed as he tumbled towards the floor.

  As soon as his palms hit the concrete he kicked his legs backward, but it was a blind strike and his feet didn’t connect. Trying to predict the actions of the soldier who’d hit him, he rolled aside—his instincts were good, and a Syncal dart snapped down into the ground where he had just been. Six lay faceup as the soldier readjusted his aim. At Six’s heart.

  Tough break, Six thought as he pointed his remote at the soldier and clicked. The soldier fell like a puppet whose strings had snapped, smacking lifelessly down onto the floor.

  Six scrambled to his feet, picking up his AM-92 and that of the fallen soldier. Then he aimed them both across the room. He lined up the sights of the first at the soldier Kyntak was currently battling, and of the second at the soldier approaching Kyntak from behind.

  Bang! Bang! Both the soldiers fell, and Kyntak looked around, confused. Six waved before turning to face the remaining soldiers.

  Three had retreated back into the stairwell, presumably to wake up reinforcements from the barracks, but five stood their ground beside the doorway. Six stepped aside as a dart zipped past, and then fired the AM-92s again. Bang, bang—two down. Kyntak was coming out of a dive-roll towards the two troops closest to him, and he landed in a firing crouch, holding out his remote. The soldiers fell limply.

  The remaining soldier had dived to one side to avoid Six’s shots and was out of Kyntak’s range. She aimed at Six as she rose to her feet, her gun arm as steady as a rock, and pulled the trigger.

  Six saw the dart coming, but didn’t have time to throw himself out of the way. Instead, he reached up and caught it, stopping its flight only centimeters away from his shoulder. Then he threw it back as hard as he could, striking the soldier on the inner shin. She doubled over, half reaching for it, the accelerant in her blood fighting the Syncal for control—then she slumped to the ground.

  “I could get used to this ‘accelerant’ stuff,” Kyntak said, flexing his muscles. “Do you think we could take some with us?”

  “No,” Six said, walking back to the nanomachine factory cube. He picked up two more AM-92s as he went, and hooked them into his belt. “It’s bad for you.” He looked at his watch—it was 05:51:22. It seemed years ago that he had been raiding a warehouse looking for Nai, but it had been less than twenty-four hours.

  “Not as bad for you as getting killed in battle because you were too slow,” Kyntak said. “And if we—wait, what are you doing?”

  Six was leaning up against the giant cube, trying to push it. He had felt it move a centimeter—which meant it wasn’t bolted to the ground. “Moving this to cover the doorway. Shut up and help.”

  “Earth to Six,” Kyntak said. “That doorway is our escape route. It leads to the surface.”

  “No it doesn’t,” Six said, grunting as he pushed the cube. It crackled as it slid slowly across the gritty concrete. “It leads to a hundred freshly woken soldiers, who are being pumped up with accelerant as we speak, and who will soon be coming down this stairwell to get us.”

  “If we block the doorway now, how are we supposed to get out?” Kyntak demanded. “You think they’ll just forget we’re down here and leave?”

  “I have a plan,” Six said. “Now, are you going to stand there whining, or are you going to help me push?”

  Kyntak braced his arms against the cube. It started to grind steadily across the floor. “This plan,” he said. “It had better not involve running, falling, fighting, explosions, or gunfire, because I’ve had enough of those for one day.”

  They had barely moved the cube to cover the doorway when Six heard a thumping from the other side. He could dimly make out the silhouettes of Vanish’s soldiers pounding their fists against the glass. He had hoped that they would show concern for the safety of the equipment, and would be hesitant to try breaking through it. No such luck. But his second instinct had been correct. Because the glass cube had to be airtight and vacuum-sealed, it was structurally solid and the glass was very thick.

  The pounding ceased for a moment. Six saw a muzzle flash and heard the dim report of an Owl being fired at the glass, which didn’t break. Good.

  Six knew that if he and Kyntak had been able to push the cube all this way, a group of the soldiers would be able to push it back without too much difficulty, and it wouldn’t take them long to think of it. He ran over to the giant mechanical spider which had been working on the hollowed-out bus—it was now lying prone across the two remaining wheels, apparently having been shut down when the alert was sounded.

  Six hit the power button. A few eyelike lenses clicked sleepily open. He looked at the keypad—the controls seemed reasonably straightforward. He pressed a few keys, and the spider lifted the bus, rotated it so it was the right way up, and put it back down. Six touched four more buttons and the spider extended a long steel claw, pushing the bus across the room towards the cube. It stopped a few meters short, and Six didn’t think he’d be able to get the spider to relocate and keep pushing, so he hit the power switch again and ran over to the bus, beckoning to Kyntak.

  They pushed it up against the glass cube, adding its weight to the barrier. The thumps on the other side had stopped—Six hoped that the soldiers’ next strategy would be pushing rather than something he hadn’t foreseen.

  “Now what?” Kyntak asked.

  Six walked over
to an electrical generator and started to unscrew the bolts on one side of it with his Feather knife. A metal plate came free as he pulled, exposing the inner workings. Wires and cords were tangled everywhere—Six ignored them. In moments he had found what he was looking for—a vacuum tube. He pulled it free and rested it on the ground. There was a heavy coil of iron built into the inside wall, which he unscrewed and pulled free.

  Six left the vacuum tube and the iron coil on the floor and went over to a bomb-making chamber. First he removed the ChaoPull—a device for sucking air out of a sealed chamber. Then he punched the shatterproof glass, cracking it, and ripped the pane from its rubber seal. He grabbed the lump of grey plastic: C-4, he now realized.

  Kyntak gaped. “What are you making? An explosive-powered radio?”

  Six was stuffing the C-4 into the vacuum tube. “The soldiers outnumber us—and as long as their nanomachines function, they’ll have the edge.”

  Comprehension dawned in Kyntak’s eyes. “You think you can make an electromagnetic pulse bomb out of these scavenged parts. You think that if you set it off, the nanomachines will short out. Not only that, but you think that instead of pumping all of the Syncal, morphine, and accelerant into their systems and therefore either supercharging all the soldiers or killing them—and us, come to think of it—the nanos will become inert, and the accelerant will wear off. Then we’ll be able to move the bus and the cube, fight our way through the hundred or so soldiers, and walk out of here alive.” He paused. “Is that the plan, more or less?”

  Six looked up as he was screwing the iron coil onto the vacuum tube. “You have a problem with that?”

  “Heck no,” Kyntak said. “With you all the way.”

  A fuse, Six thought. I’ll need a fuse, and some cover. He went back to the electrical generator. “For the record, there’s more to this plan than just the EMP,” he said, pulling out wires. “We’re going to create a distraction to draw troops away from this floor. I need to radio out before the EMP fries all the transmitters in the building. Does the radio in your helmet work?”