Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

15

  October 30th.

  Matt Burke:

  Project Jericho:

  According to the flashware Grayman gave us, they’ve got four volunteer marts loaded with a designer virus—something disturbingly in the Ebola strain—that’s got an incubation delay timed to let the carriers do some serious mingling in a crowded public place before the bugs go airborne and start spreading. In turn, the bugs will let whoever they infect get pretty far from the original infection site before symptoms hit.

  In this case, they’ve targeted the Attico Metro, Athens’ beautiful new tourist-friendly subway network. Given the projected time delay, they could be sharing air with travelers who could be well on the other side of the planet before they drop. I guess the Wabs are trusting Allah (and the travel restrictions) to make sure it doesn’t get carried back to their own stomping grounds. (The whole trusting-in-Allah thing also means the Wabs don’t bother developing any kind of vaccine to protect their own—science being a Western Evil except when they can use it to slaughter people.)

  Which means if we let this get away from us here, we’d have to lock down the entire city, maybe the entire country. But then, the eternal problem with Greece is that it’s always been a smuggler’s paradise: too many islands, too much coastline. It’s never been securable. That’s how the Wabs operate here so well in the first place, despite how tight the Greeks are with the Coalition. And now they’re going to use it to start their own version of the end of the world.

  If we let it get away from us here.

  Grayman gave it to us. But then, he also instigated it, rushing the timeframe. I assume he realizes that he’s made us scramble just as much as the Wabs. I’m not sure whether I should thank him or shoot him the next time I see him.

  In his favor: The Wabs were going to do this anyway, probably within the next year or so, and by then they would have grown enough bugs and loaded up a dozen marts. This way, they’ve apparently only got four carriers recruited and ready for infection. And being that they had no time to test the strain, they don’t actually know how it will behave. Out of the lab, it might die off or mutate or drop their carriers before they get out the door.

  Against: Now the Wabs are going to expect interception. And the rule of Bushwar natural selection is that we’ve already killed off the stupid terrorists, leaving the canniest ones to fuck with us.

  So here I am, hanging out in a Greek subway station whose name I can’t even begin to pronounce, my interface shades wired into some bleeding-edge Hal that’s telling me it’s got the whole thing under control (which I can’t believe anyone buys, given it’s apparent track record so far, unless we’ve been played on this trip-down-the-rabbit-hole even beyond what my best paranoia can imagine). Trying to look like the only reason I’m sweating is that I’m some tourist from somewhere where an eighty-degree October is unthinkable. (I thought this was supposed to be a low-risk shakedown on some new intel-gathering computer brain—why are they willing to let it run a real live potential-fucking-apocalypse?) Trying to look nothing like I’m about to help save the goddamn world from a plague.

  Lunch traffic just starts getting thick when the first blip goes live.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  The fucking machine disorients me by flashing heads-up feed across my glasses: file photos of the probable carriers begin dropping into the glowing lines of the subway map as we get contacts. My glasses are wired for two-way feed, so Doc Becker’s Hal sees what I see—what each one of us sees—and uses that to help create its magic “battle-map”. Digital bastard even gives us marching orders: plotting the movements of our targets against our positions and telling us which way to huff it to get on them and start hemming them in.

  The problem being, we’re scattered across twenty different stations. That means—even with the extra guns Richards dragged in—we’ve got only three or four per site underground, and snipers on less than half of the street exits. And Richards (or is it Datascan?) doesn’t want to shift anybody until we’ve got all the contacts locked. By then, it could be too late.

  The wait for all four targets to surface gives one of them plenty of time to get himself on a train. Thankfully, Anderson and Ransom are onboard pretty much right behind him. Live feed shows the targeted mart looking edgy but seemingly oblivious to his tail. Hopefully he isn’t a good actor.

  I can watch the mart on the train over the heads-up, since we haven’t locked a target on my station yet—for now, I’m just a spectator. The train mart’s just a kid, really: bone-skinny and hollow-eyed like a junky or someone who’s seen way too much of what we do to certain countries from the air. But not looking like he knows he’s about to die drowning in his own bodily fluids sometime in the next few hours. I almost wonder if his handlers convinced him the virus wouldn’t kill him too. This makes me think about those “parental controls”.

  I watch the grid shift as one of the five bio teams shadows the target train at street level, ready to swoop in and bag the kid and seal off the immediate kill-site (this assuming the intel is good and we manage to dex him before he goes contagious).

  Blip Two surfaces at one of the south-end terminals. This mart’s a little more of what I would comfortably expect: heavy-set, designer leather to look like a rich tourist, head and beard shaved to hide the stereotyped profiling-triggers. He gets himself hung up in tourist traffic at the gates—which will make him harder to pick off—but at least it doesn’t look like he’ll be getting on a train anytime soon.

  “PROXIMITY WARNING: CAPTAIN BURKE: SUBJECT IDENTIFIED.”

  The machine’s cold synthetic vox buzzes in my jack and almost makes my knees go, flashing a graphic over a face bobbing in the crowd maybe twenty meters ahead of me. Mart Three’s another kid, but then they keep looking younger to me every year. He’s a short little shit—I’m surprised Doc’s toy scanned him since I can barely see the top of his head through about a hundred taller ones. But then I remember that the Datascan’s supposedly hacked the Metro’s security net, so it has more than just our eyes to play with.

  Then it unnerves me further by highlighting the guy’s head in my heads-up to facilitate visual tracking, so he’s got this disturbing digital halo as I follow his slow movement through the heavy current of commuters. Then the arrogant digital SOB flashes “CAPTAIN BURKE: INITIATE PARALLEL LATERAL TRACK” and draws lines and arrows across my vision, telling me which way it wants me to go.

  “That’s three live…” I hear Richards purr in my jack, sounding like he’d forgotten to breathe since Target One locked. He’s up in one of the bio trucks, probably already sealed in a MOPP-suit, playing armchair general. That, at least, is my one happy thought: the butt-hurt look on Richards face all day, as it finally sinks in that even though he’d been at least ostensibly running the show this far, now his higher-ups tell him he has to sit back and let some untried machine call the shots when it finally gets really important. Which makes me wonder if he ever was in charge of this op in the first place.

  “HOLDFIRE. INCOMPLETE LOCK.”

  I don’t get feed from any of the others anymore. Hal wants me focused on the job at hand. At least it lights-up Samuels, so I know where he is in the crowd, trying not to look like he’s eager to push his way through the bodies up on Shorty’s ass.

  “TARGET FOUR: LOCK.”

  No idea where—I wonder who’s got the last one—but then…

  “ENGAGE AND NEUTRALIZE. FIRING SOLUTION:”

  Now the son-of-a-bitch Hal draws lines of fire in front of my eyes telling me which way to shoot. Then it takes all the guesswork out of making the first move by cutting into the security system and blaring the alert sirens and slamming all the shutters down over the exits.

  This, of course, causes total panic in the tunnel station. The train that had been loading seals up tight, almost dismembering anyone in the doors as they snap shut and engage the bio-chem seals. I can hear people banging on the subway car windows and the airtight steel exit shutters over the scr
eaming and the sirens and the dull droning of the PA vox telling people not to panic in six languages.

  Shorty freezes up for about a half second and I almost lose him in the chaos but then I see him rip something out of his coat.

  “GUN!! EVERYBODY DOWN!!!”

  The sound of my own voice jolts me as Datascan automatically projects my shout over the PA at max volume, then immediately translates it into what I assume is Greek with an almost convincing panic. The crowd surges like a wave breaking on the tunnel platform and I see that Shorty’s got one of those damn plastic Fletchers so the weapons screens didn’t nail him bringing it down here and he’s looking for a target—any target—and then he just starts spraying in the same flash he picks me out. So I point my weapon and don’t care if it lines up with Hal’s neat “firing solution” or not and I just squeeze a handful of rounds back into the storm of darts he starts spitting, center-of-mass.

  I can feel flechettes slice into my hand and arm and face and thud into my body armor and ping off my glasses and I lose my gun but someone—Samuels—is still shooting and shooting and all I can see is a flailing running crawling mass of bodies as the tide of flesh and bone slams me back into the sterile tile of the terminal wall. I lose my legs in there somewhere—it is very much like getting hit by an actual wave—and wind up on my ass with my arms over my head trying not to get trampled and wondering where my gun went but all I see are bodies crawling over bodies.

  But no one is shooting anymore.

  “TARGET ONE NEUTRALIZED. TARGET THREE NEUTRALIZED. TARGET TWO…”

  “What… are we winning…?” I can barely breathe—it’s the best my brain can manage.

  “Burke!” Samuels. I think.

  The tide starts to ebb as anyone who can move gets as far away from the center of the storm as the security barriers will allow. I get enough light and air and peace to look at the bloody mess of my right arm, lanced through in a handful places including right between the bones of my middle two fingers from knuckle web to palm. The limb is numb and throbbing from the elbow down. I stare at it like a dumbshit until I realize that the right side of my face is wet and burning, and blood is dripping back past my ear, but I don’t have the nerve to go poking at it to feel how bad. Then my eyes focus a little farther off and I realize how lucky I was to have what armor I did.

  There’s a scattering of bloody bodies that looks like a vest went off—Shorty just started spraying everything with that fucking needlegun. My brain guesstimates about two dozen casualties, before I start getting shocky and need to fight the urge to puke. Most are still squirming crawling screaming but there are a number I can see that aren’t moving. The nice clean bright floor is splattered with blood. And I’m having to lay back again getting dizzy so I can’t see if Shorty is among the moving or the not moving.

  “You get him…?” I’m asking the ceiling lighting. The floor is nice and cool.

  “You got him,” Samuels tells me comfortingly. “I just got him got him.”

  I can see his face form in the silhouette that hovers over me.

  “Man down!” he’s saying to someone else, shaky under the cool casual calm he’s trying to maintain, which I’m worried is for my benefit. “Medivac. He’s chewed but not vital. Hang in, Captain…” That last part, that was to me.

  “Bag ‘em. Sweep it clean.” Richards. That was Richards. I’ve still got my jack on but my glasses have slid up my forehead. Over his cool orders (at least Hal is letting him direct the mopping up) the PA is droning in six different languages. When it gets around to the English version again I realize it’s trying to reassure people to stay calm and telling them not to bolt when the doors roll up. Which finally happens about the time I’m debating a nap. I can’t see the time, but I expect the locals rolled in fast as soon as the shit came. Armored CT cops and military. But they’ll keep their distance—just holding the crowds in—until the bio teams can jump in and bag up Shorty and start lining up everybody that was locked in here with him (with us) for shots and quarantine assignments should the initial blood work show any hot virus.

  Which is when I start wondering: So where is Grayman?

  “Captain Burke: Status?” Richards. In my ear. So nice of him to care. Wherever he is.

  “Looks worse than he is,” Samuels answers for me before I can think up something especially smart-assed. And then a medic team is all over me with packing and styptics.

  “Looks like everything just went clean through, Captain.” They say that, but they poke at me like I’m dead. I have to growl at them to make them get better bedside manners. But all I get is a doofy condescending grin as this blurry sergeant runs a field-scan over my face and arm. “Nothing arterial that shows. Lucky. Very lucky. But you’ll be butt-hurt for a while.” Asshole even talks like me.

  They whack my shoulder with a local to kill the throb and cover my eyes to spray some styptic on my face. Past them, I can see the MOPP suits zipping up what’s left of Shorty. I don’t get enough of a look for satisfaction.

  “I’ve got four cold,” someone is saying, “And nine I need rushed out STAT. The rest can sit. We can patch the majority and triage here. It could have been worse…”

  And I’m refusing something systemic (despite a flash of trivia that suggests PTSD is less likely if you pair getting your ass shot up with getting promptly whacked with something opiate-based—something about how the experience stores more positively if it’s colored by good drugs) and trying to sit my bloody ass up with one working arm when I feel the first big thump through the tile under me.

  Or through my head. I can’t really hear it. It vaguely reminds me of the bangerbees and their dumbass wall-shaking bazooka speakers: you can’t hear the tunes but you can hear everything rattling for blocks with every bass beat.

  And it is a beat: I can feel it coming in rhythm, but less like a beat than a wave, throbbing through the tunnels (and my skull), a half-second or so apart, each one stronger than the last. I feel myself getting sick again, but it’s not from the shock. And then I can hear things starting to rattle loose. Metal. Glass. Tile. My fillings.

  “Jesus fuck…” I think that was one of the medics, but my ears feel like they’re popping. “What is…?”

  Jericho.

  “…and the walls came tumbling down…”

  Grayman. Where is Grayman?