by J. N. Chaney
Oubrick cupped his ear and screamed over at Heather, “You little whore!”
His rage created a new window of opportunity for me and I exploited it, swinging my sword at the back of his leg. The blade went deep, cutting into the muscle and stopping at the bone. Oubrick roared. He turned back to look at the injury and then glared up at me. I pulled the sword away but it didn’t budge. It was lodged in the back of his thigh bone.
Oubrick struck my sword hand with his shaft. My hand exploded in heat and I jerked it away, leaving the sword in Oubrick’s leg. He laughed, reached down, and wiggled the blade free of his leg. Now he had two weapons and I had none. But given how much blood I saw pooling on the floor, the man didn’t have long.
“You know,” Oubrick said, smearing his blood across his face with the back of his hand, “when my employer presented us with the assignments and I saw your name on the employee roster, I took the Oragga Complex just for this. Just so I could look you in the eyes as I killed you.”
“Well, I hate to disappoint you, but we’re going to have to tell your employer that you came up empty handed on both fronts.”
Oubrick spit on the ground. “They never come up empty handed, fool.” He paused and cocked his head at me. “You don’t even know what this is all about, do you,” Oubrick said, wincing as he took a step toward me. “I bet you haven’t a clue what’s in those cases.”
“I would if a certain AI had clued me in,” I mumbled.
“Sir, as I said—”
“Don’t care, Lars. It’s too late for apologies.” For some strange reason, I really enjoyed hearing the sound of his voice right then. I almost felt bad about cutting him off. But he had been a real dick about the information.
Suddenly, a massive explosion detonated from somewhere up in the tower; I guessed it was another neutron bomb that finally decided to go off. The floor dropped another meter. For the briefest moment, I was weightless and then slammed into the ground, collapsing to my hands and knees.
Heather screamed, and Oubrick lost his grip on both weapons. They clattered to the floor and then started sliding toward the far wall near a bank of elevators. The building was shifting again.
We all began sliding in the direction of the elevators, our bodies picking up speed as we went. Heather was the first to hit the wall. I heard something snap and she cried out. A crate slammed against her and she yelled again, pinned against the wall.
Oubrick was next, but despite his injuries, he still managed to absorb his impact with the oncoming wall with his legs. He grunted and then started crawling toward the sword. I was the last to collide with the wall and couldn’t quite get my legs around. I took the brunt of the blow to my hip and outstretched hand. It hurt like hells, but I was still in one piece. And I was also weaponless.
That was when I remembered the knife in my belt loops. Would it still be there? I reached a hand back and—sure enough—my fingers found the handle. Oubrick charged me and I brought the knife up to parry his chop. He may have been badly wounded, but the tall man was a fighter. The next several blows came in rapid succession as I blocked one after another, first left, then right, then left again.
A tremor shook my body again. I tried to look for something to hold on to, but nothing stood out. The building lurched, leveling out in a matter of seconds. It was going to break free any second it felt like.
“Sir?” Lars asked.
“Talk to me, Lars!” I yelled. “Tell me you have some good news!”
Oubrick roared, regained his feet, and came barreling toward me. I parried his thrust with my knife, but barely. Somehow, I was beginning to feel weak. And a resurgence of pain was beginning to spread throughout my body. The drug is wearing off, I realized. Not now. Not now!
“It’s the opposite, sir,” Lars said. “Platform cohesion is now at forty-eight percent.”
“Forty-eight?!”
Oubrick swung again and I backed away, narrowly missing a sword tip in my gut. Where my strength was failing, Oubrick’s seemed to be ramping up. But why wouldn’t he be? His adrenaline was kicking in as his body was most likely minutes away from death, whereas my adrenaline had been pumping for the last hour almost non-stop. My reserves were low, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stay in this fight. I looked to Heather, but she was pinned against the elevator wall by the crates.
“Also, sir,” said Lars, “please be advised that someone else has come down the stairs and is about to enter the hangar.”
“What do you mean someone else?” I asked, not hiding my frustration with his lack of detail.
“She has managed to stay mostly outside of all the cameras’s fields of view. But it appears to be one of the former hostages,” Lars said. “A female.”
“A female?”
I blocked another thrust from Oubrick and looked back toward the double doors. A woman burst out, one I recognized, but she looked different. Gone were the stiletto heels and girlish demeanor. Her midnight black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she’d torn off her form-fitting dress above the knee. Now she held three small blades in her left hand and was running toward me. It was Rachel Fontaine.
“Rachel?” I asked no one in particular. What was she doing here?
I suddenly felt like I’d been duped. Hiding in the security hallway, hacking in Reynold’s office… She was one of them. And she’d gotten me good, what with her good looks and giant tears. I’d fallen for it. Damn, had I fallen for it. Now the lady looked deadly. Real deadly.
Then again, she had ended Travis with a gunshot wound to the base of the skull. She wouldn’t kill one of her own, would she? Unless, of course, she was some sort of rogue assassin. A grifter with a penchant to kill.
“Is she one of them?” I asked Lars.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“It appears now that her company record only dates back three weeks.”
“Three weeks? You’ve got to be joking!”
“I’m not joking, sir. This doesn’t seem like the time.”
Rachel was crossing the hangar faster than I could think, and I was still dodging Oubrick’s blows. I couldn’t tell which one of us she was looking at. But there was no time.
“Platform cohesion at forty-nine percent, sir.”
“Godsdammit, Lars!”
Oubrick didn’t seem to notice Rachel, which made me think she was with him and that this was all part of his plan. But then again, he seemed desperate; men with backup plans didn’t fight like this. He jabbed twice more, his blade piercing my left pectoral and then my right shoulder.
I blocked several more wild blows from the enraged Oubrick. Spittle flew from his mouth while blood stained my uniform. Then I jabbed twice at his face, putting him on the defensive. The reprieve lasted only a moment. He swung at my abdomen, making me leap backward.
I glanced over my shoulder to see that Rachel was about fifteen meters away, running toward us with her knives—and I still couldn’t tell whose side she was on!
Oubrick shoved me back, causing me to trip over my feet. I was so focused on not falling that I failed to block his final jab. The sword point flew at my chest.
Clank!
I looked down and saw the sword tip embedded in my flask. When I looked back up, Oubrick’s eyes went wide. He was as shocked as I was.
Because a knife protruded from the side of his shoulder. A second one appeared beside it, followed by a third in his abdomen. Oubrick reared back, screaming like a wild animal. I watched as Rachel leaped onto Oubrick, pulled one of her knives from his side, and began slashing at his face. Oubrick tried blocking her blows with his arms, but the woman was far too skilled. He screamed as she sliced him to ribbons. Gods… who was she?
Sensing that Oubrick wouldn’t recover from Rachel’s assault, I raced toward Heather and helped her out from behind the crates. She was groggy but didn’t look to be too badly injured.
“Sir,” Lars said, “platform integrity
—”
“Lars! Can you disconnect the elevator cable from its base?”
“Yes, sir, but I—”
“Open the elevator doors!”
“Opening, sir. However, the elevator is currently in the upper building and will take—”
“I don’t give a damn!” I ran Heather toward the opening doors and saw the cable about two meters out. “Disconnect it on my mark, Lars!”
“As you wish, sir.”
“Hold on, babe!” I said to Heather. I pulled her into my chest with my left arm and then leaped into the air, reaching toward the cable with my right. My hand snagged the line and I squeezed. The braided weave pinched into my flesh as our combined weight made my hand slide down the cable. I thought I might lose my grip, but I hadn’t come this far just for my right hand to give out.
“Platform cohesion at fifty percent and rising, sir,” Lars said.
An ear-splitting groan ripped down the elevator shaft. For a split second, I thought the elevator car had broken loose and was headed our way. But a quick glance up showed nothing there. Instead, I realized that the building was coming free.
“Platform cohesion at seventy-six—”
“Arrrrrgh!” I yelled as I struggled to keep Heather and me on the cable.
I was about to order Lars to disconnect the cable when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure leap into the elevator shaft. I caught a glimpse of Oubrick’s shredded face like something out of a horror-holo. He grabbed on to my shoulder. When his full weight hit me, it ripped my hand off the cable, sending Heather and me into a free fall.
We only fell for a second, rotating as we went, before landing in the elevator shaft’s basement. My body exploded in pain as my knees, hips, and spine buckled in agony. I was on my chest and tried to cry out, but no sound came. Instead, I found Oubrick underneath me, glaring up with wild bloodshot eyes. Heather screamed out my name to my right on the other side of the cable—she was still alive, struggling to hold on to the cable’s yellow base plate.
The elevator shaft’s floor began to tremble. The cable strained, and a deep twang resonated up into the darkness. Then it went slack again as the structure lurched and released pressure on it. The whole thing was about to come down.
Oubrick pulled one of Rachel’s remaining knives from his shoulder and cut me along the cheek. I held my left arm up to resist him, but still he fought, the blade’s edge moving toward my eye.
“Disconnect it, Lars! Disconnect!”
“Cable plate separation confirmed, sir.”
I felt the plate wiggle free of the lower housing, biting into my armpit. The AI had done it.
“Platform cohesion at ninety-nine percent. It has been a pleasure serving you, sir. Goodbye.”
“This is for my son,” Oubrick yelled, pressing the blade within centimeters of my eye.
“And this,” I said, holding his arm back, “is for all the hostages you killed, you son of a bitch.”
I wrapped my right arm around over the cable plate and grabbed Heather’s wrist on the other side. At the same moment, the elevator’s basement pulled away in a deafening groan of metal-on-metal. A blast of wind beat my face as the shaft filled with air displaced from a thirty-story building giving up on its long fight with gravity.
“Tootle-fuckin-loo, bitch,” I said.
Oubrick’s mouth opened as he pulled away from me, but his voice was lost in the torrent of air swirling around us. As the opening to the hangar passed, I saw another body leap into the elevator shaft. It was Rachel. Her body was suspended in mid-air for the briefest moment, sailing toward the cable as the entire structure fell away. At the last second, her arms wrapped around my knees and her body swung all of us out to the side. The additional weight yanked my arm out of its socket. I groaned in agony.
Still, I kept my hand-hold on Heather and managed to throw my left arm over the other side of the cable’s base plate. Rachel struggled to hold on too, but her grip slackened. She slid down to my ankles. I looked down and yelled, “Hold on!”
“I’m trying!”
The elevator shaft raced beside me. Floor after floor went by as the walls accelerated faster and faster. The chamber went by in a flurry of wind and sound. Electrical connections burst, shooting sparks across our three bodies. Metal plates and vent grates bounced between the walls. And bits of concrete struck my head and arms, threatening to knock me from my perch. But I wasn’t going down easy. Not today.
I looked up and saw the mouth of the elevator shaft on fire. The flaming hole raced toward us at breakneck speed. More debris came with it, clattering down through the shaft.
“HOLD ON!” I yelled.
The fiery mouth was the last thing to race past us, flames whipping in a torrent, as the building fell away. The tower kept groaning as it went, metal tearing, windows exploding, I-beams buckling. The monstrosity rotated as if in slow motion, plummeting toward the planet’s surface, until it disappeared beneath the moon-lit cloud floor.
The building left a wispy white hole in its wake. I watched as small electrical charges created soft motes of light within the haze. The sounds were distant now, mere whispers of what they had been. Suddenly, a massive orange glow erupted from the planet’s surface—a mix of unspent neutron bombs, gasses, and electrical current coalescing into a giant inferno that shook the sky. A black plume emerged, pushing aside the white billowing clouds. Lightning danced through the clouds, washing everything in brilliant white light.
“Lars,” I said, looking high over my head. “Care to—” I grunted, my arm on fire. “Care to call us a ride?”
I fought to keep my hand on Heather, but her white-knuckled grip around the cable and its base plate let me know she wasn’t going anywhere. I glanced down at Rachel. She clung to me like a cat who had no intention of wasting her nine lives on this one fall. We swung there at the end of a thirty-story cable, some one-hundred-and-fifty meters below the platform.
“Lars?” I asked again. “You there, buddy?”
As if to emphasize the point, another massive explosion rocked the planet’s surface ten kilometers below. That was when I remembered that he was housed in Oragga’s office. “Damn,” I said. “And I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
Less than a minute later, several shuttles dropped below the platform’s horizon and spotted us with their forward lights. I couldn’t recall a time that I’d been so happy to see the Union in all my life. And their timing couldn’t have been better. My limbs were beginning to shake uncontrollably as I approached muscle failure in… damn, my whole body, I guess.
“I take it all back,” I said to no one in particular, swinging there below the platform. “I’m never taking an elevator again.”
A shuttle slid in underneath us and opened a hatch in the top of its fuselage. I saw two uniformed crew reach their hands up and coax Rachel’s legs toward the opening. The shuttle continued to ascend until the men could grab Rachel and pull her inside. Heather was next. She fell willingly into the crew’s hands, trembling as they pulled her below.
Just before my arms gave out and I fell into the care of the Union, I looked around the shuttle’s wings and into the clouds below. “Thanks, Mr. Invisible,” I said to Lars. “For everything.”
26
A week passed before I replied to a message from Mr. Oragga’s assistant. Not his assistant’s assistant, but the main gatekeeper herself. The communique simply asked for me to meet Oragga at his Sellion City residence at my earliest convenience. I didn’t have to be an elite member of society to know that letting someone like me pick their own time for a meeting was a big deal.
My delay was understandable, however, as I’d spent most of the week in the hospital, getting poked, prodded, and probed—yes, probed—by every manner of medical device ever invented, it seemed. The medical staff treated me like royalty, word spreading quickly throughout the floor that I was that guy that saved all the hostages. I was asked for several autographs, signing everything from casts to napkins,
and several body parts—several of which were more fun to sign than others.
The doctors said I was in pretty good condition, all things considered. I figured what they meant to say was that for someone who’d been shot at, stabbed, body-slammed, and nearly thrown off the platform, I was a damned wonder boy. Still, they did things by the book and took their time patching me up. Being a minor celebrity had its perks, and I intended to run with them as long as they lasted. The funny thing about fame is that it’s fleeting. I bet imaginary credits against myself that the whole planet would forget my first name by next week, and my last name in less than two months. And in six months, someone on the street might recognize my face, but they’d snap their fingers as they tried to place me.
For now, I was enjoying the attention. It felt kinda nice. Though I could have done without all the nurses always turning the holo-feed on in my recovery room. Anytime my face was on the news, they liked to point at the feed and say, “That’s you, Mr. Reed!” As if I didn’t already know.
Lying in the hospital bed did get kind of boring. Sure, I had plenty of messages to watch and read—Mr. Oragga’s one of the most interesting ones by far. Another from the incoming mayor congratulating me and inviting me to dinner at his mansion was pretty cool too. Then there were thousands of fan letters. I had marriage proposals, people asking me to have kids with them (literally), and more than a few love notes from inmates. And if the pictures and videos they sent were to be believed, several of the ladies were pretty cute.
Chief Bill Meeks actually came by to visit—twice. He was the only non-medical personnel who’d been allowed to come see me. He snuck beers in under his firefighter jacket and produced a bottle opener from his boot.