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Spooky’s trip back to Sydney was much more comfortable than the ride in the drone: first class on a Quantas jetliner out of Johannesburg. If not for his warring thoughts, he would have enjoyed it, though the plane was full for a Sunday. He’d been escorted on, VIP-style, at the last minute, as certain as it was possible to be that his enemies had not had time to act against him from this end.
As always, he had a plan for the other.
Not since before the Eden Plague repaired the brain damage he did not know was there, had such an easy decision seemed so difficult. He wondered what had made him agree so quickly to seize Australia. Impulse? Since when have I been impulsive, or anything less than self-serving? The whole thing smacked of sentimentality, something he had sworn to expunge from himself.
Now he wished he’d taken a trip up to Carletonville with Daniel, to see Elise and her team of biopsychologists, to delve more deeply into the Plague’s true effects on the brain and mind. He’d always assumed that the virus had remade him once, from something into something else, when he had contracted it. Now he began to wonder if the process had ever actually ended, or was ongoing.
And if it continued in him, then it did so in others? What would that mean, for himself, and for humanity’s evolution? Though that was perhaps the wrong word, as the virus was most assuredly a product of intelligent design.
He had agreed to seize power, but now he wished he hadn’t, so strong was the lure of self-discovery. Brutally, he forced that concern down.
Plenty of time for that when we beat this Destroyer.
Even so...when was a Psycho not a Psycho?
To this question, he fell asleep, waking only upon touching down.
This time Ann did not meet him; he had forbidden it, concerned that their mutual enemies might target them together. Better that he use his skills to make his stealthy way alone.
Pulling on a reflective vest and a ball cap, he held some cheap red ear protectors under his arm as he exited the plane. Instead of walking up the ramp, he spoke a quiet word in the ear of the short Asian man guarding the small emergency stairway at the jetway’s articulated corner. The worker handed him an airport badge.
Spooky walked through the “authorized personnel” door, clipped on the badge and slipped on the headgear as he descended the steps. Sauntering across the tarmac, he was now indistinguishable from the dozens of ground crew that scurried here and there, conducting the airport’s business.
Sticking to the secure pathways, he eventually exited the terminal in front, and took off the badge, vest and ear guards, shoving them under his arm. He ditched them in a nearby dustbin when the cab dropped him off at a corner near one of Direct Action’s clandestine offices.
Glancing around, he had a feeling of something out of place – perhaps of someone observing him closely. Smoothly he adjusted his cap in a nearby storefront window, using it as a mirror. It allowed him to spot a set of observers in a car just pulled up across the street.
Must have made me after all, and followed me from the airport.
Turning to his right, he stutter-stepped, then performed a rear-march without pausing as he saw two more men coming down the sidewalk, hands beneath their coats. The about-turn gained him nothing, however, as two more came from that direction. A quick spin spotted at least a dozen more closing in.
He thought he might be able to disable several and get away, but the guns they undoubtedly carried would cause chaos in the streets. While he did not care terribly about innocent death, he loathed the idea of making the evening news, and cameras looked down upon them from high on the walls. For someone who lived his life in the shadows, there had to be a better way.
Hurrying into the store, a popular coffee shop, he slipped through the press of patrons and out the back into the alley. As he stepped out the door, he saw the eyes of a strangely built man with a hoodie gaze at him from a metal face.
Then he felt a noose settle over his head.
Surprise did not stop him from reacting instantly as the loop closed with machine speed. Reaching up as it began to jerk skyward, he tightened his hands to keep his head from being ripped right off his shoulders, and then jackknifed his body to reach upward with his feet to grasp the cable like a circus acrobat.
Now looking up vertically along the line, he saw a man holding a winch control lever, gazing down at him with grim purpose from an opened window. Bereft of weapons, Spooky had only one choice.
Upside-down, he climbed like a gymnast with his hands alone. Nano-infused power allowed him to gain at least three meters, but the cable’s circle around his neck did not loosen enough to release him.
As he approached the winch and man, he saw only one chance to survive in literally one piece. Making a loop with the available slack, he grasped it with one hand like a cowboy with a lasso, and as his feet reached the upper window frame, he dropped the circle over the man’s head.
Now his attacker had a dilemma. Continue taking up the cable, and the winch would pull his own head off first. Or, stop the winch and try to free himself.
He chose the latter, the only rational decision for a human being.
As the man struggled with the noose around his neck, Spooky arched his body into the window to place his feet on the floor, then he kicked his assailant in the gut as hard as he could. He could feel organs rupture as his curled-back toes dug deep, tearing skin and ripping muscle.
Spooky’s triumph was short-lived, however, as bullets stitched across the wall near him. One caught him in the side, and he ignored the flare of pain to reach down and flip up a chair in the direction of the shooter, apparently the winch-man’s backup. With the cable around his neck, his options seemed few.
The chair caused the shooter to dodge for long enough that Spooky could reach up to open the loop around his neck. Muscles bulged with nanite strength as he overcame the tightening clamp with pure power. He felt the skin of his fingers abrade and a muscle in his left forearm rip loose from the bone with the effort, but he was able to squeeze the cable over his head and off.
Then it became a weapon, his only one.
The cable was about a quarter inch across, braided of steel, and so weighed enough to be used as a crude flail. Holding about a meter of it with its head-sized clamped loop, Spooky dodged forward even as the gunman ripped off another burst.
He dropped to roll under the bullets, hanging on to the cable all the while, and then swung it like a metal whip in a whirling blow that caught the submachine gun’s magazine and spun the weapon out of the man’s hands. Two quick strikes, forehand and back, with his good right hand put the man down, skull shattered.
The room he occupied appeared to be an office, luxuriously furnished. Glancing out the window, he spotted four men waiting at the bottom aiming guns, looking up. Bullets followed his head as he yanked it back in out of the line of fire.
No one with a hoodie.
Spooky wondered what the plan had been. Was the metal-faced man wearing combat armor, a nanocommando deemed sufficient to finish him off as he hung in the air from the cable? They had suckered him well, driving him through the obvious escape route and into their trap. Had the winch-man made a mistake? Or had he been a glory hound, certain that he had his quarry helpless and wanting to make the kill himself?
Those questions would have to wait. Crossing the room to pick up the second man’s weapon, a submachine gun of Uzi make, Spooky lay down and crawled to the interior door, pressing his eye to the crack beneath. Nothing could be seen within three or four meters distance, no feet waiting immediately outside, so he rolled out of the way and reached for the knob. Opening it slowly, he saw nothing and drew no reaction.
Obviously bringing him all the way up here had not been in their plans, else they would have had more than two men waiting, and that gave him his opening. The clandestine Direct Action office rested within a building next to this one, a similar ten-story corporate structure that would lease space to anyone with money. He recalled that a fourth-floor midair glass walkway linked the two, and he now ran through halls empty on this Sunday, searching for the way across.
Then he skidded to a halt.
While his attackers seemed to have made a mistake, one obvious backup plan would involve the connecting corridor, if they knew about his destination: a trap within a trap. Suspended in the air, the bottleneck would surround him with glass, with nowhere to go. If they were waiting at both ends...he might survive a forty-foot drop to the pavement, but he would likely be further injured, making him a sitting duck.
His left arm was still useless, but he had gained a firearm. There must be at least eight ways out of the building, two emergency exits on each side. Better to take his chances on one of them, or perhaps break a window from the second floor and make the easy leap to a grassy knoll in the landscaping.
Pounding steps could be heard from the direction of the main stairs near the elevator well in the center of the building, so he ran for one side, perpendicular to the alley wall of the winch, or that of the connecting walkway. Reaching the end of the corridor, he found the exit steps.
Hearing the heavy tread coming after, he turned at the stairwell door and aimed his Uzi down the corridor the way he had come. Just one man followed him. The one with the hoodie, and the metal face.
Spooky fired one burst, striking the man center mass. As expected, this yielded no result, but he’d had to try, in case his assumption about the armor was incorrect. He snarled and leaped down the stairs.
Bigger, just as fast, probably tougher, especially compared to his own injured state, and relatively immune to bullets, his opponent had little to fear. The only thing Spooky could do was run, escape. On the second floor he exited the stairwell and hurried three doors down, desiring to get away from anyone waiting at the exit below. A powerful kick snapped the lock and he entered the office. Without pausing, he launched a heavy lounge chair with his foot, directly through the external floor-to-ceiling glass.
Then he followed it.
Bullets ripped the air above him as he struck the grass below and rolled through the shards, cutting his shoulder lightly. Using his momentum, he spun to his feet and leaped ten meters across an ornamental pond, prompting a burning agony where he had been shot.
Behind him he heard the heavy thud of the big man dropping to the ground and following. Without looking back, he ignored the pain and accelerated, his legs churning faster than any mere human.
An Olympic sprinter can briefly approach forty kilometers per hour. Spooky sustained at least seventy as he aimed himself down a nearby street to run alongside rolling cars. As soon as he came to a red light, he used the level rear deck of one to vault over the mass, landing on the hood of a taxi in the front before stepping down and turning to avoid the cross traffic.
This gave him a chance to glance back the way he came, and he saw his pursuer still coming on, nearly as fast as he. Spooky cursed the ancestral gods he did not believe in and racked his brain for some way out of this dilemma.
Almost, he face-palmed himself for forgetting the obvious, until now. Slowing his sprint, he reached out to deftly snatch a phone from a pedestrian’s hand, drawing a shrieking complaint. Making sure he was not losing ground as he wove through traffic, he dialed a number from memory, then spoke a code phrase once it connected, and a location.
Sirens wailed as the city’s police force woke up to the mayhem. Spooky took a left, continuing to put distance between him and his original drop-off location, ensuring that he was not driven back into the arms of his attackers. Only the one man still pursued, the dogged armored nanocommando.
Ahead he spotted police cars setting up a roadblock, but too slowly, and all unready. Leaping over a vehicle, he lightly brushed its flashing lights as he continued past. Yells to stop followed, turning to cries of outrage as his pursuer ran heavily between the blockers, sending two officers flying on his way through.
One more minute of sprinting and dodging brought him within sight of his goal: the Harbour Bridge. Racing along the elevated roadway that approached it, and seeing the man followed him still, he flung the Uzi away as soon as he reached the edge of Dawes Point, and crossed to the bridge proper above the water. The weapon performed a long graceful ballistic arc that ended in a splash. Considering what waited at the other end, he did not want anyone making any targeting mistakes, and if he ended up in official custody...better to be without it.
The demands he had made upon his body took their toll and he slowed, breathing heavily. Cradling his useless arm made his running ever more awkward as the pain and injury made itself felt. Spooky had ignored both for a time, using Dadirri techniques, but every body had its limit, especially as the nano and Eden Plague tried to heal him without the benefit of extra nutrients, or sufficient water.
Pushing aside the hunger and thirst he jogged onward, glancing over his shoulder from time to time to make sure the other did not get too close. He moved over to the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, which eased the outraged honking that accompanied him.
By the middle of the bridge his body began to betray him, so he slowed further. Gritting his teeth against a blossoming cramp and the fire in his side, he tried to conserve his strength, timing his arrival for the moment when he would inevitably be overtaken.
Holding the phone to his lips, he reported his position and situation, describing his nemesis, and his own clothes for good measure. Behind him he could feel the implacable thumping of heavy boots on the walkway, and Spooky considered the possibility that he would have to leap over the railing and into the water, as a last resort.
He hoped the man’s armor was heavy, and that he would not swim well.
One hundred meters from the end, he could see two SUVs parked, backs to him, blocking one lane of outbound traffic. Somehow they had come up the wrong way and managed to set up at the designated spot, and Spooky blessed those same ancestral gods now as he stumbled toward them. Eighty meters...sixty...he could hear the pounding, pounding of feet, could imagine he felt the man’s hot breath upon his neck.
Putting on a desperate burst of speed, he held the distance until forty meters, thirty, twenty...ten...not since he had hiked out of Vietnam into Cambodia with his dying father on his back had he been so close to physical collapse.
As he passed the nearer SUV, a passenger door opened on the farther one. Spooky dove into it, pulled the armored slab closed and turned to look over the back seat.
At the same time the rear gate door of the other vehicle flew up. Spooky could not see what awaited the pursuer, but he suddenly stumbled and jerked to a halt, lightnings arcing along his body as he grabbed for the guardrail. Hanging heavily onto the metal, sparks from ricochets showed where shock projectiles, fired from the back of the SUV, missed the metal-faced man to strike the surrounding bridge structure.
Like a Frankenstein’s golem, the figure turned and tried to get away, then sagged. With one final convulsive effort he rolled himself over the railing and fell.
Leaping out of the SUV, Spooky walked unsteadily to the edge in time to see the weighty splash as he impacted the water twenty meters below. He watched for long moments as nothing surfaced, until the Direct Action operatives in the SUVs called to him, warning of police on their way.
“Take me to Headquarters,” he instructed once he’d climbed back in.
A draw, then, really. He’d killed a couple of minor foot soldiers in his enemy’s ranks, and he had gotten away from the ace in the hole, the real hit man. As his two armored SUVs drove sedately away from the scene toward his stronghold, he wondered who had initiated the attack.
The obvious answer was Ariadne Smythe, who had tried to thwart him before, so that’s where he would start. Even if she was not behind this, she would have to be eliminated if he was to take over as Markis had asked him to.
A more interesting question was, from where had they obtained a full nanocommando? He’d made the non-replicating, partial-power version of nano widely available to the Free Communities governments, for the Space Marines and other appropriate military forces, but this man had possessed speed, strength and endurance akin to Spooky’s own.
Perhaps even superior to it.
That limited the possibilities, and pointed at the U.S. Tiny Fortress program. Either someone in Direct Action had betrayed him and given away some of his prized nanites in his absence – or his enemies had acquired another, maybe better version, from the U.S.
Which if true, led to another unsettling question: was it the Americans official doing, or had it gotten away from them, perhaps via a rogue agent?
The fact that there was only a single superman involved was a good sign, however. If the nano was self-replicating, it could have been used to infect any number of attackers. Instead, there had been only one.
Spooky hoped that meant it could only be used on a single individual.
Now forewarned, he began to plan how to deal with this new threat.
* * *
Ten minutes later a man in tattered clothing walked out of Sydney Harbor and into Dawes Point Park, a small swatch of grass and trees tucked beneath the Harbour Bridge. A few onlookers gazed curiously at him as he squelched by in soggy boots, jeans and hoodie, but only hours later did one of them think to report the incident to the police, after seeing the evening news.
A normal human being, even a nanocommando, might have pulled out a phone and made a call. This man merely activated an internal mechanism, electronically dialing a number from equally electronic augmented memory.
“Eliminator,” he sent in a synthesized internal voice. No noise emanated from his body. Instead, an internal generator sent a mobile network signal that was interpreted at the other end as sound, so to the woman listening it seemed she was carrying on a normal conversation.
“Is it done?”
“Negative. The target was wounded but escaped.”
“Sodding hell. Not such a piece of piss as you thought, eh?”
Walking down the park’s access road, the man remained silent, with nothing to say.
“Return to base, then.” The connection closed.
The hit man’s next call was to his team, calling for vehicular pickup as soon as they were done with cursory cleanup efforts at the attack scene. At least they would remove the bodies and equipment. Despite the screw-up that let the target slip away, he had confidence they could do a simple job like that and avoid the dragnet. Since most Australians were Edens now, crime, and therefore the need for police resources, had dwindled enormously.
He waited in an alley until the Land Rover came. As he climbed into the back seat, its frame settled perceptibly on its wheels. “Return to base,” he repeated his boss’s instruction to the driver, then closed his eyes and opened the files in his head, already planning his next move.
The chips in his head and their programming forced him to take his instructions from the owner of that voiceprint, but he was not a robot. Rather, his conscience had simply been burned out of him through brutal and ecstatic conditioning, raw pain and pleasure pumped into his nerves and brain, and the guardian code hovered in the background all the time, watching.
But the human brain is a complex and devious thing, and he had found over several missions that he had a lot of leeway when his instructions were not specific. If he was told to terminate a target at a certain place and time, but no more, then he might have complete freedom to choose the method. Usually many caveats were placed on him, such as “avoid collateral damage” or “do not be identified as a Shadow,” but as in any deal with the devil, there was the spirit of his instructions and there was the letter.
Not that he intended to violate either any time soon, but no amount of conditioning could burn out a man’s basic biological drives – survival, freedom, sex...revenge. That’s why he had made sure it was he who had been given to the Australian bitch, whose goals aligned so nicely with his own.
Markis was outside of his reach for now, and Larry Nightingale. Skull was dead, more’s the pity, and so was Zeke Johnstone. That left Spooky, who he’d come so close to today. Well, he’d have another chance, he swore.
When the Land Rover pulled up to the Central Authority compound’s gate, he pulled his metal face off, revealing a bland visage of flesh very similar to the one he’d started life with. The reconstructive efforts of Eden Plague and nano had allowed for extensive surgeries and implantations, but they had a certain memory that tried to rebuild what was there before. That face used to belong to a man named Miguel Carrasco, former Texas Ranger, former security contractor, former and current rapist.
He dreamed of showing his targets that face before they died.
Without the metal mask that armored him, he could pass for human. With it, he need fear little but a lucky shot to an eye, and it also had its uses as a weapon of surprise and terror.
Except Nguyen had not been terrified, and hardly surprised. The Carrasco cyborg knew the man would be very slippery, but he’d thought the plan foolproof. In fact, if the damned idiot on the winch had not screwed up, it would have been as simple as reaching up and pulling his target’s arms and legs off as a cruel child dismembers an insect.
An insect...that’s what Nguyen was. A very quick, very dangerous insect.
A pain began to grow between his ears and the metal man looked up to find that the vehicle had already entered the underground parking garage of the Central Authority complex and parked. The two pickup men had left him sitting there, probably eager to get as far from him as possible. He saw one of them turning in the keys at the dispatch window.
Another insect.
He then promptly forgot about him.
The pain told him to report to his cell, linked to a simple verbal command that had routed itself to him via the wireless network. Because he had never been told not to, he had built up quite a database of words in that specific voiceprint. Perhaps, when the time was right, he might be able to use the recordings to construct a method of countermanding the real orders, by talking to the chips in his head with that voice.
Survival was a given. Freedom was his plan. Revenge was a long-term goal. The last drive, sex, waited for him back in his cell, he hoped. Unless the bitch denied him his reward because of the screw-ups of others. Well, one day perhaps, she would reward him with herself.
Against her will, of course. Nothing else was as much fun.
