King of Hearts hit the button to unlock his office door. The QS opened the door, but didn’t step inside.
“May I come in?” she asked. Her voice was casual, but not friendly.
“Of course you can,” King said. “If I refused, you could have me arrested. Make this your own office, and come in whenever you like.”
She sat down opposite him. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that the Spades perform a necessary function here,” she said.
“You’re right. You don’t need to tell me.”
“Without a fail-safe,” she continued, “the Deck would become corrupt. The Code would change, the agents would create their own agendas, and then the whole thing would either fragment into cells or become a company as bad as ChaoSonic. Neither of us wants that.”
“Why are you lecturing me about this?” King demanded. “I was there when the rules were made!”
“Is that a license to break them?” the QS asked. “I just want to point out that balance needs to be maintained. The Hearts and Diamonds are useless without the Spades keeping them in line; the Spades have no function without the red suits to monitor; and we’d all disappear without the Clubs training new recruits.” She leaned across his desk. “You know I have a right to be here.”
“No, you don’t,” King said. “Agent Six of Hearts is the finest agent we’ve ever had. You’ve seen his mission records.”
“You think they prove he’s incorruptible?”
“He is,” King said, holding her gaze.
“Less than three hours ago, we received an anonymous phone call. The caller said he had witnessed Agent Six taking money from a known Code-breaker with ties to ChaoSonic. He was able to describe Six accurately. And according to our system, Six was logged out at the time. So far, we can’t find anyone to corroborate his whereabouts.”
“Irrefutable evidence,” King said sarcastically. “I stand corrected.”
The QS smiled icily. “It’s not much, but we can’t let the accusation go uninvestigated. Of course, I’d like to hear Six’s side of the story.” She stood up and started to pace the room. “But when confronted, Agent Six of Hearts sabotaged an elevator to escape capture. He stole weapons and equipment from the armory, including a lock-release gun and plastic explosives. He ransacked the office of Agent Queen of Hearts—who, by the way, we can’t seem to find either. Agent Six shot a Spade agent, admittedly with nonlethal ammunition, then attacked her with a sword. He resisted arrest once again and escaped the building with a stolen parachute. We’ve checked his house and discovered that he doesn’t live there. He falsified his address on the Deck computers.” She put her hands on King’s desk. “And yet you say he’s innocent? Innocent people don’t behave like this.”
“Did he say anything to your agents?” King asked.
The QS let a hiss of air escape through gritted teeth. “Yes. He accused me, personally, of violating the Code by trying to arrest him.”
“Unless you had reasonable grounds,” King said, “he was right to do so.”
“Resisting arrest is, in itself, sufficient grounds for arrest!”
“Agent Six has done nothing wrong,” King said. “Therefore, when an armed response team of Spades was sent after him, he could easily deduce that evidence had been fabricated to link him to a Code violation. With the knowledge that someone was trying to frame him, resisting arrest would have seemed the best course of action.” He smiled ironically. “And because your teams are so efficient, the methods he used to escape are excusable. Anything less and he would not still be at large.”
The QS sat down again. “Our investigative teams are beyond reproach,” she said, drumming her fingernails on the desk. “If Six had given himself up, and the accusations turned out to be false, he would be back at work by now and the culprit would probably be in custody. Instead, we have a Code-breaker on the loose, whether Agent Six is guilty or not.”
King raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ll help in whatever way I can. Have you investigated the caller? And who was the Code-breaker Six supposedly met?”
“You already know I won’t tell you that,” the QS growled, “just like you won’t tell me where Agent Six is.”
There was a pause.
“You believe him to be guilty,” King said finally, “yet you assume that he’ll call us with his location?”
“I don’t believe he would conceal his whereabouts from you,” the QS said, giving him a meaningful look. “And it wouldn’t hurt you to cooperate with me.”
King shrugged. “As I said, I’ll help however I can. But there are other matters that require my attention.” He switched on his computer monitor.
The QS understood the signal and stood up. She turned back to him when she reached the doorway. “Agent Six’s exemplary mission results and test scores do not prove his innocence,” she said. “No one is incorruptible, King of Hearts.”
King tapped out a sequence on the keyboard, and the door swung shut as the Queen of Spades left.
The streetlamps buzzed past overhead as Six ran down the street. The shops and buildings were deserted—people had heard the gunfire and the explosions. They hadn’t been drawn towards the noise by curiosity, nor had they run away in panic; they had calmly changed their routes to avoid the area, as if it were nothing more than a traffic jam.
Six had decided that the best course of action was to go home. His house was less than eleven kilometers away—a fifteen-minute run. He should arrive five minutes before King was expecting his call.
Six had figured that Vanish would only have one base of operations, for the same reason that the Deck only had one—any more would make it hard to stay under ChaoSonic’s radar. Therefore the troops had probably been deployed from where Kyntak was being held.
It would have to be quite close to the rendezvous point, so Vanish could control the situation. The soldiers would need to be able to travel between the two points via ground vehicles in a matter of minutes, not hours.
Assuming that the base wasn’t on the other side of the Seawall, which seemed a fair assessment based on the number of troops they had, that left a semicircular search area with an approximate radius of twenty kilometers. And that meant 628 square kilometers of potential locations.
But Vanish wouldn’t have made the rendezvous point right next door—he must have known there was a risk that Deck forces would scour the surrounding area looking for Kyntak. We’d be doing it now if the Spades hadn’t messed it up, Six thought. So he would have left a safety buffer—enough distance between the base and the rendezvous point so that the Deck wouldn’t have the manpower to search far enough. At least ten kilometers—that took a semicircular chunk out of the original area: radius ten kilometers, area 157 square kilometers.
This left a curved strip of possible locations ten kilometers wide and more than a hundred kilometers long. Approximately 471 kilometers in area, Six calculated. Not a big part of a 7.5 million-square-kilometer City, but still way too much to search on his own.
Six hoped the troops in the monorail hadn’t found the phone. Beyond stumbling on the base with blind luck, it was his only chance.
As he was without a mobile or any money (and no way of getting any unless he stole it or used his card, which would attract the attention of the Spades), Six had decided to use the landline at home to call King. And if he was going to break into an enemy base with no information and no backup, he was going to need weaponry and equipment, which he could no longer get from the Deck.
His house was just around the corner. He slowed to an inconspicuous walk. It seemed unlikely that the Spades would have found it, but it was best to be cautious.
The house and the lawn surrounding it looked exactly as he had left them that morning. Six disarmed the four locks, opened the door, and punched in the alarm code. A barely audible beep of consent emerged from the panel, and Six shut the door behind him.
He did his usual sweep of the house. No intruders. Harry was standing perfectly still in the training room, showing no sign that he had moved since Six left the house fourteen hours ago.
Was that only this morning? Six wondered. It feels like it’s been days.
“Harry,” he said.
The robot didn’t respond, but that was normal. Six hadn’t asked a direct question.
“Has anything unusual happened in the house today?”
“You left approximately ninety-five minutes before you usually do on Mondays,” Harry growled.
“Anything since I left?” Six asked.
“No.”
That was good enough for Six. He glanced at his watch: 19:37:51. The monorail might not have reached its destination yet, and he didn’t want to call King prematurely. He started his computer and opened up his in-box.
Six raised an eyebrow in surprise. There was a new message from King, sent just eight minutes previously. It had an attachment entitled OIvanish.doc. Six read the e-mail first.
Six
I hacked into the ChaoSonic security mainframe and pulled their file on Vanish. It raises more questions than answers, but might be useful to you.
I had a visit from the QS a few minutes ago and I think she’s still suspicious of me, so my phone may be tapped by now—but I’ve uploaded the program tracking your phone to the following web page: http://cww.prog91167/sim2305 3306.ds.
The Spades don’t seem to know about Project Falcon. Someone’s trying to set you up to look like a double agent. I’ll let you know if I can work out who.
Watch your back.
King
Six opened the attached document and text flooded the screen. It was a dossier on Vanish, apparently written by a ChaoSonic security analyst named Serfie Thaldurken, whose contact details were at the top of the page. Six was already discouraged. ChaoSonic had its analysts writing dossiers on Vanish, and therefore large security forces looking for him. They’d clearly been trying to find him for a long time. How was Six going to fare on his own, racing against the clock?
The first section of the dossier was a list of events believed to have been orchestrated by Vanish or linked to him, categorized in reverse chronological order. These included numerous assassinations, abductions, and even bank robberies. There were also several break-ins at ChaoSonic scientific facilities, and a ransacking of the ruins of the Lab, Six was surprised to see, less than a month after Kyntak had rescued him from there.
Six scrolled down, sifting back through time. The most common activities seemed to be robberies and abductions. Vanish had stolen a vast amount of equipment, data, and weaponry from various ChaoSonic facilities, along with many rare valuables, each of which would fetch a small fortune if offered to the right buyer. He had kidnapped dozens of people, usually asking for a ransom but only sometimes receiving it, and even then rarely setting the prisoners free.
Just like Kyntak, Six thought. Vanish’s victims were all taken for some kind of strategic value less obvious than monetary—they had information, or a high public profile, or an important position within an organization. Several ChaoSonic executives, security chiefs, and shareholders had been kidnapped by Vanish; in fact, this seemed to be what had brought him to the organization’s attention.
He believes Kyntak is me, Six thought. So what does he want with me, if not the ransom?
The next section of the document was a list of people suspected of being involved with Vanish’s operations. There were more than a hundred names, but most had no more than a brief physical description and the reason they had come under suspicion. Many were soldiers, either suspected of working in Vanish’s army or killed and identified later. None had been captured alive. Six saw that most of the soldiers were ex-ChaoSonic—presumably having changed sides because the pay was better. He knew that ChaoSonic rarely paid its employees generously.
Some of the suspects—in fact, all of the people who’d been abducted and later released—were higher-ranking ChaoSonic employees. At first, Six assumed that the fact Vanish hadn’t killed them was the grounds for the suspicion against them, but he then saw that all had been guilty of stealing information or technology which quickly found its way into Vanish’s hands.
So he only lets them go if they agree to work for him? he thought. How does he keep them to their word?
Six saw Earle Shuji on the list. The picture of her was an old one—Six could still see the greed in her beautiful dark eyes. The caption stated that Vanish had been a potential buyer for her soldier bots, but that the deal had been aborted when Shuji disappeared; apparently she had been telling the truth. The paragraph concluded with “Missing, presumed dead.”
Six felt a touch of satisfaction. The Deck had hidden her well, and it seemed she had made no move to contact old friends.
He kept reading.
Retuni Lerke was on the list too. Apparently he had leaked Lab data to Vanish’s organization. This didn’t surprise Six. Eight months ago Lerke had stolen a sample of Six’s DNA and tried to sell it to a ChaoSonic security official. Methryn Crexe had been planning to have Lerke killed, but Six and Kyntak had arrested Crexe before he could do this.
Six assumed that Lerke, like most high-ranking ChaoSonic employees, was extremely greedy if not actively cruel. But he also suspected that Lerke was actually insane. Project Falcon could not have been conceived by a normal brain, and double-crossing Crexe was madness. Six hoped that Lerke was not involved in today’s events. Vanish was scary enough on his own.
He didn’t make eye contact with Lerke’s picture. He knew what Lerke looked like, and glimpsing that face staring out of the screen unnerved him. He scrolled down immediately, seeing the bald head and pale eyes only in his peripheral vision.
There was a picture of the red-eyed woman who had recited the ransom demand, Niskev Pacye. There wasn’t much information—she had lived an unremarkable life before being hired as a neurologist in a ChaoSonic hospital. She’d risen to the rank of senior neurosurgeon before disappearing completely, and then showing up two years later as Vanish’s representative in a data trade. There was no indication she’d ever joined his soldiers in battle. Her role seemed limited to adviser and spokesperson.
Six was alarmed to see Chelsea Tridya on the list. She knew too much about him, Kyntak, and the Deck. But his panic subsided when he saw that the grounds for her inclusion were slender. ChaoSonic suspected that Vanish was the one who had stolen the Lab’s supply of Tridya’s aging drug. To do this, he would have to have known it existed, and it was more palatable for ChaoSonic to assume that Tridya had told him about it than that there had been a leak within their organization.
Six didn’t recognize any of the other names. The next section was the shortest—known information about Vanish himself. Six looked at the picture first and recoiled in horror.
It was a black-and-white mug shot, taken in a ChaoSonic cell. The man in the photo was about thirty, bald, slightly chubby, and 174 centimeters tall, according to a text box in the corner. But it took Six a moment to notice any of this because his eyes were drawn to the scars on the man’s face.
Three broad gashes split the flesh, one from his right nostril to his chin, one from above his right eye to his cheekbone, and one from the left side of his forehead up to the top of his skull. A series of minor scratches latticed his left cheek, and there was a small triangular gouge under his left eye—it looked like mascara that had run.
The man’s eyes were closed. The background was an uneven grey-and-white gradient—a pillow, Six realized. He was asleep.
The wounds had been cleaned before the picture was taken, so there was no blood, but this only made it more horrific. Six thought he could see exposed bone in the gouge in the left cheek, and he looked away, heart pounding.
Six had once gone undercover in a ChaoSonic jail to break out an agent, and he’d seen plenty of brutality there. And vivid images of the prisoners at Earle Shuji’s factory still haunted him.
But he’d never seen wanton disfiguration like this. He started reading the caption.
This was the only known photo of Vanish. One of his soldiers had defected, informing ChaoSonic that Vanish was planning a raid on one of their satellite uplink stations. He said that Vanish wanted to use equipment which was integrated into the building, and would therefore have to be there in person. ChaoSonic left the facility minimally guarded, and ambushed Vanish’s fifteen-person team once they were inside. Thirteen of Vanish’s soldiers were killed. Only he and the defector were left alive.
The ChaoSonic troops put Vanish in an armored personnel carrier so he could be transported to a secret prison facility for processing. But when the APC arrived, he was rushed straight into the emergency room. Apparently Vanish had mutilated his own face with his fingernails.
According to the document, he didn’t speak a single word the entire time he was in their custody; but that wasn’t long. His troops broke into the emergency room less than three hours after his condition had been stabilized. It was unclear how they’d found it. The picture was taken ten minutes before their arrival.
During the rescue, Vanish’s team killed three doctors and nine guards, leaving one doctor and one guard alive. A week later, the defector’s body was found under the ChaoSonic security chief’s desk, with a high concentration of Syncal in his bloodstream—almost double the amount that had been injected into Six that morning.
Thaldurken drew special attention to the fact that twenty-six people had been killed: thirteen of Vanish’s and thirteen of ChaoSonic’s, including the defector. Thaldurken suggested that Vanish may have been trying to send a message to ChaoSonic—that he had only reacted defensively, with force that was precisely equal to that used against him.
He also said that he didn’t believe Vanish had wounded himself just to get into the emergency room for an easier escape. With so much damage to his face, he couldn’t be identified by any witnesses to his crimes or by previously taken photographs—not that there were many of either. As long as Vanish maintained his silence in ChaoSonic custody, his real name would never be exposed.
But this seemed illogical to Six. By gouging out his own face, hadn’t Vanish made his appearance so distinctive that he would never be able to conceal his identity again?
Six recalled an old story about a criminal whose head had been shaved and who had shaved the heads of a dozen other men as they slept so he could not be identified the next morning. He imagined Vanish inflicting injuries identical to his own on the faces of thousands of innocent people so ChaoSonic would never find him.
He shook off the image with a shiver. Not only was that completely insane, it wouldn’t work. Presumably the doctors in the emergency room had taken a sample of Vanish’s blood and compared it to their DNA database.
He scrolled down. Yes, they had, but it hadn’t helped identify him. Vanish’s DNA wasn’t on file, and his blood was of the most common type, O positive. Six knew that trying to identify someone by blood type was nearly impossible. He could think of twenty people at the Deck who were O positive, including himself. He scrolled back up and kept reading.
Vanish hadn’t mutilated thousands of strangers to stay hidden. He had just disappeared. While his forces occasionally turned up and wreaked havoc on ChaoSonic facilities, the man himself had not been seen again. And his capture had taken place…almost thirty years ago?
Six went over this again, just to make sure he hadn’t misread it. He hadn’t. Vanish had scarred himself and disappeared twenty-eight years, eight months, and three days ago.
He scrolled farther up, looking at the list of crimes Vanish was believed to be responsible for. The first one was eleven years earlier, and they got older as Six read. Abduction of a ChaoSonic official, twenty-two years ago. Bombing of the Gear munitions factory, thirty-eight years ago. Assassination of a security chief, forty-seven years ago. There were more events listed. ChaoSonic was the result of a small merger almost fifty years ago, so that was as far back as the records went.
In fact, the people who’d been kidnapped, set free, and then discovered working for Vanish were rarer than Six had thought. Each kidnapping only happened once the previous victim was dead. Because he usually picked people in such extreme positions of power within ChaoSonic, Vanish only seemed to need one at a time.
No wonder they suspect Chelsea Tridya, Six thought. This implied that Vanish was at least seventy, in a city where most people were dead at sixty. The Lab’s supply of Tridya’s drug was stolen only a few months ago, and it couldn’t actually make someone younger. It couldn’t even keep their age at a complete standstill. The Lab was using an inverted formula anyway—they were making children age quickly. So ChaoSonic assumed that Vanish collaborated with Tridya, and had access to the drug in some form for at least a decade. Tridya hadn’t designed her formula back then, but maybe they didn’t know that.
Six held the theory in his mind, testing it, feeling its weight like a ball being tossed lightly from one hand to the other. Did he believe that there was a seventy-year-old, hideously scarred puppet-master behind today’s events?
No way. ChaoSonic had had the wool pulled over their eyes.
Vanish wasn’t a man at all.
Vanish was an organization.
It only took Six a few seconds to connect his spare mobile phone to the web page King had sent him. Soon the location of the teenage boy’s mobile was a blinking red dot on the screen, superimposed over a map of the City. There was a white line which showed where the phone had been since King set up the tracking program. It seemed that the monorail train had gone more or less straight from the Timeout to a warehouse thirteen kilometers west of it, and stopped.
It’s in my search area, Six thought. And it’s a warehouse, so it’d be a suitable base of operations for Vanish, particularly if there’s an underground area—that way ChaoSonic wouldn’t know how big it is. And there’s an airfield right next to it, so the troops can get all over the City quickly.
He stared at the screen of his phone intently, searching for anything that would contradict the signs. There was nothing.
I think I’ve just found Kyntak, he thought.
It was 19:39:45. He needed to get going as soon as possible, but had to get some equipment first. Six walked into the training room and pressed his palm lightly against the wall. It slid aside, revealing four rows of weapons.
For Kyntak’s safety, he was going to have to enter the facility silently and invisibly. This meant lightweight equipment that could be used quietly—no shotguns, no automatic rifles. But he was going to have to get out as well—and once he had rescued Kyntak, he expected the alarm would be sounded quickly.
He picked out a quarterstaff, which could be separated into two halves for carrying, and an Owl semiautomatic pistol. He screwed a silencer to the gun, then took a nylon rope from the rack and started spooling it over his shoulder.
“I’m going on a suicidal rescue mission,” he said to Harry as he worked. “Want to come?”
“No,” Harry said. He didn’t turn his head to look at Six.
Of course not, thought Six. It’s not that he’s scared; it’s that he doesn’t want anything. He’s a robot. “Do you want to stay here?”
“No.”
Six thought about it. He couldn’t use Harry to create a diversion for easier entry—any disturbance would be either too subtle to help or so obvious the alarm would be raised. And taking him inside wasn’t an option. One intruder would have a far better chance of staying hidden than two.
But when he and Kyntak were on their way out, possibly with the entire Vanish army behind them, they would be able to use his firepower.
“Harry, get out the motorbike,” he said. “I’m going to find an outfit for you.”
Harry walked out the door, and Six started sifting through his wardrobe.
Two minutes later, the house was locked up and he was outside, helping Harry get dressed. Six didn’t have a garage or a backyard. His bike was kept on the thin strip of concrete between the back of his house and the wall separating his property from his neighbors’. He had built the motorcycle himself from parts of other bikes. He’d had to scan each piece for bugs as he went, because ChaoSonic made them all, and ChaoSonic often bugged their products. But it was worth it. Six’s bike was better quality than even the most expensive models; it had a six-cylinder engine, a carbon-fiber chassis, and a softail-style monoshock suspension. The fiberglass fairing was polished to an obsidian-like shine.
Six had chosen to dress Harry in one of his long black coats, a pair of grey jogging pants, and a thick woolen beanie. Harry was taller than Six, so the pants didn’t quite reach his ankles, but not enough plastic skin was exposed to look suspicious. His synthetic feet and hands could pass as shoes and gloves. Other than his fingertips and the soles of his feet, Harry’s plastic exoskeleton was coated in PTFE, an almost frictionless fluoropolymer, so Six had to attach the belt very tightly around Harry’s waist to keep his pants from falling down.
There was really nothing Six could put on Harry’s face—a ski mask or even sunglasses would be too suspicious. He resolved that Harry would sit behind him on the bike and they would go fast. Anyone who happened to look would be much more likely to think mask than robot.
Six himself had changed into a black spandex catsuit—the clothes he’d borrowed from the teenage hoodlums were useless from a stealth point of view. He had the two halves of the quarterstaff strapped to his back, with the climbing rope looped over the straps and the silenced Owl in his belt.
“Do you know how to ride a motorbike?” Six asked Harry as he climbed on.
“No.”
“Fair enough,” Six said. Why would a robot that could run at sixty kilometers an hour need to know how to ride a motorbike? “Hang on tight.”
Plastic forearms crushed his abdomen. “Not that tight,” wheezed Six. “Just don’t fall off.” Harry’s grip loosened, Six revved the engine, and the motorbike thundered into the night.
Driving didn’t take much concentration, so Six was free to consider the facts as they traveled. If Vanish is an organization rather than a man, this changes everything, Six thought as the wind blasted past his face. It would explain the hundreds of highly trained troops, the half century of crimes attributed to one man, the deals with so many Code-breakers and the co-opting of so many officials. A single person couldn’t do all that, even assuming that he was able to live to the age of seventy. Sooner or later he’d be found out, or betrayed, or murdered by a rival.
It was like struggling to assemble a jigsaw puzzle and discovering halfway through that the wrong picture was on the box. An organization could achieve many things that a lone person could not—ChaoSonic had shown everyone that. Corporations were not subject to human ailments; they didn’t die naturally and were hard to kill. They didn’t have emotions, and their actions could affect many people, requiring just as many people to affect them back. And the value of extra manpower could never be underestimated.
But there was something that gave lone operatives an advantage—concealment.
ChaoSonic had never allowed another corporation to rise. It was clinging to its monopoly over the City with every white knuckle it had. There were thousands of ChaoSonic operatives whose sole purpose was to find fledgling corporations and crush them, eliminating competitors in advance. Finding the Deck was not their top priority yet, partly because it was so well hidden, partly because it was a nonprofit organization, and partly because its interests so often overlapped with ChaoSonic’s own. ChaoSonic lost money to thieves, and employees to murderers, and the Deck was constantly shuffling them away. But anyone else who was a member of a non-ChaoSonic group had better be looking over his or her shoulder.
But now Six was picturing something new: a secret organization that had been established more than fifty years ago, before ChaoSonic had tightened its grip; that had stayed secret until now by attributing all its actions to a lone enigmatic man, recruiting more and more people, remaining invisible even as it grew, welling up towards ChaoSonic from beneath, like a volcano under the City that was slowly getting ready to explode.
Pedestrians crossing the street hurried as Six and Harry rocketed past through the fog, pulsing in and out of visibility as streetlamps rushed by overhead. Six saw a small child tugging on the trouser leg of a man and pointing at Harry. He twisted some more power into the engine with the throttle, giving them an extra boost into the next wall of gloom.
The situation seemed both simpler and more complex than Six had guessed a few hours ago. On the one hand, the bizarre variety of Vanish’s actions so far—breaking into the Deck, killing Methryn Crexe, kidnapping Kyntak, attempting to abduct Six, then trying to kill him when they failed—could be explained by the fact that a conglomerate had more motives than a single operative. No group was ever perfectly unified, because different people would always have different agendas. The strongest teams used their diversity to support their efforts, King had once said, while the weaker ones let their differences tear them apart. He had been trying to explain the value of cooperation to Six, and failing. Six had seen why other people might need to work together, but there was nothing he was incapable of doing on his own.
So Vanish was a group of people, each of whom had something to gain from today’s events. But this realization didn’t help Six much—one man would have been easier to investigate than fifty.
But for now, Six had a single goal—rescue Kyntak. Kyntak would get the Spades off his back and help him keep Vanish from exposing them.
Six clenched his hands around the grips on the handlebars as other thoughts swirled in his brain. Unless I can’t rescue him. Unless I’m not strong enough and I die trying. Unless he’s already dead and I’m on my own again.
They were getting close now. He slowed the bike down to a manageable seventy kilometers per hour. Other people are addictive, he thought. You don’t need them at first, but once you’ve been exposed, you can’t get by without them. A year ago I was completely satisfied being on my own. Not happy, but satisfied. And now I’m on a suicide mission, looking for my twin brother. Not just because it’s right and because I owe it to him. And not because I like him all that much. Because I need him. I can’t go back to the way I used to live.
He switched off the headlight and clicked on the ChaoSilent muffler. He’d taken the chip from a pair of stealth boots and attached it to the exhaust pipe when he built the bike; the small subwoofer and tweeter amplifiers, which he’d pilfered from a guitar amp and placed under the suspension, now emitted the phase opposite of his motor and tire noise. His bike glided along with a barely audible clicking sound as the volume settings adjusted themselves.
The giant domed shell of the warehouse materialized on the horizon. Six slowed the bike even more, scanning the area for soldiers. None yet, but he was still outside the perimeter.
As he’d guessed, the barrier was no more than a chain-link fence, about four meters high. He had no doubt that Vanish could afford something better: automated sentry guns, electrified razor wire, or even a small-scale replica of the Seawall around the warehouse. But spending so much money in such a public way would shatter the illusion that the warehouse was privately owned and unimportant. It would draw ChaoSonic operatives to it, like rats to rotten meat.
Six thought it was safe to assume that there’d be some form of security between the fence and the warehouse, again probably something not too flashy. He eased the bike to a halt, hooked his fingers through the fence, and pressed his face against the wire, peering into the darkness. The warehouse was still just a silhouette to him. The fog shielded the details from his gaze.
“Harry,” he whispered. “Can you see any guards?”
“Yes,” Harry said. His voice was muted to the volume of Six’s own, but there was no difference in tone—a robotic equivalent of whispering that still unsettled Six. “There are three sentries in towers on the three visible corners of the warehouse, each armed with Wedge-tail FBN2 sniper rifles. There are two guards standing near the main door, and another near the side door, each carrying Raptor pistols.”
“Any sensors?” Six asked.
“Yes. There is a ChaoSonic Mark 3 security light on each wall of the warehouse.”
“What range do they have?”
That model of security light was older than Harry, so he had the specifications in his CPU. It took him less than half a second to recall the data. “They can be tuned to detect movement at a maximum range of fifty meters,” he said.
Six nodded. That meant that if they crossed the fence, they could only get about ten meters before a spotlight would click on, exposing them.
He tensed as something moved at his feet, but relaxed as soon as he looked down. It was just a rat, sniffing his shoe as it scurried past. Harry’s head turned to follow it; he’d never seen an animal before, Six guessed.
Six picked the rat up by its tail, holding it at arm’s length. It hissed in panic and waved its claws in the air as it swung from side to side. Wrinkling his nose with disgust, aware of how many germs were likely to be rubbing off onto his skin, Six pushed it flat against the fence, and it wriggled through one of the holes and landed on the ground on the other side.
As he had expected, the rat scampered in a direct line away from him. It vanished into the darkness between the fence and the warehouse.
“Harry, can you hit the sensor closest to us with your paintball gun?”
“Yes,” the bot replied.
There was a pause. Six sighed. He’d asked instead of instructed. “Do it,” he said.
Harry raised his arm and fired a round into the darkness. The security light snapped on as the ball of goo slapped against the sensor, illuminating the concrete surrounding the warehouse. Six could see the sentries in the towers now, and the guards. None of them were wearing night-vision goggles, so they were relying on the security lights to alert them. The warehouse was painted red, stained black in parts by the darkness. There were five sedans and two construction vehicles parked outside the giant door, all too close to the building to offer any cover. There was a narrow ladder attached to the warehouse wall, but a sentry was standing right next to it. The rat had changed direction; it was running parallel to the fence about twenty meters away.
There was a long pause. Six waited for the timer to switch the light off again.
The distant crack of a sniper rifle echoed out from one of the towers, and the rat skidded sideways across the concrete. Six winced. Sorry, buddy, he thought. I didn’t expect that.
The light clicked off. With the sensor blocked by paint, Six figured it was now safe to cross. He curled his fingers around the links in the fence.
“Harry,” he said, “follow me.” He climbed the fence easily, crossed the tip before the wire had time to buckle under his weight, and dropped nimbly down to the other side. Harry didn’t climb—he jumped, lifting his legs up so they didn’t scrape the fence on the way over, and landed with a silence that belied his weight. He rose slowly out of his crouch to stand beside Six.
Six took cautious steps forward. Enough to bring him within range of the sensor.
The darkness was impenetrable. He couldn’t see the guards or the sentry towers. The security light stayed off.
They were inside the fence, but they still had to make it past the sentries and the door guards, and Six had to assume there would be more troops inside. They would see him as soon as he walked through the door.
Six peered into the gloom, picturing everything he had seen when the light was on. Two towers on the corners nearest him, with a sniper in each one. Neither was as high as the warehouse, or he’d be able to see them above the silhouette of the domed roof. Five sedans and two construction vehicles.
He could go a little closer and open fire. Disable all the sentries before they raised the alarm, and get inside before their command realized anything was wrong. Then use the same strategy when he got inside—keep his gun out and shoot anyone who got in his way.
Would he turn into a killing machine, exactly what the Lab had designed him to be, in the hope that Kyntak might be saved? Was that any worse than condemning Kyntak to death so he could keep his vow to never take a human life again?
It was 20:01:45. Every second decreased the likelihood that Kyntak was still alive. Six drew out his Owl and aimed it into the darkness by instinct alone, lining up the sights with where the sniper’s head had been.
The gun felt heavier when it was aimed at a person—as if the bullet itself was already weighed down with the life it might be about to take. Six slipped into his firing crouch. He felt Harry’s gaze on his back: not judging, but watching nonetheless. He pictured the sniper, staring coolly down the barrel of his rifle, unaware that his skull could be shattered at any moment by a bullet.
Six holstered the Owl. “We’re going back,” he said.
“No, we are not,” Harry said. “We’re standing still.”
Six rubbed his eyes with his empty gun hand. “We’re going to go back to the fence,” he said. “We’re going to get my bike.”