Element Zero (22 page)

Calliope Flax—Stillwell Corps Base

I felt a rumble through the floor, and the map that floated in the dark warped. A band of static flicked in front of me, and the light came back. I could see.

“Shit, we lost it!”

Everything was a blur. I blinked, and saw the floor down below me. I was facedown, with my forehead pressed into a rubber pad. My body hurt, and there was pressure in the back of my skull. The floor shook again.

I looked to my left and saw Ramirez and Singh humped over a terminal. There was a window behind them, and I saw a big flash of light there. The two looked up.

“Goddamn it!” Ramirez shouted, slamming his fist on the desk. Something out there blew up. Something big.

“I told you!” a voice said. “I warned you he’d—”

“Shut your mouth, soldier!”

Everything went black again. The map blinked a few times, then came back. The points of light began to pop back up.

Synchronizing . . .

“It’s the shockwave,”
Singh said. They were quiet for a minute.
“We’ve got it back.”

“Shit! What was the target?”

“The CMC building.”

“How much dam—”

“It was completely destroyed, sir.”

The room got quiet after that. The CMC . . . that was one of the big three. Did he just say Fawkes had destroyed it?

The radio squawked, and I heard Ramirez pick up. A voice babbled on the other side.

“Understood.”
I heard the handset click back into its cradle.
“Vaggot’s team hasn’t been able to get control of the satellite back. Will the virus work or not?”

“It should have stopped them. They—”

“We are running out of options, damn it! Did it work or not?”

The shape on the map bled closer to us. A shot went off somewhere outside, then a bunch more on top of it. Another voice piped up.

“Sir, the hostiles are continuing to move. They’re definitely heading for this location.”

“It’s her,”
Singh said.
“She pulled something over the command spoke just before it dropped. Fawkes traced her when the link was active.”

“Then unplug her!”
Ramirez snapped.

“It’s too late! He already got the location!”
The arm that broke off from the main shape got closer.

“Then shoot her!”

“It won’t matter! He used her to jump into our systems! He knows about Vaggot, he knows everything!”

“Is this base secure or not?” a voice shouted. “Stop them at the perimeter, goddamn it!”

“They were overwhelmed, sir. There’s too many of them!”

“They’re in. Perimeter has been breached in sections three and four . . . ”

“Sir, if they take this base before Vaggot’s team succeeds, that will be the end of it. Never mind her. We have to concentrate on holding them back.”

There was a loud snap, and the map cut out. The static stopped. Light flashed in the dark, and I could see again. I heard machines wind down, and pain throbbed down my arms.

“They cut the power,” someone said.

My JZI picked back up and threw up a bunch of warning messages.

Heart function ceased.

Blood-oxygen levels below threshold.

Body temperature below threshold.

It kicked off the emergency resus. I seized as the wire to my heart lit up. Oxygen and adrenaline pumped into my bloodstream.

“Where are they now?” Ramirez asked.

“I don’t know. We lost the uplink. Security’s down.”

My body seized again, and this time the vitals picked back up. My heart thumped. I clenched my fists and heard the knuckles crack.

Heart function resumed.

I grabbed the edges of the gurney and pushed myself up. Wires around my body stretched tight, and I felt pressure at my neck.

The lights were out and the room was full of guys, some in uniform, some in suits. There was equipment set up, but all the screens were blank.

Cn u rd me?

The message popped up just as the emergency lights kicked in and the computers turned over. I could make out Singh and Ramirez. Some of the rest were guys from my squad. Some I’d never seen before. They were packing shit up, getting ready to move out.

That you, kid?

Ys. I ct pwr. I c u. U c me?

I brought up the GPS and found her signal. She was in the building, to the south.

How the hell did you get on the base?

Ur dfnses r trshd. U gys r fckd.

She followed us. The little shit actually staged a rescue.

You armed?

Y.

You got a vehicle?

Y.

Then get in it and be ready. I’ll come to you.

“She’s up!” someone barked. I turned and saw Ramirez point at me.

“Singh, take care of it!”

Singh drew his gun, but he didn’t aim it.

“Singh!” Ramirez yelled.

“I took something Fawkes doesn’t want getting out,” I told Singh. “The ones in the building are here for me. I’ll draw them off.”

Ramirez stepped in and pointed his gun. I grabbed his wrist and twisted as the shot went off and metal sparked next to my face. The pressure behind my neck built as I got up, then the wires came loose and snapped away.

I twisted his wrist and he hollered. When his fingers went limp, I took the gun.

“Cal, wait!”

I bit him on the hand. I bit him so hard that for a second I felt the bones between my teeth. He screamed as salty blood filled my mouth.

I pulled back. He stood there, one hand bent the wrong way and the other one bloody. I could see the teeth marks in the meat of his palm. They were deep.

I looked at the rest. There were two grunts left; the remainder were suits. I sucked the salt off my teeth and spit a red gob onto the floor.

“Shoot her!” one of the suits ordered, but no one else would do it. The grunts ignored them and filed out. The last one to go turned back to them.

“If you’re coming, then fall in.”

He left, and they followed. I spit on the floor again, trying to get the taste out of my mouth. I’d never bitten anyone in my life, no matter how dirty the fight got. The mark on Ramirez’s hand was brutal. I don’t know why the hell I did it.

Singh was still standing there staring at me as I wiped blood off my chin.

“I’ll draw them off,” I told him. He nodded.

Vika, which way?

Sth ext.

My shirt was folded next to the gurney. I slipped it back on and buttoned up as I ran after them. From the sound of it, they were headed for the main lot at the north side of the building. Before I lost the feed, it looked like the revivors were moving in from the south.

You’re about to get a shitload of company. Keep the engine running; this might be tight.

Rgr.

Down the hall, I saw the last of the suits peel off and head toward the main entrance. I got a fix on Vika and tracked her as she made a beeline for the back lot.

Wachalowski, pick up.
It took him a few seconds, but he answered.

Cal, where are you?

Long story. What the fuck is going on out there?

Fawkes just took out the CMC building. Where are you?

I’m on the base. Look, never mind how, but I was just on Fawkes’s command spoke. Not for long, but long enough to dump his buffers. I’m sending them to you now.

I compressed everything I got and fired it over the JZI.

Got it. I’m coming in by air now. I’ll meet you—

Don’t come after me. Go to the command center. I’ll get back to you.

I cut the line as something crashed through a window down the hall. Back behind me, a couple shots went off.

As I passed an open door, I caught a flash of moonlit eyes and heard the crunch of feet as they shuffled through broken glass up ahead.

Faye Dasalia—Heinlein Industries, Test Facility Five

At the end of a remote corridor, I pushed open a heavy steel door and felt cold air pass over me. The other side was dark, but when I adjusted my optical filters I could make out a heavy sheet of plastic with a slit in the middle hanging from the ceiling ahead. The flaps rippled gently as fog swirled around my ankles, carrying a smell that seemed vaguely familiar. I slipped through as the door thumped shut behind me.

As I moved through the dark, an encrypted call came in from somewhere inside the building. Someone who wasn’t MacReady was attempting to contact me in secret. I accepted the key and opened the link.

Faye, you escaped.
It was Dulari.

Yes.

Don’t tell me where you are. Fawkes got an approximate location on you during his last communication. He’s sent Ang to find you.

I stood at one end of a room whose other side I couldn’t see. It was lit from above by some kind of very dim, pale green glow. The room was a maze of tubes, pipes and wires. Wires trailed from somewhere overhead to connections in steel trays that were assembled in stacks. Slick, creviced gray membrane covered each one, and I sensed electric current humming through it.

I recognized the smell then. It was the greasy, bitter tar smell of heated revivor blood.

Faye,
Dulari said.
Fawkes dropped one of the nukes. He used The Eye to destroy the CMC Tower. I didn’t realize. I didn’t know how far he’d go.

The route that MacReady had laid out for me took me through the strange room, and as I began to make my way though, other details began to jump out at me: long needles and hairless flesh, miles of squiggling black veins pulsing under thin, wet sheets of gelatin. The low hum of air circulators and liquid coursing through pipes filled my ears, stirring memories from deep, deep inside.

Faye, he’s not finished. He’s going to destroy everything. I don’t think we can stop him.

We can’t,
I told her.
Be very careful around Fawkes.

Believe me, I am.

Thank you for the warning. Keep off this line, or he’ll catch you.

Faye—

I cut off the connection, and her words faded as I breathed in the smell of the room through my nose.

It was one of the few times that a physical place had affected me since my reanimation. For some reason, standing there in that strange place was comforting. I’d never been there, but it reminded me somehow of my return back into this world. The sound and the smells were imprinted on my brain, like I’d felt them before during my long sleep after my life was taken. In a way, I found difficult to explain that it felt safe and familiar, like being home.

Something was being born, there. I caught myself wishing Lev was with me so that we could compare that strange perception. I wondered what he would have made of it.

Follow the path,
MacReady interrupted.
Hurry.

What is this?

The future,
he said.
The next step. Revivors without human limitations, that don’t require second-tier benefits. No human can get through there without requisitioning a biohazard suit. It will buy you some extra time, but you have to move quickly.

I continued on, picking out organic shapes in the dark. I saw fat squiggles of tissue I didn’t recognize, bones that seemed almost but not quite human, and then eventually muscles, joints, fingers and toes. At the opposite end of the chamber was a door, and I pushed it open, leaving the web of disconnected pieces behind me.

It’s just up ahead,
MacReady said. Ahead was a single, gray metal door.

I see it.

I turned the handle and pulled open the door. The room was in the shape of a large circle, the curves of its wall covered ceiling to floor with microthin display screens. The center of the circle was dominated by a large, round table, six workstations arranged around its circumference. Only one of the stations was occupied. A man in a suit sat there. He didn’t turn when I stepped into the room, and the door clicked shut behind me. He just stared at the screen closest to where he sat, while it displayed footage of a large explosion.

“Mr. MacReady?” He nodded.

The electronic screens that covered the wall displayed a dizzying amount of data. I scanned it, picking out code mixed with complex mathematical equations littered between more familiar items: media clips, handwritten notes, and photos. On the screen he was watching, a large structure was collapsing into flames.

“That’s the CMC Tower,” he said quietly. He rubbed at his brow, and I saw his hand shake. “That was the CMC Tower.”

I realized the feed was live. That hole was forming in the skyline right now. Over MacReady’s shoulder, I watched the last of the Central Media Communications Tower crumble into the cloud of smoke and fire.

Memories were rising out of the darkness, points of light expanding to display visions of that structure as it loomed in the distance. The morning it all started, as I rode the monorail on my way to the scene of Mae Zhu’s murder, I’d watched the tower’s shadow loom off in the distance through the haze of snow. I’d seen it nearly every day of my life.

I made this possible.

The blocks around the blast lost power, the buildings and neon lights going dark to form a black hole in the bright cityscape. A smaller building nearby began to fall. I’d always known this was part of Fawkes’ plan. I knew he would destroy the three towers, but it seemed that knowing it and seeing it with my own eyes were two different things, even now. For the first time in a long time, I wondered if I hadn’t placed my trust in the wrong man.

“You may not have much time, Mr. MacReady.”

He turned then, and looked at me. He was an older man with thick, wavy hair that had turned completely gray. He smiled, showing unnaturally white teeth, but he couldn’t maintain it. He stood and approached me.

“You’ve held up remarkably well,” he said.

“That isn’t Fawkes’ only target.”

“I know. Did Fawkes remove the Leichenesser seed, or was it Agent Wachalowski?”

“It was Nico.” My eyes moved over the screens, following the trees of data mapped out there. On some level, the patterns were familiar. I saw profiles of individuals, lines tracing associations between them.

“It reminds me of the precinct,” I told him. “When we’d try to chart organized crime or gang associations.”

That caused him to grin weakly. He followed me as I passed by him and stepped toward the screens.

“That’s not too far off,” he said.

A high-pitched whine filled my head as something cold pierced the skin behind my ear. Immediately, I felt my muscles seize. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could, my jaw locked in place.

“I’m sorry, Faye,” he said. He guided me down into the chair he’d been sitting in, and reflected in the screen I saw that he had some sort of handheld tool pressed near the base of my skull. He disconnected something at its tip and moved it away, placing it on the table behind him. A long, metallic rod was left behind, sticking several inches out of the back of my head. He guided a wire into the rod and fastened it there.

I tried to move, but I was completely paralyzed. When I tried to access my communications node, I found I was cut off. He moved back around to where I could see him and tapped a stylus to an electronic pad he held in one hand. My jaw unlocked.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I’ve frozen your primary systems. I’ve cut off most of your motor functions, and outgoing communications will be monitored and controlled from here on out.”

I triggered the injector, but my arm didn’t respond. In my system tree, everything was locked down. My core functions still ran, but electrical impulses had been cut off at the C3 vertebrae.

“I will need to disable your control shunt as well,” he said.

“If you do, Fawkes will reestablish his command spoke.”

“I know, but he won’t be able to do much with you now.”

“He’ll be able to track me and come here.”

“I know,” MacReady said, “but there’s no other option; Fawkes has to be stopped. Your friend needs your help, and I can’t leave this to chance.”

“My friend?”

“Agent Wachalowski,” he said. “He needs your help, and so do I.”

He pointed to the screens of data.

“This is where we continued Fawkes’s work,” he said, “after he was gone. This is where we continued his work studying Zhang’s Syndrome. There were six of us at first. Heinser, Cross, Deatherage, Dulari, Chen . . . and myself. We kept it quiet, but believe me, I understand, and I know what Fawkes is trying to do.”

“You may not know as much as you think,” I told him.

“Every second-tier citizen who dies comes through here,” he said. “We’ve had access to all of them, along with every scrapped generation-seven model we’ve been able to get back in here. As you saw on your way in, reclaiming their memories has gotten much more efficient since Fawkes’s day. That’s a lot of data points. These people manipulate things in a very-well-thought-out way to influence policy and politics on governmental, corporate, and even social levels. Right now, their most powerful organization is based in the UAC, and the UAC dominates the globe both militarily and economically. But there are others like them, and over time other seats of power will rise in other parts of the world, if they haven’t already. What we will ultimately end up with is a group of powerful countries that follow the UAC model.”

What he said surprised me. I’d heard this before, but I didn’t expect to hear it from him.

“You sound like Fawkes,” I said.

“Fawkes’s data was irrefutable,” he said quietly, looking back to the destruction on the screen. “When I realized what we had, I knew no one could know. When your friend Wachalowski came sniffing around, I threw him a bone, hoping he’d track down Fawkes on his own without leading anyone back to us. But it was a mistake. Both sides figured out someone was watching them from here. Cross was killed and Heinser disappeared overseas after the Second Chance incident. Two years ago someone—Ang, I think—took matters into his own hands and used a rail-gun sniper to try to assassinate their leader, Motoko Ai, when she came out into the open to meet with Agent Wachalowski. I should have known then. I should have kept a closer eye on him. When Ang and Dulari truly understood what was at stake, data gathering wasn’t enough. They wanted action.”

“They were right,” I said. “Fawkes has a plan to stop them, not study them.”

“There are things Fawkes doesn’t know,” he said, “things he never bothered to learn. He was obsessed with proving their existence and eliminating them. He never dug into those lost memories to understand what drove these people. They are afraid of something, Faye. Something much bigger than Fawkes himself.”

His words triggered something inside. Memories swirled over the void below them, and one small cluster disengaged from the rest. As one ember broke orbit, a portal opened to the contents inside.

“What you did was attempted murder, Noelle,”
I said.
“You’re going to jail.”

In the memory, I sat in an interrogation room. A gaunt, wasted woman sat across the table from me. This was the memory Fawkes didn’t want to hear.

“I wish I was,”
she said.
“They might not be able to get to me there. That’s why I’ll never go.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“I was supposed to stop him,”
she said.
“I just wanted to stop him. Samuel Fawkes is a dangerous man.”

“He’s some engineer at Heinlein Industries. The man is not dangerous.”

“Things change,”
she whispered.

MacReady’s brow creased as he watched the tablet in front of him. He tapped at it with his stylus, and memory addresses began to appear in the HUD in front of me.

“That’s a suppressed segment you’re replaying,” he said. “Reclaimed information.”

“A woman,” I told him, “long ago. Fawkes was still alive, but she was afraid of him even then. Afraid enough that she had tried to kill him.”

“Did she say why?”

“No,” I said. “She never did, not directly, but I got the impression it was to avoid something much larger.”

“Did you relate these memories to Fawkes?”

“I tried. He didn’t agree.”

”Well, your instincts were right, I’m afraid. What they fear is much larger than anything we’ve seen so far, and it begins with the destruction of this city.”

“Fawkes has specific targets. He won’t destroy the city. He’s trying to save it.”

“Fawkes will destroy the city,” MacReady said. “He knows that killing hundreds or even thousands of them is futile. If you remove the human equation, then the only efficient way to stop this is genocide. He’s been lying to you, Faye. He plans to wipe the slate clean, and start fresh. These people, these mutations, they don’t just envision the city’s destruction; they’ve seen a nuclear annihilation specifically. They foresee eleven nuclear devices—specifically eleven—that will cause it, and after dropping one in the bay as a warning, that is exactly the number Fawkes currently has pointed at the city from the orbiting missile shield. Fawkes will destroy this city and with control of the nuclear defense shield I don’t think he’ll stop there. These people have foreseen a world-ending event, Faye. Total annihilation of society as we know it.”

He stepped closer, and I could see the bands of orange heat that ran up either side of his neck beneath the skin. The core in his chest pulsed. He believed it too.

“Fawkes will strike another target, probably soon, and I think you know that,” he said. “You’ve been dead a long time, but I don’t think you’re ready to write off the world you knew as an acceptable loss, not yet. Please. Help your friend.”

Orange flickered behind MacReady’s pupils. Shortly after, he forwarded a link to my communications node. It was him. It was Nico.

“I’m putting him through,” MacReady said.