EMPATHY: Part 11
Gina sat in her cell, staring at the door. She wondered how she could ever have thought this plan would work. How stupid the whole thing seemed now! Break into the most heavily-defended building in Hong Kong, bust someone out of a Fed prison, and then escape scot free. Yeah, right.
Then the Spice trance came on again, and her growing despair became remote, out of touch. Unpleasant memories forced themselves upon her, demanding that she sort them out in chronological order. She remembered being led here, blindfolded, rough hands pushing and shoving. New bruises from being thrown around and from the initial questioning. The interrogator had been full of cold anger and judgement, and took special pleasure in his job when faced with people who’d murdered four heroic Federal Police Officers in cold blood. The left side of her face was puffy and caked with blood.
Even worse, the Feds had split them up. Bomber’s body had gone to the infirmary on a stretcher. Rat had gone down a different corridor on Level 3, and since then Gina hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her . . . Out of idle curiosity, she reached out with her third eye and was surprised to feel Rat’s identity radiating from a cell not far away. Her mood was as black as Gina’s.
Gina smiled despite her state. Misery loves company. On a sudden whim, and without even thinking about it, she placed herself behind Rat’s eyes. Only days ago she would’ve had no idea how to do that, would have considered it impossible if she’d considered it at all.
A nasty smell hung in Rat’s cubicle. It seemed to come from a suspicious collection of stains in the corner. They looked recent, and nobody had bothered to give the cell a good cleaning yet.
Bruises ached on her arms and legs from being pushed around. She sat on the concrete floor, slow tears rolling down her nose and falling in drops. Sniffling, she wiped her wet hands on her brand-new orange jumpsuit, scrubbed at her face. The crushing despair inside Rat was too much for Gina to take, and she nearly pulled herself back, but Rat moved suddenly, went down on her knees facing the corner almost touching her forehead to the floor. She had no idea which direction Mecca might be in, but that didn’t seem to matter much just then.
In the other cell, Gina gasped when she realised what Rat was doing.
“Merciful father,” Rat whispered into the empty room, “I know I don’t talk to you very often, and I’m really sorry. I can’t remember any of the prayers. Now I wish I could. It’s just that . . . Well, I’ll get to the point. I, um, got myself into some trouble. Bad trouble. And I’d really, really like to get out of it again. So, um . . . Please? I’ll be good. Well, I’ll be better. I’ll start praying and stuff, I promise. I know you probably get a lot of these, and nobody really follows through, but . . . Please?” She bit down hard on her lip as she finished, embarrassed and ashamed, and decided that this farce was over. She got off her knees and examined the cell again, trying to think of what she could do to make things a bit easier on God.
She started by taking stock of the things she had. None of her usual toys, of course, but she’d been careful. The Chrome Rat wasn’t so stupid as to walk into the lion’s den without some capture precautions. All the usual locations had been searched, and the memory of that burned hot inside her mind, full of anger and shame. That’s why she hid things where they only used a scanner, and only her most expensive stuff, masked to resemble organic material. She dug her pinky finger into her ear — Gina cringed at the awful sensation — and pried out a thin ceramic rod glued to the inside of her ear canal. That one little piece had cost her every bit of coin she’d made for three months. It might just turn out to be the best money she’d ever spent.
Next she tugged at the lashes of her right eye until the lid pulled free from her sclera, and shook out four plastic spheres no larger than the head of a pin. They drifted almost weightlessly into her upheld hand, and she loaded them into the rod one at a time. A tiny light at the base of the rod blinked for a moment, indicating a full charge, and went out.
Right, thought the Chrome Rat, to business.
Kneeling in front of the door, she slid the rod into the lock and switched it on. The little infrared laser was invisible to the naked eye, but after only a second Rat could feel the heat pouring out of the keyhole, accompanied by little wisps of smoke. She rotated the base of the rod slightly to turn down the laser. Setting off a smoke alarm was the last thing she wanted right now.
First she burned out the linkage to the local area computer network. That would throw up a minor maintenance flag on Lazarus, but it bought her some time. Working quickly, she cut through the casing protecting the main electronics, and surgically lanced out the power control chip. The lock, unable to get a computer response telling it what to do, interpreted the situation as a power failure and used its emergency battery to open the deadbolt. There was a sharp whirr of electric motors, and Rat slipped out of the way as the door swung open towards her.
For a moment she considered putting her white prison shoes back on, but decided she’d be better off barefoot, and ducked into the hallway. She closed the door behind her and manually worked the deadbolt back into place. If she was really lucky, any robot sent by Lazarus would be fooled into thinking the door hadn’t even been opened.
The place looked almost familiar to her now. White corridors, bright lights, distant footsteps and the whirr of robotic motors. The small coloured signs at the intersections started to make sense, and she believed she could work them into her mental map of the area. She took a second to get her bearings, made sure she had the way back to the surface committed to memory. Then she dashed off, quiet as a mouse, on her way to the guardroom.
It was weird to feel air brushing against her skin and playing through her hair. Usually everything above her chin was covered by her preferred hood and sunglasses. Now she wore nothing but the orange jumpsuit, straight black hair tickling her shoulders, bare feet touching the cold floor. She harrumphed when she caught her own reflection in a pane of glass, and stopped a moment to look. Blue. Yes, her eyes were blue.
A sudden noise snapped her back to reality. The guardroom was just down the hall, and she heard faint sounds echoing inside. A male voice talking in Conglom. There was no response, and the droning monotone suggested that the man might be recording something. The Chrome Rat crept closer and popped her head round the doorframe.
One brief glance told her a lot. Fed uniform, sitting with his back to the door. He was busy sorting items from a plastic rucksack and logging them into the computer. None of the stuff looked familiar to Rat, but as long as it kept him busy, all was well.
As she crept inside, she tried to dredge up the endless physical education exercises and lectures from her school days. Martial arts were a mandatory part of the curriculum for any child in North Korea. Rat had never done very well in any of them, but if she could just remember how to kick . . .
Her leg snapped out like a steel bar, her heel hit the back of his head with a hard crack. He grunted and slumped forward onto the table. Rat, meanwhile, massaged her pulled groin and hopped around the chair to check his pockets.
The Fed didn’t carry much of anything useful. There was a wireless earbug in his breast pocket, and his holster contained one of the Feds’ nasty riot batons. Rat gingerly took hold of the grip. The shaft telescoped out at the touch of a button, and the whole thing started to vibrate with the lethal voltages coursing through it. It was like trying to hold on to half a metre of solid evil. Rat turned it off and put it back, not prepared to try and use that.
She tried on the earbug and heard the sporadic coded chatter of a Fed base on a stressful day. It was set to their standard frequency. Now that would come in handy, Rat decided with a grin, and secured it in her ear.
Next she looked around for her own stuff, and found her clothes hanging from a storage peg. She looked longingly at them but there was no time to stop and change. Rummaging around, she found her bag of toys — empty — and a few other useless bits and bobs. The only weapon, stuffed away in an open locker, was Gina’s little taser, stone cold to the touch when Rat picked it up. They’d drained the battery. She switched it on, and it slowly started to charge itself. Lastly Rat spotted her precious mobile phone and pounced on it, but despite several attempts she couldn’t find any signal down here. Unsurprised, she clipped it onto her waistband for later.
Only a few minutes left before somebody found her missing from her cell. She needed a plan to get everybody out of here, and fast. Pretty tall order with few options and no equipment. How could one person create enough chaos to fool both an AI and an army of Feds for long enough to make good their escape?
Rat eyed the bottle of cleaning alcohol on top of the weapons locker and got an idea. She reached for it, and stopped when she felt a rifle barrel pressed into the small of her back.
“Put your hands on your head,” said a cold voice by her ear, “and turn around, slowly. No sudden moves.” Quick hands tore the taser from her grasp and threw it into the corner.
Rat’s heart sunk into the ground as she obeyed the voice. Caught this early in the game? How could she have let that happen? Blazing anger and despair roared up inside her, at herself and everyone and everything that got her involved in this mess. She looked up into the Fed’s dark, unhelmeted face, close to tears, and asked, “How did you rumble me?”
“Cameras, puppet.” He watched Rat’s horrified expression and flashed a cocksure smile. “You forgot about ’em, eh? They’re in your cell, in the hallways, everywhere. Lazarus knew what you were doing the second you started. It just took us a minute to catch up with ya, is all.” His mouth widened into a leer. “‘Course, I turned ’em off before I went in here. I could kill ya right now and all I’d have to do is fill out a sheet of paper. You wanna be a good girl and stay alive?” Rat nodded slowly, which seemed to please him. After all there were so many things a girl, now alone and unarmed, could do for him. Dread choked her throat as he continued, “Then be nice to me, little puppet. Real nice.”
“Okay,” the Chrome Rat murmured and pressed the button on her hastily-constructed emergency plan. The hidden laser in her palm lanced across the Fed’s face, burning out both his eyes. He let out a terrible scream and clawed at them with one hand, firing wildly with the other. Rat ducked behind him and kicked him in the groin over and over until he crumpled into a ball and stopped moving.
“Was it good for you?” she spat, picking up the rifle and pressing it to his head. Her finger brushed the trigger, twitchy with anger and revulsion, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to fire. Finally she just chucked it away and scooped up the Mk5 from the corner, then grabbed the Fed’s little PDA, tucking both into her waistband. She glared one last time at the two unconscious Feds and growled, “Bunch of sleazy bastards.”
The only other thing she took from the guardroom was her lockpicking kit. It looked somewhat battered but still serviceable, and all the bits seemed to be there, so she couldn’t waste any more time here. She paused in the doorway and kissed her little laser, thanking it silently, and slipped it back into her pocket. Lastly she took out the PDA and told it to give her a map. It did so, in exquisite detail and with a little flashing light indicating her current location. Little number codes hovered over each door for which the Fed had a high-enough security clearance. Rat really loved technology sometimes.
First order of business, she thought to herself, need some backup. Or at least a diversion.
“Prisoner search,” she whispered to the PDA. “First name Gina, any last name. Display list.” The PDA quickly sorted through its database and spat out only one entry. Rat tapped it. The name flashed up onto the screen, but the rest was blank save for the words ‘Locked File, Security Flagged’ blinking away in red. She frowned. “Okay. Locate prisoner, Gina Hart or alias of same. Plot route from current location and display.” She didn’t know the right terminology for its voice parser so she improvised whatever sounded like it might work. Sure enough, the simple computer interpreted her instructions perfectly, giving her a glowing blue map to Gina’s cell.
She followed the route only in the roughest sense, dodging Feds and robots by taking detours and hiding behind corner. The place had been designed to defeat a stealthy approach, but they hadn’t anticipated someone who could open one of their precious cells in seconds. Determined, Rat forged on until she stood in front of Gina’s cell, and wondered if she really wanted to open it at all.
“What a horrible thought,” she told herself. “She’s my friend. I think.”
And a liability, said another, darker part of her that didn’t usually speak up. Remember what the Emperor said back there? Loose strings, they’re just gonna tie you up. Dead weight’s just gonna slow you down. He was right, and they killed him for it. None of ’em are worth getting caught again. You gotta get out while you can.
“I don’t have time for this. They know I’m out, they’ll be after me soon.”
All the more reason to turn around and walk away.
“No! Christ, I can’t do that.”
You know you can, or you wouldn’t be arguing so hard. It ain’t difficult. Just make a right face and put one foot in front of the other. You’ve done it before.
“I don’t want to!”
That’s a lie.
The need to act pressed more and more heavily on her as the seconds ticked away. She remembered when she was stuck on that ladder. The terrible presence in her head pushed her down and held her prisoner in her own mind, like she was being drowned or suffocated, even violated sexually. She watched her hands moving horribly against her will. Powerless.
Looking back at it now, Gina had saved her life, but there was still an unnatural, evil feeling that clung irrevocably to the whole experience. It shouldn’t affect her decision, but she couldn’t help it.
“Snap decision,” she told herself, unable to stand still for another second, and she opened the door.
Gina slipped back into her own head and tried to look surprised.
“So what’s our plan now?” asked Gina after Rat had filled her in on everything she already knew. “If they know we’re loose, we’re just as doomed as we were last time. Oh.” Light-headed from the Spice, she stumbled and caught herself on the wall. She shouldn’t have spent so long in somebody else’s mind, everything so clear and real. None of her muscles seemed to work quite right anymore, like they were in a different place than they used to be. It got a little bit better as she kept moving.
“I tried the stealth angle,” Rat said. “It didn’t work. What we need to do now is change the rules of the game.” She smiled, muttering some commands into her PDA. She’d obviously been thinking about this a while. “Follow me.”
Gina sensed the small team of Feds coming to intercept them long before they came close. Even Rat with her earbug hadn’t heard them coming; they were maintaining tight radio silence. Rat quickly replotted their route and gave the Feds a wide berth, as well as avoiding the security robot routes clearly detailed on the little screen. Gina had to marvel at the little device. The Feds probably never considered it a possibility that one might fall into the hands of a prisoner, being carried by the rough, tough and only slightly corrupt.
“What about Bomber?” Gina blurted suddenly. The question had been building inside her for hours now. She’d tried to stop herself from asking, afraid of what the answer might be, but she couldn’t keep it in any longer.
“Don’t know if he’s alive or what. We’ll try and get to him if we get a chance. Here we are!” Rat slowed slightly to point up ahead to a door marked with yellow and black warning stripes. The simple, unadorned sign next to it read, ‘Utility Cupboard 301’, but the door’s massive construction put the lie to that description. It looked like solid steel deadbolted with a host of electronic and mechanical locks, keeping it shut from anyone and anything that might have the same idea as Rat. She snorted quietly as she walked towards it, digging a pack out of her waistband. “Good thing I brought my picks.”
Watching Rat move towards the door, Gina was suddenly overcome by a surge of all-overriding terror. Something felt terribly wrong. Warning bells rang in her ears, and she moved to grab Rat just as the girl passed a branching corridor to her right. The robotic guns took only an instant to lock on and fire.
Gina launched herself into a tackle that would’ve done any rugby player proud. Bullets whizzed past her ears as she caught Rat squarely in the small of the back, and they went down in a tumble, rolling behind the corner into relative safety.
Blood coated Gina’s hands as she stood back up. The sight of it was too horrible to take. She sank to her knees and threw up on the floor, though only acid came out of her empty stomach. Soon there was nothing left to expel. She dry-heaved a few more times before the sickness subsided.
Rat squirmed about on the floor and clutched her thigh, but she waved away Gina’s attention with a mutter of, “It’s just a flesh wound.” Red stains soaked the leg of her jumpsuit when she dragged herself back to her feet. She stumbled, dizzy for a moment, but shook it off in iron determination. Metal legs were already clicking against the floor. She shouted, “Hold them off! We can’t lose now!”
“With what?” screamed Gina. She got no answer. Desperation drove her hand to her Mk5 and she fired wildly down the corridor. Lightning cracked through the air, well short of the lone security bot, but the bot’s legs froze to an abrupt stop. It braced itself to provide return fire, and Gina ducked back behind the corner an eyeblink before the lead started flying.
Sweat dribbled in rivulets down Rat’s face. She stood by the door working the locks with blood-slick hands. “Just keep it going for a minute, just a minute.” She glanced down at the small canisters of knockout gas bouncing around her feet, trailing wisps of green smoke. “Ah, shit.” She pulled her jumpsuit up to cover her nose and mouth and worked at the locks with redoubled effort.
Gina followed Rat’s example and covered her face. At the same time she begged the Mk5 to finish recharging. The security bot could just run in and kill them both at any time, but she hoped Lazarus didn’t know that. It would, of course. It saw everything and it knew exactly what her weapon could do. Maybe it was simply content to wait for the knockout gas to take effect and reinforcements to arrive.
Maybe it changed its mind when it realised just how fast Rat was going through the locks. With an electronic spoofer and a full-powered locksmith’s laser at her disposal, she tore them down two at a time. More metal feet were racing towards the scene, but Rat was already throwing open the door. On the other side Gina saw exposed electrical wiring of all varieties, metal boxes and piles of insulation, all manner of counters and gauges. All the circuit breakers and fuse boxes for the below-ground complex.
With her last ounce of strength, Rat threw the breakers and collapsed. The lights flickered but stayed on. The security robot slid to a halt not a metre away from Gina, stopped, then seemed to recover from its momentary confusion, its gun tracking once more on a dazed and coughing Gina.
“SURRENDER,” demanded Lazarus’s booming voice, blasting from the bot’s loudspeaker. “THE GRID HAS MANY BACKUPS AND OVERRIDES. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN–“
Gina fired her Mk5 straight into Utility Cupboard 301. The world went white for one endless second, then blacked out.
Blurry eyes fluttered open. At first she saw only the city, black scorched buildings under a red sky. Even the sun was red. Then she realised there was no sun, no sky, and the red suns were emergency lights casting their sullen red glow over the corridor.
Gina coughed. The knockout gas sent drums pounding through her head, but the explosion had dispersed most of it. Only a vague swimming-pool smell remained, mixing in the air with the reek of burnt plastic. Black scorch marks surrounded the door. The only thing she could see inside the cupboard was a mass of molten plastic and soot-stained metal. A stab of worry went through her when she noticed Rat’s body, or lack thereof. Rat had been lying in front of the cupboard when it blew. Not anymore.
Gina looked around in near-panic and found her slumped against the wall, face and hands blackened and cracked and oozing blood. More blood poured from the gaping rent in her thigh. The bullet had made a raw, pulpy hole all the way through. Rat’s desperate lungs worked hard to suck in each shallow breath of life, but they wouldn’t last forever.
She tore the leg off Rat’s jumpsuit and bandaged the hole as tightly as she could. ‘Still breathing’ was good enough. They were headed for the high-security infirmary anyway. She picked up the PDA and ordered it to show her the way.
Some people might abandon their friends in time of need, but not Gina.
Panting and puffing, she dragged Rat’s body along through the corridors, past unmoving robots and around Fed patrols. Gina could sense them clearly now. Clumps of leaderless confusion without Lazarus to direct them. Frustration, inability to coordinate an effective trap. Gina simply went around or waited for them to move on. One time she had a scare when there were two patrols on either side of her, blocking off her only alternate route, but then one of the Feds imagined he spotted something and sent his team running off in the wrong direction. Gina wasn’t sure if it was luck or something she’d done subconsciously.
Finally she reached her destination, a pair of automated doors with the words ‘Medical Centre’ printed on them, conveniently located just down the hall from the interrogation room. Gina gave a shudder, but took control of herself right away and gently lowered Rat’s body onto the ground. Then she brought up her Mk5 and dashed into the room. A sense of purpose burned in her eyes.
She felt the Fed before she stepped through the doors. His back was to the door, standing next to a white-coated man in animated conversation. Upset and worried about the power outage. They stood in front of a one-way mirror looking at a patient, and only turned when they heard the doors come open. Gina pulled the trigger an instant after that, very nearly too late.
The Fed moved like greased lightning. His pistol was in his hand and halfway up to a shooting stance by the time Gina fired. The bolt of lightning took a heartbeat longer to cross the room. She saw his fingers twitch against the trigger guard. Sweat beaded on his face, teeth clenched together. He focused everything into forcing his paralysed muscles to move just an inch further, support his weight just a second longer. Then his over-amplified nervous system blew out and his legs went out from under him.
“Freeze,” she told the man in the white coat, “unless you want the same thing happening to you.” The air around the Mk5 shimmered with heat, and it hummed menacingly. He put up his arms in surrender. She smiled at the age-old gesture and took a careful step closer.
“I don’t want any violence here,” he said. “This is a hospital.”
“It’s a butcher’s shop. But I’m going to give you one chance.” She jerked her head towards the door. “You’re a doctor. There’s a patient lying outside for you. Get her in here. If she dies, you die.”
Horrified understanding dawned behind his eyes. He stammered, “I’m not– We have orderlies–“
“No orderlies. You.”
“But I’m not a surgeon,” he insisted. The look she gave him convinced him otherwise, at least for the moment.
He brought Rat inside under Gina’s watchful eye and laid her gently on a gurney. He turned to Gina in all seriousness and said, “Listen, I’m a radiologist, I’m not trained to program this model of autosurgeon. I haven’t used one since I was an intern! These injuries are far beyond anything I ever studied for! With Lazarus offline, there’s nothing I can do!”
“Is there anyone else here who could?”
“We have a trauma surgeon, but she went home an hour ago. I’d have to put a call through to her house.” He let out a short, manic laugh and ran a hand through his gel-choked black hair. “I wasn’t even supposed to be here! I only got called in a few hours ago because someone came in with acute radiation poisoning. Just my luck, eh?”
“Yeah,” she replied, legs shaking. She couldn’t think about Bomber right now. He was dead, and there was a raw hole in her heart where his face used to be. “Yeah, I guess you’re having a pretty good day, ’cause I’m a real impatient woman with a gun to your head and not a lot of time. My friend is over there on that table, hurt. Now get to work.” She shoved him towards the control board and tried her best to look dangerous.
Left with no alternative, the doctor did as he was told.
The operation seemed to last forever. Seconds turned into minutes, each ticking by with endless finality. Gina heard the soft but insistent alarm stating that the patient was crashing. The doctor worked frantically, sweat dripping down from under his VR crown, fingers twitching whenever he needed to direct the spider-like robot behind the bulletproof screen.
First it carved the bullet fragments out of Rat’s leg with halting, unsure movements, and finally managed to stop the bleeding. A fast IV drip attempted to alleviate the massive blood loss from the ham-handed cutting. Once that was done, guided by a long tubular appendage with an endoscope on the end, the autosurgeon went after patches of interior bleeding. It sucked and stitched and kept Rat’s failing heart going with little electrical pulses. It sliced off burnt skin from the face and arms and applied brand-new grafts from the sterile meat farm recessed into the wall. The autosurgeon moved more easily wherever its automated functions could take over, but lacking true intelligence of its own, it still needed a human to direct the procedure.
At last, the heartbeat started to steady out and a bit of colour returned to Rat’s pale cheeks. Blood poured into her from the IV drip, but nobody could say if it were quick enough to stop her body breaking down.
“That’s it,” he sighed in abject relief. The VR crown slid off his head, and he put it down carefully into its cradle. “That’s all I can do. The rest is up to God, and time.”
“Not quite,” said Gina. “We need to be out of here right now. Stim her.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I can’t do that. She’s in no shape to take stimulants, much less move! Do you want her dead after all this?”
Gina flashed him a grim smile. “No, but she needs to be awake for my plan to work. Stim her.” She prodded him in the back with her Mk5, and smiled when he obeyed. “Good. Now, do you have any nurse uniforms lying around?”
The infirmary’s old supply cupboard yielded a stack of uniforms, old-fashioned blue button-up jackets with matching zippered skirts, none of them quite her size. In the end she erred on the baggy side, just for a change. The Mk5 strapped to the inside of her thigh with surgical tape. She couldn’t bear to touch the Fed’s pistol, but she searched in vain for something to replace her lost knife, wherever it was now. That knife had saved her bacon when it mattered, and she missed the feeling of its hard steel against her chest. Oh well, she sighed. Lastly she put on the blue nurse’s hat with an old caduceus emblem on it, two snakes coiled round a winged staff.
“Great Buddha,” was the first thing the doctor said when he saw her. “It covers you from neck to knee, and still you make that outfit look scandalous.”
“It’s a disguise,” she told him. A few touches of make-up, stolen from some nurse’s emergency kit, hid the cuts and bruises well enough.
“Not much of one,” mumbled a voice from the corner. Rat worked up a smile and twitched her arm. “Why can’t I move?” Then, “Oh, I don’t feel so good.”
Gina rushed to the bedside and helped Rat to sit up. “The two are related. We gave you a muscle relaxant so you wouldn’t hurt yourself. It’ll wear off in a minute.”
“So who’re you all dressed up for?”
“All part of my plan.”
“Christ. Better be a good one.” She yawned. “Want to let me in on it?”
“We’ll put you on a stretcher and wheel you out through the front door. If anyone stops us, you’re a medical emergency that can’t be treated here ’cause of the power failure. Just keep screaming, things’ll be fine.” Just at that moment, a chair flew through the one-way mirror and smashed an instrument table over on its side. Sharp glass and surgical steel went over the floor. A wild-eyed man in a hospital gown leaped through the gap and seized the doctor by the throat, Fed pistol in his other hand, and glanced around like a trapped animal.
“I have had a gun pointed at me entirely too many times today,” said Gina wearily, too tired to be shocked. “Put it down, Bomber.”
“Oh, you’re here,” he said. “That’s . . . um, good.” He looked down, confused. “I can’t drop my arm.”
As he turned his head, Gina gasped in horror. The side of his head had been shaven and a raw red scar ran across his temple for the entire length of his ear. It looked medieval in its brutality. “What did they do to you?” she whispered.
The doctor coughed, “I think I can answer that question.” He at least had the decency to look ashamed. “Dr. Ashigaru — that trauma surgeon I mentioned — they called her in for other reasons as well as patching him up. I was there, and . . . Well, after we managed to get him stable, the higher-ups were afraid of another rescue attempt, and the mindrip process was taking too long thanks to his implant. So they ordered her to try and cut it out of his brain.”
Bomber blinked at him. “It can’t be cut out. If you tried, anything could happen.”
“Anything did happen. The implant threatened to fry your whole cerebral cortex when it detected our stealth scalpel, so Dr. Ashigaru had to abort. Your EEG was practically flat for an hour after the operation.” Rubbing his stubbled chin, he added, “The implant may still be active and using you to protect itself from further tampering. Do you know its capabilities?”
“If I ever did, they wiped that out a long time ago.” A faint sheen of sweat covered his skin. “I’m tryin’ not to pull the trigger . . .”
The doctor smiled in utter fascination. “Amazing, you must have some top-level hardware in there. I saw your X-rays but I never guessed–” He stopped himself and coughed self-consciously. “I’m sorry, got a bit carried away. Cybernetics are sort of a hobby.”
“So is there anything you can do to get that implant to sit back down and shut up?” asked Gina.
“Not a thing, I’m afraid. We don’t have a cyberneticist assigned, they’re in short supply all over.” When that explanation failed to please his audience, the doctor suggested, “Maybe a muscle relaxant? He can’t hurt anyone if he can’t move.”
“I don’t think anyone should be comin’ any closer right now,” said Bomber, voice trembling. His arm, too, started to shake.
“What choice do we have?” asked Gina. Just as she finished her sentence, the door to the main ward slid open.
The orderly didn’t even get the chance to see who killed him. The bullet was already bouncing around his brain before the door came fully open, the pill tray in his arms crashing to the floor, and Bomber was already spinning around to deal with his next target. The doctor flew backwards in a spray of blood. Two holes, one in his head, one in his heart. Then the gun swung towards Gina, only a few feet away, who — terrified eyes locked on the weapon, unable to do anything except watch her own death — never saw Rat fumbling the Mk5 from the back of her waistband.
There were two sharp cracks, one after the other. Bomber twitched and sat down hard on the floor. Silence.
“No,” said Bomber, his hands travelling across Gina’s body, searching for a wound. The touch brought her back to consciousness, and she realised she must’ve fainted.
“No,” Bomber continued. “I shot you. I saw it.”
Gina gently disengaged herself and climbed up to her knees, glanced down at herself. “I feel fine. I’m fine.” That didn’t appease him, and he moved past her to search the wall by eye and touch.
“No bullet hole. This doesn’t make sense,” he rumbled, and checked the Fed pistol. A glimmer of emotion crossed his face then, just a moment of full-on astonishment. “I pulled the trigger six times. Magazine’s down only four rounds. How?”
“Can we talk about this later, maybe?” interjected Rat. The sound of her voice seemed to bring the others back to their senses. Next she spoke to Bomber. “Are you feelin’ okay now? Any less fucking crazy?” He nodded slowly. “Then we still need to get out of here. Original plan’s still in effect, right?”
Clearing her throat, Gina said, “Yeah. Yeah, it is.” She looked at Bomber in his blue hospital gown and frowned. “It’ll look suspicious if it’s just a nurse taking two patients out. You need to look like a doctor.” She gestured her chin at the expired Fed doctor without actually looking at him. If she didn’t look at him, he wasn’t there, wasn’t dead.
Not wasting any more words, Bomber stripped the body, quickly putting on whatever remained free of bloodstains. After that he salvaged a wig from the cupboard and cut it into shape with a pair of shears. Gina meanwhile got her feet back under her and checked on Rat.
“Thanks,” she said under her breath, picking up the Mk5 from the floor where Rat’s trembling fingers had dropped it. “You ready?”
“No,” Rat answered. She radiated drugged energy and the tunnel-vision focus of stimulants working in her brain. Even barely conscious with a bullet wound in her leg, she took a kind of manic pleasure from the whole thing. “Let’s do it.”
They wheeled Rat down the hall to the security elevator, which had reverted to manual control for the emergency. It still had power. A single yellow bulb burned in the ceiling, and green glowing neon surrounded the control panel. Gina hit the button for the ground floor and prayed for the doors to close.
Which they did, but not before a battle-armoured Fed officer squeezed in, mouthing apologies for delaying them.
“Official business, I’m afraid,” he said in Conglom. The voice had a metallic echo to it from inside the helmet. Smooth grey and black metal covered his entire body, augmenting his strength and speed far beyond human limits. If the need arose, that suit could kill all three of the escapees with its pinky. “There’s been a prisoner breakout. You haven’t seen anything, have you?”
“No, sorry,” Gina replied. Rat punctuated the sentence with a bloodcurdling scream, and Gina whispered some soothing words. “Easy. We’ll get you to a hospital soon.”
“What’s wrong with your patient?”
Gina lied smoothly. It was a line she’d practiced over and over in her head. “He needs a special machine to survive, but ours went down with the power failure. We’ll lose him if we don’t get him to a hospital within the hour.”
“Ah.” The Fed rocked back on his heels, trying to get the elevator to speed up by sheer force of will. “Do you need an escort? I can arrange a car to clear the way for you.”
A brilliant and utterly false smile lit up Gina’s face. “Very kind of you, but we only need an ambulance.”
“As you wish. At least allow me to escort you to the motor pool.” He suddenly cocked his head as if listening to a distant sound. “Forgive me, it seems even that privilege is denied me. I have been told to report upstairs. Important people are unhappy.” The carriage doors opened and he stood aside for the medical team. “Take good care of your patient, miss. And wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” she told him sincerely and helped lift the gurney out of the carriage. She breathed a long sigh of relief when the doors closed again, taking him out of sight and out of reach.
Gina stayed in front of the gurney for the rest of the way, down the immaculate white halls and into the same lobby where they’d first entered. She mumbled the words medical emergency to the woman at the desk, the very same one that had let them in, who didn’t even bother to look up as she overrode lockdown procedures and opened the outer door.
Cool night air caressed her face. Her nose filled with the sweet smell of wet concrete and a hint of smoke from the wrecked helicopter, resting some ways down the car park under a thick sheet of plastic. It was being tended to by a very careful hazard team and a lead-lined nuclear disposal van. Bomber explained that a simple crash landing couldn’t possibly breach the armoured reactor, but getting rid of it was a challenge.
They ditched the gurney in a corner and crossed the grounds under Bomber’s tactical guidance. Rat’s legs still couldn’t support her whole weight, so the others half-carried her. There were Fed eyes everywhere — almost everywhere — to try and compensate for Lazarus’s absence. It didn’t work. Nobody saw three shadows sneaking across the grounds, or at least nobody thought long enough to stop them.
They slipped out the gate behind a Fed patrol car and crossed the street. Solid tarmac under their feet, then kerbstones and pavement. Gina’s heart pounded harder with each step. Sounds of chaos fading behind her, still unable to believe she was out again.
A surge of pure elation overwhelmed her. Tears sprung into her eyes as she grabbed Bomber and Rat both and hugged them tight to her. She could tell they felt the same.
Bomber flagged down the first taxi they laid eyes on, and they piled into it at a run. At last they sprawled out onto the fake leather interior in glorious freedom, heading for nowhere in particular. Any direction would do, as long as it was away.
EMPATHY: Part 10
“What do we do now?” asked Rat. She stood over Bomber with her hands hovering a few inches above him, feeling like she should do something but too afraid to touch. The creeping horror of the building had finally wiped the grin off her face.
“Cut him loose,” the Emperor ordered, tossing her a sheathed Fed sword from the corpse. Rat took a moment to figure out how to deploy it, then started sawing through the tough fabric. To Gina he said, “Talk to him. He knows your voice, remind him who he is and where he is.”
Gina nodded in response. She stepped up and took Bomber’s hand in hers, felt the whipcord tension in them. She opened her mouth to talk to him, and she realised she didn’t have a clue about who he was. Much less what to tell him.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said in a small, humiliated voice. How insane it all was — how insane she had to be! She nearly died for someone she didn’t even know.
Bomber let out a deep breath, and all the tension seemed to flow out of his body until he hung limply in the chair. Rat stepped back in surprise and alarm, accidentally nicking him on the hand with the sword. He didn’t move or cry out as blood welled up out of the wound. Gina rushed to check for a pulse.
“Still breathing,” she sighed with relief. “Don’t do that to me, you bastard. We’ve come all this way. You can’t croak on me now.”
She reached out to take his hand. His fingers wrapped loosely around her thumb, empty of strength but not of will. Her free hand found the button to release the hooks on his eyelids. They swung away, and Bomber shut his eyes as tight as he could, like he wasn’t sure this rescue wasn’t another of the room’s terrible illusions.
Rat moved around to the other side of the chair, cut the straps, and pressed a patch against Bomber’s neck. “Antidote,” she said by way of explanation. “He’s doped up on muscle relaxants and psycho shit. This’ll help.”
“What kind of psycho shit?”
Rat didn’t look happy about hearing that question. After a while, she answered, “The kind that’ll make you believe any fuckin’ thing you see. Fucks with your mind bad, real bad.”
“Enough to get past his training?” asked Gina, one eye on the Emperor guarding the door.
“A good knife could do it if wielded with care and patience,” he said with the voice of experience, a faint smile on his face. The smile quickly disappeared when he added, “Feds, however, are not the careful or patient sort.”
“Right.” She gently clasped Bomber’s hand to her chest, beaming a fragile smile down at him. “Hey, Bomber. Or Simon. Whatever the hell your name is.”
Glassy eyes swivelled to make eye contact with her, though they didn’t quite seem to understand what they saw. She reached out to touch his forehead. It was slick with the cold sweat of panic and helpless effort.
“It’s okay to come out now,” she continued. “You’re safe. At least for a while, I think. We still need to get out of here, but that’s for later. First things first. Um.” She glanced around. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but you’re about twenty metres underground in the Fed building in Hong Kong. They’ve been . . . doing stuff to you.”
Bomber blinked a couple of times, focusing on a spot several inches above her head, and said, “I know.”
She almost cried out when she heard his voice, and blurted, “You’re back!”
“I think so,” he said, his voice weak and hoarse from screaming. “What took you so long?” The corners of his mouth curled up into the ghost of a smile.
“You were counting on us to rescue you?” blurted Rat, astonished.
“Of course. Why else would I turn myself in?” He lifted a hand to his forehead to rub his eyes. “God, I feel like shit.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Gina said. “You turned yourself in?”
“Gina,” he looked up at her like a man confronted with the sight of the sun after a long time underground, “I found out some things. About Gabriel, I mean. Until he got wind of it. Wasn’t very happy about people snooping into his past. His guys tried to grab me, boxed me in. I couldn’t get out. So I bust into the police station and confessed some things. Then they turned me over to the Feds.” A shadow passed over him for a second, but he quickly shook it off. “Listen, I know where we gotta go.”
Her stomach did backflips at seeing him again. Emotions churned in her belly — excitement and fear, fondness and dread, lust and pity, and a whole mess of others. She hesitated and stammered as she spoke. “T-Tell me about it later. Later. We need to get you out of here, right now.”
For once he didn’t argue with her. Instead he gripped the sides of the chair and swung his legs down to the floor, slowly putting weight on them. After a few cautious seconds, he satisfied himself that he could indeed stand upright. “I think I’m okay to walk. You guys got a plan?”
All conversation stopped short when his eyes met the Emperor’s. The two men stood facing each other, and the Emperor’s face showed no sign of emotion at their reunion.
“Simon. Did you perform that favour I asked of you?” the Emperor asked in a silky soft tone of voice.
“I did,” he said.
The Emperor nodded in acceptance of this fact. “Good.” The next instant his gun was aimed unerringly at Bomber’s head. “Then we are done. Any last words?”
“What the hell is this?” demanded Gina, looking back and forth between the two of them. The gun hung in the air at the end of the Emperor’s arm, waiting to be fired in an act of summary execution. The serene smile on his face made her angrier than anything she could remember.
Bomber answered, “He’s decided I’m no longer of any use to him. I’ve paid my debts. I’m not an asset to him anymore, just a liability.”
“How delicately you phrase that,” the Emperor chuckled. He kept both eyes on Bomber as he told Gina, “Drop your bag, please. And your purse. I am not about to make that mistake again.” Her hand had already moved halfway to her Mk5, she really didn’t want to put the purse down, but she grudgingly did as told.
Bomber kept his arms at his sides, rigid as a statue while he looked the Emperor in the eye. “What about the girl, then? And the boy? More liabilities to be eliminated?”
“You yourself should know about leaving loose ends.”
“Hey, I ain’t no fuckin’ liability to anyone,” Rat snarled, ready to defend her reputation tooth and nail even in the face of a maniac with a gun. The Emperor remained unimpressed. His eyes were glued to Bomber just in case anyone got any ideas.
It was obvious, Gina realised. He considered Bomber to be the only threat in the room. She clutched her hand to her bosom slowly, so as not to get shot for her trouble. Her eyes met Bomber’s.
“Yes,” Bomber said, “I know all about loose ends.” And his arm twitched, just enough to get the Emperor’s attention but not enough to provoke an immediate gunshot. The Emperor’s eyes flickered to track the movement just for an instant. Enough for Gina. She lunged and drove her knife hilt-deep into his arm.
It was a testament to the Emperor’s nerve and self-discipline that he didn’t let go of his gun. Threatened from two fronts with only a single weapon, he knew what to do, and his split-second reflexes pulled the trigger down to the metal. A string of automatic fire cracked through the air towards Bomber, and the Emperor backed away from Gina as his gun — slowed but not stopped by the wound — turned towards her.
The knife was stuck in the raw red wound and twisted out of her grasp as the Emperor moved. Disarmed and out of ideas, she had one endless moment to stare into the Emperor’s murderous eyes, just waiting to die.
Then the barrel lurched sideways and the Emperor dropped like a stone. He didn’t even twitch when he hit the floor, already dead. Bomber stood over him, panting and clutching his chest, blood oozing between his fingers.
“Nice work,” he wheezed in a nasty, wet voice that didn’t seem to come entirely from his throat. “Had me worried for a second there. I figured he’d wait ’till we were out.” Inspecting his wound by eye and feel, he added, “Think he punctured a lung.”
Gina’s eyes moved with horrified slowness from the red stain on his jumpsuit to his pale, drawn face. “God, we’ve gotta get you to a hospital!”
“Be fine as long as I can stay somewhere safe for a while. Just get me out of here.” He looked at Rat for a second, who was climbing out from behind cover with a dead look in her eyes, staring at the corpse. The Emperor, one of her greatest role models, lay in front of her in a bleeding heap of humanity — and her image of him as an invincible colossus of self-made power came tumbling down. “Friend of yours?” he asked Gina from the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah, I’m everybody’s fuckin’ friend!” Rat screamed, suddenly livid, launching into Bomber with a fury even more intense than anything Gina had seen from Rat. “I just love people I don’t even know who fuck up the plan to rescue them from the biggest hive of Feds on the continent! Well hey, buddy, you just killed our only ticket out of the dungeon! Now what the fuck are we gonna do?!”
A bloody smile crossed Bomber’s face, baring red-stained teeth. “Leave that to me. Bring the bags.” He started for the door, but his wobbly legs had lost their adrenaline strength, and he went down to one knee without even realising it had happened.
Snatching up her purse, Gina pulled his arm over her shoulders and supported his swaying body as they stumbled out of the room.
Gina slotted the needle back into the first aid kit. She started to look for something more permanent than the simple slap-on patch on Bomber’s chest, but he stopped her with a resolute look on his face.
“No time,” he said, “this’ll do. Help your friend.”
Gina nodded and went over to the door, throwing her weight against the heavy cabinet that Rat was trying to turn into a barricade. Together they managed to slide it into place by fits and starts. Bomber, meanwhile, struggled to his feet and stumbled into the supply cabinet without a word.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Arranging our way out,” he said with a mad smile on his lips.
“Don’t joke around, Bomber. I can’t take that right now.”
“I’m not. See,” Bomber explained in tones alternately harsh with pain and giddy from the chemical haze, “I knew when I went in that — worst-case scenario — I’d probably end up here. Had a chance to jack into VR, study the building a bit. Found some floor plans from when Hong Kong StateSec took over and refurbished the place.” He grinned his horrible bloody teeth at Gina. “Pretty much rebuilt the whole interior from the ground up, complete with a brand new air system.”
“Whoa, stop there,” said Gina. “Air system?”
“A whole network of ventilation ducts between the floors and some of the walls. Big enough for a man, with manual controls for the machinery, in case of emergency or counter-insurgency procedures. Or if the high-ups needed to get out the building. Thank God for institutional paranoia.”
“But the Feds know about them?”
“Yeah, but the ducts ain’t wired into Lazarus. Feds kept ’em free of automated electronics. They’re even on a separate electrical grid. A little bolt-hole in case Lazarus ever turned on ’em. Ah!” He staggered back from the cabinet with a grunt, holding a large fire extinguisher, then wedged it firmly against the side wall.
“You’re actually serious?” asked Rat. “What do you think this is, a bad action flick? You expect us to go through the vents?”
“Yep.” As he stepped back he drew his gun and said, “Duck.”
The extinguisher — and the wall next to it — exploded in a shower of super-cooled gas and concrete shards. Bomber shielded his eyes with his arm and turned away, careful to keep his skin covered from the gas until the ventilation system had sucked it all up, and Gina followed his example. Once the dust settled she peeked out again. Where the extinguisher had been was now a hole in the floor, lined with a jagged edge of sharp rubble and sheet steel, leading into a simple rectangular duct. A primitive light strip was recessed into the duct ceiling, and its floor was covered in a sticky brown soup of rotting blood and human waste.
“Huh,” he said. “One of the drains must’ve burst. I guess if Lazarus can’t fix it, it doesn’t get done.” He looked at the others and shrugged. “Well, it beats standing here getting killed. We don’t have a lot of options at this juncture.”
One whiff of the atmosphere down there almost convinced Gina to take her chances with the Feds. She could barely stand to be within sight of the hole. Still, she knew they couldn’t stay here, and a series of soft scrapes and screwing noises from the door confirmed it. Those sounds were every inch as disturbing as the smell, telling her that somebody was planting charges to blow the heavy mechanical lock from the outside.
Bomber glanced up at the sound, obviously something he’d been expecting but would’ve liked to have happened a bit later. “Getting ready to bust in. We should be out of here when they do.”
“You said there were guards,” Rat said. She stared down the hole, lips drawn back in disgust, but her brain was still working on the problem at hand. “They could be waiting for us wherever we come out. How’re we gonna get past them?”
“We can avoid ’em, ’cause we got something they don’t.” He reached up to playfully ruff Gina’s hair. “Our very own telepath.”
No! Gina wanted to scream, but looking into Bomber’s bruised and puffy face, she couldn’t find it in her to tell him no. It was like the whole universe conspired to get her to take just one more pill, and one more, and one more.
“Alright,” she said, trying to hide the miserable fear and resentment from her voice. “Alright. But I’m going to be seriously fucked up when it kicks in. I can’t help carry you.”
“I can handle that.” Rat met their surprised glances, looking back and forth between the two of them, adjusting the heavy bag slung over her shoulder. “Well, what are we waiting for? An invitation?”
Clambering down the hole with a physical ease that surprised Gina, Rat dropped herself the last few inches and landed badly off-balance. The weight of the bag knocked her sideways into the tube wall, where she came to rest for a few seconds muttering breathless obscenities.
“Not as easy as it looks,” she called grumpily once she’d recovered from the impact. “I’m okay, come on down.”
Gina helped to lower Bomber down the hole, then glanced over her shoulder into the holographic room. Somehow, for some reason she couldn’t quite explain, a twinge of guilt tugged at her heart.
“Are you sure we should leave the body?” she asked.
“Let the Feds have him,” hissed Bomber. For a moment he turned into the stone-hearted thing that sent icicles of fear down her spine, the thing that killed people as easily and thoughtlessly as it might snuff out a candle, but he quickly regained control of himself. “They’re not gonna get much out of a corpse.”
The only sound left in the room was the subtle stretching of plastic explosive pushing deeper into the lock. Minute electronic beep of a detonator reporting readiness. Every noise outside rang clear as day through the big keyholes. Not much time left, Gina knew, and she bit down on her tongue, staring at the strip of pills in her hand. She didn’t want to. She shouldn’t have to. It wasn’t fair. She’d never had the courage to end it quickly, and now that she’d finally found her will to live, it seemed like there was no way off the path to self-destruction.
Finally she decided her self-pity had reached critical mass and put it away in disgust, swallowed one of the little capsules, and climbed down. Moments later the lock blew into pieces, and great battle robots crashed through the door with guns ready to tear apart their targets, and found none.
Many of the light fixtures had burnt out, leaving great islands of darkness in the light. Thumps and clanging noises echoed all around them, their origins unclear. It could’ve been someone banging on the walls or a whole Fed squad tromping just around the corner to try and head them off, there was no way to tell. They passed the busted drain, sharp metal intruding into the duct, and the sludge all around them thickened to the consistency of custard.
Bomber and Gina could just manage a low crawl through the ducts, up to their elbows in sludge, while Rat dragged the bag along on all fours. Bomber kept a decent pace despite the bullet through his lung, although his laboured breathing got louder and shallower as the effort took its toll.
Gina’s head floated on her shoulders, felt like it were wrapped in cotton wool. The exercise fired her metabolism, and the Spice was starting to hit her bloodstream, bringing with it the muddled lucidity of the third eye trance. It was early, too early, and it came on fast.
‘Never again’ would be too early for Gina’s liking. She could take a step back and see her mind starting to unravel, bits of the outside creeping in, hallucinations, other people living in her head . . . Mental note, she told herself, check in to loony bin when this shit is over.
“You don’t look so good,” Rat puffed through her teeth, grimly hauling the heavy bag from knee to knee.
“Spice. It’s starting.” Gina pinched the bridge of her nose. Her thoughts were individual raindrops falling into a pond, forming little eddies of understanding where the ripples flowed into each other. The pond was dark and murky and seemed to move in slow-motion. There were fish in there as well, and God only knew what they were for.
Bomber rasped, “Can you feel anything?”
“Not yet,” she told him, which wasn’t entirely true. Little whispers of thought and emotion ran through the building and into her body like an electric current, faint, without words or coherent images. Gina couldn’t make heads or tails of them. There was only one emotion she could make out, a pronounced undercurrent in everything and everywhere around her.
Rage.
Shivering and lost in her oncoming trance, Gina bumped head-first into a wall. She sat down hard on the bare metal of the tunnel, looking around in confusion. The tunnel had opened up suddenly and now ended in a vertical steel shaft several floors high, sharply square and covered with long streaks of rust. A single unsteady-looking ladder disappeared into the dimness above, covered in sharp burrs and peeling slivers of rust to make the whole thing a little bit more dangerous. Its builders obviously hadn’t thought much of health and safety.
Bomber was the first to start up the rungs. He grunted with every step, and started dripping blood halfway through, but he made it up all the same, propping himself up against the wall in a half-sitting position. Gina followed him up, concentrating hard on each rung to keep herself from drifting, and Rat brought up the rear. Gina finally made it to the top, and went down on her knees to give Rat a hand. She popped her head over the rim just in time to see the bag hit the bottom of the shaft with a terrible crunch. Echoes rattled off the walls for what seemed like an eternity before they finally died down.
Everywhere, heads turned and searched for the source of the noise. Gina could feel them homing in like hounds on a hunt. She glanced down at Rat, but Rat never even looked at the bag as it fell. She just clung to the rungs in silence. Cold sweat stood out on her forehead, and her shoulders were shaking.
“My arms won’t work,” she said to the wall.
Gina frowned. “What are you talking about? Of course your arms work.”
“No, you don’t understand. I can’t let go.” She looked up at Gina with terror-wide eyes. “It’s too high.”
“You’re afraid of heights?” Gina asked incredulously, and Rat nodded. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“How?! What was I supposed to come out with? ‘Hey, little note, I know we’re bein’ chased by a small army of people who want to kill us all slowly, but I’ve got this slight problem with high places . . .'” She relaxed her grip slightly in her fit of anger, but as soon as she realised what had happened she cried out and yanked herself tight to the rungs again.
The hard-edged feelings and killing thoughts of Feds on the warpath closed in all around them, a frenzy of sharks with blood in the water. Gina said frantically, “Come on, Rat, you’ve got to keep going! They’re gonna find us any second!”
“I’m telling you,” Rat said through gritted teeth, “I. Can’t. Move.”
In desperation Gina swung herself back over the edge and climbed back down to where Rat was stuck, about two-thirds of the way up the ladder. Her heart pounded with adrenaline and her head throbbed from the Spice, a whirlpool of emotions, only a few of which were her own. She reached out to Rat and called, “Take my hand, I’ll guide you up!”
“I’d be happy to, but I can’t. I . . .” She bit down on her tongue, moisture in her eyes as she looked up. “I’m sorry.” When Gina didn’t seem to understand, Rat’s voice turned into a hoarse scream of, “Go! Go on without me!”
The hopelessness in Rat’s heart scythed into Gina. It was sharp and bitter, every inch as strong as if it were her own. She wanted to turn and run away, leave Rat to her fate, but she found that she couldn’t do that any more than Rat could let go of the rusty steel in her hands.
Gina’s hand and mind reached out in a single motion. She didn’t know how she did it, it was something out of instinct. For a few seconds she saw out of Rat’s eyes, saw the fingers locked around the bars, pried them loose one by one. Astonishment and abject panic fought for control of Rat’s mind, but Gina was already there, quieting them. Her fingers locked around Rat’s wrist and pulled.
All of Gina’s muscles screamed in pain. Her mind felt like it was being twisted by massive hands. Rat fought her body and mind every step of the way, but she refused to let go. Another step, another, and another, and then they were over the edge. Safe. She crumbled, all the energy gone out of her limbs, flat on her back on the tunnel floor.
After a few tortured breaths, she called Bomber’s name. He didn’t respond. With a fading burst of energy she kicked him in the shins, and he started awake.
“Christ,” he said thickly, looking down at the trickle of blood oozing from his chest and through his fingers. “I was starting to drift. Thanks.”
“We can’t stop here,” Gina panted, her fingers crusted with blood and rust. “They’ll be coming up this way in a few seconds.”
He nodded grimly and pulled her to her feet in the larger tunnel, high enough to walk upright. She tried to do the same for Rat, but Rat jerked away from her touch and scurried to her feet a short distance away. The fear and awe and loathing in her eyes said everything that needed to be said. Gina had done something bad, something that made her unnatural and wrong, and she might never be normal again.
And out there, somewhere in the great wide world, Gabriel smiled.
They wandered on in silence. Gina stayed in the front, occasionally changing direction at Bomber’s say-so. Rat stayed in the back to be alone and as far from Gina as possible. There were Feds all around, their footsteps and muttered voices echoing through the tunnels from all sides. Gina wondered if she could reach out that far and make them take a wrong turn or something like that. And if that were possible, should she?
Something had gone wrong somewhere along the way. That much was obvious. Spice was a receiver, not a transmitter. It couldn’t . . . shouldn’t be able to make her do the things she’d done. Onounu had managed some pretty weird things in her day, as did the other old veterans of the Street, but they couldn’t possibly exceed the effects of the drug. Nobody could. Nobody except Gabriel.
You did this, she thought at him, but got no response.
They came to a heavy metal door recessed in a block of grey concrete, and Bomber came forward to have a look, beckoning Rat over. Gina was almost heartened by the sight of a wall made of something other than sheet steel or plasterboard. As they crowded in, she noticed the door lock, like something out of ancient times. It was a ten-digit mechanical number pad, the numbers long gone to use and rust. Exposed alarm wires ran from the lock into the door.
Once Rat had identified the lock, she said, “Tell me we’re not supposed to open that.”
“Can’t pick it?” asked Bomber, still short of breath.
“It’s an antique, man. I’d either set off the alarm, cause the door to lock down, or both. No way to get around one of these without the code.”
“I was afraid of that.” He placed his hand against the bare concrete at the doorframe and ran his fingers lightly down, searching for something. “Don’t know if this code still works. Worth a try.” He seemed to find what he was looking for and, running his fingers over some notches in the concrete, called out a short number sequence.
Rat gaped at Bomber in shock and awe. “How the hell did you know that was there?”
“The Emperor told me about it once. This is nearly the same way he escaped from StateSec, long before you were born. And they never found out how.” Bomber stepped back and punched his numbers into the lock. It popped with a loud metal clack, and Bomber allowed himself a smile as he pulled the door open. “The man was a legend, all right.”
A bullet grazed his cheek and tore a hole through Gina’s loose-fitting top, missing her by millimetres. She dropped to the floor while Bomber slammed the door shut again, muttering, “Shit, shit, shit!”
“And this is why, in the real world, you don’t go through the fucking air vents!” snarled Rat. “What the hell are we gonna do now?!”
“Gina!” Bomber grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her to get her attention, his own body braced against the door in case anyone tried to break in. “How many are there?”
“I . . .” She stopped herself short of telling him she couldn’t do that. This was an emergency, and just because it wasn’t easy didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. She pushed her mind beyond the door, casting herself out like a net, and tried to cover the whole room without scattering her mind into little pieces. The strands of the net kept together by willpower alone. It echoed against other minds in the room and tried to feel their individuality. She counted one, two, three . . .
“Three Feds,” she said firmly. “Don’t know about bots. They’ve got backup on the way as well.”
“Then they’re gonna have to make some room,” Bomber answered, pulling a pair of concealed handguns out of his jumpsuit waistband. Gina recognised them as coming from their equipment bag, but she had no idea when or how he’d gotten his hands on them. “Make no mistake, this job’s been easy so far. That’s over now.” He glanced over his shoulder as if he could see through the door, then continued in a monotone, almost robotic voice. “From here on in there’s gonna be Feds and ‘bots crawlin’ all over the place, and we can’t hesitate.” His eyes focused on Gina. “Quick answer. Can you kill?”
That, Gina knew immediately, was not the best question to ask someone with a load of Spice raging in her bloodstream. A dark torrent of smells, sounds and images poured through her. She could cope with the old, faded memories of corpses she’d seen on the Street. It was the fresh ones that gave her trouble. There were too many. The Russians in the alley, the duelling gangers, the Triad man hunting for the Emperor, Onounu and Mashei. Each death replayed itself before her eyes and she couldn’t seem to stop.
But all of them were just a build-up to the most vivid scene, the most horrible memory in her head. Her stomach heaved at the feeling of her finger squeezing the trigger. The gun kicking back into the heel of her hand. Blood spattering across her clothes, dripping from her hands. A curl of smoke pouring out the barrel. The dead thug lying on the cold concrete floor front of her, blood and brains seeping out of him.
Acid burned at the back of her throat and her eyes filled with moisture as she stammered, “I– I–“
“Can you kill?”
“No!” she cried out. Tears stung her eyes and she turned away, sobbing silently, wet droplets slowly washing away the flashbacks. Even with her back to him she could feel Bomber’s eyes on her. They didn’t judge or disapprove, but they were . . . disappointed.
“I can,” Rat said into the silence. She took one of the guns from Bomber, a small pistol with a bright red fire/safe switch on the side. She looked Bomber squarely in the eye, doing her best to ignore Gina shuddering beside her.
“Good,” Bomber answered, checking Rat’s gun for her. Then he turned back to Gina and rested a sympathetic hand on her arm. “Don’t worry. Keep that taser of yours handy, it might save the day, and nobody’s gotta die. Yeah?”
Gina nodded and scrubbed angrily at her eyes. She was more upset with herself for breaking down than for her inability to kill another human being. But she had her Mk5, and its warmth in her hand was like a ten-thousand-volt security blanket.
“On three,” said Bomber, and she watched as he counted down on his fingers.
The next few minutes were a confused blur of activity, and Gina couldn’t figure out what was happening and what they’d already done.
The door swung open. Bomber moved as if he felt no pain. Gunshots. A mad dash across a room crowded with storage pallets and forklift trucks. That gave them some good cover against the automatic fire pouring from the Feds. At one point Gina remembered zapping the machine gun emplacement with her Mk5, welding the gunner’s hands to his weapon.
She didn’t know how they made it into the other room. Her next clear memory was of helping Bomber slam the big metal locking bar across the warehouse door. Little dents appeared in the wall where bullets rammed into the corrugated steel. They scrambled away from it in case the steel gave way, but it never did, and the hail of bullets soon stopped.
Panting, Gina gradually came down from the rush of their flight, and got her head back under control. Her heartbeat slowed as she glanced around.
The ceiling disappeared so far up into the darkness that Gina couldn’t make it out. The only light came from large spots erected along the walls, pointed at each of the vehicles in the warehouse, all arranged in separate parking lots. There were town cars, jeeps, lorries, armoured cars, tanks. This had to be the motor pool.
Rat immediately went over to one of the tanks to check it out, but Bomber trudged on ahead to a bunch of storage bays at the far end, all covered by a big blue tarpaulin.
“Help me get this off,” he rasped. A trail of blood drops followed at his heels and pooled wherever he stopped. His face was white and drawn, his eyes unfocused. He spat blood-stained phlegm onto the flat concrete floor.
Gina had no time or desire to argue. Bit by bit the tarpaulin came off, and revealed a slender black helicopter the likes of which she’d never seen. It was low and wide in the middle, and tapered to a sharp point at the front around the large cockpit. A bunch of exposed electrical wires hung under the cockpit to mark what had once been a weapon mount. At the back the copter had an aeroplane tail instead of a tail rotor. The canopy stood open, and inside were two big bucket seats waiting for a pilot and a gunner.
“Wow,” said Rat, having lost all interest in the tanks. “Now that is slick.”
“Get in. I need to start up the reactor.” A harsh, rasping cough rocked through him. He seemed somehow smaller when he straightened himself out again, only to find the others still staring at him dumbly. “Move! Anyone still out here without a rad suit in ten seconds is gonna have a real bad day!”
That spurred Gina and Rat into action quickly enough. They scrambled up the pilot steps as fast as they could and squeezed the both of them into the gunner’s seat, leaving the walled-off pilot’s chair free for Bomber. Olive drab bulkheads surrounded Gina, all covered with black computer screens and manual safety switches. Instead of a set of main controls, however, the only thing in front of Gina was a small niche containing a primitive VR crown resting calmly in its cradle.
There sounded a clear, metallic click, and the world started to rumble. Back-lights behind the safety switches sprang on. The screens came to life, ticking off diagnostic information. Lists of text and little green bars scrolled down them, although occasionally a yellow bar would stick at the top of the screen while the checks continued. The violent pumping of coolant liquid bubbled everywhere around Gina.
Suddenly she saw Bomber, toppling over the edge of the cockpit into the pilot’s chair. She tried to get up to see if he was all right, but the canopy swung closed before she could do anything.
“Bomber?” she asked nervously, squirming under the weight of a seventeen-year-old girl squeezed into her lap.
“I can hear you,” he breathed, and she instantly knew he was dying. Intense pain radiated through the walls and into her third eye. She heard him swallowing something, and he headed her off before she could ask her next question. “Anti-rads, just in case I make it. This thing was meant to have a full crew with hazard suits. It’s got a nasty output.”
All her questions seemed inappropriate just then. Instead she simply said, “You’ve done this before.”
“I was a test pilot in the old US Army Aviation Branch. Top secret stuff. Last project before the Federation took over, we were workin’ on nuclear copters with integrated energy weapons, VR controls, nano-maintenance, really advanced stuff.” His breathing seemed to steady out a bit as he talked. “Mini-reactors, lightweight and low-output, but with plenty of power for the main gun. Good for at least fifty years without refuelling. We had five prototypes, one for each stage of development, all working. And then we woke up one morning and there wasn’t any United States anymore.”
Meanwhile he put the copter through its pre-flight procedures. Gina saw the yellow-marked systems flashing with the words, ‘Self-repair initiated’, and they turned green one by one, while the warehouse doors buckled under the Feds’ brute-force assault.
“When the Feds came to take over our base, a couple of the pilots in my squadron decided they didn’t really like the idea of them bein’ in power. They made a break for it with four of the birds and blew the base behind ’em. One and Two used their birds to start a pretty short-lived guerrilla war against the Federation. Three was never heard from again. Number Four, though, he had the bright idea of takin’ his all the way to Hong Kong, maybe hire himself out as a merc to StateSec. Only the Feds got there before he did. Caught him, threw him in a cell to rot, ripped all the best tech out of his bird, and then forgot about it in storage.” He flipped a loud mechanical switch. “Still workin’, though.”
The last yellow marks disappeared, and the rotors came on like the beating of mighty wings. They started to turn lethargically, as if they were all rusted up, and something nasty rattled in the mechanism. But in a matter of moments the rattling died away and the rotors really cut loose.
The copter lurched off the ground, turning around inside the tall warehouse, looking for a way out. There was none. They’d forgotten to unbolt one of the vehicle doors, and Gina felt her heart sink.
“There may be a slight bump,” Bomber said, and plunged the copter directly into the wall.
It tore through the half-inch of corrugated steel like a brick through a car windscreen. Bomber grunted at the controls, fighting for altitude with most of his rotor blades torn to pieces, and turned the motor to its maximum output. He was starting to pull away from the Fed building when a missile slammed into the side of the copter. The impact sent it lurching sideways, G-forces slamming Gina into her seatbelt straps. The last vestiges of rotor shattered themselves against the ground as the copter ploughed end over end through the car park. Great chunks of asphalt whirled through the air in a frenzy of devastation. Gina would’ve thrown up, but the Gs weighing in on her sucked the gorge right back into her stomach.
When they finally came to rest, Gina struggled to undo the belt, wrapped tight around her and Rat. The button wouldn’t depress at first, but with some pushing and pulling it finally popped loose. She scrambled to open the cockpit canopy and get the hell out while they still had time.
She looked up into the glare of street lights, their escape route only a stone’s throw away, partly blocked the inexpressive face of a Fed battle helmet. It echoed with a deep commanding voice, “I suggest you stay still and offer no resistance.”
Gina went numb inside. Metal hands tore her out of the copter and bundled her into a tough plastic sack. She screamed and clawed uselessly at the inside of the bag, needing to know what was happening, but she couldn’t even make out the words from the shouting voices outside. The only emotions left to her were frustration and terror.
EMPATHY: Part 9
The night passed by, dark and dreamless, Gina didn’t stir until the first rays of morning sunlight touched her face. It poured through the glass sliding doors like a river of honey and turned the room to gold.
Blinking against the brightness, Gina turned over and went back to sleep. She didn’t get long before the alarm clock on the nightstand started buzzing.
After a few random thwacks failed to turn the thing off, she was forced to wake up in order to search for the ‘off’ button. Sleepy fingers fumbled with the infernal contraption — which had apparently been bolted to the nightstand — but failed to find the proper button. Finally she found the electrical cord and yanked it out of its socket. The alarm died in a satisfying warble of electronic noise.
Just when Gina had crawled back under the red silk sheets, a voice said, “Begging your pardon, miss, but there’s a call waiting for you. He requested to speak to you as soon as you were up.”
“Jesus, fine,” she muttered and sat up in her island of sinfully sweet comfort. “Put him through.”
“Rise and shine, girls,” Jock said chipperly from the video screen on Gina’s nightstand. “I hope you had a good night’s sleep.”
“We did, actually. What do you want?”
Jock’s mocking tone didn’t change, but she knew that he was serious when he continued. “I’m here to give you the good news. It’s on. Today.” He let that sink in to her sleep-muddled brain for a moment, then said, “We’re going in before seven o’clock tonight. Probably closer to six. That means that, as of this call, you got maybe six hours to get ready before you need to start getting to the Fed building. I suggest you get on with it.”
Rubbing her eyes, Gina tried to think, and felt Rat creep up to listen over her shoulder. She asked, “What? Why before seven?”
“‘Cause that’s when they’re coming in to move him. I got hold of their schedule and a bunch of other stuff to cover up the real objective, and they’re not too happy with me right now.” He chuckled. “Speaking of which, I’m gonna be moving shop as soon as you’re all out and safe. Off east to Laputa, hide out and make sure they can’t find me or anything that might lead to me.”
“Just make sure you don’t end up the same way,” Rat interjected. “I ain’t coming for your black ass if you get jacked.”
Gina leaned forward, said, “Can you get in touch with the Emperor? He’s still got all our stuff.”
“I can’t reach him right now, he’s temporarily out of contact. All according to plan. But I know he’s dumped your bags in a spot near the Fed building, I know where it is, so everything will go smooth as long as you keep to the schedule.”
“I guess that’ll do. Anything else?”
“Nope, just remember, six hours is all the free time you got. Better spend it preparing, whatever the hell you ‘paths do. We’re up against the fucking Feds here. I want as wide a margin of error as we can get.”
“Right. Bye.” Gina hung up with the touch of a button, biting down hard on her tongue. She didn’t want to take Spice again. She didn’t like what it was doing to her anymore. But that was all she was good for, and Bomber needed her help.
Rat scratched her head and said, “So this is it, huh? The big day?”
“Looks like it,” Gina agreed. “Better get dressed.”
The Federal Law and Police Hong Kong Building, formerly the Hong Kong State Security Building, formerly the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Forces Hong Kong Building, formerly the Prince of Wales Building, loomed over them like a giant upside-down wine bottle hammered into a block of concrete. It was a monstrosity of 1970s architecture, and neither time nor its owners had been kind to it in its hundred-year lifespan.
From the outside, the building was an unbroken slab of concrete, although you could still make out the shapes of old bricked-up windows on every floor. An electric fence lined with concertina razorwire kept the grounds free of virtually any living thing. At one time there had been greenery on those grounds, even swimming pools, but all of that had been cut down or filled in. Now there was only tarmac and grey concrete barracks.
Originally it housed the headquarters of the British garrison in Hong Kong, until they handed it over to the Chinese in 1997. The Chinese held it until Hong Kong won its independence in 2049, just a few years before Gina was born. Hong Kong StateSec turned it from an office building into a fortress. It quickly gained a grim reputation, people being brutalised and tortured in underground cells, and worse. After the big coup, however, the Feds did little to improve the building’s image.
The square where Gina stood was flanked by long posts, topped with suspicious-looking grey-brown orbs that you could hear moving whenever you turned your eyes away. They each contained about half a dozen cameras, capable of every mode of vision known to man.
The scariest thing about them was knowing there was nobody on the other side. Every bit of security here was wired directly into the Feds’ own AI, housed somewhere in that gravity-defying atrocity sitting darkly at the heart of Hong Kong Central.
The sky above it was the deep, dark blue of a coming storm.
“Do you believe in hate at first sight?” asked Rat, “‘Cause I’m convinced.”
“I believe it,” Gina said emphatically. She searched around in her head for the little essence of Gabriel. It was weaker now, without the Spice reverberating in her blood, but she could just sense its presence. He didn’t like the building either. She got a strong impression that he didn’t want her to go in there.
She’d hated this place ever since the Feds took over. Hong Kong State Security hadn’t exactly been full of nice people — in fact, most of them were Feds now — but at least you knew where you stood with the secret police of an oppressive dictatorial regime. You had a general idea what they were up to because every now and again the government would release a grand statement or manifesto, or somebody would have the courage to speak up about torture and the occasional death squad.
With the Feds, though, nobody talked. Nobody ever talked.
Six hours had gone by in their full-featured hotel room while Gina did absolutely nothing. She just sat staring out a window, digging up old memories, and then burying them again in a hurry. The sights, sounds and smells of her old home district stirred up some uncomfortable memories. The past touched her more strongly here than anywhere else.
She was fourteen years old the day the Federation took over Hong Kong. ‘Federation Day’ was apparently the best name anyone could think of, so they took that and ran with it. There were banners on every corner and military cargo jets thundering overhead covering the streets with bright leaflets and artificial rose petals. The world was united — but not before the east-coast of the old United States had been nuked to glass with stolen Russian weapons, and several world leaders had mysteriously vanished or died in tragic accidents.
The old Hong Kong government capitulated pretty quickly after the president suffered some unnamed mishap in his bathtub. The rich and well-connected of Hong Kong certainly weren’t happy to see the Federation move in, spelling the end for their little golden age of prominence and decadence.
Hi, Mom, Dad, she thought to herself as she remembered their horrified faces on F-Day. But the Federation did pretty well by you in the end, didn’t it? Isn’t it Mr. and Mrs. Director now? Administrator? Fuck, I forget.
“Found the bags,” Rat announced over the radio, pulling two amorphous black shapes out of the bushes behind the old City Hall. Gina heard the subdued noise of a zipper. “Looks like everything’s here. What do you wanna do now?”
“What I want to do is run and don’t look back.”
“Yeah.” She tapped her earpiece. “Yo, Jock, got the bags and all set.”
“Good. Find the back gate of the building grounds. Follow Connaught Road Central to the edge of the fence, turn left and follow the fence, keep it on your right. You’ll know the gate when you see it, it’s a vehicle entrance, there’ll be a couple of unmanned rollers and tanks in the parking lot. There’s someone guarding the gate, but don’t worry. Talk to him.”
“Got it,” said Gina, shouldering her bag. They started walking.
She made a quick mental catalogue of all the things inside that bag. It contained pretty much an entire super-spy arsenal, and the interior was lined with an X-ray image — a sheet of lead-backed film that, when scanned by an X-ray machine, would show nothing but the contents of an ordinary travel bag. Toothpaste and pyjamas. Just the thing a couple of misdirected tourists would carry.
The fence seemed to go on for miles. Rat was starting to struggle with her heavy bag and trying hard not to let Gina know. Gina worried that Jock might have been wrong about the gate, but then she spotted it and let out a sigh of relief.
The Fed at the guardhouse didn’t seem to be so pleased to see them. He was a young Caucasian with blonde hair and dark, cautious eyes. He fit his uniform like a Greek statue, and his face had the vaguely square look that the Feds seemed to favour in their constables. Gina waved to him with a smile, which seemed to make him uncomfortable.
“This is a restricted area,” he said sternly, though trying not to sound belligerent. “I’m sorry, miss, but there’s no loitering allowed. You and your friend will have to keep moving.”
Okay, thought Gina, talk to him. Christ. Talk about what?
She put on a slight pout and looked wounded as she stepped closer to him. “Aw, c’mon. You look like you know the place, can’t you at least give us some directions? We’ve been walking for ages and I don’t know where we are.”
Some of the air seemed to go out of him like she’d just dispelled any possible excitement, and he scratched the back of his head as he said, “How do you get lost in Hong Kong Central? Haven’t you got a GPS?”
“I’d have one if I could afford it,” she said smoothly, pushing out her chest for the full charm effect. The light of the afternoon sun shone perfectly down her top. “We’re travelling on a budget, like on TV, yeah? Across the world on a thousand dollars a day? We’ve been on target since India, just got here yesterday, but now we just want a place to stay for tonight.”
The Fed swallowed and pulled his eyes from her chest back to her face. He started to sweat when he caught her wicked smile and let her touch his arm without protest. She murmured, “Maybe you’ve got a place, huh? I could make it worth your while.” And on the inside, Come on, Jock . . .
“I can’t do that, miss,” he struggled, fighting to keep his discipline. “Not that I don’t want to, but I’m on the job, you see. Besides, I’m just a recruit. I live in the barracks here. What am I gonna do, hide you two in a closet for the night?” He shook his head. “Can’t help you, miss. Sorry. Please move along.”
“Come on,” she said, getting desperate, resisting as he pushed her away. “Um, just five minutes in the tool shed?”
He brought up his rifle to keep her at arm’s length and said firmly, “It’s time for you to go, miss. If you don’t move away, I’m authorised to use lethal force.”
Gina stepped back and dug her hands into her sides. This was not going as well as she’d hoped, and now she was out of ideas. “Jock . . .” she growled under her breath, and almost as if summoned, things began to happen.
A dark shadow appeared in the space behind the Fed. Before anyone could react, a long arm reached around him and locked an iron grip on his rifle. Fed-trained reflexes tried to twist out of the lock, and almost managed it, but the arms were too strong. An elbow curled around his throat and, with a sharp jerk backwards, snapped his neck.
The Emperor stepped out of the shadows, slowly lowered the Fed’s body to the ground, and started going through the dead man’s pockets.
Rat was the first to speak, gawking wide-eyed at the body. “That was awesome,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” the Emperor grunted. He checked the rifle’s chamber to make sure it was empty, then pulled a holomask over the Fed’s face and started stripping him out of his uniform. “I am not sure this one is entirely my size, but it will do.”
Coming out of her shock, Gina stammered, “What the fuck did you just do? There’s cameras all over the place! There’s patrols every ten minutes!”
“Jock disabled the camera circuit and looped it to a recording. Patrols have been temporarily suspended. There is nothing to worry about.”
“You killed a fucking Fed! Of course there’s something to worry about!” She was nearing hysterics now. “God, you were gonna kill him anyway. Why? You made me talk to him like that, when you knew you were gonna kill him . . .”
The Emperor didn’t concern himself with answering her. He buttoned up his new uniform jacket, pulled the holomask off the body, checked the inside for stains, then put it on. Finally he buckled something black and tight around his throat below the uniform collar. Gina couldn’t see him with his back turned, but when he finished and got up again, she saw the dead Fed standing there in his place. And also lying on the ground in his skivvies. The two were identical to the naked eye.
“Are you ready?” the Emperor asked with the voice of the dead man.
“Yeah.” She swallowed. “Um, yeah.”
“Oh, sweet! I’ve heard about those,” jabbered Rat, unfazed by the still-warm corpse lying on the ground next to her. “Voice synthesiser, samples someone else’s voice, then straps to your larynx and makes you talk exactly like ’em. Undetectable by the human ear, you need a full voice analyser.” She was grinning ear to ear. “Fuckin’ beautiful. Do I get one?”
“A bit short to be a Fed, are you not?” the Emperor chuckled. “Just do your part. We’re going inside.”
Knowing the truth behind the holomask didn’t lessen its psychological impact on Gina. She kept her distance from the Emperor, disguised as he was. The whole thing was too weird to believe, and right now she was afraid to think of what might happen to her sanity if she started believing in it.
There was no guard at the door. Any remaining life seemed to have left the area with the death of the Fed, and nothing could seem to fill the void that Gina felt around her. A terrible absence of something. The grey landscape fell away behind them, steel-banded concrete giving way to white linoleum and plasterboard. The whole place was antiseptically clean, even the empty reception desk.
A door marked ‘Staff Washrooms’ opened on their right. A woman Fed in a junior constable’s uniform walked out of it, glowered as she caught sight of them. She obviously resented anyone who dared to show up during her toilet break, making it look like she’d abandoned her post.
“What do you want, pleb?” she demanded of the Emperor.
“Look afraid,” he snarled under his breath at Rat and Gina. Louder, he continued, “I caught these two sneaking around outside the gate. They looked suspicious. I checked them, didn’t find anything, but I figured I should bring them in just to be safe.”
The constable frowned, then sighed, “Yeah, alright. I’ll buzz you in.” The console bleeped when her fingers touched it, and the large armoured door behind her swung open. “Interrogation block’s clear, on you go.”
“Be careful,” Jock’s voiced echoed in their ears as they marched into the belly of the beast. “Every door here is wired with holodisruptors, metal detectors, everything. Each time I disable security on one they’ll be more likely to notice something’s up. As soon as that AI starts tracking me, we’re on a time limit. Countdown reaches zero before you’re out, I’ll have to disconnect and you’ll be on your own.”
The Emperor accepted the information without even blinking. “Understood. I will call the door numbers out to you.”
“Okay. I’ve got some old building plans from the public record, way out of date, but they may be–“
“That won’t be necessary,” the Emperor decreed. “I’ve been here before.”
Jock said nothing after that. Gina suppressed a cold shudder and glanced along the featureless white walls, broken only by the occasional bump, gap or shadow. The Emperor stared hard at these whenever one came into view, and didn’t relax until it was safely behind them. Disturbed, Gina reached out to touch the walls, just for the feel something solid — and drew her hand back with a half-swallowed shriek. The wall felt superbly wrong to the touch. It was smooth where it should be rough, it was warm where it should be cold, and slick. It left some kind of residue on her fingertips when she drew away.
The next thing she knew, the Emperor’s hand was locked around her throat and the eyes that were not his glared balefully into her. He growled, “Be silent or I’ll cut your throat myself. I will not allow you to gamble with my life. Now, I want you to nod that you understand. Don’t speak. Nod.” Gina nodded, and the powerful grip vanished. The Emperor turned away from her and continued to their first obstacle.
It was a simple steel-framed blue door with a key card box mounted to one side and a camera globe above it. The globe was identical to those on posts outside, moving slowly to keep track of the approaching party. The words ‘Security Door’ were written in large red print on the wall next to it, along with a number. A small back-lit sign on the wall pointed its arrow at the door, stating that this was indeed the way to the interrogation block.
“Door 106, blue,” muttered the Emperor, then ran his stolen key card through the box. The camera globe froze with a click and the door swung open. It made no protest when the Emperor stepped through. “Nice work, Jock. This may succeed after all.”
Jock snorted at the insult to his professional pride. “Did you forget my ranking, sir?”
“Never.”
Again, they met no resistance in the corridor beyond. They passed rows of numbered doors on both sides, all thoroughly soundproofed, but one or two of them bumped and trembled at irregular intervals. Once Gina could swear she heard screams, as if someone had pressed his mouth against the inside of the door and howled with all his might.
“Holding cells,” the Emperor said to no one in particular. “We’re looking for the black level, three floors down. That is where they will be holding him.” He glanced at Gina and Rat to make sure they understood. “Speed is required. I have not managed to gain access to the prisoner records so we will have to search every cell. Simon will have held out so far, but I’ll be surprised if he lasts until his transport arrives.”
Gina frowned at him. He seemed to have relaxed a bit, enough for her to dare a question. She asked, “How do you know that?”
“Simon has training, military anti-questioning indoctrination. Implants, boosted metabolism, everything. It is the only thing that has given us enough time to stage a breakout. Without it, I would be as far away from Hong Kong as possible right now.”
“Bomber was in the military?” she blurted out.
“That is my conclusion. I’ve seen the implants. They are not of a kind that is available to civilians, not even to me.”
“And you didn’t steal them?” chirped Rat, giving him a conspiratorial smile.
“I may someday. At the time, he was more valuable to me alive.” He held up a hand and pointed to one of the doors leading off the corridor. It was marked with a small moving pictogram of a white silhouetted figure walking up some steps. “That stairwell will take us down to the level above the black level. There’s only one entrance to the black level, and we’ll need to pass a major security checkpoint. Not something we can simply shut down. And there will be guards.”
“So what do we do? Crawl through an air vent?”
“Not exactly,” he said softly. He gave Jock the door number for the stairwell and opened it with a swipe of the key card. No security appeared as they went inside and wound down the galvanised steel steps, hard-soled boots clanging against bare metal.
The white plasterboard decor went on unchanged, even deep underground in a disused stairwell, and that was slightly disturbing in itself. Regardless of the obvious Feds, the place seemed too clean for human habitation. A Fed garrison-cum-prison building wouldn’t exactly feel welcoming under the best of circumstances, but the level of sheer eeriness went further than that. Only a machine could be comfortable here.
The third door opened as easily as the others. The sense of wrongness only increased when they emerged out in the pastel white corridor. Dozens of featureless cubicles stretched out on either side, blocked up with heavy steel doors and watched by unblinking electronic security. The Feds used these to interrogate some of their more dangerous prisoners, and Gina had to wonder at the people who worked here every day. In the simplest terms, she was standing in a maximum-security dungeon twelve metres under Hong Kong. Not even a proper medieval-type dungeon, either — one of those new-fangled ones where torture was trim and tidy.
“This way,” the Emperor declared and led on. “Jock, any danger?”
“Doesn’t look like they’ve found us out yet. You may need Rat to open some locks, though.”
Rat had her tools in hand before Jock finished his sentence. There was a small bag holding a selection of ordinary mechanical picks, stuck to the back of a little palmtop computer. The computer was wired on one side to a blank slip of plastic the size of a credit card, and to an alligator clip on the other, which could splice directly into any wired connection. A tiny wireless antenna stuck out the top to complete its arsenal.
They halted at the first off-colour landmark Gina had seen, a large blast door that was painted completely black. Another simple card slot was mounted on the side, and two Feds watched them from a small control room opposite the door. The red mark on their uniforms declared them to be constables on disciplinary review, stuck with the worst of the drudge jobs, possibly pending dishonourable discharge. And it took effort to get sacked from the Feds.
“What are you doing down here, pleb?” one of the Feds asked in a savage voice, half with suspicion, half with boredom. “You know you don’t have clearance for Level 3.”
The Emperor shrugged nonchalantly. “My sergeant told me to report here. Got some high-risk prisoners, they need to go into black.”
“Then why didn’t your sergeant send someone with clearance? We’re not fucking stupid, you know.” He got up and stared hard at the Emperor, but carefully kept Gina and Rat in his field of vision at all times. “We know what you fucking plebs do with the women you get down there. Or maybe you were after the boy?” He glanced at Rat, and there was a flicker of something like pity in his eyes.
Switching tactics, the Emperor sighed, “Alright, you’ve caught me. It was just the woman, I promise. Come on. It’s not like I can use just any cell, can I?”
“He’s got a point there, Paul,” said the woman next to him, scratching her head with a pen. “Remember when Wong and Declan tried that? Courts got hold of the camera records, administration dropped both of ’em like a shit-covered brick. Just for doing some little dissident bitch, like it was against the law.” She shrugged and threw a sympathetic glance at the Emperor, the man she thought was a young Fed recruit. With effort she managed to avoid looking at the prisoners the entire time, which — being prisoners — would be beneath her notice. It kept them from becoming human beings, subject to empathy and consideration.
“Yeah, well . . .” Paul made a face. “Alright, you can use one of the empty cells. But no marks on her, and I want you out before the next patrol, got it? I never saw you, and you weren’t here.” He glanced at Rat again, like he felt he needed to do something, then fixed the Emperor with a hard look. “And you leave the boy alone. No hands-on to minors, that’s where we draw the line.”
The Emperor gave him a huge smile and thanked him profusely as the door locks disengaged. Half a metre of tungsten-reinforced steel swung open very slowly, moving as if in a dream.
Gina had watched the conversation with a detached feeling, like watching a horror film from the comfort and safety of your own home, something that couldn’t really be happening in the really real world. Something too horrible to contemplate. She walked along in a haze, through the black door into some kind of airlock, and waited to be led out again.
“Okay,” sighed Jock, “I took out Level 3 security, but I think I may have tipped off the AI that something’s up. I’ll try to keep it suppressed as long as I can. Hurry, you haven’t got a lot of time.”
“Roger,” the Emperor growled, taking Gina by the hand and dragging her out of the airlock. His free hand tore the holomask off his head and threw it into a corner, then stripped off his voice synthesiser. To Gina’s shock, his skin was dry, like he hadn’t shed so much as a drop of nervous sweat. “Follow me. If you come across any Feds, there’s stun grenades in your bags. And real weapons should you decide you have the stomach for them. Still, if anyone proves too much trouble, you may call me.”
He took the Fed sword from his holster and flicked its blade out of the grip like a half-metre switchblade, barely thicker than a steel wire and sharper than any razor. There was a killing smile on his face as he added, “Stealth is no longer an issue.”
Gina peered through the small lexan window recessed into the door in front of her. It looked out onto a little holding cell, one of many along this corridor, consisting of four padded white walls and a lot of empty space. The cell lacked even basic sanitation. The only notable feature was the single white lamp set into the ceiling, bright and terrible like a tiny sun.
“It’s empty,” she said to nobody in particular. The cells, like the corridor, were as clean and desolate as the rest of the building.
“The cells are only for keeping people between sessions,” explained the Emperor, jogging down to the nearest branch of the hallway to get his bearings. Finally he motioned for the others to follow him and headed down the branching corridor. “Our best bet is the interrogation room. I know the direction, but I’m not sure how to get there from here. Keep your eyes open, you will know it when you see it.”
Rat glanced around with a hunted expression, the disturbing sterility of the building started to work on her. “Where the hell is everyone? I thought we’d be up to our eyeballs in Feds and prisoners down here.”
“You’ve seen too many action movies,” Jock reproached. “They go through prisoners pretty fast. As for patrols, Lazarus — the AI — already does that far more reliably than they possibly could. Any Feds you see are gonna be interrogators or prison escorts. Food, water, security, that’s all handled by robots under Lazarus.”
The Emperor interjected, “Another reason to keep your eyes open. They may start sending robots that aren’t part of the Level 3 security grid, and I would rather not have a group of armed security bots snapping at my heels.”
As if on cue, the click of metal feet on linoleum sounded faintly up ahead. The Emperor stopped dead in his tracks and caught Gina with an outstretched arm before she cannoned into him. “Damn,” he breathed. “Quick, hide!”
Gina whispered a baffled, “Where?” Then Rat caught her hand and dragged Gina into a cell she’d just picked open. As soon as they were sure nothing would see them, they both popped their heads round the door to watch.
The Emperor moved like flowing silk, slipping soundlessly into a corner. The footsteps clicked closer. They were soft but clear, high-pitched, like they belonged to something small. Something small with a machine gun, most likely. Just when Gina was sure it had to be just around the corner, ready to jump into view and start shooting, the footsteps stopped.
A few seconds went by in silence. Gina’s heart thumped like an overworked bass drum. Time seemed frozen, nobody daring to move, and Gina almost jumped out of her skin when she heard another click, and another — slightly smaller, slightly softer, slightly farther away. Receding into the distance.
“It’s patrolling the main artery,” the Emperor grumped. “We should be able to avoid it if we move quickly and quietl–“
Something pulled Gina’s attention to the door opposite the Emperor’s corner. For a moment it was as if she were looking at that door from the other side, a hand reaching for the handle. Then it swung open.
A Fed walked out of it, looking over his shoulder, continuing a fragment of conversation with the person inside. “. . . think you’ll change your mind pretty soon, Allie. I really do. Just you . . . wait . . .” His head swivelled round too late to react to the big black shadow moving towards him. The door fell into its lock behind him, cutting off his only possible direction of movement.
Gina saw the moment of shock when he made eye contact with the Emperor. She saw the blade come down in a flash, so quickly that the Fed had no time to scream. She saw the blood arcing away as the body hit the floor.
“Jesus,” whispered Rat, paling.
The Emperor stood over his victim, blood and bodily fluids dripping off his sword. He knelt down to check the Fed’s pulse, then — satisfied that there was none — moved on to checking the Fed’s pockets.
“Is he . . .” Rat swallowed, unable to finish the question. It was obviously the first time she’d seen real blood dripping out of a real dead body. Life slowly slipping away. Gina, however, couldn’t feel that horror anymore, not after the bodies she’d seen in the street gutters, in the dark alleys, in the remote power substations. To her it was different, something cold and guilty burning deep inside, bringing back unpleasant things she’d seen and done. She did her best to ignore it.
She squeezed Rat’s shoulder. The momentary nudge of comfort seemed to brighten Rat back up, and the girl’s smile returned.
Gina picked her way out into the corridor, wilfully avoided looking at the mess, and waited there until the Emperor found what he was looking for. He lifted a small pocket computer to his face for a closer look, then jumped to his feet with a triumphant flash of teeth.
“Ha! I’ve got it!” he said. “Prisoner records, cell listings, everything I was missing. It’s all here.”
Again, excitement spasmed in Gina’s belly. “Then you know where Bomber is?”
The Emperor nodded to himself, dragging his finger down the screen in search of something, then bared his teeth in triumph. “Cell 304. Simon Caine. It is over there.” He pointed to one of the cells they’d already checked. “For the bad news, that cell is empty.”
“So where’s Bomber?”
“I’m checking the interrogation schedules,” he said. “It looks like . . . Ai.” Even the Emperor seemed shocked at what he read. “They must be close to breaking him. Nine hours in the interrogation room is almost unheard-of.”
“Bomber’s tough,” Gina said stubbornly.
“He will not be tough for much longer. Map!” he growled at the palm computer, and it obeyed with a beep. “Security overlay, and plot a route to the interrogation room.”
“This is Jock,” a voice said in Gina’s ear. “I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but I think–“
His voice disappeared in a burst of static. The next instant, an alarm started howling through the corridors, and Gina had to cover her ears against the noise.
“TRESPASSERS,” said a very different voice, booming through the radio so loud it hurt. Rat screamed and clawed at her earbug, fighting to get it out. “YOU WILL SURRENDER.”
Not “I demand your surrender”, thought Gina, or “surrender or die”. You will surrender.
She tore the earbug out and crushed it to pieces under her boot-heel. There was no doubt in her mind about who — or what — had just spoken to her. It used a human voice and spoke human words, but there was nothing human on the other side of that transmission. Her heart pounded and her stomach heaved, sick with churning emotions.
The Emperor gritted his teeth, filling his free hand with a gun he’d kept hidden underneath his clothing. “Quickly. We have no time to waste.”
He whirled round the corner and had his gun on target before the security bot could finish its step. Its spider legs jabbed down to brace against the floor, the machine gun on its back started to swivel towards him, but it could only move so fast. Three gunshots roared through the air, and the robot fell to the ground with three smoking holes through its centre of mass.
Old fires raced through his blood. It had been years since he had need to fire a gun himself, since he’d had to kill out of necessity. So many years, so much time spent on building an empire, on diplomacy and exchanging favours. Wasted. All of it, wasted.
His only thought now was of revenge. Revenge on the Feds, revenge on his traitorous fellow Triad Lords, and revenge on those who cost him his fortress. Not necessarily in that order.
He ran dead ahead down the new corridor, surprising a Fed who was responding to the disturbance. Hardly a challenge. The Fed dropped with a bullet through her brain before her helmet had a chance to deploy.
They didn’t know what they were up against. Fed nerve-boosting and combat implants were good, but restricted. Held down by laws and regulations. The Emperor got his boosts in the back alleys of Hong Kong and Singapore, where the supposed limits of the human body had no meaning. He was limited only by the speed of thought.
They were all going to pay.
Gina clutched her head and bit back a scream as her consciousness ripped back into her own body. Head spinning like a whirlwind, she dropped to her knees and doubled over, burying her head in her arms. This couldn’t happen, she told herself. It was impossible. She hadn’t taken any Spice, she shouldn’t be hearing anybody’s thoughts, much less have the Emperor’s elemental rage slammed into her brain like a hot iron. The experience was overwhelming, the images still flashed on her closed eyelids. For a moment she felt the little piece of Gabriel inside her, trying to warn her of something, but she couldn’t make it out. The only thing she knew was that the Emperor hadn’t stopped to wait, and now Rat dragged her bodily to her feet and pulled her along.
“Come on, girl,” panted Rat, hauling at Gina’s hand and trying to keep up with the Emperor at the same time. “Now’s not the time to have a meltdown! You gotta keep going!”
“I . . .” A massive wave of nausea crashed into her, robbing her of the ability to speak. She stumbled blindly after Rat, lost to the world. By sheer willpower she managed to swallow her gorge, but any semblance of strength went out of her again the moment the Emperor called a halt.
Her vision narrowed to tunnels framed with red and black, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars that was also on fire. Ash people danced in front of her eyes and the skin of her fingers seemed to flake away in a scorching wind. A terrible sensation blazed behind her eyes, the tearing-cobwebs feeling of the Spice trance but not quite — as if something had jammed a wedge into her third eye and was forcing it slightly ajar.
“The interrogation room is on the left here,” the Emperor said, peeking around the corner. “End of the corridor. There may be guards. We have no time for games, so pull yourself together.” He snorted contemptuously. “There’s–“
Nobody had heard the Fed approach, not even the Emperor. Only Gina felt an itching sensation behind her eyes, almost forcibly pulling her head around until she looked behind her — directly into the barrel of a Fed assault rifle. Ice shot up her spine, and her gaze skipped upwards to a pair of dark, goggle-shielded eyes, narrowed in judgement. He looked into her as she looked into him.
He settled the rifle’s stock comfortably into his shoulder, let out a long breath, and pulled the trigger. The bullet cracked through the air towards her, crossing the half-metre of distance in an instant.
And missed.
Suddenly the Emperor’s sword was sticking out of the Fed’s head, and they were running again, Rat pulling Gina along like an ambulatory sack of grain. “Move!” Rat shouted at her. “There’s more of ’em right behind us and I’m not gonna carry you!”
Gunshots rattled from behind them as they plunged headlong towards the interrogation room. The door swung open, and a large security bot came tromping out in the middle of loading its weapons, shaped like an oversized ostrich with machine guns for wings. Then it vanished in a cloud of grenade smoke, steaming pieces of metal littering the blackened floor.
A bullet panged off the steel door the same instant that Gina disappeared behind it, and the Emperor slammed it shut after her, chest heaving from exertion and excitement. Inhumanly-quick hands drew a pocket knife from somewhere and jammed it into the lock to keep it from opening again.
“How long’s that gonna hold ’em?” asked Rat, a big grin on her face, still having the time of her life.
“Long enough,” the Emperor panted. He took a quick look around the room and kept his gun ready. Once he was satisfied that nothing was actively trying to kill him, he checked Gina for bullet holes, finding none.
“You should be dead,” he growled accusingly, and the haunted expression on Rat’s face implied agreement. Their eyes were on her like a group of medieval villagers might survey a suspected witch.
“Why’re you looking at me like that?” she gasped, teeth chattering with residual terror.
The Emperor’s lip curled in disgust. He stepped back from her unsure whether or not to kill her on the spot. “I saw it happen. Nobody could miss from that range. It was unnatural.”
“Can’t we just be happy that I’m still alive?” she said. That reasoning didn’t seem to impress the Emperor, but he looked away and lowered his gun, concentrating instead on their surroundings.
The moment Gina actually looked at the place, her skin started to crawl. Even the pure white walls couldn’t disguise the purpose of this room. They could not disguise the tables and chairs with strong plastic straps. Not the concrete floor scarred with the marks of high-pressure hoses, attempting to clear away the curious stains around the drains in the floor. Not the generator in one corner with its bare electrodes, not the large tub of red-clouded water. Not the display racks full of sharp things, all clean and shiny, but with just enough visible wear on them to show that they’d been used. Pain and horror were embedded into the very air.
An older Fed, a woman with greying hair, came out of an unseen part of the T-shaped room wearing an exasperated expression. She saw the Emperor’s uniform and started, “Well! What the hell is all this commotion–“
The Emperor’s gun was at her throat before she could finish her sentence. “Be silent,” he commanded, and was obeyed. “We are looking for a friend of ours who is being kept here. He goes by the name ‘Simon Caine’. You will take us to him, won’t you?”
Swallowing the lump of fear in her throat, the Fed bobbed a slow, careful nod. She obviously didn’t want to set off the homicidal maniac. Instead she put up her hands and turned around, leading the way to the far end of the room. An open door waited on the right, and through it another small, cube-shaped room.
That room was more horrible than anything she’d seen. It was empty. Completely blank except for something resembling a dentist’s chair, sprouting robotic arms that ended in needles and tubes of liquid, heavy straps holding a body in place. Gina could feel the charge of static electricity in the air as she followed the Emperor inside. The residual power of a massive hologram generator. When she came closer, she saw that the body was a man in an orange jumpsuit whose eyelids had been pulled back by tiny robotic hooks, forcing him to watch. Intelligent eyedroppers watched his eyes and watered them as needed. Everything had to be kept in top condition, after all.
She saw the man’s face, and her heart broke when she recognised Bomber, his body taut as a wire and twitching like a madman. The only sound were his moans and gasping breaths.
For the longest time she couldn’t tear her eyes away from him. But then she noticed the Emperor, looking around the room and not liking what he saw. His face twisted slowly into an expression of such ice-cold rage that Gina backed away, pulling Rat with her.
It was a good thing she did. In a single smooth instant, he shoved the Fed against the wall and blew her brains out.
