Element Zero (11 page)

Three names: Harold Deatherage, Ang Chen, and Dulari Shaddrah. They’re all Heinlein employees, Al, Chen is one of the top researchers on—

I know who he is.
Van Offo paused on the other end of the line.
This is bad. You want to get back here right away, Nico.

Why? What happened?

Word came down while you were under: Fawkes has taken control of Heinlein Industries.

What?

He piped over some video footage that looked like it was taken from a flyby of Heinlein’s campus. Below I could see a throng of people crowded at the entrance to the security tarmac. Past them I could see an open flame roar through the empty windshield of a large truck. Smoke rose into the air from several locations in the distance.

This was taken less than an hour ago,
he said.

How?
I asked.
And why would he do that?

We don’t know how he managed it, but the current assumption is that it was so he could use their link to the defense grid.

They use that to upgrade revivors in the field,
I said,
and for the revivor communications bands.

It’s still part of the defense grid. It was a way in. He somehow used it to take control of a satellite armed with twelve nuclear ICBMs less than an hour ago.

What?

Nico, he’s threatening to launch if we try to send anyone in after him.

I rounded the corner and found a mob at the elevators. Turning right, I found the stairwell door and pushed it open, leaving a smear of blood behind. It was quieter in there. I started down as the door slammed behind me.

If he’s threatening instead of just firing
, I said,
then what does he want
?

We don’t know yet.

Can we get control of the nukes back?

They’re trying,
he said.
But like I told you, I think this could be it. The end. It’s coming.

Not if we stop it.

If they could stop it, they—

Never mind that,
I said.
Focus. What was going on in that basement? Were we able to figure it out?

Not yet,
he said.
But, Nico, something strange happened down there.

What?

The people down there, the screaming man in particular—I couldn’t control them. I tried to calm him down, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t influence him.

I remembered the look of fear he’d had on his face when he’d made his way to the cages. Fear and confusion.

Why not?
I asked.

You are supposed to be unique,
he said.
A lot of the path that we’ve tried to lay out hinges on that fact; Ai herself predicted it. One man will be beyond our control—one. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t control those people. Any of them.

What does it mean?

He was idle for a while. I headed down the stairs to the next landing.

There’s more,
he said.
I wasn’t supposed to live through that attack.

What?

Mother of Mercy. The dark, the water, and those people . . . I was supposed to die down there. Today was supposed to be the day I die. Fawkes was to destroy the city not long after.

You—

Tenth Avenue and Park,
he said.
Just get there. We’re off the script, Nico. Something’s gone very wrong.

Faye Dasalia—Heinlein Industries, Pratsky Building

A map of the park floated in front of me as the virus I’d planted transferred control of the main computer hub over to Fawkes. He gained access to the transmitter array and connected to the satellite network. Feeds from all over had begun to pour in, and I watched as his forces stormed the campus. Teams I knew nothing about had attacked from along the perimeter. They’d crossed the open tarmac, then struck the facilities at their center. Any remaining security forces were quickly torn to pieces as his soldiers occupied the main buildings.

“What the hell is going on?” someone whispered behind an equipment rack, but nobody answered. A loud thud shook the walls, and the lights flickered. It sparked a quick, hushed murmur that stopped when gunshots boomed through the halls outside. The people with me in the Pratsky Building began to realize the trouble they were in as their phones and computers, even their JZIs, had become useless. All data was rerouted through the transmitter array; everything else was suppressed. Everyone but us was completely cut off. Electricity coursed back through the main fence. The Eye resumed its watch over the tarmac, ready to incinerate anything that moved. No one could get in—or out.

I waited in the lab, not sure what to do as gunfire cracked outside. Heinlein’s security team resisted for roughly twenty-five minutes before they finally succumbed. They weren’t set up for an attack of that scale, and when they lost the airstrip, and their air support with it, they were quickly overwhelmed. The sounds of destruction from outside faded, until all that was left were quiet whispers and frightened sobs.

“You,” a voice whispered. I turned to see a young man crouched in shadow. His eyes were intense as he stared up at me. “Revivor . . . tell me what’s happening.”

A message from Fawkes appeared in front of me, glowing softly as I stared:

Faye, come here.

His location appeared on the building’s map. He was inside the Pratsky facility.

“Stay here,” I told the young man. “Whatever they tell you to do, do it.”

As I crossed the lab, I heard Dulari’s voice come over the intercom. I watched her on one of the feeds as she spoke into a handset:

“Employees of Heinlein Industries, this is Dulari Shaddrah. For those who do not know me, I am a senior engineer in the biotech division. I understand you are anxious about this turn of events, but I urge you to remain calm and at your stations. If the soldiers have not reached you yet, they will shortly. Do not resist them, and I can promise you will not be harmed. Certain employees will have received instructions to assemble in the main hub of the Pratsky Building; make your way there now. If you are—”

She jumped, dropping the handset to the floor, as gunfire erupted through the room. Three of the revivor soldiers lined up near the offices had begun to fire on the row of cubicles. On the feed I saw Dulari’s face lit with the flash of sustained gunfire. As I watched, her expression changed to what I thought might be shock, or fear, or both.

The shots covered the sounds of the screams. Bullets riddled flimsy walls and tore the people who cowered inside to shreds as they began to move down the rows. More gunfire echoed down the halls from throughout the building.

A woman ran out from one of the offices and stumbled into the wall. She made it two steps toward the door on the other side of the room before a bullet punched through her neck and her body pitched forward onto the floor. A soldier farther down dropped an expended clip onto the bloodstained carpet and reloaded. When I looked back to the feed, I saw the handset lying on the floor. Dulari was gone.

My job was to hijack Heinlein’s transmitter. The others were supposed to smuggle me out. Fawkes was supposed to initiate his code transfer from outside of the campus, but instead he and his men were here, and they were killing everyone.

There’s a lot he doesn’t tell you,
Lev had said.
Remember that.
When I played back the memory, I felt sure Lev knew what the virus was for when he first entered the pipe. Fawkes needed a series-seven revivor to make the jump from the test facility, but something made him doubt me. The operation must have been in the works for several months at least. He had kept me in the dark.

Faye, come here.
The message pulsed in the air.

I made my way down through rows of equipment, and saw the processing plant’s inventory get called out in a window. More than one thousand revivors were stored there, awaiting shipment abroad. Manifest numbers were being catalogued, as they got ready for reanimation. Fawkes was going to wake them up, all of them.

I pushed open the door and made my way back toward the main offices, where Fawkes was, as the gunfire continued. Debris littered the tarmac, and through one window I saw the fuselage of a downed helicopter as flames spit into the wind.

The processing plant is under our control,
someone reported.
Reanimation has begun.

What about the nuclear satellite?
Fawkes asked.

The new targets are locked in.

Keep me informed.

I opened a metal door and stepped through it into a long corridor. Rows of glass panels looked out toward the tarmac where flames rippled off two twisted metal husks, and far off in the distance columns of black smoke rose into the gray sky. Between two of the buildings I saw where one of The Eye’s orbital beams had struck. The blacktop had been completely liquefied and blown out to form a wide, blistered crater. Steam drifted from the center while snow streamed down around it.

As I approached the end of the corridor, a brilliant flash from up above threw long shadows across the tarmac. The glass panels tinted darker in response; then the beam arced down like a bolt of lightning. The point of impact rose like a huge bubble, then popped in a cloud of flame as a loud crack, like thunder, split the air. The panels shook in their frames as snow pushed out from the expanding heat wave.

Last hostile Chimera has been destroyed,
a report came in.
We control the airstrip and the remaining ten aircraft.

Roger that.

Across the way, in the adjacent building, I saw figures standing inside and staring in shock. A jeep lay on its roll bar several hundred yards away, flames pouring from one tire. Underneath it, pinned by one leg, a soldier’s body lay twisted and broken. Blood ran across the blacktop.

I protected these people once.

I stepped through the door at the end of the hall and left the scene behind me. As the door closed, a man crossed in front of me, backing up with his hands held up as a burst of gunfire tore through his chest. He fell back and crashed to the floor. A moment later, the worst of the noise stopped. Sobs and moans and the occasional scream piped up, along with scattered shots.

Fawkes was close; I could sense him. A glass door led back to the R&D labs, and inside soldiers stood watch as workers were herded into offices. Up ahead of me, a man lay on the floor with blood pooled around his head. Past him, a woman’s leg stuck through a doorway, one high heel on its side a few feet away.

Fawkes was set up in the director’s office. As I approached, I saw him standing straight in front of a large, wooden desk while the UAC flag hung from a brass pole in a stand over to his left. Ang and Dulari were there. Ang’s face looked calm. Dulari’s eyes were wide. There were tears in them.

He’d been in stasis too long, and those years in storage had taken their toll. His skin had grown thin and slightly translucent. The black veins underneath were easily seen as they branched along either side of his neck and formed a web across the curve of his scalp. I knew his body was still strong physically, but he appeared almost old and decrepit. He leaned in and spoke to Dulari and Ang. I adjusted my hearing so that I could pick up their conversation.

“ . . . you found Deatherage?” Fawkes asked.

“No,” Chen said. “I think at this point we have to assume he faked the entry log and he’s not here.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“What about the other problem?”

“I’ll handle that too, Mr. Chen. Leave it alone.”

“Gen sevens retain ties to their old identities,” Ang said. “You yourself have cited her relationship with the FBI agent more than once.”

They were talking about me. It wouldn’t be the first time Ang had recommended that I be destroyed. He was clear on where he stood concerning me.

“I don’t agree,” Dulari managed, her voice shaking. “She can be trusted.”

Fawkes looked past them and the two turned and saw me. Ang had a steely look in his eye as he watched me approach them.

“Hello, Faye,” Fawkes said. His softly glowing eyes stared back at me like those of an owl. I nodded to him.

“We don’t need Mr. Deatherage any longer,” Fawkes said. “We have the variant now. Can you proceed?”

A shot went off nearby, and Dulari jumped.

“Y-yes,” she said. “The reactivation sequence is complete. Transmission of phase two was completed an hour ago.”

“The upgrade was accepted?” Fawkes asked.

“The system shows a failure rate of less than two percent,” Ang said. “It worked.”

I didn’t know what they were referring to. I waited and didn’t ask.

“How long will the change take?” Fawkes asked.

“You’ll begin to see effects immediately,” Ang said. “How long it will take for complete saturation is difficult to say, but the heightened aggression should facilitate that.”

“Monitor the situation,” Fawkes said. “Let me know if there are any problems.”

“Understood,” Dulari said. Fawkes turned to Ang.

“Make sure anyone else who can operate that equipment is eliminated,” he said. “Take the employees the soldiers have reserved and fit them with the devices.”

Ang nodded, and he and Dulari turned and left the room. As they passed by me, Dulari met my eye. She stared at me intently, like there was something she was trying to say. A second later, she sent me a message over a private circuit.

He lied to us. He’s going to kill you. I know you can cut his command spoke. Do it. Find Robert MacReady.

The way she stared back at me made me think she’d known for a while about the override I’d discovered, but she hadn’t told Fawkes. The words hung there in the air between us; then she nodded and continued on out of the room. As the door closed behind her, I sifted back through my memory and found the override. I didn’t execute it, but turned it over in my brain thoughtfully.

He’s going to kill you.
The message faded away as Fawkes watched me, his expression not changing. I’d known many revivors, but none that were quite like Fawkes. He was from an earlier generation, but his mind was incredibly well preserved. He could track amazing numbers of details, but even more important, he retained a strong capacity to scheme, and unbreakable resolve. He had big plans for the humans of this world, even though he himself was far from human. The years of isolation and obsession had left their mark on him.

“You’ve kept me in the dark,” I said. He started at me, not moving.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Honestly, because I needed a seventh-generation model to plant the virus, and I wasn’t sure you’d help me if you knew what I had planned.”

“I thought you needed Heinlein’s transmitter array.”

“I do.”

Another long burst of gunfire drowned him out for a minute. He waited calmly for it to subside.

“Then why take the whole facility?” I asked. “We could have done it remotely. By the time anyone knew, it would have been too late.”

“I have my reasons.”

“Why kill them all?”

“So that no one can undo what happens today.”

He leaned back and sat on the edge of the desk. One thin black vein bulged slightly as it squiggled from his scalp to his temple. His eyes stared at nothing for a few seconds, twitching faintly back and forth.

A second later I felt him creep in over the command spoke, that connection that gave him access to me. It had been there every day since I died, and I knew firsthand it gave him full control. He’d used it once to force me to kill Nico, and though I’d failed, I’d stabbed him through the breastbone. There was nothing he couldn’t force me to do, if that’s what he decided.

He could even send me down into the void . . . and he was.

“Sleep now,” I heard him say, and beneath my memories the void yawned wider. My high-level systems began to wind down. He was in my command node. What I was sensing was my own deanimation.

“What are you doing?” I asked. My vision flickered as I began to sink. In my mind, I fell below my field of thoughts to where the blackness waited. Its threads began to reach for me, pulling me deeper and deeper below.

I tried to force him out, but it was no use. All revivors had free will, but it wasn’t absolute; commands from the spoke overrode everything. I still had access to the override shunt; I could still sense it in my active memory, but...

“Sleep now,” he said.

Maybe this is for the best,
I thought. I’d always feared that darkness, but maybe I didn’t need to be afraid. My life had expired a long time ago. Maybe this force that was reaching out to me was something I’d been avoiding for too long.

As my last moments trickled away, the lightless force almost seemed to be alive. It was pulling me deeper down inside it. I thought it would be cold or maybe painful, but instead it was calming.

Time to go, Faye . . .

I resisted once more before relaxing. I was jarred as my knees struck the tiled floor, but barely felt anything.

Yes.

Time to go . . .

Yes. Okay.

Just then, I received a communication. It had come from outside the perimeter. Fawkes’s eyes narrowed slightly. He was watching me over the command spoke; he had seen the message too.

The message was from Nico. A single sentence:

I need you.

The blackness recoiled, and the field of memories churned inside my head. The lights swirled and scattered like coals that had been raked as my consciousness rose back through the field, and for a second I was standing with him, back at sea, on the tanker. The rain pounded over me as a tarp cracked in the wind. Nico stood in front of me, a gun smoking in his hand, but the murder had left his eyes. I reached him and grabbed hold of his slick lapel. Before he could move, I pressed my lips to his.