Element Zero (5 page)

“Mother of Mercy,” he said. There was a strange look in his eye.

“Problem?”

“No.”

Back outside, the wind gusted. Grit and snow pelted the side of the train car. Van Offo looked out at the revivor’s remains, its shirt flapping in the breeze.

“Let’s go.”

You have one job now,
he told me early on.
Manpower, equipment, funds. . . anything you need, you’ll get.

He was right. I got everything I needed. As long as in the end I put Fawkes down for good, nothing else mattered. Obstacles disappeared. Any footage taken from any camera that put the investigation in a bad light disappeared. If it did air, it was pulled. They were willing to search anyplace and detain anyone. None of it got me any closer to Fawkes.

I climbed back through the wreckage, back out into the cold. Van Offo followed, staring out through the snow as he turned over in his mind whatever divination he’d just received that he wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t, share.

2

BREACH

Zoe Ott—Stillwell Corps Base

It was warm in the car, and as Penny sped down the street, the snow that streaked past the windshield was almost hypnotic. Penny rode low in the driver’s seat, head bobbing in time with the beat as she whipped down the sharply curved ramp, apparently able to see even though I couldn’t. I hated Penny’s music at first, but it had grown on me, and as the bass beat in my chest, I caught my own head bobbing a little.

I offered her my flask as red dots of light appeared in the dark up ahead. She waved one hand no, so I nestled back into the big leather seat and I took a long pull off it myself while panels on the dashboard lit up. A holographic display blinked on an inch in front of the glass of the windshield, and the computer highlighted the red dots down the road in front of us. Penny’s fingers tapped at the dash console, and the words BLOCKING SCAN appeared there.

When they realized the scan was blocked, they’d call; this was the fifth time we’d been there, and they did it every time. The place had a ton of security, and no one got in without being checked out, but it didn’t have to be on the record. Not for us.

The video panel lit up and a good-looking guy with a crew cut and a Stillwell Corps uniform appeared. He looked at us, and Penny gave him a little wave while he verified our faces. He said something I couldn’t hear over the music, and a light next to the display turned green. He nodded at us, and the screen went dark.

The snow stopped abruptly as we blew into the tunnel, the tube lights fixed on top snaking off into the distance like three big, white worms. Text began scrolling across the bottom of the windshield, warning about stuff like security clearance, vehicle search and seizure, and other things that sounded even worse. We didn’t have to worry about any of that. The people who counted knew we were coming; in fact, they dreaded it. No one was going to search us or detain us—they wouldn’t dare. We were special messengers sent by Ai herself, and I was Element One, the grand savior of everyone who stood against Fawkes.

A jeep and an unmarked black car with tinted windows passed by us going the other way inside the tunnel, before we came out into the huge, underground lot. Penny made her way toward the side entrance they liked us to use. Two armed guards stood to either side of it as she pulled in and killed the music in time to hear the tires chirp. The two men stood like statues in the headlights while I took one last swig from the flask.

“All right,” Penny said. “Let’s do this; I need a real drink already.”

As soon as we pulled up I sensed something was missing. The buzz that came from the research lab’s busiest brain wasn’t there. I’d seen him only once in person, some scientist on permanent loan from Heinlein. He’d worked on Huma, so it made sense he’d be our best hope to sabotage it. He was an older, ugly Chinese man with thinning hair and spots on his skin. He had a cool aura, though. It was complex, with a million focused points, and in between it all his colors roiled like a storm. They reminded me of how Nico’s used to look, and thinking about that made me a little sad. Penny patted my arm.

“No Chen,” she said. She noticed it too.

I was about to get out when the door between the two guards opened and an older man in a suit stepped out. I immediately recognized the square face, and the gray military cut. I took an extra mouthful of ouzo and swallowed hard before stowing the flask in my suit-jacket pocket next to where the pistol was strapped.

“General Osterhagen,” Penny whistled. “That’s not good.”

“Why not?”

“He’s got bad news. He wants to make sure no one glosses over it.”

His face looked serious, like it always did, but Penny was right: there was something about the soft light of his consciousness that was grim and determined. Behind the thin white halo that surrounded it and behind the layers of his thought I saw worry, and that worried me.

Osterhagen didn’t look especially intimidating. In fact, if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d think he just looked like somebody’s grandfather. I knew plenty about him, though, and that included all the men he killed when he was in the service, and all the ones he killed once he was out. He’d actually killed men with his bare hands, but when you looked at those calm blue patterns that usually made up his aura, you’d never guess that any of it bothered him, ever. He didn’t scare or worry easily.

Penny killed the engine, and as we got out, I could see she’d noticed it too. We walked up to him and he held out his hand. First Penny shook it, then I did. His hand was hard, and he always squeezed a little too tight, but even though I hated touching people, I’d learned to give him my best shake. It was one of those things that mattered to him.

“General,” Penny said, throwing him a wink, “if I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have dressed up.”

Penny was dressed up; we both were whenever we visited the Stillwell Corps research facility. She flirted as a matter of course, with men and women, but there never seemed to be much interest behind it. Osterhagen, as usual, completely ignored it.

“I thought I’d give you a tour of the lab tonight,” he said. “There’s something I want you two to see.”

“Sounds great,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

In reality, she was actually really excited to see the lab, and so was I. Ai had sent us before to get what she called an unfiltered report, but so far they’d drawn the line at letting us walk around inside the work area and see what was going on. Ai never pushed it, so I assumed Osterhagen had let her view it remotely or walked her through himself, but I’d always been curious. The lab was where they took all the Huma-infected subjects they’d been able to find. I’d never actually seen one. Not that I knew of anyway.

The guards straightened up even more as he passed back by them and opened the door. We followed him in, and they brought up the rear as the door slammed shut behind us.

The hallway behind the door was long and led directly to the wing where the research took place. No one ever saw us come or go except the guards and the skittish scientist type named Moses who usually met us. There was no Moses, this time. Osterhagen turned back and I saw orange light flicker in the darks of his eyes, like I used to see with Nico sometimes, way back when. As soon as it happened, the two guards peeled off and left through the next door we passed, leaving the three of us alone.

“So where’s your man?” Penny asked. “Chen?”

“Mr. Chen is not currently on the base.”

“Why not?”

“He is off shift.”

“Hey, it’s not like we’re coming down to the wire or anything,” she said, offhand. The general scowled.

“I know that better than you,” he said. “His team works in twenty-four hour shifts. He can’t be here all the time.”

“Fair enough.”

“You seen the map lately?” he asked. He meant the computer model that kept track of all the recorded visions we’d been adding in over the years. It looked a little like a space nebula or something, a colorful ring around a dark center. A bright point where thousands and thousands of visions converged on the rim of the void like a star. That point signified some horrible holocaust, after which there was just a big nothing. Since not all recorded visions were completely certain, the nebula changed subtly over time. No matter what we did, though, it still hadn’t changed in the only way that mattered. The star was still there, and so was the void on the other side of it.

“Of course,” Penny said. “What’s bugging you?”

“Whatever is going to happen, it’s going to happen soon,” he said.

“What makes you say that?” she asked. She asked it like she wasn’t sure she believed him, but Ai had said the same thing to us. We’d figured out that no one ever saw anything that occurred after their lifetime—that’s what made that big, blank spot so scary—but aside from that, it did mean that one way or another, time was running out.

“You think we can still change this thing?” he asked over his shoulder. “That one day, something we do will make that big, empty space light up like the rest of the map, and the bright spot fade away?”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am. That’s the point.”

I was worried before, but now he had me really worried. I’d never heard him like that before. He usually got on my back for talking like that; he was more of a winat-all-costs kind of guy. He didn’t like what he called my defeatist attitude.

“Does this mean you weren’t able to make the virus work?” I asked.

Everyone knew by now that Fawkes had stolen Heinlein Industries’ prototype revivor model, Huma, three years back, and that he’d been using it ever since. No one really believed we’d ever find all the people infected with the Huma prototype before Fawkes finally activated them. The virus was somehow supposed to get on to their network and shut all of those infected back down again once they all came back to life. Test subjects were hard to find, though, and with them all still inactive, it was slow going. Sometimes I wondered if they’d be able to pull it off at all, but the more time that passed, the more hope was pinned on that solution. If the virus didn’t work, we were in big trouble.

“It works,” he said.

“Then—”

“Cell phones and other personal electronics off, please,” he said. We were standing at an unmarked door with a badge scanner mounted next to it.

“Is this it?” Penny asked.

“Yes.”

We shut off our gadgets, and Osterhagen waved his badge at the scanner, which turned green and made a heavy bolt pop behind the thick metal. He opened it and waved us inside.

The lab wasn’t anything like what I expected, and from the look on Penny’s face, it seemed like she felt the same way. I thought there would be rows and rows of computer equipment and guys in white lab coats, but mostly I thought I’d see revivors. I expected to see lots of them, but I didn’t see any. The scientists, if that’s what they were, looked more like soldiers, and none of them wore white lab coats. They all worked behind thick, clear plastic sheets that hung from the ceiling, and they all had on hazmat suits. They walked up and down metal walkways where heavy metal hatches were fixed to the wall. Each hatch had a thick panel of glass in the middle so you could see in, but all I saw was darkness.

I thought it would be sterile and high-tech, but it was dirty and looked more like a prison than a lab. I could see dried blood spatter on some of the plastic sheeting. The air smelled a little like rot.

“There are an estimated ten to eleven thousand carriers of the Huma prototype out there right now,” Osterhagen said. “We’ve managed to find less than four hundred of them, in a little over three years. That’s using aggressive tactics.”

“He has a limited supply of the proto—” Penny began.

“That’s an assumption,” he said, cutting her off. “We can’t afford to make that assumption here. Here, we have to prepare for the worst-case scenario, and even if the carriers number half of what we estimate, the amount of carnage those things will be able to cause is not something you could imagine, I don’t think.”

“I don’t have to imagine it,” I said. “I’ve seen it, remember?”

He signaled, and two of the soldier-scientists approached one of the hatches, each one flashing their badge at a separate scanner. LEDs on the scanners lit up green as something thudded through the floor, and I saw a black man’s hand, fingers splayed wide, press against the glass port in the door. It left a streak of something greasy and brown as it pawed at the smooth surface.

“What you’re going to see is a demonstration of the virus,” Osterhagen said. “I want you to see it for yourselves so you can let Ai know what you saw.”

The soldiers opened the hatch, and one of them stuck a cattle prod through the opening. Sparks lit up the inside and threw shadows of a body as it jerked and fell to the floor. Two more men dragged a dirty, naked man out from inside and hauled him up between them. His head lolled against a thick leather collar around his neck. The front of the collar had a heavy metal ring attached.

His toes dragged on the floor behind him as they carried him to a metal post that was about two feet high and dropped him in front of it. The one with the cattle prod came back and used a short chain to hitch the man’s collar to the post. A few rows down, more soldiers dragged out three more captives, two women and one man. All of their bodies were covered in bruises, mostly down the front of them.

“That’s lividity,” Osterhagen said offhand, “in case you were wondering.”

I wasn’t. They chained up the other three to posts facing the first one. I counted more than twenty posts total.

“In order for the nodes to form, death has to occur,” he said. “Huma stays dormant in a living system and doesn’t begin to initialize until after death. Once the reanimation is complete, they join a common network. They also join a command network, if one exists. Currently one doesn’t, but that’s okay. The full-mesh connection between them is the one we want.”

I remembered hearing some of what he said before. That’s part of what made the new revivors different from the old ones; the old ones had command connections back to whoever was controlling them, but not to each other. The new ones all had a connection to every other one, plus the control connection. I wasn’t completely sure why that was important, but as long as this worked, I didn’t care.

“Subjects secured,” a voice said over the intercom.

“Roger that,” another voice answered. “Implanting virus.”

“Transfer successful.”

A big screen lit up along the far wall down where the soldiers were, and a countdown started to tick off from twenty-one seconds.

“It takes twenty-one seconds for the virus to initialize and spread,” Osterhagen said.

“That’s kind of a long time,” Penny said. It didn’t sound like very long to me, but the general nodded.

“Too long. We need to get it down.”

The timer fell to zero, and then, just like that, all four of the test subjects went facedown against the metal posts they were chained to. None of them moved.

“Test complete,” a voice said.

“That’s it?” I asked.