Remote Control (12 page)

“Lie down on the ground, facedown.” As if the instruction needed more emphasis, the cocking of rifles echoed all around the Timeout.

A bullet from an Albatross M88 sniper rifle leaves the barrel at about thirty kilometers per hour. The Albatrosses pointed at Six were each less than twenty meters away. A shot would reach him a little over one-fortieth of a second after the trigger was pulled.

Six might be able to dive aside quick enough to dodge a single bullet, if the sniper’s reflexes were poor. But the remaining fifteen shots would kill him instantly. Six stared up into the goggled eyes of the soldiers, and slowly lowered himself onto his knees.

“Facedown,” the soldier with the megaphone repeated. Six put his hands flat on the road and lay down. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a group of soldiers racing across the Timeout towards him, eight holding assault rifles and one holding a remote control. Six remembered seeing remotes dangling from the belts of the soldiers at the apartment block, but couldn’t work out why one was being pointed at him now.

It didn’t seem to matter. It was over.

A gunshot cracked through the air. The sound bounced off the Seawall and echoed through the Timeout. Six flinched, assuming one of the snipers in the windows had fired—but no bullet hit him. He looked up in time to see the head of the soldier bearing the remote snap backward at a fatal angle. The man slumped immediately to his knees. Less than a second later another shot was fired and the soldier behind the first spun around before falling lifelessly onto the road.

The other soldiers dive-rolled to the sides, moving outward, searching for the source of the shots. Six saw it first. There was a figure standing on the rooftop of the building next to Insomnia with a rifle trained on the soldiers. As Six watched, the person ejected the cartridge of the last round and fired again, this time at one of the snipers across the street. Another head shot. The dead sniper slumped out of sight below the sill.

At first Six assumed he was seeing things, but the longer he looked, the more convinced he became. The sniper was the feathery-haired girl who’d asked him to dance. And then some random neurons fired in his brain, connecting two sentences he’d heard today:
I thought you would know a trap when you saw one…Do you want to dance?

One had been whispered, the other shouted. But Six was suddenly certain they’d been uttered by the same person.
She’s been following me
, Six thought, watching with horror as she slowly slaughtered Vanish’s team. But why?

Another soldier was reaching for the remote control, which lay next to the corpse of its previous bearer. He was shot twice in quick succession—first through his outstretched hand, then through his heart.

Six was alarmed at how quickly this simple trade-off had become a massacre, but he had no intention of letting himself be
captured. He scrambled to his feet and ran in a low crouch to the cover of a corner building.

The remaining snipers and soldiers were quick. Four seconds and five shots later, they had spotted the girl on the rooftop. She fired one last shot, killing the soldier with the megaphone, before ducking out of sight below the parapet, just before the concrete was splintered by fire from the adjacent windows and the street.

Six was torn. Should he rescue the girl who had saved his life, or should he incapacitate her to stop the loss of further lives? Either way, he needed to get up to the rooftop. He started scanning the building for entrances.

One of Vanish’s remaining snipers had put down his rifle. He lifted an Ostrich RIAC7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher and aimed it at the parapet that the girl had disappeared behind. The soldiers abandoned their formation and sprinted away from the subway entrance, holding their arms over their helmets. Six’s eyes widened. Ostriches fired RPGs with more than enough explosive in the warhead to take the whole top floor off the girl’s building. She would be blown to bits.

Six grabbed an Eagle from the hands of the nearest fallen soldier. He aimed it up at the commando with the Ostrich. His finger tightened on the trigger.

He hesitated.
Can I do this?

He didn’t have to. The soldier carrying the Ostrich twisted sideways as a bullet punched through his neck. The girl on the rooftop started to reload. As the RPG launcher tumbled forward out of the dead sniper’s grip, its trigger snagged on his gloved hand.

Six let go of the Eagle and dived forward, flattening his body against the road. He heard the
shoomp
as the Ostrich discharged a grenade towards the girl’s building.

The blast swept over Six’s head as a chunk of the building’s midsection turned to dust, showering the road with airborne debris. Concrete thumped against the road, cracking into small pieces.

The building still stood, but it looked as though a bite had been taken out of the middle. The insides of several offices were exposed; a desk and a few chairs tumbled out of the jagged hole.

Six saw the girl peer over the edge of the parapet. Her eyes flicked from the sprinting soldiers to the cavernous wound in the side of the fortress. She seemed surprised by neither. She cocked the sniper rifle once again and shot one of the fleeing soldiers. She ejected the cartridge, which fell over the edge of the parapet, and had killed another of Vanish’s snipers before it hit the ground. She glanced at Six for a moment and pointed across the street. He turned to see that more soldiers were abseiling down from the roof of one of the other buildings. Two had already hit the ground and were running towards him, weapons raised, and it seemed at least a dozen more were on the way.

Six looked back up at her, but she had disappeared—presumably hiding below the parapet again.

Six couldn’t see any convenient escape route. One branch of the Timeout was blocked by rubble, and soldiers were approaching from another. Panicked civilians were pouring out of Insomnia, and there was no way he was going to put them between himself and heavy enemy fire.

The half-destroyed building moaned. Its foundations strained under its shifting weight.

Six made his decision and charged towards the soldiers.

“Freeze!” One of the soldiers had his rifle trained on him. Six skipped to the right in case the soldier fired, but kept running
towards the team. He was unarmed, so he had no chance of defending himself at long range, but once he was surrounded by troops, they couldn’t use their guns without risking the lives of their comrades. Six was sure he could defeat them with hand-to-hand techniques. He would reach the group of soldiers in less than ten seconds.

With a final roar of protest, the building began to crumble. Six had seen enough buildings collapse to know that a safe distance was a lot farther away than this. Glancing over quickly as he ran, Six saw that the girl was throwing some kind of grappling hook over the monorail. As her platform disintegrated beneath her, she pulled the rope tight and swung out over the street, ambitious gunfire crackling around her. The building shattered downward into itself, shooting debris out from its base. Six felt tiny stones hail down on his back, and he jumped aside as a square boulder bounced out across the Timeout towards him. The soldiers all dropped into defensive crouches as rubble rained down from the sky.

The girl let go of the rope and landed deftly on the rooftop of the opposite building, hair fluttering in the breeze. Barely even pausing, she ran across the rooftop and jumped off the other side, out of Six’s view.

Okay
, Six thought.
She’s out of the picture. That leaves a couple of snipers and at least twenty ground troops for me to deal with.

He had almost reached the group, but the soldiers who’d made it out from under the building were already standing up again. The team leader opened fire with his Eagle. Six dodged as a line of sparks raced across the cement towards him. He needn’t have adjusted his course—the shots were aimed downward, obviously intended to scare him rather than wound him, and now it was too late to aim again. Six crash-tackled the leader and rolled
to his feet without stopping, driving an uppercut into the ribs of the next soldier in line and then ducking as a gloved fist whooshed over his head.

Guns clattered to the ground all around him as the troops realized that they couldn’t fire while Six was in the middle of the group. Six heard the swish of knives being drawn, but not many. Most of the soldiers opted to use their fists and boots.

Six knew that when they had strength in numbers, inexperienced fighters usually attacked one at a time, trying to wear down the stamina of their opponent, and giving each attacker room to deliver a killing blow. However, trained soldiers knew that overwhelming their opponent by attacking all at once was the quickest and most efficient method—particularly if you wanted him or her alive.

If the soldiers attempted to take him one at a time, Six was sure he could defend himself adequately. But if they all attacked him at once, he knew that he could be overwhelmed by the number of limbs alone.

As Six expected, they all attacked him at once. So he jumped, just as the mass of people pushed towards him.

Six ran a few steps across the top of the soldiers, using their helmets and shoulders as stepping-stones, before jumping down to the ground.

Now he had them where he wanted them: confused, tangled up, and still too close together to use guns. At the moment, only those on the edge could see him; the others were confused as to how their target had escaped. Six scooped up an Eagle from the ground.

He readied his weapon, prepared for an attack, but it didn’t come. All of the soldiers were scattering, sprinting out towards the dark, foggy corners of the Timeout.

Six was astonished that he’d managed to intimidate an entire platoon of highly trained soldiers after only a few seconds. They hadn’t even bothered to pick up their weapons and back away; they were fleeing into the darkness as if simply being near him were dangerous…

Six whirled around. Another Ostrich was pointed at him from one of the windows. He just had time to jump before the first shell was launched.

The flash blazed across the Timeout and cast a giant shadow of his wildly flailing body against the Seawall in front of him for a split second. Fallen dust from the collapsed building puffed back up into the air as his body slammed into the ground.

The first thing he saw when he raised his head was the remote control. He remembered the soldier reaching for it even as sniper fire dropped his comrades. It must be important. He checked the buttons as he scrambled to his feet, but it wasn’t what he expected.

It only had a short-range transmitter, powerful enough for about 150 centimeters of concentrated signal. There were four keys, with the words “Syncal,” “Accelerant,” “Morphine,” and “Locator on/off.” He dropped the remote into his pocket and started running just as the Ostrich launched another shell.

Six dived forward into the air. The road behind him shattered, sprinkling shards of asphalt onto the ground. Six executed a perfect rolling landing and flipped back up to his feet, instantly running again.

At the moment his best option seemed to be to keep running, jumping, and doging until the Ostrich used up its ammunition. But he was fast nearing the end of the road.

The next explosion was so close that it blasted him into the air. More dust was injected into the fog around him, making it impossible to see, and when the ground rushed up at him he
barely managed to cover his head with his arms before bouncing against the pavement and landing on his behind.

The air cleared above him, revealing the opaque night sky and the Seawall disappearing into it. And suddenly he knew where to go.

Six sprinted towards one of the corners of the Timeout, where Insomnia met the Seawall. Then he turned around, preparing to run parallel to the Seawall, and waited. Every one of his instincts screamed out against standing still, completely exposed. But Six knew that his plan would take at least eleven seconds to execute, and the Ostrich was capable of shooting once every thirteen seconds. If it fired during his maneuver he could lose his balance and fall to his death. He had to wait for it to fire before he started running again.

Shoomp!
There was a puff of exhaust from a window as the Ostrich fired.

Six shot forward across the asphalt, sprinting parallel to the Seawall. The shell crashed into the corner of Insomnia behind him, splattering another shower of debris across the Timeout. He figured he had at least twelve seconds before the Ostrich was ready to fire again. And he had just hit the velocity he needed.

Six pushed one foot off the pavement a little harder than was necessary, and felt the momentum suspend his body in the air. Instead of putting his other foot on the road, he put it on the Seawall and pushed down.

His body hovered for a moment, torn between gravity and momentum. He put his other foot against the Seawall, twisting his ankle to get the maximum grip, and pushed again. He rose a little higher.

Running up walls was always difficult. It had taken Six several years of practice to learn how to put his weight on a wall
without pushing himself away from it, how to lean in and use his hand as a third point of contact, how to keep up momentum while running across a vertical surface, and how to judge the best angle of ascent—too steep and he would slip and fall; too shallow and he would run out of wall before reaching the top. His running across the ceiling trick was actually easier, because he was really just jumping from one wall to the other with a flip in between. He put hardly any pressure on the ceiling itself—just enough to change direction slightly if it was required.

But Six had never scaled a wall taller than 27 meters, and the Seawall was 160 meters high. Also, the section of the wall exposed between Insomnia and the building at the opposite end of the street was only 200 meters long, 180 excluding the run-up Six had already taken. He was going to have to climb at least eighty-nine centimeters for every meter of length he covered—an angle of about forty-two degrees.

One after the other, his feet slapped against the concrete surface. The wall hadn’t been worn smooth above about eight meters, so gripping was much easier once he hit that altitude. Every few seconds he pressed his hand against the wall to get some extra thrust. Soon he was sprinting fifteen meters above the road and still rising.