The Chimera Vector (36 page)

He pushed his glasses up. ‘They were at my sister-in-law’s wedding.’ He removed his wallet and showed her some photos. ‘My flight was grounded because of a blizzard. I never made it.’

Next to a photo of him wearing a helmet and standing beside a rally car, there was a photo of a little girl. Sophia was five meters away but she’d recognize that little girl’s face anywhere.

‘Just like now,’ Benito said. ‘Wrong place, wrong time.’

Sophia felt sick. She found herself searching for words as though they’d been spilled across the floor. She could smell the sweet scent of the flowers little Sophia had given her. She wanted to vomit.

The first fracture in her programming had happened that day. The day she’d gone ahead and blown little Sophia up along with everyone else at the wedding reception. She could’ve gone against her programming; the fracture was there. She could’ve snapped out of it. But she didn’t. She took the easy way out. She killed them all.

If they both made it out alive, she promised herself she would tell Benito the truth. He deserved that much.

***

The reaction chamber was rectangular, the center neatly sliced out like an avocado seed. A narrow, metal-meshed walkway arched over the concave space. Nestled within was the reactor, like a pearl, concealed by an ever-present turbine that hummed sweetly over the hair on Damien’s arms. It felt as though the chamber was alive. The air stank of sweat and it took him a moment before he realized it was his own.

He stepped onto the walkway. Something inside his mind needled for attention. He ignored it at first but it persisted: an overwhelming desire to leave the chamber immediately.

He crossed the walkway carefully, his gaze fixed on the dome of fire below. He knew he shouldn’t be here. But there was no other option. He’d committed to it now.

A small part of him was unsettled by the choices he’d made. Was Sophia on the right side? They’d killed Blue Berets to get inside the facility. Surely that wasn’t right. But neither were half the operations he’d been assigned to. The people he’d killed. He had no sense of knowing who was innocent and who was guilty. And did the guilty deserve his death-dealing? What did he deserve?

In the center of the walkway, a ladder descended to the reactor. Damien climbed down until he was standing before the reactor itself. He noticed the circuitry that regulated the coolant temperature. He placed his hand over it and focused. Enough with the pseudogenes; it was time to use his innate ability.

Warmth spread down his arm, through his palm. It was an odd sensation: a tingle that was both warm and cool at the same time. He pulled his hand away when he smelled something burning. He’d fried the circuitry. Just like he’d fried Ernesto in the olive grove.

He climbed back up to the walkway. Footsteps in the corridor outside, feather-light but sure.

From the clinging darkness, a figure emerged. A shocktrooper. Damien took no comfort in recalling that shocktroopers always traveled in pairs. As if to confirm his thought, a second shocktrooper peeled away from behind the first. Both silent as cats. And, judging by the shape of their silhouettes, female.

Fear leaped from his stomach, forcing bile up the back of his throat. He made no effort to reach for the MP5 slung over his shoulder or the P229 holstered on his thigh. He retreated along the walkway, drawing the shocktroopers in.

The first plotted a path directly towards him, stepping onto the walkway, while the second one circled the reactor to block him from the other side. A sliver of light revealed the first shocktrooper’s face. It was Grace.

Chapter 39

Jay’s arms hung above him, fastened to the water pipe. Yep, it didn’t get any better than this. What if a shocktrooper or Blue Beret walked in right now? There was nothing he could do to stop them putting a round between his eyes. They could just wander in to relieve themselves and he’d be screwed. What was he going to do: offer to shake it for them when they’re done?

With his back against the wall, he bent his knees one after the other and inched his way into a crouch. He turned to face the wall, but only made it halfway. The plasticuffs cut into his skin. He grunted in pain. If he wasn’t tied to the pipe, he could’ve used the 550 paracord he'd laced his boots with as a friction saw to melt right through the plasticuffs’ polycarbonate resin in seconds. Or if he had a knife.

He tried to raise his hands up and pull them down hard on his body. The force of his wrists striking his ribs would snap the plasticuffs. Problem was, his arms were cuffed too high above his head. Another option would be to remove a bobby pin from his belt and shimmy the cuffs off. Kind of hard to do with your teeth. He should’ve had another means of escape, but being tied to a urinal wasn’t exactly something he’d anticipated.

Hell, this whole shit-fuck wasn’t something he’d anticipated. Lucia was probably going to slot Damien. Why not? Damien’s worth had expired, just like his own. Jay shook his head. There was Damien worrying about Denton screwing them over. And it turned out to be Nasira. That Sun Tzu guy had it right: deception was the art of war. And he’d been deceived like . . . well, like someone being deceived. Now he was basically useless.

What he couldn’t understand was why Nasira had left him alive. Did she want him to suffer the embarrassment of being beaten by a girl? At least until he was vaporized by a missile, anyway.

He couldn’t save Damien. He couldn’t even save his own brother all those years ago. His mind rolled back through everything significant in his life, only to find there wasn’t much. God, he was pathetic. It made him feel empty just thinking about it, so he stopped. Not much point doing anything really. He just sat there feeling sorry for his nondescript canvas of a life. It was all shit.

He had no idea why, but his eyes were filling with tears. He rubbed his face on his arms before any could escape. He pressed his teeth together. His fingers closed into fists. The thought of the pointlessness of everything made him angry. At what, he hadn’t a clue. But it burned inside.

‘Right, so I’m just going to sit here and wait to die?’ He laughed. ‘Fuck that.’

He pulled himself to his feet and his bound wrists dropped to the right side of his chest. He tested the plasticuffs against the pipe. Nasira had pulled them tight. They had nowhere to go but tighter. He took a few deep breaths. Calm. Think. Something sharp.

His eyes ran across the pipe to the left and then the right. There was nothing that immediately drew his attention.

No, wait.

There was a slight protrusion on the right side of the pipe. He ran his wrists along the pipe, stepped around the next urinal. But the cuffs hit a bracket and refused to go any further. Swearing, he kicked the ceramic urinal. It disconnected from the wall and smashed at his feet. He stared at it, surprised it had been mounted so poorly.

He looked back at his wrists, at the pipe they were attached to. He tried to clench his fists but his hands weren’t responding. Placing a boot on the wall, he pulled hard. The pain was unbearable. The ties cut deep into his wrists. He pulled harder. The pipe groaned. The bracket snapped. The plasticuffs sliced flesh. Then the pipe split.

Jay fell back. His shoulder blades crunched against something hard. A restroom door. The pipe had broken; both ends swayed before him like a pair of large antennae. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath. His wrists were still bound, close to his chest. He glanced down at his restrained arms and realized he probably looked like a Tyrannosaurus Rex on acid.

He straightened up and went straight for the paper-towel dispenser, pressed the nylon plasticuffs against the metal teeth and raked them back and forth. The dispenser moved with him; it wasn’t even bolted to the wall properly. He growled, and pressed his head against it to keep it in place while he worked the cuffs. The dispenser came free from the wall, sending him reeling backwards. It bounced off his knee and landed on the floor.

His wrists were still bound. He kicked the dispenser into the wall.

Vaguely aware of how stupid he must’ve appeared, he sat down in front of the dispenser and clamped it between his legs. It might’ve looked like some birth maneuver, but from there, he was able to saw the plasticuffs off.

He kicked the dispenser for good measure and got back to his feet. The red cuts on his wrists were slowly becoming thinner and thinner, until they’d disappeared entirely. Circulation returned, pricking his hands with invisible needles.

The ceiling lights dulled and flickered, then resumed their garish luminescence. Hiccup. Nasira had disabled the emergency power. He was meant to contact Damien when it was done. He reached for his throat mike, then remembered Nasira had taken it.

‘Fuck.’

He punched the wall. Tiles shattered; flakes of plaster fell on his head. He caught sight of himself in the mirror. It looked like an extreme case of dandruff.

Boots echoed down a corridor nearby. Shocktroopers. Nasira was in trouble.

Well, that’s her problem, he thought.

But then he reconsidered.

She was an arrogant bitch, but at least she hadn’t killed him.

***

Jay could hear the faint sound of metal being cut open with a blowtorch. An elevator further down from where he was. Guessing sub-level three, he got in the elevator, hit the SL3 button and the close door button at the same time, overriding any other requests.

The elevator took him down the north shaft, stopped one level below the other elevator in the south shaft. Nasira had to be inside. He crawled out the emergency hatch on the left side of his elevator and up onto its roof, then climbed through the upright zigzag of steel beams to get to the south shaft. Staring him in the face was the emergency hatch on the side of Nasira’s elevator. He could see the actinic glare of a blowtorch as it burned the outer elevator doors on sub-level two.

He thrust his foot against the hatch door. It cracked inward. He yelled Nasira’s name, then prayed she didn’t shoot him. Her face came into view. He offered her his hand. She ignored it and crawled out to the steel beam beside him.

‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.

‘Your knight in shining armor.’

‘Moron in tin foil,’ she said.

Jay heard someone entering her elevator. Clasping his hands together, he gave Nasira a boost. She leaped to the elevator roof.

‘Why’d you come help?’ she asked.

‘You didn’t kill me,’ he said.

She didn’t respond. He heard the boots. A shocktrooper on top of the elevator. With Nasira. Instead of helping her avoid the shocktroopers, he’d sent her right into one. You stupid fuck, he thought.

He looked down to see a shocktrooper crawling through the escape hatch by his feet. He made the choice: deal with this one now, help Nasira after. He hoped it was the right choice.

He dropped down, driving his boot into the shocktrooper’s back. She turned around. Jay drove his other knee into her throat. At least the knee helped him balance on her chest.

The shocktrooper drew her pistol and aimed. Jay closed the gap quickly and wrapped his armpit over her pistol. He brought his hand in and under, thumb below her ear. Press. Hard. Maintain. Then something smashed into the side of his face. She’d kicked him. He fell backwards, onto the roof of his own elevator. One ear was ringing.

The shocktrooper was already in front of him. Jay got to his feet. She reached for his rifle. Jay closed fast, before she had a chance to aim, smashed his heel into her knee. He drove his knee upward, knocking the rifle into his own hands. She barely seemed to flinch from the blow, hands still wrapped over the rifle. Now they were both holding it.

Before Jay could think, an actinic glare seared the corner of his vision. From the nozzle of what looked like a garden hose, a tongue of white-hot plasma burned at some ridiculous temperature. Then he realized. She was holding a plasma cutting torch, the same one she would’ve used on the elevator doors. The torches had been around since the 1950s, but in the nineties the Fifth Column labs had deployed mobile versions that ran off a portable battery pack.

He brought the rifle up to deflect the torch. The plasma sliced right through the barrel. Jay held the rifle against the torch-wielding hand, released the rifle magazine and slammed it into the shocktrooper’s windpipe. Rifle to torch; magazine to throat.

She knocked the magazine aside. Jay sidestepped her and drove the molten end of the rifle right into her face. Say goodbye to depth perception, bitch.

The glowing red metal hissed into her goggles. She stumbled back, pulled the rifle from her face and flung it down the elevator shaft. The left side of her goggles melted over her face.

She weaved the torch through the air. She was a bit clumsy at first, but then it sliced over Jay’s arms and grazed his shoulder. OK, maybe not so clumsy. Jay could feel his cheek hot and wet. Something burned inches into his forearm. He looked down to find the torch hadn’t actually burned his skin; it’d cut clean through and cauterized the wound. Fucking hell. He nearly passed out from the pain.

He dropped around behind the steel cables that held the elevator in the shaft. The shocktrooper didn’t follow; instead she thrust the torch directly through. Jay barely moved his head in time.

Dropping the remains of the seared rifle, he seized a steel cable with each hand. They were taut, but had just enough slack for him to trap the shocktrooper’s torch-wielding arm. Gripping the cables, Jay hauled himself up and slammed the heel of his boot down onto her head.

She dodged the blow. The torch sizzled through the cables and came free. Another arc of plasma. It slipped through Jay’s vest, through more layers of skin than he would’ve liked. He stumbled back, the pain locking him down. This was insane. He had to get out of here.

He dropped under another strike, rolled back to the steel cables. The shocktrooper came at him with a blinding series of cuts. Jay ducked, rolled and weaved out of the white plasma’s path. It burned his vision like the sun.

He moved behind the cables. The shocktrooper sidestepped. Jay matched her movements, kept the cables between them. He could hear scuffles and grunts from the roof of Nasira’s elevator in the south shaft. The torch came through. Jay weaved out of its path. Plasma scythed after him, cutting two more cables. Another strike.