The Lab (Agent Six of Hearts) Read online

  There was a grill in the metal wall above, leading to the drainage tunnels of the rig. Six deftly produced a fiftycentimeter crowbar and prized the cover off the grill. He swung up into the tunnel, and had vanished into the darkness before the cover hit the water below.

  He landed on the floor of the drain with a splash, but the water didn’t penetrate his airtight sneakers. He replaced the crowbar in his suit and zipped it back up, shivering slightly against the damp. He began to creep through the dank, gloomy drain.

  It was a very long, dark, rusty metal tunnel, with tiny pinpricks of light piercing the drainage holes and filtering up into it. The place smelled of salt and grease. Six was ankle-deep in murky black water, which flowed towards the opening he had made.

  Wasting no time, and carefully scanning his gloomy surroundings, he broke into a light jog, the water gurgling around his feet. There was no sign of any security yet, but there would be guards down here somewhere. He felt suspicious rather than relieved—they must be farther up the tunnel, he thought.

  As the water flowed underneath his feet and the walls flew by, he saw a light in the distance. It was a flashlight, but the bearer was invisible in the darkness.

  There was a manhole in the ceiling of the tunnel up ahead; Six could see slivers of light and a ladder on the wall—but he would have to sneak past the person with the flashlight first. He advanced slowly.

  A few meters from the guard, Six’s foot slipped on something beneath the inky water. He stumbled slightly, but regained his balance before falling. Water splashed around his legs as he righted himself.

  Suddenly the flashlight was pointing at him. The bearer of the flashlight had heard the splash, and had now seen Six.

  Before Six could move, eight shots were fired. And he was hit by three bullets.

  Six reeled backward with the force of the impact. Thanks to the bulletproof suit, he was only bruised by the shots, but he knew that wouldn’t last. And if the guard sounded the alarm, the four hundred soldiers who worked for the Lab would soon be hunting him—with twelve hundred reinforcements on the way. This wasn’t good.

  Six dropped to the floor and rolled into the darkness to his right. Icy water trickled down his collar as he left the beam of the flashlight.

  The guard whirled around, searching for Six, the light scanning the rust-covered walls. Six waited until it was on the other side of the tunnel, then jumped up into the air.

  The guard heard the splash and turned. But Six was already gone, clinging to the manhole in the ceiling. He flattened his body against it like a lizard on a stone.

  The guard walked beneath him, moving farther away into the tunnel; Six was closer to the ladder now. He realized that his best chance to get away was to climb up through the manhole. Quickly he pushed open the cover.

  By the time the guard had seen all the light pouring into the drain, Six was climbing up. But the guard was quick—he looked up and shot Six twice more.

  Six felt the bullets slam into his back. He fell back down into the drain, but as he did, he pulled the manhole lid back on. The soldier was enveloped in blackness, and as he raised the flashlight, it was kicked out of his hand.

  Six could still see. The darkness wasn’t absolute, and his eyes were almost as strong as those of an owl. He slammed his foot up into the guard’s chest. The guard flew up into the air and hit the roof, his back taking most of the impact. Then he fell and landed facedown on the floor with a thud, just as Six moved the manhole cover again and a flood of light poured briefly into the tunnel.

  Darkness and silence fell.

  The guard recovered quickly and picked up the flashlight. There was no point trying to hit an enemy he couldn’t see. He raised the flashlight and aimed his Hawk, but he still couldn’t see his assailant. He swung the light around all over the tunnel, but saw nothing. Six had gone.

  Up in the Lab’s basement parking lot, Six was sprinting away from the manhole, dodging pillars and parked cars. He needed to get out of this facility, now.

  It would seem that King had misjudged the situation. The Lab’s security was already too tight to infiltrate. They were shooting to kill. The Deck needed a full-on strike team in here, not one pathetically outnumbered agent.

  Six hoped that the bullet holes in the fabric of his suit were enough evidence of Code-breaking activities, because he was getting out of here and he wasn’t coming back.

  An alarm sounded, and he ducked behind a pillar in the parking lot. This was bad—really bad.

  All the guards in the building had been alerted now. Exits were being locked, digi-cams and guards were searching for him, and there was nothing he could do.

  He gritted his teeth. Should he go back the way he came? Look for another way out? Even as a bullet slammed into the wall beside his head, releasing a cloud of dust and grit, he was scrambling to his feet. He sprinted away from the sound of gunfire, but he knew he couldn’t outrun bullets from Eagle OI779 automatic rifles.

  Six crouched behind a parked car. He could hear the soldiers coming closer. I need to get out of here, he thought desperately. But I’m surrounded, I’m trapped.

  There! Just a few cars away, he saw a door marked fire exit. The guards hadn’t reached it yet.

  A chattering Eagle tore his cover to bits. He dived to one side, rolled, and was on his feet running.

  The narrow windows near the ceiling were shattering above his head. He hunched his shoulders to protect his neck and kept running as broken glass rained down. Bullets thudded into the walls around him.

  The car riddled with bullets exploded. Six felt the heat sweep across his back—he hoped it had been caused by a spark and not by a grenade. The gunfire stopped momentarily, the shooters presumably ducking for cover in the explosion.

  Six kept running. He ripped the pocket off his bodysuit and caught his radio as it fell. “This is Agent Six of Hearts,” he yelled, “requesting immediate assistance, over.”

  Looking up, he saw the fire door right ahead of him. It might be locked, but it didn’t look too solid. Six sprinted straight at the door. Just before he reached it, he turned sideways and jumped, shoulder first.

  The door snapped completely off its hinges and shattered into large splinters as it slammed into the wall behind. Six skidded through the doorway.

  “Deck HQ, do you copy? This is Agent Six of—”

  Something hit him in the face, and he was suddenly blind.

  “Got him,” he heard a voice say before he slipped into unconsciousness.

  PRISONER OF THE LAB

  Where am I? Agent Six asked himself.

  Captured, of course, he answered. I’m a prisoner of the Lab.

  He could feel a prickling sensation under his left eyelid, and he realized that one of his colored contact lenses must have broken when he’d been knocked out. He reached up with one hand, opened the eye, and started picking out splinters of plastic.

  When he opened his good eye, he found himself staring at a gritty, greyish-green ceiling, about five meters up. He looked to the left and saw a wall of the same color. He looked to the right and saw a guard, munching on half a sandwich.

  “Hi!” the guard said through a mouthful. “Did you sleep well?” He was smiling, and he sounded genuinely concerned. His features looked strangely familiar—he had piercing blue eyes, a hard-edged profile, and scruffy bleached-blond hair. His lightly tanned chin was coated in light stubble. He looked about eighteen.

  His expression had a mischievous quality—he kept looking knowingly at Six, then glancing away. He was slouching on a wooden chair, with both hands on the sandwich. Six saw he was armed with a Raptor semiautomatic, but he’d made no move to point it at Six, or even to take it out of its holster.

  “You’ve been out for, well, a while, I guess,” the guard continued. “I don’t know who hit you, but it must’ve been pretty hard.”

  Six touched a hand to his forehead. If I were human, I’d be dead, he thought.

  He looked around. The room was very
bare: blank walls, no furniture except for the bed he lay on and the guard’s chair, and the floor was only about three by two meters.

  The door was slightly ajar, and Six could see that the padlock on the other side was broken. What kind of prison is this? he thought.

  He sat up on the bed, looking around suspiciously. “I’m not buying this,” he said.

  “You’re not buying what?” the guard asked.

  Six snorted. “There’s no security camera, no alarm switch, only one guard, and the door isn’t even locked! Should I feel insulted?” His eyes narrowed. “Or is there something I can’t see?”

  The guard smiled back at him and swallowed another mouthful. “It does seem a bit undercautious at first glance, doesn’t it?”

  “No kidding.” Six examined the guard’s face. I know him, he thought. I’ve seen him before somewhere. “You really expect me to take this at face value?”

  “Not really, no. I expect you to be suspicious…but for what it’s worth, I say that what you see is genuinely what you get.”

  “No infrared cams behind the walls? No fiber optics? No collar mikes?”

  The guard shrugged. “Nope. None that I know of, at any rate.” He frowned. “I hope not.”

  Hmm, Six thought. Time to change tack.

  “I’ve been in some extremely casual prisons before,” Six said, gazing around as though in wonder, “but this!” He was lying—he had never been caught before today, so this was his first experience of captivity since his synthetic womb sixteen years before.

  “Well, it’s not actually designed to be a cell,” the guard said. “I’m not exactly sure what it’s for.”

  Six seemed to have subdued the soldier into a relaxed state of mind. Although he had seemed ridiculously calm to start with. Conversation, he reflected, does have a few good uses.

  He reached over swiftly and snatched the Raptor out of the guard’s holster. “Tell me how to get out of the building,” he demanded, aiming the barrel at the guard’s face.

  The guard continued eating. “Want the other half?” he asked, waving the sandwich. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  Six stared at him. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah, but the directions are a little complicated,” the guard said. “And there aren’t any bullets in that gun, anyway. So, are you hungry? I’m on my lunch break, so you may as well join me.”

  Six had known that there were no bullets in the chamber. He had felt how light it was the instant he had picked it up. But he had hoped that the guard didn’t know. A foolish presumption, clearly.

  Six dropped the gun onto the floor. “Fine,” he said. “How long am I going to be stuck in here with you?”

  “Hey, don’t be like that.” The guard sounded offended. “There’s no need to—”

  Six’s arm shot out towards the guard’s chest. His fist raced through the air, a blur to human eyes. But the guard deflected the blow easily, and it hit the wall behind him. The plaster cracked, spilling dust into the room.

  The soldier pushed Six back by the shoulder with one hand, and as Six spun around with the force of the blow, the guard’s feet lifted up off the ground. He held himself up on the chair with his other arm, and kicked Six’s legs out from underneath him. Six tumbled through the air and hit the wall with a force that knocked all the breath out of him—and then the guard’s feet slammed into his back. Before he knew it, he was upside down and pinned to the greyish-green wall.

  The guard’s body was propped up between the two walls of the cell—he had a hand on one wall and his feet pushed Six against the other. With his other hand, he caught the sandwich, which had been flying through the air the whole time.

  The fight had taken place in under a second.

  “—sound so negative,” the guard finished. He took another bite out of the sandwich. “It’s nice to meet you, Agent Six. I’ve been waiting for a long time.”

  Six had been trying to move, but now he froze, horrified. This man had beaten him in the fight, outsmarted him with the gun, and knew who he was.

  “Hey, relax,” the guard laughed. “It’s okay, the Lab doesn’t know, just me…”

  Six didn’t relax. He’s only about eighteen, he thought. Not old enough to remember the attacks on the Lab. How could he know? Unless…

  “Okay, I can guess what you’re thinking, and I doubt I’m going to do well out of it. So stop thinking for a second. I can probably let you down now; I think I’ve got your attention.”

  He removed his feet from Six’s back, and Six landed on the bed, arms first. The guard landed back on his chair.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, scratching his stubbly chin. “I hope I didn’t hurt you. I just didn’t want you to escape before you heard what I had to say. You’re listening now, aren’t you?”

  Six nodded dumbly.

  “You’re not hurt?”

  He shook his head. As a matter of fact, the guard hadn’t caused him any physical pain at all. The whole movement had been very carefully executed, Six thought. Not a good sign—he was dealing with a pro here. A pro who still looked oddly familiar.

  “That’s good.” The guard grinned. “Introductions first? Of course, I know your name already, but I’m Kyntak. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  He extended his hand. Six ignored it as he always did when people tried to shake his hand.

  Kyntak shrugged and withdrew it. “All right. I’ll tell you how I got here, how I know who you are, and how I can help.”

  “Why should you help me? And what makes you think I need any help?”

  The guard laughed. “I’ve helped you a fair bit already. Do you actually believe that Stadil would leave you in here with only one guard, with no bullets in his gun, no video or audio monitoring, no physical restraints, and no lock on the door?”

  Kligos Stadil—in charge of security for the Lab. King was right.

  “He was going to torture you for information right away,” Kyntak said. “But I sabotaged his equipment, so it won’t be working until they get some replacement parts. They stuck you in here, and I arranged to be in the right place at the right time so I was told to guard you. The video camera that used to be on the wall is under your bed, along with the microphone. I took the bullets out of the gun in case you tried to shoot me. I broke the lock off the door. You were tightly restrained when I got here—you were tied to the bed, but the ropes are now under your bed, too. You probably could have broken them, anyway. There’s a hidden alarm in here, too, but, believe me, I have no intention of using it.”

  He leaned forward. “After all, I wouldn’t want to be caught, either.”

  Six looked under his bed and saw five lengths of rope, a security camera, a small black square (presumably the microphone), and a large padlock. There was also a Hawk 9 millimeter and a box of ammunition. It was all true.

  “I’m not exactly what you’d call a loyal soldier,” Kyntak said. “I’m only here because I’ve been following the Lab since I was a small child. Unlike you, I wasn’t able to just let go of my origins. I traced them all the way back to my creation, and then went to seek out the creators.”

  It all clicked into place.

  Six’s eyes were wide. He should have guessed. The man sitting in front of him had beaten him in a fight. No one had done that before. Ever. And this was why.

  Kyntak had the same genetic structure as Six. He, too, was more animal than man. A product of Project Falcon.

  That was why he looked familiar. When Six mentally lightened Kyntak’s skin, unbleached his hair, and removed the stubble, his face was almost identical to his own.

  It made perfect sense. If one embryo had been obtained for illicit purposes, hundreds or even thousands more could have been cloned from it easily. They would have just needed to take a single cell from the original, separate it, grow and culture it, and then they’d have a carbon copy of it. The Lab wouldn’t have wanted to put all their eggs in one basket—several experimental fetuses would have h
ad a better chance of success than just a single one.

  This creature, the smiling, scruffy kid in front of him, was the same as Six underneath. A flesh-and-blood robot. A monster. A piece of biological weaponry.

  “You weren’t the only one born in that experiment,” Kyntak was saying, even as Six was working it out. “We two are the same model, Six. Grown from the same genetic plan.” Kyntak smiled sadly. “Feels good, doesn’t it? To find someone else who can understand?”

  “Stay away from me,” Six said. “I don’t need your understanding.”

  “So far today you’ve been shot, knocked unconscious, tied up, and if it wasn’t for me, you’d probably be dead.” Kyntak sighed. “Believe me, you need all the help you can get—and that’s what I’m offering. So be nice.”

  Six boggled at him. Be nice?

  “You know who I am, that’s a start,” Kyntak continued. “Now for what I’m doing here. A courier picked me up after the fire, when I first escaped from the Lab sixteen years ago—his transport had lost power on the speedway and he saw me on the ground near the road. When he fixed the transport, he took me to the first stop in the City and dumped me in an orphanage. It was one of the last to close before Takeover was complete. I stayed there for almost four years. But someone must have noticed how different I was from the other kids, and pretty soon the Lab was after me again in my part of the City. Luckily for me, there were a lot of dirty homeless kids around, and I managed to hide pretty well. And when I realized it was me they were after, I decided to follow them. I wanted to find out what the hell was going on.”

  He grinned. “Typical childhood, I suppose.

  “Anyway, after spying on this company and its members up until I was about ten, I started military training in the City. There was no army to join, of course, but there was a kind of boot camp for ChaoSonic security applicants. Target shooting, athletics, martial arts, kickboxing, endurance races, the works. I studied combat of all kinds.