Remote Control Read online

  “You think you can just walk in here dressed like that,” the man said, “and start ordering people around?”

  The statement struck Six as odd. He was dressed the same as half the other people in Insomnia. This man doesn’t have a girlfriend, he realized suddenly. And he doesn’t care how I’m dressed. He’s just trying to start a fight.

  But why pick him? In Six’s experience, men usually picked fights with people taller than them—a primitive display of bravery or ability. This man was short, but no shorter than Six. And there were plenty of other people in the club, many of whom would have committed actual slights to give the guy an excuse.

  “I’m sorry,” Six said, testing the waters. “I don’t want any trouble. Let me buy you a drink.”

  A flick-knife appeared in the guy’s hand, and he spun it expertly around his knuckles.

  So, Six thought. He doesn’t care what I say, and he’s not only armed but also trained.

  He tried another test. “Come any closer and I’ll kill you,” he said with as little emotion as possible.

  The man didn’t flinch. “Are you threatening me?” He has combat experience, Six thought. He didn’t pick me because he thinks I’m weak.

  Six feinted to one side, and the guy leaped towards him as though his trigger had been pulled. But his attack was a punch—the knife hand stayed back. Nonlethal force, Six thought. Interesting.

  Six ducked under the punch and stepped in, throwing his shoulder against the man’s legs just below the knees. The man didn’t cry out as he fell forward over Six, dropping the knife and smashing through the window Six had been leaning against, vanishing into the darkness outside.

  The sound of the window shattering could barely be heard over the music, but some of the nightclub patrons who’d seen what happened stopped dancing and stared. Those surrounding Six tried to back away from him, but the crowd was too thick to move through. The bouncers who had been guarding each stairway started pushing their way through the onlookers towards Six.

  So much for subtlety, he thought. Getting beaten up by a half dozen bouncers would draw too much attention, and successfully defending himself would be even worse. Slipping away into the crowd wasn’t an option either; the people were still backing away, leaving Six in the center of a widening semicircle.

  Two options. One: He could shove his way across the dance floor, dodging around the approaching bouncers as he went, head down the stairs, and hope that the people outside weren’t blocking the door.

  Six chose option two.

  Just as a bulky arm shot out of the mass of people to grab him, Six launched his body up into a backflip, shoes scraping stalactites of glass off the top of the window frame, and flew into the night outside. His body became vertical as he reached the peak of his trajectory, as if he were doing a handstand on the empty air, and then he plummeted down into the Timeout, ten meters below.

  Broken glass crunched under his sneakers as he landed, less than a meter from the fallen body of the flick-knife man. Six glanced at him—minor lacerations and a dislocated knee—nothing serious. Unconscious, maybe concussed. One of the man’s earplugs was lying on the ground, and Six nearly dismissed it as unimportant, but then he saw the tiny speaker embedded in it.

  It wasn’t an earplug. It was an earpiece.

  Hence the nonlethal force, Six thought. Hence the weapons training. Hence the trying to get him thrown out of the nightclub so he’d be in the open, exposed. This guy was one of Vanish’s men. But how did he know Six was a Deck agent? And how did he know Six was in the nightclub?

  Six picked up the earpiece and glanced around. The people waiting in line to enter Insomnia were staring at him, and while the bouncers hadn’t appeared yet, Six was sure that someone would be coming after him soon. He ran out of sight around the corner, into another of the Timeout’s three cul-de-sacs.

  The Seawall rose into the sky opposite him, a massive slab of concrete. The illumination from the streetlamps didn’t reach high enough to reveal the top, giving the impression that the wall stretched right up into outer space. Six felt like he had walked in a straight line for his entire life and had now reached the end of the world. Underneath the dull thumping and yelling from Insomnia, which bounced off the smooth surface of the wall in confusingly jagged pieces, Six could feel the concrete exuding menace. If he pressed his ear against it, he knew he would hear a deep, bass rumbling, the sound of the ocean crashing against the thick barrier in an unyielding attempt to flood the City.

  ChaoSonic had put up the Seawall when Six was a small child, supposedly to protect the residents of the City from terrorists in other countries. It was Methryn Crexe who had told him that this was a lie. There were no other countries anymore. Global warming had melted the polar ice caps, and the rest of the world was underwater. ChaoSonic had put up the wall to keep the City from sinking into the ocean, and to make sure the City’s residents never knew they were the last people on earth.

  Six removed his earplugs and replaced one with the borrowed earpiece, just as his watch ticked over: 18:59:59 to 19:00:00.

  “…now seven o’clock, Team Two,” crackled a voice calmly. “Drop off the hostage.”

  “Copy that,” came the immediate response.

  Six peered around the corner and watched the rest of the Timeout intently. Vanish clearly had operatives working behind the scenes, but where? The only movement Six could see was the line of people slowly flowing into Insomnia, and there was nothing even remotely suspicious about them.

  Six squinted into the darkness. The fog was concealing details, but something orange had appeared near the center of the Timeout, right next to the subway entrance. He looked carefully.

  It was a person in an orange undershirt and shorts, sitting on the asphalt. There was an orange bag pulled over his head, concealing his face. Six took a long look, heart pounding. It could be Kyntak, he thought. The body shape was right, and the clothes were the same as those in the ransom demand video, but his posture didn’t look good.

  The body was sitting up, but there didn’t seem to be any weight in his arms—they were hanging limply onto the road. The legs were resting flat on the ground, ankles twisted outward.

  Whoever he was, he wasn’t moving. And he had the posture of someone who no longer felt any pain.

  Six raced into the open, not caring about being spotted by the Insomnia crowd or Vanish’s operatives. As he approached he saw that the body was not moving even slightly—no breaths were being drawn into the chest. He slid to a halt and crouched beside it, pulling off the bag.

  It wasn’t Kyntak.

  It wasn’t anyone.

  A white polystyrene head stared blankly up at Six, and even as he recoiled in shock he felt how light the torso was.

  Vanish hadn’t returned Kyntak. He had left a dummy at the rendezvous point, taken the money, and disappeared. Before Six had time to wonder what was to be gained from sending at least three operatives to leave a decoy hostage, the earpiece crackled again.

  “Go, Team Two.”

  “Stand still,” a voice boomed, “and you will not be harmed.”

  Six whirled around, unable to see where the voice was coming from. He looked up. The first thing he saw was a soldier with a megaphone leaning through the second-floor window of one of the buildings; the second was the sixteen snipers aiming at him from windows all around.

  THE CLIMB

  “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.