Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (84 page)

Lightning flashed, lighting up the whole sky. A crack of thunder erupted a few seconds later. Gabe jumped at the noise, feeling the power of it hit his chest. Petal, sitting behind him, gripped his waist tighter.
 

And on it went, growing fiercer than he could ever imagine. Lightning forked all around them, making the dense, statically charged clouds glow blue. They watched as lightning struck the ground, not once or twice but hundreds of times, as if the very gods were smiting the earth.
 

“Oh fuck,” Gabe said, leaning forward. The headlight went out.

“What is it?” Petal shouted over the roar of the thunder and the gusting winds that threatened to rip them off the bike.
 

“We’re done!” The bike lurched to a stop; steam poured from the fuel cell. “The static shorted the H-core.”

The clouds ahead formed a giant cone, forks of light flashed inside the huge swirling form as it sucked up air and dust from the ground. Gabe abandoned the bike. The winds shifted. Dust, dirt, and small stones crashed into his face. He held up his jacket to block out the assault while he grabbed the strong box containing Alpha’s motherboard from the bike.

“Grab what you can,” he shouted, bellowing as loud as he could over the deafening roar of the twisting beast.

“Where will we go?” Petal screamed.

Gabe shielded his eyes, scanning the area. To his right he saw a couple of small boulders. It wasn’t ideal, but in the Great Plains there was nowhere else to go before the tornado struck. He pointed to them, and Petal’s eyes followed him. He could see fear there, and desperation.
 

“It’s the only place.”
 

She nodded and held the duffle bag with supplies up to protect her face.
 

Together, leaning against the violent, battering winds, they trekked towards the dark shapes, hoping they’d offer enough protection from the vicious winds.

Chapter 17

Sasha woke up, still strapped to the table. Her body ached with the discomfort, but thankfully her feet had stopped hurting. They itched where the skin had started to dry and heal over. She checked the time on the holoscreen in front of her: 13:00. She’d been out all night and most of the morning. As her bleary vision cleared, she saw they had worked on Malik’s leg. A metal cap was fitted to the end of the stump. A tight sleeve surrounded the rest of his thigh. He was awake, looking around his room, scanning every corner, every detail, no doubt trying to figure a way out.
 

A minute later and the door behind her opened. A waft of air blew hair into her face. A shadow crawled over her body. Looking down at her was one of the women from Malik’s room. She wore a bandage around her right wrist with spots of blood showing through.
 

The woman she’d shot in the hangar.

“You’re awake finally,” Katsuo said as he stepped into the room and stood to Sasha’s right. He regarded the other woman. “Marlena, prep Sasha for the procedure. And don’t be too careful. I see you have a little history together.” He nodded to the bandage wrapped around the woman’s wrist.

Marlena smiled as she removed a scalpel from a table of medical tools next to the bed.

Sasha’s right arm lay flat, exposing her wrist. With her free hand, Marlena applied a yellow stain of disinfecting ’Stem solution over Sasha’s wrist: the preferred location for the ronin-chip. Once installed, it’d hijack her regular dermal implant.

“This will hurt,” Marlena said as she took a chip off the table. A pair of five-millimetre-long teeth was attached to the underside. Once locked in, the teeth of the chip would integrate with her nervous system. That would bring her online to Elliot’s network and disable her own implant and internal system. The damn thing was a parasite.

She closed her eyes as the woman moved closer, bringing the scalpel to touch her skin.

“Although it’ll take just a few minutes,” Katsuo said, “it will hurt for quite some time.”

Sasha opened her eyes and spat at him, and received a hard slap to her face, knocking her head violently to the side, crashing against the steel surface of the table.
 

“Do it now,” Katsuo said.
 

The scalpel fell away and clattered to the floor. The woman began to cough, and she clutched her bandaged wrist. Her hands shook.

“What’s the matter with you?” Katsuo said, moving towards her. Marlena’s eyes snapped wide open, the veins bulging bright red. She knelt down and began to choke. He put his hand on her back and tried to help her up. She just gurgled before grabbing the scalpel. He helped her to her feet and looked into her weeping eyes.
 

“Are you hurt?”

Her mouth twisted as she forced out the words. “My... wrist...” She held it up. The bandage had turned black, and Sasha could smell burning.
 

“What the?” Katsuo stepped back, but he was too slow.

Marlena struck out with the scalpel, driving it into his carotid artery. Blood gushed from the wound, spraying across the room. She continued to drive it in until he fell to the ground with a slump and choked on his own blood.
 

The woman turned to Sasha and used the scalpel to cut her bonds.

“Why?” Sasha said as she sat up and eased the pain on her wrists and ankles.

“I’m... off the network,” Marlena said with a strange smile on her face. “Chip... damaged.”
 

She grinned like a maniac, and Sasha stepped back.

Smoke continued to rise from the darkened bandage before a flame erupted and burned away the fabric. Marlena felt to her knees and held up her burning arm like it was a torch. That was when her chest convulsed and she fell forward, striking the floor with her face. Sasha waited for a moment before checking her pulse. She was dead.
 

Katsuo’s body was still moving, however, and a whispered voice came from his throat.
 

Sasha knelt beside him. “What are you saying?”
 

He clenched his eyes shut with the effort, but squeezed out two words, “He knows,” before his breathing stopped and his head fell against his chest.

“Why are you bad guys always so cryptic?” Sasha shook her head and picked up the scalpel. She got a good look at the room. The previous cream walls were now a riot of red. A cupboard stood half open beside the door. Inside, she found more of the green medical outfits. She put one on and took Marlena’s mask after cleaning the blood off with a rag. Looking through the bits of blood on the holoscreen, she saw Malik. She took a closer look at his wrist. It didn’t appear they had chipped him yet. There was nothing to distinguish where he might be in the facility, but given the room didn’t look too dissimilar to this one, she suspected it must be close.
 

“I’m coming, Mal,” she said. “Hold on.” She turned her back on the two corpses and exited the room.

Chapter 18

The powerful winds blustered against Gabe, unbalancing his strides as he and Petal ran for the boulder formation. The storm continued to rage. Blue and white flashes burst against dark skies. The great twisting funnel of dust and air grew bigger every second.

Gabe tripped over a rock. His face struck the ground with a hollow thud.
 

Petal raced to his side and tried to pull him up, but he remained prone, shrugging her off. He pounded his fist on the ground. More hollow bangs echoed.
 

“There’s something down there,” he said, bellowing over the roar of the winds.

A blanket of dust and gravel and detritus blew into his face. He held up a protective hand and squinted at the ground.
 

“What are you looking for?” Petal said, standing with her back to the wind. Her hair blew wildly around her head. It looked as if she were being electrocuted, which given the amount of lightning, Gabe didn’t think particularly unlikely.
 

“Here.” Gabe got to his feet. He stamped along the ground and headed off to the right of the boulders, which stood no more than five metres away.
 

With each stamp that same echo rang out. He scanned the ground. As the wind continued to sweep the dust and dirt around, he noticed dark patches.
 

He crouched and wiped his hand across one of the dark areas.
 

“It’s metal! There’s a shelter here.”
 

Before Petal could say anything, he sprinted to the boulders. They were arranged in a rough circular formation. He then considered how odd it seemed for this formation of rocks to be on these plains when he could see no others for kilometres around. Even within the ruins of the old towns and settlements there was little else beyond rubble and dirt.
 

“What’ve you found?” Petal asked, joining him in the circle of tall boulders. They came up to her waist. They both crouched down, using them for temporary shelter from the vicious winds. Thunder continued to crack the skies with each flash of lightning.
 

Gabe unsheathed the katana on his back that he took from the ronin. Using the grip of the weapon, he bent down and tapped on the earth. When the strike rang out with a sound of metal, he dropped the weapon, got to his knees, and cleared the ground with his hands. The area was slightly depressed from the surrounding earth.
 

“It’s a hatch,” Petal said. “Must’ve been one of the old nuke bunkers.”

Gabe cleared the area further to reveal a circular, metal lid with two deep grooves—handholds.

“Help me with this,” Gabe said, gripping one of the holds with both of his hands.
 

Petal joined him and gripped the other hold.
 

Together they lifted the hatch against the power of the wind. It was hinged on one edge. Petal held it open while Gabe poked his head down into the hole.
 

Stale air wafted up. Familiar. He’d known this smell from his younger years: the coolant for computers used in shelters. The arid air was one of the reasons he was so eager to leave his shelter in Hong Kong and seek resources elsewhere. It made his lungs so dry he thought they would turn to papyrus.
 

Of course, the fact he could smell it now meant that there was something still running down there. And if there was something running, that meant there was... someone. He couldn’t see much through the gloom. There was a ladder attached to the wall, but he couldn’t tell how far it went down.
 

Gabe pulled his head out of the hatch.
 

“We might have company here,” he said. “Are ya picking up any traffic?” His internal transceiver wasn’t picking up anything, but now that Petal had Gerry working on her systems, she’d likely have better luck.
 

“Wait,” Petal said as she became still. She turned her head slowly taking in the area. She sniffed the air like a tracker dog. “Yeah, there’s something here. I’m getting... dark traffic. Encrypted.”

“Ronin?”

Petal nodded just as a bolt of lightning struck one of the boulders, splitting off a great chunk. It made Gabe jump back, losing his grip on the hatch. The wind caught it and slammed it back down. Lightning began to flash all around them.

“It must be the shelter,” Gabe screamed. “The metal is attracting the lightning.”
 

They had a clear choice: go into the shelter, with the potential of confronting more ronin, or stay outside in the worst storm in living memory.

Gabe looked out to the horizon. The twister had grown larger still. It was so big he had to almost turn his head a full ninety degrees to see beyond the funnel in either direction. And it was heading straight for them, less than a kilometre away. Gabe was already having trouble standing. Once it hit, it would be all over.

Chapter 19

Sasha hurried through the halls and passages, intent on finding Malik. Now that her bracers were removed, she could pick up the network with her internal systems. She tried to reach a node outside, to get a message to James or the others about Rosario Fuentes’ betrayal, but it was locked down, firewalled. She didn’t have time yet to try to hack her way in.
 

She reached the end of a grey corridor and followed it as it branched to the right. A handful of ronin members passed by, making her tense with paranoia that she had forgotten something or looked out of place. She, now dressed in one of the women’s medical outfits, including a facemask, was at least convincing enough to not get noticed.
 

But still, as she passed each person, avoiding direct eye contact, her heart threatened to break out of her chest, until she remembered her training. She pictured the now-departed General Vickers standing in front of her, screaming his orders, while the other soldiers tried to attack her from all angles. That was when her combat systems took over, making her movements smooth and quick like a snake. Her mind would go into a hyper-focal state, slowing time, turning it to liquid.

Relax. Focus. I can do this.
 

She gave a cursory nod of greeting as a group of two men, engineers by the look of their grimy faces, walked by. They were deep in conversation about some ‘phased roll-out’.