The Demon Plagues (37 page)

Air rushed past them and because of its
everpresent susurration fell silent, not literally but in their own
perceptions because it filled their worlds, this rushing in the
blackness, the stars above and the lights edging up toward them
from below. They checked their altimeters on wrists or bellies as
they preferred, watching the inexorable and hypnotic sweep of
hundreds and thousands of feet, second-hands of death-clocks
counting down toward oblivion, if only they allowed it to reach
them as it reached for them.

Nanobots inside them insulated their psyches
like speedball ricochet, wrapped them in warm cocoons of
invincibility, whispering in their ears like lovers as they had
come to know in the last few days of their training, seductive,
orgasmic, promising and delivering the adrenaline rush of the
ubermensch
. Skull kept a grip on his sanity at the expense
of joy and the happiness, or giddiness, that the others displayed.
They were deadly puppies, all teeth and tackles, all but Huff, who
always kept one eye on Skull, waiting for the inevitable wrong
move.

Somewhere during the dive the drugs burned
themselves out and the fall settled down to an ordinariness that
disappointed, Skull most of all as it was seldom that he allowed
himself out of his own head for fear of the loss of control. Sanity
had its price and tonight that price was paradise lost.

He checked his altimeter, blazing through ten
thousand feet. Thirty seconds or so and they would deploy their
ram-air wings, thirty more seconds to think about what was before
and what is ahead. The first rip and pop startled Skull out of his
almost-fugue and he released his own pilot chute that dragged his
main from its tightly packed stowage.

These parachutes were large and slow and
gentle, giants that would set them down as if on pillows even with
sixty pounds of gear. Thirty pounds of armor, twenty of weaponry,
ten of miscellaneous stuff, no nonsense. Some food, some water,
knives and lights and all those things combat troops festoon
themselves with.

They had practiced with these loads, and
Skull had hardly felt them. Not only was his body supercharged, but
his confidence followed, a dangerous invincible feeling stronger
than any happy-drug, manufactured by his own brain in no way
related to the nanobots other than his own beliefs, the high of a
rock star on stage or a lottery winner.

Their boots struck the rocky mountainsides
right after their combat equipment bags and they danced, dragging
down their canopies until they collapsed like slashed jellyfish in
the southern hemisphere’s autumnal zephyr, to follow the capsules
into nanite dust. Nine men assembled as three teams of three, only
then switching on their HUD-equipped helmets.

The sensor-equipped brain-buckets, like the
pioneering smartphones of decades before, coated the world with a
virtual overlay, identifying any anomaly it could, marking those it
couldn’t, all displayed on the inside of bullet-resistant clear
synthetic crystal of the Heads-Up Display.

“Listen up,” Skull said over their private
secure network. “Change of plan. I’m taking Objective One. Huff,
you got Two, Miller, you got Three. Get to it.”

“Uh, why?” came a voice, Miller's, Skull
thought.

“Shut up, Miller,” cut in Huff. “Do what the
man says.” They heard some mumbled muttering but no more
objections.

The three sections scattered, scrabbling
across the rocky hillside above the brightly-lit lab complex. The
HUDs showed their paths like a GPS would have before the satellites
were fried, though these keyed off the three-dimensional models
assembled from the high-resolution photographs and
synthetic-aperture radars of spy planes. These paths diverged as
soon as they jumped over the fence.

With low-light amplifiers linked to the HUD
processors, they sprinted for their objectives, exceeding thirty
miles an hour even over broken ground, leaping rocks and bushes,
hurdlers in the Special Operations Olympics.

Section Three was first to find Murphy, which
was all right by Two and One as Three was the least important, its
purpose more diversion than accomplishment. The running men tripped
a pop-flare, a simple mechanical device that fired a
parachute-equipped bright burning light into the air, pinpointing
them in its pitiless white while simultaneously drawing attention
to them. They dealt with it by the simple expedient of running
faster. By the time the reaction team came driving out in its
armored vehicles, they were hundreds of meters away. They found
another trip flare the same way, and Miller directed them toward
their target, a warehouse on the far side of the lab from the more
important targets One and Two.

Miller kicked the steel-cored door open in
one violent blow. He felt his ankle compress, an impact sprain that
would have been debilitating without the nanobots. He felt the
joint grow hot and imagined the tiny machines frantically
rebuilding his cartilage and bone like earthmoving equipment on a
construction site. He kept his weight off it as he had been taught
to make sure it healed properly, hopping easily on one leg for a
moment or two.

He stared at the stacks and pallets and
shelves inside, strangely familiar but unearthly in the faint
emergency lights. “Find something flammable, something that will
get cooking.”

Banson and Marquez leaped up onto the
shelves, banging on boxes and barrels and crates with the butts of
their assault rifles, looking for anything that would burn or boil
or burst. One of the tall shelves with heavy supplies began to sway
under Banson’s feet. “Hey, look at this!” he cried like the
juvenile delinquent he nearly was, and he deliberately began to set
up an oscillation, a harmonic swaying that within seconds knocked
it over. Giant dominos, six more shelves fell over in a rolling
barrage of falling boxes, barrels and bins. He whooped and
hollered.

“Set some charges, here and there. Rig some
thermite.”

A siren began in the distance, a rising and
falling signal that someone had noticed something, possibly them,
possibly something else. “Come on,” yelled Miller, “We need to be
the diversion.”

“Fire in the hole,” Miller heard from above,
and Marquez laughed, leaping to the top of another ten-foot-high
shelf, well out of the line of the small blasts on the mess above.
It amused him to take risks he never would have before. The bursts
were small, bare pops that soon faded to curses. “Nothing really
flammable here.”

“Come on down here, then,” he called,
dropping back to the floor. “Put your charges right here, touching
mine. They’ll all go off together. Yeah, stick a timer on there,
two minutes ought to do it. I got the command detonator too.”

They slapped their charges up next to his,
then began tossing boxes and barrels on top of the explosives. If
they couldn’t get a fire started, the next best thing was blowing
the place sky-high, like firecrackers under tin cans. Maybe they
could take down the building.

A large bay door began rolling upward just
then, and flashing yellow lights came on, warning all and sundry of
the movement. A tactical stack of the reaction force scooted
through the opening, weapons out in all the standard directions. A
bullhorn from one of the two armored vehicles revealed by the
rising door threw an amplified voice echoing into the metal space.
“Put down your weapons and approach with your hands up. This is
your only warning.”

Miller laughed, and he could hear Banson and
Marquez’s amusement come over his secure link. “Split and take
them!” he called, bolting to his right as his assault rifle spat
bullets at the armored vehicles to keep their heads down. The other
two men were closer to their dismounted team and would have no
problem with them.

Projectiles crisscrossed the hangar, bright
sparkling lights from ricochets and Needleshock impacts following
at his heels, but far too slow as he accelerated like a cheetah,
angling for the edge of the big door, trying to get out of the
building and off into the darkness. He cursed himself for putting
all six pounds of explosive compound under the supplies; he thought
he could have run up and stuck a charge on the light armored
vehicle nearest him and gotten away before he got shot, so fast
could he run.

The spotlight followed him as he raced around
the corner and out of sight, then in darkness skidded to a stop and
put an eye to a bullet-hole, flipping up his HUD. He watched as
Banson and Marquez cut down the dismounted tactical team with full
automatic fire, eerily precise even as they ran for the back of the
storehouse and the rear personnel door. They shielded themselves
from enemy heavy sticky-round machine-gun fire with the bulk of the
shelves, and as soon as the men kicked open the back door Miller
squeezed the detonator.

He closed his eyes but realized he should
have put his HUD shield down as six pounds of high explosive
shockwave slapped the metal wall in front of him, punching him in
the face as the building’s skin flexed. He fell backward into a
combat roll, ignoring the pain and running toward the side where
his men had gotten out.

As he rounded the back corner he heard the
high chattering of PW10 Needleshock submachine-guns, and he
laughed. With their full armor his men would go through these
Sickos like a mower through the green grass. He saw Banson and
Marquez trading fire with an enemy fire-team of five who had taken
good cover positions behind more pallets. Miller had their flank
and he ruthlessly exploited his position to roll up the enemy,
gunning four men down before his magazine clicked empty.

He raced the last man, Eden youth and
reaction time against Nano speed, but Miller had a lot more to do –
drop his magazine, move it over and jam the full one taped
alongside back in.The Eden just had to swing his weapon ninety
degrees.

It was a dead heat. Miller imagined he could
see the Needleshock rounds reaching for him as both men’s weapons
spat muzzle flame. Perhaps he did see them in the instant before
three hypervelocity bullets slammed through his forgotten-open face
shield and into his brain, his dying thought echoing.
I am so
stupid
.

The two other Nanos screamed in rage and
charged the shooter, cutting him down ruthlessly before checking on
their team leader. “He’s done,” said Marquez. “Let’s go kill some
of these Sicko bastards.”

Forgetting the second part of their mission,
the part where they joined up with the rest, go kill they did,
Light Brigade charges at every security force they saw until they
were finally brought down by massed fire, the Edens’ terror
overriding their reluctance to risk the kill, sticky rounds and
Needleshock and concussion grenades blending in a focused cacophony
of submission that pummeled them into unconsciousness.

***

Section Two jogged, if their blazing pace
could be so termed, toward the housing area on the southeast
outskirts of the laboratory complex, three cyborgs, faceless
robo-beings out of some sci-fi shoot-em-up, moving in ways that
were they to be put on a movie screen would engender cries of “No
way” and “Agh, what horrible CGI,” but it was all for real this
time.

They bounced twenty and thirty feet in a
stride, leaped over automobiles and trucks, supermen with single
bounds. They even jumped onto and over an entire dwelling,
scampering along its roof, berserk high-tech elves a long way from
Christmas.

Huff led his men, Bullion and Campbell, to
the intended place, a nondescript house that seemed just slightly
out of place, a bit older and grander than the others around it, as
if it had been there for some time and the others had sprung up
more recently like mushrooms, for they had. The neat and artistic
painting on the welcome-plate next to the door read “Nightingale,”
but the three men had little time to read it as they burst through
the thin front door.

Two minutes of screaming and hollering later
the occupants of the home were duly frightened and assembled in the
living room, five children whimpering all on one sofa, their four
parents sitting in the love seat and the two armchairs.

“Well, well,” Huff cackled, swinging up his
faceplate. “Daniel freakin’ Markis, at the end of my barrel. One
twitch of my finger and bang, no more DJ the PJ.”

Markis stared frozen in his seat, fearing
more for the children and his wife than himself. “What’s this
about?” he asked mildly.

“It’s about a li’l fun, Chair-man. You in the
chair now, ain’t you? But hey, don’ worry, like they say in the
movies, nothing bad’s gonna happen if you just cooperate. Here,
look at what my homie got in his hand there.” Bullion held up a
deadman switch attached to a block of explosive, all rigged to be
ugly and obvious. “One slip and, bang! You wanna gamble on your
Plague saving those cute little tweens?”

Larry, in his boxers on the love seat next to
Shawna, held his palm out to his children as they started to bolt
to him. “Stay there, baby, Ellis, just stay there.”

“Cooperate how?” Shawna asked, angry. “What
do you want?”

Sirens started to wail in the distance, and
the landline rang next to Elise Markis. She looked at it, then at
Huff, her hands clenched in her lap. Daniel’s cell phone sounded
from the bedroom. A rattling boom, a muffled explosion from far
off, shook the house. More sirens began.

“Right now, I want you to just remain seated
and shut down all your mobile and electronic devices until the
captain turns off the seatbelt sign, and we will all enjoy our
flight. Get it?” Huff laughed, his tongue sticking out,
mock-comical. “Just to help you do it, I’ll point out that these
are standard full metal jacket rounds, none of your pansy-ass
nonlethal shit. Right now my compadres are doing some dances out
there and we’d rather nobody helped command and control and
coordinate anything, you dig?
Now shut up!”