Third Transmission (2 page)

Now, the daily death toll was in the hundreds. Buildings blew apart like paper bags filled with air. Anytime
too many people congregated in one place, ChaoSonic soldiers would fire machine-guns indiscriminately into the crowd, because they knew at least half the people would fire back.

But this morning, all ChaoSonic troops had withdrawn from the hot zone. They packed up and left in a matter of hours. The rebels rejoiced and the civilians started to emerge from their bunkers. It seemed the war was over. Unless you knew about the weaponised strain of the SARS virus, and how it had been removed from a ChaoSonic lab. Unless you saw the ChaoSonic soldiers setting up roadblocks a few kliks away from the combat zone. Unless you saw a battleship with missile-launch capability heading towards the South Coast.

The Deck had been the first to connect all the dots. They'd sent out an emergency team. But a plane or helicopter would be shot down if it tried to land on the CNS
Gomorrah
. A boat could be shredded with metal storm fire. A radar-invisible submarine might have a shot, except it wouldn't be fast enough to intercept the battleship, and there was no way to procure one in time anyhow.

They'd decided that a torpedo with a human payload was their best chance of preventing a catastrophic viral outbreak. There was only room inside for one person, and thanks to the exposed fuel tank, the temperature would rise to over 45 degrees Celsius. High enough to cause heatstroke in a normal human.

Agent Six's mission was to sneak on board the CNS
Gomorrah
and find the canisters containing the SARS virus. Then he was supposed to steal them, smuggle them out and bring them back to the Deck so a vaccine could be synthesised before the canisters were safely disposed of.

He had an 800-gram SOL-bomb, which, when detonated, would create a blast of heat intense enough to melt steel within a 40-metre radius. If Six couldn't remove the canisters, he was supposed to plant the bomb there in the hope that it would destroy them.

And there was one more thing. If he couldn't find the SARS canisters, he was supposed to take the SOL to the engine room and plant it there, in the starboard corner, closest to the hull. Sink the ship, so no-one would ever see the canisters again.

He had forty-five minutes before the ship came within firing range of the South Coast.

Six checked his equipment one last time. He had a Parrot 220 RPM semi-automatic pistol, loaded with seventeen rubber bullets. He had three more magazines on his belt. He had a miniature cutting torch, with enough fuel for ten minutes of fiame. He had a scuba mask and a small oxygen bottle, in case he needed to sink the ship but was unable to escape. And he had a set of four small knives, suitable for throwing or close combat.

This mission sounded impossible. Search a huge ship, crowded with soldiers, for something very small. Then
find it, take it and escape, all without being spotted, in forty-five – he checked his watch – make that forty-four minutes.

But that was Six's life. Three weeks ago he'd escaped from the jail of a body-stealing psychopath. He'd driven a tank up a fiight of stairs. He'd been hammer-thrown up from a runway to intercept an airborne plane.

Impossible was nothing to Agent Six of Hearts.

The shuddering against his head became slower. The torpedo had almost reached its target. He jammed his boots against the fuel tank at the rear of the chamber, pushed his hands above his head, and waited for impact. He could smell his own sweat as his merocrine glands fought to keep his temperature down. It was like being in an oven.

Doong!
The air throbbed inside the torpedo as it struck the hull of the
Gomorrah
. Six gasped as the whiplash shocked through him. Even with the safety webbing, it still felt like running into a brick wall, and it took a couple of seconds for him to catch his breath.

Six pushed a button above his head, and felt the walls shake as the nose-cone was ejected, making the front of the torpedo flat. There was a crackling hum as the electromagnets around him switched on, fusing the torpedo to the hull of the ship.

Six unbuckled the straps and twisted around so he was lying on his belly. He got out the cutting torch and put on his goggles so the flame didn't blind him in the enclosed space. As he pulled the trigger, a blue light
lanced out from the nozzle, spearing through the metal, slicing the front of the torpedo and the ship's hull.

It took Six about a minute to carve a circle into the metal. Then he put his palms flat against it, careful not to touch the glowing sides, braced his feet against the rear of the torpedo, and pushed.

With a squeal and a clank, the two circles of iron popped out and thunked onto the floor. Cold air washed in over his face. Six draped a square of heat-absorbent fabric over the bottom of the hot edge, slithered out through the opening, and put the lids he'd made back over the hole.

Stage one, infiltration, was complete. He was on board the CNS
Gomorrah
.

He was in a small barracks, filled with bunk beds and blankets and not much else. There were no people. The circle he'd cut in the wall was just above one of the beds, so he had landed on a synthetic rubber mattress. This was good – the hole he'd made was in the shadow of the bunk above, and wouldn't be spotted unless someone decided to sleep in the bed Six was crouched on. Not likely to happen in the next forty-three minutes.

Six took off his goggles and climbed off the bed. His boots made no sound as he ran across the barracks. He reached a door – thick steel with a valve in the centre to open it. He twisted the wheel, and the door
ka-chunked
open.

Outside in the corridor, pipes of varying colours and thicknesses ran across the ceiling and the rusted
walls. Six knew the colours all had different meanings – blue for cold water, white for hot, yellow for fuel. It was like being inside a telephone line in a movie. The only light came from tiny, flickering bulbs above Six's head.

A soldier was walking past at a crossroads up ahead. He was in his BDUs – Battle Dress Uniform – which for ChaoSonic Naval Services meant black boots, a dark grey coat and a matching cap with a white logo on the front.

If Six was going to get to those canisters without raising the alarm, he'd need to blend in somehow. Now might be a good time to procure a disguise.

He waited until the soldier was out of sight, then he slipped forwards through the darkness towards the crossroads.

When he turned the corner, the soldier's back was receding into the distance. Six ran, silent, precise, catching up to the soldier, preparing to make his move –

Smack! Six drove his right elbow in behind the guy's shoulderblade as his left hand snaked around and clamped itself over the soldier's mouth.

The guy gave a brief, muffled cry before Six plunged his index finger into the flesh behind the jaw, striking a pressure point that knocked the soldier out cold.

Six lowered his victim to the ground, unbuttoning the coat as he did so. The soldier should be unconscious for maybe twenty minutes, which wasn't too bad. Six expected the alarm to be raised pretty soon after that
anyway. But he didn't want anyone to stumble across him. He bent two of the pipes on the wall aside, cracking the seal of rust. He stuffed the unconscious man through the gap, and twisted them back into place. There, he thought. No-one will find him, unless they're looking pretty hard.

Six put on the cap and buttoned the coat over his chest. The disguise wouldn't stand up to close examination; while Six could usually pass for eighteen, he was still clearly younger than most CNS personnel, and the clothes under his coat were cut differently to the standard uniform. But if he was spotted at a distance, he was confident that the alarm wouldn't be raised.

The Deck had been able to acquire some blueprints of the ship's interior, and Six had made some educated guesses about where the SARS canisters would be. They would be held in a room with only one door, so it could be easily guarded. The room would be on one of the lower floors, so if the ship was boarded the attackers couldn't easily reach them. It would also have powerlines from both the primary and secondary generators on the ship. Without a human host the virus had to be kept between 15 and 25 degrees Celsius or it would die. While the canisters had temperature regulators, the batteries only had thirty minutes of power. The ship had been travelling for three hours, so they must be plugged into a power socket somewhere – and Six was betting that ChaoSonic wouldn't rely solely on the primary generator.

Only two rooms on the CNS
Gomorrah
matched that description. And one was just up ahead.

Footsteps.

Six stepped sideways into a dripping alcove. He crouched, becoming little more than a shadow.

An officer strode past, heels clicking against the steel floor. He didn't glance left or right, and was gone in seconds. Six stood silently, then got moving.

The door was unguarded. Not a good sign. Six twisted the valve, and the door groaned open.

He poked his head inside. No luck – just a pantry. Shelves stacked with dried meals in cardboard boxes, all bearing the same logo as the CNS hats. A walk-in freezer up the back, with grey frost spiderwebbing out from behind the door. Six walked in, thinking he should at least check if the canisters were in the freezer –

– a soldier was sitting in the corner of the pantry, munching on potato chips. He looked up at Six.

Six froze.

The soldier froze too. Crumbs spilled out of his open mouth.

By the time the guy realised that Six wasn't an officer here to bust him for pillaging supplies, Six was already running across the pantry towards him. The soldier swore and reached for his gun, rising to his feet.

Bam!
Six's foot thumped into the man's shoulder, and he spun a full 360 degrees. The gun flipped out across the room, burying itself in an open box of biscuits.

Six aimed his next punch at the soldier's head, but his opponent saw it coming. He ducked under the blow and charged, picking Six up by the torso and driving him backwards towards the shelves.

Six twisted, whirling his body around so they were both facing the same way. Then he reached backwards over his shoulders, grabbed the soldier's tunic, and threw him up over his head.

The soldier slammed into the shelves, back first, upside down, and started to fall. Six smacked him in the face with the back of his hand as he fell, three times before he hit the ground –
crack! crack, crack!
– keeping him disoriented and weak. Then, when the soldier hit the floor, headfirst, Six grabbed his feet and dragged him over to the walk-in freezer.

The door opened with a wheezy hiss, and the soldier grunted as Six threw him in. He slid across the ice, baffled and dazed, then tried to climb to his feet.

Six slammed the freezer door, whipped out his cutting torch, and used it to melt the metal around the edges. The chill quickly hardened the liquid metal, fusing the door shut. Steel that is cooled quickly is always much more brittle than steel that has been left to harden gradually; use fast-cooled steel to make a car and it'll shatter like glass in crash-testing. But Six figured his rush-job weld would be enough to hold the soldier in for a while.

As Six retreated back towards the pantry door, he heard a thump from inside the freezer. The soldier was trying to kick the door down. It held, but it was noisy. Anyone who entered the pantry would hear it.

Six walked back into the corridor, closed the pantry door, and used the cutting torch to weld the valve in place. Now no-one could open the door, and any noises the soldier made in the freezer were inaudible. Muffled by two layers of metal.

Six put his cutting torch away, and started walking towards the other room he'd identified on the blueprints. One more room to check, and – he glanced at his watch – thirty-seven minutes to go. He was doing fine.

A shadow flitted by up ahead. Six hesitated. Was that just someone walking past? Or had someone seen him and ducked out of sight?

No reason to take the risk. Six ran forwards, heading for the corner where he'd spotted the shape. He rounded the corner –

– and someone was there, staring back at him. But he wasn't a CNS soldier. He was dressed in black commando gear, including a ski mask and a pack strapped to his torso around the shoulders and the stomach. He clasped a pickaxe in his right hand.

I'm not the only one after the SARS, Six realised.

He lunged towards the commando, fist first, aiming to strike beneath the ribs. The commando parried expertly, deflecting the blow rather than blocking it. Six's attack
had too much momentum – he stumbled forwards when his fist didn't connect.

The commando was ready for that, and swung the pickaxe, underhanded. The blade carved through the air towards the flesh under Six's jaw. Heart pounding, Six pushed himself to the side, crashing into the commando's knee. The axe missed Six's neck – its point snagged the collar of Six's stolen coat instead. The commando lifted the pickaxe, and Six was pulled up into the air.