Solarversia: The Year Long Game (48 page)

“As soon as the field dies, I’m gonna go crazy on the Marsden, spin round and spray flames everywhere. The second it runs out I’ll activate my Shadow Suckers. If I get the angle right, I should be able to shoot at anything that approaches us and make it stick to the ground. My only worry is the Acoo-Stickular; it moves way too fast.”

“I’m holding on to my Battle Axe. I’ve got that spinning combo down. I can even use the blade to deflect the waveform if it comes for us; they bounce off inorganic matter. The Huntropellimi are my only worry. I counted at least eight of them and the axe can’t pierce their armour, even with a perfectly executed combo. Good luck, I hope we both make it.”

As the field disappeared, exposing them to the battlefield once more, Nova entered the zone. She rolled to her right to evade anything that might have been eyeing them up, waiting for their field to dissipate. The second she landed back on her feet, she let rip with the Marsden, spinning around while she skipped from foot to foot. From above she looked like a Catherine Wheel on Fireworks Night. An Obarian was her first victim. It flew into the tail end of the spiralling band of flames, turning into a flaming comet. Its screech went up a couple of octaves before it hit the ground, where it tumbled to a standstill, a smoking tangle of fangs.

Next up was a Petrifier who got it square in the face just as it was about to make a kill of its own. The flames spread quickly, engulfing its entire being within seconds. The man she saved from certain death didn’t stop to thank her. Instead, he drew an arrow from the quiver on his back and aimed at her head. She froze. What kind of payback was this? It wasn’t as if the arrow could do her any harm, but a simple smile would have sufficed.

A second later she found out. The arrow whistled through the air, narrowly missing her face to spear a cave troll through its neck; a troll that had been coming for her. Now they exchanged a nod and a smile: a life for a life.

She activated her Shadow Suckers, ready for whatever the dome could throw at her, but needn’t have bothered. The minute was up. Screams turned to cheers as they were greeted by the players in the northern hemisphere like a group of war heroes returning from battle. Removing her headset, she found that the common room was even louder. She raised her arms, flexed her biceps and let rip with a war cry. If that wasn’t already enough, she kissed each bicep, sending the crowd wild.

The remaining few minutes of The Bounty Hunt flew by. The Tweel of Fate was on her side for the next three rounds, sending a whole bunch of other players to the southern hemisphere and the overall death counter toward 99,990,000. When the final person died, signalling the end of the round, Nova was hoisted onto Charlie’s shoulders and paraded around the room like an Olympic hero. Professor Carmichael handed her what looked like a quadruple measure of Glenfiddich. She necked it in one, then hurled the shot glass at the wall, smashing it to pieces.

A shiver went down her spine, but it had nothing to do with the liquor or the rush of surviving the round. It was the headline news she had read that morning which had filled her with dread and a sick sort of pleasure. Her arch-nemesis finally had a name: Theodore Markowsky. She said it over and over in her head, enunciating every last letter, getting a feel for it, wanting to know the man behind it, and hating him harder, stronger, fiercer than he could ever hate her. As the adrenaline coursed through her body, she felt invincible. She looked up at one of the cameras and narrowed her eyes. Then she raised an arm and pointed a finger.
I’m coming for you, Markowsky. And I won’t be taking prisoners
.

***

Special Agent Debrieze Kirkland volleyed to cam seventeen. It took him a few seconds to take the scene in and for its magnitude to register. A smile crept across his unshaven face. The cam was planted in the eyes of a robotic sparrow, which was perched on a branch overhanging the embankment a mile downstream, just yards from where Theodore Markowsky was kneeling in front of an altar inside a camouflaged marquee. Suspended from the altar was a tapestry bearing a curly swastika. Through the sparrow’s eyes, Kirkland could make out the same symbol embroidered on the preacher’s black robes — a symbol that had haunted his dreams for more than a year.

He was heading up the two hundred FBI agents aboard several dozen boats taking part in Operation Delta Strike. The call had come in three days before. Someone had taken a photo of some friends posing in front of the fountain at the local shopping mall in Jackson City and then shared it online. The social network she used was trialling Gogmagog, whose algorithms were set to scan the faces of any person detected in a photograph, even, it appeared, those half-hidden behind a water feature.

From a blurry shot of his profile, a wanted member of the Holy Order had been identified. Gogmagog fired off a critical alert to the FBI, and a fleet of drones was mobilised within minutes. Hovering at several thousand feet, they had triangulated the guy’s location and tailed him from on high to the parking lot, on and off the highway, along the banks of the swamp, all the way to the Compound.

Kirkland’s smile gave way to a yawn. He had slept three, maybe four hours since the alert had come in and considered himself lucky at that. Beside him, his men paddled silently: the sparrows had identified a handful of lookout towers spread around the Compound’s perimeter, so they had cut the motors a while back.

“Sir, are you getting this? We have Markowsky in our sights. He’s alone and unarmed.” Kirkland spoke into his headset just loud enough for the men on his boat to hear. The case had consumed all of their lives for far too long now. This day, this Operation, this stealth mission, was their reward.

“I see him. He’s probably praying to that Magus character right now, asking for a goddamn miracle. I’ve got a meeting with the Vice President later today. This’ll give him something to take people’s minds off the unemployment figures.” It was the Deputy Director of the FBI, stationed at a mobile command centre three hundred miles away. “The only worry now is those lookout towers. Proceed with caution.”

“Roger that, sir. I’d say it’ll be twenty minutes before we can move on them.”

Kirkland stuffed his hands behind his flak jacket. He hadn’t anticipated quite how cold it would be, the chill of the late January air five degrees cooler down here than it was up in town. It was hard to believe that they finally had Markowsky surrounded, the most wanted man in the FBI’s recent history, a man who up until a few weeks ago had been nothing but a ghost.

Suddenly, a distant explosion sent the boat lurching dangerously to one side. His men ducked, instinctively shying away from the noise. Around him, what seemed like every last bird in the state took to the skies at once. “At your stations,” he shouted and fumbled to get his dropped headset back in place.

“What the hell happened, Kirkland? I thought I instructed caution. I’ve made it abundantly clear. I want my agents returned in one piece to their families tonight.”

“I just shared my view with you, sir, stand by.”

Kirkland volleyed his view to the sparrow closest to the column of smoke billowing from whatever it was that had exploded. He used its eyes to zoom in and investigate the flaming wreck. More sparrows arrived, each able to view the scene from a different angle. He felt a rush of relief — it was one of the remote-controlled sweeper boats.

Unmanned and unarmed, they led the way on operations like this, gliding through the water searching for anything that looked of interest or out of place: people, hideouts and weapons. The datafeed in his visor confirmed it: TBP-75 had decommissioned itself. He pulled up the video feeds from the boat’s last few seconds and ran them through Gogmagog. It identified a critical component in the footage a few milliseconds before the cam was destroyed in the blast.

“What are we looking at here, Kirkland?”

“Gogmagog’s identified a trip wire covered in camouflage. The sweeper cruised into it and detonated whatever was wired to the end of it. They’ve got the place booby-trapped.”

“Shit. Deploy every last sweeper. Keep them surrounded. We’ve got drones monitoring them from above, and the choppers are five minutes away if you need them. How many submersibles do you have?”

“Forty, manned by eighteen divers. Between them, they’re monitoring every inch of the river, up and downstream. Markowsky’s gonna need to have created teleportation for real if he wants to get out of here alive.”

It took the sweeper boats twenty-six minutes to clear a safe path to the compound. Kirkland volleyed from sparrow cam to sniper sight and back again. In the old days the Order might have stood a chance in an operation like this, however small. But not now. They were employing what his superiors gloatingly referred to as ‘asymmetric warfare’. It was almost as if they were cheating: they knew the exact geospatial coordinates of all fifty members of the Order, their names, weapons, the amount of ammunition each member had and their current emotional state as diagnosed by the biometric readout of the blood coursing through their veins.

Even with their huge advantage, Kirkland’s heart still pounded in his chest. People were about to die, and he’d witness every last gory detail in stereoscopic vision. He took a deep breath and mentally prepared himself.

“Operation Delta Strike is go, go, go.”

The assault started at once. A barrage of armour-piercing bullets was fired at the compound from multiple angles. The death count in Kirkland’s visor ticked up to double figures in the space of five minutes. At times the operation was eerily similar to the previous day’s practise in the virtual environment. There were moments when he thought he was in the virtual world, moments when he had to physically shake himself back to reality. The woman leading the training had warned him it would happen. She’d called it ‘technosis’. He hadn’t believed her at the time. It had seemed a ridiculous notion, being unable to distinguish the kind of reality you were experiencing. It wasn’t like he was in ’Nam, whacked out on acid.

His visor flashed up their first casualty: Agent Barker. He volleyed to a cam attached to the head of the nearest medic, watched the treatment in real time on one display while replaying the injury on another. He felt powerful, being able to jump around like this, from one perspective to another, like a god of some kind. ‘Localised ubiquity’, they were calling it in universities, ‘omni crack’ on social media. It was addictive, whatever you called it.

Fifty-six minutes, that’s all it took. Nineteen members of the Holy Order killed, twenty-seven surrendered. There were a handful of casualties among Kirkland’s agents. The agent who had lost a leg would get a prosthetic as soon as he felt ready for one, and if the rumours coming out of the medical facility were to be believed, they’d be able to order him a lab-grown organic replacement before too long.

That left four members of the Order hiding in the submarine: Theodore and Frances Markowsky, and two of their lieutenants. Spidey, the Bureau’s most advanced robo-agent, used a chunky axle grinder to cut away several sections of the hull and then lobbed canisters of tear gas into the craft, one after another. Having set up a temporary command centre on the other side of the Compound, Kirkland flicked his headset back in place and watched Spidey enter the vessel via the robot’s built-in thermal imaging cameras.

Once they’d navigated the tight spiral staircase, Spidey’s heavy metal feet clomped along the Sub’s narrow corridor, echoing eerily through the tear gas fog. When Spidey’s cameras craned into the first of the cramped rooms along the corridor, Kirkland recoiled so fast that he almost fell into his deputy.

Two bodies were slumped against one another. Their brains had been blown through the backs of their skulls. Blood was coagulating on the walls. Zooming in on what was left of their faces, Spidey, or at least the enormous database he had access to, quickly established their identities: Brandon O’Malley and Frances Markowsky.

Swallowing back the bile that had risen up his throat, he readied himself for whatever Spidey would find in the cargo hold at the bottom of the Sub, the very last place Theodore and his lieutenant Casey Brown could be hiding.

Kirkland removed his headset, walked to the rickety bridge that snaked round the Compound’s perimeter and surveyed the scene, trying to understand what it must have been like to live here, among these people. The buildings of the Compound blended so well against the surrounding flora that they gave the impression of having grown there.

He steadied himself against the old submarine, trying to work out what he’d tell the Deputy Director. Everywhere he looked, another curly swastika symbol popped out at him. They were engraved everywhere: the arched entrance to the compound, the detail in the window frames, the posts of the bridge.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, sir.”

“Don’t tell me we’ve killed Markowsky. I do
not
want to hear that, Kirkland. A suicide we can deal with. The guy was a nutcase, it’s expected behaviour.”

“Sir, it’s not that. I wish it
was
that. It’s just, well, we’ve only managed to recover two bodies from the sub: those of Frances Markowsky and Brandon O’Malley.”

The line remained silent for a few seconds. Kirkland closed his eyes and massaged his temples.

“What, and the other two bodies are too difficult to recover? There’s a load more booby traps?”

“Sir, we’ve only recovered two bodies because there only
were
two bodies to recover. Markowsky’s gone, and Casey Brown with him.”

“What do you mean, gone? Gone where? We had the place surrounded, didn’t we?”

Now it was Kirkland’s turn to pause. Every word pained him beyond belief. “There’s a cargo hold at the very bottom of the submarine. It’s full of water and its flaps are open. The divers didn’t see a thing. Sir, Markowsky’s given us the slip.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Nova chewed on a clump of hair, a habit she thought she’d kicked on her thirteenth birthday. She was at The Commodore for Show and Tell, the fourth of the final rounds. She stared at her list of ideas, hating them more by the second, and spat out a strand of hair that had come loose in her mouth.