The Valkyrie Project (3 page)

"Do you really think I'd believe you have to go? I'm sure you emptied your bowels before leaving for this mission, and if you didn't, then you're even sloppier than I'd thought."

Ana had to push hard on the anger rising from her stomach to keep from charging him right then. Of course she'd gone empty before coming to this lonely island. They both knew she was testing the boundaries, but she was more upset by the
little jab at the end. For a moment, she envisioned the MP-11 in her hand, blowing a hole through the side of the cabin and taking his head along with it.

Johnson went to the comm station and flipped a few switches. The machine hummed to life, stuttered, coughed, spat up a little
—not completely unlike a baby—and finally settled on purring like a kitten. It wasn't the most majestic of communications arrays, mashed together like a set piece for a short-form drama about "back in the days."

Apparently
it worked, though. After twisting dials—how long had this thing been sitting there?—and pushing some large mechanical buttons, Johnson seemed to connect to someone, because he began speaking.

"Mirrorlake, this is Infinity Sixty-Three."

Even more miraculously, there was someone on the other end. The voice was muffled, probably dampened by dust on the headset Johnson held up to one ear; the response crackled and hissed, too much extraneous noise for Ana to make out anything coherent.

"Roger that, Mirrorlake. The predator has been neutralized. I repeat, predator has been neutralized."

If Johnson thought she was neutralized, they clearly didn’t share the same lexical education. Ana wouldn’t be neutralized until her heart had stopped beating, her lungs had stopped taking in air and her brain was empty of electrical impulses. And right now, her brain was very full. She’d already spotted a hatch in the floor and deduced it to be an escape route, since the rest of the one-room building was free of any such thing. The old trunk that had provided the electrocuffs was the only weapons cache in sight, but the escape hatch might have some additional armaments stowed.

The back of Ana's mind hoped that Jrue was making the same sort of assessments, but the corner of her eye told her that his mind was focused on trying to keep his leg still to avoid any unnecessary pain. Hopefully he could generate some adrenaline when the time came.

"Thank you, Mirrorlake. I will await your reply." Johnson turned to his prisoners. "So, Miss V, any bets on how long before your head honchos come through with a pardon for me?"

"About as long as it takes you to find a
margarita bar in Hell."

He laughed. "I admire your grit. Such fierceness and determination. Too bad it's driven by such anger, hate, and more than just a dash of sadness."

Ana shifted in her electrocuffs. Johnson walked slowly from the rhythmic thrumming of the console, approaching his captives.

"I don't know anything about you, and yet I know so much."

Ana held still, maintaining her space, as he leaned in. His breath crept insidiously from his mouth, almost like it was trying to get inside hers. She didn't flinch. She stared into his dark, beady eyes. Glints of perverse thoughts flickered across them, but she held his gaze while her mind staggered and reeled, crumbling under his intensity. Her exterior was stone, but inside her head, a whirlpool of confusion drew her towards its swirling center. An invisible egg cracked over her head, and the innards ran slowly down from the top of her head—a childhood game meant to raise hackles doing exactly that. Only there was no friend behind her now simulating the yolk and whites with their hands. Inside her head, a finger poked at her brain, as though prodding it might cause some of her secrets to tumble out.

The man calling himself Infinity Sixty-Three
turned and the feeling vanished. How could this simple man have such a tremendous effect on her? For the past nine years, she'd seen more criminal elements than periodic ones, and had faced them all with cold steel in her hands and ice water in her veins.

Those nine years had also provided many opportunities for positive outcome visualization, resulting in the short
-form that played in her mind now: Ana was returning Johnson to her colleagues in the Agency.

Harbor no illusions. Predict only the future you can
affect.

Visualization
… and improvisation.

Ana was glad that the electrocuffs were from an age where they could have been a housewarming gift for the owner of the old cabin
in which she now sat. The guts of modern cuffs were much more difficult to expose. She electrocuted herself more than once figuring out this particular pair. She had a hard time keeping the shock off her face, but luckily Johnson wasn't paying that much attention.

Shortly before their
little mind-reading-staring-contest, Ana got the wires out, and as soon as Johnson had turned back to the comm station, Ana bounced to her feet, spun around to face Jrue, and aimed the cuffs that held her hands behind her at Johnson's spine.

She couldn't muster a great deal of force, and he had enough bulk on him to prevent her actually getting to the spine, but the voltage imparted drove him to the ground, and, even better, caused him to drop the MP-11. Ana wished she
had been able to give Jrue a little advance notice. He caught what she was doing, but was slow to move. She kicked the gun and it skittered across the hardwood floor. She chased it and Jrue flopped on top of Johnson. He was strong and athletic but not heavy enough to hold Johnson down for long. He tossed Jrue to the floor, but the pilot's sloth turned to nimbleness, and he managed to get his feet tangled with the larger man, sending him sprawling just short of Ana's position. Ana picked up the MP-11, her hands still bound behind her. She pointed the barrel between her legs.

"Jrue! Move!"

Somehow the pilot managed to spring up on his injured leg, slamming his other foot on Johnson's ankle as he went.

Ana leaned her shoulder against the logs of the cabin wall, steadying her aim. As soon as Jrue had cleared the area, she pulled the trigger.

She would have liked to look into the man's creepy undersized eyes once more as she did it, but she wasn't one for being sentimental when her life was on the line, and before she realized she'd had the thought, Johnson had been replaced by human jelly, splintered wood, and an explosive fireball. Then before she became fully aware of that thought, she was flying back through the wall that just a moment before had seemed dependable.

As she scrambled away from the burning wreck of a cabin, she remembered her earlier thought that there were probably more weapons
—and evidently some explosives—along the trapdoor escape route.

Her positive outcome visual was now: finding Jrue somewhere among
the flaming debris. She staggered a bit, and really wanted to sit, but knew that with Jrue already injured, she had to find him. She was a Valkyrie. She would decide who lived.

She ran, mostly, around trees and small fires threatening to grow, trying to map out where the explosion would have left him. He'd been on the wall near the front door, perpendicular to her. Ana took a
forty-five-degree angle in that direction, and saw him, lying face down for the second time in as many hours.

A moment later she noticed the fiery pieces of wood and hot metal ready to burn through the tree branches just above him. Adrenaline had reached every muscle in her body, and she surged forward calling out his name.

He was conscious and aware enough to look at her. A smaller splinter of wood had gone into the back of his leg, and stuck out now like a crude grave marker.

Ana pointed up as she ran. Jrue's head followed and she saw the recognition jump to his face. He start
ed crawling. A piece of plane out of one leg, now a piece of cabin floor in the other; crawling wasn't ideal, but it was perhaps the only option he had left.

The branches above fractured with a loud noise
. They both heard it even with the roaring of fire all around. She called out again, and this time Jrue rolled. Ana saw the large splinter in his leg break as he rolled over on it, taking part of his calf with it. He rolled again and again. She hurdled the newly lit fire that burned where he had been a moment before.

Ana hefted him onto her shoulder, and carried him to the beach as fast as her two good legs would bear them.

She managed to only smack him with a single tree as the fire chased them towards the sand and water. She collapsed when they reached it, dropping the injured pilot unceremoniously into the grit underfoot. It was almost exactly a hundred and eighty degrees from her dream of starting a short-form by arriving amnesiac on the beach from the sea. And once again, she knew exactly who she was and what she was doing there.

Nothing else happened, externally at least. Internally, she realized that her med
kit had either been blown into as many pieces as Johnson, or it was somewhere back through the burning forest, and here lay Jrue with a brand new gaping hole in his leg.

She summoned a second wind, and put Jrue back on her shoulder. He tried to say something, but stopped. She was already sprinting down the beach. Luckily, her ship had room for two. Certainly not more than that, but it was enough for now.

The fire continued to follow them, not as much of a danger now that the sand served as a moat of protection.

"Try not to get blood all over everything," Ana said as she tossed him into the passenger seat. She climbed in and lifted off.
As they bolted up and away she saw the island below swallowed by the conflagration. She opened up a secure channel as soon as they'd cleared the Keys, and sent ahead for a medical team, hoping that Jrue's injury would still be treatable.

--

Ana would have preferred to drop Jrue off with the doctors and head straight home, but that would have broken a regulation on just about every page of the manual she'd received upon joining the Valkyrie Project.

Besides that, there were also debriefings
—not the kind she'd imagined on the flight back, though, with Jrue sitting right next to her. Even though blood drained rapidly from his body, she had kept an eye on the breath going through those luscious lips, through his wide, sculpted chest, and raising the diaphragm beneath his stone-flat stomach.

He was put into a hover
chair immediately upon their arrival, but she was able to sneak a kiss on his forehead.
Thanks and good luck.

He was whisked away to the med center, and she descended from the lobby of the old cement building to the sub-basement floor that housed th
e Valkyrie Project division.

The actual debrief proceeded as smoothly as could be expected for a Valkyrie who'd killed someone they were supposed to recapture and came back with a pilot who would be lucky to walk again. Still, it wasn't the worst thing she'd ever had to go through.

Several messages waited for her when Ana returned to her terminal. She'd almost decided to just head home, rest, and check on things in the morning, but what she saw stopped that and all the other thoughts that had been fighting for her attention.

There were
the usual video updates from Malcolm and Aerin, but at the bottom of the list was a simpletext message, no sender; she was the only recipient.

Ana—Don't worry about me. Still good. Moze.

She glanced around the office. Late enough that most of the lesser drones had packed it in for the day. She settled down quickly, her fingers already blazing over the sleek, black interface. Bastard had delivered it not just to her work ID, but straight through to her Valkyrie Project account. She was able to trace it back through those layers of security, as though she were going through floors back up on the lift to the lobby of the building. She traced it out to the pubnet, opening the doors under the upturned glass awning, a glass and steel sunflower reaching for the sun. Then, like a ray of that sun's light, it disappeared. Refracted through the glass into her sanctum, it could have come from anywhere. That was how she knew they were brother and sister; they were both smart as hell and had a penchant for defying authority.

Moze.

She couldn't remember anybody ever calling Memo "Moze". Guillermo, yes. Memo, of course. But Moze?

Just like the manuals that came in new editions every once in a while, messages from Memo
tended to pop up from out of nowhere, only with slightly less frequency. Always short. Never any information. So in that way, much better than the manuals.

Each time one arrived, Ana wasn’t sure if she should be reassured or not. He'd been kidnapped
fourteen years ago, and she was still not convinced that the messages weren't forced output.

Ana banged her hand on the desk. Bastard. If he was out there on his own, if he'd escaped, she was sure he'd come to her when he was ready, when it was safe. But it didn’t diminish her
concern or her desire to find him first.

Ana passed up her opportunity to head home now and instead went to Murph's. They had a lot more alcohol there than she did in her little apartment.