I needed another twenty to get out.
It wasn’t the heat that was making me sweat.
The earbud in my ear buzzed.
“The laser grid is off,” said a voice. Male, slightly nasal, young.
I composed myself before I replied. Barking like a cross dog at my support team would probably not yield useful results. So, I said, very calmly, “Actually, Bug, the laser grid is still on.”
“It’s off, Cowboy. All of the systems mark it as in shutdown mode.”
The network of red lasers suddenly throbbed. The crosshatch pattern, once comfortably large enough for my body to slip through, abruptly narrowed to a grid with only scant inches to spare on all sides.
“It’s on and it’s getting cranky.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything, Bug. I’m still hanging here like a frigging bat. The floor is thirty feet below me and the laser net is getting smaller. So…really, anything you could do to shut it down would be super. Very much appreciated. Might be a bonus in it for you.”
“Um. Okay. Maybe there’s a redundancy system….”
“And, Bug…?”
“Yeah, Cowboy?”
“If you don’t stop humming the fucking Mission: Impossible theme song while you’re working…I will kill you.”
“But….”
“My whole body is a weapon.”
“I know…you could kill me more ways than I know how to die, blah, blah, blah.”
The laser grid throbbed again.
I knew that the lasers couldn’t hurt me. This wasn’t a science fiction movie. Passing through them wouldn’t result in an arm falling off or my body being neatly diced into bloody cubes. However, they would trigger the alarms; and for the last hour and sixteen minutes I’d been very, very careful not to let that happen.
Bad things would occur if that happened.
Our best intel gave a conservative estimate of sixty security personnel on site, not one of whom was bound by international treaties, human rights agreements, or basic human decency. This place recruited from groups like Blackwater and Blue Diamond Security. The kind of contractors who give mercenaries a bad name.
They would shoot me. A lot.
Bug knew there was no reset button on the mission. It was a matter of getting it right the first time, which made the learning curve more like a straight line.
“Oh, wait,” said Bug. “Looks like they have a ghost program hiding the real operations menu. You need to input a set of false commands — which work as a faux password — in order to reach the….”
“Bug….”
“Long story short,” he said, “voila.”
The laser grid switched off.
I exhaled a breath I think I’d been holding for an hour and dropped the rest of the way down the main venting shaft to the concrete floor sixty yards below.
No alarms went off. No bells, no whistles.
No army of guards storming through the hatch to do bad things to Mama Ledger’s firstborn son.
“Down,” I said. I unclipped from the drop harness and stood back as the cables whipped up out of sight.
“Lasers are going back on in three, two….”
The burning grid reappeared above me.
“Good job, Bug.”
“Sorry for the delay,” he said. “These guys are pretty tricky.”
“Be trickier.”
“Copy that. Sending the floor plan to Karnak.”
Karnak was the nickname of the portable MindReader computer tablet strapped to my left forearm. It’s a couple of generations snazzier than anything currently on the market, but my boss, Mr. Church, always makes sure his people have the best toys. It’s dual hardwired and wireless connected to a whole series of geegaws and doodads built into my combat suit. I had everything in the James Bond catalog, from miniature explosives to a small EDS — explosive detection system — and even a miniature BAMS — bio-aerosol mass spectrometer which sniffed the air for dangerous particles like viruses and bacteria. Dr. Hu, the head of our science division, has told me several times that the collective value of those gadgets was worth ten of me. Considering that the rig I wore had a three million dollar price tag, it was tough to build a convincing counterargument.
One-man army is the idea. Or, in this case, one-man high-tech infiltration team.
The thing that really tickled Hu is that if I happened to be killed during the mission, the suit would continue to transmit useful information. So…the next guy would know what killed me and maybe not get killed himself. And then, when all useful info had been uploaded, small thermal charges built into the fabric would detonate and turn all of the electronics — and the body inside the suit — into so much carbon dust.
Hu thinks that’s hilarious.
He and I have not worked up much of a sweat trying to be nice to one another. If he stepped in front of a bullet train and got smeared along half a mile of tracks, I would — believe me — find some way to struggle on with my life. Sadly he doesn’t play on the train tracks as much as I’d like.
So, there I was a mile below the April sunshine, wearing my science fiction getup, all alone, looking for something that none of us understood.
This is not an unusual day for me.
Chap. 2
It might be an unusual day for the world, though.
Hence the reason for my being here.
Hence the reason why our best intel suggested that I might not be the only cockroach in the walls. A lot of teams were scrambling around looking for the same thing. Good guys, bad guys, some unaffiliated guys, and maybe some nutjobs guys. Last time there was this much of a scramble was when a set of four, man-portable mininukes went missing from the inventory of former Soviet play toys supposedly under guard in Kazakhstan. I’d been hunting for those, too, but they were scooped up by Colonel Samson Riggs. He’s the most senior of the DMS field team leaders. Kind of an action figure demi-superhero. Even has a lantern jaw, crinkles around his piercing blue eyes, and an inflexible moral compass. We all geek out around Colonel Riggs. He’s the closest this planet will probably ever get to a real-life Captain America.
Riggs was gone, now, though. Swept away by recent events the way so many other top operatives are who maybe spend one day too long in the path of the storm. Leaving guys like me to take the next job. And the next.
This was the next job.
So far there had been fourteen separate attempts to recover the package.
Those fourteen attempts resulted in sixty-three deaths and over a hundred severe injuries. That butcher’s bill is shared pretty evenly by all the teams in this game. There are six DMS agents in the morgue. Five more who will never stand in the line of battle.
And all for something that nobody really understands.
We call it “the package” or “the football” when we’re on an open mic.
Between ourselves, off the radio, we call it “that thing” or maybe “that fucking thing.”
Its designation in all official documents is simpler.
The artifact.
Just that.
It’s as precise a label as is possible to give, at least for now.
Why?
Simple.
No one — no fucking body — knows what it is.
Or what it does.
Or where it came from.
Or who made it.