The Second American Secret War has been ongoing for three years after a conspiracy of rogue Vice President OLIVIA YOUNG and thought-destroyed megalomaniacal Soviet splinter artificial intelligence STYX dragged President HELENA SKYE into a long-brewing war with the totalitarian cabal known as MIDNIGHT. The shadow conflict has brought ruin to both sides, and a lull has emerged in the fighting as the factions lick their wounds.
Desperate to show the world that America is more than its suppressed strife, the President has forged a link to the future with the Soviet Union and West European Union - construction of twin space elevators along the equator. But forces born out of the United Nation’s ruthless prosecution of the remnants of WRAITH move in the background, chief among them the anarchic raiders known as the RED MASKS, seeking to upend this symbol of a hope that humanity that will unite as it reaches beyond this fragile blue marble.
Meanwhile, a survivor of the World’s End debacle drowns his sorrows in a dingy Washington bar, unaware that, even if he tries to move on, the ghosts of the past aren’t done with JACE RAMIREZ quite yet…
One
Amber liquid swirled in the glass, with the occasional clink of an ice cube to add color to the noise. The remnants of a cigarette stub - the last from a discarded pack that lay further down the dusty bar - let off the last curls of smoke on a half-full ashtray. Ceiling fans turned lazily over the largely abandoned Foggy Bottom dive, it's only occupants a crusty barman wiping down the same area with the same filthy rag and a tall, gangly man in a rumpled business suit.
I stared at myself through the cloudy mirror that served as the barback. With my head half-wrapped in blood-stained bandages and a wrist computer scrolling with calculations sitting off to one side, I looked like a politico at the end of his chain. My dark hair had grown out to a shaggy jaw length, my beard had gone unshaven for a month, and there were dark rings under my eyes. But close observation would note the way my gaze flickered up every now and then to the muted TV broadcasting 24-hour news mounted above the bar, or how I changed the feed on my smart watch’s holograms with an offhand flick of my finger once in a blue moon.
The barman tensed and disappeared into the back a second before the swinging saloon doors – an anachronism among anachronisms in the bustling DC neighborhood – were flung open with an unwanted burst of intrusive sunlight. A long, thin silhouette fell across the bartop to my right, and the slow walk of shoes on dirty, cracked concrete could be heard approaching. I didn’t acknowledge the new arrival, but my right hand dropped into my lap, slowly pulling towards the side of my belt.
“Relax. I’d hope we’d avoid that,” the speaker pulled up a stool next to the me, adjusting his tie and tapping the bar. The bartender melted from the shadows, depositing a glass of rye before fading from sight again. Taking a slow, relaxed sip from the tumbler, the newcomer replaced the glass on the counter and straightened his crisp white suit, a deliberate contrast to the rumpled black one I wore. His fair hair was swept back, his cheeks sharp enough to cut stone, his blue eyes piercing and discerning.
He stuck out his hand, an expensive watch flashing on his wrist. “Favian Fisk.”
Calmly, I finished my rum in one long shotgun pull before placing the glass back on the counter. “I know. I also know I’m not in the habit of accepting jobs from the Company.”
“But of course, Ramirez. You only take the jobs you deem worth your precious newfound conscience. A bounty hunter who never takes people in alive. A finder, a fixer, not for whoever pays the most, but whoever meets your inscrutable standards.” The man produced a golden dollar coin from out of nowhere, rolling it between his fingers as he spoke. His voice was deep and smooth, with a cadence that suggested he found pleasure in the honeyed precision of his rhetoric.
Idly nudging my cigarette, I didn’t offer much of an answer. I simply leaned back, scratching at my beard as I allowed Fisk to continue his speech.
Fisk pushed on, undeterred at my nonchalance. “But for all the micromanaging that requires, you seem intent on projecting the image that you just don’t care. You drink more than you used to. You routinely take greater risks in the hope of provoking your competition in areas where you can destroy them.”
“Or maybe,” I said, watching the television, “It’s all in the pursuit of one final blaze of glory. That I’ll let the world sort me out.”
Fisk just barely smirked, his thin lips quivering at one corner. He continued to roll that coin of his, sparkling ice-blue eyes watching me intently. “What even happened in New York?”
I shrugged. “I’m not some extension of the CIA, or MIDNIGHT, Fisk. Buzz off.”
“The KAZ. What do you know of it?”
I quirked an eyebrow at Fisk. So this was going to be an afternoon. Maybe I could still shake the spook. “Kenyan Autonomous Zone,” I sighed, finally deigning to respond. “Kenya was seen as a major success story in the 21st century - expanding and prosperous even beyond Chinese and WEU money. That made it ripe for a series of attacks by WRAITH in 2008, during a tumultuous election cycle. It all spiraled out of control, egged on, no doubt, by some of your friends in Langley. Maybe things were getting a bit too calm in the area?”
Fisk didn’t deny the accusation.
I glared at him before pressing on. “World’s been getting rough over the last few years, Fisk. Spillover from the 11/11 attacks and all of the drama at home and abroad that came of it. So Skye approaches me two years ago and asks me to backchannel to the Russians and Europeans an olive branch.”
It was Fisk’s turn to seem surprised. “That was you?”
“I’m a neutral party.” I tried to sound as flat and certain as possible. “I don’t do jobs at home any more. But there are people who still value my… independence.”
“Well,” Fisk said, not seeming at all to believe me, “the Twin Tethers project has been moving ahead at full steam. One in the Indian Ocean and the other in Kenya, on the other side of the mountain from Nanyuki, closer to the Tana River.”
I, of course, was aware of the project - I had been hired by the private consortium that was funding the oceanic site to ferret out dirt on Indian politicians holding up port licenses. Beyond setting up the initial meeting for the Kenyan site, however, I hadn’t stepped foot in Africa since 2012, during my wilder years as a MIDNIGHT operative.
“We doing business in the UN special zones now?” I asked.
“I’m not here to engage you over business disputes, over the various mercenary dramas at the work sites. I have something far more directly your speed, Ramirez,” Fisk leaned in. “You’ll want to hear me out.”
Glancing at my watch - this time to actually check the time - I blew a Bronx cheer and waved a hand at Fisk. “Get lost. I’m not interested.”
“I figured I wouldn’t be the one to convince you,” Kai said, adjusting his tie again and gesturing to someone just outside the bar. “But I do have just such a person. Follow!”
Leaning around on my stool, I just managed to see out of the corner of my vision someone walking towards me at such a brisk speed that I honestly couldn’t form an impression of their face.
What did form an impression, however, was the stranger’s fist connecting with my cheek at such a high speed as to knock me off his chair and face first into the bar.
Fisk glanced at his watch and turned away from the bar, tossing back his rye. “I’ll be outside, after you two… catch up.”
Two
I lifted himself off the bar just in time to intercept another speeding punch straight to my chin. I bounced off the counter and crumpled to the floor. Gritting my teeth against the pain lancing through my face, I kicked out at the legs of my unknown attacker, forcing them to dance back out of the strike’s range. A boot came up and swept towards my head – I snapped up my hand and stopped caught the kick, stopping it cold.
Glancing up at my attacker, I struggled to give a name to the face. “No,” I hissed.
My view tracked up past the boot, the leg clad in dark jeans, the black shirt and burnished red leather jacket, the short, tied-back brown hair. I knew that face.
“Yes,” the woman growled back, jerking her leg free of my grip.
“What was the name again?” I snapped my fingers up at her, at a genuine loss.
A well-worn expression of exasperation crossed her face, papering over the look of cold rage she had been sporting a second before. “I didn’t know you long enough for the agent to take a hold, Gold. We were professional allies for a single morning. Three years ago.”
“You’ll find that the good Miss Jensen’s condition has only gotten worse since 11/11,” Fisk piped up from where he leaned against a long-broken jukebox, watching our interactions with a certain amount of grim amusement. To the woman - Follow - he added, “I always was told that the speed of effect depended on the investment the target of the memetic agent had with the carrier. Should you be touched that you had such an impact on him, Follow?”
Follow threw a withering look over her shoulder at Fisk, biting back disgust on her lips as she simply growled, “Men.”
Slowly my memory began to fill in with the details of that awful finale of the World’s End assignment. “I remember now,” I said, holding up my hands. “You can stop kicking my ass.”
“I’m not kicking your ass because I want to be on your mind, Gold,” Follow sneered down at me. “I’m pushing your teeth in because you left us in the lurch after helping drag us in a goddamn war.”
Well, there was some truth to what she said. I probably could have killed the treacherous Vice President at a half-dozen points before half of a newly rebuilt airport had been reduced to rubble. But I had wanted my revenge, and things had gotten well out of control before I was finally able to execute Olivia Young - along with one other person.
“Your deal,” I said, stabbing a finger up at Follow, “you erase people’s memories, long term. So how is this asshole,” I moved my finger over to point at Fisk, “able to work with you?”
“Fisk doesn’t see operatives as human.” Follow rolled her eyes in derision towards the continually amused company man behind her. “Powers’ little disease doesn’t make my laptop forget me. It’s no different with this asshole.”
“Well, it’s nice you can still use FaceID,” I chuckled, dabbing at where she had split open my chin, my procured napkin coming away with blood. “So what do you want, Jensen?”
She reached into her burgundy jacket and drew out a folded photograph, flipping it out to fall slowly down towards me. I plucked the printout out of the air and unfolded it, taking in a sharp breath at the subject of the black-and-white photo.
“How recent is this?” I asked towards Fisk.
“Last night,” Fisk said, looking up from his phone, where he was actively typing out a message. “Security footage outside the Soviet embassy at the KAZ, near the base of the tether.”
The man in the photo was tall for a pilot - probably at the exact height limit that a man could grow and still fold up into a F-118 cockpit. Of course, Colonel Hank Easly hadn’t been a pilot for years before he had disappeared. He had been retired from the skies by a WRAITH UCAV, a fresh cybernetic eye a permanent reminder of the last sortie of Phoenix Squadron. In the years afterwards, he had served as a member of SOLIDSIX and direct handler of my three-years-dead boss, John Baylor.
Easly had been an efficient and involved commander, working hand-in-hand with Baylor to ensure a complete mission success rate - and zero team casualties - for the PALE HORSE unit - for the three years between the Soviet Civil War and the World’s End affair. I had liked Easly a lot when I served under Baylor as his XO - the Colonel was both empathetic and cerebral, always willing to go above and beyond for each of his men.
That had all ended when a captured MIDNIGHT operative had escaped custody and wrecked Easly’s black site, carrying off Easly into the night just as World’s End had really kicked off. While I was trying to survive the monster-infested hell of that rain-swept island, Nix had done a vanishing act with Easly. Not even Nix’s former handler, Colonel Thaddeus Teague, knew where Easly had gone, and I was fairly sure procuring Easly would have gone some way towards heading off the Secret War before it truly kicked off at the end of 2014.
But this photo - and it was time-stamped as Fisk had described - showed the dark-skinned, late-forties man standing in a well-appointed courtyard, deep in conversation with another man.
“Who’s his friend?” I asked.
“The KGB attache,” Fisk replied. “You realize how precarious this all is?”
I nodded, grinding my teeth. A lost American agent - one with international allegiances ties the MIDNIGHT side of the aisle would have objected to even before the war began - had shown up out of the blue in direct meeting with a foreign intelligence agent near one of the more political sensitive areas in the world.
Holding the photo like a knife, I pointed the folded paper at Fisk. “I don’t care about what you want the truth of this for - whether to save the Space Elevator or to tear apart a Skye initiative.”
“But you do care,” Fisk said quickly.
“I always liked Hank Easly,” I admitted. “I owe him one.” I looked up at Follow, groaning. “But first I need to know more from your boss.”
Three
Thaddeus Teague - a man in his late fifties with a full head of swept-back grey hair and an eyepatch - looked like he had discovered new arenas in which a man could exemplify exhaustion. The bags under his eye were so big that they could be checked luggage. Though Teague had always been humongous - a size I’d politely describe as ‘larger than you,’ he seemed crumpled inward, his white shirt and dark tie stained with sweat and day-old coffee specks. It didn’t look like he’d stepped out of his cluttered office for two days, judging by the spread of quarter-full styrofoam coffee cups on his desk and stacked takeout containers in his trash.
But fighting a losing war would do that to you.
Three years in, no one really cared that Young hadn’t had the support of all of the Senior Partners when she had moved to frame middle eastern terrorists for a staged attack in New York City. Even fewer people knew that the whole incident had been orchestrated by a now-destroyed rogue Soviet AI with delusions of godhood. All people understood were bodies and caskets. Blame didn’t care about the truth - it only needed momentum.
The Secret War - technically the Second Secret War after Johnson’s successful prosecution of defense industry nutjobs in the 60s had culminated in an aircraft carrier being nuked - had, to the outside world - taken the form of a crime wave up and down the east coast. Organized crime - a mob war, to the news and bemused FBI agents not In The Know.
But the thing about getting dragged into a war you weren’t prepared for is that you still have to have your heart in achieving the eventual victory.
And my guess - one that he could kill me if I voiced out loud - was that Teague’s heart wasn’t in it.
Oh, he had served as a field general with enough gusto to the outside world, fully living up to his legend as a ‘bomb first, ask questions later’ attack dog. But over the years I had seen the accumulating losses being to weigh on him, on his soul. I had done the jobs he had thrown my way during my new mercenary career and had tracked how each one had been a long-view link in a chain to reduce the casualties the war would inflict in both civilian spillover and to agents - on both sides.
I’d have more respect for Teague if he stopped the noble demon act and either committed to winning his war by means necessary - or flipped over to the Presidentialist side and stopped carrying on for a cause his heart didn’t feel anymore.
I caught sight of the TV over Teague’s shoulder, showing the Secretary of State giving a speech in Hong Kong. Maybe it was Skye’s newfound buddy, good ol’ Chaos Farley. Teague would never say why, but his hate for ‘that texan sumbitch’ was legendary. He had chased Farley halfway across the Cuba coastline with a helicopter, hoping to blow the wily old General to smithereens - all to no avail. This Secret War had produced no winners - save for Chaos Farley.
Teague peered up over the rim of his reading glasses as I entered his office - a room ironically on capitol hill, deep beneath the Senate Offices - and afforded me a thin smile in greeting as I shut the door behind me. He didn’t move to turn off the turntable to his side that was softly playing some japanese city pop standard, a jazz fusion number that seemed wildly at odds with Teague’s gruff old cowboy persona.
“Is Miki Matsubara really your speed?” I asked, plopping down into the plush chair that sat opposite Teague’s cluttered desk. “I figured you more a Johnny Cash sort of guy.”
“No one will ever believe you,” Teague said, pausing to hum along with the song before moving his hand over his desk, floating over several different cups before choosing a coffee at what seemed to me to be random.
“So,” he said, sipping at the long-since joe, “I see Fisk finally tracked you down. Lots of bars in DC.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t about to be lectured on the fact that I spent most of the last couple years at the bottom of a bottle. “Charming, in the way that sort of central casting snake sort of way.”
“He has his uses,” Teague shrugged. “He’s exceptionally well-informed about the rest of the world and doesn’t care about sides.”
“As opposed to Follow, who’s lived up to her name.” I made a show of studying the collection of books haphazardly piled on the shelves enclosing Teague. “Her condition’s getting stronger. How do you manage it?”
Teague’s eye wrinkled at the corner. “I have a little card I keep in my wallet. It lists the facts, along with my medication schedule.”
I snapped my fingers, as though trying to remember a lost fact. “Like that movie, the one with Guy Pearce.”
Teague did offer me a fencer’s salute of a smile at that, grateful I didn’t go for the obvious old age joke.
“So,” he said after a long pause.
“Yes. So. The Colonel.”
Seeming appreciative he didn’t have to start talking about the weight of his shoulders, Teauge nodded. “I won’t lie to you. Obviously my superiors would love to see Skye’s attempts to paper over the frayed tensions with Kiralova blow up in her face. They don’t care about the truth of what’s going on with a former NTET member. They just see some globalist traitor following through on his treason.”
“But we both owe Hank,” I said.
“We do. He and I both saved each other’s life enough times in the nineties to have a faith that goes beyond MIDNIGHT and NTET.” Teague set down his cup, interlacing his fingers and studying me over the bridge of his hands. “Do you feel a responsibility over what happened to him?”
I pursed my lips, looking away. I’d been MIDNIGHT for years, but it had all been a ploy for revenge - a revenge I had earned. I told myself at the time and for the following year that the price had been more than worth the resulting pain, that even the resulting war was still worse than a world that continued to allow someone like Olivia Young to exist.
But enough time had passed that I could allow myself a measure of honesty. I wasn’t so sure anymore.
”Do you?” I asked. “Nix was your… creature.”
”Yes,” Teague said bluntly. “I was cruel to Nix, I offered him no comfort after a lifetime of experimentation. I didn’t stamp down on his delusion that he was the true Baylor - I found the entitlement an easy handle.” He continued to observe my reaction over his tented fingers. “That’s why this war is my burden to bear. That’s why I’m bringing you in to track down Hank, and not a JSOC hit squad or a Blue Light shock team.”
”And you know I don’t kill any more.”
A faint flicker of a smile touched Teague’s expression. “That too. What was the delusion behind that, again? That no one was worth it, after Baylor?”
I wiggled a hand in a noncommittal manner. “I could tell you that I believe people can change, that they deserve a second chance, but you know that I don’t believe that, and that I won’t go out of my way to save people.”
Teague actually did offer a smile this time. It was wan, knowing, like he was looking at a condemned man. “I won’t say that the Senior Partners aren’t aware of that fact, that they haven’t tracked the increasing risk you’ve been taking on recently, and that they wouldn’t love for you to stop being a rogue piece on the board.”
”No longer the wayward prince, eh,” I said. I had expected this to come down eventually. “Put up for the cause, choose a side or die.”
”That’s why Follow will be accompanying you,” Teague put in, looking apologetic.
”There to kill Easly… or me?” I asked.
”That’s up to her,” Teague hedged.
Right. Given Follow’s continual attitude, I assumed that MIDNIGHT had some sort of handle on her to ensure her loyalty, but I couldn’t deny that she was one of their most ruthless and successful operatives. She had been critical in organizing the downfall of Young, even if she had been unable to secure her own personal revenge against the MIDNIGHT executive responsible for her ongoing condition.
”I won’t lie to you,” Teaguue continued. “You’re walking into a powder keg. The entire world’s been on edge ever since the war began, ever since STYX leaked the SHADOW and INTEGRAL TEMPEST designs onto the deep web. There’s been no end to the minor conflicts that have spun out of attacks from every terrorist cell with a manufacturing printer.” He tapped at his keyboard before spinning his monitor around to show me a map of the Kenyan Autonomous Zone.
”The greater Kenyan government has been petitioning for the KAZ to be returned to its mother nation, and I can’t say I’m not sympathetic to them. But between the UN’s desire for each space elevator to be build on neutral land - and increasing rare earth deposits being discovered in the surrounding region - you’re about to see a resurrection of resource imperialism that’ll put the 19th century to shame.”
I nodded at this. Teague was right - gone were the days of oil wars - the current frontier was races to secure - and wars over - lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper - and actual rare earth minerals. China had a massive hand in REE production, leaving the two former great powers to scramble to support their transitions to green infrastructure and support massive computing investments.
The US, despite its rabid and reflexive hatred of artificial intelligences - a view only strengthened by those who knew the truth of STYX’s involvement in the start of the Secret War - was only just now trying to catch up on decades of Soviet advancements in cybernetics. From my point of view, it seemed that Americans were willing to accept these augmentations if they were wearable, outside the body. A deeply American mindset of consumerism, I thought, shaped in part by the one tech titan coming out on top in the first world - Charlie Saint.
”The UN’s response to the crime that builds around the construction site - and the endless influx of refugees seeking work - is to continually fund bounty hunters, expecting the newborn state to police itself.” Teague flashed up a continually scrolling list of known operators - people I’d have to worry about while on-mission.
”Competitors,” I said. “Nice.”
”And then there’s the Red Masks,” Teague said, and my mood instantly soured.
I hated those guys.
WRAITH’s fracturing under the global manhunt that began last year had led to no lack of splinter groups that carved out their own niches now that they were no longer unified under Kroner’s umbrella of leadership. One of the worst of these groups were the Masks, a faction I could only politely describe as anarchistic marauders. Atavistic and destructive, they moved across the globe, inflicting massacres during their raids and turning the captured survivors into willing participants, reborn under the philosophy of their masked leader, Majiec Wilder.
”I hate that these people just reform, reforge themselves,” I groused. “They’re a rot.”
”They’ve been instigating riots in the rings surrounding the tether’s core, the Base,” Teague said. “You’ll need to be careful. There’s a lot of resentment from the people that have moved into the area in hopes of a new life - and it doesn’t take but a spark for a situation to turn ugly.”
”Okay, I get it. Dead man shows up in a hot zone that could go up at any moment. People would rather he be dead, they’d rather I’d be dead, and the only way forward is to get his ass - and mine - out of there and in to neutral hands. The world’s become too hot for me to sit on the sidelines any more.” I tossed off a lopsided grin at Teague as I stood, offering him my hand. “Anything else, Tio?”
Teague’s eye softened at that. He had known who I was the entire time, known me my entire life, had been my godfather after fighting with my father - Miller Razard - for a decade and helping found MIDNIGHT with him. I felt a certain level of affection for the grumpy old war criminal.
He stood and took my hand in a bear grip, grinding my knuckles to dust in his usual jovial manner. “Survive. That’s an order.”
Four
There wasn’t any alcohol to find on the direct flight out of DC - probably Follow’s doing, so I settled on sleeping the entire way. I woke to Follow dropping a pack into my lap, the plane idling on the moonlit runway of the ever-expanding KAZ Central Airport.
“What’s this?” I asked, rubbing my eyes as I sat up.
“Your way out if things go bad,” Follow said as she opened up a cabinet on the wall and ran her fingers over a rack of pistols before choosing one with an integrated suppressor.
I examined the thin pack - clearly meant to be worn between a bulletproof vest and a light jacket. My fingers creased a thin helium bottle sewing into the lining. “Is this a fulton?”
“We’ve got a drone on the orbiting satellite that’ll do a hot drop and skyhook you if you pull the tag on that pack,” Follow explained, juggling a handful of ammo magazines. “Ideally, we just drive back out of the space around the tether base with Easly in tow, but I convinced Teague to pull the strings on an emergency exit strategy.”
I looked dubiously down at the pack, my stomach letting out an audible growl. I had always heard that the ‘yank’ of connection caused the person attached to the balloon to forcibly void their bowels, and was almost glad that I had an empty stomach. “Groovy,” I sighed, standing and shucking my jacket to throw on the cut-down fulton pack. I looked up to catch Follow offering my a gun for my empty shoulder holster.
“You’re not doing some barefisted monk routine, are you?” she asked.
“No, no,” I said, taking the gun and examining it. “I tried doing tranq rounds for a while, but it was a hassle on any job where I wasn’t on my own and went longer than a few hours. How’re the KAZ emergency response teams?”
“The hospitals, I’m told, are very well funded and very well trained, given the amount of violence in the area,” Follow replied, eyes sparkling.
“Good. I’ve gotten very good at shooting people in the legs.” I tucked the gun and the offered mags into my shoulder rig. I crossed to where Follow stood and briefly studied the weapons rack before taking a pair of grenades with me as well.
I stepped out of the airplane to be braced by a pleasant breeze and wonderful mid-sixties temps - not bad for sitting at the equator. To my west, the rising hills leading to Kirinyaga - Mount Kenya - and to the east, the entirely man-made mountain of the titanic base of one of the twin tethers. One mountain dark, speckled with trees, the other a glittering hodgepodge of lights that illuminated what was once Kora National Park and surrounding acacia bushland.
I tensed at the first crack of gunfire in the distance, timed perfectly with Follow’s hand falling on my shoulder. “What’s the plan, hotshot?” she asked, looking up at me.
“We get a meeting with the Soviet attaché to the region. He’s the only lead we have.” I watched as an open-topped Jeep pulled up next to our little jet, entirely lacking a driver. Guess some tech genius had decided to test their FSD units here.
“Piotr Borisov,” Follow said, holding out a thin folder with the air of ‘yes, anyone could have guessed that.’ I took the folder, flipping through a dossier I had already read in the plane’s bathroom before takeoff.
“He’s in on the graft,” I said, taking the plane’s steps two at a time down to the waiting jeep. “Oversees the work permits. The american side of the power-sharing agreement is the one that handles all the physical material corruption. Borisov? He supplies the bodies.”
“Charming,” Follow said, clambering into what would have been the driver’s side and tapping a button on the jeep’s center console. Whirring quietly on an electric motor, the jeep began down a recently paved road - really, this entire area had the weirdly empty fresh concrete feel of a new development. I knew that once we dove into the densely packed levels surrounding the Base, that’d change rapidly.
“Do we have any local assets?” I asked, holding a hand out of the jeep and letting it plane up and down in the passing air.
“A KRF squad was loaned to us by our, as you pointed you, wonderfully corrupt American attache. Led by a…” she glanced at her phone. “A Captain Idriss.”
“Oh!” I said, pleased. “I worked with him and Strike Team Akula during that volcano business five years ago. You can trust him.”
“Well, that’s nice,” Follow said, not sounding at all assured and not displaying the usual confusion people showed whenever I mentioned the mission that involved a volcano and cybernetic gorillas. “What’s your plan to get an audience with Borisov? Walk up to his compound and knock on the door?”
“I was thinking I’d threaten to embarrass him instead. There’s a former WRAITH - I think he’s Red Masks now - bombmaker the CIA tracked to the KAZ last week. Borisov’s used him before when he flirted with the wrong side of the civil war, but he gave up most of his contacts to maintain good graces with the returning Kiralova.” I pulled out my own phone and flipped through some photos before showing Follow a picture of a man who looked like he had taken an explosion or two to the face in his past - or maybe he had just been born ugly.
“We nab this bombmaker and, what?”
“Borisov’s used him a couple times in the past year when powers in the area wouldn’t play nice with him. I don’t know why his contact is here now, but I think it wouldn’t be good for his standing in such a powerful post if his connections were made public.” The jeep pulled to a stop outside a particularly imposing wall of stacked habitation units - it was as if Kowloon had been built out of shipping containers. We’d have to walk from here.
Compared to the dead office park world of the airport outskirts, the underlevels of the Base had a particular aesthetic of desperation to them - decades-out-of-date decorations and crowds that seemed to appear and disappear at a whim, leaving the streets periodically crushingly clogged and desolately deserted at unpredictable intervals.
When there weren’t throngs of people moving at speed to the next protest or avoiding the riot suppression teams, I supposed I could enjoy the overnight city’s feel in an ironic sense - all white tiles and blue and pink neon, with fake potted plants around obnoxiously pastel bench cushions. The entire area seemed curated, false, but long since abandoned - a relic of some forgotten age. Considering how new the construction was, it gave the entire affair a liminal, ironic friction that set my hair on end. Cursive neon wording demarcated areas of the town, shop signs, directions to points of interest.
What few shopkeeps that weren’t hiding behind lowered chain fencing stood just behind their storefronts’ thresholds. Their weaponry was just out of sight in easy reach but all the more visible by the way their eyes darted just out of frame as Follow and I approached.
Whatever secondhand Soviet janitor robots assigned to this level had long since gone offline, leaving accumulated trash to weave a history lesson for my wandering eye. An abandoned street preacher station - weeks old - was surrounded by blood splatters and crumpled pamphlets. A burnt-out militia incident station, invectives spray painted over the singed and twisted outer bars.
“Jesus,” Follow said, stepping over a single, still-smoking shoe. “It looks like the aftermath of a warzone.”
This time I didn’t flinch as gunfire echoed in the far distance, location untraceable in the echoing and claustrophobic confines of the underlevels. “This is all manufactured - the rebellion, that is.” I looked up at a broken greek-style statue with a symbol of the USSR spray-painted onto its chest. “Soviets don’t do outreach. Not like this”
“They didn’t,” Follow countered. “Maybe things changed when Kiralova stepped back.”
Wasn’t that a cycle, I thought. Kiralova retires, no one can match Kiralova, things fall apart. Kiralova has to step back in. No, I decided. This had the hallmarks of Company action, but it was also too sloppy to be their handiwork.
A discarded phone with a shattered screen chimed on the ground near one of my shoes and I crouched to squint at the refracted image on the face of the device. “An address,” I murmured, tossing the device aside.
“Rioters are coordinating,” Follow shrugged. “Makes sense. So Borisov, how’s he feel about these riots under his nose?”
I sighed, peeking around a corner to make sure our path was clear. “I’m worried that this bombmaker - name’s Jericho - being here means Borisov’s bit off more than he can chew. Teague warned me about the Red Masks, and I think we’ll be in real trouble if we run afoul of them before we find Easly.”
“How so?” Follow’s shoulders were tense as she slipped from stall to stall, her hand constantly hovering high enough that she could more easily draw her from her jacket rig.
The sounds of an oncoming crowd grew louder, echoing down a side street adjacent to us. “Masks rip from what they need and subsume. They revel in anonymity, in allowing the downtrodden to return injustices at the world widespread, without reason or aim. By the time you’re in, you’ve gone too far, you’re running on weaponized desperation. Trapped in a cycle of violence that you could not and could never break. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman, dark or light, it just matters if you kill who they tell you to without mercy.”
Follow ducked a broken storefront, eyes glittering in the darkness. “It feels like you’ve had this bubbling inside you for a while.”
I’d had my run-ins with the Masks as they had coalesced over the past few years. “It’s false populism, it muddies local resistance to the Masks when they roll into areas like KAZ with a shadow of an excuse for a government, riddled with corruption from the word go. ‘Oh, we’re just like you, the workers, the farmers, the dockhands.’ You can have a life of wanton freedom in front of you, at the death of personality. You’ll be welcomed into the Masks, but it’s the last place you’ll be welcomed ever again.”
“Is that why the Masks fight so hard?” Follow asked. “We’ve never been able to take one alive - they kill themselves before seeing a cell.”
“They fight like they have nothing to lose, because they don’t. The Masks already took everything.”
“A walking definition of the sunk cost fallacy,” Follow mused. “And how does this fit into Jericho?”
“He took over WRAITH ops when WRAITH HUNTER started, before the Masks rolled into town. Surrendered directly to the Masks, under the assumption he could dictate the terms of his surrender. Majiec accepted it, I think, on a cruel whim.” I joined Follow in cover as a throng of people passed, holding phones high on max brightness as though they were torches - yet oddly silent, their visual cacophony at odds with their auditory stealth. “He probably wanted to see what sort of concessions she could extract from Jericho before they truly set up shop.”
I fell silent as the jeering crowd entered view - bandanas high around their faces, edges and ranged weaponry clutched in their hands. I faded into the shadows, one hand on Follow’s shoulder as the rioters passed.
“It sounds like you have an immediate lead on this Jericho, then,” Follow noted after the danger had passed.
“There’s a cafe Borisov owns, partially out of sheer love of coffee. I have a freelance contact in the area - Nahor - who started tracking Jericho the moment I took this job from Teague. He swears Jericho will be there at ten tonight.” I flashed my watch for show. “Not much time left until then.”
Five more minutes of hurried skulking through echoing, near-empty promenade passed before we emerged into open air again. We stood on a barely-fenced bridge overlooking a massive crevasse, feeling tiny in the scheme of the dichotomy of the upper and lower halves of the city. I considered the contrast of the skyscrapers looming up around us, like teeth reaching up to the sky, matched against the darkness of lower depths falling away beneath us. Entrapped in the open maw of the city, I was acutely aware that at any moment the jaws could snap shut, spelling certain doom. Only a single double-lane of the service highway that encircled the Base ducked into the crevasse, some few stories above our position, linking up to an on-ramp from below.
“I prefer the neon and fog and massive advertising billboards to that postmodern hellhole,” I said, taking in a full breath of KAZ’s oppressive smog and pointing up towards a single red circle six levels up, on the opposite face of the pedestrian causeways attached like fins to the buildings lining the man-made gorge.
“How long to fall until you hit bottom?” Follow asked, leaning out over the railing to look down in the darkened depths of the city’s bowels.
“Logically, even with the rods they’re drilling into the crust, there’s a bottom somewhere,” I said, trying to pretend like I had gotten over my childhood fear of heights. “But I’m of the mind that you may just fall forever, like a reverse event horizon - never reaching the bottom.”
Five
We may our a way across a foot bridge as I tried very, very hard to not look down into the chasm. Finding a winding set of staircases, we set our sights on Borisov’s cafe - a hip local joint known only as Zero. I could see the armed guards standing at each corner of the property, and, intermingling with the far more relaxed and bougie crowds of the upper levels, the plainclothes members of the KAZ Reaction Force team lead by Yan Idriss, a stocky man from Nairobi that I found to be reliably coolheaded in emergencies.
I caught sight of Idriss on a nearby roof and nodded to him. He returned the nod gravely, pointing down at the cafe. I followed his finger to one of the tables outside the establishment, where a handsome Palestinian man with a close-cropped beard - an ex-Levant spy - sat sipping an espresso with an empty chair conspicuously open to his side.
“Think that’s your seat,” Follow said. “I’m going to link up with Idriss, take overwatch. This is your show, Gold.”
I tapped my earpiece in acknowledgement before strolling down the seat, ignoring Borisov’s rent-a-cops to take a seat next to my contact. “Nahor,” I smiled. “It’s been too long.”
“Not long enough, Ramirez. You still owe me for that card game in Johannesburg.” His voice was a pleasant baritone, accent clipped RP.
“I owe you nothing, Nahor. I think we know you cheated with that hole card.” I waved down a passing waiter and ordered a cappuccino.
Finding the passphrase acceptable, Nahor let go of a certain tension in his shoulders. “Enjoying the city?”
I scoffed. “It’s a lot worse than the reports let on, man. This place is going to tear itself apart from the bottom up.”
Nahor shook his head. “This is Tuesday, Ramirez. You Americans are just used to sitting fat in your homes, unwilling to make any protest that actually disrupts things.” He took another sip from his stupid little espresso mug. “Now, will I pretend that this latest uptick is organic? No. But that doesn’t mean their original goals are without merit.”
I could only imagine how desperate things were for the workers that immigrated to KAZ in hopes of being on the ground floor of an express ticket to the stars. At least they could petition the UN to keep things from getting too bad. I couldn’t imagine how nasty things were happening under the consortium setting up the tether in the Indian Ocean.
Gratefully accepting my cappuccino, I waited until the server retreated before asking, “What’s Jericho’s business here? He has to know he’s endangering Borisov’s position.”
Nahor leaned in, voice low. “Desperation. Something has changed within the Masks. It’s not just about the conquest, the crawl. Majiec has a goal, and it centers around KAZ.”
I frowned. “He’s here to warn Borisov?” I took a sip from my cappuccino, considering - wait, this was actually quite good. Maybe the corrupt soviet asshole knew his beans. But yeah, Jericho wasn’t OG Masks. He was from the strain of WRAITH that valued profit first. Of course he’d have a problem with his newfound benefactors going full Motive.
“Word is, he was commissioned to deal with an aerosolizer.”
My blood ran cold. Images of the red-eyed Horde flashed through my mind, of being pursued through the underlevels of a EMP-dark airport by people whose free will have been robbed from them by a calculating foreign mind.
I tapped my earpiece. “You catch that?”
“Yeah.” Follow sounded equally troubled. “I’ll run it up the flagpole. I didn’t pack my gas mask in case bioweapons are at play.”
“So,” Nahor said as I returned my attention to him. “I thought you quit that cabal.”
“I have my own reasons,” I said, enjoying another sip from the cap. That wasn’t regular dairy- was the goat milk? It was incredible. “This is all in a chain to find another man I’ve thought dead.”
I held out my phone with the picture of Easly meeting Borisov for Nahor to study.
“I know this man. He should be dead,” Nahor stated.
“This is from yesterday,” I countered. I had taken to people-watching. Jericho should be here soon. The crowd of people in the upper half of the city were just so radically different from the underlevels - the supervisors, the executives, the tourists. Browsing the expensive boutiques that catered to them, bouncing from luxurious nightclub to even more opulent nightclub as the night wore on. They had no idea they sat on a powderkeg.
“Well, you should be worried,” Nahor said, pinch-zooming on a corner of the picture. “That’s a Red Mask sticking out of his jacket.”
There, at the end of the street, I saw a tall man dressed in black fatigues, with a tattered tan cloak draped over his torso and partially hooding his face. As the man turned towards us - acknowledging my observation - I saw the glint of eyes under the hood and got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as my mind partially recognized the stranger.
I stood, pulling Nahor back behind one of the café’s outer terrace pillars and covered my ears and neck just as the man triggered the bomb that had been placed just underneath the nearby service van.
The resulting explosion sent a pillar of fire and dust a hundred feet into the air and flattened most everyone on the street, sending those lucky not to immediately charbroiled to their ground in the ensuing shockwave. The entire world shook for a moment, and when I opened my eyes and uncovered my still-ringing ears, I could hear gunfire in the distance, coming closer.
I looked down at Nahor, who pushed past me, surveying the damage and drawing a PPK from who knew where.
“It’s the Masks!” he shouted, realizing who was launching the attack. In the distance, figures clad in black body armor advanced, mowing down the still dazed survivors of the bombing.
And there, just across the street, ducking through a gate, was the man who had flipped the switch.
“I’ve got eyes on the bomber!” I shouted half to Captain Idriss, half to Follow through my earpiece, before launching myself into the chaos of smoke and flame, gore and gunfire.
Six
Guns chattered behind me, but I had to keep going.
Onward, through the gate – a stray dog lunged at me but I batted it aside. Shouts could be heard behind me, but they only served to spur me forward.
A gap of maybe seven feet – a running jump and I hit the wall with enough force to crush the air from my lungs. Fingertips scrambled at the precipice, found purchase, and with a huff of exertion I pushed myself up and over the ledge.
I was in an open-air market and people were scrambling about, the downtown rampage having only just started moments ago. A stack of crates fell in front of me, but I vaulted off of one and then the side of a wall, rolling and hitting a table full of trinkets. The table’s legs couldn’t hold me, and it collapsed under my weight – but I was already vaulting off it, bouncing off one, two terrified civilians before vaulting clean over the hood of a smoking wreck of a sedan. I could see the bomber just at the edge of my vision, his fists pumping in full sprint as he tried to shake me.
I landed, stumbled once, and then saw a wall in front of me. I leapt, bounced off a ledge, and found myself at the edge of the upper levels, overlooking the northern shantytown. I had almost taken a ten-story plunge to the hovels below. Catching myself, I took a hard right, onward, through another open-air café. Gunshots rang out behind me, the language of Kalashnikovs floating out a word to detonate a glass vase on a nearby table in a shower of water and glass.
Into a hotel, blowing through the double doors, clearing the concierge’s desk and running into the kitchen thick with the aroma of abandoned culinary creations. Another gunshot, and the hanging pans raised a symphony of clatters and clangs. My ears rang with the calamity of it all – and I was out of the hotel, running along rooftops that framed a shallow waterway. I could see the hooded man, my quarry, in the distance, leaping from building to building with ease. I didn’t know if my pursuers - Masks or some other group - were after me or the bomber.
The roofs weren’t level, and I jumped down, scrambled upward, rolling and flipping as I saw my pursuers on the opposite tenements, tac-gear flash-black and contrasting with the blood-splattered handprints splashed across their white ceramic masks. I gulped at the sight of green laser sights scything through the haze. The Masks had my trail.
I dashed across a wooden bridge and saw a larger gap than before up ahead – and then a wall of stone and masonry. A single pipe rang the vertical length of the façade, and I jumped for it. Fingers clasped around the metal, but it –just- couldn’t support my weight and the mountings broke free, dropping the pipe to the horizontal and dislodging me. I fell to only the windshield of a parked car, nearly breaking my back in an explosion of glass and screeching metal, but I was already rolling off it and into a thin alleyway.
Down, through the narrow mazes of downtown, rebounding off walls, thankful the sightlines were too short for my pursuers to get a decent bead on my back. Shop faces flashed by on either side, glass was strewn all over the street by the detonations of the bombs earlier, and every shard crunched underfoot with lethal finality. I could hear the sounds of chaos starting to grip the city, with gunfire being traded back and forward, along with something louder, far more terrifying.
I saw another open-faced building up ahead, its entire front wall having been sheared clean off. I made it my target and was barely across the street when a van slid to a stop just in front of me. I rebounded off its front bumper, rolled, caught a glimpse of the men chasing me – they were too close – and struggled back to my feet again. A front desk, an overlooking floor, a one-two hop caught my hands on the second-level railing. An entire column fell past me, and I had to let go of one hand and swing to the side to avoid being splattered into the ground below.
Up, over the railing, take a right, up a flight of stairs, through another portal – I caught a flash of a man right behind me – and then arms encircled my waist and the pair of us tipped, off-balance over a nearby railing and fell into a narrow alleyway in a bundle of flying fists and muffled curses. I shook the man free just in time to see another figure enter the alleyfrom the opposite lane, running hard, a pair of hunters on his tail. The bomber. My chase intuition had been correct, and I had kept a hold of his trail.
I got drunkenly to my feet, and grabbed a nearby potted plant, smashing it across my attacker’s jaw. The blow collapsed him to the pavement, but not for long, as he dodged my follow-up punch and kicked my legs out from underneath me.
The ground rushed up to meet me, and I managed to roll out of the way just in time to see the bomber’s pursuers in the distance, closing the distance between them and him – maybe thirty meters. I didn’t have time to worry any more about that as boot smashed down where my head had been moments before. With a grunt, I caught the leg, twisting it and dumping my opponent to the dusty ground beside me. My enemy swore and went for the pistol holstered in the center of his tactical vest.
I drove an elbow into the man’s black mask and, in that moment, wrestled the gun from my foe’s grip. In one swift move I rolled onto one knee, took aim, and double-tapped each of the bomber’s pursuers in the knees. Twin bursts of blood, and screaming men hit the ground in a wild tumble.
I tapped my earpiece with one finger. “You got him, Follow?”
“We’ve got KRF in pursuit,” she confirmed over the radio.
I slowly stood, training my gun on the man before me. It looked like he was wearing a streamlined version of a standard MIDNIGHT stealth armor underneath the undercover tac-gear, but it wasn’t doing him any good. Blood streamed from a wound over one eye and, if he noticed that his aviators were missing a lens entirely, he didn’t look like he cared.
His eyes traced from the barrel of the gun pointed directly at his forehead, up my arm, before his eyes went wide as he recognized me. “Oh, fucking shit.”
In that moment I matched gazes with Nix, former MIDNIGHT assassin and partial architect of the disaster in New York.
Now that I knew what he was, the burning rage I felt swept back the memetic agent that Nix shared with Follow, allowing me to recognize the man as a clone of John Baylor. His brown hair was similarly long and ragged to my own cut, his beard trimmed to a thin line along his jaw, chin, and mustache. A red bandana encircled his forehead, trailing ends flapping gently in the wind that rolled through the alleyway.
John’s bandana.
“Look, Gold,” Nix said, fighting to talk over his heaving chest. “We-“
I shot him.
The round veered off to one side – he still had that fucking magnetic repulsion field – and with a snarl I ducked my head and charged as Nix struggled to his feet, going for a second gun at his hip. A bullet, perhaps a warning shot from another of his buddies, buzzed too close to one of my ears, but I ignored it as I seized him around the waist, lifting him. I pushed forward, towards the end of the alley, and we tumbled down a flight of stairs, him taking the brunt of the impacts.
He managed to break free as we both rolled to our feet, but I was able to press my momentum, delivering a swift punch to his wrist that forced him to drop his second pistol. If I gave Nix a moment’s time he’d crush me like a bug, but I didn’t care. Because of this fuck I had to put a bullet into Baylor’s brain, and right now I had found the one man actually worth killing.
We landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, rolling into the open plaza beyond, a whirl of thrown punches and knees. I roared and got my hands around his neck, but I lost the momentum when Nix took me by the collar in one hand and my leg holster in the other and physically lifted me, throwing me clean across the plaza.
I landed in a three-point slide, dust billowing up as a ground to a halt.
“You never should have come here,” I yelled to him across the chaos of the city. “You’re never going to leave here.”
Nix’s brow furrowed, and he put one hand to his ear, half-turning away, looking worried. I growled, and took two steps forward – the asshole wasn’t even paying attention to me-
“I think you might have bigger problems, Gold,” Nix said, looking back at me – before flipping backwards and hauling himself up onto the low-hanging second story balcony of a nearby building.
I grimaced and took two running steps forward, just as Follow buzzed in my earpiece – “Gold, look out!”
Nix faded out of view, just as the entire front face of the building cratered inward in a small detonation of debris and smoke.
No.
Not an explosion.
An impact.
I clenched the pistol tight in my hand and hissed into my radio. “Fuck off.”
Follow asked, “Right now?”
“I haven’t even been here an hour.”
“Maybe a half hour,” Follow allowed.
Through the billowing dust and smoke, the shimmering outline of a SHADOW TEMPEST straightened up and roared. Four times my height and three times as wide, with massive shoulder cannons and long, vicious arms, and it all didn’t fucking matter.
I raised my pistol and gestured the SHADOW TEMPEST forward. It was in between me and Nix.
“Let’s go, tin can.”
GHOST WALKER
It Came From Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda
By Mobius 1
