Deadlock (4 page)

‘Bingo,’ Otto said. ‘We have a winner, ladies and gentlemen.’

He closed the case and lifted it from the shelf, wincing as he heard a soft click from underneath the case and an instant later felt a burst of encrypted data fire through the vault’s security system, triggered by the pressure switch that he had just inadvertently released. There was nothing he could do to stop the signal as it set off a building-wide alert. Otto cursed under his breath, taking the black glass object out of its case and slipping it into one of his belt pouches before running back out of the vault.

‘Looks like Raskoff left out one tiny little detail of the security system,’ Otto said into his throat mic. ‘I think I’ve probably just set off every alarm in the building.’

‘Understood,’ the woman’s voice replied in his ear. ‘I’m on my way out. See you at ground level.’

‘Roger that,’ Otto said. ‘I’m . . .’

His voice was drowned out by the roar of automatic gunfire as several uniformed security guards burst in through the door on the far side of the room and opened fire. Otto sprinted across the room, the servers behind him exploding in a shower of shattered metal and plastic as they were shredded by the hail of bullets. One of the guard’s rounds found its target, hitting Otto between the shoulder blades, winding him and knocking him off his feet. He slammed into the ground with a crunch amidst the smouldering remnants of the ruined server units.

‘Ballistic damage sustained, ISIS systems compromised,’ a soft synthetic voice said in Otto’s ear, as he struggled to catch his breath. ‘Thermoptic camouflage system offline, ablative armour damage sustained, negative ballistic penetration. System reboot in progress.’

Otto winced as he pushed himself up on to his knees. The suit had stopped the bullet, but there was no telling how badly damaged it was without running a full diagnostic. He glanced at the display on his forearm and saw that the reboot of the suit’s systems was going to take at least another twenty seconds. Ducking for cover as more gunfire tore into the wall behind him as the security guards advanced towards him, Otto knew he didn’t have twenty seconds. He had to get out of there now.

Otto’s mind raced, complex calculations balancing time and velocity dancing through his head as he unclipped a cylindrical object from his combat harness. He glanced at the reboot countdown one last time and then tossed the flashbang grenade towards the approaching guards, leaping to his feet as it detonated with a blinding white light and deafening thunderclap. Otto ran towards the window, taking advantage of the guards’ momentary disorientation and reached out with his mind for the four tiny explosive charges that he had placed on the window a few minutes earlier. With a tiny mental nudge he triggered their detonators, shattering the window just before he hit it. He dived through the shower of glass and felt his stomach lurch as he launched himself into the void, seeming to hang in the air for an instant before plummeting towards the street far below. Otto watched as the blackened asphalt of the street raced towards him at terminal velocity. He closed his eyes a split second before impact.

He was just five metres from the ground when the ISIS suit rebooted, its variable geometry forcefield generators firing with a soft thumping sound, instantly slowing his descent and reducing Otto’s impact with the ground from undoubtedly fatal to merely painful. He hit the street with a crunching thud and lay there winded for a moment before picking himself up from the ground with a pained groan and staggering to his feet. He reached into the pouch on his belt, hoping that the object he had stolen just a minute earlier was still intact. If it had been damaged by his impact with the ground then all of this would have been for nothing. He gingerly pulled the rectangle of black glass from his belt pouch and examined it. Mercifully it still appeared to be in one piece.

‘Are you OK?’ a voice behind Otto asked. ‘That looked like a pretty rough landing.’

‘Yeah,’ Otto said as Raven approached. ‘We have to get to the car – we’ve only got a couple of minutes before they figure out what we’ve taken and shift their quantum encryption key.’

Raven gave a quick nod and they both ran towards a multi-storey parking structure. Otto glanced over his shoulder as he heard raised voices behind them. On the other side of the street, security guards were pouring from the building that he had left in such dramatic fashion. One of the guards spotted Otto and Raven running into the parking structure and yelled to the others, pointing across the street. Otto and Raven ran past the exit barrier, heading towards the sleek, black sports car that was parked just inside the entrance. Otto ran around to the passenger side as Raven climbed into the driver’s seat and hit the ignition button in the centre of the dashboard. The car sprang to life with a throaty roar and Raven floored the accelerator, sending the low-slung machine rocketing straight through the flimsy wooden barrier and out on to the street beyond. She spun the steering wheel and sent the car into a power slide as the security guards who were sprinting towards them opened fire. The bullets didn’t even dent the shining skin of the car, much less penetrate it. Raven accelerated hard and the car surged forward, weaving through the traffic ahead of them as Otto opened the glove compartment in front of him and pulled out a jet-black tablet device. He pushed the black glass rectangle into a slot in the base of the tablet and its screen flared into life, displaying a logo that looked like a stylised image of a circle of barbed wire with a progress bar that was slowly filling beneath it.

‘Come on,’ Otto said impatiently as the sound of sirens started to come from somewhere behind them. As the progress bar slowly filled he could feel only the same incomprehensible buzz of encrypted data coming from the tablet that he had sensed around the vault door a few minutes earlier. The progress bar finally vanished and the barbed-wire logo disappeared to be replaced by a screen displaying an image of a stern-faced man with grey hair and cold blue eyes wearing a dark blue suit with a Stars and Stripes pin in his lapel. Otto’s eyes flicked to the name beneath the photo and an instant later the screen went black and the tablet began to emit a high-pitched whine. Without hesitation Otto stabbed at the button to lower the car’s window and flung the tablet out through the gap. A split second later there was a flash and the concussive thump of high explosives detonating as the tablet destroyed itself in a ball of fire that would have torn their vehicle to shreds.

‘Did you get it?’ Raven snapped. ‘Do we have a name?’

‘Yeah, but I’m afraid that things may have just become slightly more complicated,’ Otto replied.

The screaming sirens of the police cars pursuing them were now getting louder as more patrol cars joined the chase from side streets behind them. Raven frowned at the sight of a road block forming a few hundred metres ahead of them.

‘Complicated we can handle, but for now it’s time we disappeared,’ she said, hitting a button on the steering wheel.

The driver in the lead police car gasped in amazement as the black sports car in front of them seemed to flicker for a moment and then vanished, as if it had never been there at all.

‘Hey, guys,’ Shelby said, flopping down in the seat next to Wing and Franz in Dr Nero’s office.

The three of them were now all that remained of their year’s Alpha stream students after the Disciples’ merciless assault on the H.I.V.E. training exercise known as the Hunt just a couple of months earlier.

‘Good morning,’ Wing said with a smile. ‘I missed you at breakfast. Where were you?’

‘Worried I might be seeing somebody else, big guy?’ Shelby asked with a wink.

‘No. Should I be?’ Wing asked with a raised eyebrow.

‘’Course not,’ Shelby said with a grin. ‘Who could ever match you, hot lips?’

‘Shelby, I have asked you repeatedly not to call me –’

‘How about the smooch-meister then?’ Shelby replied quickly. ‘I actually think I might prefer that to be honest.’

‘This is being too much information,’ Franz said under his breath, rolling his eyes.

‘If you must know where I was this morning,’ Shelby said, ‘Professor Pike never misses breakfast and I was just taking advantage of that fact to . . . erm . . . visit his office.’ She produced a sheet of folded paper from the pocket of her black uniform jumpsuit. ‘I know his memory’s probably not that great these days, but he really shouldn’t just write his master server access passwords down like that.’

‘And he just left that lying around, did he?’ Wing asked with a slight frown.

‘Yeah, just lying around . . . in his safe,’ Shelby said with a mischievous smile, ‘but if you’re going to rely on such basic security you’re really asking for this kind of thing to happen.’

‘I am thinking this is how we usually are starting the whole getting into unbelievably serious trouble thing,’ Franz said with a resigned sigh. ‘Normally I am enjoying the whole shooting and exploding and nearly dying thing as much as anyone, but I am wondering perhaps if there is any chance that I might be being allowed to sit this one out for once?’

‘No way,’ Shelby said. ‘We’re like the three musketeers now.
All for one and
–’

‘Yes, yes,’ Franz said, ‘I was afraid you were going to be saying something like that.’

The fact of the matter was that the three of them had become almost inseparable after they became the only remaining Alphas in their year. It had not been easy coping with the loss of their closest friends and the suspicious gossiping whispers of their fellow students that inevitably followed. Nobody would have dared say anything to them directly, but they had become all too used to hushed conversations that stopped as they approached and curious glances in their direction. Everyone else avoided them, as if they were just a lingering reminder of the tragedy that had befallen the school. None of their fellow students seemed to think about the loss that the three of them had suffered as well. They rarely spoke of it, but the death or capture of their fellow Alphas by the Disciples and then the sickening realisation that it was all due to the fact that Laura, one of their closest friends, had betrayed them, had been a shattering blow. There were many consequences of that betrayal, including the perhaps fatal shooting of Nigel Darkdoom and Otto’s subsequent expulsion from H.I.V.E.

‘Dare I ask what exactly you’re planning to do with the password?’ Wing asked.

‘It’s a surprise. Tell you later,’ Shelby whispered as the door hissed open and Dr Nero walked into the room.

‘Good morning,’ Nero said, sitting down behind his desk. He placed his hand on a panel on the desktop and a millimetre thick tablet slid out from a concealed slot. He tapped at the surface of the tablet and studied the screen for a few seconds. ‘I see that you have all completed the assignment that I gave you at the end of our last tutorial. Good – now we can move on to the more advanced types of corporate manipulation and examine the use of political donation as effective leverage.’

Nero had taken personal charge of supervising the three remaining Alphas after their return to the school, even though it would probably have been easier to simply fold the three of them back into the next year’s Alpha stream. It seemed that he was determined that their training in the villainous arts would not be compromised by all that had happened. On the other hand he might just have wanted to keep an especially close eye on the three of them, given their reputation for attracting the wrong kind of trouble.

Nero proceeded with the Villainy Studies lesson for another hour with the three students opposite taking notes on their own tablets and asking the occasional question.

‘Excellent,’ Nero said, as the tutorial drew to a close. ‘You all seem to have a good grasp of the use of the multinational corporation as a tool for global villainy. Do you have any other questions?’

‘Just one,’ Wing replied, looking Nero in the eye. ‘Is there any news of the fate of our fellow students yet?’

‘I thought that we had already covered this, Mr Fanchu,’ Nero replied. ‘I understand why you are so keen to know more of our pursuit of Anastasia Furan and the rest of the Disciples, but it would be at best inappropriate and at worst dangerous for me to discuss the details of ongoing operations. You will just have to trust me when I say that we are doing everything we possibly can to track down the students they abducted and rest assured that when we find them – and we
will
find them – I intend to make sure they pay in full for every single drop of blood that they have spilled. All I need you three to do is have faith in the abilities of our operatives and concentrate on the remainder of your education.’