Chapter 40

“Something’s wrong; we need to go.”

Sam was shocked to see just how much raw fear was evident in Jeff’s face. She had never seen anything like that from him. Even when he was stressed, there was still a kind of confidence to him, but that was nowhere to be seen. Instead he was rushing to grab the research and repeatedly slamming the decontamination room’s door. The first door slowly opened, and he pulled Sam in with him, barely giving her time to bag the cube. As he muttered to himself, trying to will the cleaning gases into working faster, the outer door of the plastic structure remained shut.

The room suddenly shook as the hanger door was torn open, the figure of a golden rig revealing itself. With taloned feet, bird wings, beak shaped helmet and a solid body, it was impossible to distinguish the pilot. However, the golden harpy design was synonymous with Sara Campbell and very few people would be willing to attempt to frame her. With a cracking sound, the kind distinct to micro-railguns, a golden feather launched from the wings. It tore through the plastic like it wasn’t there at all. Sam had though it was aimed at her, and the relief that it wasn’t, dropped her to her knees.

She then realised that a properly maintained rig would never miss an essentially stationary target. She turned to see what had been hit. She saw Jeff. He had his had pressed against the back door, the door towards the chamber.

“The airlock’s broken,” he called out, “when the system realises that, the door will unlock early. Take this drive an publish everything. If our data gets out, then we don’t matter anymore.”

Behind him she could see why he was pressing his hand against the door. The canister holding the formless particles had been breached by the feather and they were filling the room like a tide. When they started the decontamination process, containing lights were turned off. They used a substantial amount of power, and that power was shifted the decontamination, as that also used a lot of power. The particles would stream through the hole in the door and devour them both if they ran. If one of them remained behind to plug the hole, then the other would be able to escape. There wasn’t anything they could fill the gap with. If they stuffed a shirt in, it wouldn’t even buy them a second.

After shooting the feather, the rig left, closing the hanger door behind it. As it was, it would look like a malfunction in the containment of an improvised lab. An accident that could be easily explained. Despite the garish golden colour, it was still a rig and as such would be able to go unseen.

As the outer door opened, Sam started to run. She clutched the cube containing bag in one hand and held the hard drive against her chest. Worried that the rig would still be around the front, Sam instead ran towards the back of the hanger. There was an exit though the office area, and she rushed towards it with her best speed. She could hear Jeff’s pain-filled screams ring out behind her, but she didn’t dare turn around to look.

Outside the hanger, Sam ran towards the airport. She knew that if they were making the deaths look accidental, then the witnesses at the airport would be her best protection. Jeff had deliberately chosen the furthest hanger, during a time when the fewest people would be at the airport, which was in turn the furthest building from the population centre, on the off chance that they triggered the core going off like a nuclear bomb. That was working against Sam, as she stumbled in the dark and snow.

Sam suddenly stopped. Ahead of her was a pair of footprints that were visible even in the dark. They were too large not to be seen; a rig’s footprints. The wind picked up snow and the white outline of wings was visible for a moment before melting away. The dark had hindered her, but the pilot would have been able to see fine.

“It’s too late to regret now, villain,” the pilot’s voice rang out from the rig. It wasn’t the Sara’s mischievous voice. It was the self-assertive and baselessly confident voice of her son, Satou.

The rig’s arm became partially visible and within its grasp was a small canister of formless particles. She had no doubt that they would likewise be lab grade. It was a little unlikely that formless particles could have escaped this far our after her, though not impossible. If she died from them, it would still be a plausible story.

As the canister was about to open, the two could hear a faint sound as they turned to see a snow-bike crash into a nearby wall. Following that, a bright flash triggered behind Sam, though in front of Satou, and the light still seemed to blind her. She felt a hand pull her arm then heard several more cracking sounds, that were like fireworks. The hand directed her into a small space, possibly beneath a panel a hanger floor.

“Stay quiet,” the voice whispered, “I’ll tell you when it’s passed.”

For a few minutes after, the occasional sound of heavy footprints could be felt through the cold soil. Sam was up against a cement pillar of the foundation and her side was half buried in snow-mixed soil. In that time, her eyes started to recover, even as the arm she was laying on started to go numb. In the darkness, she still couldn’t see her rescuer, and their whisper had been to quiet to discern. Despite that, from presence, or maybe just hopeful thinking, she felt that it was Jeff.

A few more minutes, still, passed and the other person pulled out a phone. In the light of the screen, Sam confirmed her hope; it was Jeff, he had survived. What she hadn’t expected was that his right arm was missing, with a black stump at his elbow seeming to be consuming his arm. Puss was forming at the end and once she noticed it, she the smell of it hit her. It was a putrid kind of smell, like burning and rotting flesh. It didn’t seem possible for such a state to come about so quickly.

“Okay, looks like it’s gone.” He was speaking with confidence, but his teeth were chittering with cold and pain. Noticing Sam stare at his missing arm, he gave an explanation. “After I got you to run, I kicked open some of the flooring to try and get some wires to tourniquet my arm and buy a few more moments. In with the wires was some coolant tubes. Most of the things are stuck in the room with my frozen hand plugging the hole, but a few of them got into my bloodstream. Looks like I won’t be able to work around cores anymore.”

He passed it off as a joke, but the contamination was clearly tearing his arm stump apart. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how much it hurt, and she felt like if she were to speak she would just start crying. Jeff also looked like he would brake down the moment he didn’t have anything to distract himself with, and that deepened her own feelings.

“Take your sleepless pill now, you’ll need to be sharp for this next part.” As he spoke he handed his phone to her, an app with a map and a moving dot was active. “I prepared a few things in stashes around the place and the people I worked with did also. That full range flash that I blinded you with also hits cameras and detectors outside of human vision. We were lucky that he hadn’t used any kind of sound-based detection or we would have been screwed.”

He lifted the floorboard with his back and took a careful look around. With a glance at the phone he got out of the hole and helped Sam get out. Once out of the hole he took his advice and fished a pill out of her jacket pocket. Swallowing it without water was a little hard on her fear dried oesophagus, but she managed anyway. Within moments she felt as rested as if she had slept for several hours, though without the warmth of a blanket.

“The plan hasn’t changed, you need to get to a computer in the airport lounge.”

“What will you do then? You need to get to a hospital.” It bothered her a little how worried she sounded, how she was shivering and not just from the cold. Her mentor could seriously die if he didn’t make it to a hospital, but he was acting like he was going to charge into battle instead. Thinking that was when it hit her; Jeff wouldn’t be her mentor anymore. They hadn’t worked together for a while, but she still though of him that way, still felt like she could depend on him for advice. That wouldn’t be possible, even if they somehow survived. His arm was contaminated with particles, and those particles would spread throughout his blood. If he was unlucky they would even settle in his heart. If he even went near a rig core like that, he would die from the particles shredding him. With the new generation moving to entirely particle based, the training models would be refitted to take core commands remotely, and at that time, Jeff wouldn’t even be able to enter a stadium without dying. Just being in a workshop would be dangerous. The only place he would be able to work around rigs would be in theoretical positions, such as design or teaching. Despites his grudge against the Kaya’s and his rants against the school, he had always seemed happiest when working on a rig; the lost of his arm seemed as metaphoric as it was physical.

“Well,” he said after a few moments, “I’ll head to a nearby cache of things that can distract the rig.” After saying that he seemed to chuckle inwardly. “There’s also meant to be a vehicle there, so with any luck the rig will think both of us are escaping. Here, take these also,” he said as he passed a pair of goggles and a grenade to her, “There should be another flasher and glasses in the cache, anyway. Just watch the phone; if you see the rig follow me, then make your move. Each of the shipping company’s hangers have one of these panels so if you need to hide they’ll do that.”

With that, he ran out of the hanger, clearly struggling to balance but pushing forward as fast as he could. When he was well outside of her vision, she ducked back into the hole and watched the screen. She could see the dot move in the direction that Jeff had run and could only wait. There was a crack of thunder, followed by the repeated sound of railgun fire, and the dot that represented the rig seemed to be moving off towards the edge of the map.

Knowing that it was her chance, Sam ran for it. She didn’t look up. She didn’t look at the phone. She did nothing but run. She could see the light of the airport doors reflecting in the snow and she spurred herself towards it.

Thud.

The rig landed in front of her, invisible but one the less present. Satou stood between her and the protection of the airport and it was starting to get to her. She could tell that he was about to speak, say something about how good he was, but she simply dropped the flasher and blindly ran forward. She didn’t know for sure where the rigs legs were, but she took a guess and rolled, using her short stature to its fullest advantage, and made it through behind the rig.

She made it into the airport; the warmth of the central heating greeting her like a friend. She would have given in and accepted the embrace it offered and slept had she not just taken a sleepless pill. Instead she went down to business and made her way to the lounge.

There were older model computers set in cramped rows with card slots to charge by the minute for use. The prices were enough to make even the most miserly of Telcos blush, but with no competition and a scarcity of resources, the internet access could be as expensive as the company liked. That hardly seemed to matter, as Sam pulled out the drive and plugged it in. As the computer’s antivirus software ran its checks, Sam started to look around. She noticed the lights dim and the other customers look about with looks of confusion and concern. A power outage would mean sitting in the dark and cold and was hardly the experience promised by the Kaya company when they hosted the events.

That was when the first person went down.

A businessman sitting near the window started to bleed, as if his skin simply didn’t want to contain its blood anymore. Those around him soon followed as by the time a dozen people had died, a black haze had become visible even in the flickering light. Satou had released the canister of particles into the airport; collateral damage be damned.

As the haze approached her, she shut her eyes and waited, once again at the mercy of Satou’s weapons. Once again, she was alive. She could see the particles clumped together on her skin, but she brushed them off, inert. Her skin was itchy, as if bitten from head to toe by mosquitoes, but she wasn’t bleeding out like the rest of the occupants. No, not all the occupants. There was a man dressed like a businessman, but with a stature that could only be described as childlike. Stunted growth, the most obvious indicator of a sleepless user. Like Sam, the stranger was alive, and like Sam, he had choses to cause serious issues with his growth and a lethal dependency in exchange for never having to sleep.

More importantly, they had stripped away their DC; made themselves entirely unable to control any formless particle-based technology. As she and Jeff had learnt, formless particles were a viral substance. The chemical reconditioning that sleepless caused, also granted immunity to the formless particle infection; she effectively had an immunity. Vaccination against the disease that was tearing apart the room.

With new confidence in her safety, Sam opened the drive and navigated to the distribution website. While she started the upload, she also started a recording of the scene around her. She wouldn’t let them get away with it.

“Satou Campbell has let loose a…”

Bang.

A gunshot sounded and fire spread through her chest, stopping her mid-sentence. A second sounded and the drive was destroyed. A third and the computer went with it.

Sam struggled to rise, turning slowly and shakily to see who had shot her. Seeing who had stopped her, tears started to roll freely down her face. A single word escaped her lips as she fell to the floor.

“Why”