Sean Ellis - Callsign - King

Brainstorm’s probability assessment was wrong; she wasn’t stalling. In truth, there was nothing she could do.

Brainstorm wasn’t finished. “In order to expedite your research, access to the guest level had been rescinded.”

“Are you saying we can’t leave this room?”

“Affirmative. How you choose to employ your time is at your discretion. However, results are required. You will be supervised from this point forward. Furthermore, your progress will be reviewed in thirty-six hours. If it is determined that you are unable or unwilling to achieve the desired results, you will be terminated.”

Thirty-six hours, Sara thought. That was how long she had left to live. And maybe all the time left for the human race.

King hung suspended beneath the fluttering cells of a black stealth-parachute, falling gently out of the African night sky. He had decided to infiltrate the remote compound using a high-altitude, high-opening (HAHO) jump, instead of the high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) jump that Chess Team usually favored, for the simple reason that HAHO would afford ample opportunity to adjust his plan as circumstances on the ground dictated. As King glided across the sky, with the prevailing wind at his back, and now some sixty horizontal miles from where he’d left a perfectly good airplane, he watched the real-time video feed, supplied by the Predator drone that was presently circling the target, and relayed to the display in his night-vision goggles.

For all he could tell, the compound might have been abandoned. There was no sign of a security force. In fact, more than twelve hours of surveillance by the team’s personal satellite and UAV had shown no exterior activity whatsoever. In a way, that made a lot of sense. If Deep Blue’s idea about a global metacorporation was anywhere close to the truth, then absolute secrecy would be imperative. The more people that knew about something-whether mercenaries hired to protect it or food service workers brought in to feed everyone-the more chance there was for that cloak of secrecy to slip away.

King just hoped that Deep Blue was wrong about the whole thing being run by a sentient supercomputer; the last thing he wanted was to run up against an army of killer robots.

Still, if it came to that, he was ready. Slung from one shoulder was a FN Herstal SCAR H heavy combat assault rifle, outfitted with the FN40GL enhanced grenade launching module. His load-carrying vest held nine spare 20 round magazines of 7.62 X 51 mm ammunition for the rifle, along with five M433 high-explosive dual-purpose grenades and five M576 “Beehive” buckshot rounds, either of which could be used in the FN40GL. For more intimate acts of violence, he also carried a SiG P220 Combat pistol outfitted with a suppressor, and a black KA-BAR straight-edge knife. He also carried a satchel full of C-4 and detonator caps, useful for everything from door breaching to large scale demolitions.

The prodigious weight of his combat load was partially offset by the switch from the traditional Kevlar and porcelain plate body armor, to an experimental dilatant liquid body armor suit, which he wore under his black BDUs. The garment, which looked and felt like a neoprene wetsuit, utilized a shear thickening fluid, sandwiched between two layers of durable Kevlar fabric. When a ballistic projectile struck the garment, the fluid instantly became rigid, preventing penetration and dispersing the energy of impact, but under normal circumstances, it allowed a full range of movement and relatively little discomfort to the wearer. King also sported a black hockey helmet, which had been augmented with dilatant filled pads, to afford protection from both bullets and impact trauma.

It was never possible to be prepared for everything, but King didn’t think there was much that his unknown enemy would be able to throw at him that he couldn’t deal with, even killer robots.

He checked the UAV feed one last time and then switched his goggles back to night-vision mode. The display didn’t change that much. He was very close. He steered his chute into a corkscrew spiral and a few seconds later pulled hard on the toggle wires, flaring the chute to drop feather light onto the roof of the villa.

Despite Deep Blue’s best efforts, King knew absolutely nothing about what lay just below his feet. The house had been heavily insulated, resisting every form of remote sensor scan, and because it wasn’t supposed to exist, there were no architectural blueprints on record. King was going to have to search the house, room by room.

He chose to make his entry through a second-story window on the west end of the house. He rigged up a hasty rope belay, with one end tied around a vent pipe on the roof, and lowered himself down the side of the house, just to the right of the enormous opening. The curtains were drawn on the other side of the glass, but his goggles did not detect even a trace of light from beyond.

King scanned the glass visually and then swept it with a portable RF detector. The latter device was designed to pick up even the smallest fluctuations in the ambient electrical field, such as might come from alarm sensors and security cameras, but the needle on the meter did not quiver. Cautious nevertheless, he tapped the tempered pane with the hilt of his KA-BAR until it finally cracked. He carefully pulled away the broken window in large sections, pushing them into the house’s interior rather than letting them fall to the ground outside, and then crawled through.

The space beyond was enormous, and King soon realized that it was the sitting area for what was essentially a small apartment, or perhaps a guest suite. As expected, the room was unoccupied. In fact, it was completely devoid of furnishings and looked as if it had never been used. But the sensitive optics of his night-vision device did reveal a strip of bright light streaming in from under the exit. He switched off the night vision, and pushed the eyepiece up onto his helmet, where it would continue to transmit live video to Deep Blue. With his P220 at the ready, he eased the door open.

Beyond lay an empty hallway, illuminated by a single overhead light, blazing from a decorative fixture. Three doors, similar to the one through which he had just passed, lined the hall before it opened up onto a broad staircase landing. King stole forward and opened the next door down the line.

As soon as he entered, he knew that Sara had been in this room. He could smell the distinctive fragrance of her favorite soap and hair care products. Because of her SDD, Sara had to be very picky about perfumes and other scents in her bath products, and that unique combination of organic ingredients was unmistakable. But his excitement was short-lived; Sara might have been here earlier, but now she was gone.

He crept back into the hallway and tried the next door.

Here too there were the distinctive odors of human occupation, though none as evocative as Sara’s fragrance. But unlike the other suites, this room’s inhabitant was still there. A gray-haired Caucasian man sat calmly on a sofa in the front room, intently studying the display on a smartphone and evidently oblivious to the intrusion.

King checked his impulse to simply dispatch the man then and there, and instead cleared his throat. The man looked up and what little color there was in his pale face drained away.

“Put the phone down and keep your hands where I can see them,” King instructed in a level voice

The man complied without saying a word.

“Very good. You get to live a little longer. Now, who the hell are you?”

“It seems like I should be asking you that question.”

King triggered a silenced round and a neat hole appeared in the upholstery, three inches to the right of the man’s shoulder. “Try again.”