James Knapp - The Silent Army

“No guns!” Penny yelled.

I lunged and hit the bridge of his nose with my forehead. Blood spattered down my cheek and into one eye as he pulled away. Before he could recover, I stuck the gun in his face.

“Don’t,” I said. He stood, bent over, with one hand still in his coat. Blood ran in steady drops from one of his nostrils.

“Let him go,” Penny said. Zoe was staring, her face white and her eyes wide. She looked afraid but also excited.

“Throw it in the tub,” I said to the guy. Penny smirked as he drew his pistol, then tossed it into the water. It disappeared with a splash beneath the bubbles.

“You won’t make it,” she said.

“We’ll see.”

“I could still fish that gun out and shoot you, you know.”

“Then do it.”

I wiped blood from my mouth and stepped over the man I’d shot. Blood was pooling around his leg.

“It’s better this way,” Penny called after me. “You know what happens if they make it to shore.”

I left the two sitting in the hot tub, and as I headed down the hall I heard the television come back on. Soldiers chattered over a radio while helicopter rotors wound up for flight. In the hallway, I began to run.

Alice, change of plan with the MSST.

What do you mean?

The team can’t go in. I need them to get me on the boat, then wait for the extraction.

Why?

Just do it.

Primary systems initializing. It was the first thing I saw in the darkness. Information scrolled at my peripheries, and I watched as feeling began to return. They listed the fallout from the failure of my assassination attempt.

Bone repair/replacement. Armored plating replacement. Complete transfusion. Spinal repair. Organ replacement. Any one of those items was expensive. I was surprised that Fawkes had ordered them done, when surely a new revivor was cheaper.

With consciousness, my field of memories returned.They coalesced into their well-known clusters, reforming the shield between me and the void. While not technically alive, I was not lost. I didn’t really care why.

One of the memories, the one that kept coming back, rose from the field. I was back in the interrogation room before my death, before I’d made detective. The street woman was with me.

“Name?” I’d asked her.

“Noelle,” she said. “Noelle Hyde.”

“Look, if you want a lawyer—”

“I won’t need one,” she said, not looking up from the table. “I won’t go to jail.”

I remembered feeling pity for her then. She didn’t know how much trouble she was in. The man would live, but the stabbing was brutal.

“What you did was attempted murder, Noelle,” I said. “You’re going to jail.”

She shook her head.

“I wish I was. They might not be able to get to me there. That’s why I’ll never go.”

I sighed, not sure what to do. Could she be schizophrenic?

“Who is ‘they’?”

“I was supposed to stop him,” she said, “I just wanted to stop him.”

“Who told you to stop him?” I asked, but she wouldn’t say. She just stared at the table.

“Samuel Fawkes is a dangerous man,” she said.

“He’s some engineer at Heinlein Industries. The man is not dangerous.”

She looked up to meet my eye. “Things change,” she whispered.

The memory closed and fell back into the field. Had I just seen Samuel Fawkes’s killer?

I willed my fingers to move, and each of them responded. I was able to wiggle my toes as well. Whatever damage was done, they’d repaired the worst of it.

Removal of invasive bone splintering into soft tissue. Two node power cells replaced and rewired. Dermal patching (Four percent). As the checklist drifted by, I thought about what I’d seen. I remembered that woman. Someone had posted her bail, and just like she insisted, she never saw the inside of a jail cell. We turned up pints of her blood, but no body.

“Faye?” The voice came from near my ear. I opened my eyes and saw his face near mine.

“Lev.”

“Can you move?” he asked.

“Yes.”

I sat up on the steel tray, where blood had pooled and thickened like black jelly. A dermal graft ran the length of my torso, from my sternum to my crotch. Two revivors in white coats stood beside me, aprons spattered and soiled. Chrome surgical tools lay in pans of water, turned inky gray from the blood. Other pans contained fragments of yellowed bone and chunks of preserved, gelatinized tissue.

“I thought maybe you were gone for good,” Lev said.

I looked around me to find out where I was. The metal tray was in some kind of large hold where flood lamps had been set up. Beyond them it was all shadows that danced within a soft, electric moonlight. It was sourced from thousands of tiny pinpricks that flickered all around the walls of the hold, where dark shapes stood motionless. I realized then what it was I was seeing: the points of light were the eyes of revivors. Thousands of them stood waiting inside the hold, their eyes jittering as if in some mass dream.

“I’m on the ship,” I said.

“Yes.”

Some were hairless; some were not. All of them were nude and desexed. Black veins bulged and squiggled under waxy skin; they had all been in stasis for a long time, and it had taken a toll.

They were of all different races and colors, male and female, young and old. They clutched pistols and rifles to their bare chests, eyes staring up at nothing. I’d never seen so many.

“Can you stand?” Lev asked.

My diagnostics hadn’t finished running, but my central nervous system was intact. Needle-prick jolts went through my muscle tissue as I moved to the edge of the metal tray. My arms were slow to respond, especially the left one, but I managed to climb down onto the floor. The deck was cold and wet under my bare feet. A limbless torso lay a foot from Lev’s feet, part of an old revivor. There was a cavity beneath the rib cage where parts had been harvested for my repair.

“Not all of them were fully functional,” Lev said. “They were only good for parts.”

“You could have stripped me and repaired them instead.”

“I didn’t.”

Even though I was long dead, the sight in the hold triggered a certain dread. It was really happening. The whispering from the dormant revivors had become soft and distant since I was so far from shore, but I could already feel them growing stronger. The ship was getting closer.

“You said something as you woke,” Lev said. “Did you remember something?” I nodded.

“I think I know who killed Fawkes,” I said.

“They ordered it. He knows that.”

“I don’t think they did,” I said. The flickering of their eyes was hypnotic. “I don’t think that they meant for this to happen.”

“…they might not be able to get to me there. It’s why I’ll never go.”

“You never heard the name Samuel Fawkes.”

I’d actually processed one of Ai’s people. With no idea who she was, I had actually arrested the woman. I’d arrested her for trying to kill Fawkes, but it didn’t sound like Ai had ordered it. It was just the opposite; she had actually been killed for what she’d done.

“They wanted to avoid this,” I said. This wasn’t just about Fawkes or Zhang’s Syndrome. There was something else that predated either. Something they were afraid of.

I thought back to the conversation I’d seen, watching from outside the restaurant that night.