01-Spark - 5. The Deal

Chapter 5. The Deal

Trapped.

I tried to move, but my arms and waist were fastened to the wall somehow, on either side of me. Carefully, mindful of the pain in my head, I looked down. Thick metal straps held me tight to the wall, two on both of my forearms and a single big one around my waist. They were what was keeping me upright and seemed to be part of the wall somehow. I struggled against them but they didn't budge. I was beaten, helpless, and before my eyes Andy was free to hack into the system, his hands flying over the keys of the final line of defense against intruders.

The alarm from earlier was silent now, and everything was eerily quiet but for the quick typing sounds Andy was making. I wondered how much time I had been unconscious. Probably not a lot. Andy still hadn't gained access to the genesis chamber, although it was only a matter of time before he did.

I looked around for possible weapons, or a way to free myself, but of course there was nothing close by. The one thing I had going for me was that Andy hadn’t realized that I had woken up, but since I couldn't break free it was useless. I was about to struggle again when there was a crackle of static and then a disembodied man’s voice spoke.

“Lake? You there?”

Andy stopped typing and reached for what looked like a radio communicator that had been set next to his work console. He grabbed it and pressed a button.

“This is Lake. Come in.”

“Finally,” the voice said. “Damn static, couldn't get through. Had to switch frequencies and change my stakeout place just to make it work. Peacekeepers are coming now, swarming like ants over the Plant. How many made it in with you?”

“Just me.”

“Gordon? Rogers?”

“Rogers is dead. I found him right outside the final door. I don't know about Gordon. He got shot and then we separated.”

“Shit! So you're there on your own?”

“Affirmative,” Andy answered.

“Well. Okay. Good thing you’re the code breaker. We’ve got almost twenty-four hours until the lockdown is lifted, if our intel is correct. More than enough time for you to kill the monster they got in there. Remember, I need proof it's done when I come down there for extraction. I'll move into position once it gets dark. No proof, no deal.”

Andy's voice changed almost imperceptibly. I heard a note of anxiety in it as he asked, “Dean is with you?”

The man snickered. “Still here, alive and well.”

“Put him on.”

“Oh, getting bossy, are we?”

“I'm alone in here,” Andy said, his tone threatening. “None of your dogs survived. If you want me to do this, let me talk to my brother.”

There was silence on the line, broken only by a few crackles of static. Just when I thought the man wouldn’t answer, the radio communicator came back to life and he said, “Fine. Two seconds.”

There the sound of shuffling, then somebody coughing as if he was choking.

“Dean?” Andy asked quickly.

“Andy!” A different voice answered him. It sounded young, and really scared. “Don't do it! They can't get at you there! Go to the Peacekeep—”

The sound was abruptly cut off.

“Dean? Dean, answer me!” Andy demanded, grabbing and then shaking the radio communicator.

“I said two seconds,” the first man’s voice said suddenly. “You heard him. He's fine. And you got a job to do, so you better hurry up and do it, before these damn Peacekeepers find me and take us all out. Extraction in twenty-three hours, with or without you. You better be there.”

“Son of a bitch! Bentley, listen to me! We don't have to go through with this! Let Dean go!”

A cry of pain coming from the communicator answered Andy's words.

“Dean!” Andy yelled helplessly.

“Twenty-three hours, Lake,” the man named Bentley reminded him, his calm voice contrasting with the fading sound of Dean's cry. Then the faint noise of static went dead as he cut communications.

Andy hit the console angrily with his fist, slamming it down and making the screen above flicker.

“Damn it!” he exclaimed.

Then he kept on typing. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but judging from the many error messages that were displayed on the screen at regular intervals, it wasn't going well. I tried to stay as still as possible, making no noise and thinking furiously. What could I do? The restraints were too strong for me to break, and my head was pounding still. My only hope was that the security measures would hold and keep Andy from accessing the inner chamber. Maybe if they lasted long enough the lockdown would be called off and reinforcements would be able to come and help. But that was a big maybe. I had to do something, anything, to try to stop him. I shifted again, stealthily, trying to see if the restraints would at least bend a little. Where had they come from? The setup of the metal bands reminded me more of a dungeon and far less of a scientific research station, which this was supposed to be. How had Andy managed to activate them? Maybe there was a key somewhere, a button I could press to get out.

“I know you're awake, Rick,” Andy said as he worked. “You can't break free from those. I made certain of that.”

I stopped. Then I decided to drop all pretense. “You can't do this, Andy. If you kill the source of spark then it's gone forever. There are no others.”

His typing slowed, but he kept on working as he answered me. “I know that. I also know that this entire city's power is based on an unfair advantage over the rest of the continent. Have you ever been to the Mainland?”

“Yes, I have.”

Andy stopped typing altogether and looked back at me, surprised at my admission. I saw there was dried blood on his upper lip, and the area around his nose looked swollen. Out of nowhere, I felt a pang of regret at having broken his nose like that. Then I remembered what he was about to do and I narrowed my eyes, meeting his stare with as much anger as I could muster.

“Oh, that's right,” Andy said, touching his nose gingerly. “Your fighting style is very similar to the way we're trained back home. So. You have lived among us, you have seen the way things are over there. We have no fancy subway trains like you do, none that are still operational at least. We are forced to heat our homes with firewood, but most of the trees are already dead. Thousands of people die every year, of trivial diseases that could be easily cured if only our hospitals had power for the diagnosis machines to activate again.”

“I know all of that,” I answered. “And I know the usual propaganda, too. I'm not stupid. I know that here we may still have modern technology, but it's failing slowly and nobody knows how to repair it. Twenty more years and we’ll probably be as bad off as all of you. I know that now we're better off than all the Mainlanders put together, but that doesn't change the fact that there is only one living source of spark left in the world. There aren't any others, and she hasn't laid an egg in more than a hundred years. Killing her so we're just as miserable as the rest of the continent is no solution. It is only an act of vengeance.”

Andy scowled. “The sooner we are all on equal footing, the sooner mankind can start rebuilding again.”

I sneered. “Do you really believe that political slogan bullshit? I thought you were smarter than that.”

“You don't know me!” Andy exploded, surging to his feet and knocking his chair to the floor in the process. “You don't know why I'm doing this, you don’t know me at all, so don't you dare get all righteous and try to convince me to back down. Okay? Just shut up!”

He had come closer to me, and in his outburst his nose had begun to bleed again a little.

“Why are you doing this, then?” I asked. Judging from the conversation I’d overheard, I could make an educated guess as to Andy’s motivation in all this. Nevertheless, the sincerity in my voice seemed to take Andy by surprise. He actually stopped to think about the answer, but then he scoffed dismissively.

“You wouldn't understand. You're just a Peacekeeper, a glorified cop who does what he's told to do.”

“At least I choose to follow orders and protect people,” I countered. “You just let others push you around and blackmail you into doing something you really don't want to do. Come on, you're not fooling anybody here. You're trying to talk yourself into killing an entire city! And don't give me that bullshit about being equal. You know perfectly well that we're too dependent on spark to live without it. You kill the queen, we all die. Slowly, but we die. Is it worth it? Is it worth killing thousands just to save one? What are they going to do to Dean if you don't keep your end of the barg—?”

He crossed the remaining distance between us before I had even finished speaking, balled his hand into a fist and punched me right in the gut to shut me up. Hard. I groaned involuntarily, and felt as if I were going to hurl, it was that painful. I fell forward, head hanging, held upright only by the restraints.

Andy's face was less than an inch from mine. “Don't you ever drag my brother into this, Islander,” he growled. “I didn't kill you, but you're making me regret it. Now shut the fuck up and let me work.”

I was still trying to get enough breath in my lungs to reply when Andy turned around and went back to his workstation. He set to work furiously, ignoring me completely. I slowly righted myself to stand fully upright again. I coughed, it hurt. Then I spat on the metal floor. My spit was tinged with red.

I realized something then. Andy was fully committed to this. He would kill me if I tried to stop him, I was sure of that now. Somehow, I had thought that this was the same horny but thoughtful guy I had met yesterday. A guy I actually felt safe sleeping next to. He wasn't. To him, his brother was worth his own life and the lives of the people of an entire city. It was obvious that he wasn't getting out of this alive, as well. That man, Bentley, had mentioned extraction out of this place, but I knew perfectly well that there was no way out of here once the security lockdown was in place. There was only one tunnel leading out, but when it was open it would be swarming with Peacekeepers and Andy would be killed. He was in this knowing it was a suicide mission. There would be no convincing him.

In spite of myself, I felt a grudging admiration for his bravery.

Andy worked, and the firewalls were knocked down one by one. Minutes passed. I began to sweat, since the air temperature in here was much higher than outside. I had heard that the queen needed to be in a warm place all the time, but I had never seen her. Almost nobody had. This cavern was off-limits to all but one or two senior scientists; probably the ones I had found dead outside. Peacekeepers could theoretically also come in, but none of us did. Nobody had needed to in the longest time. Everyone knew how everything down here worked, but there had never been a need for me or any other Peacekeepers to come to the actual genesis chamber. Now I wondered if I would only see the queen right before she was killed before my eyes, taking with her everyone else I knew.

Andy gave a triumphant yell. The firewalls were gone. He stood up, took out his falsified Peacekeeper's ID, and swiped it over the scanner. It was a near-perfect copy of my ID, and it reminded me of the fact that if I hadn't hooked up with Andy last night, maybe he wouldn't be here. I had let him use me, stupidly, and now I was paying the price of not having been more alert. I gritted my teeth, and waited for the final lock to be disabled.

There was an error sound instead.

“Welcome, Rick Dwight. Biometric and voice identification required.”

Andy tried again, as surprised as I was that the badge hadn't worked all the way.

“Welcome, Rick Dwight. Biometric and voice identification required.”

“What the fuck?” Andy said. “Really?”

He threw the counterfeit ID away and stood up. He turned to face me, wiping some sweat from his brow. The lower outlines of his eyes had gotten a dark, bruised look from his nose injury, making him look haggard and exhausted.

“I guess I was lucky I didn't kill you,” he said, coming closer. “My intel didn’t mention that there would be a final biometric check. I'm going to need your fingerprints and probably a retina scan. You can help me. Or I can simply take them.”

He produced a small switchblade from his pocket, and in spite of myself I felt a tremor of fear. The tired but determined look in Andy's eyes told me that he would get what he needed even if I refused. I thought of that sharp-looking blade digging into my eye socket to pop the eye out for the retina scanner, then severing the bloody optic nerve...

“I will help you,” I said. “Just take me to the console.”

Andy grinned. “You're going to jump me the second I remove the restraints.”

I met his eyes with the darkest glower I could muster. “You're damn fucking right I will.”

“Computer, request for detachable bioscan terminal,” Andy said loudly, not taking his eyes off me.

“Terminal active.”

Andy reached over my head, maddeningly within my range, but all I had to hit him with was my own head, and it hurt too much to risk another blow that could do nothing. As he leaned in very close, his arms inches away, I caught a whiff of him. He smelled like sweat and blood. If I hadn't been so angry, I might have been aroused.

Andy pulled something out from the wall, stepped back and showed it to me. It was a small tablet, already active and ready to scan. Andy saw my confused look and nodded.

“In case you hadn't noticed, this room is also a subject test laboratory,” he told me. “The wall you’re strapped against can be converted into an operating table with the push of a button. Occasionally, our intel tells us, the senior scientists need somebody to, um, 'interact' a little bit more directly with the queen. They bring them here, and experiment on them. Some of them they feed to her. Some others they let go to become wandering junkies out in the streets.”

“You're lying,” I said automatically.

Andy shrugged. “I don't need to. There's lots you don't know about how they keep your precious Island running in a comfort state you can no longer afford.”

Slowly, Andy ran the tablet over my face. I tried to look away, but the scanner picked up my retinas anyway and flashed green. Then he moved the scanner to my hand. I tried to close it into a fist, but Andy grabbed my upper forearm, dug his thumb into the inner groove of my elbow and somehow pressed a nerve that forced me to open my hand. The scanner flashed green again.

It was going to happen. There was nothing I could do about it.

“How did you find me?” I asked him, at least wanting to know how I had fallen for the fake romantic meeting he had set up the night before.

Andy looked up at me. He stopped scanning. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Yesterday night. Sex with you. How did you know I was a Peacekeeper? How the hell did you set me up so perfectly?”

The scanner beeped again when Andy dabbed a drop of my blood into a special receptacle. He took it from the corner of my mouth.

“I didn't find you,” he confessed, pressing a button on the terminal. “It was a coincidence. I just got lucky, I guess.”

“Don't bullshit me, Andy,” I said threateningly. “You're going to kill me anyway when this is done, so just tell me the damn truth.”

For a fraction of a second, Andy's look softened and I caught a glimpse of the guy I had met last night. Then his determination set back in and that guy was gone. “It's the truth, Rick. We already had fake IDs and everything was set up. I had no way of knowing where they were keeping Dean, and we hadn’t been issued any orders for that night except to blend in and draw as little attention to ourselves as possible. The order to attack today came this morning. I had been expecting for the attack to happen weeks from now. I already knew this was it; whether I won or lost I wasn’t going to see the light of day again after our mission started. So I decided to have fun for one night while I still could. That's when I met you.”

Despite our mutual anger, the look he gave me was steady and honest. Was he lying? Did he even need to? Somehow, his calm acceptance of death made his words ring true. He had nothing left to lose. I found myself nodding, but I wasn’t sure I believed him.

The scanner beeped again.

“Biometric check complete. Access to inner chamber granted. Please initiate access protocol with a voice command.”

Andy stepped away from me and shut the scanner down. “Computer, open the inner chamber,” he said. My heart sank.

There was a pause. Then, “Voice mismatch. Rick Dwight, please repeat your request.”

Andy's eyes narrowed as he realized what that meant. Despite everything else, I had to smile. The people who had designed this security system had been paranoid as hell with their redundant security measures. And now it had paid off.

I lifted my eyebrows at Andy. “Unless you have a voice replicator with you, it looks like you won't be able to open the door.”

The dark look Andy gave me was enough of an answer. He didn't have a replicator. He needed me to say the actual words or this entire plan would have been for nothing.

He took out his switchblade. Walked closer. His bloody nostrils flared as he spoke. “No. I've come too close. Open that door, Rick.”

I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

He walked close enough that he could press the edge of the switchblade against my throat. I was helpless, my arms bound to the wall no matter how much my muscles bulged with the effort of trying to break free. I felt the cold touch of the metal and was forced to stay still. I felt it bite into my throat, and then the faint warm trickle of a drop of blood running down my neck.

Andy's voice was a rough whisper in my ear. He was close enough that his stubble scratched my cheek.

“I'm not playing any games, Rick. Open. That. Door.”

I swallowed, felt my Adam's apple bob against the edge of the blade he was holding. I thought about giving in, but deep down I knew I just couldn’t do it. Not after Jane and what she’d taught me.

I hardened my gaze, knowing this would be my final answer, tensed my entire body and said:

“No.”

Andy stood where he was, right next to me, our bodies still close enough for me to feel the warmth coming from him. His deadly closeness could have almost been tender. I shut my eyes, waiting for the blade to bite deeper, for Andy to slit my throat and end it all. When I felt the slight increase in pressure against my neck, I knew it was coming.

Then Andy's hand, the one holding the switchblade, started trembling. It actually made it worse, as the blade began scratching against the already open wound on my neck, setting off minute stabs of red pain in my body. The trembling got stronger, and suddenly Andy was breathing fast like he was running out of air. I opened my eyes and saw the conflict playing out over Andy’s features, clear as day. And my life hung in the balance of his decision.

The tension held, grew, and became intolerable. Then suddenly. “Fuck!” Andy roared, his voice echoing off the walls, and he snatched the blade back from my neck. He threw it on the floor with every bit of strength he had and the sharp clang of metal on metal was, to my ears, the sweetest sound I had ever heard. “Fuck...” he repeated, but his voice broke this time. He stumbled backwards, unseeing, and landed heavily on top of the chair. He covered his face with his hands so I wouldn't see the tears that had been brimming from his eyes.

“Andy…” I began, not even knowing what I was going to say.

“I can't do it,” he told me, his face still covered. His voice sounded years younger now. “I can't do it, I can't kill you in cold blood or torture you to get you to open the chamber. I thought I could, I really thought I would be able to.”

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. We were silent for a long time while he got himself under control.

“I can’t make you do it. I don't know what's going to happen now,” Andy admitted eventually, and slowly lowered his hands, wiping some tears gingerly from his bruised face. “I'm not going to make it out alive, I know that. But Dean…” he choked on the name of his brother.

“Maybe we can help him,” I said carefully, sensing that this might be the opportunity I had been waiting for. Andy was a good guy; we could work together. If I could convince him that I could help him. “You didn't kill the scientists outside, did you?”

He shook his head. “That was probably Gordon. I don't know how he did it, or when.”

“So. You haven't done anything you can't undo,” I said, more relieved than I cared to admit about Andy not having killed innocent people. “I'll tell them as much when they dig us out of here. The other Peacekeepers will listen to me. And I can help you find Dean, too. It's not over yet, Andy. Work with me.”

He looked at me sadly and shook his head again. “You don't know Bentley. If it looks like I betrayed him, he will take it out on Dean. I saw what he did to one of the hostages they tortured for intel on the Island, a few days before we sailed. Bentley made him talk, but the hostage died minutes afterward. And Bentley laughed; he had enjoyed it. He's a monster, Rick. If I'm not there, or if I don't fulfill my part, Dean will pay.”

“But we can try,” I said, willing him to trust me, desperate for this unexpected opening to hold. “Let me go. I will help you, I swear. You're not a murderer, Andy. You just proved that to me right now when you wouldn’t torture me to get what you wanted. Let me help you.”

He seemed so vulnerable at that moment. I saw him think about it, searching my face hoping to find honesty there, and I met the gaze squarely. I saw him make his decision and stand up. He walked quickly to a panel on the wall beside me and brought out a small display. He punched in a code, and the restraints binding my limbs snapped open.

p>   Thank you very much for reading! I will be releasing weekly updates to this story (Mondays), so you can follow it if you would like to be notified when the next chapter  is posted.  If you've enjoyed it so far, please go ahead and give it a quick like so I can feel better about myself.  

The biggest thank you of all goes to my amazing editor Caz, whose professionalism and helpful feedback never cease to astound me.