Trans-Siberian Railroad — Siberian Range | August 8, 2011 | 23:45
The blizzard had been building for three hours and had reached the stage where the distinction between sky and ground was no longer meaningful.
The helicopter held fifty feet over the moving train, which required the pilot to do things with the aircraft that its design parameters had not anticipated and which he was doing anyway through a combination of skill and what Alen assessed as a fatalistic relationship with the possibility of failure. The rotor wash mixed with the horizontal snow into something that hit exposed skin like small rocks.
Alen adjusted his goggles. Thermal overlay. The train below was a heat signature against the white — seven cars, the armored cargo car fourth from the rear, the personnel car aft of that where the six Direct Action operatives he had been given were watching from the cabin behind him, none of them certain they understood why a blackout operation required six men when the target was a train rather than a facility.
They were good men. He had read their files. He had spent the past four hours wishing he could tell them what he had found in the Secure Archives seven months ago, and what he had told Hunnigan, and what they were actually flying into.
He had not told them. He was still working out whether anything he could do in the next forty minutes would change what Simmons had designed this operation to produce.
"Green light," he said, over the wind. "Go."
He slid down the rope first. The train roof under his boots was ice over steel — not a surface that expected to be walked on, not a surface that was going to cooperate. He detached the line and stabilized into a crouch and had the MP7 up before the second operative hit the roof.
They went through the roof hatch in sequence. He dropped first into a corridor of dark wood paneling and overhead lighting that belonged to a different century — this section of the train had been a first-class carriage before it became something else. Two guards in the corridor turned from the direction they had been watching, which was the wrong direction, and went down before either cleared their weapons from their holsters.
They moved. Car by car. The train's layout was consistent with the brief he had been given, which meant the brief had been accurate in at least this dimension, which was information about what dimension of the operation Simmons had built with real data.
Armored cargo car. The door was reinforced — the kind of steel that indicated someone had expected this car to need to resist something substantial. He directed the charge placement and stood aside as the operative set it.
The breach blew inward.
He entered first.
The mobile laboratory inside was cold — temperature-controlled, the kind of environment that maintained specific conditions regardless of the ambient temperature outside. Cryo-tanks along both walls. Server infrastructure running on its own power supply. In the center of the room, in a containment case under blue cold-light: a sample container marked with the Golgotha designation.
He looked at it.
Then he looked at the room. The size of it. The configuration of the cryo-tanks. The specific arrangement of the laboratory infrastructure.
It was too orderly. Research environments that were genuinely operating — with researchers, with ongoing experiments, with the process of scientific work actually happening — had a specific kind of productive disorder. Equipment used and returned to approximately but not precisely its correct position. Notes in multiple hands. The physical evidence of thought happening in real time.
This room had been arranged. Recently, by someone who understood what a mobile laboratory was supposed to look like.
"Something is wrong," he said. "Check every corner. Every vent. Now."
The point man was already moving to the ventilation shaft access panel when it opened from the inside.
The figure that dropped from the shaft landed in a crouch with the specific precision of someone who had practiced this exact movement. She was wearing red. Short black hair. The quality of stillness that preceded controlled violence.
Alen raised his weapon.
He had read the Ada Wong file. He had read it three times across different classification levels — the version in the public-adjacent operational record, the version in the Grayweather files, and the version that appeared in the Family's internal documentation as a designation rather than a person. He had also read the file that existed in the Family's archive under a different designation: Carla Radames, transformed April 2009, operational since 2010, deployed as the Family's principal covert asset under the Ada Wong identity.
The woman in red was not Ada Wong.
She was Carla Radames, wearing Ada Wong's face, wearing the identity that had been imposed on her against her will and which she had spent two years converting into a weapon aimed at the person who had done it to her. Alen knew this because he had read the Family's internal documentation carefully and because he was the kind of person who read things carefully.
He kept that information behind his expression.
"Don't move," he said.
She stood slowly. The smirk that appeared on the face of Ada Wong was one that Ada Wong would not have deployed in this situation, which was itself a data point about the person behind the face.
"Simmons sends his regards, Valkyrie," she said. Her voice had the quality of someone who had been using a borrowed voice for two years and had made peace with borrowing it.
She tossed the small sphere before he had completed his assessment of the situation. It hit the floor and did not explode — it hissed, a silver-grey aerosol releasing immediately in the confined space of the cargo car.
"Gas!" he said. "Masks up!"
The problem was that the masks — standard NBC, rated for known biological agents — had not been rated for whatever was in that aerosol, and the masks were in the personnel car aft, because the brief had specified the cargo car as secure. This was the gap. This was what Simmons had built the operation around: put the operatives in a space with a delivery mechanism for an agent their gear was not rated for.
He heard the point man make a sound that did not belong in a human throat.
He turned. The point man's jaw — Miller, his file had said, twelve years of service — was distorting in the specific way that the C-Virus produced in subjects without viral resistance: rapid morphological disruption at the cellular level, the virus rewriting the host's biological architecture toward the J'avo template at a speed that indicated an engineered release concentration rather than natural infection. The arm came next, extending and changing density and losing its human geometry.
Alen fired into his own operative. He did what the situation required, which was the worst thing this work had ever required him to do, and he did it with the precision that four years of training had built and he did not let himself think about the twelve years of service in the file while he was doing it, because thinking about it would cost time that nobody in this car had.
The aerosol hit his lungs. He felt it — the specific quality of a biological agent entering a respiratory system, the burning pressure of something that expected to begin rewriting what it found. He felt it, and then he felt something else: the Progenitor sequence in his cells identifying the intruder and beginning the response that he had been watching happen in crisis situations since the Nursery.
It was not comfortable. It was the specific discomfort of a system running at maximum output against a significant threat. He coughed blood. He stayed on his feet.
Carla watched him from the catwalk above — she had moved to the elevated position while he was dealing with the operatives, which was the correct tactical choice and which told him she had been observing his capabilities before this operation and had positioned herself accordingly. Her expression, on the borrowed face, was the expression of a scientist observing a result she had predicted but still wanted to confirm.
"The rumours," she said. Her voice was quiet and precise and carried the specific quality of someone talking to themselves more than to him. "Total Progenitor resistance. I wasn't certain it was possible. Simmons said the target was interesting. He was right."
One of the mutated operatives — he did not look at the name, could not afford to look at the name — swung what had been an arm and connected. The impact lifted him and he went through the compromised cargo door and was suddenly in the blizzard, the train moving under him and then not under him, the ravine below opening in the white dark.
He thought, on the way down:
Simmons knew exactly what was on this train. He built a sample acquisition cover for the C-Virus deployment. The operatives were expendable. I was the target. Carla was there to confirm the immunity data and report it. He didn't want me dead. He wanted to know what I am.
Then the ravine received him and there was nothing but the cold and the white and the sound of the train.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Chapter Thirty-Four follows...