The door opens. A red light blinks off. A button gets pressed. John's heart skips a beat, but doesn't stop, nor does it go shooting up into overdrive. Nothing happens. John closes the door behind him and stands in front of the Hood, to all appearances, the calm and taciturn Captain Nathaniel Nixon reporting in to his boss.
Captain Nixon's boss pulls a small device out of his pocket and hits a button once, twice. He glances down at it briefly and then tosses it aside. He meets John's gaze and there's an ironic twist of a smile. "I suppose that's proof enough that you've done it, then."
"Yes, sir."
"You wouldn't believe me if I said I didn't want to have to kill you, I take it?"
John shakes his head. "I think you've only ever done what you want."
The Hood chuckles. "I think you'll find we have that in common."
This is something worth thinking about, but John's always thought fast. "I think you're right," he agrees, and then his arm draws back along an elegant axis, parallel to the floor, and punches the Hood solidly in the face.
And EOS has always had an elegant sense of comedic timing.
network:{GDFSECURE}
[
user:admin14755
password:*****************]
[[/SYSTEM:SUBBASEMENT1/MAIN-SERVER-BANKS/LIGHT-CONTROL]]
{access-level: admin!emergency clearance}
: (access)
user:admin14755
password: *****************
[[GLOBAL OVERRIDES: POWER-DOWN
Emergency Lights: FALSE
Generator backup: FALSE
Security lockdown: FALSE]]
The server room is two storeys below ground, and the entire chamber plunges into pitch darkness, and amid the startled cries from IT technicians and engineers, there's muffled cursing and the sound of a body hitting the floor.
So John's effectively punched the Hood's lights out.
[[CONNECT: Display Interface Camera 1, Camera 2
Composite Field: Stereoscopic
LOAD FILE:
ExtractData: dimensions!linear, X, Y, Z
Extracting: »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»
Extracting: »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»
Extracting: »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»
Extracting: »»»»»»
Extracting:
Complete
RENDER: Wireframe
Scale: 1:1
Opacity: 70%
RGB: 40FF40
In John's field of view, an outlined schematic of the room around him flashes into being, and bright green traces walls and doors and the bigger pieces of furniture, but he's already sprinting down the last clear path he remembered, towards the nearest door.
It hurts to punch people in the face. John's entire hand feels like it's exploded and he's biting off curse words and fighting the urge to cradle his fingers against his chest, because he needs his good hand free. "I think I broke something," he mutters, and the audio pickup in the bottom corner of his vision flares with every word. "Ow."
» You're supposed to keep your thumb out.That explains it. "Great."
» It's the main point that comes up when you cross-index a search about punching."Noted."
There's no time to wonder how and why she bothered to search that. John fumbles the glasses off his face and clumsily stuffs them in a pocket. His display fritzes out for a moment and then comes back brighter and clearer, no longer experiencing interference from another hologram. The door straight ahead of him [15 meters] leads into the wireframe image of a stairwell, leading upward [Sub-basement 1, Basement, Main floor].
» I've mapped your path upward and out. The nearest exit is 30 meters up, and 226 meters to the north."I'm gonna to need left and right. Did you only kill the power to this room?"
» So far. Up the stairs, out the door, then left. Don't punch anyone else.Even as the words fade from view, John halfway body-checks someone, stumbling helplessly through the dark, across his assigned path. He sends the other party crashing to the ground with a pained yelp and staggers himself, nearly trips on some miscellaneous piece of furniture.
He manages to keep his feet and throws a hand out to catch the wall, looming up in front of him. Even with the schematic in front of his eyes, he fumbles along the smooth surface until he finds the edge of the door and its handle.
John wishes he weren't so aware of his heart pounding, but it's probably going to be a while before that stops.
The door opens and casts a bright square of light behind him, the white lights of the stairwell. John's silhouetted for a moment against a square of white, and then he slips through and the door slams shut behind him. He sags against it and needs to take a few deep breaths, needs to let his eyes adjust, and figure out where he's going next.
LOAD FILE:
DISPLAY: dimensions!linear, X, Y, Z
RENDER: Wireframe
Scale: 1:1
Opacity: 85%
RGB: 000000
The view in front of his eyes goes from faint green to dark, black lines, outline the stairwell above him, and tracing the undersides of the upward floors. EOS has added a helpful line of red, circling up the staircases, disappearing through a door overhead, out onto the main floor. "I want the whole base shut down. Can you do that?"
» Yes."Everything. Security, power, whatever systems you can get into. I want…make a mess. There need to be bigger problems than the fact that I'm gone. Make them sorry they ever took you." That last part, maybe, he didn't need to say, but it's how he feels. He wonders if it's how she feels too, but before he can think to ask, she kicks him back on track.
» Have you stopped running? The frequency for your GPS tracker shows you somewhere in New Zealand, but I know that's not true, so I have triangulate off your proximity to wireless access points. You've stopped. Keep going.Oh. Right. "Sorry." John's moving for the stairs as this scrolls across his field of view, and he starts up them, long legs taking two at a time, and then swinging around the corner of a landing as—
There's an impact against the door and John's heart lurches, frantic and flashing back to a childhood of being chased. Through dormitories, through schoolyards, there'd been packs of them at the worst of times, and the only thing you can do is keep running, except John stops, jackrabbit-still. He freezes at the sound of the door opening and his gaze through the spaces between the risers of the stairs is caught on the gray metal door.
Darkness doesn't spill into the room the same way light had behind John, but the Hood's still a dark shadow in the too bright light of the stairwell. John's thrown a punch maybe twice in his life, and this one clearly hadn't been hard enough. Or maybe he's just not good at punching. His hand still throbs as he starts to scramble up the stairs again, grabbing the rail and hauling himself upward. "Lights!" he hisses, even as the Hood's feet start to pound up the steps behind him.
The stairwell plunges into blackness and John stumbles and catches himself on the landing with a pained shout as broken fingers hit cement. There are only two more flights of stairs, and at least he has an idea of where he's going, but the blackness is disorienting and there's heavy breathing and pounding footsteps behind him, as he staggers upright and reaches the next staircase.
»You're okay, John. Keep going.This isn't better. John doesn't know how well the Hood can see in the dark, but by the way his footfalls pound on the stairs behind him, it's clearly not slowing him down like John had hoped. The Hood breathes like an angry bull and if he could spare the breath, John's sure the man would be shouting, screaming threats and insults. All John can do is run.
There's nothing for it. He continues to scramble upward, following the bright red thread at his feet, closing the distance to a softly glowing green door, tantalizing overhead.
He'd swear the breathing behind him is getting louder, and John sucks air through teeth clenched against pain and terror. In the upper left corner of his vision, faintly visible text flickers past as EOS trawls and scrapes through GDF systems. Somewhere, alarms begin to sound. One at first, then others, different whining pulses and blasting klaxons, some near and some far. In the stairwell, a firebell starts to sound, and John swears he can feel it ringing silver blows down onto his nerves.
John's not cut out for this. He can't hear the sound of footsteps behind him, can't hear ragged, bellows-breathing, can't hear anything but pure, raw sound of the sort designed to make people stop what they're doing and panic and run. He reaches the last landing, and the door in front of him, when a hand reaches out and claws the back of his leg.
John yells and kicks out reflexively, connects with a crack of bone and is answered with an infuriated shriek of pain. There's another grasping lunge, and fingers, clawed, snag and tangle in his pantleg, almost trip him again, but instead send him stumbling against the door. John manages to catch the handle, entirely disregarding the pain in his hand and shoving it open, the blindingly bright first floor of the building.
And it's crowded. John can't tell if he's thankful to see the floor bustling with GDF personnel, mostly administrative and tech staff, milling around and in a state of vague disorder. So far most of what EOS has gotten into have been minor systems, lights and alarm systems and wireless data. He can see red flashing in the upper right corner, as EOS encounters denser, trickier security.
The door is to his left, northward, and John's lucky for his long legs, eating up distance as he keeps himself from sprinting, forces himself to maintain a brisk, non-urgent walk. Try to look like you're going somewhere, try to look busy and important, carry a clipboard and wear a lab coat and just look like you know what you're doing. It's just psychology. His hand is heavy with pain, hanging at his side, and he nearly jumps out of his skin as the door at the top of the stairwell bangs open again. But he can't turn around, can't do anything but walk, briskly, towards the door.
EOS, helpfully, brings up a security camera feed in the corner of his eye and John can suddenly see himself, walking briskly towards the door, wearing his own face. There's a pair of glasses stashed in his jacket pocket and he's visibly pale. Behind him, the Hood is still wearing Rothesay's face, but there's a river of red dripping down his collar and his expression is twisted and horrid and wrong, blazing with insanity as he bulls through the crowd. From the strange, dual vantage point, John can see people recoiling out of his path, though no one stops him. The distance between them continues to close.
John's heart hammers in his chest. There are soldiers on the door with guns, a red line leading right up to them, his only line out, blocked. There's a madman behind him, and the room is full of sound and the quiet, murmuring anxiety of people who don't want to be here any more than he does. And for whatever John had said, denying his only older brother, it is PTSD. And this place looks too much like the hospital and he hurts and he's frightened.
John's always made the most sense to EOS as a collection of data, and newly, she has a lot of it. She has his heart rate, his respiration, the way his eyes won't stop darting everywhere, the way his fingertips with their electromagnetic fields won't stop twitching. The way he's stopped talking. The way he's stopped. She has access to the diagnostic tools to recognize the leading edge of a panic attack.
» John. Don't stop. Keep going."I can't."
» Trust me. Just do what I tell you. I'm a million times smarter than you are. We'll be fine. Trust me.John doesn't know what to do.
EOS, thankfully, does.