Death Dealers

He was forced to stop when he encountered a hunk of reinforced concrete that was far too big to move. Baxter wished that he had the strength to shove such things aside or to flatten himself like putty and slip between the gaps. Hell, at this point, he would have been happy just to be able to see anything

Come on, Baxter, you’re a rocket scientist. Use your goddamn brain.

The trapped man ran his fingers along the flat surface, testing and touching it. He reached up, following the face of what seemed to be a wall. Fingertips jammed into the corner and Baxter winced as he pulled his hand back across the slope, feeling his knuckles scoured and abraded by whatever was there. However he could tell that there was at least a few inches more room in that gap. There was a section of rebar exposed on the ground, so he clamped both fists around it, pulling himself out of the crevice holding him tightly.

Tugging himself out was arduous and he could feel his slacks tugged, snagged. His back and shoulders, his stomach and chest, all felt the snarled hooks, the poking and gripping talons of what must have been a million little nails gouging at his naked skin. Finally he was loose. He slumped into the rut next to the flat slab.

It must have been a column. If it were wall, he’d have felt the seams between the cinder blocks.

If something could knock down a column that thick, then whatever had struck the building must have been incredibly powerful. He started pulling himself farther along. His legs were still in the crack behind him. Baxter had turned enough that his shoulders could get to their full breadth, his back pressed against the flat, smooth concrete behind him. He had to get his feet loose, and the snarls and splinters that bedeviled his chest and back were now ripping his slacks. One shoe was already gone and the other now popped off, snagged on some outcropping.

Baxter folded his knees to his chest, feet finally freed from the sandwiching weight he’d slithered away from. He let his legs extend beneath him, enjoying the relative roominess of his new prison. Here, he was able to breathe; he could reach down and up. The space ahead seemed to tilt slightly higher, broadening, giving him more than sufficient room to begin crawling anew, but Baxter wanted to wait, to catch his breath.

However he knew that waiting here until he gathered up more of his strength was just him not wanting to make the effort. This place was safe, it was cozy, but it was merely the illusion of comfort. He needed to get out into the open air.

Baxter rested his forehead against his wrist, swallowing. The rocket scientist was not a people person, living inside his skull most of the time, applying his formidable intellect to the calculations necessary to produce the kind of high-efficiency engines that would make the U.S. Navy’s missiles into the fastest things in the air. His latest effort had broken Mach 10 with a simulated 235-kilogram military-grade Pentolite warhead. At 7000 miles per hour, there were few things that could intercept such a projectile, especially given his comrade’s work on computer guidance and threat-avoidance algorithms.

Since Exocets had proved capable of devastating warships with warheads lighter by 70 pounds, the new design would be more than adequate to take on an enemy navy, everything up to an aircraft carrier.

That kind of math was a deeply internal thing; it was his haven, his safety. It was akin to this little slot underneath tons of rubble, a concrete shell that cradled and sheltered him in blissful darkness and silence. When dealing with other humans, he was much more at the mercy of prejudices, biases, illogic. The variables introduced in such interactions were not neat, tidy, like physics and mathematics. The laws of Newton were something he turned back to when the concept of networking was simply controlled madness and appeasing those without vision that penetrated down into the truth of reality.

Baxter couldn’t help but think of how he looked right now. Reduced to slacks that were shredded and torn, totally distressed, he looked like one of his childhood heroes. Disheveled, mousy-brown hair, long, scrawny limbs, barefoot and shirtless, Baxter was likely a dead ringer for a certain purple-trousered nuclear scientist, freshly awoken from his alter ego’s gamma-powered rampages. The rocket scientist regretted having gotten so far into science, though.

“Get moving,” Baxter barked to himself. He began squirming along. He set rocks to mark the distance he moved through the crawl space, measuring his height against the distance he moved, counting the seconds necessary to make such a journey. It took twenty seconds to crawl five feet, the distance from his shoulder to his foot, so he estimated his approximate position in the base.

Math was his refuge. He wished that he could rely on something more, something better, actual sight with which to measure, but at least the counting of seconds, the counting of lengths of his body, kept his mind occupied. With focus, he would not give in to fear and despair. Baxter knew that the best means of coping was to concentrate on what could be changed.

Slowly, surely, the space he crawled through grew larger, roomier. He laid himself flat on his belly, pausing and cradling his head between his forearms. Baxter let his thoughts drift to the sight of a man walking on coals of flame, with the caption “doable.” A contrasting image, another man walking on strewed children’s building blocks, was captioned “impossible.”

“Great,” he murmured. He rolled onto his side, finding all new misshapen rocks that poked and prodded his ribs. He grit his teeth, wishing for release.

Just one moment. I don’t care that the science sucks. Just one instance of gamma strength.

He pushed against the roof above him. Suddenly it began to shift and his heart rate shot into high gear. This wasn’t a delusion that he was somehow hefting the weight of the rubble atop him; it was panic in the horror that somehow he’d upset a delicate balance and was now going to crush himself into a fine paste.

“No!” Baxter screamed.

Light streamed down, burning his unaccustomed eyes. He folded up, waiting for the irresistible, implacable weight crushing his bones, squeezing the juices from him. Nothing came through, though. No pressure increased upon him; even through clenched eyelids, he could see the gleaming light of midday.

“We found him!” a voice shouted.

Baxter tried to open his eyes, but the sun was too bright. He could only squint, but gloved hands hooked under one of his arms, dragging him to his feet.

“Dr. Baxter?” He heard the voice in his left ear.

“Yes,” he answered, coughing. The ground felt wobbly beneath him. “Yes, I’m Robert Baxter.”

“We found him!” someone shouted again.

“You’ll be all right,” the man told him, draping something over his shoulders. The ravages upon his back and shoulders were not too rough that he couldn’t tell a blanket. It was unusual to feel so bare and cold in the desert, but it was winter. The winds were brisk, whipping around him.

“We’re getting you on a helicopter, sir,” the man added, guiding him along. He tried to get a better look at the soldier helping him out. Stark shadows showed over the man’s face, down the length of his body. This wasn’t the light of the sun and he remembered, before the churning darkness, that it was night when the explosions rocked the testing facility. Even so, he kept walking.

This was a nighttime rescue.

“How did you find me?” Baxter asked.

“You have a subcutaneous RFID chip embedded in your skin,” the soldier told him, helping him step up and onto a helicopter. Baxter felt the cushions compress beneath him and he leaned against the back of his seat. The knowledge of a chip in his body stunned him, he couldn’t remember when he would have had such a device introduced, unless it was part of the physical he’d had.

“Rob?”

Baxter could barely make out the sound of his name being spoken, had only a hint of what the voice sounded like, but even through the rumble of the helicopter’s engines and the slap of rotors against the air, he could tell it was a woman speaking to him. He forced his eyes open wider, looking to see another bundled figure sitting across from him inside the cabin of the aircraft.

Her normal flip now hung down, stringy and matted, from sweat and distress. Her blue eyes were veined in red, bags hanging beneath them. And yet the sight of Beatrice Chandler, the computer wizard whose guidance systems were the other vital ingredient in the Mach 10 missile prototype, still stirred Baxter’s feelings. As worn out, as out of sorts as she was, she was a beautiful, wonderful sight. His heart tripped, skipping a beat, and he reached out a hand to hers. She wrapped her delicate fingers around his. “Bea!”

Baxter turned to the soldier who’d guided him into the helicopter, then nodded toward the seat next to the woman.

“Go ahead!” the soldier shouted over the din of the chopper.

Baxter switched seats and snuggled against her. He lifted a part of his blanket, like a mother bird extending her wing, and enclosed Chandler’s shoulders, pulling her closer to him. Her hair was stiff and salty with sweat, but he still kissed the dome of her head, still pressed his cheek against her greasy locks. She slid one arm around his waist, laid one hand on his chest.

For a man who didn’t have much in terms of people skills, the contact between his body and hers was a godsend. Beatrice was a fellow scientist. She, too, lived a life of order, of logic and reason, and for that very reason, he could never feel alienated by her, never be betrayed by a sudden shift of whimsy.

“What happened?” Beatrice asked into his ear, the caress of her lips so close and intimate it distracted him from the situation at hand. Chandler had asked him a question, though, and as a scientist it was Baxter’s duty, his drive in life, to provide an answer to any question to which he could respond.

“The base was attacked. Something moving at a similar velocity to our prototype design, perhaps several, penetrated the testing center’s antiballistic defenses,” Baxter replied. “I was in Radar Twelve, calculating the velocity and course of our test motor when one of the first struck.”

Chandler looked up at him, her blue eyes wet and welling with tears. “You’re hurt.”

Baxter looked down at his chest, noting the crisscrosses of crimson lines, as if some inept, maddened artist had tried to add detail to him with a red marker. “Fortunately when the roof came down, I was placed such that I would not be crushed. Unfortunately conditions conspired so that any passage I made necessitated the shedding of clothing.”

Chandler managed a weak smile and then rested her head against the crook of his neck.

It was so comfortable with her this way, Baxter almost didn’t notice the soldier’s movements across from him. The man pulled a hypodermic needle from a small box in his lap.

Now, inside the chopper, with the interior lights of the aircraft providing clearer illumination, he was able to ascertain the appearance of the man. The attention to detail that grew from his intellect and aspirations to being a rocket scientist showed him that the camouflage pattern worn by this infantryman was all wrong for the Naval Weapons Testing Institute’s uniforms. If this was someone from outside the Navy, perhaps an Air Force pararescue team, then why were the patches on the man’s sleeves so studiously identical to the normal naval infantry assigned to the base?

Also, he noted, the features of the man were Chinese, not Caucasian. Baxter thought back, trying to recall inflections of the soldier’s English, seeking out further incongruities.

“Who are you?” Baxter asked, stiffening. He was now on full alert. Though he sat straighter, he knew it was nothing more than the bluff of an animal making itself seem larger to deter predators from attacking. Strength ebbed from his limbs, what musculature there had been already strained to the limits by crawling through the cracks in the rubble of the collapsed Radar Twelve center.

“We’re taking you somewhere safe,” the soldier with the hypo stated. “Now, I’ll be putting this in you just to keep you calm. There’s no point in allowing you to be distressed for the upcoming journey.”

“To where? China?” Baxter asked.

The soldier smirked. “What gave it away?”

“The digital camouflage,” Baxter said.