For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

March 17, 2031

Thirteen years after events in Tajikistan

Bao-Zhi drifted.

With his arms extended, he undulated the webbing between his fingers and felt the flow of the current. Letting the river carry him and his team along was a welcome change. A typical mission usually involved critically tight schedules and it took a lot of effort just to move around undetected. As a result, he was unaccustomed to being able to relax like this. The downtime gave him time to reflect, and he allowed the gentle swells and ebbs of the current to slip him into something like a meditative state. This was the closest thing he knew he would ever find to peace - small moments of quiet like these. So as he flowed through the aquatic environment he drank in what he could.

Then he filed it away in his memory for his final days. He knew there would be no golden years for him. He would not spend his last days in the quiet of a well-earned retirement. There would never be a warm home filled with the tiny footsteps of children.

No, Bao knew that his end would most likely be very different, filled with pain, fear, and desperation. Unlike those who were fortunate enough to be ordinary, he would not spend his last moments surrounded by family. His only companions in death would be the kind of aching loneliness and loss only known by those who perish alone.

That thought, and the inevitable chain of self-recriminations that always followed melancholy, were abruptly cut short by the soundless click of his neurolytic comm. The alien input of his team mates’ senses streamed into his mind. It slammed and jangled across the taut strings of his thinking like a chorus of broken instruments or shrieking animals. Unlike the other “gifts” he and his team had received from the state, human neurology was not adaptable to this kind of input. So a series of secondary systems kicked in to filter and tune the flood of sensations down to something he could process. Slowly, it dampened and smoothed itself out, eventually gliding over his perceptions until it felt like the cool skin of a woman’s caress.

Bao turned his attention on the curved and mossy surface looming ahead. He knew he had to time this right and would not get a second chance. They had all learned at the last bridge that the current here was swift, precluding anyone from swimming upstream regardless of skill or physical prowess. If he miscalculated, he would simply slide off or bounce away. That would leave Two to lead the team in completing this part of the mission, and Bao would have to rendezvous with them downstream.

In all the time they had been together as a unit Bao had never let his team down, and he wasn’t about to start now. So he monitored the proximity readings in his peripheral vision as they cycled rapidly down to zero.

Then, in a carefully timed, but seemingly casual gesture, he reached out and pressed his right palm to the green slimed surface as it slid by. Instantly, his hand adhered to the underlying concrete and the current swung him around. Pressing his left palm to the surface gave him a second point for leverage and he used that to press the balls of his feet to the structure. Clinging there like an underwater spider, he paused for a moment to focus on the extraneous streams of information still coursing over his brain. Through his teammates senses he observed as they grasped and clung to the massive bridge support.

Then he keyed open his comm and coded out their orders.

A single click from each of them was the only acknowledgments he received. Four, Five and Six swung the watertight packs on their backs around to their chests and began quickly assembling equipment. Two and Three rose silently to the surface like ghosts, and barely left a ripple as they allowed only enough of their heads to rise out of the water to allow them to see. Then with as much speed as was possible while still remaining carefully adhered to the bridge support, they scanned the shorelines for hundreds of meters in both directions. A quick skim of their shared perceptions told him that there was no movement or body heat visible.

Then Three stiffened slightly, and Bao felt a short, controlled burst of tension leap across their connection.

But he knew that she needed no guidance, and so he kept his silence as she detached a small sphere from her side and carefully adhered it to the bridge above the water’s surface. A half second later an invisible beam of light stabbed across the water to focus in on a surveillance camera above a riverside restaurant. The intensity of the light driven into the camera lens caused massive diffraction, and ensured that any viewer would see nothing but bright white haze.

The tiny laser had enough power for thirty minutes, and that was more than enough to ensure they would be many kilometers away before the camera’s eye could see again.

Then Two signaled an ‘all clear’ through her comm, and in response the rest of the team rose swiftly to the surface. With military precision they unloaded the underwater skiff they had been towing. From within its watertight hold came tools, equipment, explosives, and a climbing device they had termed ‘the grappler’. A black and sinister looking thing, it had an angular body and long spindly legs that the team adhered to the bridge support. Once it was secure, Six connected a pitchfork shaped head to the device, detached the trigger, and sent the signal that they should move to a safe distance.

On her cue the team sank silently back beneath the surface to a safe depth and she triggered the grappler. A deep, powerful thud sent a pressure wave through the water as the serrated spikes rocketed upwards into the bottom of the bridge’s lower deck. With a muffled thump, two of them embedded themselves less than 30 centimeters from each side, and the third sank deeply into the structure’s center. Rising back to the surface, the team split into pairs and moved swiftly to connect speed winches to each line. Seconds later they clipped themselves on, and figures rose from the moonlit water looking like men and women, but moving with the kind of inhuman grace that turns blood into ice water. None of the tiny moments of rest and straining that checker every human effort was present. There was no leaning for support, or pausing to let the lactic acid flow from an aching muscle. The dark figures simply glided effortlessly in complete defiance of the laws of nature. They were perfectly proportioned, and as ideal an example of the human form as had ever been seen, but they were completely out of scale to their surroundings.

In fact, each of the languid abominations was easily twice the height of a normal man. Their massive fists gripped lines and stuck to bridge surfaces. Their arms rippled with power and chillingly undulating muscles that never twitched, shook, or strained. Their colossal legs held them in place without shifting or effort and their helmeted heads held no faces, but featured black visors that made their countenances unknowable. Naked though they were, they showed no sign of discomfort as they worked, and their sexless black bodies gleamed wetly in the moonlight.

Setting to work efficiently, the team bored holes to the proper depth in the bridge support, and mounted their explosives inside. Long range remote triggers were inserted, and everything was covered with fast drying foam that blended the holes into their surroundings.

Bao was pleased; the setup of their fifth target was going as smoothly as the first four, and if he still had lips he suspected he would have been smiling. In less than three minutes they triggered their winches in a perfectly synchronized dance and ascended again. Then they repeated the procedure twice more to bring them to the bottom surface of the lower deck. Quickly, each team coiled up their line, and began crawling upside down like nightmarish insects towards the second support structure.

Beneath them the cold waters of the river swept on, for this was not the first time that the river had brought forth death… and it would not be the last.