HALF LIFE by SL Huang Copyright ©2014 SL Huang The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. For more information or further permissions, contact information is available at www.slhuang.com. Cover copyright ©2014 Najla Qamber All rights reserved. The cover art may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the copyright holder, except as permitted by law. Permission granted to Obooko Publishing. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance in the text to actual events or to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. ISBN 978-0-9960700-4-1 Cover art: Najla Qamber Designs Editing: Anna Genoese C 1 “W you doing in here?” I looked up. A flashlight beam shone directly in my eyes, blindingly bright. “I’m the janitor,” I said. I was wearing a coverall and everything. I waved my mop vaguely. “I’m janit-ing.” Behind the bright bulb of the heavy flashlight, the outline of a security guard loomed over me. His shadow was thick and beefy, and he didn’t seem inclined to take the light out of my eyes. “Let me see your ID,” he barked at me. Well, that was a problem—I didn’t have one. Not yet, at least. I stood my ground and made a show of fishing around in my pockets. I could take this guy, but I needed to bait him toward me just a little bit more first. “Uh. I forgot it.” “You’re going to have to come with me.” He took one more step forward, right out of range of the nearest security camera. “Perfect,” I said, and spun the mop handle to bring it smack across the side of his head. Mathematics spiraled through my brain as I moved, non-uniform circular motion blossoming in my senses. A burst of angular speed in an instantaneous blur, and the linear velocity at the far end of my mop-radius maxed out and decelerated with a thunk against the security guard’s temple. He thudded to the floor, his flashlight rolling to the side. Newton’s Second Law of How to Knock a Grown Man Unconscious. I picked the flashlight up and turned it off. I’d planned to pickpocket an ID card—it was a bit more subtle—but, hey, six of one, half a dozen of the other. I pulled the security guard’s card off his pocket, duct-taped his mouth, wrists, and ankles, and left him locked in a utility closet. The angry-looking photo on my purloined ID was of a middle-aged white man, and I was none of those things. But though Swainson Pharmaceuticals might require swiping a card to so much as access the toilet, the state-of-the-art security system didn’t care what I looked like. I made it to the laboratory on the twelfth floor without setting off any alarms. The cameras were a joke to avoid; I estimated for the widest angle possible and stepped blithely around their lines of sight as they turned back and forth to survey the hallways. “Ghost in the machine,” I whispered, slipping up to the door of the lab and swiping my stolen ID card one more time. The door slid open. Someone inside squealed in surprise. I had my Colt in my hand before I registered the chubby Indian guy in a white coat standing at the counter, his gloved hands thrust as high in the air as he could get them. “What are you doing here?” I demanded. It was two in the morning, for Chrissakes. “I’m an intern!” he stammered. “I’m cleaning the glassware. Please don’t shoot me!” “Oh, relax,” I said. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m in a program.” “You’re in a what?” I ignored the question. My idiotic promises to friends were my business. “I’m just here for that new-fangled drug you guys are making.” He paled. “No—that’s—you can’t—” “Shut up.” I waved my gun at him. “I’m only not supposed to kill people. I’ll still shoot you in the leg if you annoy me too much.” I was lying a little bit. The kid wasn’t a threat, and I wasn’t about to shoot some poor low-paid intern who wasn’t in my way anyway. But he didn’t know that. He buttoned his mouth in the terrified kind of quiet and sank down onto a lab stool. I moved to the back of the lab. The intel I had was correct: the industrial-strength lab freezers stood against the wall, heavy and solid and very securely locked. I stepped over to the third one from the left. My usual MO when committing high-end theft was a judicious application of C-4, but lab freezers were built to be explosion-proof, and a blast big enough to get in risked damaging the samples anyway. Besides, blowing holes in things was a good way to set off a security alert. “Hey,” I said to the intern, examining the keypad. “You know the code for this?” “I—uh—no—I’m just an intern—” I fired without looking. The bullet zipped down its velocity vector and pinged right where I’d aimed, taking a chunk out of one of the legs of the kid’s lab stool. He shrieked. “You sure you don’t know the code?” I asked. “I swear! I swear! They don’t tell me anything!” “Okay,” I said. Back to Plan A. My employer had told me the code was only four digits long. I started with 0000. I was on 2491 when the intern, who must have had a death wish, burst out, “You’re seriously brute-forcing it? Won’t that take forever?” My fingers didn’t stop twitching through the combinations. “‘Forever’ is a gross exaggeration,” I said. “My upper bound is less than eighty-seven minutes.” Which could result in an unexpected problem, I reflected, if someone noticed my friend the security guard was missing. Oh, well. I’d deal with that eventuality if it happened. A touch before the hour mark, the keypad light flashed green on 6720, and the lock clunked. I heaved open the freezer. The shelves were filled with neat phalanxes of vials, the liquid inside each a pale yellowish color. I slid a small insulated metal case out of the bag I had snugged across my shoulder, unscrewed the top, and transferred a rack of the vials to the padded interior. Then I twisted the case shut and pushed the freezer closed again. “I swear I won’t say a word about you,” said the intern, his words coming out so fast they tumbled over each other. “Well, not right away, you won’t,” I answered, re-stowing the case in my bag and zipping it secure. “You’ll be unconscious.” He squeaked and tried to back away from me. Not that it would do him much good. I’m very fast. The alarms went off. Sirens wailed through the corridors, with red lights flashing on all sides and an automated voice repeating “security lockdown” in three languages. This was Mr. Intern’s lucky day—no need to deal with him now; I was already blown. Someone must have found my trussed-up guard buddy. I skidded to the door and tried my stolen ID, but nothing happened. “It’s a lockdown,” stuttered the intern from behind me. “Nobody in or out; that’s how it works—” Good for them, but this lab had outside windows. I turned, picked up the nearest piece of ridiculously expensive lab equipment, and sent it smashing through the nearest one. The intern squealed again. I pulled a coil of Tech line out of a pocket of my pack. Almost as thin as wire, it was more compact than rope and just as sturdy. I threw the coils into the air as I sprinted for the window. The mathematics coalesced in my senses without effort: the line bloomed out from my hand, wave equations propagating down its length, the parametric function dropping a wide loop neatly around one of the huge industrial freezers just as I hit the window. I pulled my jacket sleeve over my hand, gripped the line, and jumped. I slid down the line into the night at breakneck speed, the floors flashing past. Tech line is slicker than most rope, but the strength of my grip created normal force sufficient to slow me—just enough. I stuck out a foot, leveraging the sole of my boot against the side of the building as it flew by, giving myself a touch more friction. A long skid of black spiked in my wake as the brick took off the rubber. The asphalt rushed up, swallowing my vision. I looped my other arm into the line and the friction surged as my flesh got tourniqueted through my jacket. I hit. My boots made contact first, my knees crumpling to absorb the deceleration as I tucked into a roll. Even so, the impact jarred through me, a thunderclap in every joint. I sprang back to my feet and shook it off. Sirens rose in the distance, headed my way, but I flipped the sound waves through a quick Doppler calculation—they wouldn’t come close to catching me. Less than a minute later, I roared away over the ridge behind the lab on the dirt bike I’d stashed there, shrouded by the night as the police wailed into Swainson Pharmaceuticals behind me.