The octagon box set, p.16
The Octagon Box Set, page 16
part #1 of The Octagon Series
Kobe mind went wild. He looked desperately at Preston, who stood calmly on the sideline. Seconds stretch to what felt like hours to Kobe, desperate to live, desperate to be released.
Preston brought his hand up to his chin, like he was contemplating Kobe’s fate, relishing in the pain his protégé was exerting. He shook his head.
No.
Trixus released Kobe, and he collapsed to the ground, hugging his arm close. She leaned down over him again, and Kobe brought his other arm up, protecting himself from the blow that would surely come.
“Don’t worry, my friend,” she said, indicating the Pinnacle that rose sharply on the horizon. “If you don’t die up there, I will see you again.” And with that, she walked away.
Kobe lay on the ground still clutching his injured arm and watched as two Enforcers came. They each took one arm of Jin’s body. It was limp like a ragdoll, his head lolling back between his raised arms, all life gone. Like a carcass, they slowly dragged him across the training square, the heels of his feet leaving a trail through the crushed gravel as it went.
Part III
The Pinnacle Trial
Cadet Log Entry #61: December 2039.
Subject: Jon Kobe, 19, Male.
Status: First Year Cadet – Law Enforcement Academy (LEA)
District: 1- New Los Angeles
Competency: Weapons Training – Coded Side Arm (CSA) Standard LE Issue.
It’s beautiful… I don’t know how to describe it. How can they design and make such a thing of beauty that can also be so devastating? Most weapons, especially sidearms, are just black, ugly pieces of clunky polymer. Functionality trumps ergonomics, as they say. But this thing in my hand doesn’t feel like it’s actually in my hand. I don’t know how to explain it. It feels like it is my hand, part of it, an extension of it. An extension of me.
As I turn over the Coded Side Arm, or CSA, in my hand, I can feel a tingling sensation in my palm, like it’s communicating with my biology. But then again, it is. The word “coded” means that it’s coded to recognize only my DNA. That means only I can use it. If someone else picks it up, it will not fire. You can also forget about someone hacking off your hand to use it. The DNA recognition technology in the grip will only recognize living tissue, not someone’s dead hand.
It truly is a thing of beauty. The composite frame is smooth and seamless, no edges or hard surfaces, machined finished to a metallic blue that seems to absorb the light from the illumination bars above my head on the Academy shooting range.
There is no magazine, no mag-well. No need for reloading, as it has an almost endless supply of ammunition. It uses compressed air encased in a spherical shell of liquid titanium. The air ball that it fires is about the size of a pea, but when it penetrates its intended target, it can expand in a nanosecond, and the effect, so I’ve been told, is devastating.
In the grip is the battery pack that powers the ammunition system. When fully charged, it can run for years. It converts the external air into the air ball spheres that the weapon fires.
I notice three tiny touchpads where my thumb has come to rest on the grip. With a slight movement, I can select three different fire-control settings: Stun, Kill, and LOD. In Stun mode, the compressed air ball does not penetrate. It hits you with full force, and the impact velocity plus the titanium coating can knock you flat on your back.
Kill mode is obvious: what you hit, you kill. It makes sense. In this mode, the air ball penetrates most material. I don’t know how it does this, but the guy in the white lab coat standing at the front of the lecture hall this morning said it could. Something to do with the liquid titanium shell that encases the compressed air being able to alter the molecular lattice of any material—concrete, timber, human flesh and bone, body armor—so that it can pass through then lodge inside. Once this happens, the shell disintegrates, and the air ball, previously confined and compressed, expands to its normal size of three feet in diameter.
Sweet.
This all happens instantaneously. Imagine the mess that would create. The technical term for this is “spherical bloom.” I call it “mopping up bits of the bad guy for a week!”
Then there is Localized Orbital Destruction, or LOD, the highest setting. Some instructors here at the Academy call it Live-or-Die mode. I guess it’s the setting you choose when you don’t have a choice. The situation has gotten out of control and you and your partner are surrounded by too many bad guys. They’re going to kill you anyway, so you may as well go out with a bang. Now when I say “bang,” I mean it. With the LOD setting, things go nuclear. The air ball is seeded with an atomic grain of a low-yield isotope. That’s right. The seed is tiny but it packs a punch. Penetration is still the same, except the spherical bloom has a radius of about three hundred feet. Everything caught within that radius is cactus.
Unlike the first two settings, which have unlimited rounds, due to the unlimited nature of air, the LOD setting has only two rounds of the isotope carried onboard the weapon. I’m not sure why. Because let’s face it: if you need to use both rounds, then your situation is beyond hopeless and you are going to die anyway.
Apparently there was this recent graduate, a woman, who was cornered during a raid on a drug dealer’s nest in Precinct 13. She and her partner were outnumbered and he was down, shot by one of the dealer’s crew. Rumor has it that she was surrounded by at least ten of the bad guys, so she let it rip in LOD mode. Blew away half of the corner block that housed their drug lab, including the dealer himself, his crew and drug mules. She ended up in the medical unit for a week and they ended up in tiny pieces.
No autopsy drone was needed that day.
1
They started at the end. They had reached the summit of the Pinnacle, but the competition had yet to commence. Like eagles perched in their own individual nests, high above the summit, they stood on their own small launch platform. It was an octagonal plate of steel with hardly enough room to move, and it was the only thing separating them from the one-hundred-foot drop to the ground below. Each of the eight small launch platforms were attached to a narrow gantry arm that extended out from a central, massive steel spire that rose upwards like a huge needle.
Like dead insects caught in a spider’s web, Kobe, Petra, Maddox and Celus, in their waist harnesses, were tethered to the guide system of their own individual zip line above their heads. There were eight zip lines in total but the group were equally spaced, so that when the locking mechanism holding them in place was released, they would streak off in four separate ninety-degree angles.
The expanse of the jungle canopy below was covered with a scattering of low clouds and mist, and the first shafts of dawn started to burn the fringe of the horizon.
They were now in the Pinnacle Domain, the electric-fenced jungle battlefield with the Pinnacle Rock at its center. Caches of weapons and supplies were strategically placed within the Domain. But Kobe knew they would not be easy to find or access. Nothing would be easy from this point onwards. Everything would be made just that little bit harder. From the outset, starting with the training camp, the odds were never in their favor.
Medical kits would also be stashed in certain places, just in case you were bitten or attacked by the jungle wildlife. Poisonous scorpions, deadly snakes, spiders, wild boar and a host of other creatures inhabited the Domain, all competing just like you to survive in their own way. As if things weren’t bad enough. You could beat all the other competitors and finally make it back to the summit, only to be bitten by a snake and die of toxic shock with the end in sight.
They were told that the ride along the zip line to their respective starting points on the jungle floor would take about three minutes and land them about ten miles from the foothills of the base of the Pinnacle, at the outer edge of the Domain, near the fence line.
As Kobe stood with his toes over the edge of his small launch platform, he looked at the steel release coupling above his head that was holding his pulley in place, holding back his weight, preventing him from beginning his rolling slide along the galvanized cable that stretched off into the distance at a gentle decline. He knew once he was released he would quickly accelerate. In the distance, he could see his zip line, taught and straight, eventually pierce a bank of cloud before disappearing into the greyness.
Brittle frost covered the flat summit ground below him, but despite the frigid air at this altitude, Kobe was warm in the envirosuit that they each wore. Not as advanced as armorskin, the skintight black envirosuit would offer them limited protection again the elements. Embedded into the inner surface skin of the suit was an array of bio-monitoring sensors that would transmit their location, pulse, core temperature and other life metrics back to Octagon.
Hovering in front of each of them was their own “following drone” that would capture and record each and every second of their progress during the Pinnacle Trial. Kobe watched as his drone, buffeted by the dawn breeze, continuously adjusted itself, dipping and weaving to maintain its hovering position just a few feet away from his face. He noticed the video camera housed on its belly that was constantly pointed at him. Maybe this was the black network Jin had spoken about.
He knew from what Preston had said that they were now entertainment for the Octagon executives. Kobe imagined thousands of privileged Octagon executives, sitting right now, glued to their display screens in their office parks or at home safe and protected behind the walls of their gated executive communities. Whilst their kids played on their perfectly manicured front lawns, their parents would be clustered around display screens inside their mansions, sipping chilled wine, swapping gossip, all waiting for the prime-time show of senseless carnage to begin.
Kobe was just a single face in the camera of his following drone, a pale and gaunt image being pulled apart, pixel by pixel, then transmitted as a stream of satellite data to thousands of viewers at the other end.
One face being watched by a sea of faces.
The pain of Jin’s senseless death was still vivid and raw in Kobe’s mind, but it was fear that gripped him now as he stood facing the rising sun, the cold bracing air on his face. He was truly scared. Scared of the unknown, scared of dying. He didn’t want to die. He had his entire life ahead of him. He was not supposed to be here. But he knew it was useless. There was nothing he could do now, he just needed to stay alive, to survive. Could he kill someone if he needed to? Kobe glanced at Petra as she stood on her platform to his left, her back to him, silent and stoic.
Could he kill her if she tried to kill him? There could only be one winner, the person who made it to the top first and activated the pyramid beacon with their hand. Looking down, Kobe could see the squat pyramid-shaped beacon sitting twenty or so yards away from the foot of the spire structure he stood on. The beacon was made of iridescent energy panels that reflected a spectrum of moving colors, almost like the surface of the pyramid was a liquid and not a solid. At night, its apex would open, projecting a shaft of narrow light into the air that could be seen by the competitors for miles, guiding them like moths to their fate.
Kobe’s stomach twisted again, waves of fear rising in him once more as he looked at the beacon and what it signified: his freedom or his death. There were no other options. Get to it first, killing anyone who gets in your way, or die trying. That’s what Preston had said.
Kobe looked at his wrist computer.
Five minutes to go.
They had all been given the small wrist-worn device so they could track the time clock once the trial began. The digital display was now counting down to launch time. When it reached zero, it would then reset to a twenty-four-hour countdown timer. It had a built in GPS map so they could find their way but not the locations of the others.
The summit could be reached a number of ways, like climbing the sheer cliff walls or following one of the mountain trails.
Three minutes.
The sun had now cleared the horizon and bathed the quilt of clouds below in hues of yellow and gold, revealing patches of lush green jungle underneath. More layers of the world slowly being peeled back.
Two minutes.
The pulley mechanism suddenly clicked and rocked slightly in his hands, his forward momentum still held back by the coupling lock and his weight still balancing on the small plate. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, trying to calm his nerves. His gut felt like it was sloshing around inside him like liquid in a glass jar.
The drone in front of Kobe angled in a little closer, almost sensing his discomfort, pulling in for a tighter shot of his face, sharing his fear with the audience.
One minute.
The waves of fear Kobe felt intensified, rising to his throat. He felt sick. He swallowed hard, his breaths now coming in quick shallow pants as he started to hyperventilate. They had all been given an enema the previous night just to make sure no one’s bowels emptied during the launch. That would not be good for ratings.
Thirty seconds.
Kobe squeezed both his hands tighter around the guy rope that connected his harness to the zip line, his teeth clenched.
Ten seconds.
He heard a mechanical “click” above his head then felt a slight tremor in the zip line.
The octagonal platform holding him fell away and Kobe plummeted.
2
Kobe fell away into nothingness. With a jolt of the zip line, his fall eased, then he shot forward, gaining momentum on a diagonal. Below, he could see the blanket of cloud and mist rushing towards him. His face was buffeted by the cold air, the wind rushing past his ears and the pulley wheels screeching as they sped along the galvanized cable. He craned his neck over his shoulder as far as the harness would allow and spotted another dark shape peeling off and away along another line, unsure who it was. The wind slapped so harshly at his eyes that he bled tears.
Faster and faster he went, his heart pounding in his hollow chest. Would he fall? Could the pulley come off the cable? A million possibilities spun in his head as he flew along the line, all of them leading to death at the end.
He lanced through the plume of cloud and mist and was instantly enveloped in an eerie greyness. He had entered the cloud layer.
A sheen of condensation coated his face, cool and refreshing. He noticed ripples of moisture across the fabric of his suit, tiny globules forming then whipping off the surface as he sped on. Kobe felt a sense of calm as he cut through the clouds, passing through the gloom. Despite his visibility being nonexistent, he felt somehow safe, hidden, shielded from the cruel world he had fallen into. His speed had now stabilized to a constant velocity. He was still moving fast but not accelerating. Ahead, he could see a patch of light, like a halo, where the clouds seemed brighter. The gloom lifted and he punched through the belly of the cloud layer, leaving tendrils of mist and vapor in his wake. He was falling through the bright clear sky again.
Below his dangling feet, the jungle unfurled in a vibrant panorama of green as the dimpled surface of the canopy stretched away in all directions until it hit the perimeter fence, a twenty-foot barrier of braided, reinforced mesh electrified to one million volts, that encircled the Domain.
Ahead, Kobe could see his zip line thread through a hole in the roof of the green canopy and a gap of inky blackness yawned open like the mouth of a dark and sinister cave. He was going to slide right through the mouth and be swallowed by the darkness beyond.
Kobe felt a slight jolt as the automatic brake on the guide system engaged, slowing his descent. He tried to pivot around to see the others, but they had all vanished in their separate directions.
Still lower he rode, skimming the bushy green tips of the tallest trees now only inches from his dangling feet. There was a sudden burst of angry black diamond shapes on the surface of the trees as a flock of birds, perched on the bulbous jungle canopy, took flight and scattered as he went by.
The dark mouth ahead grew wider, seeming to expand and reach out to him, surrounding him. Then he plunged into the blackness and was gone.
The wall of thick humidity struck Kobe like a physical thing as he passed the thermocline between environments, the cool clear air above the jungle layer and then into the dim dense heat and humidity under the canopy of green.
He slowed again. He was nearing the end of the line. He had decelerated to an almost scenic speed, enabling him to take in the sights and sounds of this new world. Immediately Kobe’s senses were overwhelmed by the chatter of birds and the constant shrill of thousands of insects moving, grating and talking all at once.
Tall brooding trees pressed in around him as he glided along a deliberate path between huge trunks that were covered in colorful shades of blue and brown moss, their branches thick with ropy vines like hangmen’s nooses. In some hollows, darkness stood tall where light could not penetrate.
The jungle floor loomed up under Kobe, a carpet of twisted vines, rotten vegetation and folded undergrowth dappled with patches of slanted light. The earthy smell of decaying vegetation mingled with a sweet floral aroma from trumpets of color greeted Kobe as he went lower.
His speed was almost down to walking pace now, but he still hung about a hundred feet above the jungle floor. Ahead, his zip line led to a lookout tower made from timber logs and raw planks that rose from the jungle floor. It had an open side into which he was channeled as he lifted his feet to clear the threshold before coming to a gentle stop where the zip line ended. Standing up on the wooden decking, Kobe unclipped his suspension line and stepped out of his harness.
Kobe checked his wrist computer. Four minutes. It had taken him just four minutes to descend from the top of the Pinnacle to his starting point on the jungle floor. He guessed he had travelled several miles across the landscape in that time.
