by Cam Daly
Kery pressed her fingers together, turning her hand into a spearhead aimed at his chest. She pulled her arm back to deliver a killing blow, making sure that he had enough time to see her motion clearly.
He stopped moving.
She continued her previous thought. “You need to stage an attack. Not on the Craven themselves, but…on something you share. The decoherence device. You and the Craven are partners. You can’t let me actually go to it in person because then I might learn how it works.”
“You are as good as they say you are, Keryapt Zess. But time is short and I need what you have. We have been allies in the past, on other worlds. We will give you one last chance to give us your body.”
“Or else what?” She made sure to keep her voice neutral to conceal her sudden elation. The Observatory had spotted Connor. He was only five hundred meters away, next to one of the Coast Guard Dolphin helicopters. His arm was held by someone in a dark business suit. A pair of Knight mechs stood nearby.
Ormlan didn’t respond verbally, but smiled. A half second later she understood that he was escalating the conflict by an order of magnitude.
The Observatory was under attack. A human satellite in Earth orbit a few thousand kilometers away had suddenly come apart, releasing a cloud of smaller objects. The satellite had malfunctioned decades ago and been discounted as an object of any interest. Apparently it had been a Molu weapon platform the entire time.
The smaller objects accelerated towards the Observatory with constant jerks and feints, avoiding straight line paths which would make them easy targets for directed energy weapons. There were dozens of them and they were very fast. Kery triggered the Observatory’s defensive systems with little hope of success.
Just a moment after that, the dark water in the bay twenty meters offshore surged upwards as something erupted out. The thing flew in a shallow arc towards where she stood with Ormlan, revealed as the spray fell behind it as a humanoid form of gold and silver metal. Three meters tall.
Apparently the Deep Thinker was better at swimming than they were at detecting it.
A pair of thick rods floated just above each shoulder. Her combat control system decided they were plasma cannons and painted bright red lines from their muzzles towards her.
Kery whirled around and pulled Ormlan’s broken body in close like a backpack. She hoped the mech wouldn’t dare fire if she could keep the Molu familycraft between herself and it.
Shadow was several seconds behind but still trying to give advice. “Keryapt! Get out of there!”
“I have to get-“ She had almost said Connor. She was surprised at herself. “Mez. She might be there. This could be our best chance.”
She dashed north, towards Connor and the Coast Guard station. It would be several seconds before Shadow could respond. Kery knew there was no reason to suspect that Mez was there. Why had she lied about her motives?
Another helpful message from Shadow, from before she could have received Keryapt’s statement. “ESWAT has launched a pair of fully loaded flyers from Alcatraz. Two minutes out.” She knew that the entire War Room was watching her struggle with Ormlan.
If there weren't a two and a half second delay there would have been a mountain of advice and information available to her, but instead the best and most experienced minds of Fleet Four were helpless spectators.
#
Connor had been daydreaming when the abduction occurred. Kery had revealed that the debit card in his new name was untrackable and had exactly one million dollars on it. He had been to Hawaii once when he was dating Amanda, and thought that might be a nice place to lay low for a while.
The cab had stopped when the warning gates came down across the access road. He had seen the red and white Coast Guard helicopters in the air before but never realized they could drive around on their wheels as well. This one had stopped in the middle of the road, directly in the path of the cab, and two men had jumped out of the side door and run towards the cab. Its rotors were still spinning - maybe that was how it moved on the ground? - but the men hadn’t hesitated to vault the low warning gates and run to each side of the cab. One man in a dark suit had pulled a gun on the driver before Connor could figure out what to do. The other opened the rear door on his side and pushed in next to Connor.
“What the hell?” As the light inside the cab came on, Connor realized the man had his face.
“Who the hell, you mean? I need your shirt and jacket. Quickly, please.” He closed the door as Connor slid as far away as he could. “I don’t want to get blood on them, so no heroics.”
The Other-Connor didn’t have a weapon, but after his talk with Kery about lasers Connor didn’t want to find out how quickly this thing could kill him. He took off his jacket then began unbuttoning his shirt, angry that once again he was the helpless victim.
“She’ll know that you aren’t me. It won’t work.” He knew that Kery could defend herself better than he could, but he still felt as if he was betraying her. He glanced at the suited man, now positioned by the cab driver’s door. His shock doubled when he realized it was Farley Ormlan.
The double spoke again in Connor’s voice. “It only has to work for a few seconds. It will be better this way - we don’t want to have to hurt her.” The double was taking its own shirt off now, and what was underneath wouldn’t pass for human. The skin was smooth and hairless, with seams visible in a few locations.
“You aren’t the Craven?” The adrenaline in his system made his fingers twitch as he tried to finish unbuttoning.
“Ha! That monstrosity is locked away in his fortress. We are Molu. This is our familycraft.”
“The little guys. Inside.” He stared at the thing. He could see the border where the arms met the chest. The colors didn’t match. It was like someone had taken two different jigsaw puzzles and forced the pieces together.
“The shirt, please.” The duplicate reached over and undid the last few buttons with amazing swiftness. He expected the hands to feel cold or metallic but they seemed completely normal. Only faster. It gave him its own shirt which he reflexively pulled on.
Farley opened the door behind Connor and a cold blast of air reminded him the helicopter was still there. He had to shout to be heard over its noise. “Let’s go, Mister James.”
Connor tried to casually bring the backpack with him as he slid out. Kery would notice it was missing.
“Leave it.”
He did. It had been a nice try.
The Connor-thing had his clothes on now. It looked exactly like him.
Farley turned back to the driver and raised his voice again. “Just deliver your passenger to where he wanted to go. As soon as that is done then you can leave.”
Connor couldn’t see the driver’s face, but the man’s knuckles were white where they clenched the steering wheel. He felt a pang of guilt when he realized they might just kill the man after this. There were photos of a woman and a little girl on the dashboard.
Farley gripped Connor’s arm with his free hand and moved towards the Coast Guard helicopter. “If you try to do anything stupid or talk to the pilots, you will regret it. Have you ever been in a helicopter?”
Connor shook his head no. He didn’t see any benefit in potential resistance as he was walked to the open side door of the stationary machine. Two human-looking pilots sat in the front, dressed in what looked like official uniforms and flight helmets. One of them glanced at Connor briefly, but probably had no clue that one of the men returning to the helicopter was not the “man” who left.
The downdraft of the rotor made conversation impossible, but it seemed as if his abductor was trying to make it seem like there hadn’t been a switch. He helped Connor into a seat and strapped him in, but didn’t offer him a headset. When the door closed it was less noisy but he still couldn’t hear the pilots talking to each other.
“What happens next?” Neither pilot seemed to notice his shouted question.
Farley sat down next to Connor. “You don’t ne
ed to shout, we can hear you easily. Now, we wait for our parents to capture Keryapt. Once that is accomplished, we will have a few questions for you.” He delivered this plan in a matter-of-fact fashion as the helicopter started rolling forward again.
“And after that?” Parents? Was Farley a Molu familycraft as well? How many of them there were in there? Did they each have a specific job, like the crew of a ship?
“If you tell us what we need to know, you will eventually be released. As will your Active friends. Killing you or them would not benefit us in the long run.”
Them? So Mezerello was alive but being held against her will. “What could I possibly know that you don’t? What makes me important?”
“Ha! People like you aren’t important to us, Mister James.” The helicopter cleared the road and the gates blocking the cab raised. He watched its tail lights disappear down the access road towards the executive terminal.
“Who is important, politicians for you to impersonate?” He felt vaguely clever for asking.
“Politicians? These identities are a means to an end.”
“Then who?”
“You clearly don’t understand why we’re here. Politicians and doctors and bankers just maintain your system. We are here for your free thinkers! Your inventors! Your chance-takers!” Farley certainly seemed to like to talk. “We - our family - were the first to see in you a chance for something truly new. And you have delivered!”
“The decoherence field. We invented that?”
“Yes! Because of you, the galactic balance of power will be changed forever. In our favor.” The helicopter slowed and stopped near a two story building with Coast Guard signs on it.
“So you and the Craven will rule all the other races?”
The alien thing gave him a devilish smile. “There is no ‘ruling’ the galaxy. Only surviving it for as long as you can. We are allies with the Craven, yes. For now! But they are known for their schemes. They don’t get into bed with someone unless they know exactly how they are going to get back out, and leave the bed on fire. And we-“ The engines of the helicopter cut out, leaving the last words unexpectedly loud. Farley leaned close and whispered the rest to him as the rotor blades slowed. “We Molu are aquatic. We don’t like fire.”
One of the pilots turned back towards them and started to ask something, but the suited man held up a hand to silence him. After a moment’s pause he leaned towards a window and peered towards the rear of the helicopter. Or at something south of them - the executive terminal? Then looked back at Connor. “Get out.” A moment before his voice had been almost giddy, like a child at his birthday. Now it was suddenly flat.
“What?” Connor was confused for a moment, but recognized when someone else’s plans were falling apart. He felt a smile begin to creep across his face. Kery had seen through the charade and disrupted their plan.
Farley turned to the pilots. “Get into the hangar, right now. Tell the heavy weapons team to prepare. Don’t ask, just go.” He cranked the side door open and grabbed the front of Connor’s shirt. “And I told you to get out.”
He half-dragged Connor from the helicopter and let him tumble to the ground. As the alien reached for the gun in its underarm holster, two stubby metallic tentacles reached from the center of its palm into sockets on the grip. That was not a normal feature for any kind of sidearm that Connor had ever seen. Farley didn’t even look at Connor as he pulled out the weapon, instead focusing on something where the cab had headed.
Connor rose to his knees to try to get a view in the same direction. Across the harbor he could see something which appeared at first glance to be a man floating in the air, arms akimbo.
A blur of movement was visible for an instant between two buildings in front of the floating man. He? It? Whatever it was trailed the blur, drifting almost casually above the road. It seemed in no hurry, but when the blur reappeared they had closed most of the distance around the perimeter of the harbor. It was only a matter of seconds before the pair of them would arrive at the Coast Guard base.
He could just make out that the blur was human sized with long streaming hair and some sort of floppy backpack. Something about the hair looked familiar. He realized suddenly that the floating “man” was much larger than human - perhaps twice as tall. The figure on the ground was Kery. Her pursuer followed a hundred meters behind her, reminding him of a parasail following a motorboat.
She disappeared behind the cluster of low buildings between them, almost heading straight towards him now, but he could track her progress by watching the airborne figure. “What is that?”
The Molu familycraft gave a savage grin as it brought its gun around to point at him. “The Deep Thinker is our parents’ personal bodyguard. There is little that your Active friend can do to protect herself from it, no matter how fast she can run.”
#
Keryapt listened to the latest update from Shadow as she ran. “We calculate 70% likelihood that the Observatory will be destroyed within thirty seconds, assuming the missiles are nuclear or equivalent. We don’t know how they located it or how they knew where to intercept Connor. The Deep Thinker is using antigravity but with tanglecomms down we can’t measure its drive power. Assume it's equivalent to our best technology. That means it's faster and more lethal than your Interloper.”
All bad news. Without tanglecomms, it was no longer easy to precisely target a gravitic generator in use. The Deep Thinker didn't need to fear long range attack as long as it kept moving.
Kery was running through a parking lot halfway to Connor when it unleashed its cannons, slicing a car in front of her in half with a beam of golden fire. Her bare feet had good traction on the asphalt and she slewed to the side to avoid the slowly blossoming explosion.
She could see the expanding shockwave from the blast and angled Ormlan’s familycraft to make sure it wasn’t torn from her hands. Even still, it was like trying to hold on to a kite while running into a hurricane. A second golden beam scribbled furrows into the ground behind her, chasing her heels.
The Thinker had tried to use the exploding car to get a clear shot at her limbs. She pulled Ormlan’s familycraft closer and ran on.
“Shadow, I need you to switch the Observatory’s weapons from defensive mode to offense. I'll make sure the Thinker is stationary long enough for the graser to hit it.”
Off to her left, she noticed the taxi cab which had delivered Ormlan. It was accelerating along the access road, the only route back to the highway. It would pass the Coast Guard station a few seconds after she got there.
Ahead, she could see Connor on the ground next to the helicopter. Next to him stood Farley Ormlan, holding a pistol of some sort. He was starting to shout something in an amplified voice in her direction.
She was processing at twenty times normal organic speeds so it would take several subjective seconds before she could make any sense of his words. Thankfully the Molu hadn’t managed to adapt the Activation process to their physiologies, so she had a distinct reaction time advantage over the familycraft.
The war machine floating along behind her didn’t share that weakness with its masters. It slewed sideways to her right, out over the bay, giving her another moment to study its weapons. Each of the four shoulder cannons would take a couple of seconds to recharge between bursts. Their magnetic suspension mounting gave them incredible fidelity in aiming, which made it much harder to determine what it could hit at any moment. Her combat control system could only render vaguely conical warning areas with frighteningly wide cross sections. The two cannons which had recently fired were given pink cones, while the other two were red.
She was looking right down the core of the plasma cannons and had an instant of warning when one of them lit up. Instinctively she jumped, bringing her legs up just as the line of golden fire connected the cannon to a parked truck behind her. Once again she found herself struggling to hold on to Ormlan as the fire bloomed around her.
Two Coast Guard buildings loomed ahead, co
nnected by a glassed in walkway. She ran in between them, cutting her direct line of sight to the machine. No humans were visible in the walkway so she put her head down and went straight through it.
The resulting shards followed her path as she cleared the buildings and entered the last stretch of parking lot before the taxiway and helicopter. The Deep Thinker was still there on her right, close enough to the water for its passage to throw up a wall of spray behind it.
She hoped that the cloud of glass would confuse the thing’s weapon sensor for a moment and let go of Ormlan’s left arm. She extended the barrel of her left Gunsleeve and fired a burst of supersonic shells at the thing’s one unfired cannon.
If they hit, it didn’t seem to have any effect. The glass fragments around her ricocheted off the few cars parked in the lot as she ran between them.
Shadow’s reply finally arrived. “I’m sorry, I have orders to leave the Observatory in defensive mode. Without the graser on point defense to stop the incoming missiles we will definitely lose it. There’s no reason to suspect Mez is there.” Her plea became more personal. “Please, forget Connor and change your trajectory. If you can get three kilometers farther north, you'll be in range of our Wasp missile battery. Can you make it?”
Keryapt suddenly felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with her synthetic body’s environment. She had been judged to be less valuable than the Observatory.
On a rational level, she understood the Admiralty’s decision. The Horseplay body was almost done, and could be remotely controlled with the Observatory. Her current Interloper body was no match for the Deep Thinker, as the only thing keeping her alive now was Ormlan’s familycraft and the hostages it contained. If she lost them, the Thinker would tear her apart.
So Shadow had been given her orders, and she was going to do what she could to keep her mother alive. But her options were limited - a handful of Wasp missiles were unlikely to stop the Thinker. Telling Keryapt to run away was just buying time.