I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1)

by John Patrick Kennedy

  “We do not have the power to defeat it, not if all the energies of the undiscovered worlds were combined with what we know. It is a darkness that makes the negative energy produced by humanity shine like the brightest light.”

  “You’re mad.”

  The smile had left his face, leaving wrinkles as if from age, but it reappeared now. “I find it difficult, at times, to preserve myself in the face of all the lives I have lived. The difficulty is not that I am mad, but that I am right.”

  “What are you doing, Terkun’shuks’pai? What is all this for?”

  He gestured to the barren rock, the fires burning down the forest, the subtle movement in the trees that told her that her fires had not been enough and that the monster’s younglings were spreading, growing. “Humanity cannot help but fight that which will attempt to destroy it, no matter how futile the battle. I have given them tools with which to fight and allies to help them. I have angered and frightened the Council so they will seal this world away from the others, to help contain the spread of the darkness, should humanity fail.”

  As Terkun’shuks’pai faded from her sight, Akllana’chikni’pai heard him whisper. “I hope it is enough.”

  Chapter 14

  In the security office of the DARPA offices, David leaned back in his chair slowly. The radio station was playing Charlie Mingus, sweet baritone sax jazz. He placed his well-shined shoes on the desk, careful not to put his back out again, and rested his hands lightly on the plastic arms of his chair. He let his eyes close. He wasn’t sleepy, just sinking into that light doze that was the best way to listen to music. The DJ must have picked tonight’s selection just for David.

  The phone buzzed, and he turned off the volume. Every time I get relaxed. He picked up the phone. “Hello. Security.”

  The phone was quiet except for a faint hum in the background, like the line was being monitored.

  “Hello?” No answer. He looked down at the phone and read the screen. It was coming from somewhere on the fourth floor. Not the operating theater Ms. Jance and those folks were using. That line had been wired into the third floor for some reason.

  David flipped through the fourth-floor video feeds. All the lights were out except in the robotics development lab. It was 1:17 a.m. and Al Lombardo, a programmer who didn’t have a wife or kids to go home to, was asleep at his desk again, face down in a pile of hardware. His monitor was flashing, with gray lines running across the screen. The rest of the room looked normal—cords dangling from the ceiling to the big yellow frames holding robotics equipment and motorized armatures, the kind for welding computer chips. David liked to come in early on testing days, see what they were up to. Lombardo had said he was doing something fun, and David would be getting an invitation to see it as soon as they had a few bugs worked out. David flipped on the intercom connected to the computer. He was already chuckling to himself.

  “You sleepin’ again, Lombardo?” he shouted into the microphone.

  But the kid didn’t even twitch.

  “Hey, Al? Al Lombardo, you awake in there? I swear you don’t stop jerking my chain, I’m going to come up there and pinch you.”

  The kid didn’t move. He must be plumb out.

  He called to the other guard station, at the other end of the building. The other guard station was a cakewalk. Nobody came in through the back door except deliveries, and those generally didn’t start until after shift change. The phone rang four long rings, was snatched up, dropped, and picked up again. “Hello? Security?”

  “Pallone? You still awake over there?”

  “Am now.”

  “I’m going up to the fourth floor. Looks like Lombardo is asleep in the Robotics lab again. Keep an ear out for the phone, you hear?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Call me when you get done so I can go back to sleep.”

  “I’m gonna make you work the front desk one of these nights, Pallone. Have to stay awake all night. You never know when folks be coming up and wanting something or other. Tonight, Ms. Jance brought in—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Call me when you get back.” Pallone hung up.

  David would have bet twenty bucks that bastard was going right back to sleep. Well, he wouldn’t be sleeping long, because David was going to sneak up behind Pallone and scare the pants off him.

  David smiled at the thought, picked up his flashlight, and, whistling that sweet jazz melody, walked over to the bank of elevators.

  Pax shrank the ball of energy surrounding him until it was at arm’s length.

  Hamster-ball, said Pax, sighing. Call it what you like, but it’s still a hamster-ball.

  He was just off the coast of the island. Greasy, ash-covered waves bobbed him up and down. Half of the thick layer of forest that lay on every other island had been stripped away, leaving black ash and steaming, bare rock. As far as he could tell, the trees hadn’t just been burned; they’d been dissolved. A shimmering wave of black vultures—there must have been hundreds of them—circled above the island, looking for scraps amidst the ruins. They weren’t going to have any luck. Everything living had been stripped away. Everything else had been destroyed. Instead of buildings, there were pits in the ground. No boats were offshore, not even the giant cruise ships. No docks or piers. No power lines, no bodies, no rubble, no roads. The place was a blank slate. A world untouched by life.

  Almost.

  A clear, bright flame moved slowly up the side of the hill, walking on what might have been an old roadbed. Lana stood out against the black, lifeless landscape like the first star in the night sky.

  Pax rolled onto a small beach and dissolved his shield. The waves around him pushed black, stinking scum over his feet. Chicks in bikinis should have been lying out on chairs. Little kids should have been running around and shrieking. Dogs chasing frisbees. Instead, it looked like the whole island had been scooped out with a spoon.

  It made the destruction of Scarlett’s school seem like the work of an amateur.

  “Lana!”

  She paused for a moment and then continued as if she hadn’t seen him.

  She’d lied to him. She had no intention of letting him try to convince her humanity was worth saving. She’d already begun her dance of death. Pax charged up the hill toward her, getting ready to throw a shield around her, to control her. He caught up to her on top of a small ridge, a flat area that might have been a parking lot.

  “Lana!” His voice came out harsh and angry and still didn’t match the fury inside him. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” Lana sounded weary beyond belief. Her swords hung limply at her sides. Her hair hung in smoldering black threads along the sides of her face, and her skin burned a deep, dull red: a fire going out. She turned and looked at him and then lowered her eyes before he could make out her expression. “Terkun’shuks’pai has released a monster of his own engineering onto your world. Left unchecked, it will consume all life. I tried to burn it. I did not succeed.”

  The words were a shock. Pax had thought of Terry as a friend, a helper. To see him blamed for the destruction around them…

  Pax was ready to shout at Lana, to deny her words and throw them back in her face, when she brought up her eyes to his. Even through her flaming, alien form he could see the complete despair there and knew that, no matter what else, Lana wasn’t lying.

  Pax held up his hand to her shoulder, not touching her, just looking at the contrast between their skins. His cool metal skin shone silver-white, untouched by the ash. Hers was turning darker every second.

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “He agrees humanity is a threat. But he claims that removing humanity won’t solve the problem. He wants to destroy all life and start over completely.” She raised her fragile-looking chin. “He knew the Council would never support this.”

  Pax looked out at the ruin of th
e island. “We have to stop this.”

  “I am useless to you. He’s anticipated everything I’ve done. And used it against me.”

  “So you’re saying we should give up.”

  She shook her head. One of the swords slipped out of her fingers and burst into sparks on the rock. She didn’t seem to notice. “He can still be surprised. He didn’t expect the difficulties he had in bringing the astral material to life. You were the one who figured out how to bring the bodies to life. Not him.”

  “I wish I hadn’t.”

  Lana’s shoulders slumped even farther. “I’m sure he had other plans if this one failed. He would sacrifice anything to achieve his ends.”

  Pax looked up at the vultures circling overhead. “I’m nothing to him,” he said, realizing with the words how horribly betrayed he felt. “Just a tool.”

  Warmth spread through his shoulder. She had put her hand on him. He could see holes in her skin where the ash was falling in on itself. He’d crush her if he held her now. Lana’s eyes were nothing but two sparks drifting inside her sockets. They still managed to look on him with pity. “He said his one regret was betraying you.”

  Pax shook his head, unable to look away from her collapsing in on herself. “Lana, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m going back to the astral plane. I only wanted to stay long enough to say farewell.”

  “But I need you. To help me stop Terry.”

  Part of the skin over her breasts fell in, collapsing in a puff of sparks. Her hair was breaking off, drifting across the barren rocks, landing among the rest of the ash.

  “Stay. Please. For me.” The words felt foreign, and involuntarily, coming out of him like a nurse jerking out a feeding tube.

  She raised her last sword in a salute and tossed it away from her like a javelin. He watched it spin in lazy loops, crumbling into black flakes and a few lonely sparks in midair.

  When he looked back, she was a thousand sparks drifting on the breeze.

  In the pool of negative energy, Scarlett lay curled up tightly in a ball, weeping. The pool had gone dark, taking away Scarlett’s view of the sky, of the clouds. It couldn’t erase the image in her mind of Pax blowing her off and jumping away, but it made her feel better. The negative energy threads stroked her shoulders like sympathetic friends. The only thing missing from her pity party was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy.

  While she lay there, the negative energy had been pumping something into her, making her more solid. And the more solid she grew, the more her own negative emotions began fading into the background. They were still there, but they didn’t bother her anymore.

  For once in her life, she didn’t feel anything, and it was a relief.

  And still, the negative energy wanted something from her.

  All right, she sent out. Tell me what you want. Let’s get this over with.

  Images started to flash in front of her eyes—threads of negative energy being drawn through some kind of hole, where they were eaten by a bunch of weird bug-like things as large as taxis.

  Okay, she thought. Uh… giant bugs from outside space and time are sucking negative energy through some kind of hole in our universe. Why should I care?

  The image shifted to that of a giant, flying black city moving through space. It looked like a termite mound made of shining black puke, and it was crawling with more bugs. It was moving toward the hole.

  So… I should care because they’re probably going to invade soon and kill everyone? Isn’t that what you want? Death? Destruction? Me burning down more schools in your honor?

  NO.

  It was the first time the negative energy had used a word, and it rattled through Scarlett’s very being with its power.

  A flood of images followed. Two kids pounded each other beside some tan-and-green plastic playground equipment while a little girl watched them from the top of the slide. An old man and woman argued in front of a trash bin beside a lake. They shouted at each other, the muscles standing out along the sides of their necks. An angry-looking man wrapped in a hoodie and a Mets blanket ate rocky road ice cream out of a half-gallon container, tears running freely down his cheeks. He stabbed the ice cream as if he were trying to eat its heart out.

  The negative energy showed her the dark city flying toward the sun—growing larger and larger as it flew, eating planets and comets and asteroids and moons. When it reached the sun, it stretched thin until it could wrap itself completely around the surface—and then the sun went out.

  Scarlett understood.

  The black city was going to attack the Earth and use it as a springboard for consuming the solar system and, from there, the universe. And the negative energy didn’t want the black city to do this. It much preferred to live symbiotically with humanity and watch it get in petty fights with itself.

  YES.

  It made a kind of sick sense.

  What do you want me to do?

  Julie arched her back and leaned away from the monitor in the operating theater. She stretched from side to side, cracking her spine. She picked up the burnt-tasting coffee Ms. Jance had brought in a Styrofoam cup. It was cold.

  Julie still finished it down to the dregs.

  Julie was looking at an MRI of Pax’s chest cavity, taken postmortem. His heart, liver, and stomach were clearly visible. But where his lungs should have been—two black, empty spaces on either side of his heart—were only lumps of pure, solid white.

  A file beside her listed the tests they had done on the silvery material they’d taken from Pax’s lungs and other parts of his body. Acid didn’t dissolve it. Carbon didn’t bind with it. It didn’t give off a smell. It didn’t respond to electrical current or magnets. Test after test had revealed nothing: the testers could only speculate that it was an artificially designed material, like some kind of plastic. Or even a sci-fi material, a self-replicating nanomaterial.

  She’d been staring at it for twenty minutes and still couldn’t make any sense of it. She closed the file.

  She had her own files on Pax’s disease, stolen by DARPA off her own computer. But she already knew what those said, and none of them said anything about this.

  Ms. Jance had fallen asleep in one of the chairs in the front row of the audience, her head on the desk, arms crossed in front of her.

  Julie rubbed her eyes. “I’m down to the last few files, Ms. Grace. Would you mind telling me what you intend to do with… whatever is impersonating my son?”

  “Classified.” Ms. Grace had been pacing back and forth behind Julie’s chair for the past hour, reeking of boozy-smelling perfume and making insufferable snorting noises as she cleared her sinuses. “But as far as I know, the plan is to take both of them alive for study.”

  “Aren’t you going to arrest the girl at least? For destroying her school?”

  “If we do, we’re obliged to arrest your son, too, aren’t we? For killing that preacher.”

  “That thing is not my son,” Julie said. Her chest and throat ached, and her voice came out hoarse. “My son is dead and lying on that table.”

  The corners of Ms. Grace’s wrinkled old mouth turned down and her lips pooched out. Her eyes looked almost sympathetic.

  I don’t need your pity! Julie blinked calmly at the woman and said, “It’s not going to be easy to capture either of them. You don’t have a department that specializes in that, do you?”

  “You’re lookin’ at it: me and Ms. Jance,” Ms. Grace said. “Can’t you tell? I got superpowers up the wazoo and a secret military base in Arizona—or was that New Mexico?” The woman put a hand on Julie’s shoulder. Her fingers were covered with wrinkles and gaudy fashion rings. She had a French manicure with little plastic flowers glued to her ring fingers, and her hands smelled like cigarettes.

  Julie resi
sted the urge to jerk away.

  “I’m sorry about your son.” Ms. Grace’s fingernails tightened on Julie’s blouse, making her flinch. “So maybe you’d better help us think of something.”

  “What do you even think I can do for you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “You want me for one of two possibilities. Either because some remnant of my son is housed within the fake body, and you want me to communicate with him, or because you think I can come up with some way to affect the material directly.”

  “Let’s just say yes on the first one, and a strong maybe on the second.”

  Julie rubbed the backs of her hands with her thumbs and went to work deeper into her forearms and wrists. “What if I refuse?”

  Ms. Grace mercifully removed her hand entirely. “Nothin’. We’ll be watching you, that’s all. We can’t force civilians to cooperate. And we certainly wouldn’t be sabotaging your future job prospects. Forever.”

  The threat in her tone matched the words. Julie was trying to formulate a response when the screen on the monitor went dark, as if it had gone to sleep in the brief time she’d glanced away from it. Julie shook the mouse in annoyance.

  The screen stayed dark.

  “Damn it,” Ms. Grace said. “Of all the damn times for the server to go down.”

  Behind them, Ms. Jance made a small, startled sound. Julie looked. Ms. Jance was sitting up with both hands flat on the table and her face raised toward something over their heads. The whites of her eyes looked very white. Her jaw relaxed for a moment and then clenched shut, bulging at the sides.

  The screens above their heads threw light across Ms. Jance’s face. A second later, the monitor in front of Julie began doing the same, flickering through different images she recognized from Pax’s files or the files from DARPA.