The Deathless Quadrilogy

by Chris Fox

  “Okay, that’s a grim tactical situation. What’s the second problem?” Jordan asked. He wanted to know the entirety of what he was dealing with before he started analyzing the problems.

  “Sobek. You’ve heard of him?” Roberts asked. He waved a hand, and a muffin floated off a tray and over to his hand. Jordan watched the signal carefully. This one he knew intimately, and he was confident that his command of telekinesis was greater than Roberts’s, even without the Ark.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Neither Isis nor Osiris had anything good to say about him. How is he an issue?”

  “About a year after Isis left to help you in your latest war, a ship showed up in port,” Roberts explained. “It had a cargo of black stone cut from Easter Island. Sobek claimed he’d made a deal with Isis, and that he’d deliver a shipment annually for the next decade.” He paused to tear a piece from the muffin, tossing it in his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Do you remember why you recruited me for that initial dig, Jordan?”

  “Of course,” Jordan said, a little more forcefully than he’d intended. “You’re a geologist—one of the finest in the world before it ended. Now? The leading expert, without a doubt.”

  “I examined this stone and learned a great deal about the properties that made it so valuable in the previous age. Here, look at this.” Roberts withdrew a smooth black stone from his pocket and tossed it to Jordan.

  Jordan plucked it from the air effortlessly. “What am I looking at?” He held the stone up to his face, studying it. It was warm to the touch, and he could sense faint energy inside of it.

  “This stone is unique, so far as I can tell,” Roberts said. “It’s a type of volcanic rock, which turns out to be one of the best materials for containing the energy we utilize for our abilities. The same energy that we get from the moon, or that the deathless get from the sun. The rock makes an excellent storage mechanism for that energy. It’s slow to charge, but will hold that charge indefinitely. In the case of Easter Island, it’s been building that energy for hundreds of thousands of years—maybe millions. Since it was out in the middle of the ocean, there was no one like us around to tap into it.”

  “So you’re saying that this stone is a battery, basically?” Jordan asked. That seemed the relevant takeaway.

  “Essentially. A battery that we can build functionality into, using shaping.”

  “Like the obelisks surrounding the perimeter,” Jordan said, snapping his fingers. “They’re sensors, aren’t they?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised that you figured out the technology so quickly, given your background with Mohn. Yes, the obelisks are my invention. They detect certain wavelengths, such as the kind we use when shaping. That’s not their only use, of course. They are also weapons—weapons we have not yet had to test.”

  “So Sobek is dropping off this stone. That’s a good thing, right?”

  “It was at first,” Roberts allowed. “The problem is that he’s growing suspicious. Sooner or later he’s going to attack—and without someone of your strength, we’re powerless to stop him.”

  18

  Anna

  Trevor rose from where he’d been squatting next to the energy field. He began pacing, a precise five steps from one corner of their cell to the other. David had somehow modified the field to keep out sound, and it seemed to block all types of signal. None of Trevor’s shaping had affected it in any way.

  They had no way of keeping time, but Trevor was fairly certain a couple days had passed. They might have already missed their first check-in.

  “Will you please stop doing that?” Irakesh said. His voice was jarring after the prolonged silence.

  “What else would you like me to do?” Trevor asked, though he did stop pacing. “David holds our fate in his hands—and with Yuri egging him on to jettison us out the airlock, I’m not liking our chances.”

  “That is a very serious problem,” Irakesh said, in a languid, relaxed voice that suggested the opposite. “But we can do nothing about it. Absolutely nothing. All planning is pointless. So we wait. That waiting may feel unbearable, but I promise you it will pass eventually. I have a great deal of experience with patience. For my eighth birthday, my mother locked me in my chambers for a month. Every day, she slid a tray under the door. It contained the day’s food and a note. It said ‘Be patient, and this will pass.’”

  “Wow,” was all Trevor could manage. “That seems incredibly harsh.”

  “Indeed it was,” Irakesh said, “but consider the lesson—and consider how early in life I learned it. I have learned a great deal more about your world and the people that dwelled in it. Your children had no patience. Even your adults had none. Everything was about instant gratification.” He gave a toothy smile. “My mother taught me the value of patience, and I have never forgotten it. I have no need to pace. If we are here for weeks, so be it.”

  “If you’re so patient, then why does my pacing bother you?” Trevor shot back, then smiled. That had scored a point.

  There was movement down one of the corridors, beyond the area that had been cordoned off for their cell. Trevor raised a hand to silence Irakesh, who subsided with a nod.

  David and Yuri strode into the central room.

  “Hello again, Trevor. Irakesh.” David nodded to each of them in turn. “I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the two of you. Your stories check out—but there are some disturbing gaps.”

  “How did you fact check us? The internet is gone,” Trevor asked.

  “For the most part, you’re correct,” David offered. He smiled, approaching the energy barrier. “Before the end, Mohn launched a dozen satellites into orbit. Ten of those satellites are still operational, and a number of factions all over the world tap into those satellites. Opening that communication leaves those systems vulnerable, and I’m able to breeze in and find out what I need.”

  “You’re a hacker?” Trevor asked. It seemed so odd for something like that to still exist.

  “Of a sort. I have abilities, I believe you’d call them shaping.” David held up a hand, and electricity crackled across his fingers. “I can generate almost any type of signal or wave, and those signals can be used to do all sorts of things. Before the world ended, I was a software engineer, so the first thing I learned to do was tap into electronics. The internet was my playground, and the few remaining systems still are.”

  “That’s how you know what happened to Mohn Corp.” Trevor moved to stand at the edge of the containment field, as close to David as he could get. “You monitor everything, and they probably have no idea you’re even here.”

  “No,” Yuri corrected, speaking for the first time. “They know satellite orbiting earth.” He stepped closer to the barrier as well. “Don’t know how to find. If we broadcast signal, they find.”

  “So you can listen, but not talk?” Trevor asked.

  “Precisely,” David said. He seemed pleased that Trevor was able to follow along. “We do a great deal of listening, and deploy Solaris’s teams to deal with the things we’re able to tackle.”

  “What are you, exactly?” Irakesh asked, finally rising to his feet. “You are neither god nor sorcerer, so far as I can tell. How did you get your abilities?”

  “Not by choice, that’s for damned sure.” David’s face hardened. “Before the world ended, I was an abductee. As far as the world was concerned, that made me crazy, but it was the truth. We call them the grey men, and they experimented on thousands of us across the globe.”

  “Why? What were they trying to create?” Trevor asked. The idea that aliens existed was something he’d been comfortable with long before the world ended. He’d never given much credence to alien abduction cases, though, because most weren’t credible.

  “We call ourselves supers. Cliché, but hey, it fits. Those of us that survived the testing found we had an array of strange abilities. My wife can phase through walls, and even teleport. I can manipulate almost any signal, and I’ve met someone who can
throw a tank like a baseball.”

  “Yeah, but why give you those abilities?” Trevor asked. “It doesn’t make any sense. They’re creating their own enemies.”

  “I get the skepticism. I asked the same thing, trust me.” David gave a weary eye roll. “The grey men were trying to create someone with my specific subset of abilities. I can simulate their technology, and I’m a Homo sapiens. The grey men have another name, something you might recognize. Have you heard of ‘the progeny of the Builders’?”

  “Shit,” Trevor said, his enthusiasm dampened. “Ka used that term. And so did Set. So these grey men are the Builders?”

  “Their forerunners, I think. The grey men were an early expedition sent to ready the Earth for their recolonization. Their goal was to access the Ark network left behind by the Builders, but when they returned they found that those Arks had been modified. The woman you’d call Isis created a sort of lock for each Ark. Those Arks can only be accessed with someone possessing the right key.” David paused. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Trevor allowed. “I have one of those keys. I know two more people who have them as well. If I understand what you’re saying, when Isis made the Ark keys she blocked these grey men from repossessing the Arks their ancestors had created?”

  “Yeah, that’s it exactly,” David said. “Isis basically changed the locks, coding the Arks to our DNA. They were experimenting on humanity, because the Arks have been modified to recognize our genetic structure. They’ll only accept an Ark Lord who started off human. The grey men know that, and have for a very long time—several thousand years, at least.”

  “Why do they need the Arks so badly?” Irakesh asked. “Surely their power has grown since leaving our world countless millennia ago.”

  “Because the grey men aren’t infallible. They came back to Earth assuming they’d have access to the Arks, and apparently they needed the Arks to send a message back home. Their own ships are too weak to generate a pulse strong enough to reach their home world.” David raised a hand and a shimmering holoscreen appeared.

  Trevor recognized it instantly as a solar system, but it was unfamiliar to him. “That blue one is their world?”

  “Yeah, so far as we know. It’s about fourteen light years away. Their ships can transmit a signal at a little slower than the speed of light, but the Arks are capable of generating a message that will travel much more swiftly. Unfortunately, the grey men were able to do exactly that. Five years ago you may have felt a pulse of incredible power being fired from the Arks.”

  “Yeah,” Trevor said. “We saw that, and had no way of explaining it at the time. You’re telling me that was these grey men phoning home?”

  “I’m afraid so. We tried to stop them, but they found a way around us. It turns out there are seven Arks, one for each continent. During Isis’s time, she created a lock for six of them. The seventh was buried under Antarctica, and didn’t have the same genetic safeguards. The grey men are in control of that Ark.”

  “Wait a minute. Does that mean the grey men can get into the Nexus?” Trevor felt himself tensing. “David, we need to warn my friends. Blair and Jordan have to know about this. When we separated, we agreed to meet up there. They’ve already used the Arks to communicate through the Nexus.”

  “Oh, my god,” David said. His face had gone ashen. “We’ve got to stop them. Yuri, go to the lab and tell Anna to get prepped for deployment.”

  19

  Out of Contact

  “I won’t be gone long.” Blair took Liz’s hand, giving it a quick squeeze. “At least one of us has to stay. You know that.”

  “I know.” Liz looked up, eyes full of emotion.

  Blair drew her into a tight hug.

  “Be quick,” she said. “I just can’t shake the feeling that if you leave I won’t see you for months. Every time we separate, it takes forever to find each other again. We’ve really just found each other. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t.” Blair kissed her hand. “I may be back in an hour. I just have to meet with the others so we can compare notes.”

  She gave him a smile, and then he was off. He fueled his blur, leaping from hill to hill. He had no idea how fast he was going, but he crossed Rohnert Park and then Petaluma in a matter of minutes.

  Along the way, he felt hundreds of canine minds reaching out. They were curious, but he was in a hurry. Introductions could come after he was back home. For now, he needed to get to the Ark before the sun set.

  It had already sunk to the horizon’s edge, barely visible over a cluster of eucalyptus trees. Blair redoubled his speed, blurring straight up 101 freeway. He blew through Novato, then San Rafael, and finally into Larkspur.

  The Ark was visible now. He could have simply light walked from Santa Rosa, but it was important that he learn the terrain in this new world. That required him to see it, even if briefly.

  Besides, he’d missed these rolling hills, the oak forests to one side, and the redwoods closer to the coast. This place had always been home; he was excited that it would be again. He and Liz had finally come home, and he wasn’t about to let some emergency tear him away—assuming there even was one.

  He paused in Larkspur, stopping in the parking lot where he’d battled against Irakesh, Trevor, and Cyntia. The place was even more ruined—every window shattered and the roof sagging inwards. Rust covered everything, even the weights inside the gym. Behind the gym was the bay, and dominating the bay was his Ark.

  Blair closed his eyes, connecting to the Ark. He willed it to light walk him directly into the Nexus, and the Ark thrummed in response. A familiar flash carried him into a moment of vertigo, then he was standing on the light bridge in the Nexus.

  “Ah, Ark Lord Blair.” Ka’s pleasant voice came from the far side of the room. The green hologram gave a jerky bow, polite as always. “You are the first to arrive. I am awaiting your companions. If you’d like to wait in the central chamber, that’s where your friends will go after arrival.”

  Blair nodded his thanks, then started walking in that direction. It didn’t take long to reach the large, round chamber. He tried to stop himself, but he looked up anyway.

  The cracks in the glass dome were no worse than they had been five years ago, but they were still just as alarming. Above that glass lay the entire weight of the ocean, so deep that it was pure, inky blackness.

  A lifelike hologram flared into existence a few feet away, and Blair was surprised to realize it was Jordan, not Ka. Jordan started to offer him a transparent hand, then stopped. “I almost forgot I can’t touch you.”

  “You couldn’t come in person?” Blair asked.

  “It would have been a hassle,” Jordan explained. “There’s a lot to catch up on, but I’m down in Lima helping Dr. Roberts. They’ve elected him president.” He gave an affectionate smile. “That guy is exactly what this country needed.”

  “Tell him I said ‘hey.’” Blair returned the smile. He missed the bristly-bearded geologist. “Looks like Trevor’s the last to arrive.”

  “Pardon me, Ark Lords.” Ka cocked its bulbous head. “The readings I received from the Ark of the Cradle when the light bridge was activated are quite alarming. The Ark’s reserves are at critical levels. It is approaching total failure. Given that state, he may not be able to activate his Ark’s communication array.”

  “Ka, can you record our conversation?” Blair asked.

  Ka bowed again. “Of course. I am already doing so. I hope this is acceptable.”

  “If Trevor arrives after we leave,” Blair said, “I want you to play the conversation Jordan and I are about to have. That will catch him up on our news.”

  “Of course. I’m happy to comply,” Ka replied—happily, of course.

  “So what did you and Liz find?” Jordan asked. He folded those tree trunk arms against his chest.

  “Angel Island was blitzed by a settlement of deathless,” Blair explained. “The survivors fled no
rth, to Santa Rosa. I don’t know if you remember—”

  “Stop talking,” a new voice said. “Right now.”

  A new hologram appeared, this one a young man in his mid-twenties. He had tousled hair, a little too artfully arranged to be accidental. A thin beard ran along his jawline.

  “Yes,” he said, “you heard me right. Shut up. The Nexus’s communications network isn’t private. All the Arks can tap into it. The grey men are listening, and so are a couple Ark Lords.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Blair asked. He shifted to warform, prepared to summon the staff if needed.

  “And who the hell are the grey men?” Jordan added.

  “We’ve got to make this fast, so please try to keep up. My name is David. I can save you, but you’re going to have to work with me, all right?”

  “Why should we do anything you say?” Jordan asked. His right hand wrapped around a holographic sidearm. “You want cooperation. Start talking.”

  “Like I said, we don’t have time. The grey men will already be on their way. Listen, I’ve got your friend Trevor. How do you think I knew to be here? He told me about your meeting. I realize trust is in short supply, but you’ve got to give me a little. Like I said, I can save you, but I need your help to do that. Are you with me?”

  “Okay, I’m on board,” Blair said.

  Jordan looked askance at him, then turned and nodded to David. “What do you need us to do?”

  “It’s best that you get off the line, Jordan. Then we can close the communications array. I’m going to come down to the Nexus. I’ll bring Trevor with me. We’re going to appear in the chamber you’re standing in, so don’t freak out. Give us a couple minutes to get our gear together.”

  20

  Meetings

  Trevor rose to his feet as Yuri re-entered the central room with a new figure in tow. He blinked in surprised, shocked to realize he knew the woman David had referred to as Anna. “Anput?”