Nick wished he’d been granted a full-view tactical feed of the battle so he could see what was happening underground. But his entreaties to the generals had been in vain. They’d been wary that even the single channel routed to his apartment could be tapped and tactical data intercepted. He would have thought that his willingness to finance the mission would have earned him more clout. Apparently there were limits to what even a quarter billion dollars could buy.
He had an idea and called out to Sosoome. “Any chance of hacking that EPF channel, getting us some additional camera views?”
“Sure. While I’m at it, why don’t I cure global insanity and institute world peace.”
Nick was frustrated enough by being out of the loop and in no mood for AI sass. He picked up a seat cushion and hurled it at the mech.
“Hey dude, watch it!” Sosoome snarled, dodging the cushion with a flying leap to an adjacent shelf.
“Earn your keep, huh? Give it a try.”
“I’m a simple mech, not master of all cyberspace,” Sosoome groused, needing to get in the last word. But the mech closed his eyes, indicating he was attempting to comply with the request.
Nick glanced over at Bel. She looked crestfallen at the battle’s terrible cost in lives. He knew that she’d seen her share of real-time horrors. But even after witnessing that mass suicide of doomers, the slaughter of so many brave soldiers was hitting her hard.
He gripped her hand. “We knew there was the possibility it was going to go this way.”
“I know. It’s just that…”
“Yeah, I know. Not the kind of world any of us should be living in.”
She stiffened her resolve and broached a new concern. “What about the assassins? Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall any of those enemy soldiers using Cohe wands. What if there’s an army of Paratwa waiting underground, ready to ambush our people?”
“Best case scenario, if there are assassins, they all died inside the buildings or the towers.” Worst case, there’s a lot more slaughter to come.
Still, Nick doubted that the troops would encounter any great force of binaries. From the brief message she had sent, it appeared that Witherstone’s source had seen only a few of them during her fourteen months of servitude. Other than occasional inspections, there was really no reason for Paratwa to congregate at Thi Maloca. The one exception would be Empedocles, youngest of the Ash Ock, who supposedly remained there in training.
Much of this Amazonian region, like most of the unsecured world, had succumbed to jamscram saturation decades ago. Unless landlines had been buried deep beneath the jungle to reach the smattering of sec villages or the Royals had developed some new technology capable of overcoming blacked-out areas, constant oversight of the complex by normal means was problematic.
But “normal” was different for Paratwa and a simple solution presented itself. Although there was no reason to keep binaries at the complex, it made sense to keep a single tway of one onsite at all times. With the other tway stationed in sec territory, communication was guaranteed.
No force or barrier known to science could stop the linked halves of a Paratwa from communicating. Tways separated by any known distance constituted organic examples of the quantum phenomenon of nonlocality, what Einstein had called “spooky action at a distance.” Binaries, by their very nature, were one of the most perfect com systems ever envisioned.
Nick wasn’t concerned about the troops encountering a contingent of assassins. His real fear, and one shared by the EPF commanders, was that the Royals had planted nukes or some other doomsday device within the complex. If so, its detonation could not only wipe out the entire attack force, it would eliminate the possibility of personnel being captured or data systems being scoured for intel.
“What’s that?” Bel asked. She was pointing to a shimmering glow at the upper edge of the monitor’s panoramic view.
Nick frowned, unable to identify what he was seeing. Located at the farthest edge of the clearing, the quivering blur seemed to be slowly clarifying into a solid form.
“Some sort of optical camo,” he guessed. If it was cloaking technology, it was a type with which he was unfamiliar.
The blur achieved enough definition to be identifiable. It was a small structure, hexagonal in shape. Judging by comparison to the other buildings, it was maybe seven meters across and just high enough for an average person to stand upright within.
Two platoons of soldiers who’d remained in the clearing, along with battle androids and a few autotanks not tasked with cleanup, were already moving toward it. All of them slowed as they got closer, wary of its odd nature.
“More than just optical camo,” Nick mused. “Whatever cloaking technology it’s using must function across a wide spectrum. Otherwise, EPF radar and scanners would have picked it up earlier.”
“I don’t think it was there earlier,” Bel said. “See those tread marks on the ground on both sides of it? One of the autotanks passed over that exact spot.”
Nick frowned. She was right. Not only was the structure utilizing an unknown form of camouflage, as of a few minutes ago it hadn’t been there. His first thought was that it had ascended from some underground lair like the towers.
The soldiers and the robots halted ten paces away. The slow-dissolving optical camo finally rendered the structure fully visible.
Its walls and roof were painted white but were streaked with broken branches and clusters of leaves. Nick abruptly understood where it had come from.
“It wasn’t underground. It was hiding, somewhere out there in the jungle.”
“A mobile building,” Bel said.
“Yeah. Either running on treads or outfitted with hover jets.”
The outlines of an ovoid portal appeared on one of the structure’s hexagonal sides. The portal slid open. Two figures stepped out into the noonday sun, side by side. They raised their hands over their heads, a clear posture of surrender. Nick maximized the zoom capability of the spy cam for a tighter view.
A man and a woman. They looked to be in their twenties. They were garbed identically, in long maroon robes trimmed in black. He was tall and slender with sharp gray eyes. Blond hair cascaded across his shoulders. She was a tad shorter. Wild brown hair framed an elfin face.
They strolled calmly toward the fifty-plus soldiers and ten robots whose weapons were trained on them. The EPF forces didn’t open fire. Nick took their hesitancy to mean that mobile command had reminded them of a primary mission objective: taking prisoners. Perhaps his entreaties to the general hadn’t been in vain after all.
Yet there was a quality about the duo that gave Nick a bad feeling. Their movement betrayed no telltales as to whether they were human or Paratwa. But what troubled him most was that they didn’t appear even mildly apprehensive. Their poise suggested a strange and unnatural calm.
Bel had the same take on the duo. “Something’s not right. Could they – or it – be a suicide bomber?”
“Maybe.” Yet those expressions of fanaticism or religious bliss often common to those about to self-destruct seemed absent here.
Nick’s bad feeling escalated. He leaned toward the monitor, trying to will the soldiers to take action.
“Shoot them,” he hissed. “Shoot them now.”
Thirty-One
Even if Nick’s prompting could have reached the soldiers, it would have come too late. The man and woman moved at the same instant, a preternatural blur of coordinated speed. One moment they were side by side, the next they were back to back, crescent webs igniting.
Slip-wrist holsters shot Cohe wands into their right palms. Fingers tightened on the eggs. Black beams whipped furiously, lancing through the weak side portals of the crescent webs of the nearest soldiers, killing them instantly. A dozen more died before the neuromuscular systems of the troops even caught up to the blinding acceleration of their opponent, now unveiled as a Paratwa assassin.
The soldiers finally opened fire. But the tways jerked and twisted, either
dodging the thruster and machine gun blasts or allowing their front and rear crescents to absorb the impacts. Their black beams continued flashing with relentless fury and unerring aim. In seconds, they’d cut down the rest of the troops.
Bel’s face hardened, as if immune to this latest example of brutal violence. But she managed to voice a good question.
“Why aren’t the robots firing?”
Things had happened so fast that Nick hadn’t even realized it. But she was right. None of the battle androids and autotanks were participating in the battle. Instead, they were pivoting and squirming, aiming their weapons in seemingly random directions but not shooting.
“What’s wrong with them?” she wondered.
“The Paratwa must be wearing some new kind of jamscram.”
Nick had never seen the technology function in such a way. A normal AV scrambler didn’t prevent autotargeting robots from firing their weapons, it merely made them miss their targets. But the battle androids and autotanks weren’t able to unleash any of their formidable offenses. The assassin must possess a more sophisticated means of disrupting an opponent’s AI systems.
Mobile command retasked the three stormlacers that remained on patrol over the surrounding jungles. They swept in from three directions, zeroing in on the assassin.
Two hands whipped upward. Two Cohe beams intertwined into a single powerful lance of energy. The first stormlacer was hit and exploded. A piece of flaming shrapnel from it nailed the second craft. That stormlacer spun out of control, its pilot ejecting an instant before the craft slammed into the jungle half a klick away.
The battle androids and autotanks finally erupted into action. But they didn’t turn their weapons on the Paratwa. Instead, they fired in unison at the third stormlacer. It was blasted from the skies before it could get off a shot.
Nick roared to his feet, raging at the screen. “Shut down the robots! The assassin has control! Goddamn it, shut them all down!”
If mobile command was trying to issue such orders, they weren’t getting through. The unknown type of scrambler utilized by the tways had taken full control.
The soldiers who had disappeared into the buildings were redirected to deal with this new threat. Hundreds of them poured from the structures and sprinted toward the scene. The first ones there died in a hail of robotic fire. The rest dove for cover, startled that their own machines were attacking them.
“Only the robots closest to the Paratwa are affected,” Bel noted. “The ones farther out seem OK.”
The assassin’s special disrupter/controller must have limited range, Nick realized. But that made little difference to the soldiers, who were now forced to fire upon a squad of their own battle androids and autotanks.
Nick whipped his attention to Sosoome. “Get me through to command!”
The mech opened the com link. The female general came on the line.
“Shut down your com nets!” Nick barked. “It’s the only way to break through their technology.”
“Being done as we speak.”
An instant later, every robot in the clearing froze as mobile command neutralized its air-to-ground com nets, returning the jungle floor to jamscram status. But because the battle androids and autotanks were non-autonomous, operating strictly under centralized control, they could no longer assist either side in the battle. The links enabling the soldiers to communicate with one another and mobile command were also knocked out of commission.
The fight was reduced to a simple equation: an independent force of hundreds of battle-hardened EPF troops supported by Delta-A squads against a single Paratwa. Nick had a bad feeling that the equation gave the assassin a decided advantage.
He was right. The slaughter was horrendous. For what seemed an eternity but was probably less than sixty seconds, the back-to-back assassin waded into the troops, its Cohes stabbing and slashing with homicidal fury. A hundred soldiers perished, then another hundred.
Nick had studied numerous videos of Paratwa attacks. He knew the fighting characteristics of the products of every known genetic lab. But this creature was something new and different. It moved with the relentless determination and blinding speed of a Voshkof Rabbit or Jeek Elemental, most fearsome of the breeds. Yet to Nick’s trained eye, the creature was neither. It represented a breed never before seen.
The answer came to him in a flash. “It’s Empedocles, the fifth Ash Ock.”
No other conclusion made sense. Still, the idea went against what was known about the Royal Caste. Intel from Ektor Fang and other sources over the years had revealed that the Royals weren’t created for combat. Their strengths lay in other areas. But if Nick was right, that rule had been cast aside when it came to this final Ash Ock.
The whirlwind of destruction continued unabated. More soldiers perished or suffered grave injuries.
But reinforcements streamed out of the buildings to replace the casualties. And then the third wave of carriers landed at the far side of the clearing, unleashing fifteen hundred fresh troops.
The Paratwa might well be one of the deadliest – if not the deadliest – set of tways ever encountered. But despite its abilities, it wasn’t impervious to the law of numbers. The strength of the opposing force and the determination of the soldiers began to turn the tide. Slowly, the assassin was forced to retreat, impelled backward by concentrated thruster blasts slamming into its front crescent webs. And then a platoon of soldiers rushed out of the jungle, outflanking the creature and forcing it to repel attackers on two sides.
Nick sensed its defeat was at hand. Within seconds of him formulating the thought, the inevitable occurred.
The woman twisted her front shield to repel fire from the flanking platoon. But that turned her weak side portal into the path of a dozen thruster rifles. The combined energies slammed into her, crushing her left midsection. With that much thruster power hitting her at the same instant, bones throughout her torso would be crumbling into dust and vital organs into gelatin.
The hits lifted her off the ground. She flew backward through the air, crashlanding on bloodstained grass ten meters away.
If there was any doubt she was dead, the man’s reaction eliminated it. He opened his palm and dropped his Cohe to the ground. His face twisted into a mask of horror. His scream was so intense and of such duration that a shiver coursed up Nick’s spine.
“My God,” Bel whispered, equally affected by that piercing cry.
Thruster blasts slammed the man’s front crescent. He was no longer resisting by leaning into the hits and augmenting his crescent web with muscle power. The blasts knocked him onto his back as if he was a bowling pin.
He disappeared from camera view as soldiers converged around him. Swift jerky movements on the part of the troops indicated he was suffering an outpouring of their rage, being brutally punched, kicked and stomped.
Nick’s mind raced, formulating new possibilities. A reconceptualized version of a plan that so recently had seemed doomed began to take shape.
“Don’t kill him,” he pleaded at the screen.
Judging by the enraged faces of the soldiers and the intensity of the beating, the percentages weren’t with the tway surviving. His screams finally ended. It was entirely possible the Paratwa remnant was already dead.
“Yo!” Sosoome yelled, drawing Nick’s attention. “All com links back online. And got you an early Christmas present.”
“You hacked into that EPF channel?”
“Yeah, but just a miniscule data stream, audio only. Otherwise, they’ll detect me and shut down the whole link.”
Sosoome turned up the monitor volume. A stern male voice, obviously a high-ranking officer aboard mobile command, was arguing with a reluctant captain on the ground.
“Dammit, Captaincaptain, I don’t give a Pasadena shrimpfuck what your troops want to do to the prick. He’s a goddamn tway. We want him alive!”
The captain protested that his troops deserved to enact vengeance on the assassin for killing so many of the
ir fellow soldiers. But his superior cut him off midsentence.
“Can that revenge crap! Alive and in good condition, Captain. Or else it’s your ass!”
More chatter emanated from the speakers but Nick tuned it out. If the tway did manage to survive its predicament – and that was a big if, despite orders from command – there was work to be done. He activated his attaboy and called Doctor Emanuel.
“Doc, a question. You said that mnemonic cursors and the whole process of implanting a false personality wouldn’t work on binaries. That their true nature, that they’re half of a single mind, a single consciousness, can never really be camouflaged, right?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“OK, but what if the original binary was capable of splitting into separate individuals, each with its own distinct identity? What if you could base a new personality not on the whole Paratwa, but only upon one of these independent halves?”
“Are you telling me that a tway of the Royal Caste has been captured?”
Nick returned his attention to the monitor. Calmer heads appeared to be prevailing among the soldiers. They’d backed away to allow a med team to lift the motionless tway onto a gurney.
It was impossible to tell if he was dead or merely unconscious. He’d been savagely kicked and beaten, especially around the face. His open mouth was agape in a frozen rictus of agony and his lips were soaked in blood. The soldiers had yanked out most of his teeth, an indignity that wasn’t merely a byproduct of their wrath. The circuitry for the crescent web strapped to the tway’s waist, and possibly that unique disrupter/controller as well, was governed by rubber pads fastened to his bicuspids and molars. Crude dental extraction was a fast method for disabling energy shields.
Nick finally responded to Doctor Emanuel’s question. “Best case scenario, an Ash Ock tway has been taken alive. Right now, all I need to know is if what I’m suggesting makes sense.”
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