The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set

by D J Edwardson

  The last assessor pushed himself out from under Adan and stared in disbelief at the latest man to go down. Across the Com channel the Admins scrambled to get a handle on what was happening.

  “Everyone’s acting completely random, like they’re drugged or something—”

  “Hold on, we’re trying to get control of the situation.”

  “Just tell me what is going on. I’ve got two men down besides Cam.”

  “Get the zoelith. Just get the zoelith and—”

  Before the last assessor could grab the device and use it on him, Adan seized control of his mind. After the usual disorientation passed, he let the man drop to his knees. Adan struggled to get him into a crawling position and move towards the zoelith. The assessor groped around clumsily until he grabbed hold of it by mere chance. Moments later, it went flush against his forehead and the last of Adan’s opponents lay motionless on the ground.

  Looking around the room, Adan was amazed. It hardly seemed possible that he had taken on four assessors and survived. But he had no time to celebrate. On the Com channel the Admins had already dispatched another contingent of assessors with zoeliths to his location. Their orders were to pursue the intruder and neutralize him.

  This information quickly sobered him. All he had done was gain himself some time. He checked the schematics which Will had provided to find out the safest place he could go from the room he was in.

  According to the layout, there were multiple branching passages along both hallways exiting the room. The incoming assessors were approaching from the left. He briefly considered trying to force the door and head back into the Institute, but a quick check of the security detail made him realize there were actually more assessors in that complex than in this one, especially near where it connected to the Annex.

  He didn’t have time to plan. He ran off to the passage on the right, hoping to find a way out as he went along.

  He got no further than the threshold before he pulled up. He hurried back and grabbed the zoelith from the hand of the last assessor. It would certainly be needed if he came across any more opposition. After this encounter he felt like he at least had some idea of how to use it to his advantage. Zoelith in hand, he plunged into the sprawling corridors of the Annex.

  Adan sprinted down several passages, taking offshoots whenever they presented themselves, until he came to a painful realization—his strength was almost spent. He thought about switching things over to his bioseine to get him through, but he couldn’t afford to have his senses numbed at this point; he needed to be as alert as possible.

  Through his access to the Com channel, he could see the positions of all the assessors within the Annex. He was not in danger of running into any of them yet, but there was no clear path of escape.

  His current hallway was lined with doors. The schematic indicated that they were all storage rooms. The hall ended in a T-intersection.

  To the right, the complex went off into living areas. The wing was largely empty except for a few assessors patrolling the hallways. Several of them were heading towards him.

  To his left, a pair of assessors stood stationed at the end of a dead end hallway. For some reason they were not moving to intercept him even though they were the closest ones to his position.

  He reached the end of the current passage and was about to head off to the right when he realized the assessors there were moving faster than he had thought. Or perhaps it was just that he was slowing down. Whatever the case, two patrols were moving to block the entrance into the living quarters.

  At the same time, the group behind him was closing in rapidly. They had just entered the other end of his hallway. He could engage them and probably defeat them, but that would take time. And he didn’t know how much longer his body would hold up.

  It would be quicker to face the two assessors positioned in the hallway on his left, but that was a dead end. Again he wondered why they were holding their position. He scanned the schematic for more details in case he’d missed something.

  The hallway was similar to the one he had just come down. Multiple doors lined each side at regular intervals. But the rooms they led into were not for storage; they were holding cells for prisoners. All of them were empty except for the one being guarded. In an instant, Adan had a summary of the prisoner’s information from Com.

  It was Gavin.

  Adan didn’t bother to check the details about why he was there or what his status was. He charged off down the hallway as fast as his fatigued body would let him, his mind focused on one thing only: getting into that cell.

  This section of the hallway was about half as long as the one he had just come from. As he rushed towards the guards, orders went out on the Com channel to engage him. The assessors were warned that he possessed a zoelith which had already been used to down four of their colleagues.

  The guards advanced slowly while Adan barreled straight ahead. He had to get into that cell before the other patrols caught up to him. When he reached them, he dove recklessly at the man on his left, trying to hit him in the forehead with the zoelith. But Adan was exhausted, and even if he hadn’t been, the man was more nimble than he was. He tilted his head to the side and grabbed Adan’s arm, tossing him to the ground. The zoelith flew from his hands. The other assessor leapt on top of him, straddling him and pinning his arms to the floor.

  Bested physically, Adan did the only thing he could, he jumped into the mind of the assessor on top of him. Shaking off the disorientation, through the eyes of his enemy he spotted the zoelith resting on the floor near his own limp body. The other assessor made a move for it, but Adan’s man lunged and grabbed hold of it first. As his partner looked on, Adan forced the assessor to bring the zoelith to his own forehead. The man crumpled beside Adan’s body.

  Adan spent only a moment inside his own mind before bouncing back into the thoughts of the remaining assessor. By now, the vertigo was minor, but controlling them was still far from easy. The zoelith was resting in the deactivated assessor’s hand underneath his body. Bending down and prying it loose took precious time. He had to lift the body up and yank it out from under him at the same time. After two failed attempts, he managed to finally get hold of it. Then the second assessor was laid out beside his partner.

  Adan picked himself up and grabbed the zoelith. He checked on the position of the remaining pursuers. The patrols from the living quarters were still a ways off, but the group coming up behind him was just about to turn into the prison corridor.

  He hoped that opening Gavin’s cell door would be as simple as the ones he had used in the building located in Axis Prime, but the door was blank, just like the one he had used to enter the Annex from the Institute.

  A quick scan of Com revealed that the door had been taken off-system. He had no idea how to bring it back. If something was disconnected from the esolace, he couldn’t manipulate it, and it was far too solid for him to force physically.

  The pursuing assessors turned the corner into his hallway.

  “Oh, please, someone help me,” he muttered under his breath.

  Frantically, he searched the esolace to see if there was any way Gavin could help him from the other side. But Gavin’s mind was as blank as the door. He must have been deactivated.

  Adan’s thoughts flew through the esolace, searching for anything he could find about the door. But his pursuits were random. He had no idea what he was looking for. The assessors were halfway down the hall before an idea came to him.

  How do I get this door back on-system?

  The moment he asked the question, the answer came. All that was required was to switch back to the Dev channel. He didn’t know why something so obvious had not occurred to him before. He was struck by how simple solutions were when he simply asked the right questions.

  He found the signature for the disabled door in the registry and brought it back on-system. After a brief moment, he could sense the door again and connected to it with his mind. It slid obediently into the
wall and he stepped through, mentally closing it behind him.

  Inside, Gavin lay motionless on top of a chromium bed, dressed in the same bland gray clothing Adan had worn when he had been at the Institute. But Adan didn’t have time to deal with him yet. He had to figure out a way to keep the door from being opened by the incoming assessors. He took it off-system, but knew the Devs would bring it back at any moment. He focused once more on what the esolace could tell him about keeping a door like this not only off-system, but inaccessible long enough for him to revive Gavin and figure a way out of this situation.

  Once again, the answer came to him simply by thinking about the problem. The doors on this prison block were subject to a security protocol. In the event of a prisoner escaping, all of them would automatically be taken off-system until they were restored via a physical trigger. While the mechanism for this was right outside in the hall, at least the Devs would be unable to open it remotely via the esolace. If he could just keep the assessors from getting to the trigger, he could deactivate them using their own zoeliths.

  He issued an alert across the channel that a prisoner had escaped from the cell. The door had already been brought back on-system by the Devs, but in response to the fabricated security breach it went off again, just before the assessors arrived outside the door. They were thrown into such confusion by the alert that for a moment they stood in front of it trying to figure out from Com what was happening.

  “It’s a security malfunction,” came the answer from Com. “You need to reactivate the door using the manual override.”

  Six assessors stood outside. Two of them had zoeliths. Adan picked the one with a zoelith closest to the override and jumped into his mind. After a blurry moment, he found himself looking at the other side of the door through a borrowed pair of eyes. Adan’s assessor pressed the zoelith to his forehead and Adan was whisked back into his own body.

  The other assessors didn’t panic this time. Following Com’s instructions, one of them stepped towards the trigger and twisted the latch to slide away the cover. All he needed to do was flip the switch inside to override the security shutdown. But as the assessor reached for it, Adan took control of his mind and dropped him to the floor.

  The zoelith happened to be right next to him and Adan’s assessor grabbed it on the first try. The man deactivated himself and fell on top of the first assessor’s body, the two of them sprawled out in front of the trigger on the floor.

  Despite Com’s explanations, Adan could tell from the mental chatter in the hallway that the loss of the second assessor had rattled the men outside the cell. The assessor Adan had just deactivated was the group’s leader. Though they still had Com, no one was eager to volunteer to access the override after seeing what had happened to the first two. In the confusion Adan took over the mind of the other assessor still holding a zoelith.

  As the third member of their group slumped to the floor, the assessors pleaded with Com to tell them what was going on.

  Then something happened that Adan did not anticipate. The remaining assessors’ minds changed. He couldn’t say exactly what it meant at first, but he could sense the difference through the esolace. They no longer felt the same. It took him several moments to understand what had happened. The control of the assessors’ minds had been given over to someone else. He couldn’t tell who, but knew it had to be the Developers.

  Now it was Adan who was thrown into confusion. For a moment all he could do was stand there as two of the assessor went and picked up the zoeliths from their fallen companions. The third one went to access the door. The assessors no longer moved as quickly as before, but they were faster than when Adan was in control, and their movements much more fluid. Clearly, the Developers were more practiced at manipulating people’s minds than he was.

  At first, Adan had hoped the assessors with the zoeliths might take the time to revive their companions, giving him a chance to think about what to do next. But reactivation was not as instantaneous as deactivation. It would take too long to bring the other assessors back. They simply waited while the assessor without a zoelith re-engaged the door.

  Adan reached out to re-establish a connection, but there was some sort of barrier around the men which made it impossible for him to see any minds to possess.

  If Adan could no longer take control of the assessors he had no way to stop them. He was trapped inside his own body now.

  He allowed himself a brief glance at Gavin. If only he were awake, he thought. He would know what to do. But he wasn’t and there was nothing Adan could do.

  The door flew open and the first of the assessors came hurtling through.

  Forty

  Developed Minds

  Adan’s mind fumbled desperately for a way to save himself. As the assessor lunged towards him, bits of information shot through his mind like sand on the wind. He was certain the answers were there; he just had to ask the right questions. His enemies were no longer the assessors, but the Developers inside their minds. But just how absolute was their control?

  Adan backpedaled towards the rear wall to give himself a fraction of a moment before the assessor reached him. And that was all the time he needed. Suddenly, the answer came to him: what if he could control the Developers themselves? There was still much about the esolace he did not understand, but he remembered that Will had initialized him with an unknown channel. Perhaps that gave him the access to control even them.

  As he shot back he tripped and fell, slamming into the wall, but he felt nothing. He was already lost inside the esolace, searching for the mind of the Developer controlling his attacker. Intelligences flew by him like lumins hurtling through the dark. It only took a moment before he found the mental signature he was looking for. It had the same feel of whoever was now inside his attacker’s head.

  Adan’s mind rushed toward the Developer’s. Bursting in, a vertigo far greater than anything he had experienced inside the assessors inundated him. This new sentience was vastly more complex and difficult to control. So many thoughts spun, contorted, and gyrated past him that at first he couldn’t tell one from the other. He couldn’t get control of anything because he didn’t know what anything was. It was all a blur—an indecipherable, dizzying, anarchy of motion.

  But as his mind adjusted to the overwhelming torrent of mental noise, the landscape inside the Dev’s mind gradually began to take shape. Isolated aspects of it slowed down, coming into sharper focus.

  Adan noticed something transparent and shimmering buried deep within the heart of the tempest. He pushed his awareness towards it, slicing through the maelstrom of distractions. Once he got close enough he saw it was just what he sought: the link to the Dev’s control of the assessor. It appeared as a nebulous, pulsating picture of the man rushing towards him in the cell. His listless eyes were locked in a fixed position. Adan wasn’t sure how, but he could look at his eyes and see through them at the same time. The assessor was staring at a zoelith and the hand clenched around it.

  Though all Adan could see of the person holding the zoelith was his arm, he knew intuitively that it was his own. For a moment, Adan was held mesmerized once again by the odd experience of looking at his own body in this unexpected way. It seemed strange that his arm was able to evade the assessor’s attempts to capture the zoelith even though he himself was no longer directly in control of it. It came to him that with his own mind vacant, his bioseine must have triggered some sort of survival response to keep him from being deactivated. If that were true, he wondered just how much control the bioseine actually had over him, even when he was inside his own mind. But he had no time to ponder further. He needed to get control of the assessor’s mind before the zoelith was lost.

  He focused in on the shimmering image inside the Dev’s mind, willing it to come under his control. There was a brief pause in which all of the spinning thoughts around the assessor’s image held still and trembled. Then the whole mental panorama imploded and Adan felt himself ejected out of the Developer’s mind a
nd into the mind of the man attacking him.

  There were no feelings of disorientation this time. Adan’s body, realizing the assessor was no longer a threat, went slack and surrendered the zoelith without resistance.

  Adan’s assessor reached for the uncontested device and pressed it onto his forehead, vaulting Adan once again back inside his own body. He opened his eyes just in time to see another assessor descending upon him.

  His mind reacted reflexively. He was only half aware of what he was doing. He plunged through the esolace and found the mind of the Developer controlling the new assessor. Forcing his way into the man’s mind, he was again gripped by waves of confusion, causing him to lose precious moments. He could only hope that his bioseine would be able to give him the time to find what he needed.

  Once things settled down, Adan searched for the connection to the assessor, but this new intelligence was organized differently from the one before. Everything ran along tracks, racing around each other in a teeming network of activity and ideas. But he found that by focusing on a particular track, he could freeze it in place. And so he ran through the man’s thoughts, touching everything he could with his mind until things became still enough for him to find what he was looking for.

  Just as the man pinned Adan’s body against the wall, Adan dove into the mental channel controlling the assessor and wrenched control of it from the Dev. The assessor pushed forward, extending the zoelith towards Adan’s forehead while his bioseine fought to push it back.

  Now came the hardest part of all. Adan could not merely take his present host off-system with the zoelith as before. The last assessor was only a step away and Adan didn’t trust his bioseine to hold him off long enough this time. His best chance was to bring down the other attacker using the assessor he was now controlling, something which, up until now, he had been unable to do.