The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set

by D J Edwardson

  “Yes, I’d say your learning has taken a definite deviation from where it needs to be. We’ll have to take care of that the next time around,” Darius said, drifting back to the front of the platform. They were the last words Adan heard before the smooth metal of the zoelith pressed against his forehead.

  Forty-Four

  A New Beginning

  The first thing Gavin saw after the zoelith was lifted from his forehead was a man staring at him through green tinted lentes. He wore a long, dusty jacket and a turban which covered his face and head.

  “Hello,” Gavin said after the man failed to introduce himself. “Who are you?”

  The stranger cleared his throat. “Someone who needs your help.”

  “Are you a friend of Adan’s? Did he send you?”

  The corners of his mouth quivered and he looked away.

  This man is afraid of me, Gavin thought. As a memorant he could hardly help but notice. Such impressions came to him naturally, like smells drifting through the air, or light hitting the surface of something at odd angles. The man’s lentes made it hard to read his thoughts very deeply, though.

  “No, he didn’t send me,” he said, “but yes, we are friends. Have you seen him? Has he been here?”

  “Yes, he was here—wait, let me check and see where he is now.” Gavin attempted to connect to the esolace, but it was gone. He sat up, alarmed. “What’s going on? The esolace—what happened to it?”

  “The energy mesh went down. I have no idea why. We were out on Virid Ridge when it crashed.”

  “But how…” Gavin’s mind began to calculate. He had sent Adan out to use the chronotrace. It required a great deal of power, but could it have crippled the entire city? If so, he must have made some significant modifications to it when he was out in the Vast.

  “There is a storm headed this way. Maybe that had something to do with it,” the stranger said.

  “No, it was the chronotrace. And if it crashed the mesh then I doubt Adan found what we were looking for.”

  “What was that?” the man asked, his jaw tensing.

  “Someone captured me when I came back to Oasis. Whoever it was, I think they stole something important from my memory. I sent Adan out with the chronotrace to find out who it was.”

  “But he hasn’t come back.” The man glanced over his shoulder at the door.

  Something’s gone wrong. His plans are in disarray. He needs my help to fix them. Gavin read his thoughts.

  “I told him to deactivate me before he left. The Devs could have taken control of me if I had gone with him. That’s the last thing I remember,” Gavin said.

  “Listen, I don’t have a lot of time. I need your help.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  Gavin still didn’t know who this stranger was, but he knew enough to know he had been telling the truth when he said that he knew Adan.

  “First, tell me what parts of your past you still remember,” the stranger said.

  “Everything up until right before I left for the Vast. Adan gave me back some of my memories after that though, from the time I met him in the desert. Is that where you’re from?”

  The man adjusted his desert scarf to cover his face a little more, “Yes. I’ve come here with a group of people from the Vast—to stop the Developers. The rest of us are waiting just outside this cell.”

  “But how is that possible? None of you have bioseines, I would have sensed it. If you didn’t come with Adan, how did you get here?” This man seemed to know a great deal about Oasis for someone from the desert.

  The stranger raised his arm, pulling down his sleeve at the same time, revealing the inhibitor he wore on his wrist. “I was part of the Remapping Initiative. I have a bioseine, but there are somatarchs inside the Annex and they’re the kind I can’t control. Somehow the Devs are still controlling them without the esolace. There must be another system that they’re using. That’s why I’ve been wearing this and that’s why I need your help.”

  The Developers had a reserve energy mesh. That much Gavin already knew. But it wasn’t powerful enough to run the esolace. Maybe they had a smaller system for emergencies. If so, this was the first time he’d heard of it. But how did this stranger get Developer access in the first place? Was this Will? If only he could get a look at his face.

  “If you’re worried they could connect to your mind, what makes you think they won’t do the same with me?” Gavin asked.

  “I don’t know. You’re a Developer. I thought you might be able to help us. We’re desperate. The somatarchs have oscillathes and we’ve lost a lot of men just getting to this point. We retreated into this section of the Annex and barricaded ourselves in, buying us a little time, but now we’re trapped. The fact that you happened to be here in this cell was completely unexpected.” The anxious tone in his voice told Gavin that he was this man’s last hope.

  “I still don’t see how I can help you,” Gavin said regretfully. “Even if the Devs don’t take control of my mind, I would be just as helpless against them as you are.”

  “I have an oscillathe,” the man said, pulling back his coat to reveal the silvery weapon. “But the bismine is almost drained. And I don’t dare go close enough to the barricades to fire it since they could just as easily shoot me first.”

  “Wait,” Gavin said, an idea flashing into his mind. “There is a way to gain access to the minds of the somatarchs that might tell us what we need to know.”

  “How? What do we have to do?”

  “We’ll need to capture one of them—alive.”

  The stranger was about to reply when a discussion erupted out in the hallway. Gavin couldn’t make out what they said, but he could tell it was in the nomad tongue. “Are those the friends you mentioned?” he asked.

  “Yes. They’re probably getting impatient.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Only eight. There are more up on the surface, but I led a small group down here to try and find the Developers. If we can stop them, we can stop the somatarchs. But we’ve already lost thirty men. The ones in the hallway are all that we have left.”

  “Do they have weapons of some sort?” Gavin asked.

  “Just some knives and javelins, primitive things.”

  “So what about these barricades you mentioned, how long do you think they will hold?”

  “For a bit. They’ll have to use cutters to get through. We found several carts out in the hallway and fused them together with taline acid. Then we fused the whole thing to the walls. It’s basically impassable until they can cut through.”

  “Wait—so you have taline as well? Do your friends have any other equipment we could use? I don’t care how primitive it is. We’re going to need something more if we want to capture a somatarch.”

  The man tipped his head towards the door. “Maybe. Let’s go find out.”

  Gavin rose. “My name is Gavin, by the way.”

  The man gave him a strained smile. “And I’m Nacio.”

  Gavin didn’t believe him. He thought he knew who this really was.

  No need to push the issue, though. We can deal with that when the time comes.

  Eight men were waiting outside in the hallway, all dressed in desert gear like Nacio. Further down the passage was the makeshift barricade, an unsightly menagerie of mangled chromium.

  As a memorant, Gavin understood what these men were like before they ever spoke a word. There was a harshness and a cruelty about them which instantly put him on guard. Had Nacio not been there, they would have sooner killed him than freed him from his cell.

  But at the moment, Gavin needed help just as badly as they did. The esolace was down—this was his chance to save the Welkin. If there was a Dev, or multiple Devs, using off-system resources, maybe they also knew about the miasma channel. The first step to finding out who they were was accessing the mind of an unconscious somatarch.

  Nacio introduced Gavin to two men who appeared to be the leaders of the others:
a short, fat man with a devious smile called Nox, and a taller, keen-eyed man named Sparc.

  “Any ally of the seer is an ally of the Waymen,” Sparc said, but Gavin could tell the words were little more than a formality.

  “Oh yes, to be sure!” Nox added, his wicked smile growing so wide there hardly seemed room for it on his face.

  Sparc was cunning and shrewd, but there was nothing complicated about him. He simply wanted power. Nox, on the other hand, was hard to read. He seemed to be a walking contradiction, his thoughts full of both mirth and savagery at the same time.

  “Gavin needs to know anything we have that could possibly be of use against the guardians,” Nacio said.

  “We need to capture one of them alive,” Gavin added.

  Nox rubbed his hands together, excited at the news.

  “All right, then. We’ll use naptrap. It will be just like snagging Welkin out in the Vast.”

  “What do you mean?” Gavin asked.

  Nacio cut Nox off before he could reply, “You brought sopor with you? Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “You didn’t ask.” Nox shrugged his shoulders mischievously.

  “Sopor, what’s that?” Gavin asked.

  “A sleeping drug,” Nacio said.

  “Excellent. How much do you have?”

  Nox opened up his garrick and struggled to count the bulges inside.

  “Four or seven…or five…or four,” he mumbled. “Ah, I’m such an empty shaft. I don’t know, but enough to keep a man down long enough to slit his throat.”

  By Gavin’s estimation there looked to be twelve.

  “I have five pods myself,” Sparc added.

  “And the others?” Gavin asked.

  “They are merely shivs,” Sparc said. “They can’t be trusted with sopor pods. We don’t use the weak Welkin variety. Ours is concentrated. A single pod will knock a man out for some time.”

  “Fine, that will be enough. Now do you have any taline left?”

  “Oh yes—” Nox began boisterously before Sparc jumped in.

  “We let the shivs carry that since it’s harmless and rather heavy. We had to use quite a bit of it, but we have two full pouches left.” Sparc snapped his fingers and two of the others came over, carrying large pouches.

  “Wonderful,” Gavin commented and turned to Nacio. “Now, I will need your oscillathe.”

  A sense of alarm flashed through Nacio’s mind at Gavin’s request, but passed away the next moment. Clearly there was some sense of distrust there, but the thought wasn’t present long enough for Gavin to discern the cause of it.

  Nacio handed him the weapon.

  “This weapon can have its zoetic frequency altered,” Gavin explained, popping open the casing and sliding one of the interior panels to the side. Sparc and Nox stepped away, a mixture of disgust and fear playing across their faces as Gavin dismantled the weapon.

  “It will no longer kill a person caught in the wave, but it will stun them briefly. We’ll be able to knock out anyone on the other side of that barrier. With an ordinary person, the stun effect lasts for a good amount of time, but the somatarchs have an accelerated metabolism. They won’t stay down for very long. I’m also going to increase the range. This will drain the power more quickly, but we don’t have much choice. We don’t want to risk getting hit by our enemy’s weapons. Once the somatarchs are down we’ll rush forward and toss the sopor through the barrier so that they stay down while we use the taline to break through the barricade.”

  Confusion and doubt reigned in the minds of the desert people, but Nacio understood him perfectly. For the sake of the others, they went over the plan one more time with Nacio putting it in terms they could better understand while Gavin finished recalibrating the oscillathe.

  Gavin advanced to the front of the group. The desert men crowded behind him at a comfortable distance.

  “Ready?” Gavin asked.

  Sparc and Nacio nodded. Nox grinned.

  Gavin stepped into range and fired the oscillathe. Instead of the whispering sound, it gave off a short, crackling noise. Muffled thumps signaled several bodies hitting the floor beyond the barricade. He fired three more times to be certain, and then shouted, “Run!”

  The men sprinted past him down the hallway, closing on the barricade with remarkable speed. Gavin lagged behind, still a little shaken from his recent revival. Sparc and Nox thrust their arms through the gaps between the fused carts and tossed their pods.

  Nacio and the others sprayed taline acid around the edges and kicked at the barricade repeatedly. As Gavin caught up to them the unwieldy conglomeration went crashing to the floor.

  “That’s it. I’m all out of pods,” Nox shouted.

  The massive hunk of metal came down on top of the bodies of four somatarchs, crushing them beneath it, most certainly killing or incapacitating them in the process. Two others lay beyond the reach of the fallen barricade.

  One of them had already begun to stir, but Nacio leapt across and grabbed its oscillathe. He put his foot on its neck while he slipped off his inhibitor. A moment later, the air whispered around the struggling creature and it was gone.

  As the creature’s empty clothing settled, the second somatarch leapt to his feet and charged Gavin, who was shambling over the barricade. There was no way for Nacio to fire without hitting Gavin and the Waymen behind him.

  “Help!” Gavin cried and dove to the floor. The somatarch was almost on top of him when an acrid smell burst into the air around them. It was so powerful it made Gavin weak all over. The flaccid body of the somatarch flopped harmlessly at his feet.

  Nox’s maniacal smile appeared upside down above Gavin’s head as the desert man leaned over him.

  “Looks like I had one more pod after all. I guess I must have miscounted,” he said.

  Nacio pulled Gavin to his feet while Sparc bludgeoned the fallen somatarch in the head with the blunt end of his wicked-looking spear.

  Gavin’s strength returned with a few gulps of fresh air. With the creature unconscious, he could at last sense its mind. He leaned against the wall and reached out to it.

  The creature was more sophisticated than any other somatarch he had ever seen, but for a memorant that mattered little. Gavin began looking for any indication of who had been controlling it before it went unconscious. It didn’t take long to realize that the standard memory traces had not been enabled on this one. Whoever had designed this version of somatarch didn’t want to leave any record behind of how it was being controlled.

  But there were other ways to get at what it knew. The ocular memory wouldn’t have nearly as much information, but it was better than nothing. Gavin dove into the temporary visual cache, rifling through images for anything useful.

  When he got to the image of a large door, he stopped, sensing there might be something he needed in that sequence. He watched as the door opened and a lev carrying several figures passed through. From the way the approaching figures moved and the dead look in their eyes, Gavin could tell they were somatarchs.

  Two of them were carrying off a body wearing the pale gray robe of a patient at the Institute. Gavin caught a glimpse of the face. It was as Adan.

  But then the images began to degrade. Something was happening to the somatarch’s mind. It was being shut down from somewhere else. Gavin sensed another presence inside the creature’s thoughts. He had to get out immediately or risk having his own mind accessed.

  As Gavin severed the connection and returned to himself, the somatarch’s body convulsed a few times. A small trickle of blood flowed out from its ear. The somatarch was dead. Gavin had seen the effects of an order like that many times. Kill dash nine. How many times had he given that same order himself?

  But who had given it this time? And what had they found out about him before he got out?

  “They cut me off. They probably know I’m awake now,” he told Nacio. “But I think I’ve found Adan. If we can get to him, there’s a chance we may be able to find
out who’s controlling the somatarchs. Let’s go.”

  Gavin took off running, the rugged desert warriors jogging behind him in anxious silence. Violent and brutal as they were, their eyes darted at every door and they glanced often at the ceiling, as if their very presence in this place was some terrible nightmare from which they longed to escape.

  Forty-Five

  A Dangerous Augmentation

  They took the emergency ramps up to the first floor of the Institute. The hallways there were deserted, but the yellow auxiliary lights running along the floor indicated that the building still had at least backup power.

  Gavin led them to the holding cell near the service bay doors. He hoped they’d find Adan there. He didn’t want to risk connecting to the cell door since he didn’t know what sort of monitoring capabilities the backup system had. So they used the last of the taline acid, eating out a hole in the thick door.

  Gavin squeezed through the opening on his hands and knees. The lighting from the hallway brushed the space around the entrance, but beyond lurked pitch black. Only Nacio came along with him. The others decided to “keep watch” as Nox put it.

  They’re afraid of the dark. They think demons might be lurking inside.

  That was just as well. He could grope around easily enough, and they would probably just slow him down. Within a few microslices it was obvious the room was unoccupied.

  The desert men grumbled at the delay, openly questioning how finding “the other seer” would help them defeat their enemies.

  “I’m sorry,” Gavin said. “I thought we would find him there.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a complete waste,” Nacio said, coming out behind him. “I found this in a drawer in the corner of the room.”

  Nacio handed something small and heavy to Gavin. “The chronotrace!” Gavin exclaimed, running his hands over the smooth dark metal. “We have to check it to see if Adan recovered the information we need.”