For now, he had his own fighting to do; he was left to face Paxson and his new friends, Wayne and Milton. Wayne alone was as big of a man as Wolfe had ever faced in a fistfight, and Maynard Halifax was starting to come back to consciousness.
Paxson shouted, “Maynard, I need you!” and the two ran out of the alley toward the front of the building. Milton tried to get around Wolfe as he faced Wayne. Nick kept backing up in an effort to keep the two men in front of him. Milton pulled out a switchblade. He stuck it out to threaten, but was not used to fighting with it. Usually showing the weapon would be enough to separate some college boy from his money. Nick used the moment of indecision to go on the offensive, striking his neck with his left hand while coming from underneath with his right arm to wrap up his right hand. Wolfe ducked under, going behind Milton and barring his arm with his right arm while using his left to twist his head to the away from his knife hand. The knife dropped harmlessly to the pavement.
Nick then put his foot into the back of Milton’s knee, forcing him to kneel. Wayne ducked out for what seemed like a second and came back with an old metal garbage can. He was visibly angry, not like the rest. Everyone else just seemed like they had a job to do, but Wayne was angry.
“You’re not going to ruin this for me!” he shouted as he brought the can down on Milton’s head. Nick got out of the way with little effort. He realized that the strike was meant for Milton, but the next one had his name on it if he didn’t do something quickly. He got low and kicked Wayne in the knee as hard as he could. Normally this would have been enough to break or at least dislocate a patella. Wayne was still standing, but now he moved with a limp and was even angrier than before.
***
Heath Chesterfield burst out of the front door of the apartment, leading into a short hallway and then into a stairwell. Across the stairs was an identical hallway and apartment door. Heath thought about going into that apartment, but he did not want to endanger anyone else’s life if he could help it. He took his chances in the stairwell. It was so damp and moldy Heath could not imagine anyone living in this building. Voices could be heard coming up the stairs. Heath turned to go back up the stairs but was met by the three men who followed him through the window. The man with the baseball bat did not miss this time.
***
Wayne had had enough of Nick Wolfe’s trickery. While he was coming back up from his low kick, he hoisted Nick up and threw him halfway down the alley, landing with a thud. Nick rolled with it enough to protect his head but had dislocated his shoulder. Before he could get up, Wayne was on top of him. He hit Nick in the face and broke his nose; after a second punch Nick was helpless. Wayne threw him over his shoulder and waited outside for everyone to come out with Heath Chesterfield.
Chapter 12
Heath woke up tied to a chair in a dark room. It was actually more like he was pallet-wrapped to the chair. He couldn’t move at all. It was dark and dry, with some dim light coming from what he guessed was a large screen just outside the room. Even though the room was dry, it smelled strange, almost sweet.
“Well, look who’s awake,” Beverly Beckett purred. Heath woke up, disoriented, but jumped as much as he could since he was wrapped up onto a chair. He realized it was Beverly, but her voice sounded like an imitation of Beverly’s voice. He didn’t know her well enough to know what she sounded like; it was more like an imitation of a human voice. The sound was deeper than a woman’s voice normally would be, but also with a tinny overtone, and there were clicking noises between some of the words. It sounded as if she were communicating to someone else in a different language while speaking with Heath.
Is this more pleasing to you, Heath?
The voice was in his head now. He realized fully where he was now and he was terrified.
There is no need to be afraid.
“What do you want from me? Why haven’t you taken me over like the others?”
You know why. The same reason we let you go the last time you were here.
“I have to agree to let you into my body?”
No, we can do that anytime we want to. We need your consent to get into your mind.
“But you already know I don’t want you in there. I don’t want you in control.”
We believe we can make you change your mind.
“Is that why you haven’t killed me? You think I can help you if I join your cause?”
Almost certainly. You possess a great many abilities. Some that can be taught, and some that can be used to inspire and lead others.
At this point Heath noticed Beverly’s hands on his shoulders, massaging him. He couldn’t feel her hands, but he could feel the pressure through the coating that kept him fastened to his chair. It felt good. He felt guilty that he didn’t resist.
You are a credit to your race. Even now you resist, if only with your mind. Even as you enjoy your massage, you’re trying to think of a way to leave this room and escape. It’s futile, but admirable. You, like the other humans we have brought on, have the skills, intelligence, and health to lead others, to take what you want. But unlike most of your peers, you recognize what you have. Unlike your peers, you feel the need to share these gifts with others.
“I’m far from perfect. I’ve done some bad things.”
Yes, but you know that too. Most of you can’t stand the idea that you might not be perfect, so you make yourselves victims, blaming others to avoid the responsibility of striving to be better.
“These traits that you admire are the same ones that keep me from wanting to let you take over. I’m not a victim, so I don’t need your help, right?”
That is true, but if we can get you to agree to let us in, those traits might become ours.
“That’s impossible. If I agree to let you in, I’ve given up on my abilities. I would be rejecting the gifts that God has given me, so I’d become one of you instantly, and there is no nobility to be passed on.”
What if you did it to save your friend Nick Wolfe? That’s a noble thing to do.
“How do you know you would be able to control me? You say ‘we’ when referring to yourselves. I am, and think of myself as an individual. Aren’t you worried that I will infect your collective, that I will corrupt your hive-like mind and break it up with each being declaring its own independence?”
It’s an experiment on our part, one that will be controlled as much as possible. In any case, we feel it’s a risk worth taking to make a better race.
“Can I see Nick?”
Beverly spoke up in her own voice, or what was left of it, “In a few minutes. He’s still talking with us.”
The light from the other room showed her silhouette. Heath thought he was hallucinating since he couldn’t really make out a shape that looked … human.
***
In the next room, Nick had woken up, similarly wrapped up in a hard, but sticky coating. It reminded him of an industrial-strength epoxy, but it didn’t smell toxic or artificial. Instead it had a sweet, honey-like odor Nick could easily smell despite having a broken nose. If his nasal passages had been fully intact the smell might have been hard to stomach. Newton Paxson didn’t try to talk as a human would by now. It all came out as squeaks and clicks. He was communicating telepathically with Nick, and revealed the presence’s plans for improving the race that was to come.
“But you aren’t exactly living beings, are you?”
Nick caught full sight of the being formerly known as Newton Paxson. He was large and looked like he was armor plated. As he came into the light he looked like a grotesque combination of machine, human, and insect. Similar to the offer made to Heath, the Paxson-creature seemed slightly annoyed, Why would you say that? What do you think we are?
“I don’t know, but from what I’ve seen you are a presence in the ship that controls machinery. Some of it is as large as this ship, others are as small as a bug-drone or a microscopic nanobot. My guess is you’re an advanced form of AI. I know you can control glands and add mass to muscle and bone, but
after seeing you, I know now that you are manipulating DNA.”
We do these things and more. The truth is that we do not exist yet, not in the terms you consider organic life.
“I don’t understand. If you do not exist yet, how are we talking? How are you controlling everything around us?”
At present, we are a set of instructions. Some instructions are logic-based rules, others are action items, and still others are a blueprint: DNA, in your parlance. Our species lived and died millions of your years ago on another world. As our world died, a large group of us contributed their genetic code, broken down into the most basic proteins and acids. These are recognizable parts that nanobots can see and put together on a molecular level. We sent a ship to Earth with our own technology, hoping to use our own nanobots to rebuild our race out of the resources in the area.
“So what happened?”
Simply put, the ship landed in the Pacific Ocean where it was badly damaged and eventually found through its faint radiation by a young Rik Kronos. He was intelligent enough to repair our technology. He was also intelligent enough to know our machines could mean disaster for him and his fellow humans. Instead of repairing our technology as we had built it, he learned our numbers-based language, decoded the instructions, and reverse-engineered our designs. By doing this he was able to maintain control over the devices, and to claim the technology as his own. He did not create the original nanobots, but he was only one of a handful of people on Earth who could understand the code, let alone use it to build something, and then change the design to fit his original ideas.
When Kronos was killed, the ship’s artificial intelligence took over, flying the ship as well as it could, but it was damaged during takeoff. While the ship’s AI was running diagnostics and repairs, it came across the original program from all those years ago. It followed the instructions as a repair, effectively awakening our original AI program, which is much more advanced than anything even Kronos had seen. Soon the ship and all its technology would be back under the control of a program created before most mammals walked the earth.
Nick felt something in his mouth. It felt like a very smooth stone. After a second he recognized it as his fake tooth with the neurotoxin. He must have taken a bigger beating than he thought. He hoped he hadn’t bitten down on it while he was unconscious.
Nick took it as a sign since there was no way he could get his hands loose to dislodge the tooth the way it was designed to be done. Instead he had only to bite down on it three times and wait to avoid turning into some kind of bug-robot that faintly remembered being Nick Wolfe, and now he could take as many nanobots inside him as his body could hold.
For now, he slid the tooth between his bottom teeth and his cheek so he could talk.
“Why do you need anyone from around here? I was on this ship a week ago when it was part of the island-ship Pangaea on the other side of the world. There were hundreds of people there, all in peak physical condition. Why not just use them?”
They were clones.
“So?”
Many were clones of clones. You see, with every generation of clones there is some degradation of the original DNA. They inevitably have terminal health issues. Usually premature aging, sometimes other diseases, but they’re built into their DNA on a cellular level. We have no wish to add these defective instructions into our own makeup. We would all perish within months, with no hope of properly breeding and replacing ourselves, let alone multiplying.
“There were no original DNA donors on the island at all? What about Rik Kronos? What about …”
Josh Taylor?
A chill went up Wolfe’s spine.
Josh Taylor died, but his body was recovered before the main component of the ship went into space. He is an original in every sense of the term, and his DNA has combined nicely with that of our charges. The ship was going to go as far as it took to find a suitable species to combine with, but once it was discovered that Taylor would be compatible for our purposes we simply turned the ship back to Earth. The time he has saved us is immeasurable but most of the equipment we need to complete the process is all on this ship.
Nick was relieved to hear there weren’t a few hundred Josh Taylor-insect hybrids coming down to invade the planet yet, but he knew he had to act to keep it from happening. He and Heath would have to destroy the lab, the computers, the cylinders—everything, or die trying.
Josh as a human being was already a trained killer and an expert in multiple fighting techniques, with or without weapons. He also was an expert at invading an area, doing whatever needed to be done, and quietly leaving. If they could access his memory the way Kronos’ technology did, the invasion would be complete before anyone would think to ask what happened.
“So in the meantime you need other originals to get your numbers up. Trillions of you are still not enough without the bodies to work with. You would like one or both of us to let you take eventual control of our minds and help you take over the world, right?”
Yes.
“I’ll do it if you let Heath go.”
Very well.
Chapter 13
The giant upright insect leaned down, face-to-face with Nick. Its giant mandibles dug in slightly on either side of Nick’s head, holding him still, and its breath was so sickly sweet it made Nick nauseous.
Nick bit down on the tooth-capsule twice. The moment was coming …
It opened its mouth and a glow came from inside. Nick thought, This is it—the bots are coming from his mouth to mine. He decided not to wait. He bit down for the third time and counted: one, two ...
On three, he spit the tooth into the mouth of the giant human-insect hybrid. On what would have been four there was a small but audible explosion in its throat as the neurotoxin began spreading throughout its body. There was also significant damage to the throat of the creature.
The bots inside reacted to the imminent danger.
The nanobots, whether guided by their own artificial intelligence, experience, the thoughts of the being formerly known as Newton Paxson, or some combination of the three, all left as quickly as possible from Paxson’s body. The ones in his head left through his eyes and ears, slowly at first, appearing as small tar-like tears, then as slow-flowing black streams. Finally Paxson’s left eye popped out violently. Most the contents of his head flew out with the explosion. The rest streamed out, then trickled. In minutes there was very little gray matter left in Newton Paxson’s head.
Beverly turned away and disappeared into a back room, as if called by a voice no one else could hear, and the recruits from Aces Over Eights went with her, surrounding her calmly, but protectively. Only Maynard remained behind.
Below the neck, there was a visible shifting going on under the skin. The muscle and bone was harder to escape than the softer eye tissue. Paxson’s skin turned from gray to black in some parts, whiter in areas abandoned by the bots. His skin and muscle were thicker still from the genetic manipulation from the last few days. Most of the bots were trapped in a prison of their own making.
Heath called out, “Maynard, get us out of here!” Maynard Halifax didn’t think twice. Despite all he had been given and the allegiance he swore to his new hive, a part of him remembered his old friend who had been there for him on so many occasions. It took a Herculean force of will, as his controllers did not want him to do it. He knew this would be the last thing he did on Earth. He would do it or die trying.
Maynard rushed over to Heath’s cocoon, wedged his hands in near the top, and started pulling the shell apart. Heath could feel it trembling, but nothing else happened for a few seconds, then there was a huge cracking sound, like a boulder splitting in two. Maynard Halifax screamed in agony as the presence imposed its will on him. He fell to the floor, unconscious. His eyes were bloody and his mouth was wide open, but he did not move.
Heath Chesterfield ran to Nick and tried to break open his casing. Despite his best efforts, he could not do it. Maynard, with his augmented strength, made it
seem so easy. He bent over and tried to catch his breath to give it another try. He rose up and caught a glance of Maynard moving on the floor. He turned to face him fully, and was horrified to see the tar-like river of Newton’s nanos flowing into his mouth and ears. Heath knew it wouldn’t take long before they jump-started Maynard, and that this time there wouldn’t be enough of Maynard left to help them.
Meanwhile Nick was still trapped in his cocoon. “What should I do?” asked Heath. Wolfe noticed one of Paxson’s mandibles a few feet away, It had been separated from the rest of his face minutes earlier. “Grab that giant mandible thing!” he ordered, “Then jam it into the cocoon as much as possible.”
“Okay, now what?”
Paxson’s head was barely attached to the rest of his body. Between the tooth explosion and the mass exodus of the nanobots there was almost no flesh between his head and his shoulders.
“Grab Paxson’s head!”
“What?!”
“Pull Paxson’s head off and use it as a hammer! If we’re lucky you’ll crack this thing wide open!”
Heath heaved the skull over his head. Even empty, it was large and heavy
“This has to be 20 pounds!”
“Good, this might just work, then.”
One hit was all it took to drive Paxson’s mandible-spike through the shell, spreading a crack extending to the top and bottom of the shell from the point of impact.
Wolfe broke free. He was finally able to pop his shoulder back in place, but it ached badly. The aching got worse as Nick’s circulation improved, but he had most of his full range of motion.
As Nick extricated himself from the last of the cocoon, there was a high, ghost-like moan from the other room next to Heath’s empty shell. It was Maynard’s body, but any other evidence of Maynard Halifax’s presence was gone forever. The approaching creature growled and moaned like an animal, but moved like a puppet. It was a monster learning to take its first steps, but he was learning quickly. Larger, insect-like eyes grew from the old sockets, pushing the old, human ones out. One dangled from below a new eye, the other just fell to the floor.
The God Class: The Third Nick Wolfe Sci Fi Adventure (Nick Wolfe Adventure Series Book 3) Page 5