Raddocks Horizon (Godyssey Legacy Book 1)

by Duran Cross

  Almost holding his breath he trains his gun on Carla, who looks terribly sick, and very scared. Rennin lowers his voice and speaks very softly. “Carla Spencer is my target.”

  “State your name and rank.”

  “Black Aegis, unit Zero-Four,” Rennin states. Black Aegis is a black operations group Rennin has never been a part of, but the mention of it coupled with the presence of an infected, makes it far more difficult to dismiss outright. Black Aegis units are notorious for killing targets and witnesses.

  The soldier's hard but plain face remains still. His blue eyes betray a sudden doubt as he regards the hooded figure, single eye glowing, pointing his gun at what he thinks is a mutual target. “I wasn't aware of any Black Aegis units still active.”

  “I'm sure the reason is obvious. Name yourself, HolinMech.”

  “Corporal Dan Logan.”

  “Well, corporal, stand aside.”

  “Black Aegis was outlawed, I'm going to have to confirm with command.”

  Rennin pushes all the air out of his lungs slowly then draws a deep breath.

  “Very well.”

  He swings his gun from Carla to the trooper, kicking off the floor. He half leaps at Logan, who doesn't panic, but moves his weapon quickly and precisely, letting off a round that hits Rennin square in the chest. He grunts in pain, but it doesn't stop his momentum as he crashes into the soldier.

  They fall to the floor grappling with each other, the soldier gritting his teeth but still cold, calm and collected. Rennin is grunting and his breathing comes in short ragged gasps. The hole in his chest is becoming hard to ignore. His andronic right hand grips the soldier's left wrist. It snaps Logan's wrist like a bread stick causing the soldier's face to twist in sudden agony. His sidearm to falls to the floor.

  Rennin braces his mechanical left leg against the floor and stands up, still gripping the soldier. He spins 180 degrees, intending to throw the soldier over himself and onto the floor, subduing him. His dramatically increased strength causes him to throw the soldier like a rag-doll across the room, smashing him through the window in one fluid motion. Dan Logan is gone before Rennin even registers the sound of breaking glass.

  “Ren,” a sobbing voice says.

  Rennin snaps out of his shock and sees Carla crouched on the floor. The drug! "Carla, are you alright?" he runs to kneel next to her.

  “You've been shot.” she coughs up, a trace of blood on her lower lip.

  Rennin draws the syringe from his pocket and loads the antigen into it. “This will cure you.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Carla, the longer you wait the worse it’ll get. There's an RV outside that will no doubt have more soldiers, who will be coming to check what happened up here any moment. They won’t be happy I killed their pillow-biting friend,” he says, struggling to breathe.

  She pulls up her dressing gown sleeve. Protruding black veins cover her thin pale forearm. Wasting no time, he injects her with the anti toxin, then returning the syringe back to his jacket pocket. He takes a sharp wheezing breath and pushes himself back to his feet, picking up Logan's sidearm. “We have to get moving.”

  Carla vomits on the floor. “I can’t. I'm so tired.”

  Rennin picks her up, as a groom would carry a bride. She has passed out and he is steadily getting dizzier, the pain in his chest increasing. Come on, old man, hip replacement next year I promise.

  Arriving at the stairwell, he starts down, just to see torchlights shining down below. The lights are bobbing as they move.

  Rifle mounted.

  He places Carla down gently, and grasps Logan's sidearm. He begins to descend the stairs at a leisurely pace. The soldiers both train red dots on him as they get close.

  “Remain calm, citizen,” one of them says and Rennin nods, backing up against the wall to let them pass.

  As they go by, he twists his body to fire a bullet through his coat and into the back of one of their heads. The other turns around, but Rennin is already at him and lands a right hook with such force that the head snaps round far enough to break his neck. He is dead before hitting the floor.

  Rennin doesn't bother to acknowledge them any further. He retrieves Carla, then starts to make his way down again.

  ◆◆◆

  After a very slow drive home, Rennin carries Carla up to his apartment. He places her in the bed and covers her up. Her face is incredibly gaunt. The trauma of almost being shot will no doubt create more stress lines. The thought of her face marked by that soldier’s actions makes Rennin think seriously about driving back there just to repeatedly kick the corpse.

  He stands up only to nearly fall over, the horrible pain in his chest beating like a hammer on his sternum. Rennin heads straight for the bathroom and sits on the toilet to at least get off his feet. He leans back, looking down at the bullet hole. It has cut straight through the armour-weave like butter.

  Rennin unzips the hooded jacket under his leather coat, peeling it back. Ripping the singlet beneath, a miniature crater in his sternum is revealed. At least it looks shallow.

  The watchman stares at it for a moment and notices something odd. A copper coloured lump, perfectly circular protrudes from the centre, sticking up as if to peekaboo at him. Using his index finger and thumb, he grips the thing feeling an instant rush of pain. Gritting his teeth and steeling himself mentally, he pulls the object free with a disturbing wet sound as it escapes his wound.

  Grunting and sighing in relief, he brings the object up for closer inspection. It’s the bullet. He stares at it for a moment, rotating it and finding that its been flattened at the end as if it hit a bullet proof vest.

  Rennin drops the slug on the floor and looks back at his wound and can just see some of his exposed sternum but it doesn’t look like bone, the surface looks like pearl but the pattern is more pointed where pearl is contoured waves.

  The watchman fetches his little medical kit from the cabinet and tacks the wound together before applying the grafting gel. It will seal the wound by morning, thanks to another little development by Caufmann. He tries to stand but a wave of darkness overcomes him.

  His legs collapse, and he’s unconscious before he hits the bathroom floor.

  ◆◆◆

  About the time Rennin blacks out, Doctor Caufmann is hurrying down to the lower levels of the lab. The other scientists are busy sleeping, or what ever they do in their downtime. It gives Caufmann free reign of the level where the CryoGen Industries team are kept in deep freeze.

  Nordoth and Straker have to be removed from stasis now, as there won’t be enough time to thaw them once the infected turn hostile. The reports from street level are increasingly bleak. Three Beta HolinMechs were found dead at Carla Spencer’s apartment block, and though Caufmann knows who did it, he has kept his silence. Three measly soldiers are nothing next to Caufmann’s body count, after all.

  Damon Kowalski, their captain, is absolutely furious nonetheless.

  The Horizon Morgue is full of bodies that have either died of the virus before the change, or been shot by the Horizon Military and Beta HolinMech strike-teams. Even storage rooms at the lab have been emptied of most of their contents, in order to be utilised as body storage. Hundreds of them, soon to be thousands.

  Caufmann walks up the narrow, dimly lit hallway, until he gets to the CryoGen Industries chamber, Room V. He manually types in one the interchanging thirty-six digit codes from memory; a feat normally impossible for ordinary people. But the doctor is far from ordinary.

  He steps into the freezer chamber where Nordoth and Straker are frozen.

  Three of six pods are empty. That isn’t right.

  He stands still, his mind racing, for a few moments wondering how this happened. Everyone is banned from CryoGen Room V. Yet the pods are empty. The three people still in stasis are Timothy Fowl, Warwick Balkan and Jonathon Holin, the blue illuminated nametags proclaim from the top of each cylindrical pod, their bodies frozen upright.

  Caufmann has n
ever been in Room V before. Seeing the name of the man who designed the HolinMech system genuinely surprises him. Straker, Nordoth and another person: Severn Mercer, are gone.

  Caufmann knows of Mercer. He assisted Nordoth to design the first combat suit that aided in protection, as well as strength enhancement, prior to CryoGen’s experimentation with hybrid and cybrid technology. Caufmann always wondered what Nordoth and Straker would say if they knew how Van Gower has utilised their theories. Looking at their empty pods, he figures he’ll never know.

  The life sign monitor has obviously been hacked. It still shows that their pods are inhabited. Who woke them from suspended animation? Where are they now? How did they do it? Van Gower could have unfrozen them and gotten rid of them, but he seemed genuinely worried when Caufmann suggested thawing them to answer his questions. Whoever or whatever took them out of stasis must have done it years ago. Thick clumps of dust have accumulated inside the empty pods.

  Caufmann only ever discovered the pods as they are registered on the lab inventory. Godyssey must have wanted to keep Nordoth and Straker’s expertise on ice. Or prevent them from starting fresh elsewhere. Godyssey is, after all, the bastard son of CryoGen Industries.

  Caufmann eyes Holin’s freeze pod with curiosity, but up until this moment he has done nothing against Van Gower’s wishes in any extreme way. He’s only willing to risk the chairman’s wrath for Straker and Nordoth’s information, which would be infinitely valuable. He doesn’t need anything from Holin that he can think of at this time.

  He shuts the lights off in CryoGen Room V, his head spinning. Oh. If the life signs were hacked, then the bodies may have been stolen, not released.

  If neither Van Gower nor myself know about this then who else could?

  No one could get into the lab. Something has gone wrong. But he can’t think who could have bypassed the security, much less who would be able to mimic the life sign signal to mask their theft.

  Later, he will be able to investigate. Now, his attention is required desperately elsewhere, so he proceeds further down the corridor to Room XVI. The door slides up into the bulkhead, allowing Caufmann to step inside the dark room beyond, where a shining pair of red eyes is all he can see. “Arca?”

  The door slams down behind him, sealing him in. Blue LED lights flicker on, allowing enough light to see each other, turning the glowing eyes from red to purple.

  Arca Drej, HolinMech Warrior deserter, stands in front of the doctor with wide eyes, hard Viking-like features, and unusually long white hair for a military android. His silvery grey HolinMech armour is still in pristine condition; Drej disappeared just before a mission.

  An X-shaped scar in his forehead shows where Caufmann removed his tracker chip. He also removed the internal transponder, preventing the ability to trace his whereabouts.

  Drej stole a shuttle and had escaped as far as Titan before the engines blew out. “Doctor Caufmann, I have to get out of here,” says Drej’s soft but deep resonant voice.

  “Impossible at this time.”

  “I can still hear it tapping! Sometimes I can feel it!” he shouts putting his hands to his chest. It looks like he is about to claw something out.

  Caufmann steps forward, but the movement carries with it a definite threat. “You have to keep your voice down. You will always feel it tapping as long as you live, so you will just have to accept it.”

  “And what is this?” he asks, showing Caufmann the back of his right hand, where a fleur-de-lis symbol protrudes.

  “You know what it means.”

  “But I’m not a traitor!” he yells, somehow keeping his voice to a whisper.

  “To Godyssey you are.”

  “They betrayed me!” he says, again in a fierce whisper. “Look what they did to me!” he pulls at his face with his left hand. The skin strains at first but soon tears revealing a pearlescent bone shell beneath. The ripped muscle fibres wriggle and writhe, struggling to reattach themselves, but Drej keeps pulling until Caufmann grips his wrist.

  “You’re going to have to stop that,” states the doctor patiently.

  Drej allows Caufmann to draw his hand away from his bleeding face, where the muscle fibres are already beginning to grasp each other, reconstructing. “I can’t stay here alone anymore, I’m going out of my mind and that’s supposed to be impossible.”

  Caufmann pities Arca Drej wholeheartedly; he is suffering the worst binary decay and andronic psychosis he’s ever heard about. Perhaps not as bad as Valhara’s madness during the CryoZaiyon Wars, but Drej is deteriorating at an accelerated pace and being cooped up in this room isn’t doing his mind any good at all.

  Valhara wasn’t the first android to suffer such a catastrophic break down, but it is the most well known. The first was Jonathon Holin’s very first HolinMech, before Drej’s kind, before they were military property. Though it seemed to have little difficulty killing the crew of the Montrialis. Alexandrite Talisman was its name. Drik Tally, for short.

  Caufmann just doesn’t have enough time to come and talk with him to help him deal with all of these issues. Drej knows he was human. He possesses no information or evidence, he just knows. “Listen, Arca, you will be getting out of here but you just need to hang on a little longer.”

  “I was better off on Titan.”

  “You fried your ship’s engines trying to fire them loud enough to drown out the sound of your own insanity. You would have been alone to go completely mad and tear your face off all you wanted, but would you be happier?”

  Drej eyes Caufmann carefully, revealing he is most definitely aware he’s being made fun of. “All I’ve done is switch one prison for another.”

  Caufmann feels a fleeting moment of wanting to hit Drej. “I’m well aware of what you’ve been through.”

  Drej scoffs out a derisive laugh. “Are you now?”

  Caufmann rolls up his right sleeve revealing his embedded circuitry.

  Drej isn’t impressed. “So you have a cybernetic arm.”

  Caufmann removes his glasses, revealing his scarred shining eyes then he takes a scalpel out of his lab coat and slices his right cheek causing a small hiss of cold steam and a trickle of a red liquid that emits thin white mist. “Do you see now?” he asks, snapping the frozen scalpel like a stick.

  Drej’s eyes are the only part of him that betray his utter shock. “CryoZaiyon blood…”

  Caufmann nods once.

  “You?” Drej chokes out. His mind is reeling and completely unable to process all this data.

  “I’ve spent years in hiding,” his gaze turns distant. “So many years cutting into my flesh and removing what technology they placed into me. I had no choice as technology became evermore advanced and capable of finding me, and others like us who are still missing. Can you even fathom what it’s like for a self-aware being to have to cut into itself and remove more and more as the years go by? Do you care? Can you care? Sometimes I’m not even sure that I do.”

  Drej is silent, a rash of compiling errors scrolling across his vision. “Who are you?”

  The doctor looks at him, “I am William Caufmann.”

  “Now you are,” Drej pauses, absolutely still, “who were you then?”

  Caufmann’s face is still steaming and as the mist passes across his face before evaporating his eyes glow dimly, despite the obfuscation. “I was born on December 15 in 2239 to parents who have had their records deleted. I became remotely flagged through the Embryon Protocol at some point in my adolescence, and was harvested at some point during my twenties. Underwent full conversion on August 3rd 2296 to fight the CryoZaiyon Wars. Officially registered AWOL November 29th 2306.”

  “There were only a handful of CryoZaiyons that returned from Venus III. Accessing,” he says, his red eyes flickering like a camera shutter as he scans his files. “Forgal Lauros, Sephirlin Darrad, Angelien Zillah, Xelxor Akcoda, and Saifer Veidan are the registered survivors. All are now dead. You are none of them.”

  Caufmann’s expression appe
ars regretful for a moment. “It’s difficult to comprehend surviving a war like that, only to die within a year of returning to Earth. I am officially registered as MIA. Though that is a technicality applied to all CryoZaiyons that never returned from Venus III. They simply cannot confirm what is a well known fact since they haven’t seen my body, nor the bodies of the other battalions.”

  Drej’s eyes widen. “Are there others?”

  Caufmann steps closer to Drej. “I’ve cut myself to pieces to remain hidden here. I’ve cut others to pieces to maintain my cover. I’ve given up every principle I was taught to develop, just to be ignored like a normal person, and you will listen to me closely, Arca Drej,” he says actually slowing down as he speaks to make sure each word impacts more than the one before. He grips Drej’s face hard enough to purse his lips and makes him lean closer. “You will not go insane, I’ve no use for insanity. I’ve been in hiding for almost fifteen years, so you can last—quietly—as long as I say you can, do you understand me?”

  Drej’s eyes don’t exhibit any defiance so Caufmann releases him. Drej still isn’t convinced. “You said you weren’t like them, how is your use of me any different to the ones I ran from?”

  “I care if you live.”

  Drej swallows.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he says gently. “Anyone looking for us will be dead in a month.”

  ◆◆◆

  Rennin wakes up to someone slapping him.

  He was having a dream about fire, knives, and some kind of circular spinning room full of blades all crisscrossing each other as the room spun like a psychotic dervish. Someone dressed in his clothes, with an inhuman parody of his face was throwing parchments made of his own skin into the revolving razor-well, and as each piece was thrown in, Rennin’s own form would become less.

  Written upon the pages of skin was gibberish, though Rennin could still comprehend it as it was spelled out in his own blood. Blood laced with memories, stored there by his own mind. His humanity was being shredded before him as the pages of flesh were hewed and cleaved from his body.