The path of Infinity is endless?
Solving riddles was an exercise best left for later, if we all survived. I checked the rifle and familiarized myself with the trigger and settings. Its battery had a seventy percent charge. I eased it against my shoulder and assessed the surrounding area.
Grey cubicles filled with boxes and documents lined the area. Above some of the desks, holographic images displayed graphs and statistics. The council had huddled across the room, their gazes shifting back and forth throughout the room, alerted from their fear and adrenaline.
“Can someone tell me where we are?”
Burns stepped forward, wiping her hands on her long skirt. “This is the Sedar building.”
“And how far is it from the docking tower?”
“Which one?” the man behind Burns asked. Finn, I think his name was.
Stars above, I couldn’t remember the name of the damn tower. The designation started with a letter . . . I think. A? B? Yes, it was B . . . something. I really needed to start remembering these things, or typing them down before I forgot them.
Before . . . B-4! That was it!
“Docking tower B-4,” I said.
“That’s . . . a little over a mile south of us,” Finn said, scratching at his white beard.
That wasn’t too far, but with men and women over middle-age, most of them even older than that, our pace would be slower than if I was alone. Still, I didn’t trust taking the council anywhere else. And I couldn’t trust the Sentinels, even the ones loyal to Terra and the council. Somewhere out there, Commander Scott and Autumn were either running or fighting. I wish I knew if they were okay, but I alone held the council’s fate in my hands. No time to waste.
“Alright. We make for B-4 and try to stay off the streets as much as possible. We’ll go from building to building until we get there. I want everyone to stay behind me, and keep alert. You’re not going to know whether someone is a friend or an enemy. Do you all have communicators?”
Everyone pulled devices from their pockets.
“You’ll have to leave them here so the Sentinels can’t track us. In fact, if you have any electronic equipment other than that, now is the time to leave it.”
The target reticle in my bionic eye flashed toward the other side of a room. The door had opened and movement beyond the entryway flashed in my sight. The guards below the float must have seen us jump in here.
“Everyone find a cubicle and hide under it. We’ve got company.”
The council didn’t hesitate. They spread throughout the immediate area. I hid behind a square pillar and peered around it to watch the doorway. My arm and leg burned and blood was still wet against my skin.
My bionic eye counted at least five men beyond the door. The wide area around us, filled with desks and columns, provided good cover, but would also do the same for the soldiers. If I allowed them into the room, they could use the barriers to flank our position. So, my goal was to bottleneck them in the doorway.
As soon as I saw a figure with my normal sight, I opened fire. Green plasma bursts shot out of the barrel and scorched the doorframe. Most of the shots went high because the recoil was hard to control when firing so many rounds at once. The vibration of the weapon numbed my fingers.
“Weapon detected!” one of them shouted. I fired another round, and this time the plasma traveled through the door. I heard cursing, but no grunts of pain.
“Burns,” I said. “We need a way out of here.”
“That door is the only exit,” she said from under the desk beside me.
In other words, we were trapped. Bottlenecking the soldiers wouldn’t work forever. The rifle’s capacity was already lowered to sixty-five percent. The soldiers just needed to wait until I expended my rounds, and they could come in and have us. There were no other options for escape, so we would have to make one.
“Which way to B-4?” I glanced down at her. She pointed south, toward a wall of windows. Another building with large windows stood across from an alleyway gap, almost the same distance as this building was from our float.
I fired a long round of plasma to force the soldiers to seek cover. Immediately after, I turned and shot the windows of this building and the one across the alley. The glass blew into what looked to be a lobby area of some kind.
“Please tell me we’re not jumping,” said a council member who must have figured out my plan. Trent, I think his name was.
“It’s the only way we’re going to get out of this. The distance isn’t farther than the last jump. You’ll all be fine,” I said between peering around the column and firing into the doorway.
The soldiers returned fire and emphasized my point. I heard the blasts a second after feeling the column rumble as plasma bursts pelted it into bits and pieces of concrete.
“We need to move!”
But no one did. The soldiers weren’t giving me a chance to fire back. Multiple plasma bursts hit the column and surrounding desks. I fired blindly, hoping to relieve the pressure.
Burns crawled out from under her desk and moved low and quick to the window. She turned to the other council members and gestured for them to follow. Some did, some didn’t. I fired another blind round and chanced a peek around the column.
Two soldiers made it into the room—their thermal images displayed in my sight. The other three were still behind the door, and an additional six were advancing up the stairs.
I knelt behind the desk Burns had hidden behind and saw that she and three other council members had already jumped. Brave woman. The rest of the council was still hesitant.
“I’m going to turn around and open fire,” I said. “When I do that, you’ll have your last chance to jump to that building. Once the chamber empties, I’m jumping. If I go before you, you’re left behind. Do you all understand?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. The next barrage of fire stopped and I unloaded the rest of the plasma over the desk. When the rifle clicked empty, I didn’t sit around to wait, nor did I make sure the council acted. I turned, focused my sights on the far building, and sprinted. When I jumped, I stretched as far as I could, hoping to grab the window frame.
My body smacked against the building in a sudden jolt. I couldn’t grab anything and, in that second, expected to fall. My life didn’t really flash before my eyes, but I did think about everything that led me up to this moment. After I fell to my death, what would happen? Would the council escape? Or would they be hunted down and slaughtered? In seconds, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.
But I didn’t fall. My hands weren’t holding anything. Something held on to me. I looked up and saw two of the council members I had yelled at—Trent and Rider. They pulled me up, their faces glistening with sweat.
“Thank you,” I breathed. Just then an object, something small and unnoticed, whipped past the top of my head. A second later Rider fell heavily to the ground, his eyes open and a bloodied hole in his forehead.
Must’ve been the snipers in the buildings.
“Go!” I screamed. Trent took off down the hall to join the rest of the council, those who still lived. I pushed myself up as hard as I could and followed Trent. A bullet struck the ground where my leg used to be. Three more bullets hit the wall as I ran forward. The council turned at an intersection in the hall. I followed into a small, boxed area with two elevator doors.
“Get the elevators up here now,” I said. “When they open, pull on the emergency stop so no one can use them.”
My voice sounded slurred and distant and I felt exhausted. I collapsed to the floor.
“Mr. Quinn?” Burns asked.
“He’s lost too much blood,” someone else said. That’s right. My wounds. The blood. Everything seemed so much hazier now than a few minutes ago.
“He’s not going to make it. We need to leave him here,” a female said. Not Burns, though. The voice was higher pitched and younger.
“Samantha Greene, you can’t be serious!” Burns said. “This man saved our lives
and is losing his own in the process. We are not going to leave him to die. Jack, you have some medical skill, don’t you?”
Whoever Jack was didn’t answer.
“Jack! We’re all scared, but this man needs your help!”
“R-right,” Jack said. Someone knelt beside me, though my focus was on the elevator doors. The council did as I asked and stopped them from moving, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t override the system.
“I need some kind of bandages. I can’t do anything about the blood he lost, but if we can bind his arm and leg, it should stop from him from bleeding out completely.”
I heard the tearing of clothes and then felt hands on my arm and leg, holding them up. Jack took the torn pieces of clothing and wrapped them around my wounds.
“That’s the best I can do, but I don’t know how we’re going to survive without weapons. And if he isn’t capable of defending us, who is?”
“It looks like they’re getting ready to jump across,” another man said. “He shouldn’t have told us to get rid of our communicators. This is all a waste! The soldiers know where we are anyway!” the woman with the higher-pitched voice cried. Indecipherable whispers spread throughout the group.
“We have to do the best we can in any situation,” Burns said. “Mr. Quinn did what he thought was right, but now we have to take control. Ms. Greene, please try to calm yourself. Mr. Trent and Mr. Larson, if you would kindly help Mr. Quinn to his feet?”
Two arms on each side lifted me. My feet felt like goo, but my arms around the other people’s shoulders supported me. I knew so little of the council. Hell, I didn’t even know most of their first names, but they worked well together. I couldn’t tell who belonged to Terra and who belonged to Gaia if my life depended on it. They could have stood around and argued, blamed each other for the chaos outside, but instead they stuck together. If we got out of this alive, there might be hope to end this war if more people thought like them.
“Everyone into the elevator,” Burns said.
“But Quinn said—”
“I know what he said, but in his current condition, he’s not able to give any more orders is he? We’re going to take the elevator up to the 75th floor, take the high ground in a manner of speaking. There’s an access hall between this building and the next, if memory serves correctly. We’ll make our way there, where we will attempt to call for help.”
Burns walked into the elevator and released it. It didn’t move. She pressed another button, the 75th floor button I assumed, and held the door for us. We filed in and the elevator moved up at an astounding speed. I thought I might vomit, until I realized I hadn’t eaten anything recently.
As we marched through the hallways, my bionic eye started to give me a headache. All the statistics and scans were too much for me to compute, so I forced my right eyelid shut and kept watch with my left. As high as we were, I heard no gunshots, no screaming. If it weren’t for the muffled distant sirens, the day might have been calm and normal as any other.
We moved quickly. No one spoke as Burns led us through the building, turning down different hallways as if she knew where she was going. I wanted to warn her to keep an eye out, to peer around corners just in case someone was waiting, but I felt too tired to speak. No one attacked us, but the snipers worried me. Somewhere in some of the buildings, they waited for us. This might have been one of them.
The group stopped in front of another hallway, this one longer and more open than any of the others. This was the bridge leading to the next building. I opened my eyelid and scanned the distance between here and the other side.
Fifty meters. If any soldiers were watching the bridge, we wouldn’t make it. There’s no way we could cross that fast, especially if Trent and Larson were carrying me.
“Leave me here,” I managed to say, the words making me breathless.
“Nonsense, Mr. Quinn. You’re just going to have to move quickly.”
“You’ll die,” I said.
Burns walked past the other members and stood close enough for me to see the wrinkles in her gentle face. She was heavy set, but had a gentle face, lightly covered in wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her forehead glistened with sweat.
“For once, it’s time for you to listen to me,” Burns said. “We’ve had this conversation before, young man, about the necessity of sacrifice and standing up for what you believe in. If our deaths mean these planets will see their folly and unite together, then I’ll gladly give mine. You have the benefit of only witnessing the last few days of this war, whereas many of us lived through a majority of it. Some, like myself, even witnessed its birth. Too many people lost their lives, Mr. Quinn, my husband included. Now . . . enough talking. Let’s get across this hall and go from there.”
I stood there, suspended on the shoulders of Trent and Larson, and wondered what else Burns experienced to become such a strong and admirable woman. Her spirit was as strong and durable as anyone I’ve ever known. She reminded me of . . . well . . . no one. I’ve known admirable people in my life, some willing to sacrifice as much as her, but she held the strength and determination of someone who couldn’t, and wouldn’t, give up.
The council needed her more than anyone. She had to survive this. Some members stood tall, like Smith and Townsend. They said little, but I saw no hesitation in their expressions, while others were worn and tired, their eyes revealing fear and uncertainty.
“Please, listen,” I forced myself to say. “If we run scattered, weapon fire will be sure to hit someone. We have to stay together. Burns should lead us forward. Smith and Townsend, stay beside her, and Greene, right behind her. And we’ll come up the rear.”
“That’s a good plan,” Burns said, then turned around. “Are we ready?”
We took off at a brisk jog. I used every ounce of energy I had to carry my own weight to lessen the pressure on Larson and Trent. We made it ten meters before the first bullet splintered a window. It missed, but more came. Then there were many more.
Smith was shot down and Greene tripped over his body. She fell, screaming, “We’re dead!” I pushed Trent off me and told him to help her up. I almost fell, too, but knew I had to survive. I had to make sure Burns survived.
She thought my plan was good, keeping together in a clump to keep ourselves from spreading out and being hit. But she didn’t realize the true reason I suggested it. I did it to protect her. I knew we would be shot at, and possibly killed, but if the council surrounded her, she would be shielded.
The meaning of this rationality suddenly registered. I used a human being as a shield for someone else. I sent them to their deaths. Who the hell was I anymore?
We all made it across the bridge, no other casualties except for Smith. Greene was hysterical, her hands trembling as she stood screaming, looking back at Smith’s corpse.
“What was his first name?” I asked.
“What does it matter anymore?” Larson said, his low voice breaking.
“Because I killed him,” I said. Everyone turned and looked at me. I figured since I killed the man, it was only respectful to learn his first name, but no one said it.
“Okay,” Burns said. “There should be a communication console in the lobby. The enemy has stayed with us this long, so they already have our position. Let’s see if we can get some damned help.”
I couldn’t recall how far up we were, but the main area was built like a massive lobby with a large square table in the center and sectional couches against each corner of the room. Trent and Larson dragged me over to one and dropped me. I landed on cushions like fluffy clouds. I just wanted to close my eyes and drift to sleep.
“Can anyone hear me?” Burns’s loud and determined voice jolted me awake. “This is Amanda Burns and I speak for the peace council.”
Oh, her first name was Amanda.
“We have experienced heavy casualties and require immediate medical assistance. Please, can anyone out there hear me? We stand together in the Jericho Communication Building, a
nd we’re only a few floors away from the roof. We beg for assistance and an evacuation vessel. Please.”
“Every single person trying to kill us just heard that!” Samantha Greene shouted.
“Samantha,” Trent said above me. “They’re already after us. It doesn’t matter.”
“I just . . . I don’t want to die. Not like this . . .”
No one ever really wanted to die, I wanted to tell her, but couldn’t find the strength. Even people who commit suicide do so because they feel there’s no alternative, no way to continue living. People know they’ll die, sometimes in detail, like Damon Derringer. Sometimes it comes quick and unexpected, like Laraar. Other times, it’s placed in front of you, horrible and sad, like Ashley.
“Let’s not waste time,” Burns said. “We’ve made our distress call, and now we must follow through with our plan. If we run into the enemy, then I want all of you to know it’s been an honor. Mr. Quinn . . .” She knelt beside me. Trent helped me to sit up. “I can only imagine what’s going through your head right now, and the pain you must be going through, but we are still alive thanks to you. You are a good man. An honorable one.”
She stood and, silent and sure, we made our way to the building’s roof. To reach it, we had to walk up seven more flights of stairs. I told Larson to help the others get upstairs while I used my good arm to hold myself up on the railing. Trent still held me on my left. Below us, many floors down, echoes from soldiers could be heard.
“I killed him, Trent,” I said softly. “She thanked me for saving her, but I did so using Smith.”
Trent said nothing, but he didn’t let go and leave me to die. Instead, he took a long breath and let it out.
“His name was Trevor. Trevor Smith.”
“In case I die, my name is Frank. I don’t know what’s running through your head, Mr. Quinn, but I can tell you this much . . . you didn’t kill Trevor. A bullet did, one shot from a coward who wouldn’t fight his enemy face to face.”
Antagonize (From the Logs of Daniel Quinn Book 2) Page 15