Jade Gods

by Patrick Freivald

  The man whispered to his companion, head ducking behind the metal unit, then shouted over the roiling surf.

  "No."

  "It means you're going to put your guns down and come out with your hands on your heads, or you're going to die." He looked at his watch, which he'd bought just for this bit of theater, the unfamiliar weight a cool annoyance against his skin. "You have ten seconds… nine… eight…"

  His eyes flicked up. Above the men on the roof, Sakura detached her harness.

  "Seven…"

  The parachute jerked, collapsing as it headed out to sea.

  "Six…"

  She plummeted, a baton in each hand, as the men stood. A pair of wet impacts dropped them to the roof as the front door opened.

  "Five…"

  Three men hustled out, hands over their heads. Sakura leapt off the roof toward the back, sailing in a clean arc, arms raised, batons extended, and disappeared out of sight.

  "Four… three…"

  Two sentries ran from around the side entrance, hands on their heads, eyes wide. Sakura followed, dragging another two, limp and dead weight, by their shirts.

  Matt lowered the bullhorn then dropped it into the sand. Turning, he walked back toward the police and said to no one in particular, "All yours."

  He triggered his COM as people rushed past, weapons raised, yelling orders. "Saddle up. We're going to Mexico."

  * * *

  Across the beach, Conor lowered the binoculars and sighed, taking the moment to shove half a McDonald's cheeseburger into his mouth. Those deaths would have triggered an incursion over the bridge like nothing seen in hundreds of years, a wholesale slaughter that would have consumed half the town and maybe, just maybe, given Rowley a run for his money.

  He swallowed, ate the rest, then munched on a French fry. Limp, lukewarm and over-salted, it mirrored his discontent rather too well. A nagging thought troubled him. Killing Matt seemed fair play of the best turnabout sort, but the rest of it, the incursion… he didn't know why he wanted it. He dropped the other half of the fry in the bag and tossed it in the waste receptacle, scowling.

  "Brilliant. Just brilliant."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Matt followed Sakura toward the waiting group of uniformed officers, a hodgepodge of men and women in dress blues or SEDENA digital camouflage, shuffling feet and fidgeting on the tarmac. They sweated under the oppressive Mexican sun, though not as badly as Matt. Setting down his operations case – thumbprint-locked and five feet long, it held his combat shotgun with high-explosive, fragmentation, and armor-penetrating microgrenades, REC-7 assault rifle with ceramic composite 'bonk killer' rounds, plus an assortment of more traditional grenades and monofilament combat knives – he shook hands and introduced himself and Sakura.

  General Marco Valdez looked like a half-dead version of his dossier photo. A tall man, his close-cropped silver hair popped against his dark brown skin, and the smile on his rugged face didn't reach his haggard eyes. He spoke in rapid-fire Spanish, and a young woman next to him in a dress blue skirt-suit translated in unaccented English. "Mister Rowley, Miss Isuji, thank you for coming. You've seen the news so I won't waste your time explaining the obvious: we're in deep trouble, and we don't know what to do about it. If the threat isn't contained in seventy-two hours the president has authorized the use of strategic fuel-air bombs to eliminate it. We would like to avoid—"

  Sakura interrupted, her voice clipped. "When did the Mexican government get strategic fuel-air bombs?"

  General Valdez turned to her as his interpreter translated, and replied through her. "We have been exploring all options for dealing with the cartels. When the civilian populations live under the terror of madmen, sometimes you do as you must."

  She nodded, face a blank mask, and he continued as an aide brought up a map of Cholula on a tablet.

  "The effects seem to be centered on the pyramid, and extend just over eight kilometers in every direction. Beyond that range people have fled, most of them, though aerial reconnaissance has picked up too many instances of civilians trying to flee the afflicted zone. After some unfortunate incidents we…" The interpreter swallowed. "We are killing all who seek to escape the quarantined area, and cannot send any more in. We've lost too many soldiers already, to friendly fire."

  "Mind control." Matt frowned.

  "Something like that. Our best and trusted soldiers turn on one another when they get too far inside the quarantine zone. We've lost a battalion, and six helicopters."

  Sakura pointed toward the sky. "Eight kilometers, pretty high. High as a bomber."

  "We've considered that, and have mobilized long-range assets. Your president denied our request for strategic support."

  Matt put his hand up. "Wait. You can't possibly be considering bombing your own city."

  The general shrugged.

  The interpreter grimaced. "If you can't help us we're going to have to."

  * * *

  An hour later, Matt approached the quarantined zone around Cholula. The dense line of military trucks, makeshift barricades, and now-abandoned buildings ringed an enormous area. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the perimeter, armed with FX-05 Xuihcoatl 'Fire Snake' assault rifles and carbines, some with underslung air-burst grenade launchers. Pillboxes dotted the rooftops outside the barricade, the barrels of tripod-mounted machine guns poking out from piles of sandbags. In the midday heat Matt couldn't see the mountains behind a yellow-gray haze of dust, smog, and humidity, so the pyramid and its church dominated the skyline.

  Soldiers made way and saluted the general, Matt and Sakura in his wake, the interpreter and two aides hurrying by his side. Matt ignored the excited whispers and awed looks, the signs of the cross and damning scowls, instead focusing on the carnage beyond the barricade.

  Bright-red blood streaked the asphalt and spattered buildings. Dozens of bodies lay in the street, twisted or slumped, dark stains on their clothing, some missing limbs, others heads. Makeshift weapons littered the ground around them, pipes and axes, chains, wrenches, nail-studded chunks of construction lumber, even a few firearms – hunting rifles and old revolvers, and the occasional military-issue Fire Snake.

  The whispers cackled their sadistic glee, and the sound reverberated down streets and alleys, echoing off of silent buildings. Something black mingled with the jade, filling Matt's nostrils with a burnt mix of cinnamon, coriander, allspice, and cooking flesh. It throbbed in time with his heart, each pulse a rush of violence straight to his frontal lobe. Sakura grunted, and Matt turned to assess the murder in her eyes, the promise of sex and death and sex in death, and restrained himself from knocking her down and gouging out those furious eyes and fucking her still-screaming skull. As the white whispers shocked down his synapses, his son and Akash and a million other souls muffling the jade whispers and the dark power amplifying them, Sakura's eyes softened.

  "You feel that."

  He nodded, though it wasn't a question.

  "My Kazuko is protecting me. Same for you?" Sakura's daughter's voice had become her white whispers the moment she'd died from cancer, the same moment Sakura's augmentations had returned.

  He nodded again, throat dry from wanting to scream. "The gang's all here."

  The soldiers hadn't reacted. As the whispers clawed at the insides of his skull, Matt wondered if the egregoroi's powers keyed off of Gerstner's, and if they'd fight or play nice in his head. For the moment the white contained the jade and black, so he turned to Valdez.

  "I've seen enough. We'll go in by foot." They didn't have the ESG Gryphon winged gliders they'd used to infiltrate Dawkins's stronghold on Lake Kivu, and gearing up a plane for a HALO jump would take too long. Matt could cover five miles in just over fourteen minutes without tiring himself out, and Sakura could do it in half that time. "You understand that there could be massive civilian casualties, even if we do this right."

>   Valdez nodded. "Our options are bad and worse."

  "And we have full authorization to use US and NATO forces to contain and eliminate the threat."

  "Si. Yes," he said without the interpreter.

  Matt keyed up his COM. "Janet?"

  "Go ahead."

  "Deploy Dragonflies, and put two Reapers up. General Valdez will make sure you have clear airspace."

  "You got it, bud."

  The Mexican army didn't have any combat drones, but Matt had direct command of up to four, only usable outside the United States and its territories. Sleeker but well bigger than a car with a twenty-meter wingspan, each Reaper carried four Hellfire Romeo missiles – armor piercing munitions capable of leveling buildings – and two GPS-guided JDAM BLU-97/B Combined Effect cluster bombs, dozens of individually-guided smart munitions designed to make everything in a half-block area go away. For fighting an egregoroi and an unknown number of hostiles, Matt would have preferred gunship support.

  They kitted up, ignoring the stares as they loaded hundreds of pounds of weapons and ammunition into pouches, packs, and straps. Sakura carried her REC7 with a satchel of 'bonk killer' ammo in spare magazines, at least four combat knives, and a bandolier with fragmentation, incendiary, and flash-bang grenades. Matt skipped the knives and assault rifle in favor of the AA-12 and his own bandolier of grenades.

  Pulling on his combat helmet, he switched the visor to black and took in the Dragonfly feed, a composite overview of the city in full color projected on his heads-up display. The cloud of information spread out as the robotic insects flitted deeper and deeper into hostile territory, replacing the fog of war with a coded overlay identifying potential targets. Buildings, streets, and individual stories shaded green if clear, red if potential hostiles were present, and light blue if the Dragonflies couldn't assess for threats.

  Default settings labeled every living human as a potential hostile.

  Target designations popped up, giving the team a common language in the blink of an eye.

  The closest hostiles crouched behind a dumpster three blocks away, just out of sight of sniper fire, their bloody hands clutching improvised weapons, clothes a torn mass of red-brown gore. Behind them a brick building stood three stories high, windows shattered, top floor smoking, with at least sixty hostiles inside, waiting. The Dragonflies called it A-1, the first target.

  "Sakura, cut right. We'll circumvent A-1, go left around A-2, then punch straight for B13 through that open market. If we hit any surprises, flank them. Janet, if A-1 comes for us, knock it down."

  Sakura dodged to the right, a wide loop that kept her out of sight of A-1. Matt did the same on the left, dashing from cover to cover, eyes and ears alert for anything the swarm of microdrones might have missed. His visor dimmed the visible light enough for his infrared and ultraviolet vision to work through it, providing more detail that supplemented the Dragonfly feed. The whole town reeked of blood and shit, overwhelming the underlying aroma of dust, corn flour, and cinnamon. He made it four deserted blocks before Janet piped up.

  "Sakura, you've got four hostiles on your six. Matt, eight on your ten, closing fast."

  "Yes," Sakura said, as Matt replied, "Roger."

  He watched the bedraggled, bloodstained octet approach on the HUD, creeping up on his position, their clumsy attempts at stealth rendered moot by the Dragonflies. He zoomed in – improvised clubs and machetes, nothing that would require a gun. Matt dashed across the street and took cover behind an overturned pushcart, feet skidding across the mushy remains of apples baking in the sun.

  They approached at a crouching run, covering the ground in loping strides more like animals than men, shoulders hunched, weapons dangling from their hands. The feed from Sakura's helmet camera flashed, a blur of motion as she took her assailants apart. Footsteps slapped across the pavement, stealth abandoned in favor of an all-out charge.

  Matt rose, caught an overhead swing from an aluminum bat on his left forearm, then chopped down into the man's leering face. His cheek and nose exploded toward the sidewalk, and Matt turned into the blow, ducking low to avoid a swing from a second assailant.

  Air whistled overhead.

  Still turning, Matt chopped the side of his hand into the second man's ribs. Stumbling sideways, machete falling from his hands, the man dropped to his knees and looked into Matt's eyes with unbridled hatred. Blood dribbled from his assailant’s mouth and nose, and Matt turned to meet the next four head-on.

  He shattered a skull with his helmet, snapped a neck with a kick to the side. A machete scraped down the armor on his bicep without fraying the Teflon-coated fabric, much less damaging the carbon fiber-reinforced ceramic underneath. Matt grabbed the arm and swung, hurling the machete-wielder into another man hard enough for blood to erupt from both their mouths. A board bounced off his helmet. Spinning, he crushed a throat with a punch, then turned to the last man.

  Flexing his fingers, he circled around the pushcart and the bodies strewn around it. His opponent gripped a bent piece of rebar, his yellowed teeth exposed in a soundless snarl.

  Hands upheld, Matt took a step back. "Walk away. You don't have to die today."

  Circling, passing the rebar from hand to hand, he babbled something neither English nor Spanish, a rapid-fire string of syllables none of which Matt recognized.

  He tried high-school Spanish. "Put it down. I don't have to kill you."

  Snarl unchanged, the man charged. Matt sidestepped a clumsy swing, and another. The best martial artist in the world stood no chance against an Aug – this man probably sold street food or ran a bicycle repair shop.

  Matt tried again. "Please stop."

  The air shuddered, the enormous noise muffled automatically by his helmet, and building A-1 flashed on his HUD, then disappeared.

  "Quit dicking around," Janet said. "You've got more incoming. A lot more."

  Matt stepped inside a clumsy swing and brought his elbow into the man's temple, hard enough to knock him senseless but not hard enough to kill. The man fell to all fours, then lunged, his full-arm tackle wrapping Matt's waist without budging him. Matt chopped the back of his head, again hard enough to render any normal person unconscious. The man bit down, trying to chew a hole through his armor.

  "Matt…"

  Skull crunching under the impact of a downward punch, his opponent finally collapsed.

  Matt ran.

  Sakura joined him halfway to the open market, matching him stride for stride, a black combat knife in each hand. "You see this?"

  Hundreds of hostiles closed on their position, maybe a thousand, matching speed and direction to intercept them though they were out of sight and several blocks away. He grunted. "I think it knows we're coming."

  "C-9," Sakura replied, changing course. He followed her toward the vacant five-story office building with huge glass windows on every floor. Red blips surrounded by double-triangles shifted to match their new trajectory – farther away, they'd reach the building seconds before the mob.

  "What's the plan?"

  "Up, then jump to C-6." C-6 stood across the street from C-9, a brick-façade hardware store three stories tall with a terracotta roof. A shed in the back made for a fifteen-foot drop, then another to the ground. The initial jump would leave a bruise, but they'd both survived much worse.

  "Won't buy us much." They rounded the corner and bolted across a small park, skirting a wading pool turned pink with half-floating bodies. A roar erupted as a growing mob sprinted across the open space to cut them off, a boiling tide of filthy men, women and children screaming and hissing in unbridled hatred. They filled the streets and alleys, loping gaits turning to outright sprints as they caught sight of their quarry.

  Two Augs against a thousand people – nobody could survive that. The whispers, Jade and black, told him not to, told him to join them in the naked, bloody revelry that defined mankind.


  At a dead run Sakura fired the REC7 at the front doors, shattering the glass. Her voice carried over the COM as she disappeared inside. "Slow them or you won't make it."

  Matt raised the AA-12 and put his finger on the trigger, still sprinting. His Friend-or-Foe picked two dozen targets, each five to ten feet from the next. Three of them children, no older than ten. Gritting his teeth, he fired. The weapon bucked, and fin-stabilized grenades hammered the front of the crowd. Bodies burst, bodies fell, people staggered to the side holding faces and stomachs and shredded limbs.

  The mob ran over the top of them, barely slowed.

  Matt rushed through the broken glass and backed into the lobby, indiscriminately spraying the crowd with frag rounds. People burst, spraying those behind with steaming red blood and chunks of meat and bone. As the entryway choked with hot, messy remains the mob pushed, using sheer mass to slide the smoking remnants forward.

  Matt reloaded on the run up a spiral stair to the second floor where Sakura fired controlled bursts into the hostiles, prioritizing those who'd made it around the growing pile. The mob flowed across the entryway like grasping tentacles, each sucker a human soul enslaved to the egregoroi's will.

  Sakura threw a pair of grenades down the stair and disappeared into the fire exit. Firing, Matt followed, slamming the door behind him before running up after her. Taking stairs four at a time, he pulled the pin on a frag. The door below banged open, so he let the grenade fall, spoon tumbling from his fingers after the explosive. He pulled another, still running, and dropped it.

  One detonated, the second moments later. Ears ringing, he made another two floors before his eardrums healed enough to hear again. Footsteps hammered up toward him, so he dropped two more grenades before hitting the crash bar on the top floor and rolling out into a hallway carpeted with drab industrial gray-brown.

  Sakura kneeled between executive offices with massive windows that looked out over the city and toward the haze-obscured mountains beyond, her REC7 trained on the far exit. Above her, a ladder led to a hatch. "It's open. Go."