Lucky her to warrant such royal treatment.
For the longest time, neither side moved. But by then, seconds would seem like minutes, as Cassandra had moved much of her consciousness to the mind chip and her nano neural net in order to hack so many lifeforms at once. Leon’s admonition to play by the rules and not engage her nano played in the back of her head. Screw that. She had an inkling this crew wasn’t exactly here to play by the rules either.
Mission complete, she found the sentient serpents encircling her weren’t backing off. The triple threat had found a way to keep their signal on the line. Now the creatures had two stations to choose from on the radio dial of their minds. Surely they would choose Cassandra’s? But she was wrong. They had been too conditioned to respond to pain and fear, and didn’t much know what to do with the other channel in their minds.
There would be no getting out of this with interspecies negotiations. Diplomacy was over.
It was fight or die.
FORTY-FIVE
The animal lover was gone. Any trace of humanity, likewise, gone. Cassandra had switched into sociopathic mode. To make the decisions she needed to make quickly and cleanly enough. Ironically, in that moment, she was more like the sentient serpents, cold-blooded and calculating, just not fearful.
They were about to see what a nano-upgraded nervous system could do against the finest genetic upgrades known to man. She reached the one in the tree with the compound bow aimed at her and the arrow whose tip was a guided missile. While he was still trying to determine where his mark had gone. And she fired the bow at one of the three nomads. At the soft underbelly. It opened like a piñata hit by the strongest kid at the party. The animal fell hard enough to shake the ground before the rest of the Umbrage had time to redirect their weapons. By then she’d had her hand halfway down the mouth of the Umbrage in her hands. Gagging him wasn’t exactly the point, but the gagging was distracting him. She was infusing him with nano. Once the nanites had a chance to replicate enough and form a mindnet by interacting with each of his synapses, she’d have access to his mind. And if they were half as psychic as the one she’d befriended, she’d have access to all their minds.
One of the Umbrage, with apparently better reflexes than the others, released his guided missile at her, delivered by way of the creature’s crossbow. She deflected it with her wrist and the back of her hand, holding them like a shield. The nano providing for her a repulsing magnetic force that redirected the missile at the second nomad. That one lost its head in the explosion. Ran through the forest without it. Its rider, with no hope of redirecting the animal, dismounted and bounded back towards the field of action.
Cassandra jumped into the melee on the ground. It was time to dance with the foot soldiers. The first one she dropped in front of was the one with the laser rifle. She made herself an obvious target. Waited for him to fire before morphing her camouflage to a mirror’s surface. Using the palm of her hand, she redirected his laser fire at the last remaining Nomad, specifically its eyes. The creature, its eyes adapted to gunfire, just not lasers, blinded, became instantly more of an asset than an adversary. In anguished pain it flailed about. Its tail knocking its own foot soldiers against one another like a dog wagging its tail over a knickknack-crowded coffee table. Their advantage in numbers was now working against them, because it was far more likely the creature would step on one of them or breathe fire on one of them before it stomped, tail-whipped, or fire-breathed Cassandra to death. The abstract notion was made concrete enough in the ensuing few seconds, by which time two-thirds of the ground troops were no more. The Umbrage reflexes were remarkably good but it seemed if they could dodge the Nomad’s tail, or its fire breathing, or its foot stomping, they couldn’t dodge the falling trees in its wake or the weapons fire from the other Umbrage; their weapons being discharged meant to hit Cassandra, or meant to warn the Nomad away from them, or simply fired wildly as they lost their footing.
The remaining Umbrage ground troops took cover, if they had been in the clearing, and if they had been in the trees, they dropped their firearms, which weren’t as camouflaged as they were.
She had no desire to make herself a target any more than they did, so she ignored the weapons tossed her direction as bait. The ones in her sightline remained perfectly still. Their camouflage had morphed more completely to match whichever tree or rock they were up against. But the ones behind her munched away at whatever edible was within reach, much like Sage Solo who she had earlier befriended. Why?
The mindnet was up with the one she’d infected. So that was why! The creatures had been sent out here with armaments that worked against their own kind, whereas conventional weapons had ceased to long ago. The triple threat had anticipated that she might have turned some of their assets against them, so sent their people equipped with the only kinds of firepower that could take down the sentient serpents.
And all that munching? Which always came from behind her, never from where it could give away the position of the Umbrage. They were already assimilating the lessons learned from their downed comrades. They must have been able to see clearly in their mind’s eyes what laserfire did to the eyeball, and to the optic nerves at a cellular, perhaps even a molecular and atomic level. A region of their grey matter, or perhaps a separate organ in their brain entirely dedicated to the task? However they did it, they were evolving genetically in real time so this latest generation of weapons would soon be useless against them as well. They needed the food to supply the fuel for the rapidly dividing, mutating cells in their bodies. That meant she had precious little time to act.
She picked up the automatic rifle. She was less concerned about being a target now, knowing what they were up to. They would be more focused on closing the loopholes on their defenses before charging her.
Her thermal imaging had been neutralized. The cold-blooded creatures were barely detectible. And even their rabid eating didn’t nudge their body temperatures up enough for her eyes to pick them up. But despite being able to slow their heartbeats to a complete crawl, to neutralize her hopped up hearing, they had to circulate those gene modifiers to where they needed to go in their bodies. Their heartbeats had gone from ten beats a minute to sixty beats a minute. The sounds largely neutralized by how quickly they’d morphed their epidermis—acting now as acoustic barriers. But it was giveaway enough for her purposes.
With the automatic rifle in single-shot mode, she picked them out of the trees one by one. It didn’t matter that they were using the trunk of the tree or a particularly thick branch as a shield, holding on often parallel to the ground. The bullets burrowed through the wood and into their bodies, carried not by gunpowder but by nuclear propulsion. The bullets but scaled down nuclear rockets. The radiation was what was taking down the Umbrage that had not yet learned to defend against it. By the time she got to the last one up in the trees, it was taking two and three bullets to take one out; one was no longer enough. In less than a minute the remaining ones would likely be immune to such small-mass nuclear exposure.
The ones on the ground, hiding behind the trees, were coming out now. They were aiming their laser rifles at her. Surely they knew that was a bad idea? They fired at her in concert. They waited for her to change. The instant she made her body a mirror reflection of her surroundings with the intent of directing the laser beams back at them, they changed their exteriors to mirror surfaces as well. Meaning they were bouncing those refracted laser beams back at the refractor. And the multiplication of said beams gave her precious few directions to jump in to avoid them without slicing her own head off. So long as more of the beams converged on her than on them, she’d heat up faster, because her morphed skin cells were, at best, only ninety-four percent refractive. Eventually, working under increasing duress, her nanites would be less efficient as a result. In short, it wasn’t a contest she could win.
But her nano-enhanced nervous system was still faster than theirs. She jumped through the holes in the net formed by the intersecting laser
lines. Picked up the one weapon that hadn’t been fired yet. It stood to reason therefore that the remaining Umbrage would not yet have any defense against it.
She fired the handgun at the last remaining Umbrage. Emptying the clip of twelve bullets, one per customer. The bullets turned out to be hollow points that didn’t penetrate the body. They just burst on contact with the surface of the Umbrage, releasing their contents. A nano-net that grew over the target until it had it completely enmeshed. And then it constricted. When its work was finished, all that was left of the remaining Umbrage was the small mounds of chunk meat where their intact bodies once stood. They looked like something their Nomad cousins had pooped out.
The Nomad that had fled earlier, in fact, missing its eyes, still found its way back to the “poop” by scent and ate it up. Evidently keen on absorbing the powers of the Umbrage in order to heal its own eyes. The eyes were in fact starting to regenerate. Cassandra decided not to stick around for the dinosaur to finish regaining its sight.
She ripped her headgear off, not wanting to allow the adversary to read her thoughts now that they had an open channel to her that she couldn’t entirely shut down. The sound that escaped her lips this time was closer to the one she made breaching the surface of the ocean after a deep dive. The pain not gone so much as mitigated. The nanites in her head picking up the slack for the damaged neural webbing resulting from removing the device until it could fast-track her healing.
The removal of the headset meant she could enjoy her last remaining thought without fear of having her mind hacked. The triple threat, by allowing the Nomads and the Umbrage to evolve further, had closed yet more loopholes for shutting them down. That meant that should they be turned against their masters, not even the triple threat would be able to defend against them. She would take that as a win. Of course, by stripping the headgear, she had removed any chance of her turning the creatures against their masters with it. Still, the psychic connection she had shared with the Umbrage briefly, while the one she’d infected with nano was still alive, suggested another possible solution.
FORTY-SIX
Natty leaned into the upward pitch of the mountain, continuing his relentless climb. “Number one survival tip, Natty, when in the Amazon forest, head downhill! Not that you aren’t immune to good advice.” He sipped from the last of his canteen. That meant he was down to scouting for swarms of insects—the most likely hope he was near water—he thought, as he continued to ascend the incline.
He sucked on a couple of the salted, dried prunes Crumley had outfitted him with. With all the sweating he was doing, his muscles were cramping up. He should have thought to pop a few in his mouth sooner. He tackled a palm heart next from his waist pouch, grateful to Crumley for doing the dirty work for him. You had to cut down an entire tree to get the heart. A precious source of carbohydrates on which to keep going, but one more sign that it was hard for man to interact with the jungle without the jungle losing.
Laney’s avatar slash thought projection slash hologram, whatever he wanted to call it, caught up with Natty a short while later as he was hiking up the mountain feeling lost, even with the compass. But he doubted it could give him moral and spiritual direction as well.
He used their latest meetup as an excuse to catch his breath and grab a fallen log to sit on. He was not in the shape of a soldier on a good day, and the Amazon rainforest had a way of taking it out of him that much more quickly.
She padded over and sat down next to Natty. They clasped their fingers together. “You remember when we used to take walks in the park, and hold hands?” he said.
“Weren’t you designing a way to keep transatlantic fiber optic cables from being hacked back then?”
“And when we went skinny dipping in the river by our house during rush hour traffic, causing all kinds of accidents?”
“That’s right! I remember. You were designing a way around quantum satellite transmission encoding back then.”
“That’s it, mock me.”
She smiled. “I’m not mocking you, Natty. I’m just saying that we caught what snatches of happiness together we could. The problem wasn’t that we were both out saving the world, the problem was, we weren’t doing it together.”
He turned his head to face her. “You mean that?”
“You think you’re the only one on a learning curve? I was just too afraid you were too vested in death and destruction.”
“I have more save-the-whales patents than there are whales!”
She smiled. “I just thought your prolific inventiveness was an excuse never to grow up. Boys with toys. It was just part of the disease affecting the planet.”
He sighed. “Maybe you were right.”
She squeezed his hand tighter, and even though she was a holographic projection, he could feel it. Like applying pressure to a sponge. “No, I wasn’t. I was blinded by my own prejudices. You weren’t working from within a system to fix what couldn’t be fixed. You were ripping the carpet out right from under them. Making their wars serve you. You were a one man liberation front. You just had to do it in a way that no one would catch on. Until it was too late to do anything about it.”
“You figured that out? I’m not sure I figured that out. It’s been a dream of mine.”
“I think your unconscious has been bubbling up solutions for you for quite some time. You just haven’t been paying attention to the smoke signals.”
He nodded. “I think you just gave me a way to pull things together here in the forest. A way for all these war games to work together as one.”
“That should make Truman quite pleased.”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so.”
He kissed her without any desire for the kiss to end. The hologram felt cold and ethereal and yet electric and alive. It was weird. But it was tangible. “I need to go now. You’ll be here when I come back?”
“Apparently, I’m everywhere.”
He smiled. “I hope to be that enlightened someday.”
FORTY-SEVEN
“Where the hell is everyone?” Leon said to Cassandra as she found her way to him despite his camouflage, and his crouching perfectly still. She’d gotten to him even through his quieted breathing and his slowed heart-rate, to lower his thermal and sonic signatures to the sentient serpents that came with inborn heat-seeking abilities and extraordinary hearing.
“All dead,” she said matter-of-factly.
There went the sonic and thermal camouflage. He felt his heart-rate and his temperature climb.
“Not quite all,” Cronos said, crawling out of the woods, drawn by their whispering. “I’m guessing ALPHA UNIT, back with the equipment, away from the front lines, is still with us for now, as well.”
Leon’s double take cracked his neck. “My men just don’t fall down and die!” he shout-whispered.
Cronos lowered his eyes in shame.
“These creatures,” Cassandra said, “I’ve been watching them. They came out of their incubators knife-proof and bullet-resistant and flameproof. Even small grenades don’t do much. And they adapt quickly to what you throw at them. So whatever you try against them, plan to kill as many as you can. Because if there are any survivors, they pass on the learning to the others. They have some kind of psychic connection to one another. And their ability to adapt… they don’t just pass the mutagen along to their descendants, they apply it to themselves.”
Leon did another double take to hit her with a look that could melt steel. “If this were coming from anyone else I’d shoot you on the spot for lunacy. You’d be too much of a threat to the sanity and survival of the other team members.” He sighed. “But being as it’s you, I suppose I’m obliged to take it as gospel.”
“What have you learned tracking them?” Cassandra asked, her tone testy, as per her baseline.
Leon gritted his teeth. “I found too much evidence of trouble transpiring up here to pursue the idea of them retreating into a subterranean world. Though the more I thought ab
out it, the more I became convinced there might be something to the notion.”
“It’s possible at least some of them thought if they got far enough underground they could escape the pain generating signal from the headsets,” Cassandra said. “Considering the other genetic alterations to their senses, they might be able to feel the EM transmissions between their headgear and the headgear worn by the triple threat. But the units cause pain that can only be modulated by the triple threat. If they get out of range the pain would only magnify further. If you’d checked with me first I could have told you you were wasting your time.”
“Maybe if you were around a little more,” Leon said, nearly losing his patience, referring to her constant disappearances to run her unsanctioned solo missions.
One look at Cronos and Leon reined himself in. He was spooked enough without seeing his leader come unglued. “The one leaking green blood was trying to rid itself of its headgear. It’s not trying anymore. He’s joined the others. Together, they’re running perimeter defense in this area. My guess is there’s a compound they’re protecting we can’t see from here.”
“Truman’s base of operations, no doubt.”
“Yeah.”
“How very James Bond villain of him,” Cronos interjected.
“What the man lacks in originality, he definitely makes up for with strategy,” Leon said, continuing to study the lizard people from a distance as he talked in a low voice. “If what Cassandra says is true, I have no idea how we’re going to get past these guys with a full team, far less down the men that we are.”
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 41