Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  It looks like it came down hard and fast, Harry thought, and felt curdling fear. The front end of the car was caved in and the tough, spider-spin armored, carbon fiber hood was splintered and curled back to the diamond glass windscreen. Chueh had apparently cut off the sound of the pilot’s commentary so as not to distract them from drawing their own conclusions, he thought, but the silence was eerie. The car lay tipped on its side and wedged between two enormous boulders about half way down the ridge. The boulders were scorched and split by what looked like particle-beam fire from heavy pulse rifles. As far as Harry could see, there was no sign of any bodies in or around the car. He suppressed a sigh of relief. Too early to know yet, he told himself.

  The image pulled back and slid down the ridge to where the crushed, burnt-out remains of a stripped-down Seraphim battle wagon lay twisted and half buried in the rockslide debris of the lower slope. Badly burnt bodies of Seraphim warriors who had been caught in the explosion and tossed out of the smashed gunboat lay scattered around the wreck. Four survivors, carrying pulse rifles, lay further up slope, apparently cut down in a fire fight by particle beam fire from the downed roadster.

  It looks like someone survived the crash long enough to take those four out, Harry thought, riding a new wave of hope.

  About thirty yards from the foot of the ridge, not far from a rushing river, lay the scattered remnants of what once might have been another battlewagon. They were spread out around the edge of a large crater gouged into fused bedrock. It looked like a grav-unit gone critical, Harry thought. The wreckage was so finely shredded that it looked like burnt paper scraps from an exploded diagram of some complex mechanical device, which in a sense it was.

  “Roger borrowed an idea or two from you, Harry,” Chueh said. “It looks like he took out one of the battlewagons and when its coils blew, he rode the explosion up while the second battlewagon took the brunt of the explosion and was smashed into the face of the ridge and then lost control ”

  Harry looked over at Jericho. “You’re sure they took Roger’s car when they left for the Quarantine?” he asked.

  Jericho nodded. “That’s it,” he said.

  “There are no bodies,” Harry pointed out. “They could have gotten away. Didn’t the scout land and try to find some sign of them?”

  “Watch,” Chueh said.

  The sound suddenly cut in on the image. “I’m going up for a closer look,” the pilot said as the image swung away from the wrecked Seraphim vehicles and climbed the slope. Roger’s car grew nearer until the scout hovered directly above it, and Harry saw a long smear of blood on the inside of the wind screen.

  “Blood spoor…driver’s side windscreen…no sign of survivors. I’m initiating standard aerial search pattern,” the scout’s laconic voice cut in as he began to spiral up the ridge, widening his circle as he went. Just as he cleared the top of the ridge, the picture jumped wildly as an explosion rocked the scout.

  “I’m taking fire! Repeat! I’m under attack! Seraphim battlewagons…” the pilot screamed as he tried to swerve away and was hit again, and then the ridge seemed to hurtle towards him. “Mayday, mayday! I’m going down! Repeat am going…” The pilot’s voice cut off in a blinding flash of blue light and the screen went blank.

  Harry turned to Chueh. “How long ago did this happen?” he asked.

  “It came in on direct feed to my headquarters less than an hour ago,” Chueh said.

  “Right,” Harry looked down at Marta. “It looks like we’ve got some scouting to do in the foothills of the High Sierras.”

  Marta looked at Chueh.

  The Tong Godfather gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

  “Before you go off half-cocked,” Jericho cut in. “There are a couple things you might want to consider.”

  “Like what?” Harry asked irritably.

  “Like how did the Seraphim find them in the first place? No one saw them leave New Hollywood. I’m sure of that. They covered their tracks and played it safe. They didn’t drive directly north through the infected waters bordering the Sinks. Instead, they stuck to the commercial traffic lanes around the island and then ran north up the Dire Straits until they hit the Trench. If anyone was following them, Roger would have picked them up long before then.

  “They must have used the monitor on Roger’s ka to track him,” Harry said impatiently.

  Jericho shook his head. “Roger pulled the monitor on his ka the day before he left. After that, there was no way they could track him.”

  Harry thought of the blood smear across the windscreen of the downed roadster. “So if he died out there, he died for real,” he said and was surprised by the stab of grief and deep sense of loss he felt.

  “I’m afraid so,” Jericho said. “But everyone’s in the same boat now. The wolves took control of the Eternal Life building early on in the rebellion and held onto it until two days ago when imperial death commandos fought their way in and shut down all the monitors.”

  “So nobody resurrects anymore?” Harry said.

  “You die now, you go into the arms of the Goddess,” Jericho said.

  “If the wolves don’t get you first,” Harry said.

  “Russian roulette,” Jericho said.

  Harry closed his eyes and once again saw the blood smear across the windscreen of Roger’s car. “Yeah, Russian roulette,” he said.

  He shook the image away and looked at Chueh. “I still can’t see how they could have caught Roger even if they were tracking him. It doesn’t make sense. His car was almost as fast as Marta. Those battlewagons couldn’t even get close enough to attack him on the open sea, let alone drive him into the coastal foothills.”

  “They didn’t force him there,” Chueh said. “That’s the direction he was headed.”

  Harry nodded absently. “It still doesn’t explain how they caught up with him. Roger’s car would run rings around anything the Seraphim threw at him.”

  “Maybe he didn’t get a chance to run rings around them,” Chueh suggested. “Maybe the wolves used their weapon to cut off his grav-units and bring him down. Back then, we still didn’t know how to counter it.”

  The holo view of the downed grav-car reappeared. “Notice, there are no signs of blast damage. It looks like the car just crashed.”

  “But there’s no sign of any wolves down there either,” Harry protested.

  “You haven’t been looking close enough, Harry,” Chueh reprimanded. The holo came to life, and once again they followed the doomed scout as he spiraled up over the ridge and was attacked. They heard his cries for help as his ship plummeted towards the ridge and that final flash of blue light before everything went blank.

  Chueh spooled back and the image froze on that flash of blue light. “That’s a flash from a wolf god-weapon,” he said.

  “Of course! How could I have missed it?” Harry said as his mind did an instant replay, standing on an alien world beneath an impossible orange sky, watching an Anubis wolf shoot a man in the back with a weapon that stripped the flesh from his body and turned bones to dust in a flash of blue light.

  Chueh looked at him in surprise. “You recognize it?” he said. “Then you know that only the Anubis wolves carry them. No mere mortal is allowed to touch a god-weapon.”

  Harry didn’t know but let it pass. “So there must have been at least one Anubis wolf down there…That means…that’s why…” Harry stopped as his mind followed this line of thought to its logical conclusion. Sometimes, logic sucked, he thought in despair.

  “It ain’t necessarily so,” Chueh said.

  “What?”

  “What you’re thinking. It ain’t necessarily so.”

  “So now you’re a fucking mind reader on top of being the bearer of glad tidings!” Harry said bitterly.

  “Careful, Harry,” Chueh’s voice was velvet over steel.

  Jericho came up behind Harry and put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re all on the same side, son.”

  Harry drew a deep breath
and let it out slowly. It didn’t help. It didn’t change the fact that the reason there were no bodies in Roger’s car was probably because the Anubis god-weapon had sucked them away. But that wasn’t Chueh’s fault, and, as Doc said, they were all on the same side.

  He turned to Chueh and bowed deeply. “I am truly sorry. I let my feelings betray me into disrespecting you. Please accept my deepest apologies. It won’t…”

  “Enough, Holly! Enough!” Chueh said in his sing song China man voice. “You leally got to learn to keep it short…And lighten up!” He grinned. For a second, the Cheshire cat hung in the air between them, grinning from ear to ear. Chueh sending a holographic postcard, Harry thought, and couldn’t help grinning back.

  “Now, you’ve got to ask yourself, why are the Seraphim and the wolves there now?” Chueh said, dropping the China man act and instead sounding like a school master pointing out the obvious.

  “My experts confirm that the car was attacked on the same day Roger and Diana left.”

  “How can they be so sure?” Harry asked.

  “By the condition of the Seraphim bodies and the fact that vultures and other scavengers have clearly been at them for some time,” Chueh said.

  “The absence of scavengers should have warned the scout that something was wrong as soon as he saw the bodies,” Jericho said.

  “The perfect twenty-twenty vision of hindsight,” Harry said. “The poor bastard probably didn’t even think of it. I doubt if I would have.”

  “Which is why you don’t go off half-cocked before you know what you’re getting into,” Chueh said.

  Harry bowed acquiescence. What else could he do?

  “Something else to think about,” Jericho said. “The Seraphim are real particular about burying their dead and collecting their weapons. They wouldn’t just leave them out there for scavengers.”

  “So the Seraphim just got there but didn’t have time to collect their dead before the scout arrived,” Harry said. “And if they’d been careful enough to land behind that ridge, they could have avoided detection.”

  Chueh began whistling “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.

  “What now?” Harry asked, irritably.

  Chueh just smiled his inscrutable oriental smile. “Even if the Seraphim are particular about burying their dead, they’re still in the middle of a war,” he pointed out. “They’re not going to send a couple of gunboats to hell and gone just to bury a few dead brothers and remember, the wolves retreated into the Nevada Quarantine. They’re not sending out warriors just to guard a burial detail.”

  Harry finally got it. “Survivors!” he shouted and felt an instant lift of hope. “They’re looking for survivors!”

  “Give that boy a cigar!” Jericho said.

  52

  Wheels within Wheels

  Harry turned to Chueh. “You think they’re alive?”

  Chueh gave a palms up gesture. “It’s possible. The Seraphim and wolves went to some trouble to try to get those two. If they got away, they might go through a lot more trouble to get them back.”

  “Or hunt them down and kill them,” Harry said.

  “That too,” Chueh said.

  “But why did they wait three days to send reinforcements?” Harry wondered.

  “The wolves retreated into the Nevada Quarantine, and the Seraphim are still fighting a war. Things are pretty chaotic. They could easily have forgotten a couple of fugitives and the gunboats that went after them,” Jericho suggested.

  “The wolves didn’t forget,” Chueh said.

  Then he turned to Harry. “Do you think you’re ready to go now?” he asked.

  Harry was impatient to be off, but something in the way Chueh asked made him hesitant.

  “Where will you start?” Chueh prodded.

  “I’ll start at the wreck and…”

  “And fight off Seraphim gunboats and wolves while you try to pick up a trail that might not even be there?” Chueh said scornfully.

  “Perhaps it would help if you knew where they were going,” he said and looked pointedly at Jericho. “You haven’t told him yet have you?” he said.

  Jericho shrugged it off. “There was no time.”

  “Perhaps you should find the time,” Chueh suggested quietly. It was the kind of Tong Godfather suggestion that, if you didn’t follow it, implied concrete shoes and a one-way trip to the bottom of the Trench.

  The two old men stared each other down, their faces set, their bodies full of motionless tension. Like high noon at the OK Corral, Harry thought.

  Jericho smiled thinly and suddenly the two old men burst out laughing. Harry looked from one to the other and wondered what he had just missed.

  Chueh saw his look of confusion and smiled. “Old friends, old games,” he said.

  Then he bowed apologetically to the two eidolons and Jericho and said. “Please excuse us for a moment, but Harry and I have some unfinished business to discuss.” Then his holographic image floated down the concrete path bordering the lake and stopped beside the low containment wall.

  Harry arched a quizzical eyebrow at Jericho, but the old man just shrugged.

  As soon as Harry joined Chueh, a privacy shield closed around them cutting off all sound from outside. Harry bowed. “I am at your service, Master Chueh.” He’d decided to play it humble until he knew where this was going.

  Chueh waved aside the humble act and got down to business. “I have a favor to ask of you,” he said.

  “A favor,” Harry asked nonplussed. Then he remembered his manners and bowed respectfully. “Of course, Master Chueh.”

  “When you leave, I want you to take Mae along with you. She and Marta make a great team.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” Harry said, careful to keep his voice as neutral as possible.

  Chueh nodded. “But more important, they’ve become friends, with all that that implies. It’s something we’ve never seen happen before with AI’s. They communicate electronically, mind to mind, like telepathy; exchanging information, customizing each other’s programs, modifying and improving their personality constructs to bring them more and more in line with a human ideal. In some ways, I think they’ve already gone beyond human.”

  “Doc says they’re the best scouts in the Sinks,” Harry said trying for studied casualness to hide his misgivings.

  Not casual enough though. Chueh threw him a sharp, penetrating glance, hardly more than a flick of the eye, but it was enough to let Harry know that he knew. Then he gave him a benign grandfatherly smile and nodded. “Yes, they’re not only the best in the Sinks. I think they may be the best team in the world. They have been exchanging military programs and constantly customizing and upgrading them based on what they experience. They’ve become so good that we’re even thinking of using their upgrades in our newest troops.”

  “Very impressive,” Harry said discreetly.

  “Yes, aren’t they?” Chueh purred. “And that’s why you should take them with you, Harry. They’re the best I have, and where you’re going, you’re going to need the best. Besides.” He grinned. “They’re both crazy about you.”

  “You’re too kind, Master Chueh,” Harry said. “But I couldn’t possibly…”

  “Please take them with my blessing,” Chueh said with a humble bow.

  The offer may have been couched as a humble request but Harry knew better. This was a Tong Godfather making an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I would be honored to have them both along,” he said, and just to let Chueh know that he knew the score, he added. “I thank you most humbly for your generosity and selfless concern for my safety.”

  Chueh stared at him for an expressionless moment, and Harry thought maybe he had spread the irony a little too thick. Then the old man burst out laughing and shook his head. “Harry, Harry, Harry, you’re a constant source of amazement.

  “One of these days you must tell me what happened to you in the Sinks,” Chueh said. “My mermen are building altars to you down there and burning candles. The stories
are getting out of hand. They’re talking about you like the Second Coming.”

  “We both know that’s a gross exaggeration,” Harry said.

  “Do we?” Chueh said, and Harry wasn’t sure whether he was serious or not. Then, the old man laughed and tried to slap him on the back, but his holographic hand went right through Harry’s body. “You see, another miracle!” Chueh said, and they both laughed a little too loudly and too long.

  Then the privacy bubble collapsed, and Chueh’s holographic image floated back to where Jericho stood, leaning over the guardrail, talking to the two eidolons in the car.

  Harry remained standing there alone, wondering what the old man was up to. He thought about the offer he couldn’t refuse. “They’re the best I have,” Chueh said and by best he meant best killing machines.

  I don’t want to open that drawer, Harry told himself, but it was too late. It was already open. In his mind’s eye he saw Marta wearing a white pinafore and the innocent doe-eyed eidolon form that suited her so well. “We have the highest kill ratio of any squad in the Sinks,” she said and smiled, and her white pinafore was splashed with blood and the bodies were piled up all around her.

  Harry closed his eyes and shook his head in futile denial. An uncontrollable rage of hatred boiled up inside him, and he grabbed the rusted guardrail with both hands as if he wanted to rip it out of the moldy concrete wall. When all this was over, he would kill both Chueh and Jericho for what they had done, he promised himself. There were few things he valued anymore, and they had stolen and debased one of the most precious. He’d left a happy, innocent, loving child in their care, and they turned her into a killing machine. “We have the highest kill ratio of any squad in the Sinks…”

  He wanted to reach deep inside himself and seek the calm serenity of his ka, but even that was denied him now, he thought bitterly.

  Well, at least one good thing had come out of all this shit, he thought. He’d discovered he was almost as good at shutting off bad memories as he was at shutting off his life. He hadn’t been lying to Doc about being able to do this, maybe just shading the truth a little, because those memories were still there, like the gods and demons haunting his ka, waiting to jump out at him, like mad, serial killer, jack-in-the-boxes, as soon as something or someone pushed the wrong button.