Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  “A large pack of Pales is approaching your position from the southwest,” the overwatch agent said. “We believe they’ve been aimed at you by agents from the Block. You have about twenty minutes before they get there. You are ordered to evacuate.”

  “How the—you know what, never mind. You can explain to me how you know any of that once we get home,” Beck said. “Acknowledged. We’re out of here in sixty seconds.”

  She waved a hand from the back of the crowd, catching Scott’s attention. With the flick of a few fingers near her throat, she gave the signal to wind it up as fast as possible. It was a shame; he’d been doing so well with this group. Convincing them without trying to do so. The panic that would come as they rushed to get away from the incoming attack would ruin the effort.

  But Scott was not so easily defeated. As soon as he looked back at the crowd, never breaking his speech, he casually glanced up as if noticing the sky for the first time. He frowned. “Damn. Ran long. We should have left half an hour ago. Sorry about that, guys.”

  To Beck’s astonishment, some of the Trads actually looked disappointed. Scott stood and brushed loose stalks of grass from his knees, gesturing for the others to rise. “Beck, would you mind hopping in your suit and putting a little fire suppressant on this? We don’t want to leave it burning and set the field on fire. Come on, everyone. Let’s get in the transport. I’m sure these Watchmen have been waiting on us to finish up for a while now. Don’t want to keep them waiting.”

  Red, possibly without realizing what he was doing, helped McCallister to his feet as he cocked his head at Scott. “How did you know what time it was?”

  The question wasn’t suspicious, just curious. But it was one that could raise concerns…

  Scott tilted his own head, halfway mimicking Red’s mannerism. “Position of the sun, obviously. You guys don’t know how to do that?”

  Beck snickered as she stepped into her suit. The man was a bullshit artist, she had to give him credit. He had been forthright with her for as long as she’d known him—or so she thought. Beck couldn’t help wondering with amusement how often Scott just made stuff up to entertain himself. He was good enough at lying that she couldn’t even be bothered by it. That sort of talent should be used.

  The HUD immediately lit up with a large area map overlaying the view through her lenses. A running estimate of when the Pales would arrive ticked away in one corner. They had plenty of time. For once there probably would not be a desperate fight for survival. If they were very lucky, the passengers would never know there was a real danger at all.

  Seeing the feed on her HUD made it clear how overwatch knew the Pales were coming. Beck thought it must be a satellite view at first, then realized that it was a drone. A drone quite high above them, watching for just such a danger. The small bright dots of Pale body heat were being chased by the dimmer but larger shapes of armored figures trailing plumes of heat as exhaust. They were rendered as tiny shapes on the HUD, but clear enough. Since no Watchman would be out here, they had to be from the Block.

  Which raised one more question.

  How? How had they bypassed the blockade of Deathwatch surrounding the place to get out here? Or were they already free when the blockade went up and the tunnel collapsed? Were there more of Keene’s agents out here? There had to be. Their numbers might not be increasing any longer, but every one of them represented an enormous danger.

  Beck’s sudden headache was a reminder of that fact.

  15

  Five minutes of rest after running for three miles at a dead sprint, then on to twenty minutes of maximum weight training. Then half an hour of deep stretching before a solid hour of combat training, including full-contact sparring.

  This was the daily routine Jason Keene underwent within the Block. He completed it without hesitation or failure.

  It had always been easy to guide his enemies into believing whatever fiction about him he wanted to pass off as reality. The Watch especially. They were confined by their training, forced into a mindset that put them apart—even above—everyone else. It was the fate of all police and military organizations, and the power that sense of superiority conveyed was such that even knowing the phenomenon existed, those who fell under its power could not help but have their perceptions altered by it.

  For years Bowers and his pet Wardens had seen him as the wished to. Weak. Consumed by power. Without discipline. Keene was self-aware enough to recognize his mistakes. Carrying on the work put in place by his predecessors in maintaining control should have been simple. The machinery was already there. No, he had to improve the process. Make blooms happen more often in his zeal to cleanse the badlands and allow for easier expansion of the Protectorate.

  The irony was obvious even to him. Keene had killed more citizens of the Protectorate than any Protector before him by a wide margin, all in an effort to push their civilization toward expansion. The goal had always been to provide iron stability through fear long enough to grow the population to a point where no single disaster would ever again have the ability to wipe out the species.

  What others never understood was how perilously the Protectorate balanced on the knife’s edge. It was not simply a matter of having babies. Humanity had done that without plan or purpose for a hundred thousand years. In the decades prior to the collapse, society had finally woken to the dangers of overpopulation.

  If it were simply a matter of bodies, the few hundred thousand immune survivors could have been tens of millions rather than a few million in the century since Manhattan was sealed off. Even the exponential growth since then—a deliberate choice—was a fraction of what could have been.

  No. Those populations had to be planned for. Infrastructure needed to be in place. A thousand considerations had to be taken into account, from food to water to power. Which required materials and manufacture and work. Keene understood his failure was in accelerating the plan, which opened it to notice. That had to be why Bowers finally caught on.

  In the end it no longer mattered. He was here, unable to leave without triggering a war.

  The Block was well named. The huge monolith of stone and steel sat tall and square inside the circular wall of the abandoned Rez it was built in. It had taken most of a decade to turn this place into a fallback site, an effort of such monumental scope that Keene found himself angry there was no one left in his orbit to appreciate the feat.

  “Sir, there is an update,” said a voice over the local Mesh. Every room had at least one terminal. This place had long since stopped being an actual prison. Every person sent here for the last five years had either been welcomed into the slowly building community or met with one ‘accident’ or another. Keene had trained his lieutenants well—they took only a certain class of criminal into their ranks for training.

  The Block was one of those curious blind spots in the world view shared by the Deathwatch. Creating a self-sustaining prison they never had to enter in force—making it easy for Keene to subvert the few jailers from their ranks on site—must have seemed a perfectly elegant solution. The logic was sound. Make a place that was such a punishment, no sane person would break the law.

  Right. Because human nature always thought about consequences before action.

  Keene had taken an interest after viewing some of the interior footage shot in this place. Seeing the surprisingly complex social structure of prisoners acting, for the most part, as relatively decent human beings had inspired him. The work of slowly taking control here, of setting up facilities out of sight of the cameras for his own use—that would have been the work of a lifetime for anyone else. A masterpiece of software engineering to fool the Mesh network and feed the cameras false data after that solution became necessary, of logistics as suits of armor and brilliant minds to improve them were ferried in unseen, of organizational and sociological mastery as Keene slowly molded the population into a small but loyal army.

  From anyone but him it would have been an historical achievement. For Keene it
was merely difficult. He did have his hands on the levers of power, after all. He was not so arrogant as to believe the majority of the credit was his to claim.

  Keene stepped away from his combat instructor, a large man named Green who had been imprisoned for multiple assaults after being cashiered from the Watch.

  “Word about our northwest strike team?” He almost didn’t want to speak the words aloud. Having one of the few teams they’d been able to seed in the badlands before their access to the outside world was completely shut off go after that transport had been a risk. Keene was painfully aware how few of their operators were free to move beyond these walls.

  “Yes, sir,” the voice said. It was one of his assistants, though the name escaped Keene. “They failed. They were able to follow at a distance and circle around in their own fast transport, but the Watch saw the swarm of Pales they sent in coming. They escaped.”

  Keene nodded, tentative relief beginning to seep in at the edges of his thoughts. “Casualties?”

  “None, sir,” came the reply. “They ran. Didn’t fight. We’re fairly sure the Watch had a recon drone flying high. If so, they had to have known our people were following. Our analysts think this was a deliberate move meant to tempt our agents into action. A test to see how they would react to bait.”

  Keene pursed his lips in thought. “If so, we’ll need to be much more cautious. We can’t risk losing more of those assets before we’re ready to act. Have our boys bunker down somewhere with a supply cache. Have our analysts go over all the data again to make sure our read on this is right. I’ll be in the bay if I’m needed.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  *

  Keene considered the bay the greatest accomplishment of his many acts in taking over the Block. Oh, once the job of corrupting the network was done and no one from the outside had any way of knowing what was going on within the Block, its creation was easy on paper. But finding ways to move in equipment and redirect resources like mining drones to dig out the space—that was a challenge.

  The bay stretched across the entire length and width of the Block itself, but forty feet below even the undercity. It was a massive space dug into the bedrock, alive with charging stations and research labs for the pilfered suits of armor. There was even a small manufacturing hub where the upgraded versions slowly being built by his loyal scientists were printed and assembled.

  This place had always been intended as a failsafe. He knew perfectly well what the outside world thought of him—a petulant king in his isolated kingdom. They believed the Block was meant as a staging ground, a place where a private army could ensure his grip on power once the actions of the so-called Cabal came to light.

  Idiots. Bowers and his followers had always been blinded by their myopic view of the world. The Block was going to be the hard nucleus of the diaspora, at least before Keene’s downfall. Back then he believed there would be more time, at least another decade to grow the ranks and arm them, train them, creating an expeditionary force capable of handling any threat the badlands could throw at them. It was a plan that fit perfectly in line with his increase in the overall timetable. The others had warned him of the fragility inherent in any plan that operated with so many moving parts, and he had soundly ignored them.

  Well. He could admit the error. It would have been more prudent to follow the guidelines created by his predecessors. He would have done so but for one inescapable truth. It was in point of fact the only place where he and the Deathwatch fell into perfect agreement.

  The stagnation built into the fabric of the Protectorate was slowly killing it. This was a reality the Protectors before him had also recognized. It was their belief that the deep, awful changes made to society and the ugly twisting of culture would strangle human innovation and vitality just slowly enough for the population to reach that critical point. They believed the human race’s decision to rob itself of the crucial elements that made them human, from creative endeavors to basic understandings of freedom, would not quite twist the species beyond saving before enough infrastructure was in place to ensure a population explosion didn't consume their resources.

  And here, Keene saw deliberate ignorance in the great men and women who came before him.

  Bowers believed the Cabal was built around the idea of maintaining power for the privileged—men like Keene, in short—because that fundamental human drive to control was too strong to manage. And in any honest assessment, Keene had to admit he enjoyed it. There was no shame in that, no more than he would have felt guilt for enjoying a decadent meal or a bout of good sex. He was wired by nature to have passions and experience pleasure—there was nothing wrong with that.

  But it had never been the impulse behind his decisions.

  Perhaps it would have been wise to slowly feel out and indoctrinate more powerful members of the Watch. Infiltrating their higher ranks with his own agents beyond the few Guards he had been able to turn might have changed things. Then again, maybe not. The rigid view of the world instilled by their organization was remarkably durable.

  The irony never ceased to amuse and frustrate him. The Movement wanted to push mankind out of its self-designed cradle and into the world once more. Keene wanted the same. It was only the Watch’s stalwart adherence to the Tenets which separated his methods from theirs. Keene and his forebears recognized the need to keep humanity focused through a shared enemy. A common fear. Driving progress by forcing them in a direction required sacrifice on a grand scale.

  This was a truth the Protectors before him also recognized, and in this Keene could not have agreed more.

  “Is it ready?” he asked one of the dozen techs scurrying around the small section of the bay set aside for his personal use. The young man paused, looking up from his terminal, and grew ashen as he realized who he’d almost walked right into.

  “Not quite yet, sir,” the tech said. “We’ve nailed down some of the electromechanical issues in tying the new fibers to the servos, but there are software bugs to work out. We don’t have the same level of computer capacity as the Watch, so our ability to create simulated testing environments is limited.”

  Keene looked at the complex set of mechanized racks filling his reserved space. “You’re saying you need more data to work out all the problems in the new model?”

  “Yes, sir,” the tech said.

  Keene pursed his lips. “And would you get that data from real-world tests?”

  The tech slowly lowered the terminal to his side, his eyes slightly disbelieving. “Of course, sir. But…that could be incredibly dangerous. The prototype doesn’t have all the safeties a finished version does. It could snap limbs…”

  Keene waved away the concern and stepped forward. As soon as his feet touched the plate in the center of the motorized racks, the chip in the base of his skull activated. The inside of his left eye lit up with embedded nanowire, forming a display screen. He blinked once to activate the process.

  Robotic arms wrapped him in a base layer unlike anything the world had ever seen. Hard joints made up of ultra-efficient motors were snapped in place, hinges locked, and threads of black fiber stretched between them before securing themselves in place. A series of pinches covered him like a hundred bee stings as miniature probes snaked from the base layer and into his skin, sensors to measure nerve conduction and response at speeds the Watch could only dream of.

  Steel arms brought plates toward him, locking them in place atop hard points built into his mechanical joints. Ceramic, steel, and carbon fiber composite layered over him with programmed efficiency.

  Within twenty seconds, Keene was unrecognizable. He took a single step forward to allow the system to place the final components, a pair of heavy steel boots.

  And a helmet familiar to anyone who had ever worn the black uniform of the Deathwatch lowered over his head.

  “Do your tests,” Keene said in the flattened electronic voice he had come to know so well. “If we’re too slow, those idiots out there may decide to sprea
d into the badlands before they’re ready. We need to give them a reason to stay the course. I’ll risk broken bones for that.”

  In truth, he would risk far more.

  16

  When the team piled into the mess hall at the Spire after their mission, it was empty. Almost empty. Beck sat alone at one of the tables, a terminal in front of her as she distractedly forked eggs into her mouth.

  She knew they were coming. After months of action which sometimes involved hunting down traitors in the Watch, Beck would have been an idiot not to use her network access to warn her any time someone was approaching her position. It took all her willpower to stay casual, looking up at them as if they hadn’t barely seen each other during her recovery. “Oh, hey guys. What’s up?”

  Predictably, Wojcik was the first to break from the pack. He moved around the table with the weird grace you never quite got used to from his giant frame and swept her completely up into his arms.

  “Oh sweet founders,” Beck wheezed as he did his best to shatter her ribs with a hug. “I just got cleared for duty, man. You’re gonna cripple me.”

  Wojcik chuckled as he set her back on the ground. Beck found herself smiling freely as the others huddled in and shook hands, slapped her shoulder, and in Jen’s case firmly stated that while she didn’t look like shit, a little makeup never killed anyone.

  “Missed you too,” Beck said, gently punching Jen on the arm. “So. You guys probably got used to having this guy as your boss. Want him to stick around since he knows what he’s doing?”

  She meant it jokingly, but there were a few guilty expressions as a couple of the team pointedly didn’t look at Eshton.

  “No, we’re happy to have you back,” Jeremy said with his usual dogged loyalty. “Though we did learn a lot from him.”

  Eshton fidgeted uncomfortably. Beck actually felt sorry for the guy. She understood him well, so reading the situation was as natural as breathing. He didn’t want any tension between the two of them, or between her and the team. The first because they were some kind of romantic item, however low-key and weird that was, and the second because unit cohesion was a delicate thing.