by Brian Trent
Apophis was suddenly coughing, choking violently. “Oh! Goodness! Help me!”
Hyde held her ground. Her troops spread evenly behind her. “What is it?”
Apophis peered at her between bouts of hacking. “It’s so hot in here!”
The falsity in his voice was mocking. Hyde glanced at her suit’s thermostat. The temperature in the room was 30 below. But he was right. The heat in the room had increased by four degrees since the start of their conversation.
Apophis put his head in his hands. Slowly he split the fingers, like a child playing peek-a-boo. “Memento mori, plaga! Mors omnibus instat!”
“Michelle!” came McAllister’s voice. “He just said he’s going to kill all—”
Hyde fired at his knee. The projectile hit the kneecap solidly, shattering cartilage and lodging there, releasing an incapacitating neurotoxin. She was concentrating on her next shot when he vanished.
“He’s blurred!” she cried, but then realized this couldn’t be. Her own blurmods should have sprung into auto-activation in response to a hyperaccelerated body. They hadn’t.
She looked to the vending machines, then up at the ceiling.
If her mods didn’t trigger, then he couldn’t be moving at hyperaccelerated speeds. So the bastard must still be there, disguised by CAMO mesh or implanted chromatophores like a fucking chameleon.
A half dozen voices were piping through her suit.
“Where did—”
“—nothing on sensors—”
“Bullshit! Radiation is spiking. Something is here—”
“Michelle! Behind you!”
She spun around in time to see Apophis standing there. Somehow he had increased in height, his body stretched long like a funhouse reflection. A bullet whined from an Alpha Team sniper and her optics illustrated its vector as it hit Apophis in the shoulder: a neurotoxin that could put down an elephant. Then she was pitched violently away as if smacked by an invisible hand. Hyde hit the wall hard, rattling her teeth. Her team sprayed the room in barely controlled bursts, but the target was gone again.
The bastard is toying with us, Hyde thought angrily.
That wasn’t the half of it. She’d seen him get hit by the neurotoxin round…but that didn’t seem to be working. He should have dropped like a lead balloon. Maybe the perp possessed an advanced nanite immune system operating on picosecond reflexes, countering the toxin before it could work. Hyde had heard rumors of corporate research labs cranking out experimental wetware implants. She struggled to keep her thoughts together.
“I’ve got nothing!”
“Did he blur?”
“Exits are sealed with nanomesh! He can’t go—”
“Michelle! Your suit temperature’s spiking! Get out of there!”
Her biosuit turned oven-hot. The heat crawled over every inch of her body, between her toes, on the backs of her knees. Spikes of pain swelled in her limbs. Hyde staggered back, stricken. The ugly sensation of being probed filled her. Scorching unseen fingertips kneaded her joints, making a very obvious ascent from her toes up to her neck…then her scalp and face…
There was a soft popping sound from her eyes. One after another, her capillaries were bursting.
Get out of here!
She retreated for the lobby, knowing that Apophis was touching her, he was inside her suit and feeling her body!
Inside her suit, her hair burst into flames.
Michelle ran straight into the wall, shrieking terribly. She clawed at her helmet. Smoke erupted from the seams of her biosuit. She found the release locks, tore the helmet from her head, and slapped at her roasting scalp.
Her squad fired into the lobby. One of her squadmates was abruptly flung by an invisible force into the ceiling. His back struck the overhead pipes and jackknifed around them. Another man burst into flames and flopped around like a fish.
Michelle had dropped her rifle, but she groped for it now. Her wetware augs were clamping down on her pain, clipping nerves. The lobby was a haze of gunpowder and smoke. It cleared just enough for her to see a chamber of horrors. Men flailing in agony, flames gushing from their mouths.
One fiery body was slamming its head repeatedly into the vending machine. It jerked away as if by an invisible hook, smashed into the nearest wall, and stuck there, affixed, while the head – couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman – was peeling away in great sizzling strips of meat inside its helmet.
I won’t remember any of this, she thought. When they regen me these things won’t even be a memory.
Then she saw it.
In the center of the room a source of heat manifested. It was a shapeless, ever-changing blot of power, tentacled and holding position like a jellyfish floating in the ocean void.
The video feed cut after that. Alpha Team couldn’t see anything in the smoke and fire, but they heard their commander screaming shrilly. It took ten minutes for Michelle Hyde’s purchase signal to be received at Wyndham Save. They never found out exactly how Apophis had killed her except that her bones were found in one room, while her jellied flesh was plastered like a glob of mucus affixed to the ceiling of another.
And hours later in her new body, she didn’t want to know.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Reflections
The next morning Gethin awoke and climbed carefully out of bed. The air had a damp, invasive quality. He glimpsed Keiko in the adjacent washroom, where she was examining her face in a smeared body-length mirror. There was no sign of the sector chief or the Wastelander.
Keiko noticed him in the mirror.
“Your face will heal in time for corporate elections,” he said.
She turned and leaned casually against the doorway, thumbs hooked into her pockets. He knew that pose. She was feeling confident, in control. Nothing to prove right now. Her Noh mask discarded in the face of certain victory. Impressive, actually, considering all they’d been through so far.
“How do you know I’m running for office?” she asked evenly.
“Are you?”
“I’m planning on pursuing a Promethean governor post in ’30 or ’35.”
Gethin nodded and massaged his foot. It was sore, but he couldn’t locate the loose bone any longer. The nanites had been busy during the night. His next urination might expel their used-up carcasses. “What post?”
Keiko’s eyes narrowed a millimeter. “Looking to be my campaign manager, Gethin?”
“Just curious, is all.” He deactivated his nerve suppression and stood, testing out his foot. The pain came on like a hammer at first. He let its full intensity course through him, gritted his teeth, and realized he could cope with it.
Gethin hobbled towards the washroom. Keiko stood aside and watched while he stripped off his shirt and rinsed his upper body. Dried sweat and grime swirled in the sink basin.
He patted himself dry while the shirt soaked in the sink. “Where are the others?”
“Jack is using the local hub to contact HQ. The IPC has almost certainly taken over airspace for fifty miles, so an extraction is unlikely. But I want Prometheus to know where we’re heading.”
“And Celeste?”
“No idea.” Keiko hesitated. “You think Doros is one of these things, don’t you?”
Gethin sighed and paced once through the room to test his balance.“I know he is.” When he saw her eyes flicker, he added, “No, I never suspected anything while working with the guy. It makes a creepy kind of sense now, though. Doros is probably one of the things that replaced Tanner.”
“Maybe he is what replaced Tanner.”
“No.”
“The attack on you in Athens?”
“Unrelated,” Gethin insisted. “At least as far as Doros goes. And I’m starting to suspect what the purpose of the attack was. And maybe even who’s responsible.”
“Oh?”
“Think of the timing. Those golems tailed me from Luna. They could have attacked me on Luna, or Babylon, but they waited until I was in Athens. If I’d been killed, the IPC would blame Prometheus. Prometheus would counter that the IPC was framing them. Someone out there wants the two greatest powers in the known universe at each other’s throats.”
Keiko thoughtfully tapped her fingers on her pants. “Not the AIs, huh?”
He returned to the sink and wrung dirty water from his shirt. “They’re merely a convenient scapegoat. You have to admit, you were ready to gulp that bait.”
“So if it isn’t them…”
“Let’s run through what we know. A new order of intelligence exists, capable of shifting between matter and energy. It can assume any shape it wants. It attacked your Lunar base, I’m guessing to obtain the exotic-matter cathode designs your company pioneered. As it left, it collided with my shuttle.”
Keiko’s lips compressed into a thin line. “The image on the recording…”
“Was our first look at one of these things.” He snapped his shirt around the shower curtain rod and stood across from her, bare-chested, emerald gaze lively and alert. “It went to Earth, we all saw that.”
“And then it – or another one of these things – attacked Segarra.”
“The attack on her was purely incidental. Its real purpose was to ensure that Stillness acquired antimatter missiles.”
The connections, coming on the heels of each other, almost physically staggered her. Keiko absently clenched and unclenched her feet in her boots. “And then it impersonated Colonel Tanner in order to sneak Stillness troopers onto an IPC airship bound for Shimizu.” She tried to pace in the small bathroom, driven by a curious cocktail of fear and awe. “What about the attack on our Pacific base? And the Lunar editorial?”
“Editorial?”
She told him about the damning newspaper article.
“Ah.” Gethin reflected for a moment. “I doubt that’s related to these creatures. But it’s almost certainly related to the people who sent those golems after me.”
“A Promethean competitor,” she said softly.
“Precisely.”
“Who do you think?”
“Can’t be that long a list. TowerTech is the obvious choice.” He grinned. “You and I always did have a habit of making enemies.”
She laughed. “Especially of each other.”
“Someone’s gotta keep us on our toes.”
“Because shapeshifting energy creatures aren’t enough.” She hesitated, wrestled with a confession, decided. “We were too similar to ever work out in the long run. Competitive, ambitious, arrogant, adversarial.”
“That might just be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Keiko’s smile slipped. “It comes with a barb.”
“Of course.”
“A mutual barb. When we were conquistadors of Arcadia, it overtook our lives. Instant gratification, affirmation, fake friends and social media circuses…but none of it was real. Meaning no disrespect, but I think I realized it before you did. I remember logging out of Arcadia one night, and looking at you in the other rig, and…” She struggled to put it into words.
Gethin took a breath. “A drooling online addict, right?”
“More than that. I started feeling like we had both been captured in some web, preventing us from ever truly taking flight and doing something that mattered.” Keiko rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “So when our marriage ended, I willfully unplugged. I applied for the corporate life, and I’ve never felt better.”
“You look good, Keiko. I mean it.”
She gave him a sly look. “So do you, even if you had to go to fucking Mars to kick your habit. Speaking of which, I have to ask, who was the girl who got Gethin Bryce to settle down on the redworld?”
“Her name was Lori.” He glanced to his reflection in the smeared mirror. “The details are unimportant.”
“You loved her,” Keiko observed with a gasp. “Gethin Bryce actually fell in love with someone.”
“No one’s perfect.”
“Not even the great bodhisattva of Faustus?”
“Don’t,” he said, giving a mock glare, “start with that.”
She handed him the damp shirt from the curtain rod. “Come on. Let’s meet up with Jack and get the hell out of here.”
* * *
Outside, the rain had diffused into a soupy vapor, making Haventown seem a haunted waystation in the damp mists of Limbo. Pale sunlight suggested it was morning. Perhaps eight or nine a.m.
Gethin saw a small huddle of men outside the commonhouse. Keiko noticed them too, and she shot him a worried look.
“Let’s not chance it,” he advised.
They turned off the path and melted into the fog. Somewhere from the main road, three women began singing a Turkish melody about underworld spirits and the brevity of life.
“We make for the center of town,” Keiko whispered.
Together, they rounded a shed. Gethin felt a stab of pain in his foot and he stumbled. His nails dug into the corrugated steel, flaking rust, while behind him came the sounds of sudden pursuit.
Keiko snatched his hand, pulling him under the awning of a tool shop. An old woman looked up from her workbench as they crouched by a bin of nails, and four seconds later a group of youths jogged past.
Gethin watched them go. “Nine people,” he said morosely. “At least two of them have clubs. Think they’re recruiting for baseball?”
“We’ve got another few seconds before they realize their mistake.”
They fled the shop, cutting across the street, and made for the main road and sound of singing. The congested shops thinned and there was a low building, with about a dozen residents milling about on the porch. The food pits weren’t far, but Gethin heard their pursuers again, and he knew they’d never make it.
Keiko’s tranquil face lost some vitality. She made a rapid survey of their surroundings and considered the narrow alleys.
“Blur,” Gethin told her. “It’s the only choice. Risk powering on your sensorium or get clubbed over the head and dragged off to a chopshop.”
She gave him a worried look. “What about you?”
“Depleted batteries. But I’ll manage. Go.”
Her finger went to her ear, but she hesitated. The youths saw them and dropped out of their collective jog, grinning cruelly, spreading out to meet them.
“Good morning,” Gethin tried.
“No,” she said, withdrawing her hand from her ear. “I’m not abandoning you.”
Gethin didn’t look away from the kids but he hissed. “Yes. Get Saylor.”
“No.”
He couldn’t identify a clear leader among the kids in the leering, scrawny bunch. He did see deadly urgency in their eyes, the violent intent. How many visitors to Haventown had come to this fate?
Then a shotgun blast sounded over their heads.
From behind the kids, Celeste’s lean figure materialized in the grimy morning air. She closed the distance to them, and when a new group of slightly older males ran up behind her, she barely acknowledged them with a look. Her shotgun leveled at the younger crew.
“Drop the weapons!” she shouted.
The crew hesitated.
“You speak English?” she demanded, in a tone that taunted them to truth. A few heads nodded. “Good, then you understood my command. Drop the weapons, now.”
No response. The two groups of men, young and old, silently conferred with each other.
The shotgun blasted.
Celeste didn’t waste it on another warning shot. This time, she discharged at the group of youths dead center. At twenty feet, the impact blew one of the boys off his feet, and he was dead before his body hit the mud.
“You murdering bitch!” an outraged cry rose up
behind her.
“Self-defense!” she roared back. “My squad visits Haventown and you assault us like dickless cowards? Why are we your enemy? All of us here share the same common threat to our lives! The arkies! They’re the ones who prosper while we die like ants in the dust!”
The mist darkened with more bodies, the town’s inhabitants drawn to the gunshots and voices.
“This is why you fail!” Celeste’s voice yanked their gazes up from the corpse. “Killing each other in the shadows, while the arky world laughs at us. I’ve been to the arky world, I’ve heard what they say. We’re rats! Outland rats who cannibalize one another. We’re better off dead, they say. We’re sick and diseased, in body and spirit.”
Someone muttered.
She glared in that direction. “What was that?”
“I said fuck them,” a kid said sullenly.
“Exactly! Fuck them, not each other! ‘Steal the scepter and the crown!’”
The man blinked in surprise. “StrikeDown.”
“StrikeDown!” she echoed. “StrikeDown!”
She fist-pumped in timing to the rhythm, latching onto each pair of eyes in turn. The youths joined her chant warily. The older men added their voices. Gethin shivered as the chorus grew. Even the morning singers, a trio of frightfully emaciated women, began chanting the refrains of the revolution song making its way among the world’s pariahs.
“StrikeDown!”
Gethin looked to Celeste, saw the lusty glitter in her eyes as she shouted with unstoppable conviction above the crowd.
“StrikeDown!”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Urgent Action
Jonas’s eye was itchy after surgery. Impact with the computer monitor had detached his retina, the doctor told him. It was an easy fix, but now he had to wear an eye patch for a few days and he hated it. It was so uncomfortable. The doctor offered him a packet of mild painkillers to help, but Jonas declined, since painkillers made him drowsy and he would rather suffer than have his concentration blunted by meds. Especially now, with all that was going on in the world.
Maximilian had called the doctor when he blacked out. Jonas remembered nothing of the ordeal that followed; his mother said the emergency ward had drained his lungs the best they could and fixed his eye. He awoke to his mother weeping and stroking his hand. He asked if they could go home.