by Tony LaRocca
“Do you need to guess?”
She shrugged. “Seven years, nine months, three days, twenty–two hours, forty–two minutes, and eleven seconds,” she said.
His face crumpled. His throat suddenly felt swollen, making it hard to breathe. He hugged her, burying his head in her uniform. She wrapped her arms around him. He cried in quick, jerking sobs.
“I’m so scared,” he said.
“I know.” She kissed his forehead. “Did you see what you did out there?”
He nodded. She caressed his left shoulder. He winced, but the pain was not terrible. It just felt sore.
“It’s because of this,” she said. “There is power here, amazing power. You are like sulfur and phosphorous rubbing against each other, igniting a match. But if you lose control of it, if you separate, even for just a few seconds, it goes from being a usable flame to a raging firestorm. And when that happens…” Her voice trailed off.
“Then I get older, really quick,” he said.
She put her hand on his cheek. It was warm. “You have to be very careful, Matthew. You have to learn to control yourself. You were able to make the swing set grow at first without becoming overwhelmed. You can learn to focus it.”
“Will you help me?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Your brothers, General Jaeger, and I will all help you. Your mother may not like it, though.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I love her, but I love you too.”
Her eyes glowed, and she tousled his hair. “You’re a good kid. Don’t worry about me, I can make it so she doesn’t know I’m here.” She winked. “In fact, she can’t hear this conversation. Think of me as your imaginary friend.”
“Okay,” he said, sniffing. “So, do I have to learn about oscerlating whatevers now?”
“Driven oscillators,” she said. “And don’t be coy. You know the correct name and all about how they work from the Sage.”
He wiped his eyes. “I thought you said you needed to teach me.”
She extended her index finger, and drew a line in the air with it. A white slit opened before her.
“There are other lessons,” she said, “and not just about physics.” She waved, stepped inside, and the white line sealed behind her.
Chapter 6
“Do you know what she has planned?”
Jaeger forced himself to stay calm, to not leap across the table, and dig his fingers into Lieutenant General Carter’s eye sockets. His superior officer gazed at him without expression, basking in the Cyleb’s ruddy glow. Yes, Jaeger wore the star of a brigadier general, but he knew the Regular Army felt his rank was undeserved, a meaningless and honorary token. Soon, very soon, his own army—his children—would be ready to rise against them. Soon he would wear a sash made from Carter’s skin, but not today.
A part of Jaeger knew that he had not felt that way ages ago, when the conversation had taken place. He knew, in his reflective meditation, that he had felt suspicion and annoyance, but not bloodlust. But for almost two decades he had relived the treacherous word play, until the desire to burn Carter, Rivers, Peters, Dvorkin… to melt their brains inside their skulls with holy fire, consumed him.
“I do not know,” he said, as he always had. “How did she even escape?”
“You tell me,” said General Peters. The tight weave of a French braid pulled her bottle–yellow hair back from her pudgy face, making her head look like a jowly moon. She waved an ample hand in the air, and a hologram flickered to life. It showed a girl in her late teens. She wore threadbare pajamas that had faded from constant washing. She lay in a hospital bed, her head lolling back and forth, as if to a waltz only she could hear. Something churned inside of Jaeger’s heart as he watched her, a mixture of shame and revulsion.
“Cyleb Zeta, originally Marianne Proctor, age eighteen,” Peters said, “the only one of your protégés to have a psychotic episode. Doctor Dvorkin assured us the constant bath of delta waves would keep her subdued, but you objected.”
“Of course I objected,” Jaeger mouthed along with his memory. “How could she overcome her mental illness that way? How could she ever heal?”
“‘Her mental illness,’” Peters said. She exhaled through her teeth. “You disgust me.”
“All right,” Carter said, “that’s enough.” Peters leaned back in her chair, her fleshy, narrow eyes boring into Jaeger’s. Carter folded his hands. “General, do you have any idea how she escaped, or where she might have gone?”
“None whatsoever,” Jaeger said. “But although I vehemently disagree with the decision, Dvorkin was correct. His delta–wave cocktail should have kept her subdued.” His voice broke on the last word. “There is no way she could have escaped on her own.”
“Do you have any idea who would have helped her, and why?”
It was Rivers, Jaeger raged at the remembrance of Carter, Rivers and Dvorkin, acting on your orders. He imagined himself grabbing Peters by her canary–colored hair, and driving her fat, lethargic face into the table. Carter would put up a fight, no doubt, but the old man would be no match for him. What would the last seventeen years have been like, if only he had taken the general’s head in his hands, and twisted until his neck snapped like a rotting branch?
“None,” he said.
Carter waved his hand through the hologram. The image changed to show the flickering shield wall that overlooked the Chihuahuan Desert. “Two hours ago, she disappeared from our mental facility. The security records for that period have been wiped clean. Within forty–five minutes, her implant marker was picked up by sentry post ninety–seven. Three minutes later, a square half–meter of the shield was disabled for sixteen seconds. The moment it re–engaged, her marker vanished from the proximity sensors.”
Jaeger ran a glowing hand over his distended chin. “An obvious trap,” he said. “Someone wants to lure me to the other side. Was there any contamination?”
“No,” Carter said. “The mutants have not yet advanced farther than Utah and Wyoming, though they’re sure as hell trying.”
Jaeger extended his mind through the background electromagnetic radiation that swamped the room. Peters had a neurological V.R. interface implanted in the base of her skull, and it was so tempting to enter it, to confuse her perceptions of reality. He stroked it, caressing her receptors as if with a feather. Her fleshy cheeks flushed.
“So the question is,” he said, “who laid this trap? Who used my children against me? Is it you, General? If I breach the shield, will I find poor Zeta strapped to an explosive laced with the Bravo–Seven–November–Golf virus?”
The electrochemical activity that exploded across Peters’s neural pathways was delicious. “How do you—we have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. Her lips quivered. “What are you implying?”
Jaeger laughed, shaking his head. “Well, General?” he asked.
Carter nodded, tapping the desk with his fingertip. “We also believe this is a trap,” he said, “but we are not your enemies, Malachi.”
“Oh, of course you’re not,” Jaeger said. “Just the same, I would like one of your esteemed officers to accompany me, to ensure the success of the mission: Captain Rivers. I’ve worked with him before—”
Jaeger screamed, his frustration cutting through his anamnesis. He sat naked and cross–legged in his chamber’s pool of iatric fluid. His cry echoed off the cavern walls. He dug his elongated, claw–like fingers into his glowing, leathery thighs. A detached faction of his mind did not truly blame Carter, Lauler, or even Peters. They had recognized the threat that he represented, and had acted accordingly. Benjamin Dvorkin and David Rivers, the men who had worked side by side with him and his children while secretly planning their destruction—they were the men he wanted to flay, whose skulls he wanted to shatter against rocks. His breath came in long, ragged gasps. Benjamin was dead, but David…
Thirty–two days had passed since he had infiltrated the Redeemer Project, rattling his saber in front of Rive
rs. Within an hour, NorMec Headquarters had cut all physical lines of communication with the outside world, and had blanketed the surrounding airspace with jamming waves. Because he had lost his temper, because he had not been able to keep from gloating. And for what? He had not even stopped the traitorous shit’s repulsive heart when he had had the chance.
Frustration roiled inside him, like boiling water in a pressure cooker. He surged his mind into the Sanctuary’s communications network, and shot through its antennas into the ionosphere. To him, different paths of technology each resembled a unique reality. Traveling along a circuit board was like sprinting blind through a maze that followed a convoluted, Escher–like logic. Wires were tubes of jet–propelled ball bearings. Open switches were holes to fall through, closed ones felt like walls of ice. Electromagnetic signals resembled the lapping waves of oceans. The higher the frequency, the more turbulent the seas.
He sieged the corrupted airwaves surrounding NorMec Headquarters, raging against its jamming signals. It felt as if he were thrashing his mind into a tsunami laced with ice and sand. The chaotic interference flayed his thoughts, shredding them beyond concentration. He lost his mental footing, and it tossed his consciousness back like a leaf.
His body remained motionless in his sanctum, while his mind rallied again and again to breach the electromagnetic maelstrom. The noise tore at him. It sliced him like razors, and stung him like wasps. He reveled in his agony. He deserved punishment for his stupidity, his hubris, and lack of self–control. Why had he been so foolish? His cold rage at David—at all biopures—had seemed so sure, so just. He had felt a delicious thrill in destroying Rivers’s next foray into cybernetics. This was his world, and humanity was not welcome to traverse it.
But now, he saw the situation for what it was, what he must do for his children, and his alone, to survive. For that, they needed a factory, one already designed to build drones and munitions. There was one such base in upstate New York—the Watervliet Arsenal—but he had ruined his chance to take it silently. His only consolation was that in cauterizing his means of access, NorMec Gov. had rendered itself blind, deaf, and dumb.
At the far reaches of his tortured perception, he felt a tickle.
Something was happening.
He withdrew his mind from his self–inflicted punishment, and extended through the few communications and emergency systems along the east coast that still functioned.
A lone jet fighter, launched from Philadelphia, rocketed towards New York City. Jaeger watched through the eyes of a hundred traffic, security, and personal cameras as it made its approach. Apparently, the day for retaliation had come.
He bounced a signal from a passing satellite off its fuselage. There was no feedback. That could be a problem. He could project his psyche over almost any wavelength, but there had to be something at the other end to receive it.
The gears of his mind whirled. He knew there must be some way to use the jet to his advantage, he just had to discover it. A little less than a million biopures still survived in the city below. Therefore, NorMec’s strike would be surgical, and such a precise attack from the air would require a homing beacon.
As if on cue, the jet focused a targeting laser on the west–most tower of the Sanctuary. Jaeger pushed his consciousness into an antenna caught in the beam, and forced his way inside. He floundered upstream against a raging river of violet light. He could not think under the searing blast of photons and raw energy, he just thrust against it by sheer force of will. He sensed that he had less than a hundredth of a second before the data stream came to an end, and shot himself through the last few particles. Within an instant, he had breached the targeting computer. His mind flooded the instrument panel, and he assessed the status of the aircraft.
There was no crew, just an autopilot following a pre–programmed course. Jaeger seized control of the sensors, and used them to scan for other aircraft.
They did not work.
He opened communications with the Sanctuary. Sigma, he sent, are there any… He stopped.
The radio was dead.
He tried accessing the targeting laser that had brought him onboard. It was dead as well. He extended his psyche throughout the cockpit’s systems. It was like feeling along a pitch–black corridor, and finding an avalanche had sealed every door. The only answer was that various fuses must have been set to burn out as soon as he had entered the plane.
They had trapped him.
Again.
It was unbelievable. Millions were dying of the Burning, the mutants were sieging the shield wall, and still, the Regular Army insisted on this nonsense. Very well, he would have to ditch the plane, and trust his consciousness would find its way back to his body. It would take him days to recover, but he could not think of any other way. He pushed the nose of the jet downward.
The controls did not respond.
He checked the fuel gauge. At the current rate of consumption, the plane had four hours of flight remaining, and that was assuming they did not refuel it in midair.
Very clever, David, he thought.
Alyanna lay back in her lawn chair, and sketched. She glanced up every now and then to watch Matthew and 0800 pass a soccer ball around the claw–swing set monstrosity. She had begged the Cyleb to get rid of the hideous thing, but he had refused. Once made, he told her, it could not be unmade. Very poetic. Bananas darted back and forth between him and her son, the retriever’s tongue trailing behind her in lobotomized ecstasy.
She appraised her sketch. She had drawn Matthew, but as a four–year–old. He was seven, 0800 had said, almost eight. How was that possible? She stroked her thumb back and forth over the charcoal lines of her son’s face, blurring them.
Matthew kicked, sending the ball in a straight line to a tree ten yards away. Even her unscientific eye could see that its path was unnatural. At its low speed, it should have followed an arc. It rebounded off the tree, and then angled downward in mid flight. 0800 dove, bouncing the ball off his head. He had an indulgent smile on his face, like a father impressed by a son’s unexpected achievement.
Because that was really what was going on, wasn’t it? Matthew was part of this new family now, a family of brothers, generals, and Sigmas. It would not be so bad if she were allowed to join, but she was just a surrogate, unwanted now that her distasteful job was complete. It did not matter that she had borne him for nine months, that with agony she had pushed him into the world, had nursed him, had her soul eroded as she watched him die, had even let that disgusting old man get inside of her—gotten her pregnant, for Christ’s sake—all to get him here. She was an embarrassment, a mistress kept hidden from the neighbors, her silence paid for with a nice house, art supplies, and a shit–tube up her colon.
Her arms itched and burned, and a few moments later, her legs followed suit. She had learned to ignore the occasional sensations. The suit stimulated her muscles with periodic electric jolts to keep them from atrophying. Likewise, every so often, she felt her center of gravity shift as they rotated her to prevent bedsores. The procedures gave her a glimmer of hope that she dare not believe in, that they would someday let her go.
A sharp cramp twisted her abdomen, as if fingers had dug into her belly, and squeezed. It happened once or twice a week. At first, she had dismissed it as her body adapting to pregnancy, but she was not so sure anymore. She had not had them when she carried Matthew. Besides, the Cylebs had her closely monitored. If a problem arose, they would probably know before she did. The pain subsided, and she chose to ignore it. Her eyes watered.
“God damn you, Dad,” she said as she watched a seven year old boy that was and was not her son send the ball through the air in a corkscrew path that defied the laws of physics. “How could you do this to me?”
The ball halted in mid–flight, and dropped to the ground. 0800 and Matthew stopped their game and stood still, staring at each other.
With a shimmering noise, a soldier materialized. His uniform was gray, and plated with armor. A
gas mask and goggles hid his features. He raised his rifle, and aimed it at 0800.
The Cyleb stared at him, his eyes wide. The soldier shook, and then crumpled to the ground. His body rippled, and vanished. 0800 gasped, as if the breath had been squeezed from his lungs.
Alyanna heard another shimmering sound, then another, and another. As soon as they appeared, the soldiers fell.
She bound from her chair, and ran to Matthew. She scooped him into her arms, groaning from his new weight. “What’s going on?” she asked. Her voice dropped off. 0800’s face was pale and waxen. A tiny rivulet of blood ran from the corner of his right eye. The silvery veins beneath his skin throbbed in thick, violent pulses.
He opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, another three soldiers appeared. The first two fell as soon as they materialized. The third struggled to raise his weapon. 0800’s eyes bulged, and the soldier joined his comrades.
A white line appeared in the air. Sigma leapt from it, her thick hair plastered to her forehead.
“They’re everywhere,” she said. “They managed to tunnel into a waste pipe, and hacked a transmitter through its pressure monitor. They’re inside the Sage.”
“I gathered,” 0800 said, panting. “I’m frying their neural links as soon as they’re in range. Where’s the general?”
Sigma looked at him, and then at Matthew. “Quickly,” she said, stepping back through the rift. “Move it, Artist,” she said to Alyanna, “there isn’t any time.”
Alyanna followed them through the tear. On the other side was a room that reminded her of an airport control tower. A virt projection dominated the center. It displayed a jet barreling through a sea of clouds.
“The mechanism is almost ready,” a third–generation said. “It’s a tiny one, but it should be able to drill into the fuselage, physically connect to the instrumentation, and transmit. It’ll give him something to escape in.”
“Can it intercept him in time?” Sigma asked.