“I get it, I’m gone.”
He blew through the clouds and emerged just below their cover before leveling out at speed. He scanned continuously while eyeing coordinates. A few moments later he didn’t need the GPS anymore – dozens of emergency lights flashed far below. He arrived overhead and saw evacuations of the clinic were underway.
“Let’s do this...”
INCOMING!
He instantly turtled inside a hardened field, hoping it would–
Thwak! The bright grid of the city spun madly.
The quantum field protected him against the strike, negating the g-forces just as in flight. He looked for the ship but couldn’t spot it.
Thwak! Again, the world spun, only this time he’d felt the strike in his bones. Energy dipped and focus wavered.
“Fuck!” he shouted. “Where is it? Help me out here!”
At your three o’clock and low. Crap, there’s two of them. Abruptly, images of commandos boarding a train flashed. Abort! Get out! Johan fled in response to a threat elsewhere, his fierce apology fading as fast as his presence.
“Shit!” Left alone, he shot downward with the thought of hiding in the city. He braced for what might be a far worse strike.
It came but not as expected – he rammed into a disc-shaped craft that suddenly appeared in his path, the impact stealing focus completely. An electrical current lashed through his body and numbed every muscle. Worse, it scrambled all sense of meta and the grid. He lay sprawled on top of the craft, limp and stunned. A glance outward revealed they were moving. Behind and above, two more black craft flew into formation. With no tug of centrifugal force, he realized he was in a field with its own gravity. The lights of the shoreline appeared. They were headed out to sea.
He willed his legs to move and with great effort, they did. In slow motion, he began to crawl towards the edge of the ship. In response, the current increased. His eyes spasmed in their sockets. Muscles shuddered and failed. Breathing became a struggle. Realization struck: he’d been captured. Panic roared.
Help. Someone help, please. The plea echoed in his head, as weak as his body. To keep his lungs pumping air was all he could do. A pulsing pressure in his ears grew into a baritone thump that grew louder. He recognized it finally, the chop of a Bell Huey. As fast as it came, it faded.
Help.
The city swung into view as the craft angled and lashed around to a new bearing. Abruptly the current stopped flowing and he slid off the craft into free fall. He glimpsed the AG ship, no longer black but a grayish-silver, also dropping from the sky. Not far off, a fiery ball that had been a helicopter lit the night. Memory of the stunning current ran through his bones. Wind whipped his weakened arms and legs. Darkness and water loomed below.
Come on... rathad was fuzzy and indistinct. He struggled to focus. A sense of bràthair returned in fragments of thought. He recognized urgency and intention.
Come on! He forced meta outward until it flowed once more into the grid. Warm and fluid, it filled every sense, returning control. He pressed intention and slowed to a stop. The bràthair wanted him to flee, which was perfectly fine but he didn’t know which way to go. In the darkness, miles from the coast with only starlight to guide him, the only place that seemed safe was down, to the water, away from the flying ships.
No. Johan resonated clearly in his mind.
“Where did you go?” he shouted. “What happened?”
An intrusion. You need to get to the downed craft.
“No way. It’s headed for the bottom of the ocean.”
No. Move quickly. A strong notion of direction rose. This way, move!
“God damn it.” Again, following not leading. He took off in that direction. “What happened to it?”
Gunner in the Huey fired a beam weapon to scramble the magnetics of the drive. It will reset itself in just a minute. You need to get to it before they do.
“I’m not going underwater. And there’s at least two more ships.”
People died to save you and get a chance at this. You won’t need to go underwater. Slow down. Head to the right. With nudges and words, Johan guided him to the ocean’s surface. Just visible under the water was the grayish-silver disc.
You need to raise it up and pop the door.
Before he could ask how, Johan interrupted. Raise it up, now!
Hovering just over the water, he reached out and felt the grid, felt the ship’s weight. It wasn’t nearly as heavy as he’d imagined–
Its drive restarted. Hurry!
–it was the water that was heavy, not the ship. Intense focus further drained him but the craft rose, water streaming away from the hull. The drive had restarted and the ship was hovering in neutral. He landed on it.
“Where’s the door?”
Feel for it.
“Nobody has ever been in one?”
Not Korda. It has a pilot, they know that much. Hurry!
He crawled over the ship and found a seam near the edges. Tugging hard did nothing except give him time to wonder if the pilot might still be alive. He imagined cracking open a hatch and being shot in the face. He stopped pulling and scanned for life instead.
Nothing at first, then a tiny bump of something. The faintest sense of meta, subtle to the point of feeling alien. Passive, he waited, hoping to feel something he could latch onto and explore.
What are you doing?
“Seeing if the pilot is alive.”
He isn’t.
“Well something in there is.”
No time! Force it open. If he’s still alive, deal with him.
“Quiet.”
Carefully, he extended to the soft meta. It remained elusive, ghost-like. The further he extended, the less he felt of it – and the more he felt he was being scanned in return.
Hurry, Austin!
He placed his face close to the hull. Something knew he was there. He formed and released a resonance message that suggested he was peaceful and wanted to come in.
Nothing came back. He sent it again.
No return.
The pilot has to be dead. Come on, damn you!
A moment later, a hiss sounded and a portion of the ship slid away. A dim light and an awful stench escaped. He peered in.
A man strapped to one of two command chairs sat with his head to one side. Laying around the cramped interior were food containers, bags, and other belongings flung about when the gravity field failed. The stench was that of death, something he had never smelled before.
In, go in. Get the body out. Move!
He climbed in and set about freeing the body from its harness. A small remote was clipped to the man’s belt, which he pocketed. With an effort, he lifted the body free and sent it flying out the hatch into the ocean.
“Gah!” He searched a bag and found a shirt to wipe the chair where the man had died. It, too, went out the hatch.
For fuck’s sake, Austin, check the controls or get out.
“Will you relax? It smells like shit in here.”
Four choppers down and two craft heading this way. It’s your ass.
He slid into the command chair. The dim meta remained. Resonance had worked before so he tried again.
In response, the hatch slid shut.
Did you do that?
“Sort of.”
Who are you in contact with?
“I have no idea.”
Look around, is there room for someone?
“Not unless they’re flat under the floor or stuffed in some side panel. There’s a bunk bed, otherwise it’s tight.”
Three displays above the chair lay flat up against the ceiling. The tip of a control grip was recessed in the chair in between his legs. The best he could do was resonate a request to go into ‘active flight mode’.
It was enough. The screens swung down and the control stick rose up. A dial also rose from the chair’s arm. With the response came a brush of meta, an unintentional bulbous protrusion related to identity. Not a name but an essence, o
ne that flowed like liquid green glass.
He didn’t think about it – he simply reached for the essence and attempted to merge with it. The next instant found him in regret.
Flattened and thinned to an intolerably minute thread, he held onto the last of his own identity like a breathing straw. Information appeared, shifted, merged, and slipped away, its ebb and flow in synch with the world outside. Whatever it was, it had only a small amount of meta flowing through its core but it carried an immense volume of data. Its rathad was highly defined and focused on what felt like a million things at once. Everything was state and properties, down to the molecular level. He barely remembered to breathe.
A complex weave of variables appeared; felt, sensed, but not all understood. Its connections were made of energy, akin to thoughts, the variables themselves suggesting values too alien to comprehend. It was scanning him so deep it felt it might scrub him into nothing.
In the next moment, the screens filled with graphics depicting status and sensors. Two craft had just arrived. A resonance message struck him with a force so powerful he jolted in the chair.
What happened?!
Memories that couldn’t have been suddenly were. He rose and went to a panel and removed its thumbscrews. Inside, rows of plastic-covered modules filled a chassis. He scanned the labels until he found one in particular and pulled it free. On another module he pushed and held a small button.
What the hell Austin?
“Remote access disabled.” He returned to the command chair. One of the screens showed a menu indicating new user set up. He initiated the voice recognition option and spoke a sentence aloud.
A male voice replied, “Pattern identification recorded. Voice recognition active for new user.”
He thumbed a switch on the control grip. The background of the displays became the front window of the ship, shown in infrared and augmented with an artificial horizon and grid lines.
What did you just do?
“Made a friend, I think.”
He turned the dial until the two craft were out of his path, then slid it forward and racked the stick to the side. The horizon spun and the two craft fell far behind.
It felt as if he’d been flying the ship for years.
• • •
AGT-3 rose from the ocean and shot south, spinning on its axis like a corkscrew before leveling out. Radio calls were ignored.
Director Tomov ordered the other two AGTs to pursue. Both remote control and self-destruct commands failed to reach the rogue ship. Flight telemetry still flowed, allowing CoreOps to track its movement. A new user was at the controls, a fact that made him sick to his stomach. The skill with which the craft was being flown suggested an inside job. It also meant the ship’s offensive elements could be used against them.
The craft shot past the island of Okinawa headed for Taiwan.
“Sir, AGTs six and seven are set for intercept. They are requesting permission to take out three.”
“Only on my mark. We won’t have a damned Roswell in Hong Kong.”
On screen, two additional units scrambled from northeastern China and India. The ships’ speeds and maneuvering ruled out use of satellite beam weapons. It would have to be a dogfight.
The director blinked at the screen. The designator for AGT-3 had disappeared.
“What just happened? Did we get him?”
“No sir. Telemetry just failed. Last track was 100 klicks south of Taiwan. No visuals from two or five. It’s gone.”
The gold dots on his panel felt like tiny nukes about to blast him to oblivion.
PART III - Control
Chapter 22
We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another,
and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint
we can glimpse but not adopt.
- R.D. Laing, 1927-1989, British Psychiatrist
In the half-light of the woods, gnarled trunks rose alongside young trees from a bed of greenery. Cries of wild birds carried on the winds through the woods. Johan walked with the boy along a dirt path smoothed by time. A sky wrapped in the gray of winter peeked between gaps in the canopy overhead.
Johan answered Ryota’s unasked question. “Almost there now. Really close.”
The korjé had found the approach to the train and had pressed it. A burst of collaboration with Cathbad’s thugs had allowed him to escape with the boy. Saoghal was starting to feel far smaller than he ever thought possible.
The path turned to skirt a tremendous redwood and ascended into heavier shade. The wind lessened but the air grew colder and damp. He took Ryota’s hand and led him from the path to the base of a knotty and ancient-looking tree. Pressing the center of a knot split the trunk open to reveal a rough doorway. It swung open to expose a set of stairs that wound down and away. Candles tied with a looped string hung just inside.
“Take one, Ryota.”
The boy stepped through the doorway and lifted a candle free. Its wick glowed orange before raising a soft flame.
He squatted in front of the opening and held the boy’s hand. “Follow the stairs. Light the other candles you find and be careful. You must not come back up the stairs, no matter what. I will come for you when it’s safe, okay?”
“Do you work with my grandpa?”
“Sort of, yes.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s okay, yes, but he left on a journey, a lot like ours. He misses you and loves you very much.”
Ryota looked down the stairwell and then back. “Do I have to hide for a long time?”
He squeezed his hand gently. “I’m not sure but probably not long. Don’t worry, you will be okay. Hurry, now. I’ve much to do in a short time.”
Fear passed from the boy just before he began down the stairs. He was a brave little soul being pushed near his limits.
Johan closed the hidden door and turned to listen. A gust of unexpected cold air blew in as a chilling reminder of the effects outside forces were having on his protected world. Given reason to research, experiment, and push their limits, the korjé hunted now with greater intelligence, combining their experience. Their raid on the train had nearly succeeded, a sign of their progress. Triggers set up all around this dream space should keep him apprised of threats as long as they weren’t detected first.
The forest faded and was replaced by the inky wash of Saoghal. He went to Cathbad and found the druid desperate for his attention. Cathbad drew him into a simple living room at night, lamp-lit with shades drawn in privacy. Subtle emotional detail woven into the fabric of the dream induced feelings of familiarity and of trust. A neat trick.
Only the druid leader wasn’t pleased.
“This won’t do. Either be more open to me or–”
Johan threw up his hands. “They’re getting close, playing smarter. I’m trying to keep you from danger. You know about the ship?”
“Yes, but do you know what you’re doing? Really know?”
“I’m learning as I go and you know it. But yes, I know what I learned.”
“And if they learned it, too?”
Johan sighed. “I didn’t have much of a choice. Whether or not you planned for this, I still have to survive. Raising the stakes, exploring what’s possible... I’d say that’s just part of the damn game at this point.”
“This isn’t a game. What you’re doing is dangerous.”
“Saoghal was already dangerous, just like Raon. I’m not going to play by anyone’s rules, especially if it means limiting my defenses. You, them, and God are going to just have to deal with it. Now, about the ship? And whatever Austin’s in contact with? It has to be the Mu, right?”
Cathbad nodded. “The ship, yes. It’s possible the Mu have acted on our behalf but I find it hard to believe. In any case, we need time to study it and Austin’s contact. Tell him we’ll soon have a place for him to bring the ship. It may be a game changer but right now there are other challenges.”
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“Like what?”
“We leaked more to the Americans, enough to give them reason to want to investigate the tower at Ichigaya. Unfortunately the Comannda are not taking chances.” Burning remnants of another downed military helicopter stole the moment, a recent memory.
The vision challenged Johan. “The nuke is built into the tower? That’s simply fantastic. How can they not set it off now? If it’s found it would reveal conspiracy.”
Understanding came, delivered by Cathbad in a rising flow.
The blast would destroy a large portion of central Tokyo. To the world it would appear a terrorist act. The few who knew better would support the lie out of necessity, helping the cover up to protect against future retaliation. Those that didn’t would be silenced by their own ranks. Such was the Comannda’s effect, as it had been for centuries. Contingencies within contingencies for every possible situation – and always potent leverage to force outcomes.
Johan suppressed a shudder and stared into the darkness beyond the living room. Millions of lives at risk. Every possible action he could imagine threatened either himself or the Runa Korda. He looked back at Cathbad, into eyes that understood helplessness despite possessing unusual power.
“What can I do?”
“Nothing yet. We need time to locate other bombs. The Confrere are helping with that. Soldado is using Booty to study Commanda network protocols and learning how to move around. He may be our best hope.”
“And what about Anki? Prophecy says she’ll help us.”
Cathbad took up a chair, fatigued even in the dream. “Yes. Yes there is that.” He weighed the moment and came to a decision. “To understand the prophecy, you must know more.”
He related Clare’s story, of her gifts, and of her passing in the San Francisco quake.
“When Clare died in 1906, we had begun to better understand the droichid. In one of the first ever successful attempts, Clare was embedded within a volunteer, Macy. A rough experience for both at first. They learned to cope, though, and spent the next forty years joined.”
“Forty years? Why so long?” Johan asked.
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