by Nick Cole
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It was like a mad bull, that monster that came out of the forest in the mountains where the smell of salt washed down over the ridge in great cool winds. And it was also like a giant gorilla. Like King Kong, who’d once destroyed New York.
Casper knew the story of King Kong. One night around their fire inside their home that had once been an old chain restaurant, Casper’s father had told him the story. He’d listened in amazement, and even laughed, as his father made all the noises and even capered like a giant ape climbing up the side of a tall building. Like the skeletal buildings that Casper sometimes saw in the ruins of downtown LA, those that had been spared most of the damage from the nukes that had been used out in the ocean, off shore.
It was only years later, after his parents were…
It was only years later that he found out King Kong was just a movie. Not a true story.
Still, every so often, at a certain time of year, he would have the dream of being in a city and being chased by a giant ape. And the city was always alive. With other people running and screaming for their lives.
But now, as that beast, which was easily the size of a small building, tore away the trees and came loping, impossibly loping, lowering its massive horns atop its simian head, it was like that nightmare was made real.
It hit THK-133, literally batting the bot—who’d been firing at the monster with its heavy blaster—off into the nearby woods of the high valley. It was all Casper could do get out of its way, to run for his life as the beast howled and screamed above him, beating its rippling, hairy chest.
He was dimly aware that even tiny Urmo had dodged.
And all this was like the last moments of the Moirai, and his desperate attempt to save them all.
As though any man can ever save anyone.
***
It had taken hours. Hours to make it back up through the outer decks after they reached the ship’s spinal rail system. From there it was a straight shot to the hangar deck.
And when they reached the hangar deck they found it surrounded. Savage marines had formed a ring of defensive emplacements near every blast door, control balcony, and maintenance lift leading out onto the sprawling deck where the Lex waited.
Casper had gained a look at the situation by maneuvering up along a series of gantries in the upper reaches of the massive complex. From there they were able to see the field.
“Looks bad,” said the medic as she stared through a Martian Infantry tactical monocle. “We’re not getting through that without taking fire. I give us a less than good chance of not getting hit before we reach the ship.”
Reina waited in the shadows below them.
Casper was lying next to the medic, using his SmartEye to study the situation. “Right… but the Lexington is still under our control,” he reminded her. “Nattersly has most likely activated the auto-turrets and PDCs. Anything moves, those guns will target and engage. See all the corpses near the blast door entrances? Those didn’t happen during the initial firefight to take the hangar deck. They’ve been trying to get close, and have been denied.“ Rail guns designed to throw up a wall of lead slugs did nasty things, even to the post-human man-machine body.
“But those PDCs will recognize us as targets too,” said the medic. “We’re going to get killed just as dead as they are.”
“Maybe,” said Casper. He rolled onto his side and pulled out a small pen-shaped object—a laser designator. Leaning on his elbows, he began to click it on and off.
“What are you doing?” asked the medic. She’d been there through thick and thin, fighting right alongside the rest of the legendary Martian light infantrymen, pulling them out of danger and patching wounds amid hurricanes of lead slugs.
Where others had not survived, she had.
For the first time, Casper looked at her. Really saw her. She wasn’t just the team’s medic. There had been others. They’d been killed too.
She had brown hair. Pink freckles. Hazel eyes.
“They call you Bones,” he said. “What’s your real name? Someone changed it in the HUD roster.”
She stared through her monocular once more, obviously uncomfortable with the question.
Then: “Medics get assigned a call sign. For some weird reason. Something about work focus and all under battle conditions. But my real name is Laura. Laura Maydoon.”
Casper continued to click his laser designator on and off. Aiming it at the flight deck of the Lex.
“Well, Laura Maydoon. This is an ancient system of communication called Morse code. And I’m telling the crew to reset the guns to not engage our biometrics. We’re not going to die today. We’re all going home.”
Rechs too? asked that other voice.
He remembered the look of possibility he had seen in Reina’s eyes.
“Yes,” he whispered. Though it surely seemed a non sequitur to the medic named Maydoon.
A moment later the Lex’s engines booted up, growling to life, steadily rising into their high-pitched whine.
“So, the guns wont shoot at us,” said the medic. “But the Savages will. How are we going to get through that?”
Casper turned toward her. “By just walking.”
“Walking?” she said incredulously.
“Yeah,” replied Casper. He got to his knees. “Those PDCs run massive intercept algorithms that crunch physics, angles of intercept, and many other things. That’s how they knock out missiles inside the vastness of space at speeds the mind can’t comprehend. Not only will those guns not hit us, but as long as the munitions in their magazines hold, they’ll prevent anything aimed at us from hitting us either—by intercepting the bullets or knocking out the source.”
“You’re saying we just walk through a hailstorm of bullets and make the boarding ramp?”
“Theoretically.” Casper smiled.
“Theoretically!”
“We designed the system for hostile first contacts. Allows us to not get wiped out if the natives go hostile.”
“Have you ever used this system in this scenario before?”
“There is a first time for everything, Corporal Maydoon. Plus… it’s the only way through this. Or at least, the only way I can see.”
The young girl swallowed hard. And Casper saw the look in her eyes. A look that said she wanted to go on. That today was not a good day to die.
She bit her lip and nodded, knowing she was once more about to do the hard thing the hard way.
“When there’s nothing left to do but fight, then fight,” she whispered to herself.
“What?” Casper asked.
“I’m in. Let’s do this.”
Casper looked over to Reina, who had listened to all of this silently, without judgment. She simply nodded.
When all was ready, the crew of the Lex signaled back. “They’re ready,” Casper said. “Thirty seconds and the guns go live. They’re also going to pop smoke to give us cover. Reina, take my hand. Corporal Maydoon, just stay on course and follow your HUD to the ship. Got it?”
The girl tried to say something, but whatever it was got caught in her throat. Instead she just raised her glove and tapped her bucket in the affirmative.
They descended on flight of stairs and turned down a short corridor. Casper peered around the corner. A team of Savage marines guarded the exit onto the hangar deck.
And then there was the long walk through flying lead.
Casper tossed a grenade and waited for the explosion. After a count of three, he and Maydoon pivoted from behind cover and sprayed the area with fire while Reina remained pinned to the wall out of sight.
Beyond the dead Savage guards lay the octagonal opening that led onto the massive hangar deck of the sprawling generation ship. And for a brief instant, far down the runway and past the other docking bays, through the opening in the hull,
Casper saw the Dead Zone.
And where space was… it wasn’t.
Never mind that, he told himself, pushing the madness-inducing images away.
They strode toward the hangar deck. “Remember, walk slowly,” he said over the comm. “Don’t hurry. The PDCs will have a much better time of protecting us if we move slow and steady and allow them to calculate the intercepts.”
Ahead, the mighty Lex—mighty in her day, small by the standards of the future—loomed on all four gears, forward flight deck nosed up and forward like some proud bird of prey, her wing engines spread off to the sides. Smoke popped from launchers appearing across the upper hull. The PDC guns went live at the same instant the Savages opened fire on the three survivors of the rescue mission.
The billowing smoke came at them like a rolling tidal wave of blossoming white cotton. The massive PDCs erupted in titanic BRAAAAAAAAPs as their processors calculated trajectories and filled the volume in between with clouds of whistling lead slugs, keeping enemy rounds from hitting them.
Casper felt Reina’s hand dig into him as her body went rigid. The smoke raced out toward them and swallowed them up, and the sound of bullets colliding with other bullets echoed all around them. The ricochets went off like high-pitched screams as math incalculable by the human mind raced to save their lives and keep them out of harm’s way. The roar of the guns made the deck and even the very air shudder; the sound was titanic, monstrous, and accompanied by hurricanes of invisible angry wasps that raced to meet their impossibly fast targets. The hornet swarms of bullets tore the swirling mad maelstrom of smoke to shreds, even as more smoke rushed in to fill the volume recently displaced.
Reina was screaming.
From Maydoon, Casper heard nothing.
“Are you there, Corporal?” he shouted, turning up the gain on his comm. He couldn’t see her through the smoke and the blur of flying metal. What if she had panicked and run?
No doubt the Moirai was being holed all across the superstructure. It was probably even starting to vent oxygen in distant compartments as loose rounds finally violated the outer hull and raced off into space.
No, not space. What he’d seen beyond the hangar exit.
Don’t think about what you saw, he screamed at himself.
“Don’t run!” he shouted across the ether at Corporal Maydoon. Not wanting the girl’s life to end here. Too many lives had ended today already.
Just not her. Let her make it.
Let me save one, he thought in some part of his mind that had always wanted to save everyone ever since the day he hadn’t been able to save his parents from nomadic murderous thugs who couldn’t have cared less that the world was trying to get back on its feet. Who’d never birthed pigs. Or grown corn. Or… Or… Or…
He hadn’t cried for his parents.
He never had.
The world had been too hard to allow for the luxury of grief.
And now, hundreds of years later, in the middle of a storm of sudden death, he felt the tears come.
I tried to save you, he thought about them. And I failed.
He reached a hand out into the smoke for the young medic. Shouting over and over for Corporal Maydoon.
“Take my hand! Don’t run!”
I’ll save you. I’ll save you. I’ll save you.
But in no direction could he find the girl.
And then he did.
His hand found her arm. And pulled her close. He felt that ancient glove of the long-forgotten Martian Infantry grab him. He heard the girl’s breathing, so rapid it sounded like she was gasping for the last of the air in a rapid decompression.
“I’ve got you!” he shouted at her.
He still couldn’t see her through the smoke.
But he had her.
And he dragged her and Reina through it all. To the boarding ramp. Onto the ship.
To safety.
The Lex fired her maneuvering thrusters and cleared the billowing smoke. Already the landing gears were up and the ship was hovering for takeoff.
The PDCs ran dry. The magazines were empty.
The monster had ceased its roar.
***
The monster had ceased its seemingly unending rushing roar in the high valley beyond the endless desert.
The apelike, bull-like beast had howled at them as though banishing them to some nether realm. As though offended at the presence of the human and the whatever Urmo was.
Because of its reach, speed, and stride, there was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No weapon. Nothing.
Standing beneath its looming presence, beyond the edge of the galaxy on a planet that never should have been… Casper came to the end of himself. As one does when there are no other options left.
The massive beast towered above him and raised fists the size of hammers that never were.
Chapter Thirty
Both that nightmare past and the terrible present were colliding inside Casper’s mind as he froze beneath the enraged glare of the monster. He was rooted. He couldn’t move fast enough to escape. There was no obstacle he could cover behind, nothing he could put between him and the threat.
There was nothing he could do. He’d come all the way across time and the galaxy… to end like this.
As he waited for the inevitable, the little beast next to him shouted uselessly, and defiantly, up at the roaring titan.
“URMO! URMO! URMO!”
It was a small defiance against something bigger than mere sanity could comprehend. It was like watching Rechs battle the inevitable all over again in those last moments of the Moirai.
***
“XO!” shouted Casper once the hatch had sealed. The crew chief and the ship’s doctor were swarming Reina, Corporal Maydoon, and Casper. Casper was shouting into his sleeve comm to be heard over the powerful whine of the Lex’s maneuvering thrusters. The ship was no doubt pivoting and powering up for a fast departure. “Get us out of here now! Best speed!” he shouted to the flight crew.
And then he was pounding down the tight passages, racing for the flight deck.
When he made it forward, the Lex was just clearing the hangar’s force field barrier and entering what should have been open space. Instead, they were entering what resembled a nebula of swirling multi-colored gases, electrical storms, and violent gravitation wells made of… made of what Casper’s mind chose to call energy locusts.
Except this was no nebula. Whereas the gases in a nebula would have formed dense storm fronts, these masses of… whatever they were—the energy locusts… swirled and shifted, interacting with other fronts of different-colored… insects. And behind all this were other layers of insects. And others beyond that. There were layers upon layers of the shifting insect storms stretching off into spatial distances reminiscent of deep space.
“Where are we?” he heard himself asking the flight crew.
The XO appeared at his elbow. “We have no idea, Captain. No stellar signatures. No star fields. Nothing. We may not even be in the reality we know as our own. Your guess is as good as mine, sir.”
Casper leaned forward and rested his hands on the backs of the pilots’ seats. Staring out through the latticed canopy of the cockpit.
“It’s called the Quantum Palace.” It was Reina. She was behind them. Her voice was soft, almost hoarse. Like she was in a trance.
Casper turned.
The Moirai was beginning to fall away from the departing Lex. The ship shuddered and bounced.
“What is that? The Quantum Palace?” he asked her.
She moved forward. Touched his hand.
“Something very ancient. Something we don’t fully understand. But… as best I can tell… it’s like a computer, and it’s not. It can talk to the galaxy. Though there is some processing function we were feeling our way around.”
We, thought
Casper. He didn’t like the answer he heard inside his own head.
“All of that,” she said, pointing toward the energy locust swarms shifting, twirling, forming new shapes and fusing with other swarms, “is data. Raw data. Data from long ago, and from even now, I suspect. This was some project of the race we all call the Ancients. They… constructed… a repository for all the knowledge they’d acquired. And even the knowledge of those that came before them. The Dead Zone was the input, if you will, in how data was stored. In other words, we’re inside some kind of pocket universe where everything can be rendered down to data. It’s an example of what I was trying to prove.”
“That intelligence precedes physicality?”
Reina nodded. He watched a bare moment of guilt cross her beautiful green eyes.
“And the other ships that were lost here?”
“Most likely they’re still in here. Somewhere. Unable to figure out what’s going on. Dying, eventually, once their life support and supplies give out. Or they’ve found exits that might, we theorize, lead to other galaxies… or even somewhere else in time.”
Casper stared at her incredulously.
“Or even other realities. Parallel universes. But that’s all just a guess. We only just barely comprehend how this place can even exist. We don’t actually know what it does. Or how to use it. We were… experimenting.”
He straightened. Staring at her. Knowing that what he would say next would change all the possibilities that might ever have been considered of him… and her.
“You were working with them.”
His tone was angry. His eyes hard. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the massive cylinder of the Rama-class ship known as the Moirai.
She nodded. Barely.
Then she lowered her eyes, dropping her head to her chest. When she spoke, he couldn’t tell if she was sobbing or just speaking quietly. Or if her voice had simply been scarred and ruined by the smoke and gunfire back on the hangar deck.