The Last Sword Maker

by Brian Nelson

  But he’d known that this could happen, hadn’t he? He’d known that this would be the dangerous time—after replication—when his goals and the Pentagon’s diverged. But he had never imagined it would happen so fast.

  Now he realized that the problem was forced evolution. He had never predicted that they would have a tool like this at their disposal. It was accelerating everything as its artificial intelligence component did all the heavy lifting for the engineers. Breakthroughs that would normally have taken years were being made in a matter of weeks. He had clearly misjudged its power. They were using it to change everything, from the hulls of submarines to camouflage and stealth technology, to finding pathogens in the body. Day after day, as he monitored each advance, he was becoming increasingly worried that someone might use forced evolution in the wrong way—that someone might ask it to do something terrible.

  And as he lay there listening to the approaching thunder, he had a new fear: that perhaps someone already had.

  He tossed the sheets aside, got out of bed, and went to his computer.

  We’re probably safe. It’s really much too soon to have a terrorist on our hands.

  That was what he had told Eric Hill the night Eric returned from the FBI with his wild story about a robber using assemblers. Now he wondered if perhaps he had misjudged Hill, that in the young man’s feverish excitement, he had seen only an inexperienced boy rather than the brilliant young scientist he really was. In fact, he had never even looked at the footage from that night, even though Admiral Curtiss had given it to him. He had had so many things to do, and when Curtiss’s men found nothing, he had let himself forget about it.

  It took him only a moment to find the footage. As soon as it began, he found himself leaning closer to the monitor, squinting, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. How strange—the man, the coat, the way he moved. Eastman instantly understood why Eric had been so disturbed by it. There was something wrong with this man. He was somehow malformed, though Eastman was at a loss to say in what way.

  He watched the tape over and over again. Each time, he tried to convince himself that it was nothing, just a strange man in a coat. Yet each time, the sickening flutter in his stomach got worse. And each time the video ended, he found himself hitting play again.

  It was only ninety seconds of footage, but an hour had passed and he was still enthralled by it. He began dissecting it with imaging software: zooming in, capturing frames, enlarging them. There must be something here! Some proof! He parsed through every moment: as the dark figure glided across the floor; as Williams, the security guard, woke and drew his gun; as the weapon shook in his hand. Then Williams collapsing, so suddenly and irrevocably dead. So fast. His head smacking the desk.

  A stroke at precisely that moment. What were the chances?

  Yes, now he was beginning to see it as Eric had seen it. As someone who understood what assemblers could do. But the proof he was looking for still eluded him.

  Finally, he got an idea. The eyes. They seemed to be the key to the man’s deformity. He took a screen shot of the eye, blew it up, then advanced the footage a few frames and did it again. As he zoomed in, the eye became a bunch of fat pixels, just blocks of color. Tan skin, black eyelash, green iris. But in the ninth image that he augmented, the eye was no longer green, but blue.

  Eastman sat back and rubbed his chin. How was that possible? He began the process again. Advanced a frame, cut out the eye, pasted it in the photo editor, and expanded it. Green. He did it again: green. Green. Green. Green. Green. Green. Green. Green. Green. Then a millisecond of blue. Then green again.

  With a mixture of both excitement and shock, he understood how perfect a word malformed was. The man was mal-formed. He had been made wrong. This was not his real face. Another face was hidden underneath.

  But then, that must mean …

  The rush of adrenaline brought a sickening warmth to his whole body.

  Someone has betrayed us, he thought.

  Because no single person, no matter how brilliant, could have done this alone. This … this thing had help from someone within the NRL. That was the only way it was possible. Just as he was seeing forced evolution geometrically accelerate their progress in the wake of replication, he knew that it was the only way this creature could have been born. Only with forced evolution—and the right combination of genius and recklessness—could he have become so powerful so quickly. That was the terrible power of Eric’s invention. All you had to do was give the nanosites a goal, and they would get there. Somehow, they would get there. And this person had been willing to saturate his own body, to let them meld with his mind and change him at the molecular level, so that he would have the power to change his appearance and kill with a thought.

  But who was he, and what were his plans? And perhaps more importantly, who had betrayed them and given him their secrets?

  Bill Eastman’s eyes scanned the room as if looking for some answer—the bed with the tossed pillows and blankets, the wall adorned with all his awards and accolades, the balcony door and the trees blowing in the wind beyond. Then his eyes came back to a picture on his desk. It was an image of Eastman himself, arm in arm with a man he had thought would never betray him.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Daylight Again

  Tangshan, China

  They ran along the cobblestone path as it twisted through the natural limestone formations. Soon, the cavern began to narrow until they were once again on a path with the river on one side. The noise of it was much louder now as the water was being forced into a smaller and smaller channel.

  Then the river disappeared underground, and the pathway suddenly ended in a wall of rock.

  “What now?” Eric shouted over the rushing water

  “I told you I didn’t want to spoil it for you,” Ying said, nodding toward the rushing river.

  “Don’t tell me this dumps into the sewage system.”

  “Not quite that bad. But the city’s storm drains are not known for cleanliness.” She turned to Ryan. “You first.”

  Ryan peeled off his shoes. “See you on the other side,” he said, and jumped in.

  Eric checked the safety on the pistol before threading the trigger guard through his belt and refastening it.

  Meanwhile, Ying pulled Mei to the water’s edge, but the girl stubbornly yanked her hand away.

  Smack!

  Ying’s slap turned the girl’s face halfway around. She turned back to her mother, the movement meticulously slow, murder in her eyes.

  But her mother’s face was equally fierce. “Don’t you dare disobey me again. Take Eric’s hand. There, give me the other. We go in together and we stay together. After we hit the water, you’ll have time for one more breath. Then you have to stay down.”

  “For how long?” Eric asked

  “I don’t know.”

  Great.

  They stood for a moment at the water’s edge, summoning their courage, which arrived with the sudden sound of a gunshot. Mei yelped and leaped onto Eric for safety. He teetered for a moment, then fell backward into the water. He fought to reach the surface for air, but Mei’s extra weight made it impossible. Too quickly, they were sucked into the tunnel.

  The force was tremendous. His arms and legs felt as if they would be ripped from his body. Powerless against the current, he concentrated on keeping Mei wrapped in his arms and protecting her head as he bumped against the smooth limestone channel. Even his hair felt as if it was being pulled out by the roots. On and on they hurtled until his shoulder smashed against a bend in the tunnel, making him lose his grip on Mei. Tumbling on and on, with no sense of up or down, he bumped against something soft—another body—and grasped desperately for it, but he couldn’t hold on.

  Arms flailing, lungs screaming, brain dying, he fought the panic. Then, just as his body was going slack and darkness was rushing in, he wa
s shot out into the air. Even as he fell, his mouth and nose sucked up the precious air.

  He landed with a hard splash in calmly flowing water and surfaced up through a layer of floating soda bottles, plastic grocery bags, and Styrofoam food containers. Treading water, he peered into the gloom. He was still underground.

  “Over here!” cried Ryan.

  The storm tunnel was about thirty feet wide, and Ryan was standing on a narrow brick ledge that ran along one side. Somehow, he had managed to keep his headlamp.

  Just then Mei came shrieking over the cataract and splashed into the water beside him. He went to her, and she clutched desperately at him. He ran his hands over her neck and face, checking her over. “Are you all right?”

  Sobbing, she nodded her head.

  As he began to sidestroke over to the ledge with her, Ying came over the waterfall. They heard her body splash down, but she didn’t make a sound.

  “Māmā, Māmā!” Mei cried.

  After he got Mei to the ledge, Eric swam out to her, Ryan’s flashlight guiding the way.

  She was conscious, but just barely.

  They laid her out on the ledge and saw that she was bleeding from the top of her head. Not too badly, but the blow must have been terrific. She shook her head from side to side and moaned, “Mei-Mei. Where is my Mei-Mei?”

  “I’m here, Māmā.”

  Ying reached for her daughter and began to cry.

  “Come on,” Eric said, “we’ve got to keep going.”

  Just then another body came over the waterfall.

  Ryan and Eric exchanged glances. Ryan put his light on the gasping soldier. Eric unstrung the pistol from his belt, then turned to Mei and spoke the same words her mother had used earlier: “Look away.”

  He prayed the wet pistol would still work. It did.

  He missed completely with the first shot. The soldier, squinting into the light, pulled out his own pistol. Eric fired twice more, hitting him in the chest and then the head. The man cried out once, then slumped in the water.

  Eric took Ying’s headlamp. “You guys get going. I’ll come when I can.”

  Mei and Ryan collected Ying, who could now stand. “I’m okay. I’m okay,” she insisted. But she wobbled on her feet and kept one hand pressed to the wound on her scalp.

  Eric checked the pistol magazine—six shots left—and waited. Two more soldiers came over the waterfall. It was a nasty business. Disoriented and half drowned, they were sitting ducks. The second one even waved at him, forcing a smile and pleading for help. Eric shot him in the face.

  After the echo of the last shot faded away, all was quiet in the dark tunnel. Eric waited, gun in hand. Three minutes. Four minutes. He tried not to think about what he had just done. You had no choice. Ying couldn’t do it this time. You had to do it to protect your friends. But he knew that something had changed inside him.

  After five minutes passed, he turned and raced down the narrow ledge and caught up to the others. Ying had recovered considerably. She still moved cautiously, and with her arm over Mei’s shoulder, but she was back in charge.

  They were getting close to the outside world. He could hear cars and horns and mopeds, and even the ching-ching of bicycle bells. Then he saw thin shafts of dusty light: the hook holes of a manhole cover. After all his months of captivity, he had to check an almost frantic urge to get out as fast as he could.

  In another fifty yards, Ying stopped. “This is it.” She pointed to a ladder of welded steel. “Ryan, you first. It opens in the back of a small alley. With any luck, no one will see you.”

  Ryan went up the ladder and, after several loud grunts, slid the manhole cover aside with a gritty scrape. Sunlight poured down on them. Freedom. It was right there at the top of the ladder. Eric peered back through the tunnel, checking the shadows, suddenly afraid that at the very moment he made it to the surface, some new obstacle would thwart their escape.

  “All clear,” Ryan called. “But hurry.” Next went Mei, then Ying. With one last scan of the tunnel, Eric scurried up the ladder and into the sunshine.

  They were in a narrow alley, only four feet separating two tired gray cinder-block buildings. Piles of garbage were pushed up against the walls—plastic bags in every color, dirty diapers, soda cans, and, near his foot, a fresh coil of human excrement.

  But Eric didn’t care. He was free, and even this air smelled sweet.

  He looked to the mouth of the alley: a busy urban street with cars and bicycles and mopeds zipping past. He looked at his coconspirators. Ying was bleeding from her scalp, and Mei had a cut on her hand. His own pants were torn and his knees spackled with blood.

  Ryan, Eric, and Mei stepped guiltily into the street, with their hands shoved in their pockets, trying to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. But Ying walked with her head high and met the gaze of anyone who dared stare at the battered woman walking around in drenched clothing on a sunny day. Half a block down, she pointed to a tiny car with a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. “This is it,” she announced.

  “This isn’t a car,” Ryan said; “it’s a golf cart.”

  Ying seemed to find the comparison insulting. “This was the hottest car in 2014,” she said.

  It looked like an insectoid. It had only one door, which opened straight up like a gull wing, allowing access to three seats set in a triangle. The driver sat alone in the front point of the triangle, and two passengers sat back against the rear window, their legs extended beside the driver. Ryan took the left back seat, and Eric took the right, with Mei on his lap.

  They pulled away from the curb and drove casually down the middle of Tangshan.

  It was Eric’s first real glimpse of China, and it was unbelievable. There were people everywhere, bumping, jostling. The sidewalks were packed with street vendors, selling dumplings and meat on sticks. A woman sat in a doorway plucking an erhu for money, its melancholy tones suddenly drowned out by techno music from a passing sports car. He saw yellow taxis and buses plastered with ads—Hongtashan cigarettes and Future Cola. Mopeds swarmed through traffic. There were makes and models of cars he had never seen before, including a strange three-wheeled vehicle that looked like a pickup truck bed strapped to the back of a motorcycle. All he could do was stare. On storefronts and balconies he saw long chains of red and gold lanterns; then massive skyscrapers, all metal and glass. They passed a park with a cluster of trees and a pagoda temple, and on the next block, a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut.

  He thought, how can all these people be leading normal lives? Going to work, raising children, falling in love, while that other world—the underground world, General Meng and his wall, Olex’s murder—existed so close, just behind them, down that long tunnel?

  They drove for fifteen minutes, putting distance between themselves and the tunnel.

  “We all need to eat,” Eric said. “Do you have any food?”

  “Under Ryan’s seat,” Ying said.

  Ryan produced a small cooler filled with a thermos of water, caffeinated sodas, potato chips, and energy bars.

  Eric opened an energy bar and offered it to Mei. She shook her head.

  “It may be important,” he said, for he felt that this thing was far from over.

  She nodded and took it, tearing at it with her teeth, then forced it down with water.

  A few minutes later, she had curled up on his lap, her temple nestled into the cleft of his chest, eyes closed. Eric had both arms around her, supporting her at each turn, a human seat belt. He liked having her this close, safe and secure, but he wondered if maybe she thought it was too intimate. So he put one hand on the armrest. Without moving her head or opening her eyes, she found his hand and wrapped it back around herself.

  “I’ve got you,” he whispered. Then he said it again. “I’ve got you.”

  He rubbed his nose into her hair, breathing in the sme
ll of her hair and skin. He had read articles about the power of pheromones. How a newborn was able to change the hormone levels of its father—curbing the testosterone level so that the man would be gentle and caring with the baby, yet also elevate cortisol so that he would protect the child from potential predators. In mothers, the changes were even more intense, regulating dozens of processes from heart rate to blood sugar levels. If the infant was too hot or too cold, for example, the child’s pheromones would alter the mother’s body temperature almost instantaneously. Her body would cool if the baby was too warm, heat up if the baby got cold. This had to be what he was feeling. Without words or language, Mei was communicating with him, throwing switches and levers inside him, telling him what to do.

  “Just a few more lights and we’ll be to the highway,” Ying said.

  Ryan suddenly threw up his hand to his window. “LOOK OUT!”

  A massive truck, two lanes wide and twelve feet high, tried to ram them broadside. Ying popped the clutch, and the little car lurched forward. The behemoth missed them by inches, hitting a man on a moped and smashing him against another car. The man was suddenly gone, submerged in steel and aluminum. The woman in the car began screaming.

  Ying accelerated around two cars and whipped into oncoming traffic.

  “How did they find us?” Ryan cried.

  Eric looked back. The truck was extracting itself from the collision. He saw the corpse momentarily sticking to, then falling from the front grill. Then the truck turned in pursuit. It was enormous—a huge olive-drab military vehicle on six wheels, each one bigger than their entire car.

  Ying ran a red light, then another. Up ahead, they could see the traffic crawling along, almost stopped. The truck was closing fast behind them. Engine roaring. And a second truck had now joined the chase.