Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

by Stephen Moss

  He would make it this time, he would make it. He would not suddenly see Hektor leaping out in front of him. He would not suddenly be accosted by the other man. But, of course, he would.

  Hektor’s black frame came flying into the little valley in front of William like an arriving comet, catapulting in over the top of the left bank to land with a loud crash on the right, having been carried across the ten-meter gap by his momentum alone. He was not surprised to see William running at him, and in truth, William was not that surprised to see Hektor suddenly arriving on the scene either. The man had an uncanny ability to read William’s actions no matter how erratically he tried to behave on their morning jaunts around the island.

  But William would not be caught so easily. He knew Hektor wanted a fight, and it would be one William would, of course, lose. And so William used what advantage he had and leaned into the coming collision, digging in with his legs and his preternaturally long arms to accelerate right into the man who had just been so keen to catch him.

  OK, he’s definitely grown a set, thought Hektor in the second or so before William cannonballed into him. But where Hektor was bracing for a fight, William was only looking to throw the other man off balance long enough to escape past him, and when they connected with a clap of released kinetic energy, Hektor was surprised as William brought his legs up and kicked off with all his strength, sending him up and away from the stunned Hektor once more.

  The boy’s getting better, thought Hektor in the split second before he impacted the ground almost as hard as William had just impacted him. Neither hit would do him much harm, neither could do him much more harm than he had already suffered, he thought. But he did not dwell on that. William was getting away. He was already up and out of the valley, and Hektor needed to use all his strength to grind himself backward, stopping his slide and repointing his hard, black, machine body up and out, to sprint after his quarry once more.

  It was not long before William was approaching the peak of Mount Achala. It was not a big mountain, and in any other place it would have been covered in trees, but this close to the Antarctic Circle there was neither enough water nor enough sunlight to sustain such niceties, so it was up a barren mountainside that William now ran, Hektor hot on his tail, their superhuman legs propelling them at ever greater speed.

  It looked for a moment like he was going to make it. That he was going to get away despite his having been caught in his little ploy. And then he broached the mountaintop and Mother Nature gave him a little lesson in true power. The island was desolate for many reasons: firstly that it was born of volcanic eruption; secondly that it had suffered through the millennia in a sea of ice and snow; and thirdly because it was starved of the sun’s precious heat for most of the year. But on top of all of that, it was because a fierce gale howled over it for most of the day.

  Not down in the bay, perhaps, protected as it was by the ridgeline that sheltered it on all sides, but here, at the peak of one of its highest mountains, the gale gained real force, and as William sprinted up into it, the wind caught him and lifted him, taking his momentum and bending it up and back, ignoring all his strength as the hundred-mile-per-hour gust picked him up and threw him back the way he had come.

  Had he been ready for it, he might have been able to withstand it, to brace for it. But he was not, and it whipped him into the air with consummate ease. Hektor saw his friend go airborne and laughed.

  Hektor: ‘whoa, my friend!’

  Hektor redirected his course, anticipating his friend’s new trajectory, and a moment later was receiving the gift of his victory once more as it fell from the sky. The two connected with force and were sent tumbling back down the mountainside in a cloud of dust and pebbles.

  William: ‘son of a …’

  And that was that. Hektor was quickly pinning William even as the other did not really fight back. They laughed. William did not really need to concede, it was over, and Hektor would not gloat. Well, not too much, anyway.

  Hektor: ‘you see, i even control the weather. there is no escaping my wrath.’

  William groaned and pushed Hektor off him with no small amount of power, sending the other man sliding across the dirt once more.

  But he was not a man. Not really. Neither of them were anymore. They were something else. They were the first of something new.

  Sudipto: ‘if you two are done, maybe you could return home so i can once again set to repairing the damage to your bodies.’

  The call came from across the island, from their compound. Not from the main base that surrounded the massive Resonance Dome even now making another Big Foot for transport to India’s new SpacePort in the Maldives. It was the last of their contractual obligations, one of the many Neal had signed them up for in return for allegiance or compliance, depending on your perspective. But more importantly for fiscal and material taxes.

  But that was not the compound that Sudipto called home, nor William most of the time, and definitely not Hektor. Across the bay from the Dome was a small collection of prefabricated buildings hidden out of sight, nestled in a break in the ridgeline next to a small lake. It was to this compound that the two machine augmented men now jogged, maintaining a brisk but easy twenty miles per hour as they chatted about the day’s chase.

  Mynd: ‘hektor, if i may interrupt, you have a call.’

  A call. It was a rare day indeed that Hektor received a call. Sometimes his mother called, but not often. Like many people in his line of work, Hektor was not that close with his family.

  Sometimes Niels or Tomas called to check up on him. They believed him to be rehabilitating in a hospital somewhere, and indeed he was, in a way. But they did not yet know what treatment he had ended up agreeing to after the firefight in North Korea had shattered both his legs. He was not yet ready for them to know that he had chosen to pursue a machine ideal that he had secretly craved for over a year now anyway, ever since he had first been introduced to the battleskins.

  The battleskin. It seemed so distant now, almost primitive, as did his old legs for that matter. His broken legs. His useless legs: weak and uninspiring long before the artillery shell had rended their bones into a hundred fragments and shards.

  But it was not one of his old team members that was calling. It was his former commander.

  Ayala: ‘hello, hektor. ¿how are you?’

  Hektor: ‘well, ayala. thank you.’

  If it had been an ordinary call, and if Hektor had still been an ordinary human, then he would probably have been out of breath, adrenalin driving his heart to race and his eyes to widen. But such things were no longer left to instinct or reflex. Such functions, while still autonomous, were now regulated by a far more evolved system than his sub-cortices. And anyway, the main source of energy expenditure during the fifteen-mile sprint he had just been on did not require his heart to race anyway. His legs no longer needed blood. They no longer ran on oxygenated hemoglobin and biofuel.

  Ayala: ‘good to hear, lieutenant. listen, this is not a social call. i may need to deploy you once more. potentially jung as well, and i wanted to get an update on your readiness. both physical and mental.’

  Hektor allowed the question to sink in. He had not been deployed since the battle at Chunghwa. Was he ready? In many ways he was more ready than he had ever been. His new body may not have been weaponized yet, but its strength alone made it something profoundly lethal. In many ways he was even stronger than John and Quavoce now, though his body’s arms and upper torso were still limited by the human muscle and bone they contained.

  That was the next step, he knew that. A step William had already taken. Hektor suppressed a shudder at the thought. What William had become was hard even for Hektor to come to terms with. If the scientist had even a fraction of the martial training and reflexes Hektor had, then he would be able to handily rip even Hektor’s body apart. And that, in the end, was the ideal, Hektor knew that. He set these thoughts aside and replied.

  Hektor: ‘you know i am ready
whenever you need me, commander. as far as jung is concerned, his treatment is at a far more delicate stage. he is still learning the benefits of the battleskins and comparing them to the phase eleven avatars. he, of course, sees the benefits of what we are offering, and knows that his injuries from his internment in pyongyang will leave him wheelchair bound for life without at least some form of our technology. But as I am more than aware, knowing what benefits the surgery brings and actually doing it are two very different things.’

  They arrived back at the compound as Hektor spoke with Ayala, William pinging him to say he would leave Hektor to his conversation before heading off to see Dr. Sudipto. Hektor sent a mental nod of agreement and thanks and continued to talk to his commander. As William jogged away down a corridor, Hektor took a different course.

  He headed to the meat locker, as they had come to affectionately call it. It was temperature controlled and hermetically sealed. A set of airlock doors giving access to an outer room where a large glass panel showed the inner storage facility itself.

  As he continued to talk to Ayala about the mission she wanted him for, he looked into the storage room. It was a gruesome sight. Three canisters stood in the space, one for each of the compound’s ‘guests.’ One was empty, reserved for Jung for if/when he finally succumbed to the procedure they continued to discuss with him.

  The next held a very strange sight: half a body. It was Hektor’s. It was what was left of him from his waist down, preserved in a thick plasma and linked to a life support machine outside the canister that pumped nutrient rich blood through synthetic arteries and into his still living ones.

  It preserved his legs despite their all but vestigial nature to him now, but more importantly it preserved his genitalia, in case he should want them back at some point. He could not help but smile wryly at the thought. You know, in case at some time in the future he should want his balls back.

  He was surprised at how hard it had actually been to let them go. His legs had perhaps been easier to say good-bye to than his supposed manhood, and the fact that it was all preserved and theoretically re-attachable down the line had helped ease his instinctual revulsion at the thought of his emasculation.

  But now it was over with it was all too easy to forget them, he thought, as he offhandedly checked his organ status as though reviewing a computer’s processing logs. Without much thought, he noted that he had a small maintenance task to take care of. When he was done here he would go to the recycling bay and attach a small tube to a socket on his hip. His machine self would then exude a desiccated lump of effluent, constituting the by-product of his digestive system processed through a far more efficient synthetic combined large intestine and bladder.

  It was all rather convenient, thought Hektor, and very civilized. But then the third canister in the room in front of him held the end result of such advances, the final evolution that Hektor knew he was being drawn toward. It held the now lifeless shell that had once been William Baerwistwyth, complete from head to toe. The only sign that he was not merely asleep being a long and savage looking scar running from the top of his head all the way down his back.

  It was a surgical scar. A scar from the groundbreaking surgery that had removed William’s brain, brainstem, and spine in their entirety, to be placed in the first Phase Thirteen body, William’s body, the first full union of man and machine.

  Behind his old body’s closed eyelids no eyeballs sat, they had gone with the brain they were attached to. Those eyes were the only part of the real William to be found on the outside of his new frame and even those were also augmented by his improved machine senses, there more because of the complexity of their linking to the brain’s visual cortex than anything else. That and a sense on William’s part that they kept him tied to his humanity and allowed others to see evidence of that humanity in his machine face.

  Phase Thirteen, that was William. Hektor was Phase Twelve, a number that would always be his, they had decided, just as Phase Thirteen would always be William’s. Like a prized number on a football team. And what a team they were. A team Ayala even now needed help from.

  Ayala: ‘the mission should be simple, i think you will agree, but once again we require subspace silence, and so i wondered if you might be interested. also, it is no more than a two-man job, as you can no doubt see, so i had hoped to see jung further along with his prosthesis. but given that he is still only using the avatar and has not taken the final step, it seems you will need another assistant.’

  She did not suggest William, despite the fact that he was hypothetically one of the most capable military machines on Earth. The mind was everything, as Banu had proven so conclusively on several occasions, and William’s talents most certainly did not lie on the battlefield. Hektor hesitated. Her offer implied he would be able to choose whom to take with him. It was a short list of candidates, made all the more problematic by his personal ties to them all.

  The life he had been forced to choose, the cost, was the implicit price he might be asking them to pay as well. He was happy with his choice, no doubt about that, but in truth he would not wish this on anyone else. All that said, he had taken each of them on worse missions, far worse. They had faced the chance of death, even the likelihood of it. They could face this if they had to.

  Hektor: ‘obviously niels and cara are at the top of the list.’

  Ayala: ‘i agree. i would recommend cara. her youth may be of advantage getting in, if stealth alone fails you.’

  Hektor knew what she meant. Her ‘youth.’ Cara was an attractive young woman, albeit one who could kill with disturbing alacrity.

  Hektor: ‘cara it is. ¿have you contacted her already?’

  Ayala: ‘i just did.’

  There was a pause. Then …

  Ayala: ‘she is getting ready even now. apparently she is quite keen to get back into the thick of things.’

  Yes, thought Hektor. That sounds like Cara.

  Chapter 17: Satellites

  They had always known about it. From the start, the Advanced Team had been informed of the relay’s proposed location and purpose. The Interstellar Subspace Transmitter burrowing its way into the moon of Mars. John had told Neal about it, but without the satellites to transmit information to it, it was frankly an obsolete tool anyway.

  With the completion of the first Skalm, they could have dispatched it there. That was possible. But that would have meant sending it away from Earth, something they could not even afford to do in order to go and rescue an ever more distant Dr. Birgit Hauptman.

  Years beforehand, back on Mobiliei, John and his co-conspirators had considered the problem of the relay. They had weighed the option of using it to send information covertly between the branches of the conspiracy on Earth and the Armada. But with the wealth of computing eyes that would be on any news coming from Earth, the chances of discovery would have been all but certain.

  So they had decided it would probably be best to leave it alone. It was a sentiment Neal had shared when John had told him of the relay’s purpose and location. Even if they could destroy it, then that would arouse just as much suspicion as if it remained functional but was unable to reach the satellites. Both would be attributed in the end to a fault in the system.

  There would be talk of foul play but the true cause of the silence would be lost among many scenarios which the distrustful factions of the Mobiliei would bandy with, if such a notion even made the list at all. They would hide their conspiracy behind countless other perceived threats, both imagined and no doubt well founded, that the many leaders aboard the Armada had cause to suspect.

  Birgit was aware of all of this. Among the flood of data coming through the link, a link whose delay was growing ever larger the farther they got from home, were data packets containing news updates, both public and more secret.

  She did not pay as much attention to them as Rob did. What free time he had was often spent trolling through the reams and reams of written updates, photographs, and audio streams
that were being packaged for them by Minnie. Given their remote location, Neal had given Minnie discretion to share any information she thought relevant with them. It was not as if they could be considered an intelligence threat.

  And so Rob enjoyed an almost unparalleled access, and he used it, both to feed his appetite for news of his lost home, and to keep track of events on Earth, events which would hold sway, he knew, over whether humanity was ever able to mount some kind of rescue mission for them.

  For Birgit, just bearing witness, spectating, was not in her. She could not wait for the world to see if it was going to survive long enough to come and save her. And so her mind blazed pathways of its own. Cutting into the undergrowth, the dense, seemingly impenetrable thick of physical limitations that blocked her path home, seeking a way through, a way back.

  As she sought a way to reach over the horizon, she had long ago begun to see that there was only one real way to get there, and it was an alchemist’s dream. They could not propel themselves. They could not even stop themselves. And so she strived for something even more ambitious. A doorway. The doorway.

  It was a silly hope, she knew that. A preposterous conceit to think that she should be able to succeed where a whole world had failed. But just as Birgit had been the mother of a new type of life, an artificial type, maybe necessity could be the mother of this.

  Birgit: ‘the parsing of data needed to process relative location is too great.’

  It had been a rhetorical statement, but Minnie, or the version of her that lived aboard Terminus, replied anyway.

  Minnie:

  ‘Scenario’, thought Birgit.

  Birgit: ‘well, one exists, but not one powerful enough.’