“You seen the Roman soldiers yet?” Jason asked.
“Pussies. You seen the Mechs?”
“Them big robot things? Yeah.”
“They ain’t.” Jason became aware that Snork was studying him. “Hey, you know, you do look like shit. The fuck is going on with your—”
His words were cut off by shouts in the street.
“Oh shit!” Snork sounded excited. “Here they come!”
Black clad insurgents streamed onto the road. They didn’t seem to aim their AKs as they filled the air with hot lead. Jason rose, pouring gunfire back at them. They were ready targets, fans of blood spraying, bodies dropping among plumes of dirt. Others shuddered, catching rounds, somehow continuing to the next doorway, finding cover behind the dead truck. Jagged shards of masonry burst from the wall in front of Jason and he concentrated his plunging fire upon those who stubbornly stayed their ground, foolish enough to trade shots with him instead of seeking any modicum of cover.
Ducking and weaving, Jason trailed ammunition links behind him as he hustled to another part of the roof. Snork was firing AKs at the insurgents, picking up a new rifle when one emptied. Jason peered cautiously into the street and didn’t see anyone beneath him. He leaned over the wall and let rip, shell casings and links ejected out of the SAW, geysers of dust walking up the street and through human targets, their rifles pitched into the air as their bodies sank to the road.
There were people firing from the second floor of the house beneath him.
When Jason sank down against the wall, the barrel of his light machine gun was glowing red. Concrete dust misted the air. “I need another barrel for this!” Jason yelled above the incoming rounds snapping over their heads.
“Downstairs!” Snork dropped a taped mag, flipped it over and slapped it home. “Seriously,” the mercenary shouted. “The fuck is wrong with you?” He stood and fired out half a magazine before sitting back down. “You look in a mirror lately? Your eyes…Down!”
The red, spiraling glow of an RPG spun towards them, corkscrewing over the roof, exploding somewhere out of sight.
Fleegle and the gold-toothed kid returned to the roof, lugging the oversized launcher tubes and command launch unit of a FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile. Jason abandoned the SAW on the rooftop, snatching up the nearest AK, checking that its magazine was full.
“What’s going on here Fleegle?” he hollered at the other man over the fracas.
“You want to know what’s going on here?” Fleegle was at work on the Javelin’s CLU, his hands on the grips. The black kid pulled the pins from hand grenades and flung them as far as he could into the street. “We’re going to blow that building over there—” Fleegle nodded in the direction of the red pulsing structure “—and then we’re out.”
“We’re out where?”
“Called in a casevac, we’re getting our wounded the fuck out of Dodge.”
“We got comms?”
“Not now. Had ‘em though. Bingo got through…” Fleegle attached a launch tube to the CLU “…hot miked that bitch ‘til someone complained, probably some rear-echelon motherfucker.”
“What’s he say?”
“ETA twenty-twenty five minutes, give or take. Not that we can tell time, our watches are fucked.”
“Yeah. You think that thing is going to fire?” The Javelin’s targeting and launch system were dependent on sophisticated electronics. If their watches were on the fritz…
“Fired before. I know, makes no sense.”
Snork criss-crossed the roof, firing the AKs he’d placed, changing places when return fire honed in on his position. The black kid took a round in his other arm and dropped the grenade he was about to toss. He scooped it up and lobbed it off the roof before it exploded.
“What about air support?”
“We tried to get on guard too. Nothing.” Fleegle cocked an eye towards the sombrero galaxy above them. “We ain’t got shit in the skies here anyhow.”
“The fuck is up with that sky?”
“The fuck is up with any of this?”
“We got wounded downstairs?”
Fleegle nodded. “A prisoner too.”
“What’s with the black kids?” The boy with the gold-tooth tightened the tourniquet around his other arm, staunching the flow of blood from that limb.
“Well, at least they ain’t trying to kill us. Hey…” Fleegle shouldered the Javelin. “You want to know what it costs to fire one of these things?” He didn’t wait for Jason to reply. “Forty grand a rocket. Forty grand. You believe that?”
Jason would be damned if he’d be Fleegle and Snork’s battle buddy. He needed to get downstairs and see about finding a new barrel for the SAW. He raced to the pillbox-like structure encasing the stairs and scrambled down.
The second floor of the building was part triage, part bunker. The wall of one room that Jason passed was blown out. Bricks and chunks of masonry littered the floor. African kids hugged the sides of the crumpled wall, firing into the street. One of them took a head shot and flopped belly up.
More kids were darting about the corridor Jason traversed, yelling to one another, toting their AKs and RPGs, dashing up and down the hall from room to room, firing out windows, breaking to their next position.
They’d gathered the wounded in an airy central room, most well away from a pile of rubble that had been a wall.
Jason spotted the mercs easily because they stood out in contrast to the tiny forms of the boy soldiers. They were off to the side of the collapsed wall, where Drooper could overwatch the street. He had one hand around the pistol grip of a SAW, its bipod wedged in the debris. Belts of ammunition accordioned about the two men on the bloodied floor. Drooper’s free hand was pressed to Bingo’s neck, keeping the blood-soaked bandages in place there. Bingo was in no shape to handle a weapon. His face was waxen, fresh blood caked with cruor in his facial hair. He lay across Drooper, trying to stem the blood flowing profusely from his friend’s leg.
The color was fading from Bingo’s face, but his eyes…his eyes were red-tinted. Neither man acknowledged Jason’s presence. Drooper fired a seemingly random burst down into the street, shell casings tinkling across the floor and bricks.
In the middle of the room, a dozen or more African boys lay on their backs. They bore a horrendous array of bullet wounds and gashes, their shredded limbs broken, bones and metal sticking out of their bodies. A few were plugged with IVs, the bags jury-rigged to hang from broken furniture. A boy with twitchy eyes had an angiocatheter in his bloody chest, allowing air to escape his chest cavity. Another kid gasped shallow breaths, his stomach swollen from internal bleeding. The boy soldiers dashing through the room slipped in the blood on the floor.
Overhead a whoosh, the Javelin firing.
Jason didn’t know what to do. He felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead and dying children in the room.
Somewhere in the distance an explosion, the missile impacting.
He went from boy to boy, checking their airways, feeling for their breathing, their circulation. Automatic rifles crackled from the rooms, from the roof and the street. Dust rolled down the wall as an RPG detonated against it. Drooper followed with a lengthy salvo.
Jason finger swept a boy’s mouth, checking to see it was clear. He moved to the next child and took a pulse, didn’t find one.
He hung his head and breathed. Have to keep it together. Not here. Not now. When he looked up, he noticed the prisoner for the first time. The man sat with the wounded but did not appear harmed. He wore a white lab jacket, the fabric discolored with filth and blood. His wrists and ankles were bound with plastic restraints.
Jason would have recognized him anywhere.
“You…”
“You know me?” Dr. Kaku was startled.
Jason strode over to the man and promptly smashed him about the head and shoulders with the butt of the AK. The man cowered on the floor, covering his head with his hands and arms, drawing his legs up to his chest.
Jason walloped him until he was winded, then he settled cross-legged across from the doctor.
The battle raged around and above them.
“…you…you know me?” Kaku spoke through a bloody mouth.
Jason watched him.
“…when…when did you know me?”
“Why are you acting like you don’t—”
“I do not.” Kaku sounded sincere. “What is your name?”
“Motherfucker!” Jason sprang back to his feet, bringing up the rifle, “And don’t act—”
“I am not!” His despair was genuine. “When did you know me?”
“When?” Jason couldn’t believe his ears.
“Yes, when?”
Jason considered putting a burst through the doctor here and now, ending him. It would be so easy, so satisfying. But there were questions he wanted answers to.
“Why are you here?” he demanded of Kaku.
“I am a prisoner.”
“No, why are you here—in this city?”
Kaku had crawled back to a sitting position. “The GWANGI project.”
“Great. That don’t tell me shit.” Drooper fired another volley out of the building. “What’s your role here?”
“I’m an astrophysicist.”
“You’re an astrophysicist. That’s great.”
“Let me ask you—”
“You ask me shit, you son of a bitch, I should—”
“Can you travel faster than the speed of light?”
“What?”
“Can you travel faster than—”
“I heard you motherfucker. The fuck—”
“Galaxies are dragged along while space swells. Our universe is inflationary,” the doctor’s eyes shone with intensity, “and the rate of recession between two galaxies can exceed the speed of light, which—”
Around them, children hollered and hemorrhaged, bedlam and tumult reigned, and through it all Kaku spoke clearly, reasonably.
“What are you talking about?” Jason yelled at him.
“The Einstein-Rosen bridge—what we refer to today as wormholes. You can ‘outpace’ light. Interdimensional travel in eleven-dimensional hyperspace…”
Jason scanned the area for SAW barrels, spotting one on the floor next to Drooper and Bingo.
“…once we learned to harness dark energy…”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying to me.”
“Which does not mean it should not be said!” Kaku replied defiantly. “Negative energy made wormholes transversable, effectively negating event horizons. Two way trips are possible. Do—you—not—see!?”
Jason punched him in the face. “I just told you I don’t motherfucker! And damn, that felt good.”
“…if you can get through a wormhole before the throat pinches off…”
“Is that what that is—up in the sky?”
“…the beauty of spinning black holes, centrifugal forces opposing gravity, keeping it open! You see? You can survive an event horizon! I know! I have—”
An explosion rocked the building around them. When the ringing in Jason’s ears died down, Kaku was still ranting. “…and the problem with travelling back is that you may travel only as early as the construction of the wormhole. But a naturally occurring wormhole—yes! We could visit ancient times. And we did! We did!”
Drooper screamed, a tracer round impacting his body armor.
“We did—do you hear me?!”
Jason turned his upper body in the direction of the mercs, watching his arm blur in the air as he did so. What the…?
Kaku jabbered on about Planck times.
Jason waved his hand in front of his face, nothing. He waved it again, faster. His hand left a trail, a blur of molecules that faded before vanishing.
“…and that is exactly the problem with going back into the past, that one might act so as to change that past. The solution—multiple parallel universes, each branching off another…”
Rolling his fingers into his palm, Jason stared at his clenched fist. His hand wavered slightly.
“…individual universes are finite,” a triumphant look masked Kaku’s face “…the multiverse is not!”
Jason punched Kaku in the jaw again, flattening him.
“What’s wrong with me?” Jason crouched over the doctor, yanking him back to a seated position by the lapels of his lab jacket. “What’s wrong with me?”
A coherent look crossed Kaku’s face as he made and sustained eye contact, his mouth and jaw bloody. “Oh…” Kaku spoke from a new-found realization. “They wounded you, did they?”
“You—wait—here!” Jason bellowed, breaking away from the man, crossing the blood-sodden floor to the mercenaries. Bingo had slumped over Drooper’s legs, barely breathing. His eyes glowed. Drooper struggled to fit a fresh belt of ammunition from a cloth camo-pouch to his SAW. Errant rounds chipped concrete from the broken wall near his head.
Jason snatched the SAW barrel from the ground and raced back towards the stairs, ignoring Kaku, ignoring the boys who lay dying and the ones who scrambled in and out of the rooms.
On the roof, red ash fell from the sky like snow, covering all. Empty Javelin launcher tubes lay pell-mell among the shell casings and dead children’s bodies. The kid with all the gold in his mouth was flat on his back, cinching a tourniquet about his bloody thigh. Judging by the look of the leg, Jason doubted the boy would be able to stand on it. A kid who could have been his twin sent the contents of an AK magazine down into the street before stooping to reload.
Fleegle sat with his back to the pillbox, powdery dust covering him like flower.
“What’s he doing here?” Jason retrieved the SAW and began to swap out the barrels.
“We did it.” Fleegle ignored Jason’s query.
“What’s he—”
“We did it.”
“Did what?”
Jason rose, risking a look over the roof, over the city. A column of smoke rose from the area where the red building had been, clouding the sky, dispersing the ash that floated down around them. Children were braving the streets, pointing out the merc’s positions to insurgents who stepped from cover, shouldering rifles and RPGs. Snork sniped them all, man and child alike.
Jason turned back to Fleegle. “I’m out of here, and I’m taking—”
“You don’t look so good.”
“Take a look at your fucking self!”
“They got you too, like they got Bingo. Didn’t they?”
“What do you…?”
“Your eyes…”
Jason didn’t answer him. He watched as the wounded kid jabbed himself in the thigh with a syringe. Almost immediately the boy was back on his feet, limping to the nearest parapet, his defiant scream drowned out by his Kalashnikov. Okay. That was intense! Jason paused long enough to fix a two-hundred round ammunition box to the SAW.
A high pitched whine sounded on the street.
“Mech!” Snork roared, throwing himself down.
The gold-toothed kid ducked, but his comrade next to him was not as fast. A pulse of distorted air demolished a section of the roof’s wall, lifting the second boy through the air, pitching him off the other side of the building.
“Boss!” Snork barked. “Javelin!”
Fleegle peeled himself from where he sat, fatigued and bloodied. “I’m taking him with me!” Jason shouted after the man, who seemed not the least interested.
Downstairs, he passed two kids removing the pins from grenades before tossing them to a third child, who alley-ooped them through a gaping hole in the wall to the street.
He got a good look at a Mech on the road, stepping awkwardly on its oversized feet, firing its pulse cannon, the wet, dematerialized remains of insurgents deposited all over the road. The shadow of another Mech stepped into view behind the first.
“None of you understand…” Kaku was in tears.
“Up!” Jason barked. “Let’s go!”
“…our collider, our imploder, the inflator�
��”
“Shut the fuck up and walk!” Jason sliced through the plastic flex cuffs restraining the doctor’s ankles. “Downstairs and out onto the street—you keep fucking close to me and don’t try to run away.”
The kids who’d taken firing positions on the first floor were all dead, sprawled in various grotesque poses. Jason dragged Kaku, glancing through windows and doorways and holes, searching for the best way out.
“Keep your head down,” Jason warned. They stared over the ruins of what had been a solid wall. Jason wasn’t concerned about the doctor’s safety. But if Kaku was seen by anyone or anything out on the street, it would bring unwanted attention their way, his way. Jason was all about keeping a low profile and finding a way out of this hell house.
He witnessed the last moments of a dozen insurgents, their AKs flashing before they came apart in a soup of bodyparts, geysering sand, and junked rifles, a Mech’s auto-cannon churning away. Not that way.
He pulled Kaku through the house, following his nose and the stench of acrid smoke. An ashy little black hand protruded from a pile of bricks beneath a window, unmoving. Past the window, thick black billows obscured a street where tires blazed. Gun reports, blasts and the whines signaling a Mech’s sonic pulses seemed to be coming from everywhere except this street. Jason made a decision. They would risk it.
He pushed Kaku through the blown out window first, and when the doctor drew no fire, Jason followed.
They shuffled through the wisps of smoke, the echoes of gunfire and explosions more pronounced out on the street. The buildings around them were damaged to varying degrees, from bullet riddled facades to flat-out collapse.
“Hold you breath.” Jason gripped Kaku by the wrist, forcing the man ahead. “Shut up.” Kaku continued his disjointed harangue. They moved into the smoke, squinting against its acrid sting. The road ahead was impassable, mounds of rubble and downed electric poles blocking their route. Jason dragged Kaku over the wreckage, both of them coughing.
They took cover on the other side of the ruins, behind a section of erect wall. The smoke wasn’t as bad here. They could breath and talk.
“What’s with the sky?” Jason scanned the empty street and buildings beyond their wall.
Kaku did not answer, prattling on. “Before an observation is made, an object exists in every possible state, in every possible time. When we determine the state the object is in, when we make an observation, our very act of observing collapses the wave function. Do you understand what this means?”
Warlord: Dervish Page 22