Blasting its way several feet into the granite of the mountainside, the impact of landing imparted thousands of gees onto the capsule, but the core had remained intact. Sid began the rapid heating sequence, thawing Zoraster’s frozen body while he powered up the bots and exoskeletons.
He fired the explosives to separate the exterior casing.
“Incoming,” alerted another splinter of Sid’s mind. On the tactical maps, hundreds of Alliance drones swarmed outward from their bases in the mountains, descending on the seismic signatures that the impacts created.
Railgun slugs tore into the side of the mountain above them.
Sid had to hurry. With a bang the exterior casing exploded away, opening the interior to the wind and snow of the Himalayan plateau they were still rolling across. His splinter was now totally cut off from the outside world as dense security blankets descended on this new theatre of war. In the outside world, he was filling the mediaworlds with propaganda, trying to create a fog of disinformation around the attack.
Nearly a second had passed since they’d hit the ground. The debris and snow was still settling while they rolled to a stop. Sid engaged the robotic surrogate housing him to begin constructing a local situational report. In his mind’s eyes, the other Grilla units came online, and a tactical display began forming. Seven of them, all ex-commandos from Zoraster’s old special-forces team, had made it through the gauntlet.
One was unaccounted for.
In overlaid display spaces, Sid watched each of the Grillas undergo the rapid thaw-and-heat cycles, their bodies coming back to life. He couldn’t help thinking about resurrection, about the Resurrection. How much of the old texts were true—how to separate fact from fiction? Was Judgment Day coming? Would the unforgotten dead rise, springing from the ancient nervenet’s memory banks?
Zoraster twitched as his body came back to life.
And would it be only humans?
The hollow thud of the railgun slugs grew louder. The Alliance defensive systems had located Sid and Zoraster’s capsule, but they were already away, disappearing into the swirling snow. Behind them the capsule exploded in a crunching explosion.
Zoraster’s meat-mind was coming back to groggy life as his exoskeleton marched him along the mountain ridge. He smiled a toothy grin at the drone Sid’s mind hovered in. “You okay, kid?”
Sid laughed. “I’m not the frozen steak dinner. How are you feeling?”
“Not something I’d like to do every day, but okay.” As a protection against the extreme accelerations, they’d put the Grilla commandos in deep-freeze. It was something they were engineered for. To the Alliance, this would all just look like a failed kinetic attack. “Everyone get through?”
Sid relayed the situational report into Zoraster’s systems. Seven of the capsules carrying his Grilla commandos got through. One was still unaccounted for. Now it was listed as destroyed.
The Grilla sighed. “Damn it, Zane.” He looked at Sid’s drone. “He was a good friend.”
Sid tried to find more information, but there wasn’t any. All of Zoraster’s old army buddies had volunteered for the mission, without asking any questions, when he put out the call. Now one of them was dead. They trudged through the ice and boulders in silence. The first stage was complete. There was a long hike ahead, over the spine of the Himalayas to the plains beyond, but so far, that was all Sid knew.
“Do you have any idea how we’re going to get into Arunchel Pradesh?” Sid asked, texting the question quietly into Zoraster’s secondary channels. Arunchel Pradesh—literally, the “land of the rising sun” in Sanskrit—was the location of the first Sino-Indian wars in the Himalayas over a hundred years before. It was also the flashpoint that started the Weather Wars.
It was now where Allied Command kept their main headquarters.
“We’re heading into Nyingchi first,” replied Zoraster.
Sid waited for him to expand on his plan, but the Grilla just trudged through the snow.
Glancing up at the towering peaks of the Himalayas, the splinter of Sid’s mind hovering in the drone hoped that the Grilla had a plan.
3
“ALL IS LOST!” screamed Hezekiah. “And because of what? This boy?” He threw an accusing finger at Bob.
Isaiah placed himself in front of Bob, protecting him. “You are the King of Judah, you cast out the false idols. Yahweh will protect us.”
Bob trembled, the scroll of papyrus balanced on his knees shaking. Night was falling, and the smoke from the cooking fires of the two hundred thousand Assyrian troops camping outside the walls of Jerusalem was drifting in, even into the royal palace.
Hezekiah scowled. “Where is this god you speak of?” He grabbed a smoldering pan of incense and threw it against the wall. The slaves cowered. “The twenty-four cities of Judah have been sacked. It was on this boy’s words that you counseled me not to pay tribute to Sennacherib!”
“He will come,” Bob heard himself saying, leaning forward to look the king directly in the eyes. “Yahweh will lay waste to the legions.”
“Your head will be the first thing I will present to Sennacherib come the first light,” growled Hezekiah, but already there were the screams of life being ripped from thousands of souls beyond the walls. Hezekiah’s head turned to look through the billowing curtains into the screeching night, the expression on his face turning from anger to bewilderment, and then into fear.
THE DREAMS WASHED from Bob’s mind as he awoke. Australian aboriginals believed that man dreamed the world into existence. What world am I dreaming of?
Bob’s mind flitted into the sensor systems of the transport in which his body was being smuggled. There were no humans aboard except for him and the priest, stowed below decks in a life-support crate. All around was the heaving blue of the oceans, the wind whipping the tips of waves into a froth that skidded across the sea’s surface. He was in an automated oceanic tanker-transport, one of the thousands that mindlessly plowed the watery wilderness.
On Atopia, the ocean was Bob’s friend, his playground. He tried mapping his tactile sense—his water sense—onto the sea’s surface around the tanker, like he used to do at home, but now it felt alien, angry.
Nearly the only things that were alive out here—if that label could be applied—were the machines that roamed the waves, ferrying cargo back and forth to feed the seething mass of humans on the shores. Human biomass now exceeded all wild terrestrial biomass. Overhead in the skies, he could sense the turbofan transport networks, their insides filled with this same human biomass that they ingested and regurgitated at each stop. Dead seas, dead lands, and all creatures enslaved to the human project of pleasuring themselves.
The priest, his body in stasis in the pod next to Bob, was awake as well, and he opened a private communication channel. “Are you feeling ready for the coming fight?” he asked.
Bob mentally shook himself, waking himself up. Such dark thoughts, it wasn’t like him. Then again, his body lay encased in a life-support unit at the bottom of an oceanic transport, an unwilling linchpin in a surreal global conflict. “Not really,” Bob replied. “My mind is filled with such—”
“Fear and doubt is normal in such a situation.”
In such a situation. “You were right.” Right about the end of the world. Bob didn’t entirely trust the Terra Novans, but everything Tyrel said seemed to make sense. Mohesha was the one to suggest that the priest come with him. She contacted the priest to debrief him, and he’d offered to continue on the journey with Bob. The priest was more comfortable with Terra Novan technology than he was, and Mohesha knew Bob trusted him. She knew this would be a rough road.
“The truth comes in many ways to those who seek it,” replied the priest.
Both of them were immobile in the bottom of the transport, speaking through their minds. Bob had renounced Atopian technology—it was too dangerous to connect into it
anymore. He was using Terra Novan tech now. Terra Novans didn’t use proxxi, so Bob freed his, creating a set of corporations around the world that Robert could control to establish his identity as a legal person. He missed his old friend, and on this leg of the trip he was in total radio silence.
Once again he was cut off from the world, but now he was on a mission.
“We need you to return to Atopia,” Tyrel had explained to Bob at the end of the Terra Novan Council meeting.
“Return to Atopia?” Where just days before this would have excited him, when Tyrel said it, his stomach had knotted up.
“You are the only one that might be able to get through to Jimmy Scadden. What’s left of him in there still trusts you, even loves you. He spared you. You might be able to drive a wedge of uncertainty into his mind.” Tyrel had paused. “Or obliterate him.”
“Can’t I try talking to him from here?” Bob had complained.
“You need to get inside the Atopian perimeter; it’s the only way we can try to ensure the White Rider won’t intercept you.”
Bob had finally agreed.
But only as it gave him the chance to rescue his family, and to rescue Nancy. But he didn’t know if he’d even be able to convince them to leave. Still, he had to try.
A part of Bob wished he’d managed to speak to Sid more after the meeting, but somehow there hadn’t been time. To be honest, he hadn’t made the time. To be honest, he didn’t really want to talk.
At the meeting, they’d unpacked all the data that Patricia gave to him. It seemed to confirm what the Terra Novans were thinking, but the POND data was unexpected, and nobody had any idea what it meant, or if it was even relevant. Sid was still working on decoding it. The most critical information, though, had been what Willy’s body had been carrying, the information on the identities of the other Horsemen.
It was this that had set the plan in motion.
The Terra Novans had given him nearly unfettered access to all their resources, the ability for him to summon their entire cyber-arsenal if needed. He was the critical node in the fight that had to get through, that might be able to cut the head from the snake.
“How much did Mohesha tell you?” Bob asked the priest. He wasn’t sure what Mohesha had shared.
“Enough. We must decide for ourselves what to believe and what to cast out. The battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness began long ago.”
In his mind’s eye, Bob saw a fly crawling on the strip-lighting embedded in the ceiling. The fly crawled around, its only concern finding its next meal, perhaps finding a mate. If he reached up to swat it, it would try to escape, realizing something was trying to kill it. It wouldn’t understand what was trying to kill it. It would only understand that it had to run. Bob had a creeping sensation of the same thing.
Inside his mind, he burned to get back onto Atopia, to take his family and Nancy to safety. He couldn’t fail again.
He was the only one who really knew Jimmy, the only one Jimmy might listen to, and he was the only one who knew the Atopian systems as well as Jimmy did. An image of Jimmy on the beach back at Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party floated into his mind, that young trusting boy looking to Bob for help. Now he needed to use that trust, find the love for Bob that might still exist somewhere inside his old friend.
And use that love against him.
4
NANCY SURVEYED THE hall. It was filled with row upon row of young men and women, healthy young men and women—healthy save one respect. They weren’t aware at all. They were cocooned in life-support units, white pods stacked along the length of the hall like eggs in a hive, ready to hatch. Attending drones hovered and buzzed between them.
The facility she was virtually inspecting was located in an office tower in the middle of San Francisco, but she was finding more of them in nearly every city. They were operated as infirmaries by Cognix Corporation, a spillover from the private health care systems it helped operate around the world.
In the cocoons were the disappeared, the people who’d become lost in the Atopian virtual reality system. They went in, but their awareness never came out. On Atopia, before launch, there were reports of this happening, but they’d been pushed aside. Nancy wished she had paid more attention. Only now did she understand the truth.
Jimmy was stealing souls.
“Some report that over a million people are now among the disappeared,” a Boston Globe reporter said in a mediaworld that Nancy watched in a corner of her mind. “Inquiries at Cognix Corporation go unanswered, yet the FDA refuses to hold an inquest into the issue.”
There were rumors, reports, but nobody seemed too worried. It wasn’t just that people were too busy to care, or too interested in their own selfish pursuits. They honestly didn’t notice, or when they did, they’d forget. The highest rates of disappearances were in areas with the highest penetration of pssi, and there was a collective blind spot operating in the externally stored memories and meta-cognitions systems. The disappeared list Nancy was compiling correlated with people in influential positions. Jimmy was taking control.
Another newsworld caught Nancy’s attention: “UN commission reports happiness rates soaring around the world . . .”
Something had to be done. She couldn’t wait any more.
“ARE YOU CONTENT knowing Jimmy is taking Cognix away from you?” asked Nancy. Cognix was Herman Kesselring’s baby. She turned to look out of the phase-shifting windows of the Cognix Board room onto the forests of Atopia more than a thousand feet below.
Kesselring’s face flushed. “I am still the main shareholder. I’ve got nothing to fear from young Scadden.”
“Is that why you hide up here all the time?” Kesselring had barely left the confines of the upper corporate office complex in weeks. “You’re sure acting scared.”
“Have you seen the stock price of Cognix?” Kesselring blustered. “We’re on track to become the fourth-largest economy on the planet—”
“This isn’t about money anymore, Mr. Kesselring. Do you know he’s amassing a private psombie army?” She didn’t need to specify who they were talking about.
“The body lend-lease program? That’s not a private army—”
“Let’s cut the bullshit right now, Herman.”
That stopped Kesselring in his tracks. In the silence, Nancy stared out the window at the crescent of white sand beaches ringing the floating-island-nation-state, at the waves breaking over the frothy breakwaters. The beaches were empty, where before they’d been packed with tourists. They hadn’t been coming here for the water, however, they’d been coming to experience pssi, and now that pssi was everywhere, the tourists were elsewhere. Nancy used to feel such peace when she looked out at this view—but now when she saw those waves, she always thought of Bob and wondered where he was.
“Aren’t you part of the science team going to the Dallas Commune?” asked Kesselring, trying to shift topics.
The Commune outside of Dallas, Texas, under siege by American internal security forces, had been breached. It was the sister to the much better fortified Montana Commune. Atopia had been asked to send in its head technical team to do a forensic analysis of the Commune’s systems. “I am. My main subjective is there now.”
Kesselring drummed his fingers against the conference room table. Nancy could almost see the gears clicking in his head.
“How do you know you can keep anything secret from him?” he said finally.
“I don’t, but then we’re going to have to take some calculated risks if we’re going to stand up to him.” Implicit in this was the risk she was already taking. She didn’t know that Jimmy didn’t already own Kesselring. She was sure Jimmy was controlling the rest of the Board, starting with Dr. Granger, whose normally vapid expressions had become more sinister.
“We?” Kesselring smiled. “So now we are a ‘we?’ ”
Nancy turned away from watching the waves to face Kesselring. “We are.” She sent some data into Kesselring’s networks, some of the information Bob gave her. Kesselring’s eyes widened. “I need you to call a special, very private meeting of senior shareholders.”
On an overlaid situational display, Nancy watched Alliance battle platforms converging on Terra Nova in the Southern Atlantic. She didn’t reveal everything she knew about Jimmy. She kept secret that Jimmy had stolen Commander Rick Strong’s wife. That needed to be used at the right moment.
Kesselring’s mind raced through the data she gave him. “You received this from Patricia?”
Nancy nodded. Maybe she should attempt to contact Mohesha at Terra Nova. The other option was Bob, but that was far too risky. Jimmy would have sensors waiting to be tripped if she tried anything like that. Even here, she was keeping her memories of this meeting locked away inside the perimeter of Kesselring’s private security blankets. Each part of her mind would have to start to work independently, like cells of an espionage network, each knowing the other existed, but not knowing where or what they were up to.
Not until it came time for them to come together.
AT THE SAME time, another part of Nancy’s mind hovered at the peripheries of the Dallas Commune in the scrublands of Texas. Surrounding it on all sides were bipedal bots, the letters “FBI” stenciled on their sides. Overhead, in the clear blue sky, the Dallas Commune’s mile-high electromagnetic shield of aerial plankton shimmered, pulsated, and then a gust of wind washed it away. There were four Communes in America, and all of them were under investigation. The Dallas location was the first whose perimeter had been breached.
“Good to go,” came the all clear command.
In an instant, Nancy’s point-of-view shot across the dirt roads and barns into the center of the Commune, inside the vestry of a small church. She eased her virtual presence inside, slowly materializing her virtual body onto a chair. Already a clouding of Atopian smarticles permeated the space. This Commune’s Reverend was pouring himself a cup of tea.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 22