Kesselring continued feeding his bird. “The report presented at the board meeting, with the information Colonel Kramer extracted from Mr. Indigo.”
Jimmy frowned and glanced back at the break in the trees. “What do you mean?”
“The original report had details about you being responsible for the disappearance of Commander Strong’s wife and other Atopians.” Kesselring didn’t look up as he said this, but stared into the eyes of his falcon, giving it another chunk of bloody meat that it gobbled back.
Jimmy’s full attention swung to Kesselring. “Where did you hear that?”
“I think you forget who built this place, the resources and connections I have.”
Jimmy looked at the ground. “They were just lies, fabrications by the extremists to try and destabilize the Alliance. I thought that spreading them further would only serve their goals. The Alliance gave us interim command of their forces for the operation against Terra Nova—”
“I know, Jimmy,” interrupted Kesselring. The entire Allied Command staff in Arunchal Pradesh had been killed in a surprise attack. The Alliance had captured a Grilla, Zoraster, in connection with it, and Sidney Horowitz was implicated. It had pushed the Alliance into declaring war on the AU, confirming Jimmy’s terrorist theories. “My problem is that you lied to me.”
A whirring noise came from the direction of Kesselring’s chalet, and a swarm of ornithopter bots rose into the sky, darting and weaving. The falcon saw them and its head twitched to the side, flexing its claws into the leather glove covering Kesselring’s hand.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir.” Jimmy shifted from one foot to the other, his head down. “You’ve been like a father to me, even more since Patricia passed. I can’t tell you how grateful I am—”
A bell chimed and Jimmy glanced into the augmented space of the Alps, at a church spire that climbed over the trees in a village nestled high above.
“I think it’s time, Mr. Scadden, that we dispense with the charade.” Kesselring looked at Jimmy, who stopped shifting and looked up to return his gaze. “Do you know anything about falconry?” In the background, Kesselring tensed his phantoms, monitoring the data flow around Jimmy’s networks.
“Not really, no.”
Lifting his arm, Kesselring whistled and set the falcon free. With two quick and powerful beats of its wings, it lifted up and soared across the grass, then sailed into the sky to chase the ornithopters.
“Raptors are not pets,” Kesselring explained, his eyes following the bird. “They are non-affectionate animals. Do you know what this means?”
Saying nothing, Jimmy shook his head. Wheeling overhead, the falcon shrieked as it caught the first robot, pinned it in its talons and dropped to the ground.
“It means they have no ability to deal with dominant or submissive roles. There is no love, no aim to please, just an opportunistic understanding that the falconer affords it the easiest source of food and protection. It’s a matter of convenience, not love.”
The falcon took several stabs at the robot with its beak. Kesselring whistled, and the falcon hopped toward him and then took to the air, the robot still in its grip. It landed back on Kesselring’s gloved hand, the bot clutched in the talons of one foot.
“When it comes down to it,” continued Kesselring, reaching to take the small bot from the bird’s grip. He presented it with another morsel of red flesh. “At most, it’s a matter of trust: the bird trusts the falconer not to steal its food and to provide protection, and the falconer trusts the bird to hunt and return when called.” He lifted his hand and set the falcon free again. “Now which one of us is which?”
Jimmy unclasped his hands from behind his back. His face hardened. “Isn’t this what you wanted, Herman?” He lifted his hands, palms up. “Terra Nova laid down, the world at your feet? Happiness indices are at an all-time high, the populations of the world lulled into a pssi-induced coma while it funnels money into your accounts. Don’t tell me you did this for truth and beauty.”
“These disappearances are becoming problematic—”
“Did you imagine this would be trouble free? There are a lot of people—governments, corporations—that don’t like what’s happening. Don’t tell me that you didn’t think sacrificing a few lives would be necessary to save billions.”
“And Nancy has come to me with concerns,” Kesselring said, “details of a private psombie army, promises of eternal life.”
Jimmy nodded. “So this is coming from Nancy?”
Kesselring shook his head. “Not entirely, but we have concerns.”
“These are not just empty promises,” said Jimmy. “We are on the verge of that promised land that we started all this for, leading the world toward Atopia, the world without borders that has no end.”
The falcon screeched in the sky, trapping another flying bot.
Kesselring stood still. “That Patricia and I started this for, not you.”
“And now she is gone, and here you and I stand.” Jimmy dropped his arms.
Kesselring paused. While they were talking, Jimmy added layers around this reality, sectioning it off from the multiverse. Kesselring’s agents fought for position, but it was difficult to resist Jimmy’s strength. Kesselring was cut off from the outside world now.
“Let’s speak plainly.” Kesselring stood and faced Jimmy. “I am ready to allow your”—he searched for the right words—“indulgences, and to fully protect and support you with my resources, as long as these indulgences serve our common interest. In return, you share with me what you’re doing.”
They watched each other while scenarios played out in the background. Kesselring could feel Jimmy’s networks probing, feinting, as they sized each other up, their private display spaces filled with timelines that spread out from this nexus point.
“Agreed,” Jimmy said finally.
Their networks exchanged access and safeguard requests. Kesselring nodded. “And find Robert Baxter, will you? This is getting embarrassing.”
Jimmy nodded and smiled. “The final battle has begun, Herman, you should be proud of what you’ve achieved. You will soon be getting everything you deserve.” He turned and walked toward the trees, disappearing into them and toward the access tunnel to go below.
Kesselring waited until he felt Jimmy’s presence gone, and then initiated a sweep, cleansing the area. The falcon squawked in the grass, busy ripping the guts of the second bot it had captured. He ignored it and reached out with one of his phantom limbs to open an invisible door. It swung open into blackness, and Nancy stepped through, closing the tunnel behind her.
“You see?” she said. “Do you believe me now?”
13
HUMMING TO HIMSELF, Bunky flexed his motor cortex, feeling the thrum of his digger bots eating their way into the bedrock. After weeks of talking with underminers around the world, he was happy to get back to work. Thankfully, Sibeal and the glasscutters handled ongoing communications with the other groups, leaving him to get back to what he was really good at—digging.
It was a busy week, trying to juggle his contract work while working with Sibeal to search out and remove as much of the mystery crystal as possible. He offered to drop the contracts, but she insisted he keep them, saying they needed to maintain normalcy to keep their cover.
He didn’t mind. He liked being busy, and it helped keep him from wondering what happened to Zoraster. They hadn’t heard anything from the big monkey since they lost contact with him. Everyone feared the worst.
“What’s shakin’, Shaky?” he messaged to his partner who controlled the other half of their fleet of diggers. Shaky was two blocks west of him. They were both five hundred feet below Times Square.
“I’m drier than a witch’s tit, mate,” Shaky replied. It was the end of the day, or at least the end of the work day. He forwarded an image of a stallion charging across a grassy pla
in.
“Yes, I think it’s time for a beer at the White Horse, my friend.”
“One beer?!”
“Oh dear, did I say beer?” Bunky smiled. “I meant beers, my good man. Set those borer bots into a cross-grid . . .” He stopped mid-sentence and frowned. What the hell is that?
“What did you say, mate? The signal cut off. Hurry up, I’m thirsty!”
Bunky checked his networks. Bringing his awareness back into the pod of his construction mechanoid, he flicked the manual control switch for their largest tunnel-boring machine. It didn’t respond. Was it offline? He began running through a checklist.
“Hey, Bunk,” Shaky said, “I just lost contact with some of my diggers up three and four shafts.”
“Give me a sec.”
Out of the corner of an eye Bunky saw something, and reflexively he lifted one of his mechanoid’s arms. The next instant he was knocked backward as one of his pipe runners came flailing out of the darkness into him. Regaining his senses, he turned on all the lights in the tunnel, then leaned over to pick up the bot that smashed into him.
Before he could grab it, the bot wriggled around and shot straight at his head again.
He gripped the small bot in his mechanoid hand, having barely caught it before it would have brained him. It took him an instant to process. A malfunction? No, not a malfunction. The bot squirmed in his grip. This thing wants to kill me. “Shaky!” yelled Bunky. “Get the hell out of there!”
He crushed the bot and threw it aside.
His entire network of bots dropped from his network. An explosion lit up the tunnel behind him. He logged into the city sensors, and his jaw dropped. The giant boring machine, thirty feet across and half a football field long, reversed direction and was charging back up the tunnel toward them, heading directly for the Midtown den.
“RUN!” he screamed to Shaky as he turned and began sprinting his mechanoid into the blackness.
THE SEAS OF the south Atlantic were calm. The Alliance battle platform, its smooth black surface designed to cloak it from both kinetics and electromagnetics, was quiet on the outside, but inside, its slingshot systems were cycling up. Just over the horizon, ten miles away, the glass towers of Terra Nova glistened. A series of small panels, each no thicker than a man’s arm, opened up across the mile-wide surface of the platform.
Even cloaked, this raised alarms on Terra Nova.
The battle platform’s slingshots began unloading, the off-center rotating platform weapons hidden below spitting out thousands of incendiary pellets at several miles per second. The surface of the platform erupted in an inferno of super-heated plasma shockwaves. The ocean around the platform boiled. Three seconds later the island of Terra Nova was immersed in a miles-wide fireball, its own shield weapons staving off the initial attack.
“SIBEAL, DO YOU notice anything odd?” Sid asked, sitting in the White Horse.
Bunky and Shaky were supposed to be back for a pint soon, but he’d lost contact with them.
“What do you mean, odd?”
“There haven’t been any security alerts in the past two hours.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” She flashed a part of her mind over his data. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
It wasn’t that anything was wrong, just an absence of something being wrong—an anomaly. Not getting any security alerts had been soothing for a half an hour, but after an hour it became unusual. When two hours passed, Sid became downright suspicious. He began digging into the sensor logs, but then looked up. Something was roaring down one of the main arteries toward the den. Nothing was showing up on the sensors.
Sid grabbed Sibeal’s arm, pulling her away from the table just as Bunky’s mechanoid launched out of the darkness of the main tunnel, jumping to crash into the opposite wall just beside the pub.
At almost the same moment Shaky came skidding out of another tunnel. “Out of the way!” he yelled as the rock wall behind him crashed down and the boring machine launched itself into space and into the opposite wall. Slabs of rock rained down into the lower levels. The screaming began as people scrambled to get away.
Opening his eyes, Sid found himself face to face with Shaky. He had somehow cradled Sid and Sibeal beneath his mechanoid, protecting them. Grunting, Shaky began to lift himself up, a shower of rock and debris sliding off his back. The rotors of the borer were still going at full speed and it began grinding into the far wall, slowly dragging itself away as it ate into the rock.
An overlaid display opened in Sid’s optic channels. “You need to see this,” said Vicious, Sid’s proxxi. Reports flooded in about mass arrests. Sid watched as the underground den in Rio they worked with erupted in flames. An orbital view of the South Atlantic showed Alliance platforms opening fire on Terra Nova. In Montana the protective shell of the Commune lit up as it was attacked by drones.
A coordinated global attack was underway.
The Ascetics were under assault by police forces across America. Mikhail Butorin chimed in with a report. Sibeal locked into Sid’s workspace and they began plotting escape routes while setting secondary communication channels with their partners.
“Don’t bother,” said a voice from the gaping hole in the wall above them. From the darkness, an army of black-uniformed troops in body armor poured into the den. Their faces were covered by smooth black masks. One of them stood motionless in the middle while the rest flowed around him, and addressed Sid. “It’s been a long time, my friend.”
Sid stared at the masked face. “Do I know you?” he asked. Then the featureless mask morphed into a face that Sid recognized. Fear jangled his fingertips. He pushed Sibeal behind him. “What do you want?”
Jimmy smiled at Sid. One of his splinters was inhabiting the psombie trooper that stared down at them.
“You never were much for social ritual, were you, Sid?” Jimmy’s psombie jumped down and stepped across the ragged pile of rocks onto the patio of the White Horse. “Maybe a nice, hi, how are you? It’s been a long time, my friend.”
“Are we friends, Jimmy?” Sid asked, backing away with Sibeal behind him. He was projecting escape routes into the future, but as fast he could create new scenarios, Jimmy cut them down and overpowered him. Sid was used to fighting in the gameworlds where he was swift and brave. Now his skin prickled at the naked danger. His hands shook.
Jimmy nodded. “I thought we were.”
“Then why did you almost just kill me?” Sid looked around the den. The psombie troops were collecting the survivors. There were crushed bodies under the rocks.
“Not my choice,” Jimmy said, shrugging, “not anymore. This is an Alliance military operation. After what happened in Arunchal—”
“We didn’t do that,” Sid interrupted. Was this the same Jimmy he knew and grew up with? The meeting on Terra Nova flooded his mind. Am I face to face with some ancient evil? He looked into Jimmy’s eyes, but sensed nothing, just a blank emotional wall.
“Then come with me and prove it.” Jimmy edged closer. “Your Grilla friend has been very uncooperative.”
Sibeal pulled Sid aside. “You have Zoraster?”
“We do,” admitted Jimmy, coming another step closer.
“I know you think you’re the fastest gun in the network,” Jimmy laughed. “In fact, it’s one of the reasons I always liked you. But you can’t win this fight.”
“Then why don’t you come get me,” Sid said more bravely than he felt. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve. The other psombie guards formed a circle around them. He might be able to take out one or two.
Jimmy backed up a step and sighed. “We can do this the hard way, or the easy way.” A new wave of psombie troops appeared at the gaping hole in the rock wall.
Sid’s shoulders slumped. Better to wait for another moment. He could use some more time to probe the networks of the psombies, see if he could hack into Jimmy’s
connection. Maybe it was an opportunity. “Okay, we’ll come.” He started a private network with Sibeal.
“Good.” Jimmy crossed the last few steps between. “I need to know where Bob is.”
Sid shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I know you know,” sighed Jimmy. “And I know I can’t hack into your networks remotely. But there are other ways.”
Sid backed up, but there was nowhere to go. Psombie guards grabbed them from behind.
“And more important . . .” Jimmy paused, leaning down to pick up a shard of shattered glass.
“What?”
Jimmy held the sliver of glass up to Sid’s eye. “Where’s Willy, Sid?”
14
FAITH WASN’T SOMETHING that came easily to Vince. He had it once, but it had been ripped from him, replaced with a need to control. Sitting alone in his cell, Vince knew it was this that drove him to build Phuture News—his desire to control, a futile attempt to hold destiny in his hands.
But in the end, his creation had controlled him. He had robbed himself of his own freedom.
Trapped in a jail cell, he felt free for the first time in years. All he had left was faith now. It was a funny thing, to feel free in a jail. He smiled and pulled a woolen blanket around his shoulders, then settled into the metal cot.
There was nothing to do but wait.
After cooperating and giving them his information, Colonel Kramer transferred him into the minimum-security brig at the Anacostia-Bolling base just across the Potomac from the Pentagon. Vince bargained each bit of freedom—for a shave, for a shower, for a cell with a tiny view of blue sky—for every new piece of information.
Soon enough they’d discover the lies, but that wasn’t in Vince’s control.
Not anymore.
He did everything he could. His struggle to believe the Terra Novan story had been replaced by the simple idea of doing the right thing. In his mind, that meant sticking up for people close to you, so he carried out his end of the plan Sid and Bob laid out.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 26