Sheriff Proudstar resigned himself and bit down on his cigar, “Everybody hit the deck!”
The deputies dropped.
The sheriff drew his sidearm and fired a single shot at the big borg, followed by a whistle, “Come get me, sparky!”
The beast snarled, taking the bait as Proudstar pulled his legs out. He grabbed up his M4, loaded a feeder round and marched up to the hovroad.
Azarov heard machine gun fire, spat-spat, spat-spat and bullets striking metal. The cyborg roared, there was a scream and the gunfire stopped. Sounds of metal being shredded. Azarov waited half a minute. The borg did not return. She poked her head outside the tunnel to lead the deputies away just as one of the Harrier jets fell screeching from the sky and exploded on the hovroad, filling the ditch with acid from its battery core.
11:54 am – Six Minutes Before Event.
The aquarium lights went dark. The holointerface went dark. The six holoscreens went dark. In a room with walls the color of pitch, everything was blacker than the devil’s soul.
Two seconds passed, three, four…
How much longer? Tara pushed.
From somewhere in the lightless room, Dax’s mind responded, Not much…
Five seconds later, illumination returned. Everything seemed normal, but the lights now flickered intermittently.
“A little longer than last time?” asked Dax.
“.743 sec_onds longer,” said Joan, her computerized voice warbling in the com. “Remote destruction of all drone black box data, is is is_complete, private_and Doug_dog)_Dougla_s County Law Enf_o-rc=ment are clean.”
“How many dolphins?”
“Time is compressing at an expo_nential rate. I am combat-bating two Chilean white dolphins operat-ing a Pasterski class supercomp…_Office of the Architect, inform_I_I estimate they____defeat m_algorithmic firewalls in_in less than 190 seconds. Compromise of hard firewall will occur within five seconds aft_er followi__.”
“Can I still activate the self destruct sequence?”
“Affirmative. Th_e activ_ation lever will have to____manually thrown,” said Joan.
“Contingencies for William are in the Secondcity cloud?”
“Affi-r_mative, Daxane Jul____Abner. All rrrequ_wested data at Secondcity now-now. Journal_abner_daxane trans-trans_ferred to portable_e drive on control_. Control table. Time is compressing at an exponential rate. With____removal of_____tether, shall I direct unit AK9MIL ALPHA____any specific action? aside______callback?
“Let him kill those who he deems deserve it,” said Dax, his voice dispassionate.
Tara had turned her back to the holoscreen array. She never long held interest for the technical details of running a still. That sort of logic was for Dorothy and her perfectly organized mind. Tara much preferred to lose herself in the fluid wash of light and color that was Joan’s 200,000 liter aquarium habitat. Time seemed to stop on the far side of that glass. It made Tara wish she was a dolphin. Not a dolphin who drove supercomputers. Just a dolphin, free in the open sea.
Such were the implacable dreams of Tara Adler Dean. She watched Joan closely now with a knitted brow, leaning forward with elbows on her knees. The dolphin’s tail swept up and down, churning the water. The electroencephalogram terminals held her in place and kept her from ramming her beak into the glass. Her normal gray-blue color had been exchanged for the deathly white of old bone. Every few seconds the small dolphin would freeze, float inertly, then come to.
Even the dolphin, moved to the last by Dax’s hand.
There was no force to be appeased, no sacrifice that could put a halt to the events her love had put in motion.
You are going to die, Joan.
Tara spun back to the holoscreen array, tucking her bloodied, scratched and muddy legs beneath her. She ignored the pain of lacerations from splinter and forest. She ignored the ache and filth and stink. Her eyes fixed on holoscreen six. A simple, 2.5 dimensional, low-light projection showed THOR charging to the top of the hovroad where he was met by Sheriff Proudstar. The sheriff madly puffed a cigar and opened fire on the cyborg point blank with a huge gray machine gun. The bullets danced off THOR’S armor, tossing sparks as though someone was attacking him with a chainsaw. Sixty seconds earlier, they had lost their hack into the sheriff’s department comstream. Joan did not have the resources any longer. For the first time Tara could remember, they were flying blind with a camera drone only. They were living life without the sweet protection of knowing everything all the time.
Tara had never felt more alive.
She blinked, emotionless as THOR moved in a flash and pinned the sheriff to the hovroad. The cyborg snarled and smashed the man’s leg, popping the femur like a twig. Proudstar’s wails of agony were strangely unreal without any sound to accompany them. The sheriff lost consciousness. THOR flicked his body down the far side of the embankment where it rolled into a stand of tall grass. THOR immediately charged the nearest C17 Globemaster.
The cyborg drove its jaws into the underbelly of the C17 and dragged the entire plane a few centimeters off its docking mounts across the pavement. Tara imagined the terror of the drone drivers inside, Specialists McBride and Langley. Did they have children? Were they beautiful? Or were they as ugly as their mean, shrill voices sounded over com? The women seemed unreal, like caricatures, bots without souls. She watched THOR re-establish his grip and rip the giant cargo plane’s hull open wide like a sardine can, far enough to actually climb inside. The plane rocked violently as he ripped apart the aircraft, seeking his prey. The sergeants had been instructed by their commander to remain in their emergency driver cages.
Another great call… Trooper Apollo.
THOR soon erupted from the gash in the side of the plane with one of the women in his jaws. His claws were dripping with blood from dispatching the other. The blonde headed bot driver screamed and flailed as he snapped her into halves. Blood and intestines dripped down onto the gravel shoulder of the hovroad beneath his claws.
Tara watched the two Air Force Harrier jump jets arrive. They hovered above the Globemasters and THOR.
The Abner Family Pumpkin & Gourd security drones had retreated to a position 300 meters above the barn. From that distance, even with maximum stabilization, the image of the hovroad was shaky. Tara watched with eyes wide as the long, black, tentacle-like cables that supported the 24 hanging co2 scrubbers on C643’s belly dropped in front of the drones’ magnified view.
The first boxy, greenish-black co2 filter the size of an ocean vessel shipping container slammed into the pumpkin field close to the trashed hulks of the CRAB bots, exploding in an orange fireball of carbon dioxide resin. The belly of the blimp broke through the clouds next, seeming to fill the sky as its scrubbing receptacles ruptured below it like dirty coal bombs.
“It’s going to land on Purple Tree,” said Dax.
The dirigible itself was the size of a cruise ship. It consumed the horizon. The co2 scrubbing chambers exploded steadily, one after the other, each sending up a fountain of fire and black smoke.
Tara saw a flash down the field. Magnified. The colonel, Marcus Apollo, had exited the rear C17 and fired a lightning gun at THOR at point blank range. The neurological footprint of the time she had allured the man on Interstate 70 came before Tara’s eyes, unwanted, precise in its engramatic detail. She could hear the man’s fear from that day, his misunderstanding. She could feel an echo of the same sensation now. She knew he cried out, a raging heart long since devoured by fury and hate.
THOR knew no such empathy.
The cyborg twisted in a flashing semicircle and decapitated The Butcher of Chābahār with a hooked dew claw. The body dropped. His bald, shining head tumbled down the gravel shoulder of the hovroad and came to rest face-up beside an intact pumpkin. The last thing Tara saw before the drone lost its visual was THOR leaping onto the rear C17, crushing the cockpit and using its wing as a springboard to attack the nearest Harrier jet.
“Can THOR survive long enough to get back here
, Joan? Two Harriers?” asked Dax. “We must leave no trace of his presence.”
“1 Harrier only_rremains at this time. Har_rier employs tem_p_oral seek_ing G…_Gatling guns with ttian-al_…um piercing nanoflachettes. Standeee-rd ant_-cyborg heaaa_vy weaaa_pons system. Time. Time is com__p…ressing at an expo_nen…tial raaa_teee…. ”
Tara was glad it was her in the aquarium. It would have fractured Dorothy’s heart to see Joan’s connection to the human world collapse.
I’ll see you at the rendezvous, sister.
Later that evening. All would be forgiven.
“Joan, give us the expanded view of scrubber C643 across all screens,” said Dax.
“On scr_eee-n…”
Tara spun to face the dolphin. Her tail had stopped thrashing, though her interface diodes remained green.
“How long do you have, Joan?” asked Tara sadly.
Her voice became steady and clear for the last time, “Not very long on this side of the world. I shall not see you again, Tara Adler Dean. Nor you, Daxane Julius Abner. May my absorption bring you peace.”
Dax’s lips formed a thin line. He chose not to watch the dolphin’s final moments. His eyes were fixed on the holoscreen array. Outside, the last of the dangling co2 scrubbers had exploded, digging into the soil. Their wrecked fuselages acted like anchors and catapulted the massive dirigible forward and down in an accelerating kinetic arc.
The blimp, that far off would have looked like an insect in the sky, overflowed the six holoscreens. Its iron-toned, fabric body passed perpendicular across the driveway, putting ground zero in Purple Tree Farms’ 5,000 acre field of harvest-ready marijuana. The dirigible’s thin endoskeleton crumpled. A hydrogen fireball engulfed the sky, licking the clouds. Black-orange flames the color of a dying pumpkin raged and the clouds were parted from the mushroom cloud of heat. Gray billows of smoke from the flash-incinerated marijuana roiled up, making new clouds. Dax unconsciously moved his hand to hold Tara’s, together watching the silent devastation outside. It was beyond surreal, coms down, hidden in aquarium control where they heard nothing but the quiet humming of Joan’s habitat oxygenators.
As the last of the dirigible’s tensile fabric disintegrated into flames, Dax looked at Tara, “I believe that’s our cue, darling.”
Her attention lingered on the destruction outside. Smoke and fire filled the entire southern horizon, making it impossible to see the hovroad or THOR or the Air Force Harrier gunship.
“How much longer does Joan have?” Tara asked, feeling foolish right after she said it.
The dolphin’s body floated free, upside down, listless and pale, slow-spinning adrift in the artificial currents of the aquarium. Her eyes were glassy. The LED’s on the electroencephalogram terminals blinked a dirty crimson.
The peripheral lighting failed. Blackness surrounded them.
“Take my hand,” said Dax’s courtly voice, edged with pain.
He activated a flashlight and limped ahead. They ran their hands along the glass wall of Joan’s habitat. Dax stopped beside the insulated room housing the Hadassa supercomputing mainframe and fusion generator.
Illuminated by the glow of the biometric security scanner, Tara looked with fear on the insulated door.
Dax pressed the flashlight into her hands, “I’ll meet you in the warehouse in twenty seconds. If I’m not out there in thirty, come for me.”
Tara nodded and disappeared into the hallway, grateful to be away from the fusion room.
Dax placed his hand into the scanner. The heavy steel door swung open with a pneumatic rush and he passed through. The room’s light was tinted blue by the pulsing glow of the fusion reactor.
Dax limped forward.
The manual self destruct was a thirty centimeter steel lever painted bright yellow on the far side of the chamber.
Another step.
Dax exhaled, breathless. The first wave of temporal psychosis hit. He dragged his wounded leg. Violet blood oozed from the edges of the failing epoxyderm patch, slicking his shoe.
Perhaps I will marry her. Don’t lecture me on class. I’m sorry about the dirtied clothes.
Dax heard a man’s voice reply over the hum of the fusion core, “I can see you now. This is how I am repaid? You have become an even greater disgrace…”
Another step towards the lever, Dax frowned miserably, talking to the voices in his head, “Your insanity brought us to this point! There was no Vision, only subjugation!” He bellowed at the wall, but his voice sounded like whale squeaks and clicks, those sounds 20th century marine biologists had mistaken for simple sonar. “If you can’t understand me, who will then?”
He imagined blood was falling from his amber eyes. His pupils felt hot, the blackness of them sucking up the light of an evil sun. His wounded leg felt like a bag of wet sand. He dragged it forward.
His hand wrapped around the shining lever. The metal felt soft.
Pull it before your skin starts to melt.
The lever fell with an easy click.
“Now I see your tiny game, built by little minds and little thoughts,” said the voice.
Dax shouted at the floor, “You let her be ripped apart by animals.”
“To prevent war.”
“War is the only choice you gave us!” he said desperately.
An overhead klaxon began to chime repetitively in the bedroom sized space, “179 seconds until fusion core destabilization. Implosion imminent. Please evacuate.”
Sweat poured from Dax’s forehead, mingling with the blood and soot.
He looked down and babbled to himself, “This was my finest suit. After coming so far. You are the there, and here is now. With Joan!” he reached out, blinded, clawing the rubcrete walls incoherently, “I swim, she walks, we are floating pylons inside the peace, the pax, the peace, the pax, Dax…”
“DAX!” Tara screamed as loudly as she could, dragging him the last few inches back into the aquarium.
He fell on top of her and she kicked the reinforced metal door shut. Blackness returned. Normal space time returned.
Dax winced, “Did it happen? Did you see my mother’s gown? It was so long, nearly flowing to the floor. Did you see how long it was, darling…? I got my suit dirty. I…”
She slapped him, “Shut up! We have to move!” She was already on her feet, bracing, pulling him, “You were only in there 25 seconds. You started screaming so I came back.”
“…but I need to marry you. My mother will want to attend! I want to…”
Tara rolled her eyes. She grabbed his head and forced the thought, Move with me! into his mind. More easily then, she pulled him up by the arm and lead him through the hall into the warehouse wielding the thin beam of the flashlight ahead of them. They made their way across the corner of the warehouse. The still’s big brass fractionating columns shone in brief bursts of reflection as the flashlight beam passed over them. The two humanoid warehouse robots stood in shadowed silence beside the stairs leading up. Their expressions were vacant, haunted.
The agony in Dax’s leg was so great by the time they made it to the top of the long flight of stairs that he had to hop. He put most of his weight on Tara.
His sense of standard time was returning, “How long do we have?” he asked as they made their way across the barn.
From outside, they could now hear the roar of fires and the thrumming spat-tak-spat-tak-spat-tak of machine guns and throbbing jet turbines in the distance. The smell of marijuana smoke was thick. Even inside the barn, a white haze clung to the rafters.
“No more than two minutes, maybe a little less.”
Halfway across the asphalt floor, Dax smiled weakly and paused.
An expression of elation crossed his face, “We’re going to make it, my darling,” he said. “It will take another sixty seconds before implosion begins in earnest. But I love you! More than anything!” His bloodshot, tiger yellow eyes washed into hers, “You are the reason for it all, my sweet. Why I live and die. I should very much like to
make you my wife. If you will marry me?”
Tara started to cry, surprised that she had any tears left in her body, “Dogdamn you! Yes, fuck! Done! You’re still living in the crazy…” But as she allowed herself to fall into his eyes, she knew it was true. Tara pulled him so tight that the heat of his dirty skin burned, “I love you more than stardust…” She brushed a bit of soot from his forehead, “You are the only one my soul has ever known, Daxane.” She laughed and kissed him delicately on the cheek, then pulled away, “Now can we please get the sky outta this shitbox?!”
Dax inclined his head towards the door, “After you, my rose.”
He let her lead him out of the barn to the Lincoln, docked and waiting just outside in the burning war zone that had for near a decade been his home.
High Noon.
Danny Everquist screamed in frustration, smashing his hand against his desk, “No! No! No!”
The moment the clock struck noon, the holographic keyboard reappeared. It did not flicker but projected normally. He madly began typing manual retrieval commands into the mainframe, but there was no trace.
The drone’s stream data he had been archiving all morning had vanished. The telemetry, video, the intrastream chatter. Everything… wiped. Wiped from the department hard drives. Wiped from the Govcloud. The datastreams from the third copy he had been making for himself on his 500tb binary thumb drive where Dina lived in her virtual lounge were even wiped.
It was the same process that had erased the information each time he had attempted to surreptitiously record conversations with Joan. The computer said it was recording, showed an ever increasing accumulation of data on the drives. But when he went back to review, the directories were just filled with thousands of terabytes of emptiness.
“Do you wish to reformat Govcloud Drive: J at this time?” asked the com merrily.
Absorption: Phase 03 (The Eighteenth Shadow) Page 25