Absorption: Phase 03 (The Eighteenth Shadow)

by Grafton, Jon Lee

“For the love of Dog,” said Danny.

  “For the love of Dog is not an actionable command. Do you wish to…”

  “Mute.” Danny collapsed back in his chair, then sat up in alarm and tapped his combud, “Dina? Baby?” he gulped. “Tell me you’re okay?”

  The tangi-gram’s voice replied quickly in a whisper, “I am okay, Danechka! I am watching on the lounge screen. More covering my eyes and weeping than watching, if you want for real. My efforts for peace, they are for nothing. I am dressing in black for a month.”

  “They aren’t for nothing, baby. We have each other,” said Danny.

  “I love you, Danechka.”

  “Do you want to come out?”

  “No!” she said emphatically. “I am still watching, I kid. I have my flag and a tiny vodka cocktail in hand. Something is happening to the stream. You go. Save Joan!”

  “I’ll try. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Danechka,” said the girl’s high voice, then Dina was gone.

  Danny looked at his holoscreen array. Something was happening. Available holostream bandwidth was steadily dropping. It had been slow at first, but the capacity strain was growing exponentially. Some systems functioned normally. Others were growing increasingly glitchy.

  Danny tried to focus on the task at hand.

  I need proof that all of this…

  He had even thought to carbon the streams from the Purple Tree Farms security drones that had witnessed most of the carnage at ground level.

  Of course those units were wiped clean.

  As was the backup drive at Purple Tree’s on-site security office. As well as their redundant Govcloud allocation. The two Purple Tree Farms security drone pilots working the undesirable Saturday morning shift had no doubt thought they were recording the show of their lives.

  Now they would have only memories to live with. Fallible, human memories.

  Nothing was considered less admissible in a court of law.

  “Nicely played, Joan,” he said. “But what else have you done?”

  Everquist’s first damaged drone had run out of power and spun down. The second was still in the game. Minutes earlier, co2 scrubbing dirigible C643 had collapsed out of the sky, setting the fields of Purple Tree Farms ablaze in a mushroom cloud of hydrogen fire that filled the wind with a sweet, earthy aroma of burning jane. The explosion had knocked out all com traffic between Danny and the sheriff’s team. The drone fed him real time video, nothing else. He had no life signs on Colonel Apollo’s team. Or his fellow deputies.

  Everquist cautiously moved the drone back east, centering it over the pumpkin field. Danny split the vidstream from the starboard and port cameras across his holoscreens. The monitor on the left showed the barn. The monitor on the right showed the hovroad.

  The THOR unit had destroyed one of the AV9C Harrier jets. Danny had not witnessed the attack and, unfortunately, had just discovered he had no record of it or anything else. Judging from the shearing claw marks along the top of the rear Globemaster’s fuselage, he could only guess that the cyborg had climbed on top of the huge cargo plane and bounded off.

  The THOR unit jumped off the Globemaster, caught the AV9C’s wing?

  Or nose, or some other part of the Harrier in his jaws, dragged it to the ground where it exploded in a ditch on the pumpkin field side of the hovroad. The fire from the explosion had probably burned Danny’s fellow deputies alive. There was no sign of them. The corrugated metal drainage tunnel had flooded with battery acid from the downed fighter jet, judging by its location. Blood stained the hovroad and the sides of the Globemasters’ mangled fuselages. Two corpses in military fatigues lay on the pavement. One had been bitten in half, the other decapitated.

  The clouds had reformed, gray and miserable. The rain drizzled, relentless. On the left monitor Everquist watched, eyes numb, as Mr. Abner and Tara Dean got into the waiting hovsedan and floated it down the driveway. The pack of Coyotes appeared. Danny watched the little cyborgs trot along behind the Lincoln, moving single file and doing their best to keep to the ditches.

  It would take Abner and Dean a minute or two to make the hovroad as they maneuvered through the carnage of the field. Danny bit his lip in frustration. Who was he going to ping? The police? Animal control? The Army… cyborg soldiers and human, were scattered and dead. The Air Force was there now and had already lost half their deployment.

  Tara Dean had arrived on this land in a stolen, wrecked hovcar nearly three years earlier.

  Everyone assumed she had disappeared. Or was killed.

  In fact, she had moved into the closest farmhouse. Danny shook his head. A day ago, the scene would have been shocking, something to see. Now he was distressed that these criminals might not make it to freedom.

  You run now or you die…

  Meanwhile, the stream continued to clog itself. Danny typed a command, piggy-backing onto a packet and examined the response.

  Banks?

  Thousands, no, millions, correction, billions of pings were coming through the Govcloud servers. People trying to access their bank accounts.

  Why?

  Danny had incoming Ipv7’s lighting up his holotab; sheriffs from the next county over, FBI, MTF, Air Force, more damn Army. The nearest Federal reinforcements, six more AV9C Air Force jump Harriers, wouldn’t arrive from Missouri for another ten minutes.

  Abner and Tara Dean won’t make it far without Joan. But I could…

  Danny looked at the barn one more time. It looked strange.

  Smaller?

  He was distracted. Motion on the opposite monitor caught his eye.

  The second Harrier AV9C was pummeling THOR from the safety of a 300 meter elevation. Danny’s holotab still fed him text data from the drone’s primary scanner. There was no sound. No com. Watching either monitor was like viewing a real time silent movie. Danny felt like he couldn’t even breathe. His eyes were red and dry. He was on his seventh can of Mountain Dew.

  Yet drained as he was, Everquist could not help but feel compelled and inspired. The actions of this dying war cyborg seemed heroic.

  All part of Joan’s plan.

  THOR tried to hide in the woods, but the trees were too thick for him to maneuver. Wherever he ran, he would never leave the borders of the property. A 600 acre farm was barely enough room for the borg to achieve full velocity over dry ground, let alone across a muddy field pock-marked with cyborg carcasses and pumpkin guts. As he ran among the trees, he savaged them with his jaws, knocking left and right, snapping old oaks and walnuts like pencils, but this only slowed his progress. The swiveling, turret-mounted Gatling gun on the belly of the Harrier hacked at him mercilessly. Sparks and dust fires sprouted off his nickel-toned armor. The customized learning algorithms Danny had programmed into the background of his holotab began feeding him answers to the questions he had not yet asked.

  A Perpetual Reload Temporal Seeking .40 Caliber Molecular Disrupting Nanochem Flechette Cannon was the technical title for the machine gun on the anti-cyborg Harrier.

  The name used by Air Force jockies was DOGSburner.

  The flechettes were tipped with lonsdaleite, a substance mined on the lunar penal colonies with a molecular carbon structure 58% harder than that of a Terran diamond. Once a flechette round was embedded in the titanalum armor, thousands of nanobots armed with particle drills were deployed. The particle drills pulled the protons in the alloy free from their orbit far enough to cause the metal to soften.

  A DOGSburner destroyed from the inside out.

  Those pilots said they had no word on borg activity…

  Everquist hated watching the cyborg die, helpless.

  Helpless because you are utterly faithful.

  The unit no longer had a driver.

  It all comes back to the cowboy. But if he’s not driving… who is?

  THOR had returned to the field to gain momentum. His left hind leg was failing, dragging him slower and slower as he pulled through the field’s muck. His armor weakened, the Harrier no
w opened fire with larger air to ground ordinance. The anti-tank missiles knocked him to the ground with brutal force. He wailed with anger and desperation but was up again almost immediately. The cyborg kept limping, running, lunging forward.

  “Go to the barn, big guy! There’s nowhere else!” said Danny, surprising himself.

  Everquist glanced at the barn on his left holoscreen. He squinted. Something had definitely changed. The roof was sagging. The timbers had split. The iron girders hidden beneath the simulated wood were melting down like propane-torched spoons. He could see the three drones that obviously belonged to Abner Family Pumpkin & Gourd, LLC circling above the barn’s collapsing roof. They floated, listless in an invisible spiral whirlpool in the sky.

  Danny understood.

  Thor is going back to Joan.

  Danny rubbed his eyes in disbelief, “Jeezus… destabilize the fusion core and you’ll scramble every holodrive for ten kilometers.”

  He said the words quietly, with appreciation.

  Air to ground ordinance slammed THOR into the mud again and again. And again.

  He’s not fighting back.

  The once beautiful, geometrically perfect armor on THOR’s back was now a melted pile of slag. He gained the hard surface of the asphalt circle drive. He dug divots from the pavement with his three functional paws, locked claws and launched himself into the sinkhole that the barn was fast becoming. The Harrier floated overhead, raising its elevation as it continued launching ordinance at the cyborg. THOR clung like a bat to the metal rails of what had once been the barn’s roof. His armored lids dropped down, covering his vidorbs. THOR did not move again. The blue glow was gone. Yet the Harrier pilot continued to fire.

  “That’s it, moron!” yelled Danny at his holoscreens with disgust. “Keep shooting missiles at a gravotemporal black hole!”

  He still had no coms with the Harrier, and could not hack in manually.

  Dolphins…

  The rate of implosion increased exponentially once THOR leapt onto the roof of the barn. Danny winced as the big cyborg was sucked down, crushed into molecular nothing between the dense girders and fractured bergs of cement that had made up the barn’s floor. Danny saw a momentary spark of light. Copper? Metal and glass? Steam and roiling water gleaming up through the rubble from what looked like a subterranean warehouse. The rate of collapse accelerated. The dirt ten meters around the barn began crumbling inwards, down, down, down.

  The barn was gone. The drones were gone. THOR was gone.

  Fifteen seconds later, a massive sinkhole 300 meters in diameter was all that remained. The barn and everything mechanical in it had been smashed at the atomic level and pulled into the fusion reactor’s wormhole.

  On the right side of the lawn, the last of the farmhouse burned, falling into itself. Only the original, 19th century chimney remained standing. In the forest behind the lawn, the bone white blades of the wind turbine hung as still as silence itself, half-hidden in windless haze and drizzle.

  Danny didn’t know what else to do. He banked the drone.

  I have to follow Mr. Abner and Ms. Dean. If anyone will know about the dolphins, it’s them.

  The silky, black hovcar had just made the hovroad and was cautiously floating around the wreckage of the C17 Globemasters.

  Maybe they can still escape.

  12:04 pm – Four Minutes After Event.

  “Dax! Talk to me! Please!”

  “Float east, my darling. Float east until William pings… then we all go west.”

  Those were the last words he had spoken.

  Dax had lost consciousness as soon as she lowered him into the passenger seat. She reached out with her mind. He was alive. She could feel the beating of his heart, fluttering, light and fast in contrast to the steady rhythm of her own. They made their way, hovering slowly, following the hard surface of the driveway away from the barn, away from the burning farmhouse. The second jet was roaring overhead, spitting machine gun fire at THOR.

  THOR, the impossible, patient giant, who before this morning Tara had seen only as a slumbering guard protecting Joan, protecting them all. The warehouse was the only place he had ever known until this day. And he protected them yet, drawing the fire of the warplane as they slipped away. Tara was reminded of the night she had arrived on Dax Abner’s doorstep, fleeing for her life from the slaughterhouse. It was time to flee back the way she had come.

  East.

  She looked over, “Betties like me were born to fly, baby.”

  Dax’s leg oozed blood. His breath labored. The hovcar bumped as they passed over the fat cables that had supported the co2 scrubbers, one after the other, dangling like broken nipples from a torched udder. The cables littered the driveway and field. The burned out, black boxes of the scrubbers themselves were large as hovcargo boxes, each crushed and partially buried in the mud.

  Tara could feel the Coyotes. They were following her faithfully.

  Stupidly.

  Their love was blind.

  She pushed a thought to Coyote One, Hide. Wait for me. You are my children, I will return.

  The dashboard holoscreen chimed, distracting her.

  An NAUS Federal Homeland Security logo appeared as the com said, “Attention, citizens. You are presently located within the boundaries of a Federal crime scene. Halt, and await further instruction from law enforcement author…”

  “Com mute. Manual override, minimum hovlev gradient, no outside streams, engage firewall,” said Tara resolutely.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the Lincoln’s onboard AI. “Do you wish to block transmissions from Abner Family Pumpkin & Gourd employees and contractors as well?”

  “No! Is there incoming?”

  “Not presently. Transmissions from company affiliates only will be allowed through. Manual control engaged. Thank you, Tara Dean.”

  Tara loved floating the heavy, armored MKZ. Dax had long since reprogrammed the fleet of company Lincolns so they could not be easily hacked from an external source. Manual meant manual.

  All the same, she had to float infuriatingly slow down the driveway. The mutilated, bronze carcasses of RIOT bots were sprinkled amidst the scorched earth. Giant craters loomed. A few orange pumpkins, still intact, drew the eye, and to her left the blackened fields of Purple Tree Farms smoldered sweetly, damp smoke like upside down waterfalls rising to meet the gray.

  Somewhere beyond the windows were the shredded, melted remains of SIEGFRIED, FREYA, SNOTRA and LOFN. The Rottweilers who had run to their deaths for them.

  Tara swallowed the misery of that thought as the Lincoln made the edge of the hovroad, sledding past the thrashed bodies of the big planes that had brought the deadly CRAB units. Smears of human blood stained the clawed fuselage and folded wings of the plane nearest as she floated the black hovcar past.

  Then, just like that, the hovroad opened up, a lean, clean line before her that bisected the dappled, smoky horizon.

  “Float east, my darling. Float east until William pings…”

  “What good ever came of going east?” she asked the dashboard and slammed her foot against the accelerator.

  The hovcar’s powerful prop fans punched them back into the seats. The Lincoln MKZ’s morpho-adaptive seat belts automatically extended, wrapping around their bodies to secure them. The fields on either side turned to a blur as they rocketed away.

  She listened for Dax’s heartbeat. Still there, weak but steady.

  “It’s much easier to flee for your life when the hovcar’s com isn’t bitching at you, don’t you think, love?” she said conversationally.

  Tara reached and put her hand tenderly on his leg, then clutched the wheel as they came over a hill and she swerved to miss an old farm hovtruck lumbering in the opposite direction towards the city.

  The dashboard holoscreen flickered, static at first. She kept her eyes on the windshield HUD. Velocity 205 kph. The dashboard flickered again, this time displaying the text, INCOMING STREAM.

  Tara felt her hopes r
ise, “William?!”

  The holoscreen projected a black graphic triangle. She had seen this emblem before. A thousand times.

  But where?

  The triangle of Vision! Words appeared below the graphic, INCOMING STREAM – OTA.GOV

  “Nooo!” she screamed. “Computer, no outside streams!”

  The voice that responded in the comdot was not that of the hovcar’s computer. An elderly man’s face appeared in the dash. He looked miserly but well kept, with thin lips and white hair. His eyes were closed.

  Like Dax with fifty years on him.

  When the man opened his eyes, a splitting pain punched her skull. The transmission flickered. The man’s eyes were… so orange. She glanced at the hovroad, then looked back. His face was contorted in pain as well, but his eyes gleamed, pupils black and huge, focused on Dax’s lifeless form.

  “What have you done to my son?” he hissed with eloquence.

  Tara snapped instinctively, “Back off, grandpa! Dax’s father is dead!”

  The man glowered at her, then glanced away, grasping his temple, “Foolish girl. The reign of your black dolphin has ended. I will reclaim my heir.” He squinted like a vulture, “I know you, Tara Adler. Your family is the mop I used to clean the filth off this nation.”

  Tara’s hands slipped briefly from the wheel. The vitreous words slashed at her. The nasty, wizened face flickered on the screen, but she forced herself to look at it again.

  She finally understood, pushing the thought, the Architect.

  Fury consumed her eyes until they were black, blacker than they had ever been, the green, lightning irises completely gone.

  The old man recoiled as she spat back at him, “You will never have Daxane!”

  The man drew his lips back like a wounded horse.

  Just like Dax when he is hurt. This is freaky.

  The Architect tried to look at her face but obviously could not, still he said, “You talk with your father’s trashy mouth, no doubt breed with your mother’s trashy organ. Daxane may sit beside you now, but the sky darkens fast, fugitive.”

  She made herself keep looking at the burning face on the dashboard holoscreen, her brow fierce with determination, “One day, Richard, I will come for you. I’ll pull the eyes from your head with my own hands. Dax belongs to me!”