“I’m sorry I led you to this, my love,” Aldous said, his voice nearly failing him as he struggled to keep his gaze fixed on the death-bringers.
“It’s not over yet,” Samantha replied. “We’ll take more than a few of them with us.”
“No!” Aldous quickly shouted, turning to Samantha and the other post-humans assembled. “We’re not killers. They’re the ones that are here for war, not us. We won’t lose sight of who we are!”
“It’s a little beyond that now, don’t you think?” Samantha replied. “They’re here to kill us.”
“It’s not that simple,” Aldous answered, turning back to the rapidly assembling force opposing them. “If they suspected we were here, they could have deployed a tactical nuke. There’s no need for all of this...this show.”
“Then what do they want?” Sanha shouted from amongst the increasingly large group of assembled post-humans.
“I don’t know. To negotiate our surrender?” Aldous conjectured.
“Or to look us in the eye,” Samantha suggested, “and make sure they get every last one of us.”
Aldous didn’t counter Samantha’s suggestion; it was plausible. Her words had sent a palpable spike in tension in what was already a barely controlled terror amongst those assembled. He turned to them and called out, “A show of hands! Who wishes to make a run for it? We will do our best to cover your escape!”
At first, no hands went up.
“This will be your one and only chance!” Aldous shouted.
A long handful of seconds passed before the first hand went up. Once one went into the air, several others followed. A few seconds later, nearly half of those assembled had raised their hands.
Aldous nodded. “Okay. When I give the word, you must flee as fast as you can and scatter in all directions! We’ll do our best to disrupt any pursuit!”
Sanha was not amongst those who chose to flee. He sidled up beside Aldous and Samantha and shared a determined expression with them. “Any predictions to ease my mind, my old friend?”
“Not this time, I’m afraid,” Aldous replied.
“Then,” Sanha began with a sigh, “at least it should be interesting.”
“Indeed.” Aldous turned to Samantha. “Are you ready, Sam?”
She nodded. “I’m ready. I’ve dreamt of this.”
His eyes narrowed. “I mean it, Sam. We’re not life-takers. We’re life-savers.”
She remained silent.
Aldous didn’t have time to press the point. Every second that passed was another moment in which the Purists might launch their attack. He held his arm up to signal the post-humans, and the entranceway grew suddenly silent as every man, woman, and child collectively held their breath.
“Now!”
10
“For Christ’s sake!” Craig screamed out as the freezing water bit into his skin, shooting stabs of pain throughout his body. For a moment, he became unhinged, panicking as he clawed desperately in the darkness toward the only thing he could see: the white wall of ice in front of him. His soaked and numb fingers slipped off the icy side as the monolith seemed to toss him aside, back into the black abyss from which he’d come. He thrashed desperately to keep his head above water, the pain of a cranial submersion too painful for him to endure a second time. When it became clear that he couldn’t get a grip on the ice, his mind suddenly cleared.
His mind’s eye was still flashing in his peripheral vision. He’d not yet gone through all of the set-up screens, and the flight systems were up next. As impossible as it sounded, he would have to fly to save himself; failure would make death a certainty.
“Okay, okay,” he sputtered to himself, spitting out frigid salt water as he blinked away the stinging droplets so he could read his screen. The first one asked him to calibrate his vertical ascent by thinking Up. “Goddamn this Jedi crap.” He shut his eyes tight and tried to will himself upward, out of the water. To his utter shock and astonishment, that was exactly what occurred. First his shoulders, then his arms and hands, and eventually even his legs escaped the icy vice of the water. He opened his eyes, astonished, but as soon as he broke his concentration, his ascent stopped. “Ha!” he shouted to himself in amazed triumph. “I did it!”
The text: “Are you satisfied with your vertical ascent? Yes/No,” appeared on the next screen before his eyes.
“Hell yes!” he shouted as he clicked the YES button with his mind.
Immediately, the next screen asked him to calibrate his vertical descent. The gleeful smile of triumph was quickly replaced with a countenance of horror as he looked down at the frigid water undulating only inches below the soles of his boots.
“Aw hell,” he cursed. “There’s gotta be a way around this.” He tried to flip the screen, but each time he tried, he received an error message. “No. Come on!” After a long minute passed, an implacable conclusion was reached: He would have to dunk himself back into the water. His flight systems were going to force him below the surface of the waves, and he would have to finish the rest of the calibration fully submerged. He fleetingly remembered the respirocytes, causing a brief stab of longing in his chest. Would the new nanobots the A.I. said were throughout his body be able to breathe for him?
The face of the doctor with the beautiful smile suddenly flashed into his memory. “The Freitas test,” he whispered to himself. Without inhaling beforehand, he held his breath, hoping the nanobots would kick in and begin breathing for him. Seconds ticked by as his body shook from the extreme cold. Within just a few moments, his chest began to feel tight as his throat started to close and his head began to pound. He exhaled. “Damn. Damn it!” The nanobots didn’t take over the breathing for him.
He looked back down at the frozen, suffocating abyss. There was only one thing left to do. He began to inhale deeply, taking as much air into his lungs as possible, trying to expand them as much as he could before his descent. “This sucks,” he whispered to himself as he kept his eyes locked on the unconquerable foe below. “I don’t want to die...not again.”
His mind’s eye’s instruction to think down remained. Every moment that he waited to begin, his body shook more violently, sapping more of his energy, and limiting his ability to hold his breath. If he waited much longer, there would be no chance that he could make it back up. “Okay,” he whispered to himself once again. “Okay.”
He thought, Down.
His flight system seemed to take control of his body and push him downward, quickly sinking him into the flesh-flaying fangs of the water. He inhaled until the last possible moment. A second later, his head was below the surface.
“Are you satisfied with your vertical descent? Yes/No.”
Craig clicked YES.
The next screen asked him to calibrate flight to his left.
Craig thought, Left.
The flight systems dragged him through the deadly cold water for a few meters before stopping. Valuable seconds ticked by.
“Are you satisfied with your horizontal left? Yes/No.”
Craig clicked YES.Yes, Goddamn it!
The screen asking to calibrate for horizontal right appeared next.
Craig thought, Right.
The movement to the right nearly sucked the rest of the air out of his lungs. He was on the edge of panic.
“Are you satisfied...”
Yes, Goddamn it! Yes!
The forward horizontal calibration screen appeared.
Craig thought, Forward, and the flight systems brought him mere centimeters from the wall of the iceberg.
“Are you satisfied...”
Craig clicked YES.
Backward was next.
Craig thought, Backward, then clicked YES.
“Initial calibration complete,” read the next screen.
Craig had run out of time.
He thought, Up, and prayed that the flight system would answer.
11
Hundreds of post-humans suddenly spilled out of the side of Mount Andromeda, seemingly emerging out of t
he snowscape itself, their green magnetic cocoons glowing brightly in the darkness. En masse, they looked like a volcanic eruption, except instead of lava, the mountain was emitting fireflies. Aldous, Samantha, and an impromptu smorgasbord of twenty post-humans lingered behind, blasting powerful bursts of magnetic energy toward the transport harriers in an attempt to cover the escape of their fleeing brethren.
The gun turrets of the harriers quickly locked on to an overwhelming plethora of targets and began firing, but it wasn’t bullets that burst from the barrels of their guns; rather, their ammunition was bright white blasts of energy, tinged with yellow auras, designed to disrupt the magnetic cocoons of the post-humans. They were frighteningly effective, knocking person after person out of the air, most of them falling dozens—if not hundreds—of meters to their deaths.
“Monsters!” Samantha furiously shouted as she continued blasting toward the harriers. As her eyes locked on one harrier in particular that had shot several people out of the air, she broke her promise to Aldous. She took a moment to let the charge build in her fingertips before releasing an enormous blast of electromagnetic energy that severely damaged the systems on the craft. It fell out of formation and began dropping, spinning as it plummeted, its one remaining functional engine beginning to smoke as it took on the overwhelming burden of the aircraft’s entire weight.
Aldous turned, his expression aghast at what his wife had done. “Sam!”
Samantha didn’t reply. Her expression was conflicted, but she didn’t regret what she’d done to the Purist harrier or the Purists inside who were about to die. What she did regret was hurting her husband.
A dark realization suddenly took over Aldous’s eyes. Either he would have to allow the Purists in the transport to die and cross an ethical line that he’d sworn never to cross, or he would have to fly out and risk his life to save them. For Aldous, it wasn’t even a choice. He turned and began to sprint toward the ledge of the loading bay, lifting off into the air and engaging his cocoon, shooting toward the stricken harrier.
“Aldous!” Samantha finally shouted. She immediately established a connection through her mind’s eye. “Don’t do it!”
“I have to,” Aldous replied as he reached the belly of the aircraft and began to support it, awkwardly bringing the ship down toward an impending hard landing in the snow.
“Aldous,” Samantha uttered with a resigned sigh. She’d never met a more stubborn man. Even in the face of his exterminator, Aldous wouldn’t sacrifice his ethics. She wondered if there were anything that could ever make him.
She lifted off of the edge of the loading bay, determined to at least help him carry his burden, even if she disagreed with it. She’d flown only a few meters before, from her left, a Purist super soldier flying at nearly 200 kilometers an hour collided with her, driving her body into the wall of the rock face, instantly shattering every bone in her body. The soldier used his prosthetic hand to dig into the rock of the wall, holding himself in place as he watched Samantha drop into the snow some two dozen meters below, her blood staining the previously perfect whiteness.
Aldous watched the horrific scene of his wife’s demise both from his vantage point under the crippled harrier and in his mind’s eye. As the harrier touched down safely into the cushion of snow, his wife fell like a limp ragdoll, tumbling head over heels several times before landing hard. “Sam! Sam!” he shouted. He knew he wouldn’t hear a response. There was simply no way. “Sam!”
He released the smoking harrier, now safely on the ground, and began to fly toward his wife, but the moment he lifted into the air, a disruptor blast from another super soldier stripped him of his powers. He slammed back down, no longer protected by his cocoon, and slid, face first, into the snow. His eyes never left the dark, crumpled form of his wife in the snow, illuminated by the firefight and the blinding spotlights of the Purists’ transports. The red ring of blood around her body was quickly expanding.
“Sam! No!”
12
Craig angled his body awkwardly as he worked desperately to overcome his violent shivering and steer himself through the air onto the Planck platform. When he finally touched down, he collapsed onto his knees, huddling his torso against his legs as his training had taught him to do, making himself as small as possible as the frigid air cut through his soaked black jacket and pants. He crossed his arms over his chest and curled his hands into fists, his fingers so numb that he could barely move them.
After enough time passed for him to recognize that curling up wasn’t going to generate the body heat he needed to stave off hypothermia, he began flipping through screens in his mind’s eye to find instructions for how to generate the magnetic cocoons that the A.I. had described to him. Once he found the right screen, he had to follow through with more calibrations. The screens showed him how to generate pulses of green magnetic energy on his fingertips and how to release them like little thunderbolts in whichever direction he chose. They also showed him how to generate much larger balls of energy, a phenomenon that looked like ball lightning, and to send it wherever he wished with the ease of a thought. Finally, he learned to generate the lifesaving cocoon for which he had been searching. In an instant, his entire body was encapsulated in a green aura that looked to Craig like pictures he’d seen of the aurora borealis, the beautiful green pulsating, bands of energy wisping in ghost-like fashion around him.
The shelter the cocoon provided him was an immense relief, but he was still soaking wet, and he doubted that the warmth of his breath and what little body heat still remained would be enough to turn the tide against the damage that had already been done to his body temperature. He rocked slightly to and fro, attempting to generate heat from movement as his eyes darted around, looking for something he could use to turn up the heat. The Planck was obviously extraordinarily advanced technology, but he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to use any of it to his advantage. The only other object in sight was the enormous mountain of ice on which the Planck was firmly set. There was nothing combustible. His survival training would do him little good in that place, in the black night, right in the middle of the ocean. Jesus, he thought. I’ve got a Goddamn nuclear generator in my spine, and I’m going to freeze to death.
Several more minutes passed by. Craig’s rocking slowed as his mind drifted to the events of what, for him, had made up the past twenty-four hours. Could this be Hell? he wondered. It seemed plausible. After all, no one denied that he had, indeed, died. Could this all be part of some death dream? Everything seemed too absurd to be real. Fourteen years? I was gone for fourteen years and Sam married that...Sam really married Aldous Gibson? A young Aldous at that. The government won the war but turned on its own people in an attempt to prevent A.I.? And I’m a...what did they call me? A post-human? My God.
If all that weren’t enough, he’d now been sent through some sort of wormhole into a parallel universe and had apparently arrived on an ice flow in the middle of an ocean, only God knew where. Am I even on Earth? he asked himself. More importantly, can technology like this even really exist? What the hell did Sam mean about boiling space?
He nodded to himself. Yes. This is Hell.
Without warning, an image appeared in his mind’s eye that nearly sent him backward off the Planck platform again. The image was an extreme close-up of an eye, but it flickered on and off before vanishing completely.
“What the hell?”
A few more seconds ticked by before another image flashed before him; this time it was the visage of the A.I., much smaller and upside down. He was speaking and appeared to be trying vehemently to communicate something important. Craig tried to read his lips, but after a few minutes, he realized it was a useless endeavor, the upside-down mouth making incomprehensible shapes and giving him a headache. Almost as soon as he gave up, the A.I.’s image vanished.
Craig waited several more seconds for the image to return, but when it became apparent that the wait might be a long one, he decided to get to his feet. He knew if he
stayed there any longer, he was going to freeze.
He flew straight up, still protected in his beautiful green cocoon, and floated high above the iceberg below. He scanned the area slowly as his altitude increased, taking in the full 360 degrees, looking for any sign of land. The horizon was completely black in all directions. The night was moonless, but as he looked up, he recognized the Big Dipper. Finally, something familiar.
Suddenly, a flicker caught his eye. Far in the distance, a faint yellow light slipped into existence over the edge of the world. It was so faint that Craig was afraid he might lose it as he began to fly toward it, fearful that it might be moving away from him. As he flew faster and faster, the light quickly began to grow in intensity. After a few minutes of excited and desperate pursuit, it became clear that the object was a ship, and it was moving toward him. He flew toward it as quickly as he could, only slowing once the ship was almost within reach. It was a gigantic passenger ship, and its lights burned brightly. Warmth. Salvation.
Just as Craig dared a smile, his eyes caught the bright white lettering on the hull: T-I-T-A-N-I-C.
“Uh-oh.”
13
“You men all right?” the super soldier hollered at the flight crew of the downed harrier transport.
Three men finished exiting the aircraft; though smoking, it was mostly intact. They were regular humans, in sharp contrast to the super soldier who had addressed them. “Yeah,” one of them hollered back. “We’re all accounted for, sir!”
“Good,” the super soldier replied. Aldous was barely able to crane his neck to see the silhouetted figure standing only a few meters in front of him and two paces to his right.
He wore a black, collapsible woven carbon nanotube wing on his back, standard issue for all Purist super soldiers. Four small stealth jet engines fitted with plasma actuators to increase efficiency and drastically reduce noise were mounted on the wing; the engines were idle now as the super soldier conversed with the downed airmen. “I got you a present,” the super soldier commented, indicating with one of his cybernetic arm prostheses toward Aldous as he lay, nearly motionless in the snow. The prosthesis was black but shiny, and it caught a glint of light near the wrist as the sharp claw of the index finger pointed to Aldous. “Enjoy.” He turned to leave but suddenly stopped, turning back. “Don’t dawdle. Their generators only stay down for a couple minutes. Once he powers back up, you’ll be no match for him.” And with that, he completed his turn and crouched down, coiling his powerful cybernetic leg prostheses, and then leapt several meters in the air, his stealth engines firing up to give him the lift he needed to swoop quickly toward the holographic slope. The post-humans who were behind it would be his prey.
Post-Human Series Books 1-4 Page 9