The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  The plane’s tires chirped on the runway as it rushed past Boen. He walked back to the hangar and waited for it to taxi over.

  At the hangar, the belly of the plane opened and a team of technicians emerged. One held a remote control that guided a treaded, massive metal chair that carried John Raimey. His footsteps would have damaged the floor of the plane.

  Raimey looked down at Boen. Even though the rest of him was now black, bulging armor, and his head was small, seated between his giant shoulders, his face was the same face that Boen remembered. More lines, more worries, but the same. Dark skin, a scar that hooked down the right side of his cheek. Eyes as emotionless as those on a doll. Bitter eyes.

  “Is she here?” Raimey asked. No ‘hello.’ No ‘what have you been up to.’ Boen felt the tension. He knew the bond he and Raimey once shared was long gone.

  “She is.”

  The chair moved slowly down the ramp. Technicians crawled over Raimey like mites, preparing him for the mission that would start in one hour. The chair rocked to a stop at the bottom of the ramp.

  “Clear?” Raimey asked.

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  Three ‘clears’ was a go. John stood up. He was thirteen feet tall and weighed six tons. His jet black armor was an osmium and depleted-uranium alloy coated in advanced ceramic/Kevlar energy-dispersing plates. His entire body, down to the nuts and bolts, had been built from the same material. Two massive drive chains spun slowly around his waist. In battle, they were a blur, a frenzy, rolling inertia that helped him change direction, punch, and provide gyroscopic balance.

  Raimey’s hands alone weighed over eight hundred pounds each. The knuckles were bulbous with armor, the hands themselves virtually unbreakable. When they were open, a grown man could sit in the palm; when closed, they looked like the jagged end of a mace.

  Technicians wheeled over two massive metal boxes. Raimey plucked the metal boxes off the ground and slid one onto each shoulder. They clacked into place. Using his mind, he racked the slides back on his shoulders and slapped them forward, loading the projectile-less artillery round.

  A Tank Major’s size made him formidable. His armor made him almost impenetrable. But it was his hydraulshock punch—where the full energy of an artillery shell was transferred through his indestructible fists—that made Tank Majors the lords of war. That, above all else, was what made them Death.

  “He’s all yours,” one of the technicians said to Earl. Earl nodded and he and the giant walked into the hangar.

  “You know where he is?” Raimey said. He had come to kill Mohammed Jawal, the leader of the Western Curse, the predominant terrorist organization in the United States. During the King Sleeper/China conflict, the Western Curse had risen above the noise as a primary tool of the Chinese. Xan Shin, a high-level Chinese official, lured them to China with weapons and resources, recruited them to act as mercenaries. Xan Shin died in the conflict—at John’s hand—but the Western Curse, now with modern weapons and near-limitless funds, lived on stronger than ever. Their leader, Mohammed Jawal, was a brilliant man, at one point an advisor to the White House, and he was impossible to track down. The members of the Western Curse did something crazy in this world of cyberspace and Mindlinks and teraflops: they communicated in person, carrying messages written on paper.

  “Evan believes so.”

  Raimey grimaced at the name. Evan Lindo was there the day Raimey became a Tank Major. “I don’t trust him talking to her.”

  “You know I don’t trust him either, but he’s kept his word. She just started college. She interns at the Derik Building. He’s in Washington all the time anyway.”

  Raimey grunted. “You know about Israel?” he said. “We stopped a train full of weapons.”

  “The Coalition is attempting a diplomatic solution.”

  Raimey’s laugh was humorless. The Coalition—the U.S., EU, and China—had occupied sections of the Middle East for two decades, taking the oil. “It’s going to happen. They have nothing to lose.”

  “We’re preparing for all possibilities.”

  They passed transport trucks with soldiers milling around them, getting ready for the mission. Everyone paused to stare when Raimey passed.

  Boen punched a keypad to open a rolling door, but stopped short.

  “I don’t know how this is going to go,” he said.

  “She agreed to come, didn’t she?” Raimey asked.

  “When I contacted her, she said ‘no.’ Evan convinced her. He wanted you for this mission. Evan wants Mohammed alive.”

  Raimey chewed on his lip. His eyes searched the ground. “You did your part, Earl. I know she hates me. I just hope I can get her to hate me a little less.”

  “I’m sorry, John—”

  “I’m a grown man, Earl. I could have said ‘no.’” Raimey nodded at the keypad.

  Boen finished entering the code and the door rolled up. In the middle of the empty structure was a sixteen-year-old girl. She had long, curled hair and light brown skin. She’d be beautiful if she didn’t look so angry. She wore a lead vest and gloves, standard protocol around Raimey’s armor. Two soldiers stood nearby.

  “Can we be alone?” Raimey asked quietly. Boen nodded at the soldiers and they left through a side exit. Raimey walked inside and Boen closed the door, leaving the father alone with his daughter.

  = = =

  Vanessa Raimey stood at her full height, and was still just a speck in her father’s shadow. Her hands were clenched into fists, and Raimey could see that she was shaking.

  Raimey started. “Thank you for coming, I know you’re angry, I’m so sorry about your mo—”

  “Don’t even start,” Vanessa interrupted. “You don’t get to be sorry. You don’t get to apologize. You weren’t there.”

  Raimey looked at the ground as if he had come across a rabid dog. “I had no choice,” he said quietly. “If I didn’t do this, she wouldn’t have gotten the medical treatment she needed. They guaranteed you’d be taken care of.”

  Vanessa pulled a photo out of her coat. Tiffany Raimey had been vibrant and slender, caramel-skinned, with flowing black hair. She had exuded life. But in the photo Vanessa held, Tiffany was desiccated, starving, hairless. A skeleton with skin, dead everywhere except in the eyes. And in the eyes was pain. “This is what we got when you left.”

  Vanessa tossed the photo at Raimey; it fluttered to his feet. “That’s a month before she died. She lasted a MONTH like that! At the end she weighed eighty pounds.”

  Tears rolled down Vanessa’s cheeks. “I’d feed her and she’d vomit all over herself. Some nights she would scream all the way through. Toward the end, she’d get confused and ask where you were. When you were coming home. At first I told her the truth because I was stupid and young, and she would cry between the screams. And I think that’s when I became an adult. Kids are told that lying’s bad and we should never do it. When really, it was the best gift I could ever give. And so I told her you were coming home soon. Every night, you were coming home soon.”

  “At the end, she was lucid though. Do you know what she said to me before she went? Can you guess?”

  Raimey shook his head. “No.”

  She said, “Don’t hate him.”

  Raimey’s jaw quivered. He had braced himself for anger. He had hoped that after Vanessa had screamed and yelled, a bridge could be built between them. But he wasn’t prepared to hear that his wife’s dying wish was forgiveness. He wasn’t ready for the chasm to open further into his deepest regret.

  Vanessa paused, buried in the past. “When I told her I didn’t hate you, that was my hardest lie. Because there was nothing I wanted more than for you to be in that bed instead of her, wasting away with no chance to live. Nothing.”

  She looked up at Raimey, her eyes filled with watery hate. “I never want to see you again. Don’t contact me. If you die, don’t have anyone reach out. I don’t want your stuff, I don’t want your money. I
don’t care. I want to be happy. And I can’t do that when I think about you.”

  = = =

  Boen waited outside for only two minutes before he heard Raimey call through the door. “You can open it.”

  He did. Behind Raimey, Vanessa was gone. Boen was confused.

  “She came here to tell me that she never wants to see me again, and she never wants me to contact her,” Raimey explained.

  Boen was speechless. Raimey stared out at the transport and soldiers. His calm was unnerving, and Boen realized it was resignation. Raimey had thought this was how it would end.

  “Is that the team?” Raimey asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to come here anymore, Earl. I can’t be this close to her, and not have her in my life.” Raimey looked down at Boen. Tears clung to his eyes. “I’ll do whatever you or Evan want overseas. If I do that, you’ll take care of her, right?”

  “Raimey, it’s not like that.”

  “YES IT IS,” Raimey growled. “Evan’s all over her. He’s the one teaching her. Not you. If I’m a good boy, she’ll be fine, right?”

  “Yes,” Boen said quietly.

  “Make sure of that, Earl.”

  Raimey left Boen and stepped into the transport without a nod to the Tank Minors. Twenty minutes later, he was rumbling off toward Chicago.

  = = =

  Mohammed Jawal, the founder of the Western Curse, was an educated man. Sixty, tall and long, he had the frame of a basketball player. His chest-length beard and salt-and-pepper hair hid a chiseled jaw and hard, attractive lines. Without the facial hair, he might have looked like a Bond villain.

  He had been in Chicago for many years. It was too dangerous to move around. Not because of the police or the bionics—the Mega Cities stretched those eyes thin. No, it was the wandering gaze of a senior citizen on the subway that he feared. The curious child he passed on the street. Mohammed knew what few others did: that through the Mindlink, both MindCorp and the government could read your thoughts. And this knowledge had turned him into a paranoid recluse.

  It was so obvious, and so ignored. The Mindlink was a two-way street. Data flowed out and in, to create the immersive experience of “being there.” In his dark room, Mohammed laughed, but it was hollow and tired. The great unwashed, how they flocked to a device that opened their mind up like a wound. They watched what they ate, but gave no second thought to the five thousand radio frequencies bombarding their brain cells and transforming their consciousness—what made them them—into a space run by a corporation and overseen by the government. Fear doesn’t make people wary—it makes them trusting and short of memory. They want to be taken care of. They want to be told everything’s okay. They want to believe. And the Mindlink did all those things. But cost has nothing to do with currency. Cost is a part of life, concession a scale constantly tipping one way or the other.

  Nowhere was safe.

  “We’re almost ready,” Sharif, his second lieutenant, said quietly from the doorway. Mohammed knelt east in the dark, praying for victory. But he was not an extremist, or a terrorist, though he was framed by the news as such. He was a nationalist, and his country had been pillaged by the Coalition for its oil.

  Once, he had been a happy man. There was a time when he had hope. But then his extended family in Iran had been moved into boroughs, ghettos, that housed them like Jews before the Holocaust. Some had been murdered. It was a history repeated without the ovens or gas.

  “Make an example out of him,” Mohammed said.

  “For Allah.”

  “No. For Iran. For Iraq. For Saudi Arabia and all of our forgotten brothers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  = = =

  Dr. Brad Zienkiewicz’s heart hammered in his chest. He could not believe that Cynthia had offered to use him as bait. He was one of the founders of MindCorp. He and Cynthia had stood side by side on that historic day when Tom, a test chimp, used a functional Mindlink to choose corresponding animals with his thoughts. It was Brad who had developed the consumer browser interface that took them from portal to portal without causing a seizure. He owned one percent of the company. He was worth over one hundred billion dollars.

  And he had been demoted to a worm.

  “Relax,” the hook said. Tank Minor Razal, a stocky Filipino, sat across from Brad as they rode to the MindCorp data node north of the city, where intelligence Sleepers had predicted the good doctor would be abducted and beheaded on a live feed.

  “Easy for you to say—you’re bulletproof,” Brad replied.

  Razal smiled and looked out the window. He had never been in a consumer vehicle before. Only the ultra-wealthy could afford them.

  “How much did this thing cost?” he asked. He slid his hands over the leather seats.

  “Twenty million,” Brad replied. He wasn’t interested in discussing the car. He was interested in living through the next hour.

  Razal whistled. “Wow. How much are tires?”

  It wasn’t the leather that made the car expensive, nor the metal. The oil was almost gone and what was left was hoarded by the government. Plastics of any kind were a luxury.

  Brad slapped his legs, exasperated. “I don’t know, a couple hundred thousand per.”

  “Crazy, huh?”

  “Yeah . . . crazy. Could you focus on me not dying?”

  Razal’s eyes clouded up as if he were stoned. The bionic’s constant smirk vanished. “Roger. One mile away. Got it.”

  All Tank Minors were connected wirelessly. His dazed look vanished and that inside-joke smirk reappeared on the stocky Filipino’s lips.

  He turned back to Brad. “You’re not going to die.”

  Brad hitched a finger toward the front of the car. “You and the green-eyed guy are gonna make sure?”

  “Our team is positioned around the node. Stick by me and don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Like?”

  “Like run away or something, or get in the way while I’m shooting. Stupid stuff.”

  Razal was dressed in a suit to hide his modified body. He held a leather briefcase that concealed a submachine gun. He wore sunglasses and a wig to conceal his eyes and face. He was a Level 2 Tank Minor and one of the best marksmen in the bionic division.

  “I can’t believe Cynthia has gotten so involved,” Brad said, shaking his head. Cynthia had worked with the U.S. military for almost a decade—from the first bionic, to the collusion against China, to the Terror War that had plagued the world since the superpowers had occupied the oil-rich nations. It was a conflict of interest that many of the founders objected to, though quietly.

  “Without her, we’d be blind, sir,” Razal said. “And you would have been driving here not knowing whether your head was going to be put on a platter.”

  Zienkiewicz gulped and changed the subject. “I’m just glad this is the last of it. It is, right? You’re going to take them down, scan their brains, and get that bastard?”

  “I can’t discuss that information,” Razal replied, while nodding ‘yes.’ “But hypothetically, if we had permission to do that, and we found pertinent information, then we’d have another team on standby to act on that information immediately.”

  = = =

  First Team did not have a Tank Major: they needed to be quick and discreet. But they did have Mike Glass, the only Level 5 Tank Minor in existence.

  The day before, Glass had attached to the team on special instruction from Evan Lindo. Razal and the other five Minors couldn’t believe it when he walked through the door. Most soldiers had only heard of him. He alone had toppled the resistance in the Middle East and hunted down terrorist leaders on our soil. Day-to-day, he was Evan Lindo’s right hand. In the field, he was an assassin. At all times he was a ghost. Even Tank Minors, strong men capable of flipping cars, looked away in his presence.

  His Alabama twang was thin and labored because of the single cut-down lung that provided his biomass oxygen. His eyes didn’t blink—they were lenses. There were plen
ty of bullies in the military, but he wasn’t one. In fact, he barely spoke. What made him intimidating was the extreme detachment he had with those he interacted with. And because of his modifications—especially his eyes—he had slid into that uncanny valley where something is disturbing because it is so close to life-like, yet seems manufactured. That, plus the hearsay, and the potential for violence from his frame that even a Level 3 would be helpless to defend, had made him into something approaching myth.

  And that myth now stood before Razal and his team, outlining the upcoming mission.

  “Sleepers have picked up a tail that leads to the outskirts of Chicago. A low-level lieutenant of the Western Curse was going online for . . .” Glass paused.

  Everyone at the same time said, “sex.” The majority of the breaks they got on terrorists were from the parties breaking down and going online to pork.

  Glass nodded. “His name is Matt Campbell. He was the in.”

  There was no screen in the briefing room. All of the Minors could see in their heads what Glass was showing them. It became memory. They saw a standard map overlay that turned into a detailed satellite feed. It shifted to a perspective near the top of a skyscraper.

  Razal realized they were watching the footage through Glass’s eyes. He must have been a hundred stories up. Birds flew beneath him. The zoom made the men nauseated, and a few of them shook their heads as the view from the skyscraper kept moving in toward the crowd. Then suddenly the view locked in on a white male walking through the crowd, looking around nervously. The footage swayed from side to side like the sight of a riflescope. They were seeing firsthand how Glass’s vision worked.

  One of the soldiers started to dry heave. Glass paused.

  “Should I take you off the feed?” No sympathy, no nothing. Words.

  “No, sir. I’m fine.”

  The zoom kept up with the man, and then he turned the corner. The tight zoom vanished and they were a thousand feet above the city and Glass was on the move, working along the rooftops. The image cut—this part was unimportant for the brief—but Razal was beside himself with awe: Glass had effortlessly leapt across chasms that were fifteen yards across. He must be lighter than he looks, he thought. Most Tank Minors weighed around three hundred pounds.