Once Haq had taken control of the borough, the retribution for any terrorist act was swift and final. Aadil had seen bodies piled up in the middle of the square, hundreds, if not more. Haq gave them no proper burial, no last rites. He lit them up and let them burn, a human bonfire. Their ashes covered the borough in filthy snow, the smell of overcooked pork filling the air and searing the lesson into everyone’s brain: Do not step out of line.
Aadil found himself inside the armory. Everything here was mounted up high and mechanized to accommodate Haq’s size and lack of fine dexterity. Huge blued magazines too big and heavy for a man to carry were lined up one after another. At the top of each magazine, the dull copper cylinder of an artillery round was exposed.
The Tank Major’s helmet was also in the room. It would mount solidly to Haq’s shoulders and transfer the weight of any debris that would land on it to his body, protecting his fragile human neck. The eight-inch-thick bulletproof glass was cut into the front of the helmet like a skull; the rest of it was copper brown, just like the rest of the giant armored body.
“In here,” Haq called out, his voice bouncing around the corner ahead. Remembering his purpose for the trip, Aadil quickened his step and turned into the last room.
= = =
Haq was the height and width of a semi truck. He stood eleven feet tall and weighed eight thousand pounds. His armless, legless mockery of a human body was shielded by uranium-depleted armor, the densest material on the planet. Gears and hydraulics the color of gunmetal were buried under plates of armor. A pair of massive waist chains spun slowly, counter to one another, their gyroscopic properties keeping him balanced. In battle they spun up like a chainsaw, allowing for very rapid movement.
The Tank Major was impervious to gunfire, impervious to rocket-propelled grenades. He could tear apart cars like they were wet paper. He used no guns; he didn’t need them. What made him devastating was the hydraulshock attack. Six projectile-less artillery rounds, three feet long and ten inches in diameter, were housed in a magazine integrated into each of the Tank Major’s shoulders, atop arms that were nearly indestructible. They had to be, because the hydraulshock attack was a punch. When the artillery round fired from inside the shoulder chamber, the expanding gas would thrust forward a dummy bullet plunger that sent dense fluid throughout the arm and back leg, launching the Tank Major forward. For a fraction of a second, a Tank Major and its five-hundred-pound fists were as fast as a bullet.
The hydraulshock punctured armored vehicles like tin cans. Walls evaporated into dust, and buildings toppled as 3,500,000 foot-pounds of energy were delivered through the Tank Major’s anvil-like fists. And afterward, just like a gun, the shoulder breach would open, the spent artillery shell would flip out, and another round would load in. With enough rounds, a Tank Major could raze a city.
Now, Tank Major Abdul Haq sat in a massive metal chair designed for his body. Thick rubber cables lined the floor. Some ran to monitors that showed his biorhythms, others monitored the Tank Major battle chassis. He motioned for Aadil to sit down on a wooden chair of human proportions.
Haq was once a hard-looking, handsome man, but that had been taken away when the bomb that killed his family flashed the temperature around him to seven hundred degrees. His face was now a quilt of scar tissue. Only his eyes were the same: cold, cunning, and drowning with apathy, like a teacher who has taught the same lesson for a thousand years.
He was ill. Two quarter-size sores on his left cheek dripped pus, and his chest rattled with each breath. Aadil hoped his own face concealed his shock and fear.
“How is Batrisyla?” Haq asked, his voice felt rather than heard.
“She is good and sends her regards,” Aadil said.
“Why have you come here?”
Aadil chose his words carefully. “Batrisyla thought it would be wise to see you. We found a boy in the fishery. He was dressed in orange and he had been shot. He is not from this borough.” Aadil lowered his eyes, his voice barely a whisper. “We don’t know what to do. We need your help.”
II
Aadil trotted ahead of Haq on their way out of the city, occasionally looking back to make sure his brother-in-law was still in tow. The city gave way to hovels, makeshift homes built onto the skeleton of the old world. Residents watched them pass from safety of the shadows, unsure of what to think: an old man beckoning a Tank Major?
If his sister had not requested him, Haq would have sent Aadil off. No one in the borough knew of their relationship. Early on, it would have meant her death. From the beginning, their family had had no qualms about exchanging information with the Coalition for favors. To stay alive and powerful in this land, you had to be a reed in a stream; the rocks wore away. And so Abdul Haq and his family bent. For their service to the Coalition, the family was granted amnesty and a way out. And Haq, too crippled to lead a normal life, was granted power and purpose.
But now the massive Tank Major was dying. It was slow, but certain. His body armor was radioactive, and it was poisoning him. There were countermeasures—lead lining, anti-radiation treatments—but they just prolonged the inevitable. The cost of the Tank Major’s power, Abdul Haq knew, was his life.
Some of the Tank Majors who ruled others boroughs had already died. Haq knew this because early on the Tank Majors had communicated with each other to compare extremist trends, to discuss strategies. But the Coalition, afraid of a coup, outlawed these radio transmissions six years into their deployment, isolating the Tank Majors from one another. Even then, however, a few giants’ signals already gave only static—and a few gave insane replies.
The armor was death to everything it touched.
When Haq saw a black disc high over the fishery, he thought for a moment that his wandering mind had caused one of his hover-rovers to drift. A quick inventory proved him wrong; what was overhead was not his.
“Stop,” Haq commanded. Aadil froze as if his foot had just pressed the trigger of a mine.
He, too, spotted the disc, and fear filled him. “It’s above our house.”
Haq now knew that his sister had acted responsibly in calling him. Hover-rovers were attached to Tank Majors and Tank Minors. “Be still,” he told Aadil. “I don’t want it to see us.”
The hover-rover methodically scanned the fishery in neat rows, like a boy mowing his lawn. Hover-rovers had multiple technologies integrated into them. The standard high-definition color camera was used in ideal conditions, but the hover-rovers were also equipped with infrared, night vision, and X-ray.
Haq had to know whose eyes were invading his borough, and there was only one way to find out: he summoned one of his own hover-rovers. If it was another Tank Major like him, then he could deal with its curiosity. But if the unmarked hover-rover belonged to the Coalition, then the stakes were much higher.
Aadil watched as one of Haq’s hover-rovers glided toward them from the center of the city. It was at a much higher altitude than the rogue hover-rover flying around his house.
As it got close, Haq’s hover-rover picked up speed and dive-bombed the mystery rover like a falcon attacking unsuspecting prey. To Aadil’s surprise, it crashed directly into it, and both hover-rovers turned from graceful floating discs into bricks, slamming through Aadil’s roof. From inside Batrisyla screamed. Aadil ran to the house, Haq close behind.
Batrisyla was shaken, but fine. She cursed her brother up and down, but he wasn’t interested. He removed more of the roof to examine the hover-rovers’ crumpled remains.
When he separated the rogue hover-rover from his own, his face turned grim. It was exactly as he had feared.
= = =
Tank Minor Wesley’s ever-present sneer contorted into a scream when Tank Major Edward Chao ripped his head clean from his shoulders as punishment for shooting the boy. Chao let the body go, and it fell backward, landing at the feet of the other two Minors he had summoned. They both took a step back.
Chao didn’t notice. He was thinking about the boy. He, like the rest
of the soldiers and technicians in the room, had watched the last of the hover-rover’s transmission. Its infrared and X-ray eyes showed the boy sleeping in a home near a massive pool.
That the boy was alive was a blessing, maybe even a miracle (if Chao believed in such things), but finding him within the jurisdiction of Abdul Haq complicated matters. Haq tended to think that the land he governed was his own.
The boy wasn’t a prodigy, but even so, the odds of finding his replacement were one in fifty thousand. And in this part of the world, fifty thousand kids was a lot. Anywhere else, Chao wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.
Chao flipped Wesley’s head end over end in his hand like a football as he planned what to do next. Maybe he was permanently suffering ADD, or maybe it was just the implants, but suddenly he imagined what Wesley would be seeing if he were still hanging on. Floor to ceiling, floor to ceiling, round and round we go.
Chao caught Wesley’s head and held it close to his own, their foreheads almost touching. Wesley’s eyes couldn’t indicate life or death; they were merely equipment. “You seeing me, old boy?” Chao asked. “Raise your hand if you can.”
Chao’s burst of laughter caused the at-attention Tank Minors to step back again.
You have to make work fun.
While Kadir, the Moldy Giant, governed the city of fog, Chao governed the ship-base moored off its shore that housed the Multipliers of the Northern Star. Chao had interrogated everyone about the boy’s escape, but had gotten no answers. In the bowels of the ship where the boy and the other child Multipliers were held, there were only Sleepers—hackers—who were always in cyberspace. Sleepers were numb and unaware of the real world; for them, reality and dream had been swapped.
They had quaked in front of Chao when he’d drilled down for answers. He knew they thought he was crazy. And he was, a bit—but not to the point of ineffectiveness. It was the guile which frightened them, the oily current behind his eyes, the recognition that dipping just a toe into his thoughts could drive them insane.
Chao had been there since the beginning. Before the Mindlink. Before the Terror War. He had been through the conflict with China as a regular soldier, then the civil war between MindCorp and the U.S. as a Tank Major. He and the god—Lindo, the Northern Star—were on a first-name basis.
Forty years ago, modern civilization had been on the brink of death until the brilliant scientist Cynthia Revo had invented a way to create a new universe via her Mindlink: a device that allowed a person to connect their mind directly to cyberspace.
Dr. Evan Lindo, a U.S. military advisor and chief weapons designer at the time, quickly foresaw the Mindlink’s military applications. The Tank Major and the Tank Minor were his immediate triumphs. But his crowning achievement was his own being: the Northern Star, a singular consciousness that spanned across the globe through thousands of people and a billion CPUs. When it went online during the civil war, it decimated governments and made cyberspace and the real world its own. Evan Lindo was a god—and the father of all this despair.
“Sir?” One of the Tank Minors interrupted Chao’s thoughts. Chao realized that they had been standing at the ready for thirty minutes and he had barely looked at them.
He waved them away. “I’ll handle it myself.”
Off comm in the quietest corners on base, some soldiers had questioned why Chao—such an important soldier in the wake of this new world—would be cast out into the middle of nowhere, guarding a Multiplier. Evan had offered him New York. He had offered him the UK. But Chao had chosen this place. He hadn’t become a Tank Major to usher in peace. He had become one to dominate in war.
Chao lobbed Wesley’s head out a window that faced the ocean and headed to the armory.
= = =
Haq was going to take the boy back tonight. Whatever had been done to the boy wasn’t right, but Haq no longer saw things in terms of right and wrong, good and evil. What he saw was cost. And the cost to keep the boy free—if that was even possible—was too great. By bringing the boy back, maybe his borough would be spared.
Haq knew where he had to go: the port city by the sea. The Coalition base was there. He had flown over it on his deployment to this borough. The base was massive and its purpose unclear. At the time, two nuclear coolant towers were being built behind it. Whatever it was intended for, it needed a lot of power.
Haq remembered when the base first came online. The Tank Major of that borough had told Haq that the entire city was covered in fog.
= = =
Chao entered Haq’s borough. His hover-rover scouted ahead, feeling out the area like an insect’s antennae. It quickly found Haq’s bunker and glided over it, X-raying down one level at a time. Through it, Chao saw the boy two hundred feet down. His small skeleton shifted back and forth, maybe from a bad dream. He scanned another room and saw the skeletons of two adults, no doubt the ones who owned the shack near the fishery. And then he saw Abdul Haq, who appeared to be walking toward the boy.
For his size, Chao moved at alarming speed.
= = =
Haq walked to the boy’s room as quietly as he could. The boy had not awakened since Aadil found him. No doubt his little body was doing everything in its power to heal. His mind was obviously a tool, so maybe the boy was catatonic anyway.
Haq scooped up the boy in one of his gigantic hands and walked past the room where his sister and Aadil slept. The rubber-lined floor helped his massive form sneak by without waking them. He reached the elevator in the blast room and pressed the button to go up.
He turned: Batrisyla, barefoot, her hair down, stared up at him.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Even in the dark, Haq could see the plea for mercy on her face.
“The boy must go back.”
“To what? They shot him! They obviously don’t want him.” She grabbed for the boy, but her brother raised his massive hand out of her reach.
“Then he’s dangerous to them. Who knows what he is.” Haq got into the elevator. As the door closed, Batrisyla darted in. They went up.
“We’ll raise him, Aadil and I.”
“They will kill you, Batrisyla!” Haq shouted. “This child hasn’t been abandoned or forgotten! He isn’t a puppy that has no home!”
Batrisyla started to cry. Haq had seen this reaction when they were young, but never since. And he knew the well from where those tears sprang. She and Aadil had never conceived a child.
“If they come in here, fight them,” she pleaded. She put her arms around her brother the best she could, but it was like hugging a car. She pounded her fists against him. “Fight them!”
Haq looked down at his sister, the strands of white overtaking her once oil-black hair. Sorrow filled him.
“I can’t fight them, Batrisyla. They made me. They own me.”
She looked up at him, defeated. Her brother: so powerful, so useless.
When the elevator door opened, the unexpected concussive blow of Chao’s hydraulshock caused Batrisyla’s eardrums to rupture. She was behind her brother when Chao’s fist warped Haq’s chest plate and sent the giant reeling back into the elevator. His tree-sized leg slammed into her, snapping her spine, and when Haq fell over, she was pinned beneath him.
The mechanisms that allowed her brother to move, to live, were a mystery to her. When Haq moved quickly, he revved up like a buzz saw, but for the most part he was quiet. Right now, whatever was in there was struggling to work, like an engine without oil grinding to its death.
Batrisyla turned her head and saw another giant, different but serving the same purpose, standing above them. This giant, an American, was no doubt a Tank Major, but his design was more human than her brother’s, less mechanical.
Fighting to remain conscious, Batrisyla watched with a scream stuck in her throat as the giant lifted the boy from where he had fallen and placed him outside.
She saw Chao squat down on his knees next to her brother.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Haq told the Tank Majo
r between shallow breaths. “I was bringing the boy to you.”
Batrisyla thought she heard the other Tank Major say, “That’s a good soldier.”
Batrisyla couldn’t feel her legs. The taste of copper filled her mouth, and she spit. Chao noticed her but remained focused on her brother. Blood poured out Haq’s nose. His human body, encased within the Tank Major form, had been compressed along with his mechanics. His breath was rapid and shallow.
Chao leaned in toward Haq and whispered in his ear. He then stood up and dug his hands into the sides of Haq’s warped chest armor and tore it off. The warped plate fell to the side, exposing Haq’s human body: a head and a torso, without arms or legs, cut down neatly to fit.
Chao scooped him out of the chassis and dropped him next to his sister. A harness was fused to his head, neck and spine; it was what gave him control of his body. Chao ripped this from Haq’s back. He pressed the elevator button to send it down, then bowed as the door closed.
Haq watched his sister struggle to stay alive, her small body crushed underneath his mechanical one.
Batrisyla struggled to free her arms, but Haq could see that one was pinned and the other was broken. Her hips were twisted at an impossible angle. They stared at each other, ideas and thoughts passing between them without a word spoken.
“I love you. Please tell Aadil I love him too,” she said.
Haq said, “I love you, too.” But it was too late.
She died in front of his eyes, crushed under his Tank Major body, now separate from him. Batrisyla was beautiful. She was the kind one of the family. The honorable one. Her vacant eyes stared at him accusingly for the path he had taken. For the life he had chosen.
The attack had knocked the elevator off its rails, and it shuddered its way down to the bottom of the silo. Haq faced the empty gaze of his sister, unable to look away, as if the depths of his remorse had created a black hole that his vision could not escape. She was gone. His sister, Batrisyla, was gone. She was somewhere else; he hoped it was somewhere beautiful. But it was not here. Never again.
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