The Earth Transformed - Ghost Book I

by Mike Stackpole

  My eyes opened to blurry figures moving between me and the light. A weight lifted from my head. My heart was racing like I’d just run up a mountain in cement shoes, and my brain and nerves were all shouting, “Danger! Danger! Danger!” in my ears.

  “Ghost,” said a voice. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  For a second I didn’t know who Ghost was, but then it all came back, and my brain started to calm down as everything dialed into focus. Athalia was holding the headphone/helmet thingy and everyone else was staring at me with looks of worry, uneasiness, and anticipation.

  “You alright, brother?” asked Vargas.

  It was a little too early to answer that, but I didn’t want to disappoint anybody, so I gave it a shot. “I… I think so.”

  “And…?” asked Angie.

  I frowned. “And what?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t you remember what this all about? You went in there to figure out where Finster hid the sec pass. Did you find out?”

  “I…” My mind flashed back to what I had been through. The puzzles, the night screamer, the spider, the fighting multiple Finsters, the baseball game for Christ’s sake. Then, at the end… Yes! “Yeah yeah, it’s fine. He handed it to me.” I opened the hand that had been holding the sec–pass. “It’s right—”

  Of course there was nothing in my hand. If I hadn’t been so disoriented I would have known it before I spoke. Everything in the maze had been an illusion. Why should the card have been any different?

  Angie groaned. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

  “I—”

  A strange clicking noise interrupted me. Everybody turned around. The sound was coming from Finster’s head, which was still connected to the console. It was vibrating slightly and the eyes were flashing on and off.

  “What the hell?” said Vargas.

  “Ain’t gonna blow up, is it?” asked Hell Razor.

  Finally, with a ping and whirr, the metal dome of Finster’s head split open and folded back on itself, revealing the innards of his electronic brain — basically just a bunch of wires and transistors and other stuff I didn’t understand.

  Athalia did, however, and noticed right away that something didn’t belong. She frowned and reached her long fingers toward the open head. “What is…?”

  She plucked something out from between two thick black plastic cards that slotted into some kind of circuit board. It was the sec pass. She laughed. “He was telling the truth. The pass was in his memory! Right in the middle of it!”

  I didn’t get the joke, and I don’t think the others did either. We did get, though, that we’d finally found the thing we’d come here to get in the first place.

  Angie snatched it out of Athalia’s fingers. “All right! Finally!”

  Hell Razor spat on the floor again. “Now we can get out of this mad house.”

  “But what the hell was it doing in there in the first place?” asked Vargas.

  “He probably put it there once he overheard us saying we were looking for it,” said Ace. “He wanted to use it as a bargaining chip, remember? And he wouldn’t have wanted us to find it before we’d made a deal with him.”

  “Why ask why?” said Angie. “I’m just glad we’ve got it.”

  Vargas stood and stretched. The others did too. “Alright, let’s get out of here. We gotta get ourselves dosed with Prussian Blue before we—”

  “Wait,” I said. “One thing.”

  They looked back at me.

  “While I was in there, in Finster’s head, he told me that Base Cochise was after him, and us too. It was eliminating all threats, he said.”

  Angie frowned. “So he’s saying the killer robots aren’t just some weird glitch? The base is actively sending them out to kill people?”

  I shrugged. “Finster seemed to think so. He said Cochise knew we were coming, and that it would destroy us, then he gave me the sec pass and told us to use the armor to protect ourselves.”

  “Sounds like more of Finster’s paranoia,” said Athalia.

  “Could be,” said Vargas. “Guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

  Metal Maniac poked his head in the door and gave us a salute. “Uh, hate to interrupt, but we’re puttin’ the bodies of Finster’s victims in the ground, and some of ‘em are your people. Thought you might want to come send ‘em off.”

  Everybody was quiet at that, but at last Vargas nodded. “We do indeed, friend. We do indeed. Lead on.”

  ***

  You know that old gag about wanting to live long enough to go to your own funeral?

  Well, you don’t.

  Really.

  A guy never feels quite so much like a fifth wheel than when his friends are standing around the grave of his former self, passing around a bottle and talking about what a great guy he was and how much they’re going to miss him.

  Hell Razor’s eulogy was short and sweet. “He was a good drinkin’ buddy, and he had your back in a fight.” He took a slug for himself, then poured some down into the open grave. “Kick ass in Hell, brother.”

  Thrasher’s was even shorter. “Good friend. Great ranger.”

  He poured some out too, drank, and passed the bottle to Vargas.

  Vargas took a swig, then cleared his throat. “I didn’t know him as well as the rest of you, but that he died twice in the pursuit of his duties and never gave up trying to stop the enemies of man speaks volumes about his loyalty to the Desert Rangers and his commitment to building a better world. Here’s to him.” He splashed some booze into the grave then passed the bottle to Angie.

  She wiped her eyes and nose, knocked back a swallow, and then spat it down at my old self’s burlap–wrapped corpse.

  “I’m mad at you, you bastard,” she hissed. “You shouldn’t have died. You shouldn’t have left me! You should have said goodbye! But…” She hiccupped. “But I guess being’ mad ain’t gonna bring you back, so…” She snorfed on the sleeve of her leather jacket. “Well, wherever you went, I hope there’s a big nasty redhead there waiting for you, and a world without walls where you can ride forever and ever and never find the edge of the map.”

  She blew a kiss down into the hole. “Happy trails, you glorious son–of–a–bitch.”

  Her eyes were blurry as she swung around, holding out the bottle for the next person, but they focused when she realized the next person was me. At least she had the decency to look embarrassed as she turned away.

  I took the bottle and gulped a swallow. It burned all the way down, or maybe that was something else. I raised the bottle.

  “Sounds like a hell of a guy. I wish I’d known him.”

  Everybody looked uncomfortable at that.

  Athalia broke the silence by taking the bottle from me and having a genteel sip. “I didn’t know him either, but here’s hoping his memory lives on long after he’s gone.”

  I burped. “Thanks. I’m doing my best.”

  Everyone just kind of stared at the grave until Athalia set the bottle down and cleared her throat.

  “Er, If you will allow me, I’d like to offer a prayer?”

  Angie and the rangers shrugged.

  “Do your worst, sister,” said Vargas.

  “Thank you.”

  She closed her eyes and folded her hands. “As the mighty fire of the atom once consumed the Earth, so its legacy has consumed you. In its heat you are purified and made righteous. May the Great Glow look upon you and smile, welcoming you into its warm embrace. And may it think on us all mercifully, giving us solace and comfort in our times of need, and know that it inspires us. Amen.”

  The rangers mumbled a few half–hearted amens, then turned and shuffled off toward Cecil’s tavern where all the townies were already several drinks into the wake for their dead. Ace, as the guy who knew the old me even less well than I did, had been standing off at a respectful distance and staying out of the last toast, but now he fell in beside Angie, and as they walked, she reached out an arm and hooked it around his waist. He
put his arm over her shoulder and they continued on like that, heads together.

  Athalia and I stayed at the grave, though I hardly noticed she was there. I just kept staring at the little stone they’d set at the head of the plot, the one with the name on it that didn’t fit me in the slightest, but which eclipsed the one I’d been given like the Earth stepping in front of a candle. I felt stranger than I’d felt in my strange, short life, and if you’ve been following along, you gotta admit, that had to be pretty strange.

  I added it all up in my head: my girlfriend once removed — or was that twice — didn’t even want me as a shoulder to cry on, probably because it reminded her too much of the shoulder of the dead guy she actually loved, my friends had all just toasted my former self like I wasn’t standing right there next to them hearing every word they were saying, I was having trouble caring about self–preservation or physical danger, and I was having a hard time telling which memories were mine and which belonged to my other iterations. Maybe these were all signs that I wasn’t supposed to be here. Maybe cloning messed with the natural balance of things, and this constant feeling I had that my life was disposable was the world trying to get me to fix the situation. Maybe I wasn’t actually alive at all.

  The more I thought about it, the more it felt like the truth. I was already gone, a memory of a better man that had lived on beyond his death. If I stuck around any longer I’d just end up being an embarrassment to myself and everybody who had known the old me. It was time to go.

  “Yeah,” I took out my gun. “Somebody already dug my grave. Might as well fill it.”

  I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud until Athalia stopped my hand as I was putting the gun to my head.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Everybody’s already said goodbye to me.”

  “Because it would be selfish. Because the rangers need all the guns they can get to go against Base Cochise.” She smiled and squeezed my wrist. “Because I would miss you.”

  I laughed. Or maybe choked. “Ha! You’d be the only one.”

  She shrugged. “One’s enough, isn’t it?”

  I lowered the gun and looked her in the eye. Funny I hadn’t noticed until now that she was the only one who talked to me like I was real.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”

  I stroked her cheek and leaned in to kiss her, but she smiled and backed away, tugging me toward the bar.

  “Come on. Let’s join the others.”

  I groaned. “Do we have to? They’ll be telling stories about me by now — and I won’t remember any of them.”

  “I need a drink to knock myself out,” she said. “We’re heading out early for Sleeper One tomorrow, and I’m still too keyed up to sleep. Besides, we both need another shot of Prussian Blue.”

  I sighed and started down the hill with her, holding her hand. As we got closer to the tavern, I could hear people talking and laughing, and I could pick out individual laughs, some bright, some harsh, some tinged with sadness. Each voice was different, loud or soft, sharp or mellow, but each one unique, and each one human.

  I didn’t know any more if I fit that description, and I didn’t know how I felt about that, but at least I was holding someone’s hand.

  At least I wasn’t alone.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Michael A. Stackpole is a an award-winning game designer, computer game designer and novelist in the science fiction and fantasy field. He is best known for his work in FASA’s BattleTech® universe and for his Star Wars® X-wing comics (from Dark Horse Comics) and bestselling Star Wars® novels from Bantam Books.

  Photo by Heather Hill.

  Nathan Long is a screen and prose writer, with two movies, one Saturday-morning adventure series, and a handful of live-action and animated TV episodes to his name, as well as eleven fantasy novels and several award-winning short stories. He hails from Pennsylvania, where he grew up, went to school, and played in various punk and rock-a-billy bands, before following his writing dreams to Hollywood, where he now writes full time - and still occasionally plays in bands.