Retaliate

by Alex Albrinck

  At long last, after taking every possible precaution, it was time.

  He strapped his communicator to his forearm, checking for a signal every few hundred yards. Writings from the Golden Ages told him that such an act was once common, in an age when transmission towers—and though nobody believed him, satellites—didn’t provide signals everywhere and without interruption. The people of this era didn’t know that pain; the condensed, walled cities provided a small coverage footprint requirement, and it was rare indeed for any who lived inside the walls to find anything other than the best possible signal strength.

  Unless you were in a secret underground military bunker, of course, where such signals were routinely blocked to avoid exposure.

  They’d parked as close to the nearest human settlement as they’d dared. The plan had been to approach until achieving a steady signal, ideally without encountering anyone like Wesley who chose to live outside the protective walls. He suspected they’d find nomadic people as far as five miles from the comforting sight of the walled cities, but might achieve connectivity as far away as fifteen miles. They were five miles outside that range; Wesley erred on the side of starting too far away to reduce the risk they’d be discovered by the locals.

  There was no guarantee that the signal would let them reach those on the other side of the planet, assuming there was anyone left over there. But Wesley suspected that the Phoenix group wouldn’t build those towers unless they could use them to talk to their counterparts all over the world, and even beyond. There was a way to use the towers as he desired. They just had to link in, and then they’d figure it out.

  It was hardly a foolproof plan. But it was the best they had for now. If it didn’t work—and the odds were against them—they’d go back to the ship, try to find ports along the coasts where they could steal fuel and storage tanks, and then eventually risk gliding across one of the two largest oceans covering the surface. If needed, they’d find a spot unharmed by the Ravagers and survive in the wilderness until… well, whatever happened next.

  They walked in silence for quite some time. Wesley led the way, followed by Jill, Mary, Jack, and John. Each of them checked their personal communication devices for a signal every so often; they had no reason to think any of the devices would work better than the others, but with five devices their odds were better than with just one.

  Wesley watched the terrain, alert for any clues of imminent threats to their well-being. He saw tracks of herbivorous animals that couldn't harm them, predators who might consider them a tasty alternative to their traditional prey. He did what he could to avoid the paths of the latter, but gripped his knife a bit tighter when avoidance wasn’t an option.

  He also looked for any sign of human incursions into the forest here, but found nothing. They might well be the first people who’d walked on this ground since… well, the first in a very, very long time.

  They'd been walking for nearly an hour when he held up his hand. “Let's stop for a bit. Drink some water, grab a quick bite to eat. We can sit for a few minutes, check for signals.”

  They sat around the perimeter of the clearing, sipping from water bottles. Wesley thought that by arranging them in the widest circle he’d dared that he’d increase the odds that one of the devices would detect a signal.

  But the odds were not in their favor.

  As the quintet sat quietly, Wesley heard something. He listened with greater intensity. And what he heard made his skin crawl. He twisted around and faced the sound, a noise coming from the northeast.

  “I'm not getting anything,” Jill reported.

  “Me, either,” Jack agreed.

  “Shh!” Wesley hissed.

  Mary bristled. “There's no need to be rude, Wes—”

  “Quiet!” Wesley hissed, his voice sharp. Mary stared at him, her jaw hanging open, and John frowned at Wesley’s tone. Wesley held a hand up to his ear. “Do you hear that?”

  Mary was the first to hear the sound that had spooked Wesley. She frowned. “What is that?”

  Wesley left his pack and started hoisting himself up the nearest tree, wincing as the rough bark scraped skin still tender from his burns. He climbed as high as he could, until the tree canopy thinned out, and peered into the distance.

  What he saw confirmed his worst fears, the fears that began with a sound that he’d hoped he’d never hear again. He scrambled back to the ground, ignoring the pain as the bark ripped the skin from his hands, and began screaming. “Get your packs! Run! Get back to the beach and head straight for the boat!”

  “What's wrong, Wesley?” John shouted back. He pulled out his sidearm and checked the safety. “We’re armed and can handle any threat—”

  “Ravagers!” Wesley screamed as he hit the ground and grabbed his pack. “Massive swarm headed this way! Run to the water!” And he sprinted back the way they'd come.

  They didn't hesitate this time. He heard the quartet thundering along behind him, their footfalls drowning out the odd sounds of a growing swarm of Ravagers: the crescendoing thunder of the initial attack and complete destruction, the utter silence left in its wake.

  Wesley saw something moving in the corner of his eye. He had no time to assess what it might be, to assess the threat, to determine if he should stop or keep moving. Something hit him hard, a bruising blast that sent him sailing through the air. He didn’t stop until he’d crashed into one of the many trees lining the faint trail they’d made on the way in from the beach.

  Wesley crashed to the ground, gasping in pain, wondering if he'd dislocated his shoulder. Wondering if whatever had hit him would strike again, or turn its attention to the others.

  “Mary!”

  Wesley froze. It was a man’s voice, but not John’s. It was a voice he hadn’t heard before.

  Or had he? Memories fogged, reformed, fogged again. The voice seemed strange, then familiar, then strange again. Who was the speaker?

  Gritting his teeth, wincing against the pain that threatened to cloud his vision with tears, he rolled over, trying to see the voice's owner, and worked to get himself to his knees.

  “Who… who are you?” The fear in Mary’s voice galvanized Wesley, and he found himself able to rise to his knees after all.

  Another blur. John. Running at the newcomer. Wesley could see the man now, a giant, muscle-bound specimen who looked like he’d been carved from a giant block of granite. John plowed into the man and bounced off, then tried again. With a look something like regret, the newcomer lashed out at John, and the smaller man crumbled to the ground. The newcomer looked horrified at what he’d done.

  Then he turned back toward Mary, taking a tentative step forward. “It's me!” The man's voice was masked momentarily, drowned out by a gust of wind fluttering the leaves, and Wesley could see him say something else but couldn’t hear him.

  But he was struck by a certainty now, a certainty that he’d seen this man before, had heard his voice.

  But where? And more critically: was the man a friend? Or an enemy?

  Mary's face contorted through a range of emotions as she too tried to process the stranger’s identity. Eyes wide with fear, then narrowing in confusion, then tightening into anger. A deep, resentful anger, more powerful than he’d seen from anyone in a long time. “What are you doing here?” Her voice was a snarl, feral in nature, and Wesley felt the damaged hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He pushed himself up, moving away from the relative comfort of the ground, begging his damaged body to fight through the newest round of injuries.

  Mary took a step toward the stranger, wagging and jabbing a finger in his direction. “You've done enough damage already, haven’t you?”

  Wesley gulped, fully convinced Mary would kill the newcomer with her bare hands if given a chance.

  And then she stopped, her face back to its confused look. “Wait. You… know me? But… how?”

  That made no sense, but he watched the man's posture slump a bit. “I do know you. I remember everything now, every mome
nt of it. I can’t say I fully understand how, but it’s true.” He looked at Mary with such longing that Wesley felt uncomfortable. “I will say I'm sorry, because I am, and because it’s what I should do. But I remember enough now to know that mere words aren’t enough to repair the damage that was done in the years I remembered nothing.”

  Wesley struggled to his feet, baffled at the conversation. Mary knew this man, and he knew her. But why didn’t she realize that until he’d offered the bizarre series of words? Why were his appearance and voice not enough?

  And why was the giant apologizing to Mary?

  But whatever the explanation, it was clear that Mary had accepted the man as a friend.

  John and the children exchanged puzzled glances, a look John shared with Wesley, who tried to shrug but couldn’t move his shoulders enough. But the unspoken words were clear. None of them understood, either.

  The giant nodded at John. “Who's he?”

  Mary's face clouded again, though it didn’t have the same hint of white hot anger she’d expressed in her look before. But her tone expressed a deep undercurrent of hurt and betrayal. “A friend. Someone who was there for me when you weren’t… because you were with her.”

  This man cheated on Mary? They’d had a relationship of some kind? Now Wesley was truly baffled. But John blinked rapidly, as if Mary’s confession had awakened understanding in him.

  The giant, for his part, denied nothing. Not exactly. “I didn't know what I was doing. You were there. You know I didn't know.”

  “Didn't you? Or was that just an excuse you used to hook up with that rich wh—”

  “Mary!” It was John's voice, sharp and loud. “Children present.”

  Wesley's mind whirled. Mary’s words, interrupted though they were, were the last clue. He suddenly knew why this man looked familiar. He stumbled forward, pain forgotten, and charged. “It's Oswald Silver's pilot! The rest of you! Get to the boat! I’ll hold him off!”

  He collided with the granite wall posing as a human being and bounced off, crashing to the ground, just as John had in the earlier tackling attempt.

  “Wesley, no!” Mary shouted. He couldn’t decide what shocked him more: that she was defending this man… or that the giant had fallen to the ground as well after Wesley’s feeble tackle attempt.

  “He cheated on you, no?” Wesley grunted, trying to regain his feet. The impact had driven air forcibly from his lungs. The giant hadn’t moved. Wesley didn’t know if he was hurt or simply relying on their kindness; he wouldn’t wait to find out. He scrambled over to the man, straddled the man’s back, and pushed his elbow into the bones at the base of the man’s neck. He glanced up at Mary, who looked frightened. He didn’t know which of the many frightening things happening were the major source of that look. “What makes you think he's not here to kill you, or take you as prisoners back to his old boss?”

  “He's not here to do that,” Mary snapped.

  Her certainty was baffling. “Do you know that for sure?” Wesley asked. The children stood with John who held them back, whispering something to them, something Wesley supposed translated to “let them handle this and stay out of the way.” He turned his attention back to Mary. “You didn't seem too happy to see him.”

  “I… didn't recognize him.”

  Wesley spread his hands, baffled. “You didn't recognize your ex-husband?” He didn’t know that, didn’t know if the implied relationship had included a marital covenant, but took a chance. His eyes moved back to the twins and he opted to take another chance with an assumption. “You didn’t recognize the father of your children?”

  Jack and Jill's mouths fell open. “Daddy?” Their voices were plaintive, sad, confused, and Wesley felt an immense surge of guilt at having unintentionally brought them into the conversation. He shifted his weight to look at them, to apologize.

  But “Daddy” used Wesley's adjusted positioning to his advantage, spinning around at an impossible speed. Before he could blink twice, Wesley found himself on the ground, straddled by the giant man, and with a gun barrel pointing between his eyes. “Who are you?” the giant demanded.

  Wesley screwed up his courage and stared back defiantly. “My name is Wesley Cardinal. I survived the Ravager swarm in the West unleashed by your so-called wife and her father, the man you worked for. Or still do.” Wesley swallowed hard, but he refused to look away. “And I won't let you hurt them, even if it kills me.”

  “I would never hurt them,” the man whispered. And then, as an afterthought: “Not when I have my full mind and memories, at least.”

  The giant’s eyes drifted as if he were experiencing some private memory. Wesley didn’t know what the last comment meant, but given the man’s incredible strength, one thing was clear.

  This man was a threat. But the larger threat—the oncoming Ravager swarm—grew closer by the second. The time for talk had ended. He had to eliminate this intermediate threat so that they could escape the larger threat.

  He wrenched his arms free and seized the man's hands, driving the gun away from his face, and tried to pry it away before the giant regained focus. But the man recovered quickly and thrusted his knee toward Wesley's midsection. Wesley anticipated the move and spun away from the impact. The giant—expecting contact but finding only air—lost his balance and his leverage.

  Wesley, still holding the man’s hands in an effort to keep the gun pointed safely away, thrust upward as he sensed the giant’s loss of balance. Adrenaline masked his pain and gave him the extra explosive strength he needed in this fight to the death.

  The move worked. The giant’s momentum and Wesley’s perfectly timed move flipped the other man over onto his back. Wesley, still caught inside the man’s legs, flipped over as well… and found himself in a position of leverage once again.

  He put his full focus on tearing the gun free.

  He felt the pain begin seconds later, a mild ache at first, then growing and growing inside his mind like a dull knife moving through his brain, growing sharper as it ripped through neurons and nerve endings. The tears came because he couldn’t stop them, a futile external response to the knifelike pain that morphed into something like a raging fire. He lost control of his limbs, felt the giant easily pull the gun away, felt himself collapse on top of the man, felt himself flipped once more onto his back, tears streaming down his head, the fiery torment worse than anything the Voice ever did.

  He could see the gun, just barely, through the watery streams of tears flooding his eyes, aiming once more at his skull.

  He heard the gunshot. But his mind was so far gone at that point that he saw nothing, felt nothing, just a gentle descent into darkness.

  The last thing he heard, before everything vanished, was Mary's poignant scream.

  —26—

  MICAH JAMISON

  THE DATA HAD ENTERED his processing centers and the robotic part of him accepted the logical conclusions.

  The compression bomb had gone off.

  Visual sensors from the ship showed massive levels of damage to the docking bay and the hub to which it connected. Human bodies not meant for the compression bomb’s increased pressure, nor the pressureless void of the vacuum of space succumbed to their fate.

  Messages from the communications networks poured in. Death count in the hundreds. Space station sealed off to prevent greater damage and loss of life, sentencing any who’d survived the initial blast in that space to a prolonged death. Reports that Delilah Silver had been seen in the corridor right at the blast zone, leading along on a human leash a woman no one recognized. Confirmation that Delilah Silver had been impaled by the explosion’s shrapnel, crushed by the compression wave, and that her body was among those that might never be reclaimed.

  Every data point he’d received pointed to only one conclusion.

  Sheila Clarke was dead, killed by the compression bomb he’d triggered to free the ship and bring her home.

  He’d killed her. Not intentionally. But she was dead all the same.<
br />
  He activated the consciousness module, fed all the stimuli inside. He should be feeling the emotions of horror and sadness. Then anger. Then a curious emotion called guilt, in which humans allowed past actions or inactions to influence their energy and happiness levels long after an event had passed. And then denial, a refusal to accept her death. Denial, he found, was powerful; his consciousness, acting as a human mind, grasped for any microcosmic series of events that might point to Sheila’s survival. This was done to increase levels of what humans called “hope,” an irrational belief that bad situations would improve, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

  Humans continued to experience hope because sometimes hope was justified. They longed for positive outcomes to occur.

  Then he experienced what some called the emotion of acceptance, in which he ignored the emotion of hope and lived by facts. Sheila was dead, and it was his fault. Those were facts. His consciousness module determined the next action a human must take.

  His body form held small stashes of water, not because he needed it—water tended to be damaging to a metal-based body—but so that he could simulate human bodily functions that used moisture in the rare cases it was absolutely necessary. Micah’s eyes turned red and swelled. His breathing—which he’d left off until now—came in ragged gasps. His metal limbs spasmed slightly. The speakers inside his throat disgorged the appropriate sounds. And the moisture was pumped to his face and out tiny holes in his eyes.

  Micah cried. Cried until the moisture was gone, until he literally could not cry any longer.

  Then he turned his consciousness off, suspecting that his many human counterparts throughout the centuries wished they could end heartache so easily, by merely flipping a switch.

  He left the underground chamber and cleaned the ship of whatever debris remained after the heat of reentry, removed from the interior anything that wouldn’t help him, added a few supplies. He tested the link between this robotic brain and the Ravager control program, ensuring he could “see” and “feel” them, could talk to and command them. He also ensured that the “ping” between his current brain and the control computer worked; if he “died” on his latest mission, that machine would assume control until his next body form and brain reanimated. Until that happened, the Ravagers would continue executing his last instructions.