by Ian Williams
“Tell me then, what precisely are they offering to do for us?”
“Well, they know we’re going to try and remove the shield above the city. When we do they’re set to begin their own attack on Isaac’s forces inside their world. I can coordinate with them and make sure the attacks happen simultaneously. But we will need to do more than just bring down the shield. Once Isaac is facing attacks from all sides he should be spread across both worlds. That is when we need to move against him directly.”
“So we give the Ring his location and they can blow him to kingdom come.”
“Unfortunately, that’s where the problem lies.”
Captain Rigs looked Graham up and down as he considered for a moment. “You don't know how to find him, do you?”
“No-one does. He’s too deeply entrenched in both worlds to pin his location down to only one place. But by removing the relays from the equation and destroying his stronghold within the Sentient world, we will leave him with nowhere else to go. That’s where these other Sentients will step in. The only place he’ll have left to retreat to will lead him directly into their forces.”
“OK, so with the shield down we should be able to take Isaac’s army. The Ring can pick them off from above too. And while we’re doing that your Sentient friends can deal with Isaac. That sounds like a plan to me.”
“And that’s where my role comes in. To make absolutely sure we do actually kill Isaac once and for all, I’ll be in constant communication with the Sentient forces. If we defeat him in both worlds at the same time we should be able to remove him completely.”
“Finally, I see the real you.” Captain Rigs patted Graham firmly on the shoulder. “All this nonsense with keeping secrets from me and lying to be allowed on this mission; what was that all for?”
“Would you really have agreed to let me come if I had told you?”
“Point taken.”
“Thing is… there’s more. The real reason I’ve been involved is a little more selfish of me. You see, I’ve been having problems. Needless to say, I was hoping to get help from the Sentients, as it relates to them. Now it seems the only way I’ll get that help is if we beat Isaac first.”
“Gregson went through what she saw with me; the voices, the blackouts, and that thing on your hand.”
“And you believe it’s true?”
“I don’t command liars, Graham. I’ll admit that if it hadn’t come from one of my own, I would have ignored it. You’re lucky she insisted on going with you, otherwise this conversation would have gone differently.”
Graham gave a grateful smile to Gregson in the corner.
“So,” Captain Rigs continued. “Our main goal remains the destruction of the newly installed relays. To do that I need more people than we currently have. Watts is in the process of reaching these other groups of survivors around the city. If they will agree to meet somewhere safe, I can put the plan to them.” Captain Rigs finished with a nod to Gregson, who approached the papers and maps, to point out the relevant areas.
“We’ve got fourteen of these new, bigger relays currently operating. They’re circled in red here,” she said. “To hit them all we’ll need to spread our people a little thinly. Near to us there are six relays. We should be able to take them out without a problem, with enough of the EMPs that is. The rest will be for the other groups to hit by themselves. We’re going to give them the designs for their own EMPs.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Graham jumped in to add. “After the bigger relays are gone I’m pretty certain the older, pre-existing network should kick back in.”
“How certain, exactly?”
“Very. Years spent working with them while at Simova has shown me just how resilient they are. Just look what happened after Anthony’s group overloaded the country’s network. Even though a huge amount of them were destroyed, it still only took a year-and-a-half to get a majority of them working again. I know what the smaller relays can take.”
“Excellent, that’s good to know. Now, if one group fails it should still be possible to bring down the shield. The power needed to hold it over the city will be too much for one or two relays to maintain,” Captain Rigs said. “There’s no way of knowing exactly how many we’ll need to take out, though. All we can do is treat them all as required. We’ll need an EMP device for each target, so your friend, Jack, will need help to make them for us. Gregson, you see to that. I want them ready by the time I get back from the meeting. Watts, what’s your progress?”
“Sir, I’ve managed to speak with two of the three groups so far. Both have agreed to meet.”
“Who are we missing?”
“I’m having trouble reaching the third group, led by this Petra Vuković woman.”
“Wait, Petra Vuković?” Graham asked. “As in the city’s main D-Stim dealer?”
“Yes, why?”
Graham rubbed the ridge above his eyes as he answered. “I’ve had the pleasure of meeting that old bag already. She nearly killed me and my sister Ruth. The only way she’ll agree to do anything is if she gets something out of it.”
“To save herself, I think she’ll agree to help.” Captain Rigs smiled at Graham, for the first time in a warm way too. “Seems we have everything we need. I want you with me at this meeting. If any of them are too stubborn or afraid to help us, I’ll need you to convince them to change their minds. Informing them of help from your Sentient friends could be enough to bring these people on board.”
“You got it,” Graham replied. He felt a surge of confidence as they shook hands.
“We’ll turn this chaos around. No-one can be allowed to stand against us again. With the shield finally down we’ll show this Isaac exactly what we’re made of.”
“Sir, I’ve got the last group. They want to speak with you,” Watts said, his hand over the microphone in front of him.
“About damn time,” Captain Rigs answered with a sigh. “Graham, tell the others to be ready to leave in one hour. We’ll head out to the meeting place early. I want everything prepared before our guests arrive.”
Graham agreed with an awkward thumbs-up gesture, then left the room. As he closed the door behind him he met the younger version of himself standing there waiting, a look of disapproval on his face.
“I don’t like being so buddy, buddy with that guy,” it said.
“Not now,” was all Graham cared to say in reply. He was too busy to allow such concerns to take hold.
The next few hours were going to prove the most important for their plan of attack. With the other survivors teaming up together and joining the fight it looked to be a goal they might actually be able to achieve. Yet Graham, in a moment of pessimism, reminded himself that success still hung in the balance, and from a thinning thread too.
* * *
“Do not move, brave warrior. We will soon have you to safety.”
Stanley cracked open one eye to see the owner of the kind voice that had spoken to him. Only after a second of searching the illuminated face, he found his eye beginning to ache. He closed it again and returned to his own thoughts. They were nervous thoughts, thoughts of just what would happen to him if the friendly being kneeling beside his broken body knew of his true identity and purpose.
“You have survived against the greatest of odds, my fearless soul. Rest now.” The voice carried much further across the coal-like landscape than expected. It spread out like a flock of winged creatures fluttering away. An echo took the words and softened them as they travelled afield.
The next thing Stanley felt was the warm touch from the small gathering of Sentients there to rescue him. They each gripped at his own glowing body – one he had stolen from the real owner – and slowly picked him up from the dust ridden ground. He was to be carried to their land as a wounded soldier, a fallen comrade, who they would bring back to health through kindness and care.
And they would be sorely punished for it.
“How has he survived in such a place and in such a c
ondition?” another of the Sentients asked. “All others have perished, so why is this one different?”
“It is not our place to question these things,” the first replied. “One of our own has returned to us from the fight. He is to be treated as a hero. Only after he is safe and repaired can we then ask your questions.”
For the next few minutes Stanley was spared more conversation and allowed the time to find some form of control over his racing mind. He was in enemy territory, yet they were showing him the greatest of respect. It put him in a state of confused apprehension. His identity was his secret burden, his cross to bear, and the one thing he could not share.
But something about the way they carried him aloft and talked of his bravery had rubbed off on him. Despite the fight they talked of, not being the one he had taken part in, he still agreed with their sentiment; in Isaac's eyes he hoped to be the hero these thought him to be.
The world around him soon changed into something more appealing. They had taken him out of the pockmarked battlefield he had been dumped in. They had moved on from where the fighting had once raged and where the scenery it had ravaged now lay desolate and lifeless. Suddenly things were a lot brighter and more angelic in appearance.
He would not be seduced by what he saw, though; these were demons, not angels.
“We have arrived,” a Sentient down by Stanley’s new legs said. “Open the gates.”
He could not resist watching this happen around him. Even though his own glow caused pain for his virtual eyes – a strange sensation considering his real body was still in the real world somewhere, he had to keep them open to see the entrance of the enemy’s protected realm.
An enormous set of doors, almost twenty feet in height, slowly began to part in front of his tiny group. It had formed out of nothing but the dim hue of light this part of the world consisted of. Where a space had existed before, now a doorway had appeared that led into a miraculous scene. Beyond the entrance was another plane of existence, one that had nothing in common at all with the wider world it resided in.
The Sentients continued to carry him through their home, giving him the chance to take it all in. Everything he saw would be priceless for his master’s cause. He had managed to do the one thing no-one else had ever succeeded in doing. He had made it past the enemy’s defences, and inside their walls. Now his concern was in keeping up appearances for as long as possible while he searched for a weakness. Anything would do, even the smallest of exploits would suffice.
“Where are you taking me,” he said. His voice shared no resemblance to his own at all. With his disguised form came someone else’s tone too. Because of the injuries Isaac had inflicted upon him to cement this cover story he weaved, his sound was weak and without the same distance of travel. It still surprised him to hear his words coming through his mouth with another’s voice attached.
“You must heal, great soldier. Your life-force is severely damaged. You must be fixed,” came the reply.
Through the pathways and walkways of their home they took him. Along the way others would stop and stare as what they perceived as one of their own was carried past. They all appeared to lower their featureless heads in respect to the fallen. This lone survivor they had rescued from the battlefield was on show for all to see and admire. Stanley was enjoying the attention. It was almost a shame to him that he would be the one to destroy them all.
Whoever had provided the base design for the Sentients’ hidden world had lived a remarkably ordinary life, from what he saw. The more they had shown him the more he was sure it had come from one of his own. Strangely it appeared to have become a protective shell for the beings there. It was obvious to him that the Sentients had somehow mixed their code with that of this mystery human.
They had changed a lot of the different scenes here, turning what had been a linear flow into a chaotic and seemingly random amalgamation of them all. What logic had bound these places together had been removed for the convenience of those using it as their temporary home.
“He will be taken to the central memory segment.”
Hearing this sealed it finally for Stanley. He had found his first truly remarkable piece of evidence to use against them. So, this is all made of the memories from this one human? he thought with a smile he knew would not appear for others to see; his new face lacked detail, as everyone else’s did.
After another short trip through someone’s memory lane it finally brought them all to the place of Stanley’s recuperation. It sat within a long hall, with wooden beams across the ceiling that garnered a complex pattern of carvings all along them.
The Sentients would have no idea what the inside of a Church would look like, which explained the oddly placed split between memories. Where the rear wall should have sealed the room off, there now appeared an outside scene of sunshine in a park. These beings living within moved from one to another without any knowledge that it should not be that way.
Stanley was gently laid out on a wooden table set out where the alter once was. The Sentients who had carried him through their world stepped back, bowed in another show of respect, then left.
He tried not to move too much, even to rid himself of the pain from his injuries. Even when the unexpected sound of splashing water met his ears, he remained still. From what he had seen along the way these memories were acting out in a kind of loop. The children he expected were playing in a fountain in the park scene beyond the church were doing so for as long as the memory lasted. They were just shadows of the real people, echoes of what had once been. It made everything he witnessed even more amazing, to know that the glowing beings were the reality and the people there were all but phantoms.
He lifted his head off of the table and looked to the approaching beings he heard enter the room. It was a shock for him to see at first. These beings were not hiding behind the anonymity of faceless bodies, but had taken form, human form. Two were as human as any he had ever known, yet one had failed miserably in that endeavour. It stood much taller than the other two and seemed more alien-like than even the Sentients without detail there.
“My friend, you have come back to us,” the strangely disturbing looking being asked him, its stick-thin arms hanging by its side.
“Kindness, let him rest,” the human in much smarter attire than the rest said. He then approached Stanley himself. “Please, do not move. You are badly injured. With time you will be able to tell us everything you have seen. But until you are well you should remain still.”
The last of them to speak was an older gentleman. “He has sustained major damage. I see ruptures throughout his core. I suggest we ask others for help with this, he’s going to require a lot of new energy to fix him.”
“What do you think happened to the others?”
“I don’t know, Luke. The last we saw of them they were fending off a whole team of enemy fighters. I thought for sure they had all died. This one is incredibly lucky to have survived by itself.”
The tallest of the three, by quite a lot, lowered itself to Stanley’s height. It peered directly into his face and stared menacingly. For a short while he thought his disguise had failed him and they could see the real him beneath the glowing exterior. But after a second or two Kindness tried his best at a smile that reassured Stanley.
“You are proof that Isaac cannot beat us all,” Kindness said. “You stood against him and live to tell the tale. All will hear of your bravery. Here today we witness the first of Isaac’s failures.”
“One of many to come too, wouldn’t you agree, Stephen?” Luke added.
Stephen replied with a slow nod.
A smug kind of satisfaction at hearing this unexpectedly found Stanley. How little these poor souls really knew of their enemy. Where they saw a sign of hope it was in fact the very opposite. Stanley would be their downfall, their ultimate undoing. From the inside he planned to end them. And from the outside they were to collapse in.
“I will inform the rest,” Kindness added before wande
ring away.
The other two remained silent. They looked to each other with varying degrees of worry written across their facsimiles of human faces. It became clear to Stanley that these two were less easy to trick. Despite his best attempts to seem like one of them, and in the face of his continued silence, they appeared uneasy with the situation. Their friend’s instant reaction of pride and respect had failed to rub off on them. He would have to keep an eye on them both, or risk allowing them space to undermine him.
Lucky for him the next part of his mission was to be much easier than the first. Now inside, he could find their weakness, and he already knew roughly where to start. Only after a little investigation of his own would he be sure he could do what was needed of him. Of course he had another problem to face before that. While his recovery proceeded he could go nowhere without raising suspicion. As soon as he was well enough he would act, and everything he saw around him would be torn down.
They had no idea how much trouble they were truly in.
Chapter 21
Friends and allies
Evening came, and the meeting time was fast approaching. Everything that could be done to ready the meeting place had been. Security, as far as was possible, had been set up around the inside. Guards were made up of those who had volunteered to help Captain Rigs. Although only lightly armed with lethal or non-lethal pistols, they were given patrol routes to walk throughout the building while the discussions were to happen on the ground floor.
It was not a place that stood out much, but every precaution was being taken regardless. The restaurant they waited in was perfectly set up to hold a friendly meeting of minds. It had been easy to secure too. Whoever had been hiding there once before had already sealed off the entrances with wooden boards.