by M. R. Forbes
“Hayden.”
“Natalia?” he said, responding to the voice. He looked past the soldiers, out into the street. Natalia was there, crouched on the ground with Hallia cradled in her arms. A trife was moving toward her from the left.
What the hell was this?
“Hayden, help us,” Natalia said. Her head shifted, and she looked right at him. She was frightened. Hallia started crying.
Hayden lowered his eyes. This couldn’t be real. He was in Edenrise. Natalia was in Sanisco. She couldn’t be here. He looked back at the trife standing in front of them. Three of them, blocking the path between him and his family. They held their claws out toward him, hissing.
“Hayden. Help.”
The trife were closing in on Natalia. One of them slashed at her, its claws catching her face and knocking her down.
Hayden reacted without thinking, growling as he jumped up and charged the trife in front of him. He was vaguely aware of the crackling sound of gunfire as he closed on the demons, and then he was driving into them, his large hand and claw working in unison to tear through the creatures.
He left them dead on the ground at his back, rushing out into the street to Natalia.
Except she was gone.
He froze, swinging wildly around in search of her. He saw a large group of trife to the south, coming toward him with some other monster he had never seen before. It was large and bulky, on four thick, oily legs. Its head was huge and flat, two bright eyes staring right at him.
People were surrounding him. At least fifty, dressed in dark robes with eagle and star tattoos on their cheeks or foreheads. They were carrying big revolvers and pointing them in the direction of the trife.
How had the Scrappers gotten here?
The trife and the Scrappers moved toward one another, leaving him standing in the middle of it. Revolvers fired, claws slashed, and both trife and humans started to die.
Hayden rushed forward, joining the Scrappers against the trife. King’s followers were murderers and rapists and cannibals, but at least they were human.
He reached the first of the demons, straight-arming it in the chest with his oversized hand, the force lifting it off its feet and crushing its brittle bones. He rushed past it, grabbing his sidearm and aiming, firing one round after another into the targets. Demons fell ahead of him. One. Two. Three. He continued forward, rushing the largest monster.
His eyes shifted past it, checking the field before he engaged the creature. He noticed the shield spire ahead, and the web of blue energy crackling through the shields beyond. The shields were still up. Where had all the trife come from?
He blinked a few times, and then closed his right eye, squinting the left to zoom in on shields in the distance, searching for a break in the coverage. A sharp jolt behind the replacement eye caused him to drop to his knees, crying out and clutching at it. He had never felt anything so painful. He fell forward onto his stomach, clutching at the eye, ready to try to tear it out. Was it defective? Malfunctioning? He heard the Scrappers moving over him, engaging the trife ahead of him. He laid on the ground, eyes closed while the pain started to subside.
Natalia wasn’t here. The trife weren’t here. There was something wrong with the shields. He knew all of that was true, but at the same time everything he had seen was so damn real. His brain was convinced it was there. The pain in his eye had to be a clue. It had to mean something.
The replacements worked by syncing the control ring to the nervous system, allowing that part of it to translate back and forth between the digital and the organic. Eyes were different though. Chandra said eyes didn’t have a control ring. They could only pass information in. A one-way translation.
He remained still, playing dead while the fight raged on around him. This was important. He was hallucinating. He had to be. The web of energy in the shields was a clue. Hadn’t Nathan said the Other was using a weapon that overloaded the nervous system, sending electrical signals through it that caused the victim to see things?
If the eye could only pass information in, and what it was sending didn’t match up, what would happen then? If he used both eyes, maybe the brain would disregard the confusing signal and use the one it understood. But what if he only used one eye?
He raised his head slightly, testing the theory. With both eyes opened, he watched the largest trife tear through two of the Scrappers, dropping them only a few meters away. Then he closed his right eye, leaving only the replacement to see through.
The pain was immediate and intense. He dropped his head again, looking away while the pain began to fade. That was it, wasn’t it? Nothing he was looking at was real. The mechanical eye knew it. How could he get it to convince his mind?
He looked up again, keeping his right eye closed. Again, his head exploded in pain. He stayed with it, fighting through it, telling himself what he thought was real wasn’t real. Trying to force his mind to trust his eye.
The pain started to fade at the same time the truth began to emerge. The trife morphed into a strange hybrid of soldier and demon. The Scrappers lost their robes and tattoos, revealed as civilian residents of the city.
He heard gunfire in the distance. It seemed like it was coming from everywhere at once. He wasn’t the only one hallucinating. All of Edenrise had become affected by the electrical variance the Other had somehow introduced into the energy field. They were all going mad.
He found the spire again. He had to get through this mess and into the spire.
Whatever the Other had done, it was up to him to stop it.
Chapter 28
Hayden charged a dozen small steps up to the entrance to the spire, firing the assault rifle he had picked up on the way at the Liberators still guarding the front door. They were shooting back at him, but their aim was terrible, their rounds often short, their nerves frayed by the eager assault of what they likely saw as a single trife. The chaos of the city around him was serving to make his ingress easier, a distraction he didn’t really need but wasn’t going to waste.
He dropped four soldiers before reaching the top step, the magazine of his rifle empty. He dropped the weapon, throwing himself against the wall of the building as a pair of soldiers just inside the door targeted him. Their bullets missed him but came too close for comfort.
He took a few deep breaths, regrouping himself. He headed back the way he had come, into the streets of the city. There were a lot more dead civilians than soldiers, and the fallen soldiers he did see appeared to be undamaged. Had they hallucinated that they were being shot? Had their brains been so convinced they had acted as though the wounds were real?
A chill ran through him at the thought. The Other didn’t need the virus to kill everyone in the city. Which meant if it was at Hangar Six, it was planning to launch. For that, it would need the shields to come down. But the powers-that-be would never lower their protective shields.Unless the shields were causing the populace to hallucinate, and they were all dying anyway.
“Fuck,” Hayden cursed under his breath.
The Other had to have done something to the generators in the spire to create the electrical variance of the web, and if he didn’t figure it out and stop it right now, General Neill was going to lower the shields and leave an already weakened city wide open for the nearby trife.
The Others hadn’t only played Tinker into searching for the artifact. They had played all of humankind. Proxima was preparing for an assault from space that would never come. An assault that would never have to come. They were facing forward while the Others were sneaking in through the back door, easily outmaneuvering even a man with Tinker’s intellect.
Hayden broke from his spot on the wall, rushing the doors. He threw himself at the soldier on the right side, driving his claw into the man’s stomach, grabbing him and spinning him around as the second soldier opened fire. The soldier’s bullets tore into Hayden’s human shield, and then Hayden kicked the shield back into the first man, pushing him away. He broke around the side, sl
ashing the soldier’s neck with his claw.
He picked up one of their rifles, checking the display. Twenty rounds. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t have time to waste. He turned toward the short corridor leading deeper into the base of the spire. It ended at another door which was already hanging open, blood stains and bullet holes coating its surface.
He paused at the door, breaking around it ready to fire. The spire control room was round and small with four terminals facing a holographic projection of the city in the center – a simulation of the energy field protecting them from attack. That field was webbed with the blue energy now, though in the simplicity of the hologram it looked more like dark lines.
There were two bodies on the ground inside the hologram, their hands wrapped around one another’s necks. Logically, only one of the men should have been dead, but the Other had managed to twist and manipulate logic so far that it made perfect sense to both men that they had died.
Hayden approached one of the terminals, scanning it. The interface was unlocked, the controls to lower the shields from within the spire available to anyone who entered. The Other wasn’t here, or there would be no reason for the diversions. It could press a button to bring the shields down.
He noticed a door on the other side of the room. He ran over to it, pushing through into another short corridor to an open door leading to a stairwell. Hayden went to the stairs, realizing they must lead to an underground generator. Whatever the Other had done, the generator was his most likely target.
He started descending, coming across more bodies as he went. He raced down eight flights of steps before reaching the bottom. There, he found a heavy metal blast door. A label beside the door identified the space beyond as the generator room.
Except the door was still sealed.
He stood in front of it, trying to decide what to do. Maybe he was wrong, and the Other hadn’t been down here. It could have snuck in with someone else when the door was opened. It also could have opened the door itself. There was a security panel next to the door, and he put his hand to it to see what would happen.
ACCESS DENIED.
He wasn’t surprised. Still, it didn’t mean the enemy hadn’t been down here. It was able to make itself look like anyone it had come into contact with. Was it enough to fool the biometric scanners too?
He reached out with his left hand, feeling for a seam in the door. It was too small to get anything into it to start forcing it open. If he couldn’t get through that way, there was only one other way to get in.
He took a step back, drawing back his oversized hand. Then he threw it forward, slamming it into the door. The force of the blow left a dent in the metal.
“Fine,” he said out loud. “You want to do it this way; we’ll do it this way.”
He drew his hand back and punched the door again, and again, and again, hitting it in the same place each time, denting in the metal barrier and forcing the edge to slide in to follow the reshaping metal. He hit it over and over again. Ten times. Twenty. Thirty. He kept bashing the door, leaving dents in the knuckles of the hand from the repetitive pounding.
Finally, the edge of the door grew visible. Hayden stopped punching, using his other hand to dig his fingers in and grip it with as much leverage on it as he could get. He started tugging on the door, dragging it aside against its will. It took almost a minute to make a space he could fit through, but he made it happen.
The space behind the door was relatively small, and the air was at least ten degrees warmer, making the area hot and hard to breathe in. But maybe it wasn’t the heat that made the air hard to breathe.
Maybe it was the source of the shield spire’s power.
Hayden stood in the entrance to the room, staring at an alien spacecraft.
Chapter 29
Nathan pushed open the smaller door leading into Hangar Six. The first thing he noticed was the smell. It was one of death and blood, and he immediately noticed a dead soldier on his left, a vicious knife wound across the man’s throat. Blood stained his uniform and pooled around his head. And his rifle was gone.
Was the soldier who killed him still here?
Nathan’s eyes shifted to the expanse of the hangar. He was expecting more of an open space, but this was also his first glimpse at the delivery vehicles Tinker had designed to transport the virus around the globe. He knew they were relatively small, about the length of his arm. Even so, he hadn’t even tried to guess how they were organized.
He saw it now. The rockets were mounted in racks, each of which held at least one hundred of them. The racks were installed to approximately two-dozen larger rockets that took up most of the available space in the hangar, little more than long, sharp spears with large thrusters at their base. The entire package was imposing and sent a chill racing down his spine.
One of the large rockets had a portable scaffold beside it, the base of which was lined with canisters like the one James had left in Crosston. A soldier was crouched on it, rifle aimed at Nathan.
Nathan brought his weapon up, swinging it to his shoulder to return fire as the first rounds exploded from the soldier’s gun. He was a decent shot, and one of the slugs from the first burst found Nathan, slamming him in the leg. The force of the impact knocked him down and he cursed as he hit the ground. He couldn’t afford to take cover behind any of the DVs. One wrong shot could kill everyone in the city.
Instead, he rolled back to his knees, throwing himself forward to stay ahead of the shooter’s attack. Bullets whizzed over his head and smacked into the floor behind him. He found his footing and dove forward again, adjusting his weapon as he did. Rolling sideways, he pivoted on his knee and rose with his rifle already in firing position. If he missed the soldier, he would be the one who killed them all.
He didn’t think. He just shot, squeezing the trigger and releasing a single round. He was a Stacker and had top scores on every simulation the Centurion military ran. He was still surprised when his slug hit the soldier square in the face, snapping his head back and stopping his attack. Making that kind of shot wasn’t part of the simulations.
He got up, testing his leg as he took his first step. The bullet had hit him in the meaty part of his thigh, grazing flesh and fat but luckily missing muscle and bone. It was uncomfortable but livable; he was back to speed within a few seconds.
There was only one place for him to go. A metal staircase led up the right wall of the hangar to the control room. It was visible from the ground as a large pane of thick impact-proof glass affixed to a metal box that dangled from the side of the structure. He didn’t see anyone inside it from here, but that didn’t mean the Other wasn’t up there. In fact, he hoped it was up there. He was eager to pay it back for the misery and death it had caused.
He made his way to the stairs and started to climb. He was at the second of four landings when a new noise – an odd hissing sound, coming from deeper into the hangar – gave him pause. He turned and looked out over the launch vehicles, searching for the source of the noise. He found it a moment later, a small stream of mist rising from the floor, emitted by the thrusters of one of the larger rockets.
Was it preparing to launch?
He increased his speed, running up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He made it to the top, to the closed door leading into the control room. He tried to push through it, stymied when it didn’t give. The door was locked tight.
He put his hand to the security panel to the right of it. Nothing happened. Not even an access denied. The panel was dead. The hissing sound grew in pitch. He looked back at the vehicles, noticing a second rocket had activated and was beginning to warm. He tilted his head up to the roof. It was only a minute or two from being fully open.
He stepped back, firing his rifle at the lock on the door, hoping he could destroy it. He kept shooting until his weapon was empty, and then he put all of his force behind a solid kick, slamming the door with his foot. It smashed inward, shattering the damaged lock. He dropped the rifle and drew hi
s sidearm, aiming it into the room.
The empty room.
The Other wasn’t here.
He rushed in, looking down at the controls. One of the displays showed the door status, and he tapped on the control surface, hoping he could shut it down. As soon as he touched the surface, a screen popped up asking for a password he didn’t know.
“Fuck!” he shouted, moving to the rocket controls. The screens were changing, cycling from one vehicle to another. He watched as a small screen popped up:
LV #6 LAUNCH SEQUENCE INITIATED.
He heard the hissing change pitch again, joined by another rocket.
He slammed on the control surface, but all it did was bring up another password screen. He cursed a second time. The Other was using the interface from somewhere else.
Coming here had been an entire waste of time.
He turned, vaulting the side of the stairwell and dropping a few meters to the landing. He hit hard, his leg nearly giving out when he landed. He didn’t have time for injury. He didn’t have time for pain. There was only one place he could think of that would have remote access to the hangar controls.
He had five minutes at most to get his ass to Operations.
Chapter 30
The alien vessel wasn’t large. It also wasn’t in great shape. On first glance, it was clear to Hayden that some portion of the ship had been lost over a number of years. There were multiple points where the matte black alloy shell was picked away, exposing writing and joints and other components he couldn’t begin to understand. Sections of the metal skin were pock-marked and corroded, and the whole thing had an odd patina that suggested it had been submerged under water at some time.