Afterglow, p.31
Afterglow, page 31
Or can it? Del filled his mind with darkness and, when he sensed the child’s attention, he sadly unfolded one of his favorite memories.
Years in the past, better times inside his lab on Cloud9. “This was my home,” he narrated, unsure any of his words made it through to the child, but it helped him guide his thoughts, and perhaps radiating such strong emotions would catch its attention.
He stood before a carbon-black biped. “This will one day become a voidian called Ursurper Gale. It’s a new biology designed for exploring and colonizing space. At the moment he has no brains. It’s just an experimental body guided by remote control. He’s got senses, even eyes. See those tiny camera bumps on his shoulders?”
I did this. I was really here. For a second, he dangled that familiarity, that feeling-of-knowing out there like bait. And then… he let the memory unfurl.
Bored, needing to go play with something fun, he eased into a GFC VR-couch and let his Inner-I take control, shutting down his body, feeding his mind with data from Gale’s senses.
“This was me at my most content, just weeks before the Nova-Insanity ruined everything.” He pinged Ellayna on his Inner-I comms. “I’m taking the new voidian exploration body out for a spin.” Her face popped into his view. Her eyes still held the twinkle from their recent amorous encounter inside one of the centrifugal workout chambers.
“Knock yourself out, Del.” She looked away, clearly distracted by other, more important tasks.
Del trooped Gale’s body over to the airlock and executed the safety protocols. The hiss of vanishing air flowed over Gale’s ultra-sensitive skin, tingling, alive as if the velocity and momentum vectors of every molecule meant something profound and delightful.
Alarms sounded, seals hissed and popped. Lights flashed. The child is watching! Just watching. I have its attention.
The airlock’s outer door opened and Del thrust out into space, feeling the prickle of raw vacuum on his fullerene skin, untethered, unrestrained. He activated a small rocket pack on his back. Within seconds Cloud9 vanished to a speck behind him and the Earth was a glorious blue-grey ball hanging in front. He felt the child push past him, interested, no… fascinated. It reached out, tiny hands trying to grasp the Earthly globe as any child would, confused that it couldn’t touch but enthralled by the colors and soft motion.
“Welcome to infinity,” said Del, quietly. “Except for a few probes and colonists, this is, as far as we know, everything meaningful to ever exist. Our entire culture. This is an encapsulation of what it is to be alive.”
The child kept reaching, wanting to touch, but then pulled back, perhaps frustration, perhaps the realization that this was something very large, very, very far away.
Del kept the narrative flowing. “This… this is the very definition of life.” He turned gently away, skimming his vision over the dense core of the Milky Way and then up, out of the galactic plane to the darkest regions of space. “And this… this is everything else.” He let the image settle, felt the quiet in the child’s mind. “If all of life is behind us then this is the nearest to death I’ve ever experienced. An immense, endless, meaningless void.” He activated the rocket and felt the ache of acceleration, but the Universe didn’t change, nothing grew closer or larger. “And yet, gazing upon this dark infinity gives me hope. Hope that one day we’ll go out there and sprinkle life throughout those stars.”
He felt the child drifting ahead of him as if compelled to test the size and texture of everything in front of it. Del eased back gently, quietly, into reality.
CHAPTER 70
Waypoint
Ursurper Gale crashed out of the assault capsule, rolling into his combat wheel form, and passing the advanced Burns who took up defensive positions around the ruined penetrator vehicle. He flashed past the remnants of humans, their bones and brains shattered by the concussion wave from their assault craft. The Burns had already dispatched any survivors, and the ground was now clear for Gale and the other shock troops to roll forward on their designated vectors and begin the destruction of Hmech’s defensive formations.
As Gale moved, he channeled memories from deep storage, that flash of information he’d received from Jett just before he exploded. He felt Jett’s passion for combat, something he’d never really felt from his baseline existence as Del Krondeck, but something he needed right now.
His direction arrow jolted right, and he turned, almost a reflex, through a block wall and into an adjacent room. Incoming fire raked his armored plates as he unfurled out of his wheel and opened fire with his hyper-rifle. A single fire-controlled sweep dispatched the remaining foes, shattering their bodies into a red fog.
He ran now, instead of rolling, giving his Inner-I a few seconds of clarity to snapshot his surroundings before folding back into an assault wheel. Lasers burned pinholes through his frontal armor; one of his side plates absorbed a rocket propelled grenade hit. The plate crumbled and blew away. The explosion from his reactive armor sent him reeling sideways to cartwheel back to his feet, crouch into a combat pose and return fire at his multiple attackers. Targets vied for attention on his tactical display, his gun snapping to each location, one every well-metered fiftieth of a second. A maser seared his fullerene skin as he plunged through a door and into a hallway, corkscrewing along its length. Floor, wall, ceiling, wall, and back to the floor, leaving dazed enemies gazing sadly ahead as their shattered bodies dropped to the ground.
“Waypoint number one ahead.” The message flashed across his vision, colored arrows showing potential routes, red rectangles highlighting possible dangers while green Xs marked targets. Some were found by auto-guns mounted on his shoulder armor; other targets he destroyed himself.
He felt nothing but exhilaration, his mind detached and body on automatic, following an unconscious plan, one pre-rehearsed and memorized in the simulators back at the Enclave. All he had to do was correct minor deviations and watch for surprises, keep the gun locked on targets with the minimum of transition-time from one to the next. Airtime was crucial: the fractions of seconds while his gun located its next target. He could aim and fire faster than even the auto-turrets with their electronic feedback loops and target recognition software. Anything operated by remote-control stood no chance, the millisecond information–propagation delays meant they were dead before their command signals returned from their operators.
The bullets left his gun barrel at six-thousand kilometers per hour, tiny thunder cracks leaving orange lightning trails. Gale’s gun glowed red. Fibers, bones and muscles shone with burnt-orange heat through his carbon-black skin.
A Burn slowed, taking heavy damage, folding under the weight of incoming fire before striding headlong into the deadly assault, taking as much attention as possible away from his companions. As he fell, a tiny bomb in his head activated, incinerating his corpse and all its damning data and technology. The Burn’s life-sign vanished from Gale’s readout. Fourteen Burns remained. Gale wondered how the other units were doing as they all converged on their respective waypoints.
A message flashed in his view. “Waypoint number one. Secured.” A crossroads of tunnels. Gale’s direction arrows rolled and changed. He paused waiting for the others to reach their own personal goals. Timing was always critical.
“And go!” Abandoning the impression of a coordinated attack on the mass-driver, the attackers turned and headed off on different vectors, ones pointing them straight for the central bunker where Hmech and his personal guard would be frantically setting up their defense.
CHAPTER 71
The Battle Home
Jorben was surprised when he was granted leave at such short notice. “Go!” his unit commander yelled at him. “You are a mess, Soldier. Go the fuck home and sort your life out.”
He watched from a hillock overlooking Arlen as assault craft careened into distant Transit Mountain. The thunder of war machines rolled across the hills, and lightning flashes lit its plateaus. Why haven’t I been recalled? His feet twitched back to his distant barracks, but no, something more urgent ailed his mind.
He needed to confront Nathan. To get some things off his chest. He told himself he would be calm, restrained, and that even if Nathan attacked him, he’d do nothing in defense. Just talk. But also make his point to the man that if he ever did anything to hurt Leal again, then a very angry Jorben would come for him, rip off all his extremities and cram them into whichever of Nathan’s orifices was making the most noise at that particular moment.
Who would be stupid enough to attack the Alliance? He watched for a few more seconds, checking his Inner-I. Nothing. Guess they really don’t need me at the moment?
Jogging across the entire city to Arlen wouldn’t normally be a problem for Jorben, especially as he’d been rebodied a few weeks earlier. But today, wearing an Alliance badge and uniform, he’d found himself in the crossfire from various militia factions who sensed vulnerability in the Alliance’s power structure and rose up to fight. He even took a minor hit to the shoulder. It didn’t slow him down, just made him angrier.
Reggie, the security guard saw him coming and stepped outside of his box, hand on gun holster. “You can’t go up there. He told me not to let you past.”
He?
Reggie grappled the safety clip on the holster, but before he could free the gun Jorben shoved him aside and he crashed through his own security barrier, cracking his head on a curb, and folding into a withered heap.
“Shit! Come on Reggie.” Jorben propped him upright, slapping some life back into his cheeks. His eyes twitched but remained closed. He eased the gun out of the holster, surprised to find it loaded. “You old goat! Planning on taking me down this time, eh?”
He pocketed the weapon and began the short run up to Leal’s house.
Gale noticed the human defenders moved and fought as a single unit. Even their footsteps were synchronized. They either had amazing training and battle sequencing software or were chained together mentally, possibly using some version of Knoss’s convolution-space technology to create a unified battlefield experience.
Four of his fellow Burns had now fallen, taken down at ambush points where the enemy simply sat awaiting anything that came around the corner. Gale’s versatile anatomy allowed him to move faster, spiraling up and over ceilings, even crashing through walls avoiding obvious traps and kill zones. The Burns by comparison were more cumbersome, and their human-like morphology created less confusion amongst the defenders. What they lacked in voidian biology they almost made up for in sheer tenacity and reckless, suicidal commitment. They had nothing to lose, except face, and probably wouldn’t even remember this conflict as their current mind-states would not update their Canned versions back at the Enclave before their self-destructs kicked-in.
Up through a ceiling vent: fire downwards and run.
Drop through, roll, unfurl – fire!
The other attack teams were faring poorly, many reduced to half-numbers. With no voidian leading their charge they were finding this fight impossible to win.
He exited the tunnel, clawing his way along the ceiling into an open area. All the guns awaiting his arrival were pointing along the corridor where he should have been. Gale leapt up onto an overhead crane and used its thick steel beams as cover. He noted that one of the attacking group reacted slightly ahead of the others, just milliseconds. A leader? He shot the presumed group leader and watched as the group’s synchronicity broke apart. They still defended, still attacked, still thought, but now lacked that mechanical cohesion. Hypothesis confirmed, he relayed the information back to their distributed battle network, and the system made appropriate adjustments to the plans.
Gale and nine Burns reached waypoint number two, the defensive perimeter of Hmech’s main bunker. The human resistance had all but vanished. Now he saw just machines, strange mesh-robots composed of ultra-thin threads; the name wireframe sprang into his mind. They moved fast, attacked hard, and didn’t think about dying or defense. One Burn fell quickly in hand-to-hand combat with one of the machines. Gale dispatched the wireframe through the corpse of the dead Burn even as the self-destruct incinerated both Burn and foe in a white flash.
A wall panel fell open as he passed and a wireframe spider sprang out; a mobile gun platform carrying a single-shot, pepper-pot-style cannon that blasted a web of hyper-velocity pellets at him. He twisted violently to evade the densest spray. Impacts stripped away most of his remaining armor and sent him crashing through a wall into an empty barrack room. A bipedal wireframe stepped through the hole, gun blazing, and the room dissolved into fragments of pumice and floor tiles as Gale and machine whirled around a common center evading and returning the other’s fire until the wireframe crumbled into carbon dust. He realized the folly of using small projectiles against wireframe foes. Larger caliber weapons worked better. He spun his free hand into a heavy bludgeon and whirled it over his head like a helicopter blade. The next wireframe he encountered took the full force of Gale’s improvised weapon and fragmented into a dozen parts that landed and kept moving, staggering around like confused insects before their local power resources drained and they collapsed to the ground.
The remaining Burns were all at their waypoints, all flashing red with damage icons. Obfuscate then obliterate, Knoss called it. Keep the enemy confused and on the move. Keep moving.
“Waypoint two secured,” the message flashed.
As a single unit the attackers changed direction again, fast, double pace back the way they had come, putting distance between themselves and the formidable wireframe defenders surrounding the bunker. At waypoint number three, they changed again, rolling and blasting through the deserted rooms and corridors that separated them from their true target: waypoint number four: the mass-driver.
CHAPTER 72
Bunkered
Rex watched as the giant metal door cranked shut and secured, sealing himself, Hmech, Del’s new body, Mira’s shambling, dead-eyed corpse, and a large cohort of nurses and guards inside the bunker. They wheeled his gurney into a corner and parked him under the watchful eye of a wireframe guard. A creature human in outline but made of fine, transparent mesh that gave it the appearance of a ghost.
Hmech stood at a control console. Screens covered the walls showing battles and defenses throughout Transit Mountain. From the small glimpses of the battle Rex could see, it appeared that the Alliance was winning.
His hands were now free of their bonds, but his feet remained tethered. He tried to sit, but pain kept him pinned flat. With Hmech distracted, he’d found it possible to resist falling inside one of his false realities. Instead he felt more like a tourist inside his own mind, dipping in and out of curious doorways, watching a while, and then moving on.
Something strange roamed those spaces, always ahead of him and out of view. Curious, almost childlike, touching nothing, afraid of breaking any of the precious items even as its tiny hands ruffled the dangling sheets and curtains of his memory. He realized he’d let this thing inside, opened the door wide when he’d dropped inside the false reality containing Mira. As sweet and innocent as this thing appeared, it was actually a virulent software virus, ripping through his mind-space on an agenda that only it could conceive.
It’s taking my memories! he realized with barely a tinge of sadness. Have them. They’re not really mine anyway.
“Deploy primary defense battalion,” Hmech said. The screens showed floors opening just outside the bunker. Dozens of wireframes stepped up and manned positions. Some were bipedal, others like spiders skittered along ceilings and walls, taking up defensive postures in holes and ventilation grills.
“We’re losing too many troops in the outer perimeter. These things are tough.” The field commander’s image took center place on the screen. Rex noticed his eyes were alive and frightened. This was a real soldier, someone outside Hmech’s control network.
“Losses are irrelevant,” Hmech barked.
“They’ve changed direction, sir, now coming right for your bunker.”
Hmech chewed nervously on his fingers, eyes scanning the screens. “What’s the plan here? They can’t get to me, surely they know this.”
“Our human casualties are mounting, sir.”
“I know, I know, machines to fight machines. Wait until they get closer, then we’ll see how tough they really are.” Hmech waved frantic arms, pulling up maps that showed flashing dots and path projections. “Send half of defense battalion-two from the mass-driver cavern to replace the human units lost on the perimeter. Pull the human defenders from around our bunker back inside the ring of somanetic-guards. The machines will hold their ground longer while the humans set up defenses inside here.”
Rex watched as the blast doors opened and a stream of hulking, blank-faced soldiers entered. They divided into groups and began setting up sniper posts on the gangways around the inside of the bunker. Hmech disappeared into a side room and emerged in an ornate powered body armor suit. He held the crystal-faceted helmet under one arm and a stubby wide barreled weapon under the other. He strode around the room at double normal speed, directing actions. A circle of sixteen wireframe guards kept pace with him, always facing outwards, circling like a halo of deadly satellites.
The harried face of the field commander jumped back onto Hmech’s air screen. “We have a good image of an attacker, sir.” Rex saw the frozen security camera image. The crystal skull was unmistakable, stripped of all the flesh and trimmings that had made it Jett, but it was the very core of the monstrous being that had grabbed him from under the Sisters’ cathedral.
Hmech slapped a table and laughed. “So, they have my voidian.” He turned to a set of different screens, ones showing missile silos being loaded with warheads. “What do you think you can achieve here?”
