Glow, p.37
Glow, page 37
Gale’s voice oozed into Jett’s mind. “This is a most unexpected development. The real Del is on Cloud9 and will soon be destroyed, but this – this other Del could be a valuable ally. If he truly has the Star-River, then he can get the device to safety and–”
“I can do that,” Jett blurted aloud. “I can fight us out of here, evade the Alliance and GFC–”
“Jett, no. Your mission here is complete. We must trust Del’s insight and set him free. I have another mission for you.”
“But this weak human – this Rex. How can we entrust the Star-River–”
“The body Del chose proved worthy. It survived the streets of Coriolis, it even evaded you, Jett, for more time than our mission could afford.”
Jett’s fingers snapped open and the man calling himself Del dropped to the ground. He staggered to his feet and looked up at Jett, now a frozen monolith lost inside his own world.
“Go!” Jett roared.
Del stared at him a second longer, as if about to question his decision. Coming to his senses, he leapt up the stairs toward the glimmer of light.
“I am minutes away from dealing our enemy a mortal blow,” Gale said. “Victory is ours.”
“But I have failed you, Ursurper, I have no Glow, no Star-River, no insights into its creation.”
“You have uncovered important connections between Glow and the Sisters. The Star-River is no longer with our enemies and now, Jett, you are right where I need you to be.” A crash echoed along the tunnel from the cathedral as the enemy blasted through Jett’s makeshift barricade. “Fight your way to the top of the cathedral tower. You have four minutes. If you make it in time, I will be there for you.”
“There? How–” But Gale vanished, leaving Jett staring as Del scampered up the last steps and lurched out to freedom.
Jett powered back through tunnels past the remains of troopers and blast doors. Militarized Sisters and terrified militiamen met him halfway. He folded a metal blast door in two, wrapping it around his arm like a giant gauntlet. Compressing his own soundwaves ahead of him, Jett leaned into the oncoming fire and churned forward like a heatshield through dense atmosphere.
The voices were quiet at last, lost in his violence, stunned that he’d let Del or Rex go free. He looked for Her, needing that companionship, and there she was, radiant, red-haired, beaming at him as she held out a picture of them both together. The man she was with looked nothing like the human wreckage he’d held in his hand, but looking into his eyes had felt strangely like looking into a mirror.
CHAPTER 44
Head For the Light
The escape pod heaved and rotated, hydraulic rams hissed and groaned, shunting Ellayna nearer to Cloud9’s exit port. The overly calm voice of the pod’s AI spoke directly into her mind. “Escape pod ready to launch. Please confirm flight plan and initiate a ten second countdown.”
Her webbing squeezed tighter prepping for acceleration. The lighting dimmed, and an ominous hum rose from the electromagnetic catapult that would fling her free of the doomed orbital.
“Flight plan confirmed,” she said. “Hold at ten second countdown.” She twitched as more saliva dripped down from Tomas poised only inches above her. She wanted to reach out and wipe his face, but her arms were pinned by webbing.
She focused on Gale’s ship, four minutes to impact, close enough to see details. He’d deployed the vehicle’s frontal debris scoop, gathering a small ball of rocky fragments onto the ship’s nose. A little extra destructive momentum but scant protection against the GFC’s defensive fire.
She reached out and pinged Gale. Instantly, he popped into her mind, carbon-black knots and twists sculpted into a weird asymmetric face. The beady black eyes seemed to reach across the shrinking void into her soul. “Ellayna,” he said, mouth unmoving. “I’m glad to see you are still alive.”
“Your clone did well down on Coriolis.” She eyed the flatlined life indicators next to the GFC trooper screens.
“Jett captured Del and uncovered his audacious escape plan. Are you pleased, Ellayna?”
She struggled to keep her voice from shaking. “This… Jett… it killed him?”
“Jett crushed him to pulp and incinerated the remains.”
Ellayna choked back the tears, reengaged her Cloud9 fire controls. “You sick bastard. I–”
“Couldn’t let such a valuable mind fall into Alliance hands now, could I, Elly?”
Her fingers slipped again, mind swimming back to reality, staring up at Tomas as more drool plopped onto her face. Elly?
Between drips she managed a sad laugh. “You know there aren’t any voidian people on Cloud9. This whole, ‘save my people riff,’ is false memory planted by Del to keep you attacking us.”
Gale emitted a rasping noise, possibly an attempt at laughter. “Ellayna, please…” his face filled her Inner-I space, intimate and close like a lover’s. “I think you have a deep misunderstanding of who my people are.”
“The voi–” Suddenly her words seemed weirdly out of touch with reality.
“The voidian people are an idea. Plans hidden; blueprints sown in minds and technology caches. Who watches this conflict, Ellayna? The whole world watches. It’s wondering who flies that suicidal mission into the crown jewel of the GFC hegemony. Who frees them from oppression, from addiction? One day they’ll know who.
“The GFC is the pressure-vessel containing the pent-up echoes of the Nova-Insanity. I am punching a hole, Ellayna, letting that pressure explode free, propelling humanity to the stars and toward us. The idea. The voidian.”
The timer ticked over to one minute. Gale’s face twisted into a parody of a smirk. “It’s been fun, Ellayna, but I must go and make my peace. I hope you choose not to shoot me down. My sacrifice will deny a great treasure to the Alliance and in that field of chaos and debris, just maybe an escape capsule can slip through.”
His feed went dead. She sighed, mental fingers still twitching to fire but knowing that she couldn’t. “May you find allies in unexpected places,” Del had said. That was proving to be startlingly true.
“Time’s up, Tomas, let’s go.” She hit the countdown.
“Sequence commencing, launch in ten seconds. Nine…”
“New flight plan approved. Seven…”
“What new flight plan? I didn’t approve any new–”
Tomas convulsed, a vast, wracking heave, his face blooming red as blood vessels ruptured and a stream of acidic vomit splattered her face.
“Tomas?” she gagged. “What flight plan–” She fumbled through her control icons that fled her mental grasp as if deleted by a hacker’s nimble fingers.
“Three…”
Tomas’s tongue flopped out of his limp, dead jaw, almost reaching her face as the pod lurched sideways into the launch tube.
“Two…”
“Hello Ellayna.” The voice was the only thing left inside her head, all controls had vanished, vomit burned her eyes and mouth.
She knew the voice. It scalded her heart the way Tomas’s death bile seared her face.
“One…”
“Trabian? What have you done?”
“Zero.”
Del Krondeck clawed his way up the steps as if wolves were dragging him down through the gates of hell. A smattering of daylight greeted him as he fell over the top stair and onto a sprawl of rough-hewn granite tiles.
A fearful glance back down into the tunnel confirmed that Jett really had let him go and had gone back down the Sisters’ tunnel toward the cathedral building.
Freedom! He couldn’t quite believe he’d escaped, not just from Jett, but from Rex’s mental prison, and from years of confinement on Cloud9. He let that thought seep into his soul, through the clouds of glowworm memories to Rex, huddled and dormant, the light of freedom, like the gates of Heaven opening and shining through: the right Heaven!
The greatest jailbreak in history! Some day the world would know of this, but not now. Now, he had to lie low, escape to safety and plan the next stage of his infiltration into the spreading somanetic plague that he’d studied inside a Star-River simulation.
He rolled to his feet and ran. A real body, spindly, thin, malnourished, but sinuous and strong. “Thank you, Felix.” He silently thanked Rex too, a temporary construct whose survival instincts and experiences had allowed him to continue existing while the glitches and faults of his great plan had worked themselves out.
He fled along a stone tunnel lined with the names of the dead. Light beams lanced through slits in the roof. The air was stale and old, not the air he expected on Coriolis Island. A sarcophagus – a damned tomb. Ironic.
He ran easily, sucking in the air, ignoring pain, and reveling in the feeling of actual motion. He skipped through a tiny door into a sparse, stone chapel. In the center, sat an old car with bars for windows and solid hand-carved tires. Cans and tools lay scattered. A guard-post blocked the only exit.
Standing half seen inside the guard building was a fierce looking robotic Sister. Her goshgun pointing right at him. “Shit.” He slowly raised his hands as a sinking feeling of defeat dropped through his stomach. “Come on–” But the click of other guns prompted his silence. A dozen militiamen hid around the garage, their eyes filled with fear. Del noticed all their guns pointed behind him. Of course, they were expecting Jett.
“It’s just me,” he said, feigning confidence and control.
“Where’s the infiltrator?” demanded one of the militiamen.
“I scared him away. Don’t fuck with the dog-man.” Del laughed nervously. A long silence followed as everyone chewed over this unexpected outcome.
A loud mechanical voice blared from the militarized Sister. “Sister-Zero confirms the infiltrator is back inside the cathedral.” She paused as if examining data feeds on her internal communication net. “Detain Rex and move him to a secure location.”
“Do you know who I really am?” Del shook his head, feigning disappointment in the Sisters and the militia, while carefully stepping forward, just a little closer to the outside world and true freedom.
“Yeah, we know exactly who you are,” a rough voice said, as the cold barrel of a pistol jammed into the back of his neck. The rest of the motley militia found their courage and crept out from hiding.
“Secure him,” the Sister said.
“That thing’s coming back. If I were you, I’d get out of here.” Del considered the look-behind-you-gag but doubted it would work.
The man with the gun spoke into his ear. “You can walk nicely, or we can start breaking things.”
“Ten seconds of freedom. Thanks a lot.” Del hung his head as men muscled him outside past the Sister and into the chapel’s graveyard. The sky was clear and hot sun shone down on Coriolis Island. A streak of meteoric fire burned from horizon to horizon with a soft, whistling song.
“Wow!” One of the militiamen said, as they all gaped at the sky. “That one’s going to hurt.”
A trail of military aircraft swarmed the now distant cathedral tower like flies around rotten fruit. “The Alliance?” Del asked.
The militiamen nodded somberly. “We’re all out of a job real soon.”
Del sucked in the warm air and shuffled his feet through the alien environment of dirt and grass. “The world is changing,” he said. “I hope you’re ready for all this.”
Jett’s mind became mercifully detached from the heinous destruction his enemies inflicted upon his body. He reciprocated. Like a force-magnifier, the more they fought, the harder he killed back. Moving and acting with smooth speed and inhuman precision, without thought or compassion.
He became unsure who or what actually did the fighting. As a spectator watching through a sensory portal, he drifted farther away, ignoring the close-in imagery: the death, the chaos, the mounting toll of damage tags that striped his vision red. As his semi-autonomous body, cued by the overriding mental layers of training and planning, whirled him through a cathedral of enemies toward Ursurper Gale’s newly defined destination: the peak of the cathedral tower. “If you make it in time, I will be there for you”.
Left eye: Destroyed.
Fiber damage thirty percent.
Head fractures. Head traumas. Damaged memory modules.
Inner-I damaged: configuring backup module.
The green arrow guided him completely now, an algorithm for fighting. He fired at everything and everyone, grabbing new weapons from corpses, emptying them into the next row of routing attackers, picking up more weapons, ignoring the damage, so much damage…
Alliance troopers stormed the cathedral, gunning down the militarized Sisters and their hapless militia allies. For crucial seconds they fought on the same side until it was just Jett and the new enemy. They didn’t have the deadly hyper-rifles of the GFC troopers, but they had high-powered weaponry, explosives, missiles, and each hit chiseled another fragment of Jett away, sculpting him into nothing and tipping his body ever closer to its inevitable entropic death.
He crashed out onto the cathedral roof. The air buzzed with Alliance combat craft and their guns were all trained on him now. The force of fire thrust him through the tower door into a moment of beatific relief. He stopped and stood facing a wall, barely able to remember how to walk let alone climb, but his legs were already climbing, icepick fingers snatching handholds from the stone walls.
Something attacked him as he fell out of the stairwell into the bell tower. Mechanical hands grabbed at his head, twisting, pulling, trying to rip away his skull. The sagely Sister made her last stand amongst her books and servers until Jett threw a coiled fiber around her and yanked upward, spaghettifying her into a stream of plastic and metal fragments that jingled back to the floor.
One of the giant bookcases stood open like a secret door, and behind, Jett saw computers and micro-manufacturing machinery: the Glow factory, hidden right in the midst of the Sisters’ cathedral. The place he’d glimpsed through the detached Scylla head. He thrust fibers into the machines, twitching carelessly into processors and memory substrates seeking the data he so urgently needed. With no mind to process the results, he routed them straight to AI-Gale and dropped into a heap in the middle of the room.
“I’m here, Ursurper.” He fought to expel the words. His jaw was gone along with his rudimentary voice-box. No spare material remained under his control to form a speaker. He visualized the words curling out into space, seeking Ursurper Gale’s distant antenna.
Damage critical. Repair nodes at overload.
Inner-I at baseline functionality.
He drifted for a while, just dreaming, thoughts of times and places he had never really known, training missions, fellow voidian warriors… All lies, fabricated memories designed to yield a specific personality, a warrior, a being with nothing to lose and a cause to champion.
A noise on the stairwell jolted him alert and he stuttered to life, snapping his appendages back from the Sisters’ machinery to hurl chunks of stone wall back down the narrow shaft. The sounds stopped but he could hear machines gathering, lasers burning through rubble, real troops checking real guns. He wished he was in better shape. This battle would have been glorious.
He focused his gaze out the small, slit window. Something out there–
Sniper! Incoming!
A crack on the skull sprawled him across the room. A missile tracking behind the bullet lodged in what was left of his chest cavity and exploded. In that instant, Jett’s body died. The nascent mind that held it together fragmented, and his fullerene tendrils fell limp, unwinding like the threads of an old blanket. Jett spread outward like a melting sculpture, settling into a mound of fabric with a shattered skull on top.
He saw his three-layer mind again, oddly inverted with the primitive, somanetic part dead, gist-memories shattered, but the higher consciousness functions still struggling on. He saw another level, something hidden until now, below even the primitive mind, like tiny emergency beacons winking to life using radio signals to seek out their kin. Not a mind, more of an algorithm. As he stared inward, it ground alive shunting dead fibers back together: A recovery mode! There is still hope.
“I’m here, Ursurper. Awaiting your arrival.”
Both eyes were gone. Jett was a mental construct that failed to connect with any physical sensation. He wallowed in emptiness, a hollow, cavernous sadness. Something he’d seen in the eyes of so many humans as his hands snapped their lives away.
“Jett?” Gale’s voice jolted him back into consciousness.
“Ursurper. Have you come for me?” He imagined Gale towering over his torn corpse, lifting him into a ship. Like She did that time, lifting his bullied, teenage body into her arms. But the voice was just an Inner-I voice, and the signal delay told him Gale was far, far away.
“Jett, I can’t be there. The final battle has gone well, but I must see it through to the end.”
“I understand,” Jett felt Gale synchronize with his AI version once again and for an instant he was that youth, lying crushed and beaten on the pavement as the thugs scattered. She stood over him, face all concern and sadness. She balanced onto a single leg and put her shoe back on, and then bent down and heaved him up and into her arms. “I can’t always be here for you, Del.”
“I know,” he said, as she struggled holding him up while walking him slowly back home.
Through the hazy memory, he heard his real voice talking. “I found the Glow factory, Ursurper. Right here in the Sisters’ cathedral.”
“You have done well, Jett.” He felt the pause as Gale examined the data.
“How do they make Glow, Ursurper. How did they break the GFC’s code?”
“They didn’t. They followed instructions sent to them over a secured link. The Sisters never possessed such knowledge.”
“Then I have failed, Ursurper.”
“No, Jett. You are exactly where I need you to be.”
Of course, Jett understood now. He was a tool, a distraction. The enemy assumed he had the Star-River and they wanted that and the Glow factory. Let them think they had it all in one place, as the real Star-River scampered to safety inside the body of a frail, odd human.
