From their centers, walls open themselves and reveal an arsenal to choose from for my mission. There are enough weaponry and destructive power in this room to start a small war. And then it hits me.
Nothing is out of place; all my weapons are there. Could that even happen if I had time jumped the first time around? What if the nightmare is nothing more than a bad dream? What if by changing my approach I put myself into more jeopardy than I normally would have?
“It’s too late to second-guess yourself, Cole. We have to proceed with the data we have now. There’s no turning back.”
“I know . . .”
But that doesn’t stop my internal questioning. I never have to replenish the stock between deployments myself. Someone at Rewind does that for me. So I could have time jumped before and still have all my weapons ready.
Unless my half-assed theory about alternate timelines is valid, and even if I time jumped ten times for the same mission, each time this room would look the same simply because it would never have happened in that particular timeline.
“You do realize that no matter what it is we do, no matter how it physically happens, it doesn’t impact our mission right this moment?” says Tanya, trying to get me out of my wretched doubting mental loops.
She is right, of course, but I can’t stop questioning everything now. I guess that’s what the human brain is all about. We want to know the answers to almost every question starting with what, how, or why. Still, time is running out so this will have to wait. For now.
I need to arm myself, not too little so as to run out of ammo, and I need things to throw at my numerous enemies in the next eleven hours, but not too much as to be encumbered by my gear either. I need to be able to move freely and do the most outrageous of stunts while fully armed, so I need to find that perfect yet fragile balance.
“Tanya, according to mission specifics, please display what weapons you recommend.”
While I will make the final decision, having her make a pre-choice saves time. She highlights every weapon in my neural HUD. The selected weapons glow green when I look at them. Just as I would, mostly, she chooses a rather sizeable arsenal. I replace the gear I took from Rewind with my own equipment, as it’s been adjusted to my liking, modified, and tested in battle.
I take an extra blaster and more sonic mines and decide to have not one, but three drones accompany us. Three is already a gamble. Their stealth tech is strong, but they emit too much interference when more than one are in close proximity. Three could vastly remove some of the surprise factors from the equation should they be detected and dispatched before they are needed.
“Then why take the risk, Cole?” asks Tanya.
“Call it a gut feeling. We’ll fly them miles apart from one another to limit the risk of them being detected.”
“Do I have to remind you that Ahmed is the most talented cyber terrorists of all time? If there’s one person that will detect the slightest interference, it’s him.”
“I’m betting on the fact that he will have bigger fish to fry today.”
“Let’s hope you’re not betting our lives with that assumption.”
I know she means well. I also remember her logic is more sound than mine at times. But the one thing I believe an AI lacks, no matter how intelligent or how vast her scope of emotions is, is instinct.
She has yet to show me a decision based on the tickling of a je ne sais quoi inside her that proves to be the right course of action. Truth be told, if instinct weren’t required, they wouldn’t bother sending a human back in time for these tasks. They’d send a synthetic canner instead.
“I’ll try not to get offended by that.”
“You shouldn’t. I don’t consider you a canner. You know that.”
“I do, but if my mind were put into a synthetic body, by your own logic, I’d become one.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean, Cole?”
How do I dig myself out of the hole I’ve just dug? I try to choose my next words carefully.
“I mean that for all your wonderful personality and superior intellect, I still think you lack instinct.”
“If that were true, do you really think I would have allowed us to tamper with mission parameters to include Captain Trevisano to this op? At the risk of having my circuits fried if anyone found out?”
And there she was, throwing me a curveball. Could what I have perceived as a leap of faith on her part, an implied trust, actually be governed by instinct?
“You better believe it, jackass,” she says, her voice icy cold.
“Was name calling really necessary?”
She laughs. “No, but it’s fun, and you have to get used to the fact that over time you’re rubbing off on me. It’s only logical, right?”
I smile as I continue to pack the gear, making sure to take some grappling hook extensions and load them into my forearms alongside my blades, claws, and missiles. We need to get going; as fun and enlightening as all this is, we’re neither on vacation nor sightseeing.
The mission is only beginning, which comes with a rush and no small dose of adrenaline boost. But I know very well that I may be asking my old partner to put her life on the line. No matter what though, we must succeed.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Read Episode 2 (Pandemonium) right now, get it here.
You can however read a sneak peek of the next episode on the next pages.
Sneak peek of the next episode
I go into the vehicle room on the fifty-seventh floor of the building. There are many options here. Flying car, chopper, a small range fighter, but more often than not, I go with my trusty jet bike. It’s fast, highly maneuverable, and has enough space to accommodate an additional passenger. Which hopefully will be needed later today. It’s also armed to the teeth with high-intensity lasers beams and plasma cannons, concussion missiles, the works. I load extra gear onto the jet bike in multiple compartments, more grenades, and additional spare weapons.
Once I’m installed on the jet bike, I select a track to listen to on the way. I’ll have time for a single song. I feel the need to listen to some music even if just for a minute or two. I scroll through my library’s metal section and choose a Sentenced song: Vengeance is Mine.
The bass line of the song starts blasting inside my head as I open the flight-level garage door. It splits open from the middle to display god-rays struggling to shine through green-tainted smog. It’s raining outside New Geneva’s dome, and each droplet that impacts on its force shield briefly illuminates it bright green.
It’s an incredible sight. Millions of droplets generate expanding green light like ripples in a pond colliding with one another, sending lifelike green caustics onto the entire city below. I check the weather forecast; it will stop raining in a four minutes and twenty seconds. Somehow I’m happy I caught it before it does stop. I love the mood it gives the city.
Before we can visit my old—friend, we stop at a predetermined target location. It’s the place where one of the terrorists involved in today’s attack lives. It’s his last known location according to the intel we’ve gathered. This person of interest is a direct connection to Ahmed, as in one of his lieutenants, Samir Faysal.
Taking him out of the equation early in the day should slow down Ahmed's plans. But before I rip his heart out, I have a few questions to ask. We land on the roof of the building where his apartment is located.
After rapidly dropping ten flights of stairs, I approach the target’s flat with caution. I use my vision augmentations to scan the place. Infrared, X-ray, subsonic resonance, light field, electromagnetic fields, local and external CCTV feeds, the works. Basically, all the data that can provide me with tactical vision through solid walls.
It’s almost like seeing through them in fact. The overlay of all that real-time data gives me a clear picture, especially when displayed over the building schematics. Tanya superimposes it onto my vision in wireframe as to not overload and
disorient my brain with too many visual stimuli.
There are two people in the flat. That’s already one more than I expected. They are sitting in the living room. I grab both my blasters and set them on maximum stun.
I guess it’s two for the price of one.
I kick the door and shoot the first target before he realizes what’s happening, but when I shoot the second one, a personal shield around him stops the blast. He gets up, but he is still not facing me. When he finally turns around, I can’t believe my eyes.
Ahmed!
I instinctively unleash a flurry of shots straight at his head, but his shield absorbs them all. He looks at me and smiles.
I feel my blood reach a boiling point inside my veins. I quickly switch both my weapons to kill mode with a single thought and keep firing. He rolls to the side and takes cover behind the sofa. I grab a sonic grenade off my belt and throw it his way. He lurches out of cover and throws it back at me.
I jump out of the way, but it’s too late; the grenade detonates before I have time to get clear of its blast radius. When it explodes, I’m thrown back against the wall, cracking it upon impact. My ears are ringing, my head buzzing, and I am completely disoriented.
I hear a rolling sound approaching me amidst the chaos happening in my mind and body, and when I look down at my feet, I see two metallic spheres rolling on the floor, one on either side of me. Before I can kick the first one away, they fly upward at shoulder level, and electrical arcs shoot from them and hit me in the chest.
My muscles contract as intense pain travels up and down my body. I am, for all intents and purposes, unable to move as an intense electric current runs through me. My neural HUD is affected, and I see an overlay of static and noisy artifacts adding to the blurriness my vision already suffers from the overload.
Tanya! Anything you can do?
She must be affected as well because I can’t sense her in my thoughts. I’m on my own now.
The amount of electricity traveling through my body seems to lower somewhat. I still can’t move, but the pain decreases. I wonder why.
“You and I go back a long way, Agent Seeker,” says Ahmed Al’Hasi. “Somehow, you’re never far. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were time traveling. But there isn’t such a thing, now is there?”
He must be fecking with me. In our last encounter—granted it might only have been a nightmare—he seemed fully aware of that fact. I still have to fight through some pain in order to speak.
“Was there a fecking question in there? What do you want from me?”
He bursts into laughter. “What do I want from you? Are you for real, Agent Seeker? You’re the one that’s always after me. Every time I have a plan in place, every time I’m about to strike somewhere, you’re there. Like a cockroach infestation I can’t get rid of. It’s been fun playing cat and mouse with you these past couple of years, but I’ve grown tired of it.”
“Boo-hoo.”
“At least you’ve become somewhat predictable. Knowing you would show up allowed me to put additional layers of security, or fail-safes if you wish, in my plans. I guess I should be thankful. Unwillingly you’ve actually made me a better servant of Allah.”
“I’m so tired of looking at your ugly mug— in fact I look forward to ripping your smile off your face—in a minute. But why wait, tell you what? Disable your gizmos, and I promise I’ll make both our lives a lot simpler.”
“I have no doubt you’d try. On the other hand, it seems to me you’re in deep trouble this time. These gizmos, as you say, have been custom made just for you. They’re one of a kind. Nice little prototypes, aren’t they? With a single thought, I can modulate the amount of electricity and even deliver a fatal jolt.”
Damn! I fecked up.
I went in with guns blazing, not taking time to analyze the situation fully before taking action. I could have sent a stealth drone to provide me with real-time video of the apartment from the outside. I would have seen Ahmed and not rushed in like a debutant foot soldier on his first day on the battlefield, looking for glory but getting death as the fair outcome for such utter stupidity. I stepped unprepared into what could very well become my grave.
How can I have been so stupid?
I don’t know if the electric current traveling through my body is weakening or if I’m building a resistance to it. I keep grimacing so he doesn’t know that I feel less pain. Somehow, I manage to transfer most of my power to two systems. First, I need Tanya back, in any capacity, and the rest I divert to my super strength. I need to get out of this mess
Failure is not an option.
Tanya speaks inside my head, but it’s all garbled. I catch enough words to make sense what she’s trying to tell me.
Cole . . . we’re . . . trouble. Got . . . destroy . . . spheres.
Yeah, thanks, I figured that one out already. If I can destroy one or even both spheres, perhaps I can end this day early; that would be something. But right now I’ll settle for not dying in such a stupid way. I need a distraction and fast.
Tanya, try to have one of the drones shoot inside the apartment, preferably without vaporizing both of us in the process. If you ‘d be so kind.
Unders . . . bzz.
I’ll take that as a yes.
Ahmed is enjoying himself. I can tell.
“Any last words, Agent Seeker? As much as I’d love to stay and enjoy this moment, as I’m sure you’re aware, I have a busy day ahead of me.”
I shoot him as deadly a look as I can muster through the pain, some of it simulated, buying the precious seconds we direly need until the drone can spring to action.
“You’re a coward, Ahmed. You and your army of mindless fanatics.”
The pain increases.
Great! I’ve made him angry. Way to go, Cole.
End of sample, read the next episode here.
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Also by Christian Kallias
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Episode 1: Freedom’s End
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Christian Kallias is a Bestselling, Award-winning Science Fiction author. He writes Science Fiction Space Opera with a Mythology twist and Fantasy in
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