Absolute Knowledge Box Set (Books 1-3)

by Drew Cordell

  Marwin was attempting to land the ship with only the stabilizers and landing thruster—the main thrusters were dead. Dark smoke obscured my vision of the front of the ship, but I could see the surface of the streets from the window to the side of me; we were getting closer. The ship continued to drop, and there was nothing Marwin could do to slow it.

  “Brace for impact!” he yelled.

  Just before we struck the ground, he activated the landing thruster which slowed our fall, painfully jolting us upward and decelerating our vertical motion. The belly of the ship hit the ground and continued forward, cutting through the asphalt and metal of the street and sending violent sparks surging in our wake as the ship rocketed forward. Hollow bangs of impact echoed in our ears as abandoned cars were struck and flung out of the way of the heavy aircraft. The ship hit a large truck, causing it to tip, and we came to a hard stop. I winced in pain as I was flung against the restraints of my seat, my head coming crashing back against the cushioned headrest.

  “Is everyone all right?” Marwin shouted from the front, pulling off his restraints and trying to open the door to get out of the back. The impact had crumpled the divider between the cabin and cockpit, and he had no way of getting to us through the divider.

  I turned to Mary and saw she was gritting her teeth and rubbing her head gently, nursing a cut on the side of her head that stained her hair red with blood.

  “Damn that hurt,” Mary said, struggling with her restraints and trying to free herself from the chair and coughing from the smoke that continued to fill the cabin.

  Marwin kicked at the broken door which continued to hold him captive. I had just freed myself when I saw the robot pilot sit up and dive at Marwin, reaching forward and wrapping its hands around his neck. Marwin didn’t see the attack coming and fell backward, striking his head on the window of the door and failing to defend himself against the chokehold. Acting on the surge of adrenaline, I reached down and grabbed my R78, drawing the weapon and lining up the shot through the smoke stinging my eyes. I squeezed the trigger, and the robot dropped on top of Marwin, motionless with a sizable whole through its head.

  “Thanks, Jake,” he panted. “Get Mary out and grab the bag in the back. We need to get the hell away from this ship.”

  I freed Mary by shooting the latch on the base of her chair and helped her move out of the ship while I pulled the huge duffel bag out onto the concrete. The wake of our impact was staggering. Broken, burning cars had been thrown out of the way, and the road was shattered along our point of entry. It didn’t make sense the cars were in the center of the road in the first place. Now that I noticed it, no one was on the streets, no lights were on the inside of apartments, either. Everything except the ship was deathly silent.

  “Why the hell aren’t there any people out here? Do the Mids have a curfew?” I asked Marwin as he dropped out of the ship, walking over to check on Mary and me. Marwin flipped on a flashlight and used it to see what he was doing with the bag. The air was surprisingly clean other than the burning fuel and billows of smoke coming from our crashed ship.

  “They don’t have a curfew. Something is wrong.” Marwin worked quickly, sifting through the bag and passing us each a lighter version of Inquisitor armor which we scrambled to put on. Marwin gave us a bugout bag loaded with ammo, food, water, and credits. He distributed a TX-4 compact submachine gun, and Hellfire Blade to each of us as well. “We need to move. I don’t like the look of this. The Omniscience Engine was reporting things were normal in the Mids, and this is far from normal. We need to keep our guard up and find a safe spot. If Infinitum was trying to kill us, it will send more Enforcers if they’re not on their way already.”

  “I thought Infinitum couldn’t kill me,” I said, fighting against the soreness and pain from the crash as my adrenaline faded. I could feel the bruises starting to form across my torso; they stung and ached as I moved with the others.

  Marwin walked forward, scanning the street with his weapon raised. “It probably took a calculated risk. I didn’t think Infinitum would drop support to the Mids anytime soon, either. I think it perceived us as a threat and didn’t want us in Olympus anymore. Maybe it thinks we can’t make a difference here. We’re still alive, which means it probably still needs you for something. That doesn’t explain what happened here, though. Let’s move. You can get some painkillers from your suit if you need them, just don’t go crazy in case we need them for later. None of us have any serious injuries. We’re just going to be sore as hell.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked Mary as I leaned in to check on her head.

  “I’ll be all right. Let’s go,” she said, starting to jog behind Marwin, twisting her armored helmet into place.

  I followed the two of them, keeping up with their jog and fighting the stiffness that surged through my body from the crash. My head and body were aching, but I needed to keep moving. I clicked a button on my wrist display and felt a sting in my arm as a needle with light painkillers slid through my skin. There were cars scattered along the streets in disarray, and trash bags had formed huge walls along the sides of apartments. It looked like the trash hadn’t been collected in weeks or months.

  “Do you have any idea where we are?” I asked Marwin.

  “We’re going to try to get into the utilities station. It’s the central structural tube that connects all three levels with power and water. It has elevators we should be able to access that can take us to the Slums or Olympus. We need to choose one or the other; I really don’t want to be stuck here. I’ve got a bad feeling about the Mids right now,” Marwin said as we ran.

  I could see the structure in the distance, but it looked to be miles away. Still, using a car was out of the question with the congested roads, and I hadn’t seen another airship since we crashed.

  “What happens if Infinitum shuts down the elevator when we’re in it?” Mary asked.

  Marwin cursed. “It’s not like there’s a staircase. You’re right; we can’t risk taking the damn elevator. We’d be helpless. Infinitum either didn’t want us in Olympus, or it wanted to kill us without alerting Adrihel of its presence.”

  “If we go down to the Slums, we can reconnect with the Champions. But we lost the data from the directive retrieval, right?”

  “No, we didn’t. I had someone on the inside redirect the download as a precaution. I thought Infinitum might have been on to us, so I implemented the safeguard without telling you two. The Slums look like our best option, which means we either need access to an airship or some parachutes. Oh, and we’re going to need a datapad with about thirty petabytes of storage. Whichever way we look at it, we’re going to need to visit an Enforcer station.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Look, I haven’t seen a single dropship or any sign of life here. We need the equipment, and that’s the only place we’re going to get it. The dropships are normally automated like everything else in this God forsaken country, but it has a manual override, and I can fly a dropship. Even better, they’ve got energy turrets on the sides you two can use to protect us while I fly. If we can’t find a suitable ship, then we need to find parachutes to base jump to the Slums.”

  “So we’re going to the Slums if we can’t get a ship?” I asked.

  “I think we ought to go to the Slums, regardless. If I can get a decent datapad, then we’ll have access to the Omniscience Engine directives if I can get in touch with my contact.”

  “Who is your contact?” Mary asked.

  “It’s better not to name them; Infinitum could be listening,” Marwin responded.

  We kept running until Marwin reported we were a block away after checking the display on his wrist. We were running the suits offline, and Marwin had pulled the transponder beacons out of the suits to keep Infinitum from tracking us directly.

  “Even without the transponders and encrypted comms frequency through our helmets?” I asked.

  “We don’t need to take the risk. Once we have everything we
need, we’ll get in contact. We won’t talk about it before then,” he responded.

  “No problem,” I said. As I moved forward, my weapon’s flashlight beam caught a hooded figure leaning inside a car window, as if searching it for something. The figure turned to face me with wide eyes. She was a woman who looked to be in her early thirties with crazed hair spewing from the sides of the hoodie she wore. I didn’t think she could see us against the strong LED beams of our weapons, but she turned and started to run.

  “Contact!” I shouted as orange energy bursts struck the road by our feet and the surrounding cars. Someone else was shooting at us. Marwin dove forward and braced his back on the door of a car as he peered around, trying to locate the attacker. Mary and I had taken cover behind a large pile of trash bags on the curb of the road.

  “One hundred yards, upper floor of the apartment complex at your three!” Marwin shouted as he raised himself from cover and fired his handgun toward a window in an apartment. The attack halted as the gunner was forced into cover, and Marwin took the opportunity to move up through the crowded streets, keeping his weapon trained on the window in the distance. “Keep moving, stay in cover. The shooter is using some sort of SMG; the spread is all over the place.”

  Mary and I rushed forward and slid behind a rundown SUV as more energy bolts flew through the sky, illuminating the dark pavement.

  “Vision systems on and lights off,” Marwin called as he raised from cover. I flipped off my weapon’s built in flashlight and waited for the vision systems in my helmet to kick in. Without the lights, the road was pitch black, and the gunner’s fire became more frantic and random. I toggled my vision system and moved forward with Mary, able to see the cars and obstacles along the dark street. The energy bolts burned white in my display, overloading the night vision system.

  Mary pushed me to the side as a bolt of energy struck her in the arm. The Nanotech absorbed the impact and dissipated the blast in a burst of orange sparks.

  “I’m going to try to catch the woman!” I called, pulling myself from cover and sprinting forward as the energy bolts continued to rain around me, some of them bouncing off the pavement and slamming into the sides of cars.

  “Copy. We’re right behind you, Jake. Let’s see what’s going on here,” Marwin said. “Don’t use lethal force unless you have to. They’re not Enforcers.”

  I continued after the woman, enabling my suit’s power function to speed up my running. I tried to relax my muscles as much as possible as the powerful tech pushed my body into overdrive. The woman rounded a corner into an alley, and I cut the boost on my suit to take the turn. As I rounded it, beams of light erupted from the alley and distorted my night vision. My suit reacted and powered off the display on my helmet, but the beams were still blinding. There were voices yelling, and as Mary and Marwin rounded the corner, I could make out the outlines of two figures standing in front of me. There was a man with an uneven beard and the woman I had been chasing through the streets. Their faces were gaunt despite the bulky jackets they wore. It didn’t look like they were eating well. The man’s hair was sandy blonde, but it was plastered in grime.

  “Put down your weapons. We don’t want to hurt you!” Marwin yelled through his suit’s speaker system.

  Without any apparent options of escape, the two laid down their weapons on the ground. I moved my LED beam over them and saw they were using the severed arms of Enforcers with an electronics board soldered onto the side. Thick sprawls of colored wiring jutted from the makeshift weapons where crude triggers were attached.

  “We’re not going to hurt you, and we’re not with the Government,” Marwin said.

  “You expect us to believe that?” the man asked, stepping forward and shielding the woman with his body.

  “No, and I understand your distrust. We’ll explain everything, but we need to go somewhere less open than this. Where is your friend with the SMG?” Marwin asked.

  “Bernie, they aren’t Enforcers. I think we should talk with them,” the man said over a handheld radio, still watching us with distrustful eyes.

  “Are they armed?” the voice responded.

  “Yeah, and they’re wearing some sort of armored suits.”

  “Have to be the Government. I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he responded.

  “Like I said, we’ll explain everything once we’re inside. I don’t want to be on the streets for longer than necessary. And since your friend Bernie was running overwatch on your scavenging operations, I’d say you don’t want to be out here longer than necessary either,” Marwin negotiated.

  The man and the woman exchanged a nervous gaze as his words rang true. “What are your names?” the woman asked us.

  “I’m Marwin, this is Jake, and this is Mary,” he said introducing us. “How many people do you have in your group?”

  “I’m Nick, and this is my wife Emily. The only other person in our group, the one who was shooting at you, is named Bernie; he’s Emily’s dad,” the man responded. “Come on. Let’s get off the streets,” he said to us before pulling the radio from his pocket again. “Bernie, we’re coming up. Put down the weapon so no one gets hurt. They might be able to help us,” he said.

  “Do they have food, water?”

  Nick turned to us, and Marwin nodded. “We’ll be happy to give you a meal while you give us some answers,” Marwin said.

  “Bring them up,” Bernie said over the radio. Nick and Emily picked up their weapons, but kept them lowered in an unthreatening way.

  “Needless to say, if you try anything, you’re dead. Our suits will protect us long enough to kill you,” Marwin said. “Not trying to frighten you; I’m just telling you the facts.”

  “Yeah, got it,” Nick said as he wrapped an arm around Emily and led us to an apartment building a block away. The retina scanner activated as Nick placed his eye in front of it, and the steel door opened with a click. We were standing at the bottom of a stairwell that led up several stories of concrete stairs. A car battery sat on the inside of the stairwell, wired to the scanner on the main door. The lights on the inside of the building were out, but our flashlights were more than enough to pierce the darkness.

  Nick and Emily lead us up several flights of stairs to an apartment. As we walked, I noticed black X’s painted on every door. We approached a door that look like all the rest, and Nick knocked. A man in his sixties with a scraggly beard appeared, examining us with cautious eyes. “Nick, Emily. I hope you haven’t doomed us.”

  “We were already doomed,” Nick said as he walked inside. This apartment had power and was lit with several warm lights. The apartment itself was roomy, but it was cluttered with mechanical parts, batteries, and anything else the three of them had managed to scavenge.

  “I’m Bernie. What are your names?” the man asked us.

  Marwin twisted off his helmet and set it on the counter, motioning for Mary and me to do the same.

  “I’m Marwin, and this is Mary and Jake. We’ll explain everything. I’m just going to get some meals prepared for you three while Jake does a quick sweep of the apartment, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said, still staring at our armor and weapons.

  Marwin took off his backpack and attached his SMG to the side while Mary and I did the same. Marwin produced three ration packs from his pack and handed them out to Bernie, Emily, and Nick while I began my sweep of the apartment with my handgun raised. There were only a few rooms, and only the small study was of interest. Inside were Enforcer parts and various components from other technology that had been scrounged together. Heaps of metal and wiring rested beside a metal desk which held a large magnifying lamp, a box of expensive looking tools, and a microboard soldering station. One of the three of them knew some degree of engineering. That explained their hacked energy rifles.

  The rest of the rooms were clear, but it became apparent they were surviving day to day without a stockpile of food. How could something like this happen in the Mids without anyone in Ol
ympus knowing?

  After checking to be sure everything was clear, I joined the others in the living room and sat on the couch with Marwin and Mary.

  “All clear,” I told Marwin. Our hosts were wolfing down their food as quickly as possible, pausing between bites to breathe and drink from the water bottles Marwin had given them.

  “We’ll tell you everything once we’re done. I’m sorry, but we haven’t eaten in four days,” Bernie said through a bite of lasagna.

  “Take your time,” Marwin said, studying the people in front of him as they ate.

  “If you’re not from the Government, then who are you? And how do you not know what’s going on in the Mids?” Nick asked through a bite of his food.

  “We were from the Government, but they’re trying to kill us now. We were Inquisitors, but our ship got shot down from the Upper Level, and now the Government is trying to cover it up. The less you know about the specifics, the better. They’ll kill you if you know too much.”

  “You really don’t know what’s happening here, then?” Emily asked in amazement.

  Marwin shook his head. “No ma’am. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We need to find a dropship and Government datapad before we go to the Slums.”

  “Why fly when you could take the central elevators?” Bernie asked.

  “The AI that controls all of New York is the thing trying to kill us. With a ship, at least I could try to modify it and take out the transponder to fly it off the grid.”

  “I don’t think that will work unless you really know what you’re doing. The transponder is integrated into the main board of the standard Enforcer dropships you’d find here. And that’s assuming you could find a ship that isn’t guarded. If the Government is really after you, then they probably wouldn’t throw you into the internment camp they’re running.”