The truck began moving. Julie was pushed onto the barely padded bench seat, panting and shaking. Her chest ached; cold sweat was rolling down between her breasts, across her belly, off her face, and down her neck.
I’m having another heart attack.
I’m going to die this time.
She leaned against the wall of the truck, which had a stiffly padded black headrest attached over a row of cabinets and other equipment she hadn’t noticed at first glance. Toward the front of their compartment was a green metal container strapped to the wall and marked with a red cross.
The man beside her slipped off his helmet. He was older than she expected—her age, maybe even older. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
“I need my meds, which are in my purse. Back in the building.”
“What do you need?”
“Nitro spray. Four hundred micrograms. Fast.”
Something outside the truck thudded, and everyone hesitated for a moment.
“Operation Clean Slate completed,” said a voice over the radio.
“Shit,” someone whispered.
Julie gasped as pain seared up her chest. The troop in the truck went into action. Men crowded off the bench to clear a space for her. Two of them helped her lie down. The one who’d spoken to her opened the kit on the wall and pulled out some nitro spray. She gave herself a couple of sprays under her tongue and waited. Her heart felt like it was hiccupping. A stethoscope slipped between the buttons of her blouse.
“Irregular rhythm,” the man who’d removed his helmet said. “We need to get her to a hospital.”
“She won’t be safe there, sir. Their systems are compromised.”
“What other chance has she got?”
“We have to take her to the bunker,” said the other man. “She’s the one who knows the most about the physiology and psychology of the two initial subjects. We can’t take chances with her.”
“Not taking her to a hospital right now is taking chances with her.”
“I’m sorry, Captain. We know the AI is after her specifically. I mean, we can’t take the chance it will take her from us.”
“Then get us there faster.”
The medic’s order almost made Julie laugh. The truck was already lurching and heaving with reckless speed. The other soldier, however, nodded, He opened up a metal panel at the front of the compartment and called through it. “Cap says to move it. Passenger having a heart attack back here.”
The nitro was doing its job, loosening the tightness in her chest. She was still sweating like a pig, though she felt like she was in a refrigerator. She put her hand on her forehead. It felt waxy and cold.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Secret bunker,” the medic said. “I can’t tell you how long to get there because I don’t know. There’s a full complement of ER-level medical equipment there, though. I know that much.”
“Good.” She closed her eyes. The vehicle jounced underneath them, rattling her body around on the seat. “I’m feeling much better now, thank you, but I certainly wouldn’t slow down anytime soon.”
A radio overhead gave a burst of static. “Seatbelts, people.”
Hands touched her, strapping her to the seat with webbed belts that snapped shut and then tightened across her clothing and her legs. She kept her eyes closed. Thank goodness they weren’t asking her to sit up. By the sound of it, everyone was trying to squeeze together on the other bench, but a couple of the men were going to have to stand, no way around it. She let herself drift.
“Bump.” The radio announced, and the vehicle jerked. The road underneath them now was rougher, either an old asphalt road full of potholes or a gravel road, or some such. The driver barely slowed down.
“ETA one hour, fifteen minutes,” the radio voice announced. “If you gotta go, piss out a window. We have strict orders not to stop.”
She felt the presence of someone leaning above her, saw a shadow over her closed eyelids. She frowned and opened her eyes. “Yes?”
“Is it true what they’re saying?” asked one of the soldiers.
“I don’t know. What are they saying?”
The man above her hadn’t removed his helmet, and her own face was reflected back to her, an ugly distortion. “World War III. The Chinese sent an AI after us and it went rogue… it’s taking down systems all over the planet. Destroyed our satellites. Blew up an island in the Caribbean. And maybe a couple of places in New York City. A school.”
She sighed. The man bending over her wouldn’t be the only one who was worried. Everyone who had the slightest clue what was happening was probably terrified by now.
Julie could have told them the person who’d destroyed the school was in another one of the vehicles, traveling to the bunker with them. She had no love for the girl, but since Ms. Jance seemed to be willing to handle that problem, Julie was willing to leave it alone. For now. The island had been the monster attacking Pax—but the satellites or the AIs? She had no idea.
In short: she knew nothing that would reassure these men. Nothing.
So she shook her head, closed her eyes, and let herself drift as the truck rattled down the road.
Pax is dead, she told herself. She’d seen the body, hadn’t she? All that was left of him was a sick mockery. You’re free now.
You’re free.
Like a crack in a window, the rift distorted the light around it, making it look like the stars were being sucked down a hole. It was close. If what Terry had said was true, it was near Earth’s orbit. Part of Pax hadn’t really believed Terry until then. Old human habits die hard: seeing was believing.
But just because Terry was right didn’t mean Pax had to forgive Terry. If he had been honest from the start, they could have shown people and the entire planet could have been working on finding a solution. Pax wouldn’t have had to waste time learning to be the world’s worst superhero.
But no. Terry had to act like a complete lunatic, and now there’s a cosmic bathtub drain in the solar system. Fucking Terry.
The plant-monster was still accelerating toward the rift when something came through from the other side. It was a distant speck that only showed up because it blocked the light behind it. The fact that Pax could pick it out with his naked eye meant it was either immense… or very, very close. He wasn’t sure what was worse.
As it came closer, Pax could see it was indeed a ship of some kind. The ship seemed to be made of floating plates supported by some kind of shimmering purple force field. It passed across the face of the moon.
Fuck.
It was too fucking close.
The ship was shaped like a bird with wings held close to its body. As Pax watched, a dozen sharp-edged wings made of the same plates spread out, facing the sun. The ship began to maneuver. It looked like it was going to settle into an Earth orbit.
Or land on the surface.
The plant-monster’s ship threw out a pulse of acceleration, closing so quickly with the invader’s ship that it splattered onto that nearly invisible black surface, plastering it with pinkish-brown goo—a suicide mission that didn’t even seem to knock the larger ship off course.
The plant-monster began reforming itself into blister-like shapes, partially shielded by some of the remaining metal plates. The vacuum of space didn’t affect it at all, as near as Pax could tell.
The purple field between the large black plates on the invader’s ship rippled and began to dissolve. One of the wings twisted and bent until it jutted out at a crazy angle.
The plant-monster was disrupting the ship.
Pax threw a bubble around both of them and tethered it to the moon with a thick blue cord. The invader’s ship’s momentum carried it around, swinging it toward the moon in a short, fast arc.
Pax poppe
d the bubble, and the ship slammed into the moon, right along the sunrise line. He couldn’t remember whether they were on the side of the moon visible from the Earth.
I fucking hope not. Otherwise half the amateur astronomers’ telescopes on the planet would be watching him right now, and he could just imagine the panic that would set off. The ship’s solid plates rebounded off the surface; Pax tracked them down and tossed them into another bubble.
When Pax had captured all the pieces large enough to be tracked by radar (he hoped), he looked back toward the rift, watching it for a few long seconds. He couldn’t see anything else coming through. That didn’t mean others hadn’t already, though.
He pulled himself toward the crash site and landed carefully next to the largest mass of the ship, setting the broken pieces down next to him.
A blob of armored sludge was dragging itself across a massive obsidian plate in front of him. Root-like appendages crept out from a small bubble of water, protected by what looked like part of a refrigerator door. Behind it was a thin line cut into the obsidian. Pax put his hand on the plate of obsidian: it vibrated as the plant-monster cut through it, probably breaking it up to make a better ship of its own. The cut wasn’t perfectly straight, but it went all the way through the twenty-centimeter wing plate, and it was moving pretty fast. Puffs of dust disbursed into the near vacuum.
The ship wasn’t large, at least as far as evil outer space alien invader ships went, maybe five times as tall as Pax’s approximately human-sized form, and the whole thing seemed to be made of something midway between astral material and obsidian. Some of the bigger chunks of the wings had split into smaller, curved pieces. Pax pulled them out of his way. He wanted to get at the hull of the ship.
See what was in there.
And, if possible, kill it.
Pieces of the ship collapsed onto the moon’s surface as the plant-monster tore them apart. But some of the wart-like mini-plant-monsters were dragging themselves toward the hull, just as Pax was.
First I was killing it, now I’m helping it. Pax shook his head. My life is way, way too weird.
He dragged aside parts of the collapsed wing sections, being careful not to crush the mini-monsters, until he reached the hull of the ship. It was a stretched teardrop-shape that was nearly ten meters across at its widest point. Not huge or anything. More like a fighter jet than a warship.
The hull had cracked in a dozen places, exposing an inner structure that was completely packed with solid, octagonal chunks of smoked-quartz crystals. A couple of the crystals had broken open, leaking dark fluid out from the hull onto the surface of the moon in thick pools, making the surface of the moon look like a blood-spattered crime scene as it boiled away.
Nothing seemed to be moving inside the ship.
Pax found a split in the hull wide enough to allow him entry. He lifted one of the plant-monsters out of the way, setting it carefully on another part of the hull. The hull was about forty-five centimeters thick, sharp as hell, and was made of the same obsidian material all the way through.
Balanced on his stomach, halfway inside the ship, Pax pulled thick shards of broken crystal out of the way. The obsidian hull soaked up the sunlight shining on the surface—probably to help shield it from detection, Pax thought. Even after adjusting his eyesight, Pax could hardly see. The inside of the ship was pitch black.
Cold, dark fluid leaked out over his hands and onto his chest. The pieces of crystal ground together like broken glass as he dug at them.
He pulled out a handful of shards and flicked a chunk of crystal off his fingertips. The liquid inside the hull had started to boil right in front of his face, making visibility even worse.
He reached in again, sticking his fingers through the steaming fog into the black ooze, and his hand scraped something solid under the crystal shards.
He pushed on it. A hard plate of something gave slightly under his fingers.
It slid away and something wormlike touched Pax’s fingers.
And bit down.
Fuck. The word came out silently in the near vacuum. Pax jerked his hand back and felt about a hundred sharp things dragging over his fingers. At first they skidded over the astral material…
But then they bit in.
Pax jerked his hand again, but it was stuck. Something smacked on the inside of the crystal octagon when he yanked his hand. He made a fist and pulled even harder, trying to knock the fuck out of whatever was biting him.
The wormlike things crawled over the back of his hand, trying to find an opening. He jerked harder, pulling whatever was inside as far forward as possible, grabbed at one of the wormlike things with his other hand, wrapped it around two fingers, and then ripped it free.
Whatever was inside the crystal let his hand go. He brought up a pinprick shield and floated it toward the mist.
A black angular shape thrust out of the fog.
It had an insectile face, eyeless. Twisting black threads that almost looked like negative energy tentacles surrounded its mouth. One of them was limp and oozing greenish-black gunk.
It bared long, silver-stained dagger-like teeth at him.
Pax jerked back, slamming his head against the hull and swore. Loudly.
He swore again. Because he realized that he’d heard himself swear. The purple field had come up again, covering a small space under several of the plates. It had filled with air—close enough to Earth-normal atmospheric pressure that his voice sounded normal as he swore steadily: shit, shit, shit.
The triangular bug-head was heaving its way toward him. Gouts of the black fluid were oozing out from the crystal, splashing over the edge of the hull. It was trying to climb out.
Pax started crawling backward out of the hull and dropped to the moon’s surface.
The shape coming out of the octagonal crystal looked like an elongated beetle. Its longer limbs were pinned by the narrow quartz, but the shorter claws up and down its sides were able to heave it forward slowly. Shoulder-like lumps thrust back and forth as the creature struggled. Black fluid splashed on Pax’s face. He wiped it off with the back of his hand, and it stung.
The wounds on his hand were pulling inward in deep dimples. His fingers were getting stiff.
The first two of the alien’s long legs slipped out of the crystal. At first Pax thought they were holding canisters. Then he realized what he was seeing was part of the legs, made of dripping black exoskeleton. With a wet slurping noise, the alien slid out of the crack in the hull. Gray moon dust puffed up and stuck to its shell.
It had an abdomen that looked more like a centipede’s than a beetle’s, but with dozens of claw-tipped, wormy legs running up and down its sides. It had wings, too, three pairs of sharp ones that looked more like weapons than like something that would help it fly. It buzzed them and black fluid splattered everywhere.
The back of Pax’s hand was burning now. The dents had become pinprick holes—all the way through his hand. He still had the wormlike mouthpart wrapped around his fingers. He dropped it.
The monster hissed at him, its mouthparts spreading to show its teeth.
The holes in Pax’s hand were wide enough to put a finger through now.
Pax pinched the fingers of his other hand around his wrist, weakened the astral material inside the wrist, and pinched it off. He tossed the hand onto the moon’s surface. The holes stretched until the astral material appeared to pop and then collapsed into black sludge.
He grew another hand.
The monster shook its wings one more time and raised the two arms with canisters on the ends. Like they were guns.
Pax pushed a hand against the purple field and punched it with a fist. It didn’t budge.
The canisters started to glow purple. Pax threw up a shield.
The first shot dissolved the shield. The sec
ond slammed into his chest, knocking him on his ass under an overhanging plate.
Fuck.
The surface was already pulling inward.
The alien was walking toward him on black, chicken-like feet.
Pax kicked backward, pushing himself farther under the overhanging plate, until his back was jammed between it and the moon’s surface. He grabbed for the bottom edge of the purple field—
Please don’t be a sphere. Please don’t be a sphere.
—and slipped a hand under.
The alien seemed to ooze under the overhang, its centipede belly flopping forward and easily changing the monster from two main weight-bearing legs to four, with the front two still pointing the canisters at him. The alien roared at him, stretching its mouthparts wide. This close, Pax could see the teeth weren’t teeth—they were saw-edged beaks that opened onto tubes of black ooze. Digestive material.
He was being shot with stomach acid. Great. Just great.
He threw a pinprick force field into the alien’s open mouth.
The alien snapped its mouth shut and covered it with a plate. Pax set the field to bounce around on the inside of the alien’s shell. The small, wormy tentacles around the plate scrabbled at its skin. Had the alien had eyes, they would have gone wide.
In about a second it fell over, stirring up dust. It thrashed its legs. Its canisters went off again but only hit the obsidian panels. In a couple of minutes, it would be dead.
Pax had other problems.
He shoved his hand under the purple shield as far as he could—about an inch past the wrist.
Then he melted his arm.
I’m not human anymore. I’m really not human anymore.
He said it over and over, like it was a prayer. The arm melted into a silver puddle that disturbingly reminded him of Scarlett’s pool of negative energy. Doesn’t matter. He let the fluid drain out of the rest of his body, sluicing around his dissolving chest, until just his head and the big, white, metallic ring of his chest were left.
I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) Page 31
