by M. R. Forbes
He didn’t have time to load it. Isaac slammed their car into the rear side of the enemy modbox, sending it spinning into the soldier and ultimately pinning him to a wall, leaving him screaming in agony as they raced down the street, the truck behind them gaining ground .
Hayden looked back again. The truck’s mods allowed two shooters to stand on either side of the front near the grille, protected by the armor while they attacked whatever they were following. Bullets peppered the car, most of them deflected by the armor around the vehicle, but a few making it all the way to the glass. It shattered inward, spraying Hayden and Max.
“Ike!” Hayden roared as the car took a hard left and he was thrown into the door. The car screamed around a corner, nearly sliding into a wall.
Isaac sped up again, trying to put some distance between them and the truck. “Sorry!” he yelled back, taking the next turn more slowly to keep the modbox under control.
The shooters continued their assault while a fresh group of ground troops ahead of them started laying down fire.
“How the hell do we get out of here?” Isaac asked, slightly panicked. He lowered his head as the forward bullets came too close to the small opening he was using to see through.
“Drive straight,” Max said.
“I am driving straight,” Isaac replied.
“On what planet is this driving straight? Hahaha. Haha.”
“Ike, keep the wheel steady,” Hayden said.
Max slid to the center of the back seat, turning to face the rear. He dropped his rifle and raised his right hand, aiming it out through the window.
A steady stream of bullets hit them from the front, pausing only when Isaac reached the enemy positions, blasting through them and leaving the enemy behind. The truck continued to give chase, a drone suddenly launching from behind its cab.
“Max!” Hayden said as the drone started to rise. Where the hell had August gotten a drone?
“Affirmation.” Max shifted his hand. A stream of blue plasma spewed from the tips of his fingers, burning away the flesh for the third time. It connected with the drone, burning through it and causing the machine to drop back out of the sky. It crashed behind the truck, which continued to gain on them.
“Nice shot,” Hayden said. “Do it again.”
“Must I accomplish everything?” Max said. He adjusted his aim, preparing to fire.
The soldiers riding the front of the truck found their aim. A burst of slugs dug into Max through the broken window, disrupting his aim as he unleashed the plasma. It sliced through the top of the roof as Max slumped back.
“Damn it,” Hayden said. “Ike, we need to lose them.”
“Working on it,” Isaac replied. “Hold on.”
Hayden braced himself as the car turned again, fishtailing as it went around the next corner. The rear hit the curb, bouncing up and into a pole, which bounced it back the other way. The vehicle didn’t stop moving, regaining its wheels and continuing to speed up.
The truck had a harder time with the turn, slowing even more to make it safely. It bought them a little more distance, disrupting the enemy’s aim.
“Max, you okay?” Hayden asked.
“Pozz.”
The Intellect slid to the other side of the car and began climbing out.
“What the hell are you doing?” Hayden asked.
He didn’t answer until he was standing on the trunk, facing the truck. “Assisting your escape. I will rejoin you outside the city.”
“I don’t think so,” Hayden replied. “You still have the key.”
“It is secure.” Max looked back. “Do not underestimate me, Sheriff. Hahaha. Haha.”
“Max,” Hayden complained.
“I will rejoin you outside the city,” Max repeated.
Then he jumped.
He went higher and further than Hayden would have believed, leaping on a smooth arc that carried him toward the pursuing truck. He went over the top of the cab and vanished.
“Should I stop?” Isaac asked.
“No,” Hayden replied. “Keep going.”
Max reappeared on top of the truck a moment later, jumping down beside one of the militants. He grabbed the man and threw him in front of the truck, causing it to run him over. Then he grabbed the passenger door of the cab and yanked it open, lunging in and grabbing the driver. The truck rocked back and forth for a second and then went out of control, skidding and toppling into its side and throwing the other soldier into the street.
Gunfire sounded ahead of them, and Hayden redirected his attention to the front. He moved to the window, leaning out slightly and returning fire, cutting down two militants as Isaac closed on them.
Then the car was past, headed east.
“Make the next right,” Hayden said. “We need to go south. Get us out of the city.”
“What about Max?”
Hayden wasn’t sure what to say. The Axon AI hadn’t given him much of a chance to stop him. He wouldn’t even care that Max was gone if he weren’t carrying the nodule. “He made his choice. We’ll give him thirty minutes to catch up and then we’re on our way.”
“On our way where?”
“To end this.”
Chapter 44
Hayden leaned against the side of the car, running his fingers along the armored steel plates, feeling the dozens of indents and divots carved into the metal by enemy gunfire. His eyes were locked on the skyline of Tijuana to the north, watching and waiting for Max to appear.
“I can’t believe they’re gone,” Isaac said. He was sitting on the trunk of the car, his legs dangling over the spiny rear bumper, his eyes staring east toward the distant hills.
“Grace?” Hayden said.
“Yeah. And Cyrus. This’ll probably sound messed up, but I feel like I lost my last connection to my family because he’s dead. Grace was Jason’s friend, and I lost her too. I don’t know. I feel like I’m alone.”
“You aren’t alone,” Hayden replied. “And it does sound messed up, but I think I understand. Grace and Cyrus kept you grounded. Tethered to a place and time you remember.”
“A world I recognized,” Isaac added. “This isn’t the place I knew. This isn’t a place I really want to know.”
“It’s not so bad once you get used to it. Well, except for all the fucking aliens.”
Isaac laughed. Hayden laughed with him.
“How are we going to do this, Hayden?” Isaac asked. “How are we going to kill Shurrath?”
Hayden remembered what Grace had said. She had used her dying breaths to tell him not to destroy the Relyeh ancient. “We aren’t.”
Isaac looked over at him. “What do you mean?”
“We aren’t going to kill him. Grace was convinced ending Shurrath’s life would bring a nastier Relyeh to Earth, looking to claim whatever Shurrath lost. It won’t help us to get rid of one problem if it creates a bigger, badder one.”
“So what? We ask him politely to please stop killing people?”
“I have a feeling that won’t work.”
“But you’re saying we need to capture him? Take him prisoner?”
“That was Grace’s suggestion. She knew more about Shurrath than we do.”
“Any ideas on how to make that happen?”
“Not yet.”
Isaac sighed. “You should have left me, Hayden. Now Shurrath knows you’re coming, and he knows you can change your appearance. If you had forgotten about me, you might have been able to sneak up on him and take him off-guard.”
“Believe me, I thought about all that. I even started riding south. It didn’t sit right. The upside is Shurrath’s bound to be more paranoid now. If I can be anybody then he’ll be nervous about everybody.”
“I like that perspective. Where did you get that thing anyway?”
“The Skin? It belonged to the Intellect that came through the portal in Dugway, believe it or not. The USSF must have caught up to it at some point, cut it into pieces to disable it and eventually decided t
o store it in a vault. That’s where Max and I went to get it.”
“Valentine,” Isaac said.
“What about her?”
“I bet she sent her people after the Intellect. Maybe they caught up to it. It wouldn’t surprise me, based on everything else we’ve learned. But how does a human catch an Intellect when they can make us see things?”
“If you’re strong-willed enough, you can overcome it.”
“Speaking from experience?”
Hayden nodded. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you when this is over.” He pointed toward the city. Someone was running along the highway toward them, moving too fast to be human. “Looks like Max is on his way.”
“Good thing for him,” Isaac said. “He only had four minutes left.”
Hayden watched Max approach. There was something different about the Intellect, but he couldn’t place it right away. Not from a distance.
“Son of a bitch,” Isaac said, recognizing the change before Hayden did. He caught on a moment later.
Max had found Cyrus and taken his body as a shell.
“Sherriff,” Max said, slowing to a stop as he reached them. “The complication is resolved.”
“Max,” Hayden growled. “What the hell is this?”
“What the hell is what, Sheriff?”
“The body, Max. Cyrus?”
“I required it. My prior shell was critically damaged in the fighting.”
“All of those bodies down there, and you had to take Cyrus?” Isaac said, clearly upset to see his son’s killer upright again.
“Yes. We specifically required him.”
“We?” Hayden asked. “What are you talking about?”
“We required his memories.”
“What do you mean?” Isaac asked.
Hayden’s anger started to fade, his lips parting in a small smirk. “Shurrath shared a bond with Cyrus. Grace said killing her father would make Shurrath weaker.”
“What does that have to do with Max taking his body?”
“Memories,” Hayden said. “Cyrus knew Shurrath better than anyone.” He looked at Max. “You know where the bastard’s hiding, don’t you?”
“Affirmation,” Max replied. “Hahahahahaha. Hahahaha. Haha.”
“In this case, I’d say the ends justify the means,” Hayden said.
Isaac nodded. “I don’t like it, but I agree. We can’t deal with Shurrath if we don’t know where to find him.”
“And we don’t have time to spend searching for him,” Hayden added. “Not only is he weakened right now, but he said it himself, and Grace confirmed it. He’s got a goliath and an army of trife marching on Sanisco as we speak. The only way we can stop it is by taking him out.”
“Without killing him?” Isaac said.
“That’s right.”
“No offense, but those two things don’t seem compatible, Sheriff.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy. Max, what about the militia in the city? Are they handled?”
“Affirmation. I disabled their transportation. Most of your technology isn’t hardened against EMP.”
“That’s why you wanted us to go on without you?” Hayden said.
“Pozz. The pulse I triggered would have been powerful enough to disable your augmentations, and you require the use of your arms. Hahaha. Haha.”
“We still need a plan,” Isaac said. “We can’t just show up at his door and expect him to surrender. How do you catch a Relyeh ancient?”
“I don’t know,” Hayden replied. “But we have time to figure it out on the way. If the goliath is in Lavega, we have about thirty-two hours before it reaches Sanose, and another four before it levels Sanisco. I don’t need to remind you my family is there.”
“We’ll stop him,” Isaac said. “One way or another. If ending Shurrath is the only way to save your people, it’s a risk we might have to take.”
“I can’t disagree with that,” Hayden replied. “But let’s leave it as a last resort. Max, which way are we going?”
“West,” Max said. “To the coast. We can follow the road south to another settlement. There are mountains past the city. That’s where we’ll find him.”
Hayden straightened up, walking over to the driver’s door. “You two hop in the back. I’ll drive.”
Chapter 45
“Governor,” Deputy Solino said, rushing into the lab.
All of the engineers looked up at his appearance, momentarily distracted from their work. To a person, they were ragged and tired, their eyes bloodshot, their clothes wrinkled, their body odor getting worse by the minute. None of them had left their stations in two days except to use the bathroom. Not even to eat.
Volunteers were handling that, bringing down meals and drinks at regular intervals and providing whatever help they could to the team that was working overtime on the most significant problem they had ever faced:
Stopping a goliath from killing them all.
At least, that was the bulk of the engineers’ biggest problem. For Natalia, it was only one piece of a larger puzzle they were fighting desperately, furiously to solve. The goliath was the most obvious, most visible symptom, but it was still only one symptom of the disease.
She wanted to cure all the symptoms—the entire disease.
“What have you got?” Natalia asked, looking up from her terminal.
They were preparing the first test of the system they’d developed to trigger the khoron’s Interdimensional Communicator—or what the other engineers called the organic mechanism—its Ick. They would start by sending a single byte of binary data through and to hopefully confirm it had made it through the Ick to the connecting transmitter. True confirmation was impossible without direct access to the alternate dimension, but they had come up with some baseline algorithms and measurements that would at least give them an educated guess.
She hoped.
“Chief Deputy Hicks sighted the goliath thirty klicks south of Sanose.”
Natalia’s heart skipped a little faster. It was getting close. “And the trife?”
“Still tailing it.” He paused, uncomfortable. “And increasing in number.”
“How many now?”
“Nearly ten thousand.”
Natalia blew out a sharp breath. “Fuck.”
“Agreed,” Solino said.
“Tell Bronson to prep the chopper. We need to be ready to intercept.”
“Governor, even if the photon rocket kills Alpha, there are still ten thousand trife down there.”
“I’m aware of that,” Natalia snapped. She lowered her head. “Sorry, Nick. I’m a little touchy right now.”
“I get it, Governor. No offense taken.”
“I don’t want to use the rocket. What I want to do is find a way to break the enemy’s hold on it. If we clear Alpha’s head, he’ll help us take care of the trife.”
“Sounds like a solid plan.”
“Only if it works. Have Hicks keep his people hidden. Let the enemy go past and hit them from behind. We won’t slow them as much, but we aren’t going to slow them much anyway, and we can pick more of them off from the rear.”
“Pozz that,” Solino said. He turned to leave. Engineer Lutz replaced him, coming up beside Natalia.
“Governor, my team’s ready.”
“What about Hess?”
“He’s ready too.”
Natalia stood up, leaning over to finish one last line of code and saving it before leaving the terminal. She followed Lutz to the back room where all of the testing equipment was set up. The khoron was now suspended in a clear conductive gel, it’s small, worm-like form dissected and spread apart. Dozens of wires ran into its body, connected to a cage Doctor Hess had expertly inserted around the Ick.
They had spent the first day studying the effects of different stimuli on the Ick. Sound waves, magnetic fields, chemical baths, light, electricity. The first success had come with a combination of a steady trickle of dopamine and an electrical charge weak enough
to be generated by the human body, yet powerful enough to kill that same body if it didn’t have a khoron inside it. They had started the levels extremely low, and the first tests had only caused the most minor shifts in the branches of the Ick. Slowly dialing up the power had increased the movement, while altering the levels of chemical had kept it balanced and under control.
Lutz’s team was in charge of devising the first transmission, while Natalia and her team had worked on modifying the neural interlink to connect to the Ick once they knew it was working. The idea was that they could use the same premise behind the interlink to pass through the Ick and into the Collective, giving a human access to the network as if they were a khoron. The science behind the interlink was relatively well known to Natalia, so if the transmission tests were successful, there was a good chance they could make it work.
Of course, she had no idea what the outcome of success might be. She conceptualized the Collective as a form of computer network, similar to the intranet on the Pilgrim or the links that connected Sanisco to Haven.
Had connected Sanisco to Haven. And Lavega. Both settlements were gone. She still didn’t know what had happened in the latter location. They hadn’t gotten anyone down there to take stock of the damage, not with Alpha headed north.
All of them assumed the worst.
Natalia looked over at Doctor Hess, standing beside the khoron’s clear vessel and watching the other engineers work. What would he say when he reported back to the Trust? Would he even live long enough to send another message? She could imagine a Centurion starship in orbit around Earth, watching the proceedings but doing nothing to help. What did they think of all this?
“Governor,” Lutz said. “Everything’s set.”
Natalia looked over at the terminal. It showed a magnified view of the encapsulated Ick, static at the moment.
“Do it,” she said.
Lutz began typing, setting power levels and starting the drip. The Ick started to vibrate instantly, coming alive.
