Covenant

by James Maxey

  She hadn’t activated her static field until they entered the dome. If she understood App’s powers—a supposition now in doubt—his memories were going to be restored up to the moment he went inside the dome. This shouldn’t be a problem. He hadn’t acted as if he’d suspected anything during their walk. He wasn’t an immediate danger to her mission.

  On a more practical matter, while she wasn’t being paid to kill App, she’d intended to kill him anyway. There was always the possibility he’d fight to defend Sarah and Mrs. Knowbokov, and an equally likely possibility that, once they were dead, he would lead the effort to avenge them. She had numerous strategies to neutralize him, but all had been built around the assumption that his belt was a source of vulnerability.

  Obviously, the only way to truly kill him would be to destroy the computers that housed the code for the belt. A warm feeling spread through her belly as she thought about the high explosives she’d hidden around the base. It had been a while since she’d gotten to blow anything up.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Dark Meteor

  Chimpion left the conference room where she’d met with the debriefing team and slipped into the nearest bathroom. Locking the door, she climbed to the ceiling and clung next to the air-conditioning vent. She removed the grate and stuck her hand far inside, pulling out a disk slightly larger than her palm. The plastic disk was made of two hemispheres swirled together like a yin yang symbol. She pressed a button and the two hemispheres popped apart and unfolded spidery black legs. She shoved them back into the vent and said, “Navigate to subbasement nine, server 12. Wait for my signal.”

  The twin robots silently skittered out of sight.

  The robots were programmed with the latest Pangean A.I. It would take an hour or two for them to figure out a path through the vents to reach the correct server. They were smart enough to avoid any laser sensors in the vents and light and nimble enough not to trigger any motion sensors. They were mostly ceramic with no magnetic profile. Their only potential vulnerability would be to chemical sniffers, since they were each packing a small but potent load of plastic explosives. Fortunately, even if the search profiles in the sniffers were updated frequently, they probably weren’t yet trained to detect the latest explosive combo designed by the Pangean laboratories. These explosives weren’t on the market yet, not even the black market. Which meant, alas, she hadn’t tested them, but she trusted the Pangean chemists to deliver good product.

  She eyed the door. She hadn’t been in the restroom long enough to raise suspicions. It was worth the risk of communicating with her employer. She pressed the pager on her belt and waited.

  The skin between her shoulder blades started to crawl a moment later. She wrinkled her nose as a pungent, alien smell filled her nostrils, like a rotten fish soaked in kerosene blending into a vat of burning chocolate. The bathroom took on a sickly green hue as the florescent lights strobed with a nauseating flicker. The human telepath who’d hired her hadn’t mastered the craft of activating the hearing centers of her brain without also bleeding into other senses.

  “You have news?” a woman’s voice asked, sounding as if someone were standing just behind her shoulder.

  “Yes,” she thought, mentally enunciating the word as clearly as she could without actually moving her lips or tongue. “Rail Blade is dead.”

  “You have proof?”

  “I’m the only witness,” thought Chimpion. “The body was utterly destroyed. You’ll have to trust me.”

  “It would be foolish to lie to a telepath. You are no fool. I believe you. I’ll see to it the funds are deposited into the Pangean account within the hour. What of the other targets?”

  “Mrs. Knowbokov is still in the compound. I can kill her at my leisure. The Thrill, unfortunately, has left the base. Her current location is unknown.”

  “This is unfortunate,” said the telepath. “Our time table has been accelerated.”

  “Things didn’t go well with Servant?” thought Chimpion. “I warned you he’d prove uncooperative.”

  “His cooperation isn’t voluntary. I’m told there’s a small but real chance the energy siphons will kill him as they drain his power. If he dies, all our preparation is for naught. We must act today. I’ll be taking telepathic control of mission personnel manning the space machine. I would prefer that Mrs. Knowbokov not see the blessed Promised Land. You must kill her within the hour.”

  Chimpion frowned. With such an accelerated timeframe, her robots probably wouldn’t have time to reach the server that housed App’s data.

  “I sense unease,” said the telepath.

  “App survived the Mars mission. I know he’s not a target, but he’s irritatingly difficult to kill and could attempt to thwart us. I’ve a plan to eliminate him, but I can’t execute it within your timeframe. Mrs. Knowbokov should be no problem, however. As for the Thrill, I don’t think I’ll be able to locate her with such short notice.”

  “That won’t be necessary. The Thrill has revealed herself. One member of my team specialized in protecting the Earth from destructive asteroid strikes. His particular skills didn’t seem to be of much use to my larger plans at first. Fortunately, he monitors the NORAD system that tracks atmospheric disturbances corresponding with incoming meteors. He’s spotted the shockwaves of an anomalous atmospheric object moving at twice the speed of sound aimed directly toward your coordinates.”

  “Sarah,” thought Chimpion.

  “He’s attempting satellite confirmation but I don’t wish to wait. I’ve already launched an intercept.”

  “Why intercept?” asked Chimpion. “Let her come. I can kill her when she gets here.”

  “No doubt,” said the telepath. “But the time of triumph has arrived. There is no need to hold resources in reserve. Go. Kill Katrina Knowbokov. Avenge Jerusalem. An archangel will deal with the Thrill.”

  “There’s still App to deal with,” said Chimpion.

  “As you say, he’s not our primary target,” said the telepath. “Have no fear. In about ten seconds, he’ll be too distracted to stand in the way of your mission.”

  Sarah paused for only a moment after finishing her call with Richard, allowing the computer in her helmet to determine a flight path. If she remained two miles above the earth, she faced very little danger of collisions with birds or bugs. Her helmet was mapping out the current flight paths of all commercial aircraft and hacking military systems to determine the locations of any military flights. The helmet also checked weather systems. Flying into raindrops at the speed she’d be travelling would be like flying into a bullets.

  It took seven minutes for her helmet to gather the data it needed, the longest seven minutes of her life. Her mind jumped in a thousand directions at once. Chimpion, a traitor? Her mother, a target. And Steam-Dragon was dead. Was she to blame? The decent thing to do would be to feel guilt, but her mind couldn’t hold onto the emotion. Amelia and Richard had children? What were their names? Would she ever meet them?

  And where was Carson right now? Should she call him? Try one more time to explain? Explain what? That she’d like to tell him more, but at the moment she was about to run off to fight an evil chimpanzee? Her world had no place for a grounded, decent, sane person like Carson. Would she ever see him again? Should she? She’d stolen five years of his life, tricking him into loving a woman who didn’t truly exist. This wasn’t something that could ever be forgiven. It wasn’t something she even wanted to be forgiven for. She deserved his contempt.

  Her helmet gave a cheerful chime as a bright green path suddenly glowed before her on her heads up display, a straight line of laser light to guide her back to the island. She clenched her fists and jaw, leaned forward, then BOOM! Zero to Mach 2 in sixty seconds. The sky exploded before her in a glowing shockwave. The turbulence rattled her teeth. While her body was immune to the inertia of her acceleration, for some reason she felt lightheaded. She hoped it would pass but the faintness grew worse, and darkness began to nibble at the edges
of her vision.

  Through sheer force of will, she pushed back the darkness. She’d covered fifty miles in a little over two minutes, a new record for her. A bright red warning light flashed in the corner of her heads up display. At this speed, the air vents in her helmet that let her breathe were developing vortexes, sapping her airflow. Did she dare go slower? She was moving roughly 1500 miles an hour. She’d still need an hour and a half to get back home.

  Home. The word was like a cold blade in her mind. Home. She loved Carson. She wanted to be with him. But that wasn’t her home. It had never been her home. It had been the home of a woman who had imagined herself into being but who’d never really existed. Her only true home was Knowbokov Island. She accepted this now. Home was the place she’d fight to defend until the last drop of blood spilled from her.

  Still, it would be dumb to suffocate before she arrived and sheer willpower couldn’t beat out oxygen deprivation for more than a minute or two. She slowed, dropping to 1200 miles per hour, the turbulence pummeling her like mattresses stuffed with sledgehammers as the shockwave twisted and reformed. She gasped, taking a deep breath as the vortexes in her vents collapsed and ice cold air flooded her helmet. She breathed deeply to fill her lungs. The green line she followed shifted to yellow.

  “Great,” she sighed. She’d plotted her flight path for Mach 2 and been in the clear. At her reduced speed, the yellow indicated she’d pass close to an obstacle. She looked ahead on the flight plan and saw that in twenty minutes she’d be near an American Airlines flight. Near, in this case, was within two miles. Not exactly a dangerous distance, though since she was covering two miles in under five seconds, there wasn’t a safety margin if her flight computer had made a bad calculation. She decided to risk it rather than wasting time plotting a new path.

  The sky was clear now. Cities and towns twinkled beneath her, brighter and more tightly clustered than the stars above but she had no time to appreciate the view. She focused intently on the yellow pathway displayed before her, counting down miles and minutes. She’d never flown this fast but it felt as if she was crawling. What if Chimpion had already attacked her mother?

  She took a long, deep breath and let it out in a stuttering groan as her fear and frustration grew heavier.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered to herself. “It’s okay.”

  Very likely, it was okay. Her rational mind kicked in, weighing Chimpion’s next move. As far as Chimpion knew, Sarah knew nothing about what had happened on Mars. If App and Steam-Dragon were dead, Chimpion could weave any story she wished. She’d have no urgent need to kill Sarah’s mother and strategic reasons to leave her alive. After all, only her mother knew Sarah’s secret identity. Chimpion would need that information. It seemed more Chimpion’s style to try to get that information through trickery than through something as messy as torture.

  If Chimpion was biding her time, what should Sarah do when they met again? Attacking her immediately had a certain gut level appeal. On the other hand, someone had to have hired Chimpion to act as an assassin. Finding out who had to be a priority. There were plenty of people who wanted Rail Blade dead, but whoever had planned this was a mastermind equal to Rex Monday. The dervishes had been so perfectly crafted to place Amelia under suspicion that it now seemed obvious that Chimpion must have had some connection to the attackers.

  Before Sarah could decide on a plan an alarm sounded. The path before her switched from yellow to red. She slowed to subsonic speed and waited for her path to clear again. Had she wandered into a plane’s airspace, or had it wandered into hers? Halving her speed should cause their vectors to diverge dramatically.

  She frowned. The alarm kept sounding and the path stayed red. In fact, several red circles appeared on her screen. Just how many planes was she near? Her eyes flickered across the display. Not planes… the radar pings were too small.

  She slowed further, until she hung in the air. It now became obvious that she hadn’t been unintentionally approaching airborne objects. The objects, instead, were approaching her. Her display helpfully informed her that she was getting pinged by multiple lasers, the types used by missiles to lock on their targets. Had she triggered some defense system at a military base? But she’d dodged missiles before, and these didn’t fit the profile. They were too small and had no heat signature, no exhaust.

  “Magnify,” she said, focusing her gaze on one of the red circles. Her display zoomed to reveal what looked like a bottle rocket lacking a flame. It wasn’t much bigger than a tube of lipstick. She doubted it could be packing much in the way of explosives, but she didn’t plan to stick around and test that theory.

  She dove, accelerating toward the ground. Whatever was coming toward her, the targeting lasers would need a clear line of sight. It wouldn’t be difficult to baffle them with cover and the land beneath her was thickly forested hills. She spread her arms just above the tree tops, slowing to a safe speed, then slipped down through the limbs into the shadows. Instantly, the targeting lasers lost her location, and just in time, since the nearest mini-missile was barely a quarter mile away.

  She sank lower, hovering mere inches over the leafy floor of the forest. She searched the sky through the branches, realizing a flaw in her plan. Whatever was targeting her couldn’t see her, but she also couldn’t see them.

  Then, BANG! Bang bang bang BANG! Bright lights exploded all around her as trees burst into flames. Shockwaves slammed her against a tree trunk. Her armor absorbed most of the impact, but she was still disoriented by the noise and flashes. She lost focus and dropped to her hands and knees, shaking her head to clear it. She took a deep breath, steadying her thoughts. Was that all? Was the attack over? Her helmet had tracked six bogies. How many had gone off?

  She looked up, wondering if she should rise above the trees just enough to get a clear radar scan. Before she could move, she saw a shadow above her, coming closer.

  “Magnify,” she whispered. “Illuminate.” Her jaw went slack as her helmet magnified the approaching form and digitally enhanced its brightness.

  An angel, wings and all, with glowing red eyes looked directly at her as it dropped from the heavens like some dark meteor.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Judgment

  As the angel drew closer, tiny objects flew from its wings, smaller, bullet-sized copies of the rockets that had targeted her. There had to be hundreds of them, if not thousands. Instead of targeting her, they swarmed above her like an explosive net, blocking her from zooming back into the sky.

  The angel came to a halt above the treetops.

  “Sarah Knowbokov,” he announced. “My name is Judgment. I am the reaver. I am the waster. I am the inescapable will of God. Your hour is at hand.”

  “Bullshit,” she shouted back, as the sensory array in her helmet deciphered the details of the form before her. Judging from the infrared data, this was a man in a fancy suit of mechanized armor. Fancy and familiar—it plainly shared a lot of design elements with Steam-Dragon’s armor, and seemed to be made of the same carbon composite. His wings were huge, but wings required motion to work and he was standing motionless in mid-air. The big power pack between his shoulder blades had a strange energy signal. Some sort of reactionless drive? Her father had built one a few months before he died but the prototype had gone missing following his death. A reactionless drive would explain the lack of any sort of exhaust on the tiny missiles that had chased her from the sky.

  “You’re one of the thirteen,” said Sarah. “That’s some fancy armor you’ve got there. I’m guessing it’s not terribly maneuverable among the trees with those wings, though.”

  “You cannot hide from me, sinner,” said Judgment, a large iron sword suddenly appearing his hands. “I shall burn the earth to cinders to bring justice to your wicked soul.”

  As he spoke, his sword glowed brightly. Sarah knew this trick. Rail Blade had been able to agitate the outer molecules of iron to make it white hot while keeping the inner molecules stable to retain st
rength.

  “You’ve stolen my sister’s secrets,” she said. “It think there’s a commandment telling you not to do that.”

  “These weren’t your sister’s secrets,” said Judgment. “Your sister stole the secrets of the Lord. His is the power to create something from nothing. His is the power to slay all who displease him. Your sister has paid a terrible price for her blasphemy.”

  Sarah started to tell him he was mistaken but held her tongue. No point in tipping off this idiot that Amelia was still alive.

  “I don’t get it,” said Sarah. “You’re obviously one of the thirteen prisoners my father accidentally turned into geniuses. I know that all of you were murderers, so, sure, I get that you’d like to kill me. But why the theatrics? Why pretend that Jerusalem meant anything to you?”

  “The hour is nigh, sinner. It is the dawn of New Jerusalem. Come forth, and face your death with dignity, should you possess any.”

  Sarah furrowed her brow. The New Jerusalem. Servant. That crazy female preacher Servant worked for. What was her name again?

  “You wouldn’t be a friend of Amy McPherson, would you?” she asked.

  “You’re not worthy to speak her sacred name!” Judgment cried, rocketing toward her, swinging his sword to clear the branches in his path. She decided it was time to test her suspicion that he couldn’t maneuver well among the trees by darting backward. Her helmet had been building a radar map of her immediate surroundings since she’d touched down. She couldn’t build up much speed among the trees, but she could easily stay a tree or two away as he touched down and started marching toward her, crying in incoherent rage as his sword chopped into trees in this path. His blade was hotter than lightning and the trees exploded into splinters as sap flashed into superheated steam.

  Unfortunately, with her attention focused on staying out of the grasp of Judgment, she’d forgotten the swarm of mini missiles he’d unleashed above the canopy. On some hidden signal, they rained down around her, POP POP POP POP, dozens of explosions per second, hitting her from every side. Her armor proved capable of dealing with the shockwaves and shrapnel, but the flashes blinded her and the noise masked the sound of Judgment racing across the leaves until, with a terrible blow, he drove the tip of his blade hard into her belly.