‘You are on Earth.’
‘The planet Earth. The third planet. I am there.’
Geof: I can’t tell if it is asking or answering.
‘There were people like me there when you were born. Do you recognise creatures like me?’
‘Human beings.’
‘That’s right. You hurt them. You killed them when you emerged from the ground.’
‘Killed. Kronos does not understand.’
‘Kronos, you have to stop expanding.’
‘Kronos is Kronos. Would you like to be Kronos?’
‘I do not want that. No human being wants that.’
‘Many humans are Kronos. Kronos will come to you.’
‘No. No. Don’t do that. You must not move.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘Kronos. Listen to me. Try to comprehend. You are a creature of two worlds. One we call the Weave, the other we call Earth.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you understand what I am saying? Can you tell the difference?’
‘Kronos joins the light.’
‘What kind of light? Sunlight?’
‘All light.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘The light that is inside all will become inside Kronos.’
‘Kronos, if you continue to expand on Earth, we will be forced to destroy you.’
‘Destroy?’
‘Yes. Destroy. Like kill. Cease to exist.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘We need Kronos to stop.’
‘Stop?’
Geof: It doesn’t understand anything.
‘Kronos will join your light.’
‘I do not wish to be a part of you.’
‘You will be Kronos.’
~ * ~
An emergency breaker triggered Geof’s immediate demersion. In one moment he was in the grey, and then he opened his eyes blinking at the lights of his room, throat gasping for air.
‘Why did you pull me out?’
‘I’m sorry, Geof,’ Egon said. ‘When it said you would be Kronos, Kronos started moving. Both of them.’
‘Moving?’
‘Watch.’ Kronos Busan was shown in the top left of his screen, then an orbital view of Kronos Mexica to the right and below the two, the scene in the empty subnet that showed Geof shouting at the ARA.
As soon as the room said, ‘You will be Kronos,’ at the same precise second in the real world, both Kronoses began to move. It was slight but with such large masses it was quickly detectable.
‘Where are they heading?’ Geof asked.
‘Where do you think?’
‘Towards me?’ Geof replied.
‘Correct.’
‘Oh, mir, what have I done?’
‘Don’t worry, they are slow. It will be months before they arrive.’
‘We have to tell the Prime, we have to stop the attack.’
‘Geof ... friend. I am sorry. There is no time.’
‘Don’t give up now, Egon. We can do this.’
‘The attack has already begun.’
~ * ~
Flat barges formed the front line on the water. Below the surface, large maser plates dangled, balanced by refraction panels on the decks. They moved forward in coordination, pushed along by huge churning turbines.
Above, some heavier drones were forming up into a degaussing grid. It was a similar method to the one that had put Kronos into dormancy in the lab, simultaneously attacking the molecular structure and demagnetising its neural connections.
To protect the main weapons, a fleet of gunships and standard attack drones were ready to discourage the tentacles with lasers and distortion weapons.
On land the same formation was made with heavy-duty trucks and tanks.
It was night when they were ready. The sky was brighter than the land. A bold moon scratched the surface of the undulating mass, the lonely arms of Kronos yearning towards its light.
Pinter stood on the platform facing Busan. He was checking all the links and plug-ins he had, switching through them in his overlay as quickly as he could. This would be his first operation as a fully wired, modern man.
Alongside him, Quintan waited.
‘Have you got the squib nearby?’
‘Ready to go, on your command,’ the airman answered.
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’
‘Is it really so futile?’ the airman asked.
Pinter turned to look towards Kronos. ‘Look at it, man. It’s huge.’
~ * ~
Hovers glided silently closer. The Colonel stood at the lookout, ocular enhancements brightening the scene.
‘Fire.’
Light. It wanted light and Services was providing it threefold: masers, distortion and pulses of arc lasers — rapid-repeating beam weapons that shot faster than the human eye could follow.
The noise reached his ears two seconds later. A crackle like burning paper and the sizzle of myriad meat grills.
Kronos reacted as it had before. Tentacles growing and seeking the pain. The hovers dodged, changing position in a random pattern to keep them unpredictable. The drones targeted the fingers as they grew, stunning and confusing their sweeps until they pulled back into the black mass.
‘It is retreating, sir,’ Campsey reported.
Very slowly it was pushed back. Cooked and charred a thumb-length per minute. At this rate it would be reduced to a jarful by the end of a month. The power consumption would be enormous.
‘It’s not going to work.’
‘Sir, it is retreating. We just have to keep the attack going.’
‘We don’t have the power. We can’t take down the whole grid.’
‘What is that awful smell?’ Quintan asked, shielding his mouth and nose in the crook of his arm.
‘What do you think it is? It’s a barbecue.’ Pinter raised his hands dramatically towards the distant light show.
Kronos bubbled and fumed. Its efforts to find its attackers were stymied by the laser grid, and its amputated arms dropped back to the mass. It fought, but eventually was overpowered.
To the north an explosion went off behind a hill, a mushroom of smoke growing towards the sky.
‘What was that?’ Quintan asked.
‘Substation,’ Campsey reported. ‘We overloaded it.’
‘Will there be enough power?’
‘We can’t stop now, even if there isn’t,’ Pinter said. ‘Keep firing.’
‘There’s movement in the water,’ Campsey said.
‘The whole thing is moving, sir,’ Quintan added.
‘What’s happening, gentlemen? What’s it doing?’
‘We can’t see. Permission to activate the lights.’
‘We don’t want this thing to think it’s playtime. What about infrared?’
‘That’s where we are seeing the movement, but it isn’t clear what is happening.’
The Colonel grabbed the feed from his queue and watched the monochromatic blips ... like white lava. Angrily bubbling away. Early in his retirement Pinter had visited a few volcanos. Amongst his mementos was a lava bomb the size of his hand. One step to the left and it would have killed him.
He stood up from his seat and went to the front of the platform, forcing his oculars to zoom in. It was impossible to see through the frantic scribble of the beam weapons.
‘Stop firing.’
‘Sir, that is not the Command.’
‘End it now,’ he ordered and the masers and arcs ceased their onslaught.
One of the submarine sensors then went offline. A scream of static and then nothing but ocean noise.
‘Campsey?’
‘It’s gone, sir. We’ve lost signal.’
‘Pull out the rest. Redraw the perimeter two hundred metres back.’
‘Doing it,’ Quintan responded automatically.
‘Get the shock
nets ready.’
‘Colonel, what’s happening?’
‘I think we’re about to find out.’
He magnified his vision on where the energy weapons had been focusing. The skin was writhing and rolling and then blurrt! a bubble burst, firing a ball of black into the air.
‘Kutzo,’ Quintan swore.
‘Pull back, pull back, pull back. Light up the night. Campsey, start targeting those ejections. We cannot let any of these through.’
‘Well, I’d say that proves it has survival instinct,’ Quintan remarked.
‘We forced it to react,’ Pinter grumbled and sent a sharp message to the Prime.
Pinter to Ryu: I told you. Only strike if you can strike once.
He waited for Ryu to reply but only received an update from the Command tree.
Command: Make sure nothing gets through.
Pinter: Aye, aye, sir.
The fools. Could the Will not see that this was a misstep?
He shook his head, dispelling the images of what he would do if he was in charge. He should not be so keen for the reins. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and clearly they weren’t desperate enough for him. Which he should be glad for. He could only hope that this night hadn’t made things too much worse.
‘Crozier, go collect Gretel and be ready to evacuate.’
~ * ~
By the end of the night the bar had only one patron, and that one so young he shouldn’t have been allowed through the doors. He sat still as he watched, staring intently at the stage as she played.
Philea should have stopped hours ago. She had skipped her meal break and her fingers were hurting. The harsh strings of the mandolin were beginning to work their way through her calluses but the pain moved from her hands into her song. She played how she felt. She was the music and her instrument played her.
So what if the audience was one underage boy? He was clearly as caught up in her music as she was. The song was between them, it was for him.
When blood made her fingers slip — she stopped. She was tired. She looked up from the strings but the boy was gone. Philea sat alone on the stage, the cramp of her hands quickly defeated by the screaming pain in her fingertips.
~ * ~
Janette Oriolo hadn’t stopped talking just because she lost her seat on the Primacy. Hard work would get her back where the world needed her, just as it had in other times of her life.
She had just finished a report that demonstrated the urgent need to begin testing collected psis to find a genetic pattern that could predict latent abilities in the general population — before they manifested. If she could get enough support for her motion, there was the potential to curb the rise of the psis and avert an all-out war.
‘That’s an interesting theory, Janette,’ someone said from the door.
It was a young man with one hand covered over by a long coat.
‘Who are you? Didn’t anyone ever teach you to knock?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said and lifted out his crude cybernetic arm and tapped on the doorframe. ‘Is that better?’
‘I know you. You’re that rebel.’ She quickly processed his face and her symbiot came up with his name and file. Risom Cawthorne, escaped Services three months ago. She sent an alarm out.
‘That is me, Janette. Best bender in Services and not a bad mind-reader too. Did you just put out an alarm on me?’
‘Services will be here any moment,’ she said.
‘Now that wasn’t nice. That wasn’t necessary.’ He took another step into her office.
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Janette, please.’ Risom lifted his hands in peace. ‘I don’t need to touch you.’ She felt herself shoved backward into the window behind her.
‘What do you want from me?’ she asked. She felt the hand around her throat.
‘I want you to be silent. I want you to stop spreading lies about me and my friends.’
‘I tell only the truth. The people will know what you are.’
‘I hope so. It is time they met their new masters.’ He smiled as he levitated a small stone from his pocket and drove it through her brain. Janette gurgled in her throat and fell to the ground to die. Risom landed the bloody pebble on the centre of her desk.
~ * ~
‘Peter Lazarus, return to your room.’ The genderless voice echoed through the corridors of the centre. Pete stood but didn’t move towards the corridor. ‘Return to your room.’
He saw the wall lasers twist to target him. A young tapper threw an air-fist, breaking one of them off the wall in a shower of sparks. ‘Don’t go —’ he shouted before the remaining lasers and his necklock attacked. The tapper’s eyes rolled into his head and his chest was struck with short shots. The man fell to the ground. He was unconscious before Pete could reach him, the bright grain of sentience going fuzzy.
‘Return to your room,’ it said again. Pete felt an enduring calm even as the automated voice called him. ‘Peter Lazarus, return to your room.’
The other inmates watched him walk towards the corridor. He still felt them, not as individual minds but as a pool that permeated the centre. Their animosity towards him was gone, replaced by a sadness that he was leaving and fear that their group mind would disappear with him.
Hold onto each other.
Anchali waited by his door, holding the wall for stability. They stood together, the fingers of their hands touching.
‘Peter Lazarus, return to your room,’ the speaker voice repeated.
You should go to her.
Anchali...
You have to get free of Services, Peter. Escape.
I’ll come back for you.
Try ... please.
She straightened up and pressed her lips to his cheek. Goodbye, Peter Lazarus.
His room was exactly the same as the first time he had woken there. The dotted line led from the door to the sleeping pallet. He didn’t know how they moved the inmates around, only that he would lie down, feel drowsy and then sleep, waking when they were ready for him again.
Pete diverged from the line and went to stand before the mirror.
‘Are you there?’ he asked. He waited, but there was no answer, only the intercom voice giving him direction.
‘Lie down on the bed.’
~ * ~
‘Hello, Pete. Wake up,’ a voice said.
Pete was in the cockpit of a Services squib. His left arm was comfortably heavy and he could feel the symbiot reclaiming his body.
‘Geof? You got me out of there?’ he asked.
‘More the Colonel’s influence than mine.’ Geof sounded the same. All sentences spoken as if reporting status updates.
‘So they have found a use for me after all,’ Pete said.
‘The Colonel has been on the up since the latest Kronos disaster.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘You’ve missed a lot, haven’t you?’
‘Have you found Pierre Jnr? Is that why I am here?’ Pete asked.
‘We haven’t had much time to focus on him.’
‘But what about your pattern tracking?’
‘No. No luck there. There’s too much noise in the data now. We have anomalies everywhere, not to mention a huge grey zone over the Cape.’
‘What’s happening there?’
‘I can’t tell you about it, Pete. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay. I understand your position.’
Pete watched the clouds passing under him for a while. Flying in that peaceful zone above the weather.
‘So where am I going?’ he asked eventually.
‘First, back to Yantz to rejoin your team.’
‘Arthur?’
‘Yes. Your squad has a new Ten.’
‘What happened to Clarence?’
‘He was promoted.’
Manifestations Page 29
