by Wesley Chu
“Leave it,” James said.
“But the gate is raised. Someone will steal—”
“That can’t be helped. We’ll come back and cover it later.” He took a quick head count. “Where’s Aliette?”
“She went north to search for you. I went south. If she does not return and we have to leave, we are to meet at the forest desk next door or the waterfall three down as the backup spot.”
The rest of the flyguards gathered, and they moved single-file down to the lower level, through a crack in the wall, to the half-flooded basement of the adjacent building. They waded through waist-deep water up to a staircase through a lobby of a large building reclaimed by nature. They treaded carefully as large water snakes slithered through the waters, eying them with slitted, intelligent eyes before allowing them to pass.
Several black-barked trees had punched through a window and spread their branches, obstructing much of the ceiling. Enormous, twisted vines crawled up the walls and chest-high weeds wavered in the wind tunnel created by the the hallway.
The small group stayed low, moving deliberately through the brush until they got behind a counter covered by thorny flowers. They settled in and waited for Aliette, listening as the shrill whine of the Valkyrie overhead grew louder. It was soon followed by footsteps and voices, and then the sound of a blaster discharge and laughter.
The sounds of Co-op soldiers faded in and out, sometimes suggesting they had walked into the lobby, other times that they had moved on. James kept the group there for an hour, still hoping for Aliette to show up. Then, they moved two blocks down to the waterfall, where a river had diverted into a building and was now gushing out of the dozens of windows on its face. She wasn’t there, either.
As night set, they decided to return to the garage. They found their transports reduced to burned husks, some of the metal still smoldering. Aliette’s broken body, blaster burns on her back, lay just outside the entrance.
James and the rest of the flyguards stood around her, heads bowed. It was his fault; he knew that. No one looked his way, but he could feel their judging eyes even as they avoided him. If he had only not drank that accursed shine. If he had only stayed strong. He looked back up at the container they had used to brew the shit. It had been destroyed as well. It was a small solace.
“We bury her,” he said. “Scavenge for anything that’s still useful.”
The flyguards spent the rest of the night burying their friend and recovering what was left of their small fleet of vehicles, their pride and joy. The mood was somber as they huddled in the darkness. This time, no one risked a fire.
The next morning, before dawn, as they prepared to leave, James made one more pass through the room to search for anything of value. He found a jar of shine tucked away behind one of the broken canisters. Anger flared and he stepped to kick the blasted thing as hard as he could.
He stopped. Something in him wouldn’t allow him to be so wasteful. James glanced around at where the flyguards were prepping to leave and made sure no one was watching. He dipped down and tucked the jar into his sack, and then left to join the rest of the group as they began their long walk back to the All Galaxy Tower.
THIRTY-FIVE
RISKY BUSINESS
Levin sat in front of a small café just off the main street near Paseo de Moret in Madrid, Spain. He sipped what looked like a child-size cup of a coffee derivative known as the café bonbon anís. The thing looked so fragile and dainty in his hand he worried he’d crush it between his fingers. Not that it would matter in a few hours.
The drink had alcohol in it, something he wasn’t aware of when he had placed the order. Levin didn’t have a problem with alcohol; he had reigned himself in during his chronman days when he realized he was starting down the slippery slope toward the bottle, as many a chronman often did. Over the past few years, he tended to drink only on rare occasions. It wasn’t that he feared the demon or temptation, but that it just wasn’t a necessary part of his life anymore. The few drops of alcohol this tiny cup of coffee had were acceptable; it was actually quite tasty.
Down the street, Levin saw the cracked remnants of the Puerta de la Moncloa. Madrid’s victory arch, damaged during the extensive bombings by the Libyans during World War III, had split in a dozen places. When the war had finally ended, the newly crowned Spanish Caliphate had decided to keep the arch standing, cracks and all, as a symbol of the struggle the country had endured in those dark years. Levin liked the way it looked, with the hundreds of pockmarks on its faces and the cracks like spiderwebs down its edges.
A new, smaller monument was built at its base with large letters, stating:
THROUGH WAR AND EVIL AND SIN, THE VICTORY ARCH STOOD—2131 CE
“Yes, it did,” he muttered, raising his child-size cup of alcoholic coffee in a salute. He checked the bright cloudless sky. The sun was halfway down. “And it will for about another hour.”
The year was 2170. At dusk, the city was going to get leveled by giant mountain walkers and then sunk underground by the AI hive mind’s feared vanguard burrowers. Most of the district, about six square blocks of the city, would remain intact even as it fell a quarter of a kilometer underground and got buried under millions of tons of rubble.
Going down with it would be an emergency aid depot with forty tons of medical supplies slated for western Africa. Levin’s job today would be to ride the fall of the district and retrieve the cache. He had come in two days ago to scout the area. Grace wanted him to hit a grain warehouse as a secondary objective if the situation permitted.
The job was already dicey enough. After all, the retrieval window was in the middle of the opening volleys of the AI War. He would have to work during a full-scale invasion, and then escape southeast to the coast and lay low until his return jump while a massive mechanical army on its way to Germany eviscerated Spain.
Then, after five days of hiding and hopefully not causing any ripples, he would have to move out to the sea and make a jump back to the present. It was an extreme hassle, but necessary. Madrid was a heavily time salvaged zone, and the region and this period were already littered with dozens of tears to the chronostream. Jumping from anywhere within thousands of kilometers was no longer an option in the time frame of the attack.
Fortunately, Grace, in her infinite intelligence, had found a narrow clean jump window. The odds of substantial ripples in a job like this were usually high, but the sheer destruction of the first few days of the AI War mitigated some of those risks.
“Levin, are you there?” Grace’s voice popped into his head.
“Yes, Mother of Time.” At this moment in the present, Grace was in the Frankenstein a hundred meters under the surface of the Alboran Sea. She would rendezvous with him once they coordinated their return jump. All this felt a little haphazard.
She had originally wanted him to go ahead and steal the supplies now. After all, she argued, it all gets destroyed anyway. However, Levin refused. Who knew what sort of mayhem he could inflict on the chronostream by attacking a warehouse in a heavily-populated area days before a dead-end time-line event?
Maybe the military would send in investigators and security that otherwise might not have gone there, and they would all perish during the attack. Maybe his early theft would somehow bring the city to high alert and warn them of the impending attack. Maybe the government would call in more of their military as a precaution and actually fight off the mountain hawks.
There were too many unpredictable scenarios, and Levin would not play a part in changing history like this, not even if it was Grace Priestly who asked it of him. One terrible mistake in his lifetime was enough. He’d rather die than cause another. For whatever reason, it was the Mother of Time who played loosest with the Time Laws she had created. Someone like her would have never made the tier as a chronman. That thought coaxed a grin out of him.
“Levin, I’ve detected a jump near you. Be careful.”
He sat up a little straighter and lowered his head
. That was the other fear of having a long-running job. ChronoCom may have detected his initial jump back here. The more time he spent in the past, the likelier it would be for the agency to send an auditor to investigate. If that was the case, he would be severely outgunned. Auditor bands were much more powerful than the chronman bands he had on, though strength of bands wasn’t everything.
It could be coincidence as well. This was a heavily-salvaged area. It could be one of the hundreds of jobs ChronoCom had run here. Levin was pretty sure his luck these days wasn’t that good. He considered dropping his paint job to save his levels for a possible fight. His paint job wouldn’t do much good if he encountered an auditor. No doubt whoever was investigating would be armed with a band detector.
He decided against it. If the jump was just a mere coincidence and that chronman just happened to know him, he would have a difficult time talking his way out of it, especially if the chronman was from after he was tried and found guilty.
Levin got his answer a few seconds later. A woman in a beige lounge suit, fashionable in this time period, took a seat near his small table. She leaned forward, almost as if flirting with him. A waitress stopped by and asked if she wanted a drink, and the woman replied in perfect regional and period Spanish. Just like his comm band, it was too perfect.
When the waitress left, the woman leaned in. “No sudden movements, friend. You won’t win a fight and you can’t run. I’m Auditor Julia Gaenler-Phobos of ChronoCom, year 2512. You are under investigation for possible violation of Time Law Six for an unsanctioned jump from a nonauthorized governing body. You will immediately surrender, release your bands to me, and divulge the entities supporting your illegal activities. Are we clear?”
Levin cursed under his breath.
“What is it?” Grace asked.
“I’m sitting with an auditor right now. Twelfth of the chain.”
“Can you beat her?”
“With auditor bands, possibly. With chronman ones, I’m not sure. More importantly, I don’t know if I want to. I raised her to the chain myself. She’s a good person.”
“Did you used to sleep with her?”
“No, Grace. What does that have to do with it?”
“Because that woman is about to haul you back to prison or worse, and all you can think about is what a stand-up individual she is. Pull your head out of your ass and do your space-forsaken job.”
The waitress returned with another of those tiny teacups and offered it to the auditor. She thanked the woman and took a sip. “So what will it be? Come easy and neat, or do I have to break you first?”
Levin chuckled. He remembered catching her practicing saying those words for the first time the night before her first retrieval of a wayward Tier-4 on Luna. “You missed a line.”
She arched an eyebrow. “What?”
Levin put his cup down and leaned back in his chair. “You usually say something else after you give your first line. What is it? I forget. Something about how you could use the exercise.”
Julia stood up and the soft orange hue of her exo surrounding her intensified. “Who are you?”
He dropped his paint job and studied the look of shock on her face. “Hello, Julia. How did you find me?”
It took her only a second to recover. Julia sprouted four orange coils from her exo and looked ready to attack. “The director told me the wastelanders operating in the northeast were salvaging again. We’ve put a heavier emphasis on tracking illegal jumps and their salvage movements. Of all people, I never thought you would be helping them. I heard you escaped, but I didn’t think you would ever betray the Time Laws so brazenly.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he said. Was it? He didn’t quite believe his words. “Julia, in all the years you knew me, did I ever betray the agency or act without honor? Can you consider that there is more to all this than you know?”
The auditor didn’t waver, but she didn’t attack him, either. Levin sensed an opportunity. Julia crossed her arms and leaned back. “Very well then, Levin. Now is your chance to defend yourself. Abyss knows you didn’t at your trial. There was a time when I would have scoffed at the charges leveled against you. But, between the facts, witness accounts, and your lack of defense, how could anyone think otherwise? Explain yourself now.”
Levin kept his face neutral, though it pained him that she thought of him this way. Her reasoning was sound. He would think the same if he was in her position. However, the truth would only risk everything he was trying to accomplish. “I cannot. Not right now, at least. I just have to hope that our relationship still carries weight.” It was a poor excuse. One that said nothing and meant even less.
Julia pursed her lips and shook her head. “How the high and noble have fallen. I shall choose to honor my old friend’s memory by pretending this wretch before me shares nothing more than his resemblance. The Levin I knew would have never stooped to pulling on my heartstrings. The real Levin always did the right thing. I will give you one last chance to do so. Surrender and release your bands.”
Levin stared at that small cup on the table, its brown milky contents only half-drunk. He paused, tapping the table twice with his fingers. He picked the cup up and threw its contents back. “Should we move to a more isolated place?”
The gesture wasn’t lost on Julia. She pondered his suggestion for a few moments and then shook her head. “My handler says this area is as good as any. Once the war starts, this entire part of the city gets wiped out. Whatever ripples we cause here will heal within a day.” In the distance, a siren began to wail.
Levin looked west at the setting sun. She was right. The first of the mountain hulks should be rising out of the ground at any moment. The radar would pick them up and a citywide panic would ensue. “Very well, then. If you agree, we wait until the attack begins before we conclude our affairs.” He gestured to the waitress to order another café bonbon anís, this time asking for triple the alcohol.
He watched the waitress leave to fulfill his order. That was probably the last thing she was ever going to do. Part of him wanted to tell her to go home and hug her loved ones for the last time. Make her peace and say her goodbyes. Levin scowled. Julia was right; he had gone soft. He turned his attention back to the auditor, who was still standing in front of him, exo powered on.
“Put your coils away,” he said. “Sit down before someone notices your exo.”
“I find that ironic coming from someone who has so blatantly disregarded—”
He cut her off. “I’ve known you for eighteen years, Julia. That’s worth something. Give me a few minutes and have a seat. Besides, it’s starting to get dark. If someone looks closely, they’ll notice your coils. You want to create unnecessary ripples?”
Julia reluctantly sat down and the two stared at each other, waging a contest of wills. She finally spoke. “I was actually happy to hear that you escaped. Most of the auditor chain didn’t believe for a second the charges they leveled against you. I had thought you would be smart enough to hole up on some backwater shithole and never show your face again.”
The waitress returned with his order. Levin picked up his cup and saluted Julia with it. “If I was going to hole up in a shithole, I would just stay on Nereid.”
“Instead you’re back on Earth running illegal jumps? What the abyss is wrong with you? Have you lost your last shred of decency, or is this some sick way of poking the giant in the eye?” Her eyes narrowed. “No, you were never motivated by wealth, nor by vice. What are you really doing here, Levin?”
He smiled. Julia didn’t honestly believe he had gone rogue. She was just telling herself this because it would make their fight easier. He took a sip from his cup and placed it back on the table. “How’s your aunt doing? The one you took leave for last year?”
“Nice try, Levin. You won’t be able to work on my emotions. She passed away three months ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. She was your last relative?”
Julia nodded. “I tr
ied to move her to Luna the last few years, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Born on Earth, die on Earth, she said. Stubborn old crone.”
“I met her once. She visited you at the Academy when you were raised to the tier.”
They continued their conversation, not missing a beat even when all the sirens nearby joined the chorus of wails. Minutes later, the news must have spread, because panic took over the streets. The denizens of the city, all thirteen million of them, would try to flee north all at the same time. By this time tomorrow, half of them would be dead. By the time the AI army reached Germany six days later, the attrition rate for Spain would be 97 percent.
The two of them stayed in their seats, even as crowds of people ran past them, screaming and looting. Fights broke out as mobs tried to board the last remaining transports that could fly. The sounds of explosions got closer. The ground rumbled. Large plumes of smoke began to rise from the ground, blackening the sky.
A few minutes later, the first of the gigantic mountain hulks appeared. Large, long metal black bodies with six legs, each as thick as buildings, stomped through the city, heavy coil-charged weapons shooting indiscriminately at anything that moved.
Several formations of defensive crafts buzzed by, shooting streams of light and trails of smoke at the walking fortresses. The first of the planes erupted into balls of fire directly over where they sat, raining debris and flames all around them.
Both Levin and Julia looked up as small specks of fire struck their exos, flickering their shields with each drop. Julia indicated something behind him and Levin turned to see the giant black metal foot of a mountain hulk no farther than a few hundred meters away.
“Is it time?” he asked.
She finished her drink and nodded. “Shall we?”
Her exo flared, and she shot six tightly intertwined coils at his shield, hoping to shatter it in one blast and end the fight quickly. She had a seventh coil that hovered above his head, no doubt anticipating that he’d dodge upward, so it would slow his movement enough the other six would hit their mark.
