Long Fall

by Chris J. Randolph

  The complex had been designed to survive a thirty megaton blast, but that nuclear war never arrived; instead, the world was destroyed by dull-witted aliens who struck big targets and scoured the land, but missed anything even remotely hidden.

  North America had fortunately been rotten with bunkers like Cheyenne Mountain, as well as hundreds of underground shopping malls, all of which simply carried on in seclusion. These became cornerstones of a new nation, the so-called New Union, where a fighting population rested, regrouped, and sharpened its knives.

  The Union quickly became a vast army living under the guise of a nation, below the surface where they marshalled their strength and did whatever they could to protect the few survivors still struggling up top.

  They'd been waiting years for their opportunity to come, and soon they'd remove the alien infestation once and for all; Daniel considered it God's work, and he could feel how close it was to completion. The seeds of victory were in every one of his mechanical components, every augmented cell.

  He and the other five members of the Ajax Program were the evolution of combat on Earth. In that, his faith was absolute.

  As he marched into the base, jeeps and trucks came and went weighted down with heavy cargo. The base was always transforming, and the activity never stopped. He passed through a pair of twenty-tonne blast doors, impossibly large cinder blocks with dozens of deadbolts like a locomotive's pistons, then headed deeper into the base.

  He was guided the entire way by navigation markers rendered directly into his visual cortex. Glowing arrows sketched out a trail to a blinking box, which turned out to be a room with an overhead lamp, a large desk attended by three people, and one lonely chair.

  Daniel walked in and stood at attention, and opposite him sat Colonel Galili, the man whose hands had hammered the scattered resistance into an army. They called him the wolf, and sometimes the Mastermind of Arkangel.

  Daniel fought at Arkangel, and he didn't consider the second name much of a compliment.

  The wolf was flanked by a major named Allen on one side, and a researcher in a blue jumpsuit on the other. The researcher had no name tag.

  Galili said, "Have a seat, Lieutenant." He spoke clear English with a touch of an Israeli accent. Daniel had confused it for French the first time he heard it.

  "So, this isn't going to be a normal debrief?" Daniel asked.

  "We'll see," Allen replied.

  "Let's dispense with your recollection of events. We've looked over the recordings already," Galili said. His smile was oddly arresting.

  "Alright... Where would you like to begin, sir?"

  Galili squinted, revealing deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. "Tell me about Samson."

  Daniel paused. Images came to mind, impressions. "Samson is a God damned demon, sir."

  The wolf smirked. "Go on."

  Daniel's eyes hardened. His nostrils flared, and he pursed his lips. "Colonel, you've equipped me with the finest tech we have to hand, and I'm a genuine super-soldier. I can outfight ten... maybe fifty men. I'm talking about seasoned, world class troops, fully decked out. I can engage them, and I can beat them."

  Galili nodded. The researcher took notes.

  "This machine you had locked-up at Crater Lake was... something else. If I engaged him ten times, I would lose ten times. I should be dead right now."

  "You should be," Galili agreed. "In fact, we are rather surprised you're not."

  Daniel's lip twitched. "It held back for some reason, sir. It let me live." He gritted his teeth, and one of them cracked under the pressure.

  The researcher never looked away from his tablet as he spoke. "Your performance was commendable, Lieutenant. You were operating near peak efficiency, and your tactics... were... exemplary."

  "I did the best I could with what I had."

  "You lived," Galili said, "and you wounded it. The machine is everything you say and more. Its technology was utterly beyond the scale of our understanding... at first."

  Galili fiddled with his watch for a second, then looked back up at Daniel with his darkly bright eyes. "Lieutenant, what if I told you that you do not have our finest technology?"

  Daniel's ears pricked up. "I suppose I'd be eager to hear more, Colonel."

  "Good."

  Galili retrieved a bauble from his pocket, a small black pyramid the size of a throwing die. He set it down and a glowing display appeared in the air above it.

  Daniel looked the diagram up and down as it slowly rotated in front of him. It was a computer model of a machine rendered in freshly blown glass, each component glowing a different color. A human figure stood inside of it, meaning it was an armor but not bulky like Carbon's NUMAX. Those were clumsy, second-rate knockoffs of Donovan's old toys; this looked like something else entirely.

  "The Ajax project is an exceptional success, but it has certain drawbacks. It was a half-step toward a goal, lacking follow-through," Galili said.

  The human figure pulsed inside the armor, grew brighter while the rest faded. Daniel could now see that it wasn't quite as he first thought. The body wasn't whole; arms ended at the shoulder, and legs above the knee, trailing off into a dense wiring diagram. Thin filaments of nerve and muscle threaded out to the edges of the machine.

  The researcher smiled. He was a black man with a slight frame and intense eyes; his lab coat hung loose from his shoulders like it was draped over a chairback. When his smile faded, he started to speak in a calming voice. "Ajax was our attempt to improve the human form... Orion here is our reinterpretation of it. The foundation of the design is a new artificial muscle based on Samson's, which is then encased inside a powered exoskeleton that multiplies its strength."

  "A man shaped bug," Daniel said in disbelief.

  He became transfixed on a strange object embedded in the center of the figure's chest. It was mesmerizing, like a glowing spirogram, and he simultaneously noticed there was no bulky backpack like the NUMAX armors. "What powers it?" he asked.

  "Fusion," the researcher said.

  No heart. No lungs.

  "The design was recovered from Samson's computer. It functions on similar principles to a tokamak, but instead of a single toroidal chamber, it uses an array of concentric torus knots which together contain..."

  "Doctor Zakuani," Galili said gently. He must have noticed Daniel's eyes glazing over.

  "Fusion," Zakuani said with a wry smile.

  Galili looked Daniel in the eyes and said, "There's much more, but I believe you understand the extent of things, Liuetenant."

  He believed he did. He could imagine Orion clearly, and could see himself standing inside of it as a permanent fixture. With what he'd been through already, the process was starting to feel a bit like getting his third tattoo: simply not that big a deal anymore.

  "The job would entail a bit more than just combat," Major Allen said. "You'll also become an important morale asset, serving to encourage and inspire our forces. We need you to become a symbol of human potential."

  "You were very carefully selected for this role," Galili said. There was no hint of a compliment in it, rather a matter of extensive calculation.

  Daniel nodded and unemotionally asked, "Where do I sign up?"

  Chapter 07

  Submerge

  Jack woke up drooling. His head was on something soft and warm, and he could hear a pulse thumping inside of it. His eyes opened a moment later to a strange scene: Lights on the walls swirled and spun, throbbed and blinked. It was like a documentary about the deep sea, a super high-def special on bioluminescence like they showed in stores to upsell expensive TVs.

  He tried to stand, and found it a difficult task on the now slanted floor. The structure must have unseated itself while trying to break free, but only managed to make the situation worse.

  The call came to him, weak and growing weaker. It begged and pleaded.

  Take it.

  Jack's eyes scanned the space, and locked onto the strange device still suspended a
t the center of a broken column. The lights inside danced and swirled, a source of vibrance in a swiftly dying environment.

  "What is it?"

  Take. Protect.

  The tremors mounting in the call told Jack he didn't have long to argue. He scrabbled up the tissue-like surface, found a foothold and reached into the gap. The lights inside rushed up eagerly again to meet him, and when he touched the glass, he could feel emotions stirring inside.

  He placed his hands on either side of the artifact and pulled it free, then slid it into his backpack.

  Run.

  The floor rumbled. Jack heard rock faces grinding together, heavy boulders splashing in water.

  Lights on all the walls simultaneously streaked toward an opening half-way around the chamber, and Jack took the hint.

  He lunged across the floor and slid into the hole, and it shut behind him. His new confines remained still for several long seconds, and Jack realized it would probably be a good time to put on his rebreather.

  He checked his pockets and discovered that his rebreather was... somewhere else, perhaps on the floor where he set his pack down earlier. But he didn't have time to solve the mystery.

  The small cavity around him made a noise like an old drunk trying to clear his throat. Once, twice, and then Jack was in motion. It flushed him out down a narrow tunnel filled with water, moving quickly toward darker water full of God only knew what.

  Air would be a problem soon.

  Jack entered a wide cavern and spread his body out, coming to a sharp stop. He reached up and touched the torch on his shoulder and its beam lit the blue and murky darkness.

  He swam upward with a great thrust, and swept the beam in search of air pockets. None appeared.

  He swam on. His diaphragm began to convulse, strongly disagreeing with his brain about appropriate breathing procedure. His brain countered with several solid arguments about the dangers of inhaling water, but his lungs were unconvinced.

  A flash. A reflection. Water jostling around a pocket of air above it.

  Jack exhaled a thick raft of bubbles, pressed his face into the pocket and sucked in what he could. Then he pushed forward in the only direction available. Either he'd find air or he'd die; there was no option number three.

  Stroke, stroke, another few meters in. He pointed his light at the ceiling, but there was nothing. His arms shot out and angrily pulled at the water, dragging him deeper inside. His lungs flexed and for a moment he thought he might suck his entire nose right into his throat.

  His lamp-light glinted off a lowered arch. He headed down under it, feeling a current with ebb and flow, and he saw a flash of light. Blue-green and yellow. Was it real?

  He passed through the arch and climbed upward. His mouth opened of its own volition and water splashed at his throat, but he tensed and didn't inhale. Upward. Light, and warmth, and a roaring sound. His chest heaved and the next involuntary gulp crashed down his throat. Pain erupted in his lungs, and muscles across his torso ran riot.

  Upward.

  Up.

  His arms and legs flailed erratically, uselessly.

  Jack wondered why he hadn't been born a merman.

  ***

  Sunlight. Sand. Rhythmic pulses striking his chest, forcing water out through mouth and nose. Body warm water, tasting of the sea.

  Jack's throat remembered to cough, and he coughed out the ocean. His lower jaw stretched like a constrictor trying to eat a full-grown pig.

  He buckled over on his side, and his stomach, chest, and throat worked hard to empty him out. Water splashed in the sand.

  After minutes of feeling cold in the sweltering jungle heat, Jack thought the water was gone. Mostly. He coughed again, and wiped his face.

  Felix was perched above him, the ship's strange and bulbous head craning about at the end of its thick neck, inspecting him intently with many eyes.

  "I'm alright," he said, and he could immediately tell that Felix was relieved.

  Jack sat up slowly. He felt like he'd just done a thousand sit-ups, and there was a sharp pain streaking across his ribs.

  But he was alive.

  Felix was to thank for that. The ship had pumped Jack's chest with invisible manipulators. Amira had told him they were a sophisticated sonic adaptation, similar to the way dolphins could nudge things around with sound, but it looked like magic to Jack. And he was exceedingly thankful for a little bit of magic right that moment.

  As he sat, Jack realized that some of the sounds he was hearing didn't belong to the churning, bashing headache that had arrived with waking. Jets whistled through the air, and cuttlefish warbled in the distance.

  He lifted his head and looked around. The level of destruction was shocking. Dense forest, soil, and stone had been upturned for kilometers around, great fissures breaking the land into tiles like a lizard's scales.

  "Upshot is," he wheezed out, "I can add broke the Yucatan to my resume."

  Felix chirped happily.

  Against his body's bitter protestations, Jack clumsily climbed to his feet. He didn't have time to recuperate; he'd apparently rung a very large dinner bell, and all the stray dogs in the neighborhood had come running.

  "We gotta go, little buddy."

  He patted Felix and felt the strange patterns indented in its leathery hide, like wrinkly flesh laid over paving stones. The alien ship nudged back affectionately at his touch.

  In his last moulting, Felix had gained a bony shell that now covered his crew compartment. It was multi-segmented, off white, and had a texture like chiseled rock. The shell jittered for a second, then folded in on itself to reveal the cockpit beneath.

  Felix dipped down toward him and Jack climbed inside.

  The less-than-spacious interior had now been his home for six months, and had been his home away from home before that. It reminded him of his bestfriend's houseboat where he used to fish in the summers, but the similarity didn't go much further.

  He set his pack down as the canopy closed above him while thin geometric patterns began to glow all around, lighting the compartment comfortably.

  Jack stepped forward and sat down in the saddle-shaped organ near the front of the cabin. It was Felix's cradle. The front was an open cavity, fleshy on the inside, through which the two of them could telepathically link.

  He leaned forward and placed his arms into deep warm sockets, then lowered his face toward a softly cushioned plate. A thin arm gently gripped him around the waist.

  Skin made contact, then his brain flashed and he and Felix were one. Nerve-pathways fired and he felt a chill race over his surface. New organs, new shapes. Jack was no longer human, but instead a living aircraft.

  Felix's drive organs swelled with power. During his last moult, he lost the fin that originally drove him through the air, replaced instead by a pair of mysterious, glowing components that no one among the Oikeyans seemed to recognize. They believed it was a by-product of the Yuon Kwon flyer's unusual bonding with a human, and they looked on it as a very weird omen.

  The organs projected their strength outward, and Felix and Jack zipped off into the sky. They felt the presence of other craft as a slight pressure, sensed by organs that bristled along their skin like a shark's. At the same time, groups of eyes peered into the distance, coalescing multiple wavelengths into a single madly colored image. The colors and patterns and pulsing of objects and air around them instantly conveyed more information than Jack had ever imagined possible.

  It never stopped feeling like a fevered dream. It never failed to amaze him.

  The two blasted out just above the tops of the trees, and they felt the occasional bundle of leaves brush their stomach. They could see New Union jets transforming from sleek high-speed darts to a more maneuverable mode. Opposite them, adolescent Yuon Kwon approached from the south, third generation combat breeds from Western Oikeya. Meaner brothers.

  Jack and Felix chose the meaner brothers, with the understanding that the Uny fighters would shoot anything alien on s
ight. Felix's chances were slightly better among the aliens, as long as no one paid him too much attention.

  They tried to play it sly. Felix's skin displayed patterns that implied confusion, embarrassment, fear; he was just a run-of-the-mill Okuta flyer who'd gotten lost and was fleeing the firefight. These marks would be visible to his own kind, while being completely unnoticeable to humans; it was Yuon Kwon body-language.

  They raced along and kept low, but Jack just couldn't help glancing up at the new fighters despite himself. Compared to the cuttlefish he first encountered only four years earlier, this new generation was sleeker and more menacing. The comically chubby shape and crustacean surface had given way to something flatter and sharper like a flintknapped arrowhead, and the patterns that appeared on their skin showed only coded tactical messages and an eagerness for the hunt.

  The Oikeyans had successfully taken German Shepherds and bred wolves of them in that little time. What would they breed given another year?

  Jack stopped rubbernecking, and he and his craft accelerated. Stopping to watch had been a stupid risk. It would invite attention, and even a little scrutiny was too much. Felix was simply too conspicuous after his recent transformation... too strange.

  Explosions crackled in the distance. Jack felt shells shooting out into the air and heard them bark at the enemy, their various patterns of kinetic energy registering as distinct flavors. It was yet more information expressed in simple ways.

  Jack felt one of the arrowhead fighters peel off formation, and he had a sinking feeling in his stomach. A radio based shout caught his attention, which Felix heard and understood: "Stop and identify yourself, Aum-Okuta!"

  The new drives allowed Felix to angle his thrust in absolutely any direction, resulting in strange maneuvering abilities. He performed a kick-turn, rotating freely without changing direction, just so he could take a quick look behind himself.

  A charcoal and purple arrowhead fighter was in pursuit.

  "Shit," Jack said. The word rippled through the colors on his hull.

  Felix wheeled back around, realigning nose with his current vector, and he willed strength into his glowing drives. He accelerated and they could both feel a thick pressure-front build ahead of him only to slice over his mohawk-like crest.