Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Free Book Offer

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  INTO DARKNESS

  Peter Fugazzotto

  Copyright © 2016 Peter Fugazzotto

  All rights reserved.

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  One

  MARLEY STARED OUT the window at the road. Through a break in the trees, the stars burned bright against the darkness.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Another twenty minutes,” said Hsu seated beside her in the driverless transport. He squeezed her hand.

  Marley could hardly wait to reach Hsu’s family compound. Through his window, she spotted the lights of Taichung, gaudy, their brilliance reflecting in long bands over the impenetrable sea. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to send the message to Prime tomorrow. Not tonight.”

  “My father’s corporation will protect us. Beyond the AI’s reach.”

  Marley felt a sudden flash of heat across her face and chest. She wished she had Hsu’s confidence but it would not be so easy for his father to protect them. Not against an AI. Not against Prime. She especially knew the violence Huang Di Prime was capable of. She touched a button in the armrest. The thick glass of the window did not move. She held the button down. “Window’s not working.”

  Hsu stretched to roll down his window, and when it did not open, he grunted. “At least I’m trapped with my lovely wife.” He ran his fingers up her forearm.

  She giggled and flicked his fingers away. “Twenty minutes, my love. Then you can do your best.”

  “Now I’m the one who needs air.” Hsu tapped the window button again, and when it still did not move, he leaned forward and squinted at the automated dashboard. “You know anything about these models?”

  Marley pinched his butt. “You’re the engineer. Why would I know anything?”

  Marley kept her hand pressed against his backside. It felt good to touch him. She did not want to lose contact with him. Recently, she had spent too many months away from him fixing problems at the far edges of Huang Di Prime’s Asian territory. She shuddered at the memory of her recent string of jobs, many focusing on weakening his rival AI Antaboga-2. Too many dead by her gun. Marley wanted to be free of Prime.

  She wished they were already at the family compound. She had news to tell Hsu.

  He typed on the passenger keyboard, the keys clacking beneath his fingers. “Driver, status check on the windows.” He glanced at Marley with a smile, but then he stared past her out the rear window, his lips slack. “Shit, did we just take a wrong turn?”

  Marley followed his gaze. The distant lights of the port were replaced by a dark canopy of trees. “This isn’t the way?”

  “No! We’re headed the wrong way!”

  Marley lunged forward and slammed her fist on the emergency brake button. The transport did not slow down and, if anything picked up more speed, careening along the unlit road.

  “What’s going on here, Marley?”

  “We need help.” She lifted her hair and pulled the signal blocker from the data port embedded in the base of her skull. “Prime, this is Marley. I have a situation. I need help.” Static crackled over the comms implant.

  The car lurched around a corner, tires squealing, and Marley slid across the seat into Hsu. His eyes widened with fear.

  “I can’t make contact,” she said. “Something’s blocking the comms line.” She pounded the brake button again.

  Hsu leaned into the door and pulled at the handle. The door would not open.

  “Stop! We can’t just jump out. We’ll kill ourselves.” Outside the window, the trees blurred. The car rounded another corner and Marley tumbled into Hsu. She lost her breath. He caught her in his arms and held her for a moment.

  She wanted to stay in the safety of his arms but she needed to act.

  She pushed away from him and thrust her hand into the travel bag near her feet. She pulled out a pistol and pointed it as the console. “Put on your seat belt, Hsu! Only one way to stop this car!”

  Before she pulled the trigger, the night sky flared as if daylight had suddenly burst above the mountains.

  Marley saw everything clearly: the soft line of his lips, his right hand clutching the seat belt, the heavy canopy of mango trees alongside the road, the dark-cloaked birds huddled on the branches.

  Then came the thunder of the explosion, the air sucking away, the stars beneath them, the birds spinning away. Marley floated in the middle of the compartment as if gravity had been disrupted. Then it returned and she crashed into the window, the ceiling, Hsu, the floor, and the ceiling again.

  He screamed. Metal groaned. Bones cracked.

  Her head broke the window. Everything went black.

  She woke to heat. Searing heat. Above the roar of the fire, the birds screeched.

  She opened her eyes. She lay halfway out of the passenger window, sprawled in soft grasses and shards of glass. When she tried to crawl, she could not find the ground with her right arm and fell.

  Pain seared up her spine and she passed out again.

  Fluid dripped on her cheeks, too cold to be blood. The acrid stench of fuel enveloped her.

  She gagged and puked blood-streaked phlegm.

  She dug her left elbow into the soft earth and tried to drag herself from the wreckage. She did not move. She craned her neck backwards. The twisted metal of the fiery transport pinned her legs at mid-thigh. Pain pulsed in growing waves through her entire body.

  She whispered a stream of curses but it was useless. She was trapped and at any moment the wreckage could burst into a fireball. She wo
uld be burned alive if she did not get out.

  She remembered Hsu. Was he still in the transport? She screamed his name.

  She stared back into the flames. Hsu lay unconscious and crumpled against the far window. Blood gushed from a cut along his brow. He coughed bits of flesh and bones from torn lips.

  His jacket was on fire. But he still did not wake.

  “Hsu!” she screamed. “Hsu!”

  His limbs reflexively curled up against the flames. The hair on the side of his head singed and the flesh reddened and blistered.

  Marley screamed, and despite the near blinding pain, redoubled her effort to tear herself from the pinning wreckage. She could not escape. She could not help Hsu. Through sudden tears, she watched him burn.

  She looked around for the gun. If she could not save him, she could prevent his suffering and then her own, when the time came.

  A low hum erupted from the sky. A black-hulled ship descended, its movement parting the unfurling smoke.

  “Hold on, Hsu! Hold on! Help is coming.”

  The pain overwhelmed her. She faded in and out of consciousness. The ship became two ships hovering. A black clad man walked through the smoke, flames reflecting off his shiny helmet. A biometal arm reached through the flames. She watched him drag a nano knife above both her knees. She smelled the cold titanium of a robot servitor’s chest place and felt the hard embrace of his arms.

  She called to the black clad man standing in front of the burning wreckage. “Save him! Pull him out! Hsu!”

  She waited for the figure to reach one more time into the flames.

  He did not.

  She lost consciousness.

  When she woke, she was in the gloom of a ship. She stared through the open door and down the ramp. The black clad man strode towards her, away from the wreckage. For a moment, she thought he carried something. But her vision had doubled. He carried nothing.

  Then behind him, the transport exploded in a searing ball of flame, so hot that it flushed her face, so hot that the tears dried in her eyes.

  The man entered the ship, the flames haloing around him. The door of the ship slid closed behind him, and Marley was swallowed in darkness.

  Two

  MARLEY WOKE TO blinding light. Searing pain. The cramping of her stomach. Worse, she remembered the screams of Hsu.

  She could not sit up. A cold sheet draped over her skin. She felt disjointed, incomplete. Her reflection distorted in the steel dish of an operating light that hung overhead. She saw that she was no longer whole.

  The sheet flattened to the bed just below her hips – her legs gone – and her left side was collapsed. Her face was half-covered in bloodstained gauze, darkest where one eye should have been. Tubes fed her blood in and out of a machine that pumped in the place of a failed heart, and next to that another inflated her lungs with a steady, ghastly wheeze.

  She had survived the accident. She was kept alive by machines. She scoffed. She no longer truly lived.

  She was ready to die. With Hsu gone, she saw no reason to keep living.

  She tried to lift her right hand to touch her belly, to see if any hope remained, but she could not even wiggle her fingers, much less lift her hand.

  Marley cursed. She could not move. She could not yank the tubes that kept her alive. But she could cry. Tears formed in her eye. She wanted to die.

  The pale green ceiling of the operating room swirled into a bright blue sky and the walls transformed into willows. The hum of the machines turned into the ripple of a stream. Something was wrong. She was standing. She rotated in a slow circle, her bare feet brushing grass. She looked in all directions. She could not find the sun.

  She hoped this was the end. She hoped she had died.

  A figure sat on a bench by the stream. Maybe it was Hsu. Maybe this was eternity.

  The figure sheeted in static. The pixels gathered.

  Marley stood before a middle-age Chinese man, his belly bulging against his silk jacket.

  “Huang Di Prime,” she said. “Am I dead?”

  “Antaboga-2. She did this to you. And to Hsu.”

  “She won then.”

  “You have a choice.” He patted the bench next to him.

  Marley remained standing. Black crows circled in the forest. She winced at the sudden waft of her rotting flesh.

  “So ready to die?” Prime asked. This interface, the one he assumed for Marley, always reminded her of her father and she hated the AI for playing off such an obvious emotion. His compulsive manipulation was one of the reasons she had been trying to escape. That and the endless killing that she was part of.

  “Turn off the machines. Let me die. I have no reason to live. Let me go.”

  “You have a choice.”

  “Death is a choice. I’m ready to die. I saw myself on the table. There’s nothing left.”

  “I can give you what you want.”

  Marley laughed. But as she did, searing pain raced like acid through her veins.

  Prime waited until her breath evened. “I can rebuild you. Augment you.”

  On two separate occasions, she had glimpsed those agents he had Augmented. She had seen the biometal plates, the fluvium limbs, the ease with which one of them had torn a steel door from its hinges, the bullets denting but not penetrating flesh. But she had also seen the robotic eye, and, even then, she had wondered whether they were still human.

  “Better to die,” said Marley. “That’s what I want. Give me that.”

  Suddenly the sky billowed with black smoke. The bench transformed into the burning wreckage of the transport. Hsu screamed in terror. Marley felt her skin prickle. She saw a shuttle race from the wreckage and towards the sea. She followed it, chasing it over the city lights, and through the dark waves, until she caught up with it. She saw the mark of Antaboga-2 on the hull.

  She reached a giant hand to tear it out of the sky. She was blinded by sudden sharp light. She lay on the operating table. Unable to move. Unable to avenge the death of her husband and unborn child. She heard Huang Di Prime’s voice, disembodied.

  “You have a choice. But you have to want it with all of your being. Because only darkness lies ahead. And you will need strength and resolve to do what we have to do. Antaboga-2 will not go easily into the night.”

  “I want it,” croaked Marley, through swollen lips, her voice a horror to her own ears. “I want to kill Antaboga-2. I want her to pay for what she did.”

  Cold fluid coursed through her veins. The room fell to black, and the last thing she remembered was the whirring of the surgical blade as it started its work.

  Three

  BEHIND MARLEY, FOUR mercenaries crouched against a wall in an alley in Old Shanghai. They wore skin-tight black and silver combat suits and cradled laser-sighted rifles. The midday sun reflected off their VR goggles, hiding their eyes from Marley. She felt better not knowing whether they stared at her Augmentations.

  “We blast the door and terminate her,” said Marley.

  But despite her words, she swallowed hard, fighting back the sudden tightness in her belly. She glanced at her team again – four mid-level operatives, with too much gray hair and wrinkles around their lips. Huang Di Prime should have provided her with a more elite team. Especially with what was at stake.

  Behind her team, where the alley opened to the Guangdong Road, a wall of robot skeletons held in formation, gun arms chambered. The sun reflected off plates of smooth titanium, hydraulic tubes, and exposed gears.

  “We should send the robots in first,” said Bozzie, the only member of her mercenary team she had worked with previously. A family man who should have retired years ago.

  Marley tried to see his eyes but could only see the shadowy reflection of herself in his goggles.

  “The drone has not returned,” said Marley. “Antaboga-2 has done something to the machines. We can’t send the robots in. Too risky. This is a human mission.”

  “So we go in? No connection with Prime’s network?”

/>   “I know you’re scared, Bozzie. I saw what she did to Asim. She has to be stopped. Murderer.”

  Asim had been Augmented too: biometal arms and a chest plate, advanced implants embedded in his skull. A super-warrior like Marley but Antaboga-2 had killed him. Burned him alive.

  Marley felt a shearing pain behind her eyes and leaned a hand against the crumbling brick wall. The alley stank of urine and rat feces. She peered around the dented dumpster at the large, brushed-metal door. Antaboga-2 hid somewhere in that building.

  To turn back now would be to betray Hsu. His death needed to be avenged.

  She toggled her VR goggles and a map overlaid her vision. She spread her fingers to zoom in. She was a small red dot and next to her the four mercenaries were small green circles. Map lines revealed neighborhood apartments, squalid tenements and broken elevators around her. But the map of what lay before her was a black smudge, the map wiped from the network by Antaboga-2. The map would be of no use in her lair. Only darkness lay ahead. Marley swatted away the map and stared down the alley.

  “Agent Marley?”

  She turned to Bozzie.

  “Awaiting instructions.”

  “Place the charges and blast the door.”

  Bozzie and Cowboy set off at a crouch, their boots slapping the pavement. They quickly set X-P4 explosive packets into the bricks around the door. Cowboy threw thumbs up, and the two men darted back to the dumpster.

  The ground shuddered. Fragments of brick sprayed across the sky. A piece of the wall crashed against the dumpster causing Bozzie to stumble into Marley, his hand falling on her biometal arm. He recoiled.

  His gaze, eyes obscured behind the goggles, caught hers for a moment. Shock, disgust, embarrassment? She could not tell.

  Before the dust cleared, she gave the command, “Let’s hunt down an AI.”

  Marley raced over the scattering of bricks, past the fallen door, and into the darkness.

  Four

  IN THE HALLWAY, old fluorescent lights flicked on and off. Marley held the point position. Her team crept behind, guns ready.