Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  They left Olesya to clean up, as they always had, and she gathered the remnants of their lunch without complaint.

  As she turned to carry the tray back to the house, a loud crisp birdsong rang out across the forest. It was unusually clear and true and Olesya paused, trying to place it. She knew the birds of the forest well. It was a wood warbler, she was sure of that, but not one of the songs she was familiar with.

  - - -

  Inside the house, two black-suited figures reacted quickly to the sound. One was upstairs, gathering basic clothing: one pair of jeans and a shirt from Olesya’s closet, two pairs of jeans and some shirts from one of the men’s.

  The second man was waiting for him as he came lightly but hastily down the stairs, nodding to confirm he had the other item they had sought, the keys to the smaller, but far more roadworthy truck that sat in front of the house.

  They both exited through a side door as Olesya approached the house, and vanished into the woods to join their warbling colleague.

  - - -

  Olesya did not think it too strange when she heard the smaller family truck start from the front of the house. It was not uncommon for one of the men to return to the house during the afternoon and head into town if they needed something, a machine part or replacement tool. She assumed it was either her brother or father, as whoever it was did not knock on the door to say hello, something her husband always did when he came back ahead of the other two.

  She heard it trundle off down the gravel road that led off down to the main road to town, and carried on about the laundry, cleaning, and preparations for the always-eventful return of the children from school.

  - - -

  Hektor drove the truck away from the house alone. Once well down the deserted country road, he pulled over.

  They moved quickly. The rest of the team had been waiting for him in the trees, and now leapt out from the side of the road, two of them keeping an eye on the gravel road in both directions while Cara, Bohdan, and Frederik stripped their suits off quickly, and changed into the clothing Bohdan had procured from inside the house. None of the men commented on Cara’s brief nudity, or on the ill-fitting shirt and trousers she now wore. This was partly out of respect for her privacy, but mostly out of a sense of self-preservation.

  Once the three of them were done, they dumped their now empty suits in the covered flatbed of the five-year-old Kama pickup truck and clambered into its diminutive cab, Bohdan driving, Cara in the passenger seat, and Frederik crammed unceremoniously into the tiny, cluttered rear seat. Bohdan was already gunning the truck off and away to the main road as the last three leapt lithely aboard, pulling the rear gate of the truck’s liftgate closed behind them, and covering themselves with the various blankets and scraps that were strewn across the well-used truck’s dusty floor.

  Chapter 38: Deception

  As the dark, deep ocean rolled and crashed, the black jet thundered by high, high above, sending a shock wave out across the deserted, grey, rolling turmoil as it rocketed southward.

  This was a truly desolate place. Thousands of miles from any land, even farther from anything you might comfortably call a city, this was the Southern Atlantic as it widened ever farther until the mighty Capes Horn and Hope signaled the last of humanity’s outposts, and you were left with only the great grey expanse of the planet-circling Southern Ocean.

  From space, a subroutine of Minnie’s looked down on the small black plane from satellite eyes, tracking it as it raced southward. It was not monitoring the plane itself, but watching for the slightest hint that it was being followed.

  It carried but one passenger, himself cradled in a gravity couch similar to those that had protected the crew of New Moon One during their epic passage through Earth’s core. For Neal could spare no time for the sound barrier. With his body sedated, his very nervous system pacified by neuronal override, he slept as his plane soared over the vast, brooding ocean.

  But his mind was alive as the StratoJet rocketed onward, brushing aside the buffeting of an abused stratosphere as the thin air argued its passage, shouting at hurricane volumes at the violence of the StratoJet’s meteoric passage.

  Among all the leadership of the Terrestrial Allied Space Command, only Neal knew of the location he was heading to. The crews of the three ships delivering the massive cargos to this secret place had been completely unaware of their purpose, and once they had arrived they had been sequestered along with the engineers that were supervising the unloading of those cargoes, without leave or outside communication.

  Even Minnie was kept in the dark.

  Neal: ‘ok, minnie, if you are comfortable that i remain undetected, please discontinue tracking and edit all systems to ensure there is no record of my final coordinates or heading.’

  Minnie had done this twice before when Neal had visited whatever he was visiting. She was curious by design, but she was not capable of subterfuge as she was systematically incapable of operating outside of her programming, and if her programming was clear on anything, it was that she respected the needs of the taskforce, and most of all, the needs of its leader, Neal Danielson.

  But though Neal’s secrecy in this may have seemed obsessive, it was well placed. For despite her loyalty, Minnie was well aware of Amadeu’s ability to pry data from her, even data that she was programmed never to share, such was his inherent understanding of her makeup, and so she actually appreciated the way Neal’s neuroticism stopped her from inadvertently betraying his trust.

  Minnie:

  Before he could reply, Minnie had extricated herself from his plane’s systems, and he was left, suddenly, with control of the plane. Not that it would crash, the plane’s onboard AI, though limited, could fly itself indefinitely. But the AI was also deliberately unaware of their true destination, and so Neal now opened up his link to it in order to redirect its progress.

  The ensuing turn was hard and efficient, the plane following Neal’s orders to fly at the very limits of his body’s tolerance, and if he hadn’t already been sedated, the G-forces would have knocked him out cold.

  There followed twenty minutes of strange silence. A silence Neal had rarely enjoyed since Minnie had become such a vital part of his work. But she was far away now, physically and mentally, and he was alone.

  He waited, trying to busy himself with reviewing schedules and design documents, but without Minnie to aid him, to answer his questions and respond to his ideas and thoughts, he found he was all but at a loss.

  He was forced, for a moment, to contemplate fully just what he was doing, and it was not a sensation he enjoyed, knowing, as he did, how little clue he really had about how to actually pull off the undertaking at hand. So instead, his mind veered to a subject he hadn’t had the chance to contemplate in what seemed like years. Girls.

  Ughh. It was just as unpleasant a thought, he realized, not least of which because it was even more convoluted than the saving of a planet. But there was one, he thought, maybe, potentially, one he might see something of a mutual flame with.

  No, forget that, no. It was, as it had always been for him, a waste of time. He was not without desire, but he was most certainly without luck, and he wallowed in that memory for a while, almost angry at Minnie for leaving him, even though he had ordered it.

  But it was not long before he was approaching a line. Travelling at over four thousand miles an hour, he was soon breaching a perimeter and a timer went off in his mind telling him he should be within range.

  Neal at Mynd: ‘¿mynd, can you hear me?’

  Mynd:

  Neal: ‘hello, mynd.’

  Mynd:

  Neal felt the familiar warmth of communing with a fully-fledged Artificial Mind once more. Not an Artificial Intelligence, that was nothing like this, any personality an AI possessed was merely an approximation, a rough imitation of true sentience. An Artificial Mind was replete with all the learning and accumu
lated knowledge of a lifetime, often more than one.

  In that respect this AM was no different, though it was as unique from Minnie as an AM could be. This was Mynd. Mynd did not have the systems reach of Minnie, confined, as he was, to the island home of Neal’s most important project. But, like Minnie, he was born of the combined knowledge of two people.

  The first had been Neal himself. And it was he that had named his creation Mynd. Saying these first words at his birth, “You are from my mind, so I will call you Mynd.”

  He had been very pleased with himself. That first conversation had been as disconcerting and yet strangely comforting as Amadeu and Birgit’s first communing with Minnie. But Mynd had needed more than just his memories and thoughts. As Minnie had before him, Mynd had needed nurturing, raising. A guiding voice in the darkness as he emerged into his substrate self. And so, unable to dedicate the time needed himself, Neal had co-opted William Baerwistwyth, the tragically disabled mathematics genius formerly of Amadeu’s spinal interface team, and added the brilliant young man’s experience to Mynd’s being, as parent, nursemaid, and tutor.

  Neal: ‘¿how are you, mynd? i am inbound as we speak. ¿can your systems see me?’

  Mynd:

  Neal chuckled despite himself. It was like having a son who was already more comfortable with computers than you were, not an uncommon sensation for any parent, he was sure. But at only six weeks, old Mynd was capable of far greater feats than playing Angry Birds, and even flying a plane barely tested his abilities.

  But Neal would not need his artificial son to take control over his StratoJet today.

  Neal: ‘no, mynd, i am afraid i cannot stay long and will not be landing. i have come only to check on progress and make sure you have everything you need.’

  Mynd:

  Would he like to see? Neal knew what Mynd meant, and he braced himself before saying yes. Mynd was not nearly as practiced with communicating with humans as Minnie was, and Neal knew this was going to be an intense experience.

  Neal: ‘yes, mynd. please show me your status.’

  His mind expanded, Mynd reaching in via the plane’s subspace tweeter even as the StratoJet slowed from its meteoric pace as it approached the dark, foreboding island that Mynd called home.

  Neal was shown the desolate island first from above, from his plane’s own nose-mounted sensor sweet. But even as Neal reconciled that this was the view, he realized he was actually seeing it from a moving heavy-lifting truck below simultaneously, and from a camera on a gantry crane, and from the deck of one of the three cargo tankers offloading their shipments in the wide bay.

  He fought a wave of nausea at the influx of information, even as he absorbed the scene.

  Below him, around him, was Deception Island. Deep, deep in the Southern Ocean, cradled by the Antarctic Peninsula, long abandoned by the whalers that had been the only people to ever call it home. Some persistently underfunded research facilities still used it occasionally, but not this far after the passing of summer.

  It was now off limits to anyone that Neal had not personally invited there. A cordon enforced with lethal force by two dedicated StratoJets and a small contingent of shock troops.

  Despite its extremely isolation, Deception Island was actually quite welcoming compared to its neighbors. For its high, mountainous coastline was deceptively treacherous, and in fact hid a broad, deep harbor at the island’s heart, the crater at the center of the massive volcano that was Deception Island. The huge bay took up the bulk of the island’s width, sheltered by the entirety of the island’s U-shaped, mountainous mass.

  The harbor was accessible only by a narrow breach in the island’s south coast, known by the early sailors as Neptune’s Bellows because of the hard wind that forced its way out between the high cliffs on either side.

  Neal was happy to see the last of the huge cargo ships driving in through that wind even now, dwarfed by the cliffs on either side, and by the cavernous harbor beyond.

  Massive lights lit the harbor, banishing the ever-present grey twilight that hung over the island and its Antarctic cousins this time of year. The cargo ship was turning hard as it entered the harbor proper, joining two others off of Penfold’s Point, just inside the bay’s entrance. They tied up to massive floating pontoons, themselves merely platforms for the wheels of the massive gantry cranes that were still unloading the ship’s wares.

  The entire operation was focused on the center of the broad, flat peninsula that jutted out into the bay. At the center of which, in what had once been a small lake, a truly massive, quarter-kilometer wide structure was taking shape.

  Neal studied the great edifice. Sensing his focus, Mynd took their attention suddenly, drastically downward, into the structure. Neal’s mind was suddenly filled with data: power conduits, systems status, build schedules. It all flowed through him, and once he got over the initial shock of the translation, he felt the coming completeness of the Resonance Dome like building joy, its budding turgidity almost perverse, definitely profound. An emotion, more than a concept.

  Mynd:

  Neal was treated with the sight of the activating of the manipulators that lined the Dome’s lower half. As they had come alive, they had pulsed the gathered rain water in the deep basin into great geysers that spewed the water up, and out, to fall in great showers on the assorted buildings growing up around the base of the Dome.

  The bottom half of the Dome was partially sunk into the ground, in part to give some structural support to the massive sphere, and in part to lower the breech, both for easier loading of materials and unloading of finished products.

  Neal: ‘very good, mynd. i am happy to see that the manipulators are working as planned. that is very good news, indeed, mynd.’

  Mynd:

  Neal was, as always, astonished by what had been accomplished here in such a short time, and yet still profoundly frustrated at how long it was taking.

  They needed this. He had waited too long to start the real production of the fleet. He still had to wait for the return of New Moon One before he could start on Earth’s heavy defenses, but the fighters, the smaller but still huge craft that he would need in order to fight the coming Mobiliei Armada, those he could be making now.

  And, perhaps more importantly, those he could be using in the fight he knew he was being forced into with Russia and China.

  Mynd: <¿you desire the skalm?>

  As Neal’s frustrations bled through the link, Mynd responded, and images of the first planned Skalm filled Neal’s head. It was the first design they would be working on once the Resonance Dome was ready, and Mynd was fully primed to form the fantastic craft, both physically and mentally.

  First Mynd showed Neal the raw materials, both as lists of component parts and as cargo manifests, arrival dates, most already passed, some still to come, and then finally as a whole, as the final event.

  The three-dimensional image spun in Neal’s mind, brought into focus and vivacious color by his desire for it.

  Viewed from the front it was a broad ‘X’, nearly a hundred meters across. At its center was a twenty-meter-wide ball of fusion power, the ship’s core. It was both its main engine and its main weapon. From that central sphere, spiny protrusions jutted out in all directions, but were dominated by a single dangerous-looking needle, pointing directly forward, longer and thicker than the rest, and a fat nozzle at the rear.

  The stupendous power the
core generated could either be fired out the nozzle at her back to propel the ship forward at incredible speed, or be targeted out the spines that protruded from the reactor in every other direction as nuclear fueled lasers, particle beams of devastating destructive power.

  Out of this core, four carbon nanocomb spars reached out, each capped by a smaller but equally spiny version of the main core reactor. With their own lesser nozzles set out and away from the main core, they could fire individually or as one to spin the stellar weapon on any axis, making it capable of turning on a dime at hypersonic speeds, rotating as a whole to redirect either its main weapon or its main drive or both.

  It was a whirlwind of destruction. An evolutionary leap in weaponry. It was a machine gun pitted against bows and arrows. It was the pinnacle of even Mobiliei military technology, both on and off world, and as such he could be certain that neither Mikhail nor Pei would dream of giving such a weapon to the Russian or Chinese.

  And most of all, because of Neal’s maniacal focus on the secrecy of this project, he knew that his enemies could not know Neal was this close to making one himself. Because if Mikhail and Pei knew what he was making here in the cold and dark of the Antarctic, they would stop at nothing to prevent its completion.

  He was so close. After all this time it would come down to weeks, maybe days. He just needed a little more time.

  - - -

  An hour later, Neal was outbound again, his inspection complete, crossing back out of Mynd’s communications reach and the strictly enforced no man’s land around Deception Island’s desolate shores. Before leaving, Neal had also spoken briefly with William, who was now spending most of his time in the machine.

  They had made the man a suit, its bionic reinforcements allowing him to walk around. But since his introduction to cyberspace, he had lost interest in such things, or faith in them; one of the many scars of being betrayed by your own body.