Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  “Both Laneys confirm as much. The one that was on ice at the time she told me the compass pointed to it, and now that she’s fled the compound, she says this is the direction she was running from. Of course, the same force affecting the compass could have been affecting her mind chip, throwing off her sense of direction.”

  “I had one of our droids do a flyover. Nothing. We’re proceding on faith, instincts, and unreliable witness testimony,” Leon said. “It’s one of those situations where the best tech fails you. In short, business as usual.”

  Leon's men spent the next several hours making the vehicles they had left behind during their first encounter with a Goliath-Bot serviceable for the climb up the mountain. With Crumley gone, he’d had to make the call to his supply team himself. Having to absorb Crumley’s duties, he missed him all the more. Made Leon realize how much he took for granted. Crumley could anticipate his needs better than he could.

  The vehicles that didn't need refurbishing after being damaged in the robot wars, and just needed to be reclaimed from hiding, tunneled out of the jungle like giant wood boring insects. They took to the narrow dirt road snaking up the mountain.

  They’d nearly missed the path. The unit had fanned out around the base of the mountain to see if they stumbled over the compound out of sheer dumb luck. So far no luck with that project. But the path had materialized out of nowhere. “Forget the compass, huh? I say we take the road as a sign we’re on the right path, being as it’s the only path,” Natty said.

  Leon grunted. “Lots of reasons for the road. Illegal logging. Drug trafficking. Some temple some tribe uses for worship up there. Hell, a mud slide. Let’s not forget some aborted government project regarding forestry management or oil exploration. Still…” He stared at the compass.

  There was no looking over Leon’s shoulder, so Natty settled for looking over his arm. “The needle doesn’t exactly line up.”

  “Close enough, accounting for terrain and accessibility by road.”

  ***

  Inside Truman’s secret research compound, the juvenile Nomad came to as they were operating on him. Yelping so as to snap the anesthesiologist staring flabbergasted at the human hybrid coming to life out of his trance.

  Vargo barked, “More anesthesia, you fool!”

  But it was too late. The Nomad picked up the anesthesiologist in his tail and raised him high overhead. About to flick him against the wall, Truman interrupted him. “Don't,” Truman said, “or we'll cut it off. You'll live through this if you behave. We just want the secrets locked in your DNA. After that, you can go out and make all the little lizard people you want.”

  The Nomad calmed down, and lowered the anesthesiologist back to the ground.

  Vargo, the doctor in charge, cowering against the wall, returned to his vivisection. The creature, in the absence of anesthesia, screamed in agony. Bone saws and chisels tended to elicit such responses, especially when put to use in the service of marrow extraction. Laser scalpels, surgical hooks, lancets and curettes, hemostatic forceps, retractors… No torturer that ever lived had anything on a thoracic surgeon.

  Vargo was an artist with each of his tools.

  To say nothing of the truly medieval-looking devices like the dermatome typically used for procuring thin slices of skin for skin grafts. But this more distant cousin was procuring microscopic samples for analysis. It peeled back the Nomad with robotic precision, provoking the same responses as one might expect from peeling someone alive.

  Truman checked his watch. They needed to extract more DNA wisdom from the Nomads and the Umbrage before Leon and his people reached the compound. He didn’t put it past them to do so despite the impenetrable wall of troops he’d put between himself and them. He also didn’t put it past them to find a way to turn his best assets against him. Thus the rush to find out the latest insights into the Nomads and the Umbrage genetics that could lead to weapons that could actually kill them. The creatures did their best work modifying themselves under duress, hence the ghoulish vivisection as opposed to a less invasive approach.

  In the room adjacent to this one an Umbrage was getting the same treatment and the same rationale to keep him in check, and his cries were like the mating cry response to the Nomad’s shrieks.

  ***

  They were headed up the dirt road snaking up the mountain, when an explosion triggered a landslide blocking the path to Leon's troops.

  Leon stepped outside his truck to survey the situation. “I appreciate the first unambiguous sign we’re on the right track.” He gave the "Forward ho!" sign to his men, whistling and waving them on.

  The multi-axle rigs, sporting anywhere between six and twelve tires, were entering terrain where the wheels weren’t going to be enough. They unfolded their undercarriage hydraulic-powered extensions to crawl over the boulders like land crabs.

  A short while later, well past the landslide, the caravan had paused yet again, this time on their own recognizance. Leon sipped at his canteen, studying the rest of the road up the hill. “They'll keep slowing us down every chance they get.”

  “Speaking of…,” Natty said, “there’s one road up this mountain, so it’s the most obvious place to be mobbed by the Nomads and the Umbrage. So where the hell are they?”

  Leon sucked a bale full of air into his lungs; though on this particular point he didn’t exactly need the extra oxygen to power his suppositions. “My thoughts exactly. More than a little suspicious.”

  Natty only now realized that’s why he’d stopped the convoy. To apply his war-amplified senses to the task of ferreting out the next trap, determined to see, hear, smell, feel, even taste things in the air that would escape normal people’s detection.

  “You can thank me,” Cassandra said, walking back from running point at the front of the line to reconnoiter for them, and obviously overhearing their latest exchange. “When you were all getting stitched up, in between toying with your decloaking device, I had Natty whip up another little ditty for me, puts out a vibe of peace and love, goodness and kindness, better than a 1960s hippy-dippy love in.”

  “It’s the same device the military uses for psy-ops games, though usually set to make the enemy populace suicidally depressed when the beam hits them,” Natty explained.

  “The Nomads and Umbrage are so conditioned to fear and pain that they avoid the energy field,” Cassandra said.

  “You can bet once we reach the compound that little toy isn’t going to work anymore.” Leon took another sip from his canteen. “You can’t keep a place this off-grid without shielding it from just about any kind of EMF interference. And then the Nomads and Umbrage are going to be on us like vitamin A on GMO rice.”

  “You let me worry about that,” Cassandra said, walking back to the front of their convoy.

  “Gladly!” Leon shouted smart-assed after her. “Makes me almost miss the days when I had to whip my men up to the fever pitch needed to get up the smallest mountain,” he mumbled.

  Natty walked up to Leon and showed him his compass. It was spinning wildly.

  “We must be getting close,” Leon said, planting his fists on his hips and surveying the territory. This time, not for unclear but present dangers, but for the compound. His squinting eyes didn’t help.

  Natty regarded the steep slope of the mountain. “We keep driving up looking for cut-aways where you might logically site a compound. But what if it's sited where you wouldn't look for it?”

  Leon followed his eyes to the drop-off in the distance, up the road. “Someplace where you couldn't possibly stick one. An invisibility cloak would be of considerably greater application there.”

  Once back in the truck and headed up the mountain, he listened to the strange sounds the vehicles were making, like Acacia bugs, and noticed how the noises faded as they climbed the mountain, swallowed up by the cresting winds. It gave him an idea. “I don't suppose we can use ground penetrating radar to reach through the girth of this mountain? We could use the waves’ deflection to detect a
n invisible object of any mass. If it’s a big enough compound it’s going to have a foundation that penetrates well into the mountain.”

  “You're dreaming,” Natty said. “Not with veering off the road and with twice as many vehicles.”

  “So we're back to needing a hope and a prayer. Lucky for you, that's my department.”

  A short while later, running on instinct alone, Leon stopped the convoy. He and his men scoured the mountain at this elevation hoping to stumble over the cloaked compound.

  Leon sensed danger, and signaled the others. The men stopped dead in their tracks, and raised their weapons. With OMEGA FORCE somewhat decimated, the bulk of the troops belonged to ALPHA UNIT. But ALPHA UNIT or not, they could read and respond to his hand signals just fine.

  “What is it?” Natty whispered.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was using active noise cancellation technology in the area. Something just isn’t entirely right with the way sound carries up here.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? I can…”

  “Quiet. This is something else.”

  The Nomads dropped down from the kapok and rubber trees, encircling them, snarling. It was new, or at least formerly unobserved, behavior. The adults were too big for tree climbing. But evidently the juveniles had developed a strategy that befitted their smaller sizes.

  “No,” Leon hissed at Natty, “they wouldn't like trees, just because they're lizard men. They'd like caves.”

  “If I was right about everything it'd give you a complex.”

  They continued to flinch as the juvenile Nomads inched towards them. From the menace the young Nomads imparted, “juvenile” just didn’t seem an accurate reflection of the truth.

  Laney boldly stepped between Leon's men and the lizard people. The young Nomads, just as curiously, backed away.

  “What the hell's going on?” Leon said to Natty.

  Natty thought about it. “She healed one of them, remember? They’re psychically connected. What you do to one, you do to them all.”

  “Well, if you're right about this one, I promise not to take it personally.”

  “They think of Laney as their mother,” Cassandra explained.

  Natty, doing a double take at Cassandra, said, “How can they tell you apart? You aren’t wearing your comou skin.” Granted, Cassandra’s head was shaved and Laney’s was not, but he doubted that would mean much to an imprinting lizard.

  “My scent. I can’t mask it, not well enough to get past their noses. I should have anticipated this.” Her tone was pure acid.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Not every chick can pull off a shaved head.”

  Laney put her hands up to the temples of the twenty-four footer leaning its head down at her. She stared into its eyes and did this Mesmer act with it, their eyes fixed unblinking on one another, then yanked out the headset. The animal cried out but then put its head back in her hands for comforting.

  “I don’t believe this,” Cassandra muttered.

  “It’s like baptism. They’re being born again. I’m not much on these Christian rituals,” Natty mumbled.

  “Yeah, well, we can both get over ourselves,” Leon interjected, watching what was going on with equal fascination.

  A loud roar erupted from out of nowhere that coated the skin of OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT—now merged for the final showdown—with goosebumps, as if they were morphing into armadillos with armored hides to deal with what was out there.

  Then the creature’s mother came charging through the bush. “Holy shit!” Leon said. “That’s the mother? The thing must be a hundred foot tall. I thought these were the adults.”

  “They’re clearly just the juveniles, DiSparta,” Natty said. “Try and keep up.” He gulped as the hundred footer put its head down for Laney to undo its headgear just as all weapons were going hot on it, thinking for sure it was going to take off Laney’s head for her troubles.

  “These must be the ones still more responsive to her than to the pain,” Cassandra mumbled by way of explanation, though it wasn’t clear if she was just trying to get what was going on straight in her own head or if she was explaining it to the group.

  Laney repeated her Mesmer ritual with the mother, who, like her child, screamed upon being released from the headgear. Her roar was enough to send several ALPHA TEAM grunts to the ground between the blast of wind and the sonic blast.

  “How long is this mass going to go on?” Natty said, showing impatience, and checking his watch.

  “Let’s hope all morning,” Leon said. “We could use the extra recruits.”

  As it turned out, it just went on for another half hour or so. Not nearly enough Nomads and Umbrage baptized to field a team of proportionate size. But there was no point in changing their underdog status this late in the game, Natty thought. No one would know what to do with themselves.

  ***

  After Laney was finished with her baptisms and Leon had counted how many more good guys were on their side, he was feeling better about their predicament. Then Satellite showed him the RevoCorp satellite array images, shoving the display in his face. They were still outnumbered a hundred to one.

  “Can you spell hopeless?” Cassandra said to Leon, crowding beside him studying the big picture view of Satellite’s iPad.

  “I have worked out an amicable surrender,” Cronos interjected between the dirty looks they were giving one another. “One that allows us to keep our dignity. Basically, we take our heads off before they have a chance to.”

  Leon snorted. He had a real dilemma before him, and absolutely no time in which to deliberate it. If they pulled out now, he might save what was left of OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT. They weren’t exactly replaceable. You recruited from the best of the best. And then you trained them to the next level. The kind of people who could do what they did anywhere in the world, at best, could be counted in quadruple digits. Most of them were already spoken for. So, live to fight another day, or cash in all that equity now?

  He met their eyes with the weary look of an aging lion, who knew that the closer he got to the end, the harder he’d have to fight for his right to lead them.

  Finally the revelation just came, powered by a will all its own. “In the immortal words of my favorite singer, people, ‘Freedom is nothing left to lose’.”

  The ripple of understanding percolated through the ranks, carried by head nods and grunts, transmitted as readily through the hodgepodge assortment of psychic Umbrage and Nomads as through the humans in Leon’s employ, who, granted, had the advantage of listening in by way of his COM.

  As always, Leon led the way.

  Cassandra, refusing to march another foot into the face of oblivion until she was good and finished stewing, had unwittingly given Laney a chance to powwow with her sister, who stepped up to her now. She’d missed Cassandra’s “it’s hopeless” pronouncement of earlier, still distracted by her new entourage and their little love-in.

  “You think, with your help, there’s any chance at all we might survive this?”

  “No.” There had been no hesitation in giving her response, the finality of the tone as certain as the one inscribed into the tablets with the ten commandments.

  Laney snorted. “You could have sugar-coated it this once.”

  “The sugar coating’ll likely be you on the tongue of one of those Nomads you couldn’t turn,” she said, finally advancing towards the cliff.

  “No one can live without a certain amount of denial!” Laney shouted after her. When she got no response, she mumbled, “It’s just not possible.”

  ***

  The young Nomads turned and clawed their way to the drop off.

  Leon, curious as to why they picked now to break off from the pack, walked up to the cliff's edge, saw nothing but a sheer drop. “It's a dead end.” He signaled his men to head the other way, then he regarded the juvenile Nomads beside him refusing to budge. “What, are you guys short sighted?”

  The young N
omad next to him picked him up in one hand, and dangled him over the cliff. Leon's men raised their guns at the creature.

  Then, the Nomad threw Leon off the mountain.

  Leon’s screaming carried as the rest of the team watched him drop into the bottomless abyss. Only... not too far down he landed on something. He’d fallen far enough fast enough in any case for the smart-Kevlar to kick in, growing over him to cushion his landing, the rapid foaming reaction deploying like an airbag. The effects of the fall neutralized, Leon stood. Whatever chemical reaction was driving the aerogel response in his vest reversed itself, causing the vest to deflate, and he looked back to normal.

  An energy field of some kind? Leon was trying to make sense of it. Finally, he exclaimed, “The compound!”

  He looked up at the Nomads and his own crew gazing down at him. “So you don't rely entirely on visible light to see,” he said, referring to the juvenile Nomads. “That could come in useful.”

  Cassandra took a look down at Leon and smiled.

  ***

  Natty ran up to the robot Sherpa dragging his long line of suitcases up the mountain. The baggage carts had been strung together, train-like, and snaked their way down the mountain for as far as the eye could see. “You sure you brought all the suitcases?” Natty said, tearing into the one with the tag he’d just inspected and getting no satisfaction.

  “I’d love to say, ‘You’re the only one with the screw loose,’ but as it turns out,” he shook his leg so Natty could hear the loose screws, “popped a few dragging all this shit up here.”

  Natty sighed and ran to the next suitcase to expect the tag. One reading of the label and he kept moving down the line. “I’m sure the women’s movement appreciates you divorcing them from this cliché,” the robot said, “but maybe it’s time you considered Over-Packers Anonymous.” Natty couldn’t help thinking how much the robot looked like Tobor, the Eighth Man, from the cartoon he used to watch as a kid. Tobor and Johnny Quest reruns on the Boomerang channel had pretty much gotten him through his childhood. All the same, he couldn’t afford to be distracted; he was on a mission.