Afon bent his knees and surged into the air, soaring over the top of the forest canopy. Fyodor heard a quick burst of multiple rifle fire, blam-blam-blam, and then silence. Another quick burst, this one from a single gun, and then nothing.
In the dark of the forest, Fyodor tried to calm himself. If the shooting’s stopped, that means they’re fine, Afon and Nanook must have killed the soldiers. Or … the soldiers have stopped shooting, because there’s nothing left for them to shoot at, and Afon and Nanook are dead, or captured.
His world was now black and white – two possibilities existed, and silence filled the void of knowledge between the two. He was a good soldier, he knew that there was a reason that orders were given, and not meant to be questioned; right or wrong, commands in the field had to be followed. One unsynchronized step, even one toe in a place it’s not supposed to be, could be fatal – not just to the man who stepped out of line, but to all of his fellow soldiers who would have to rescue him.
But … still …
Fyodor found he had a ready excuse for every part of his military training that instructed him to stay put. If he could just stand up for a minute, he would be able to get some sense of things, be able to know whether it was the bad guys, or the good guys, who had won a few minutes ago. He might even be able to scan back over the grounds with his binoculars, and figure out if Mortterra was dead or alive. He wouldn’t move, Fyodor would follow orders, but he really had to get a good look at the situation, if he wanted to have half a chance of defending himself.
Decision made, Fyodor lifted himself from the forest floor. He took his hat off, trying to reduce the amount of metal on his uniform; it could catch a beam from a searchlight, and reflect back, letting any AmEur Alliance soldiers see him that were looking his way.
Fyodor raised the binoculars to his eyes and quickly scanned the area that Mortterra had been in, when he and Afon had taken their shots at him.
A puddle of blood was sinking into the dead grass, where Mortterra had been sitting when he was shot. A group of AmEur Alliance soldiers were gathered around the spot, talking to each other. One soldier gestured at the place where Afon had shot from, the other shook his head, and pointed to where Fyodor was.
They can’t see me; they’re just trying to figure out where the shots came from. They don’t look sad though, or even alarmed. I wonder …
“Freeze!”
The command came from behind him, to his left. Fyodor didn’t move, but kept looking through the binoculars, trying to gauge the distance from where he was standing, to the large boulder at the edge of the tree line. If he could make it there in one jump, he’d have cover, and be able to yell out for Afon and Nanook, if they were still unharmed.
“Freeze,” the voice said again. “Now, turn around slowly, with your hands in the air.”
It’s way too long, Fyodor thought.
“Soldier,” Fyodor said, with as much authority as he could muster, “Don’t shoot your officer. I’ll turn around, slowly, so you can see my uniform.”
Fyodor turned, hands in the air, and still clutching the binoculars.
A soldier of the AmEur Alliance was standing a few feet away, holding a pistol aimed at Fyodor’s midsection.
Fyodor started to lower his hands and said, “See, it’s all just a misunderstanding. These things happen all the time, when we go into lockdown.”
“I said freeze … Captain,” the soldier said, with a sneering emphasis on the last word. “I’m here directly on the orders of President Ignis Mortterra. I am to take you into custody, Captain Nizienko.”
“Here on Mortterra’s orders? I doubt that, Private,” Fyodor said. “The President was just shot.”
The soldier held his gun trained on Fyodor and said, “Yes, someone did just try to assassinate the President, but he is fine, and we’ve been ordered to bring all suspects to the President’s office for questioning.”
“All suspects doesn’t include your fellow soldiers, and it certainly doesn’t mean your superior officer,” Fyodor said. “Now, stand down Private.”
Speaking very slowly, as if advancing on a wild and scared animal, the soldier said, “No, Captain Nizienko, with all due respect, you will come with me. You’re not just a suspect; we have a witness who saw you take the shot. Now, slowly lower your hands and hold them out in front of you, wrist to wrist, so I can get these cuffs on.”
“There really is some mistake,” Fyodor said, stalling for time. He looked back over his shoulder, gauging the distance to the boulder again. “If you would just give me a moment to explain myself, I’m sure that this can all be worked out.”
Fyodor took a step back, away from the soldier, then another step, keeping eye contact the whole time, so as not to give away his intention.
“Freeze Nizienko,” the soldier said, noticing his movement.
Fyodor turned and leaped toward the boulder, crashing onto the ground just inches from his intended target when the bullet from the AmEur Alliance soldier hit him in the side.
TWENTY NINE
“Careful now, don’t overdo it boy,” Ignis Mortterra said.
He was holding a cup of water to Fyodor’s lips, who was tied down to a chair in Mortterra’s office. Ankles, thighs, wrists, and shoulders were bound with thick rubber straps to a wooden high-backed chair.
Fyodor craned his neck forward, asking for more water with his body in a way that his mind would never consent to verbalize. He strained against the straps that held him in place, when Mortterra withdrew the cup from his reach.
“You’ll get what you want,” Mortterra said, “when I get what I want. Now, whom were you working with? Who were your accomplices?”
Fyodor stared straight ahead and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about sir. I heard the alarm sound, knew that we were on lockdown, and I was guarding the perimeter when a junior office assaulted me – apparently with a tranquilizer gun, given how groggy I feel. That’s all I know, Mr. President.”
“Is it really? That’s all you’ve been doing today,” Ignis Mortterra said, “just rushing to my aid, and trying to patriotically defend the AmEur Alliance?”
“I told you what I was doing sir,” Fyodor said. “This is all just a mistake. Your soldier out there claimed that there was a witness to the shooting, but I swear, whoever they are, they saw wrong.”
“Did they now? Ah, young Fyodor, you may share in your sister’s illustrious lineage, but you clearly do not share in her powers … nor do you share in mine,” Mortterra said, and laughed. “The witness that you claimed saw things wrong, is me. I saw you still holding the rifle, after you shot at me, and I saw you looking through a pair of binoculars to see how good your shot was, to see if you had hit your mark, to see if you had killed me. But here I am boy, good as new.”
Mortterra reached over and slapped Fyodor across the face, once, and then again, much harder. Fyodor held still, stoic, through the first slap, but the second one broke his nose and his blood splattered onto the row of computers next to him.
The blood ran down Fyodor’s face and onto his uniform. There was no way for him to stop it by tilting his head (the back of the chair was in his way), or holding a cloth to his nose (his hands were tied to the arms of the chair), he just had to wait for it to clot.
“How did you see the shooter, if you were down on the ground bleeding?” Fyodor said, giving up the pretense of innocence. “I saw you wounded so, come to think of it, how are you even here now?”
“I saw you shoot me, and I’m perfectly fine now, for the same reason that I can do this,” Mortterra said, and picked up the chair that Fyodor was strapped to and held it up in the air with one hand.
“You can thank your sister for this,” Mortterra said, and grinned at the horrified look on Fyodor’s face, high in the air above him.
“And you can thank her for this, too,” Mortterra said, and threw Fyodor and the chair twenty feet across the room, and into the wall on the other side.
Fyodor’s scre
am echoed through the whole east wing of Thule Airbase, but the soldiers of the AmEur Alliance were used to such sounds, and they knew not to respond. After the failed execution of the Immortals, and their escape, Mortterra had begun interrogating prisoners himself. The sounds that the soldiers had heard, and ignored, in the past were even worse than Fyodor’s agony.
Fyodor and his chair crashed into the wall sideways, splintering the wood, and driving hundreds of shards into his skin. His left arm and leg broke on impact and Fyodor, mercifully, lost consciousness before three of his ribs shattered when he, and the remnants of the chair, hit the floor.
Mortterra flew across the room and landed at Fyodor’s side, hoping to question him.
“Damn it,” Mortterra said, when he realized that Fyodor was unconscious. He pressed a button on the wall and spoke into a microphone. The old intercom from when Thule was a United States Air Force base still worked, so the AmEur Alliance had made use of what was there. “I need a medical team to my office, a.s.a.p. Make sure they bring a stretcher.”
“Yes Mr. Presi …”
Mortterra reached over and pressed end on the call button. The person who’d received his order would hear Mortterra hanging up, when they were halfway through his honorific title. Mortterra thought that interrupting someone’s well-practiced ass kissing routine kept them on their toes, and he needed everyone on their toes now. Fyodor had an accomplice, and until Mortterra was able to find the traitor, he wouldn’t feel safe. There are ways to kill someone who is immortal, not easy ways, but there are ways.
A knock sounded at the door, and Mortterra let the medical team in.
“This is a dangerous prisoner,” Mortterra said. “Guard him with your life, and let me know when he regains consciousness. There are some questions I’d like the answer to that only he can provide, until we find his cohort, the other shooter. Remember, he is the brother of our former scientist-turned-traitor, Dr. Isidora Nizienko – be careful with him.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” one of the members of the medical team replied. “We’ll heal him up for you, and once he’s conscious, and these fractures are set, we’ll notify you so that you can question him.”
“Why would you set his fractures? The more pain he is in, the better. This man took a shot at me, I don’t care how much fucking pain he’s in. He should die for what he did.”
“Yes Mr. President,” the AmEur Alliance doctor said. “Of course. It’s just that when you said to be careful with him, I must have misinterpreted you sir. I apologize, Mr. President.”
“I do want you to be careful of him, not with him. He is a dangerous man, a Captain of the AmEur Alliance turned traitor, just like his sister. Be careful of him, his whole bloodline is full of dangerous traitors,” Mortterra said. “Keep him in restraints and under guard, until he is awake, then contact me. Speaking of bloodlines reminds me, Doctor, did you bring a bag with you?”
“Yes Mr. President,” the doctor said, ushered his team into the hallway with the stretcher bearing Fyodor’s unconscious form, and signaled them to stay and wait for him. They put Fyodor’s stretcher on the ground in the hallway, and his broken arm fell off of it limply, and at a grotesque angle. The doctor bit his lip and winced instinctively at the pain that he knew his patient … no … his prisoner would feel if he were awake. The doctor shut the door to Ignis Mortterra’s office, and took a bag of O+ blood from his doctor’s kit bag.
Mortterra greedily snatched the blood from the doctor’s hands, ripped the bag open, and drained the contents into his mouth, swallowing it all in one gulp.
“Thank you Doctor,” Ignis Mortterra said, and wiped the blood from his lips. He leaned back against the door, smiled, and sighed. “Ah, I needed that. The sad necessity of getting physical with some of our prisoners can be quite,” Mortterra paused for effect, “draining,” he finished with a giggle.
“Any time, Mr. President,” the doctor said, and looked toward the door that Mortterra was leaning against. The man in the hallway would die if the doctor couldn’t treat him soon. He wouldn’t set the fractures, that would be too obvious an affront to Mortterra’s instructions, but he did need to stop the tortured mans bleeding, or he wouldn’t live long enough for Mortterra to torture some more.
“You know Doctor, on second thought,” Mortterra said, having watched the doctor’s facial expressions, and perfectly interpreted them, “why don’t you leave the traitor here. Put an oxygen mask on him, or whatever you need to do, so he doesn’t die immediately, but leave him here. I only need him alive for a little while, once he wakes up. After I’ve finished questioning him, he will be of no use to me. Let him die the bloody death a traitor deserves … don’t you agree, Doctor?”
“Whatever you think is best, Mr. President,” the doctor said, his will to fight having been broken long ago. He avoided eye contact with Mortterra and walked to the door, shoulders hunched.
Mortterra held the door to his office open, and the doctor gestured to the medical team to bring Fyodor back into the room.
Fyodor groaned slightly, just on the edge of consciousness, when his stretcher was set down. The doctor bent over him, applying pressure pads where he could, to staunch the bleeding. He pulled an oxygen mask over Fyodor’s nose and mouth, and stood up.
“There’s no telling if he’ll regain consciousness, before he expires, Mr. President,” the doctor said. “He has a few hours, at best.”
“Understood, Doctor. Thank you for your assistance today,” Ignis Mortterra said, still holding the door to his office open, waiting for the doctor to leave. “The AmEur Alliance is grateful for your service,” Mortterra smiled coldly at the doctor, and he all but ran from the room.
Fyodor groaned again, and Mortterra shut the door to his office and locked it. He walked over to a table holding a number of locked containers filled with glass vials. Each one was labeled in Dr. Isidora Nizienko’s precise writing: Immortality 1, Immortality 2, etc. Isi had tried a number of different routes in her experimentation to reach the goal of a rapidly healing, self-sustaining human. The nanobot injections were her most successful experiment, and the one put through mass testing in the Immortality Project clinical trials, but earlier experiments had shown promise as well. Nothing had worked consistently though, until the nanobots.
Mortterra remembered one of Isi’s earliest experiments in immortality, before she had started her experiments with nanobots, and smiled. Isi had been looking at the bodily structure of the worlds great predators, for inspiration. She’d collected DNA samples from killer whales, lions, tigers, and wolves, looking for a marker that they all shared, something in common, some trait that glued together apex predators around the world, some gene that she could build an immortal version of homo sapiens around. In her experiments with the DNA of wolves, Isi had injected a virus, with the DNA of a grey wolf, into a mouse. It was one of the funniest things Mortterra had ever seen. The mouse did change into a wolf, briefly, but the genetic alteration was unstable, so it kept switching back and forth between the two states.
Mortterra distinctly remembered walking into Isi’s laboratory unannounced, during the days of the mouse-wolf. She was sitting in a chair in front of one of her worktables, eating her lunch, and feeding pieces of it the wolf-mouse sitting in her lap. When Mortterra had walked toward Isi, who had her back to him, the mouse had sensed a threat, jumped off of Isi’s lap, and transformed into a large grey wolf. The mouse-wolf had bared its fangs at Mortterra and lunged. Mortterra had pulled his gun from his holster and shot the cursed thing, emptying his clip into it. Isi had jumped from her chair and held the wolf’s head in her lap, as it was bleeding. She’d been screaming something at Mortterra, but he couldn’t remember what. He just remembered thinking that her experiment had failed again, since the wolf was clearly dying, and not immortal. The wolf had closed her eyes, breathed deeply, shuddered once, with her head still in Isi’s lap, and disappeared. Vanished – until Mortterra heard the skittering of tiny paws on the cold linoleum floor behi
nd where Isi was seated. The damn thing had turned itself back into a mouse. Mortterra had lunged forward and crushed the mouse under his boot, ignoring Isi’s screams.
That had been one of his most fun moments in years, the sound of those little bones that loved and relied on Isi, crushing under the weight of his boot. And Mortterra would give anything to see that look on her face again – that broken look, shedding tears over a fucking mouse.
“Oh, wouldn’t that be fun, Mortterra thought, and picked up the vial marked Immortality 9, twirling it between his fingers.
Ignis Mortterra grabbed a syringe from the worktable, and loaded it with the virus that contained wolf DNA. He walked over to Fyodor, still lying prone and unconscious on the stretcher, and whispered, “You can thank your sister for this too,” before he injected him with the virus.
END OF BOOK ONE.
*The nanobots in this book are fueled by blood, but a human author (and her dog) needs to eat actual food. I work in the restaurant business, which, while good for developing characters in these stories, barely pays a living wage. So, if you liked Immortal Earth, please take a moment to leave a review on Amazon. You’ll be helping other readers to find a book they might like, and helping a stereotypically poor, struggling indie author gal. It costs nothing, but would mean the world to me. And hey, I’m a new author, so leave a bad review too. Tell me what you would change. Tell me what you want to see in the rest of the series. Tell me what you don’t want to see. Talk to me, I’m listening.
~ Sarah
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