Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  “It’s nanomesh,” Jack explained. “Untearable.”

  Celeste scooped up fistfuls of mud and splattered it over their legs. She touched her fingertips to Jack’s belly tattoo. Anger rose briefly to her eyes, and she was about to give an acidic editorial on how shameless arkies were to steal the heraldry of Outland clans, like nineteenth-century American frontier soldiers pillaging woven beads and feathered headdresses and deerskin tunics without a care to the cultural significance they represented. But the temptation passed, her blood cooled, and she resumed her work.

  Finally, she stood back to admire her handiwork. They were a dirtied, grim-looking crew. She wondered how they would fare against her original squad, tech-toys aside, in a pit fight. Jamala might be able to take Keiko. She had seen Gethin fight and he was resourceful but inexperienced; without blurmods, he wouldn’t last long. Jack was a different story. She’d seen Outlanders of his stature. A good, hulking genotype, instinctively inspiring respect.

  The thought flashed crazily in her head and it spoke in Jeff’s tone: Here’s your new squad, Celeste!

  Her eyes flicked to the rifles they carried. Each was pointed at someone in the group. A cold-blooded diagram of mistrust: the Prometheans were wary of Gethin. Gethin was edgy towards his ex-wife. And all were unsettled by Celeste.

  Some fucking squad, she thought.

  Sourly, she asked, “What happened in that office, Gethin? We both know that wasn’t your colonel, but I know something else: he was the same guy who nearly killed me in the Hudson Wastes.”

  Gethin looked shaken. “That’s not possible.”

  “Listen to me,” she began, and told the others about Tanner’s choice of words. About his eyes.

  Jack shrugged. “Coincidence. We’re thousands of miles away.”

  “It’s the same man.” She hesitated, caught Gethin’s wondering eyes, and said, “Or not a man, remember? Something that can shapeshift. Become whatever it wants.”

  “The man who exploded in the Hudson is dead,” Jack insisted. “Pardon me, Celeste, but he’s fried now. We all saw the video.”

  “It was him,” she maintained. “I feel it.”

  Keiko laughed bitterly. “Are psychic powers cropping up in the Wastes?”

  “Is basic attention to detail disappearing among arkies?” She looked at Gethin. “Tell them what your colleague found.”

  He did. He related Disch’s analysis. The phasing of matter. The insistence that Segarra’s assailant had been inhuman.

  Keiko gave a skeptical grunt. “Not human? What the hell does that mean? What do you think he was?”

  Gethin cleared his throat, the rain collecting around his face. “An anomaly.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “They Made Me.”

  The moon is made of green cheese.

  The moon is made of green cheese.

  Why green? Hanmura2 wondered as he let his people wipe his perspiring brow while the grafter isolated nerve strands and closed down their avenues of pain. The clinic in his corporate suite on Luna was drafty with filtered air, gloomy, reminiscent of old noir flatfilms about gangster hideouts. The walls were painted crimson. Circular lights riddled the ceiling like bullet holes and the windows were digital renders of a faux Kyoto landscape with a daimyo fortress rising above groves of chinaberry trees.

  But all Hanmura2 could think about was that silly myth, over and over:

  The moon is made of green cheese.

  His right arm was completely encased by the grafter. The machine hummed, fit snugly around his mutilated limb to weave newly printed muscle fiber to bone. There was no sensation; they’d reactivate his nerve endings soon enough. But the memory of agony made him delirious. His nostrils felt caulked with the stink of charred flesh.

  Hanmura2’s attendants ringed him like glum, stricken slaves. They were sworn to obedience to protect him, to die for him, and yet this grievous thing had happened on their watch. Someone would pay. The group was almost gibbering with panic. After all, they had all signed Hanmura corporate release forms, and therefore getting fired meant a memory wipe. That meant years for some people. Decades. An entire life swallowed by a whiteout nova.

  Thus far, he hadn’t fired anyone. Bodyguard Hideo begged to be allowed to die, but Hanmura2 refused.

  How can I blame him? he asked himself. It was my idea to go to Club Nadsat. To tail those women to the room.

  Hanmura2 sipped water. Choked on it. Swallowed.

  “Show me the clip,” he said at last.

  Hideo ruefully fired up the holodisplay. Club Nadsat appeared. People were screaming and running for exits. The music and colored lights were gone. Bodies were strewn on stairs and draped over railings.

  In the center of the main dance floor was a freakishly tall version of the man named Apophis. He hung magically over the room, drifting around as if wheeled by invisible wires, and was booming, “They made me! They made me! It won’t stop in my head! They won’t let me stop! I kill for them! I kill for them!”

  He was wearing pale brown vestments with the PI logo on one sleeve. His right arm was encased in a grotesque biomechanical sheath, stone blue in color. Veinlike rigging and tendons fused into mechanical joints and servos.

  Hanmura2 leaned interestedly at this.

  Using this freakish cybernetic arm, Apophis was flailing madly at the shrieking club patrons. Wherever he pointed, people burst into flame. One couple was cowering behind a table; Apophis hovered above them, howling, and aimed his prosthesis in their direction. The couple erupted in fire; the girl ran like a living torch across the room, thrashing and shrieking. The boy dashed in the opposite direction. Like two moths streaking apart from each other after a brush with a campfire.

  And Apophis kept howling. “They made me! They made me!”

  Stars! Hanmura2 thought. He found himself enthralled with the expression of gut-wrenching desperation and agony on Apophis’s face. It looked so genuine; some out-of-control Frankensteinian thing consigned to murderous impulses. A man strugglingly helplessly against a programmed violence instilled by his creators.

  But it was all an incredible deception. Even that augmented arm casing. Hanmura2 knew from his own experience that Apophis needed no enhancements to wield his phenomenal power. The Promethean garb, the cybernetic arm…

  It was just cinema.

  But why?

  And what the hell was he?

  The footage ended. Hanmura2’s attendants let out a collective gasp. Slowly, all eyes went to their corporate master…this man who had survived an encounter with the devil.

  “Hideo? Send my message to IPC command.”

  His bodyguard scurried off. Hanmura2 narrowed his eyes at the others.

  “You are each sworn to utter secrecy. This creature is an abomination of Prometheus Industries. Let the IPC handle it. We stand to profit. Each of you will be rewarded for your silence.”

  They all knew what that meant. The rewards he could bestow were far greater than anything they might get from leaking this info to datahounds.

  But they were clearly troubled. If Prometheus could create a devil-thing like this, how soon before other companies followed? It reeked of superstitions, witchcraft, devilry, Dark Age horror.

  Hanmura2 settled back into his chair. The medprogram tirelessly worked its spinnerets.

  Apophis won’t trouble me again, he thought. He wants to use me as a pawn in his unknowable game? Fine. Nonetheless, he felt a measure of comfort knowing that his security forces were on high alert. His Lunar compound was sealed tight.

  He closed his eyes.

  He tried to see the end of this game.

  Apophis was surely not a PI creation. He was a father of lies, shuffling appearances and treachery like Mahjong tiles. And besides, if revenge was really his intent, why not attack Prometheus direct?

  Because he want
ed the IPC involved.

  He wanted war.

  Hanmura2 shuddered. All I need to do is position myself and company to benefit from that war. Grease the right palms, make the right deals. Prometheus Industries is going down. Hanmura Enterprises will be ascendant.

  Unless…

  What if Apophis was playing the same game with Gates and Bielawa? Maybe he had tracked them down too. Appeared like a giant scorpion and offered them the same strange deal. Rule within the new power structure of humanity. Be a satrap of the empire that is to come.

  What new empire?

  Hanmura2 felt his breathing constrict. He could still hear that wretched howling in his skull. The attack on Club Nadsat was the story on the newsfeeds. Apophis wanted that. He was mugging for the camera. Playing his part to the hilt. Showing the corporate logo on his sleeve. It was as if Apophis was truly a devil in disguise, a hengeyokai trickster, and Hanmura2 struggled to remember if such tricksters had weaknesses according to bygone legends. Bow to a kappa, that sort of thing.

  Hanmura2 heard a sudden rattling. He realized his arms were shaking; his arm in the grafter unit trembled against the sheath.

  Please! he asked the gods of his ancestors. Please let this creature have a weakness. Or at least an enemy who is stronger than him.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Anomalies

  The rain had taken on a steady, icicle-thin quality. They marched through the drizzle, Gethin talking as Celeste supported his right side, seeking refuge from the wet and cold. The crash site lay several miles behind them to the west. When they stumbled on a large drainpipe jutting from a mountainside, Keiko insisted they hole up for a few hours to regain their strength. She shone a flashlight inside to make certain it was unoccupied; the pipe ran on for twenty meters before it was pinched by collapse.

  Keiko erected a hasty blockade at the drainage pipe’s entrance with an armful of twigs and branches, corking them inside. Water ran beneath them from an unremembered sewer system within the hillside.

  Gethin lay with his splinted leg flat. “The IPC has recognized the need to research outside established parameters. To investigate mysteries from an asymmetrical angle.”

  Keiko reduced her flashlight’s beam to a dull glow. Her ex-husband’s features gathered shadows – for an instant, she was reminded of their life together in a fourth-tier Athenian wing, wedged among the arcology’s HVAC systems. Eating hasty lunches together before donning the VR rigs and vanishing into Arcadium fictions…like drug addicts, scarfing down just enough sustenance to keep alive through the next binge. The drainage pipe reminded her of that damp, cramped life together, and her flashlight’s glow could be the HUD display of a loading screen.

  “What mysteries?” she asked, shooing the unwanted memories away. “What kinds of mysteries are really left in the world, Gethin?”

  He related what he’d shared with Celeste. AIs. Glops. Ashoka.

  Celeste said unhappily, “The thing that attacked me was no Ashoka.”

  But Gethin looked unfazed. “You can’t justify that declaration, Segarra. Maybe they can make surreptitious planetside visits, walking among us now. Or maybe we’re in an actual first-contact extraterrestrial situation.” He saw the others roll their eyes. “Hear me out. And forget all the holos you’ve seen, with their conceit that extraterrestrial organisms would descend to Earth in dazzling saucer-shaped UFOs. A real extraterrestrial might be a seven-thousand-foot-long pyramid that pushes itself along a sluglike mucous foot.”

  Keiko gave an impatient sigh, but Jack, stretching out his legs in the tunnel, was warming to the discussion. “Okay…”

  “Or an aerostat jellyfish that can turn invisible at will,” Gethin added. Both Prometheans looked at him, stricken by his reference to the Base 59 footage.

  Celeste thought about the way the High Priest had managed to hold himself together despite the weaponfire pulping him. She remembered those search-beam eyes.

  “Ashoka or aliens,” Jack muttered.

  “Or artificial intelligence,” continued Gethin. “Personally, I’m discounting it because Tanner – I mean Tanner’s doppelganger – used it as his preferred scapegoat, one that played right into Keiko’s favored boogeyman. I submit it only to underscore how quickly threats to human dominance can arise in our brave new era. It took more than a hundred and thirty thousand generations for humanity to evolve from tree dwellers to emailers. How many generations of machine intelligence has Avalon undergone?”

  Jack said, “Everyone predicted conflict with the machines. They were wrong. They keep away from us.”

  “Biding their time,” Keiko quipped.

  For a moment a babbling argument erupted, Keiko and Jack sparring in what was clearly the latest round of an enduring match. Then Gethin laughed coldly, and they stopped, words hanging from their lips, to gape at him.

  He looked genuinely amused, his laughter pure and real. “What is it about our species that we insist on perceiving everything in goddamn binary code? Black or white. On switch, off switch. Humans versus machines.”

  Keiko drew herself into a seiza squat, better suited to the drainpipe’s constraints. “Are you saying there isn’t a potential conflict between us?”

  He smiled wryly. “Between you and me, Keiko?” When she blushed at this, he changed subject. “Again, even in this discussion we’re falling into binary. Aliens or AIs? There are other possibilities. We have yet to conduct a comprehensive investigation into transgenic ecologies on Earth. Before the Fall, we know that genetic tinkering had become available to numerous civilian, academic, and extremist groups. Think of those mollusks we ran into earlier. Almost nothing is known about them, and yet they clearly demonstrated inquisitiveness and intelligence.”

  “Glops can’t outcompete us,” Keiko snapped.

  “No? One hundred thousand years ago evolution produced several distinct groups of would-be champions. Most were megafauna. The cave lions, sabertooths, bears, a species of wingless terror bird in the open prairie. A few were a varied handful of hominid species. At a glance, you’d be hard-pressed to pick a winner from that motley ensemble, and you sure as hell wouldn’t bet on the hominids. They were small, vulnerable, lacking claws, armor, or poison sacs. They were unimpressive. Yet those primate runts would soon drive out all competition. This is an important point, and it should rein in our impulse to dismiss glops as irrelevant curiosities.”

  “You think humans could be crowded out by competition?” Keiko sneered. “With our weapons and technology? Not a chance.”

  “Yet you pathologically worry about AIs.”

  “Because AIs are different than glops!”

  He smiled broadly. “How do you know? How can you be certain that a transgenic species in the Wastes doesn’t possess the biological equivalent of quantum computers in their heads? There are strange breeds out here, propagating. While we were blowing ourselves up, maybe some superslug built a rocket ship and colonized Pluto. Maybe that explains the IPC ban.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Is it? Why? In a way it’s ironic. There were several sentient species around when humanity first started. We killed them off. Now, our sorcery has engineered new intelligences. Who knows what they’re capable of? That’s why investigators like me check every credible report we get.”

  “Like termites in Ecuador?” Celeste chimed in.

  Thunder sounded outside their barrier. The small stream trickling under them swelled, and Keiko checked to make sure the water could escape through the blockade she’d fashioned.

  “Don’t want to drown in our hideout,” she muttered, managing an awkward expression that might have been a smile.

  Celeste sighed. “All this speculation gets us nowhere. What was impersonating Tanner? What are we dealing with?”

  All eyes were on Gethin. He looked from one person to the next.

  “How the hell am I su
pposed to know?”

  Keiko groaned.

  But Jack looked thoughtful. “Let’s table the discussion. Get two hours’ rest and we’ll resume our march.”

  A hideous chorus of lupine howls pierced the rain. The glop world’s trumpets of war.

  Yes, Gethin thought with a chill. Pleasant dreams.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Haventown

  The steady deluge created a mesmerizing sonic pattern on the pipe. It sounded like the march of armies, and Gethin hugged himself sleepily. When he came to, Celeste was peering in at him from outside the drainage pipe. Night was in full bloom, blacker than pitch. In the backsplash of flashlight lowbeams, he regarded Celeste’s rain-plastered hair, her eyes bright beneath the tangle.

  She looked beautiful. The Prometheans waited behind her, armed and ready to break camp.

  “How long did I sleep?” he asked.

  “A few hours.” She helped him out of the pipe. He climbed into the rain, and carefully shifted his weight to his good foot.

  Without a word, Celeste pressed a syringe of some kind to his broken foot. He felt nothing; nerve suppression made his foot feel like wood.

  “Nanite infusion?” he asked, astonished. “Where did you get that?”

  “From the wreck. You geniuses didn’t bother salvaging anything other than rifles and some food. By the time I got there you were already gone, so I nabbed some packaged arky meals and two medkits. This shit is priceless out here.”

  Gethin regarded his broken foot. “Thank you.”

  She gave a cold smile. He had the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. Like a serpent. She remembered thinking that arkies were no longer human, and Gethin’s saurian gaze underscored that impression. “We’re even. You saved my life with that S-jack in Babylon.”

  “That was my pleasure to—”

  “Shut up and move your ass.”

  Within minutes they were marching again, following a line of fire hydrants and concrete foundations overgrown with furry moss. Jack aided Gethin as his foot slowly healed under the nanite infusion, while Celeste trekked far ahead, tirelessly scouting.