SIXTY-THREE
Mudra was growing into her cowboy mystique the longer she stayed in the saddle of her Nomad. With a few notable exceptions, of course. Any of which were apparent from her latest dalliance with the “moles.” The rocket launching vehicles that had a knack for firing their rockets then burrowing into the earth to their underground supply lines made the mistake of getting too near her this time, in their eagerness to take her out of play. Working the Nomad like a prize bronco with her reins she got the creature to flick its tail hard enough to send one of the “moles” into a boulder. The vehicle impacted so hard it could no longer open its shielding to fire, and so limped away.
As to the one that got off a couple rockets… She turned her Nomad’s head at the end of her reins, powered by a hydraulic pulley mechanism that was exquisitely tuned to her reflexes, making her and the beast feel as one. The Nomad’s head batted the rocket at the side, changing its trajectory and sending it back at one of the “moles” thus taking another one of them out.
The other three “moles” were retreating into the ground, realizing this was a bad idea to encircle her in such an open area. She took advantage of their asses to the sky to target their one vulnerable point. Their rear ends. The rest of them sufficiently shielded against their own weapons. She fired the laser gun mounted on her shoulder with an impulse from her head gear. It was yet another departure from cowboy lore she’d allowed herself. Typically the pistol would be worn on her hip, and it would be firing lead not lasers. Alas, a purist she was not. The shoulder-mounted laser gun took out another of the “moles” before it could finish burying itself.
When the pivoting mechanism on the lasergun jammed, she tagged the next enemy asset by tossing the boomerang dangling on the side of her saddle into her own laser beam, diverting the light ray with the mirrored surface of the Frisbee at the next “mole” determined to bury itself. “Another one down,” she thought, as she caught the returning boomerang.
They were coming at her out of the woods now, the engineers turned soldiers, in their deep sea diving suits. They’d managed to put a hurting on her Nomad by squeezing the hydraulic powered pincers at the end of their arms together.
Thrown from her bucking mount, Mudra landed on her feet, her whip in hand. It had previously been dangling from the other side of her saddle.
She sliced through the engineers’ diving suits with a single flick of her nano-edged whip, which cut through metal as easily as it did butter. She hated to say it, but she was going to miss them when they were gone. The engineers made half-assed warriors, but what they lacked in fighting skill they more than made up for with ingenuity. One of them was currently holding on to her wrist, the one with the whip and squeezing. The pain was bearable from her trance state but the arm wouldn’t last much longer, even with her nano-infused body, if she continued to ignore the guy. She pivoted her shoulder-mounted laser gun at him with a thought, the turning mechanism stuttering and threatening to fail again, and took off his head. Once again, the diving suit, impregnable in many ways, didn’t offer much protection against a laser.
She then had to slice the arm off the diving suit and reach into it, pull out the severed arm, and loosen the grip of the pincers around her hand.
The rest the Aqua Men were doing their best to hightail it in retreat, realizing that their deep sea diving suits had some downsides. Not the least of which was their total inability to allow for rapid movement.
She didn’t even bother to finish off the rest. Who knows? They might afford her some amusement later dragging out their latest toys to play with.
***
One of the engineers in the deep sea diving suits running for cover said, “Are we going to lose this thing?”
The fellow hightailing it beside him replied, “Leon doesn’t lose battles. It’s nowhere on the résumé.”
“Maybe he lied on his résumé like everybody else.”
SIXTY-FOUR
Get A Clue fired into the mass of morphing robots coming at him up the FORESCO compound corridor. Each one he hit, just went from being one big crab-bot to twelve baby ones. And still he kept firing, figuring the baby ones would be easier to contend with.
“Dude, stop firing. It ever occur to you how you got your nickname?” That was Sound Man. Get A Clue couldn’t stop himself. Just the sight of those big-ass crab-bots coming his way was enough to override all sense. Sound Man pulled back, leaving him to his fate.
The smallest crab bots, smaller than the size of a quarter, jumped Get A Clue, got their pincers into him and dug their legs into him as well. He was screaming and still they were piling onto him. They had to know he was dead man walking; the rest should have gone after Sound Man. Soon they had Get A Clue covered, every inch of him. He was their bitch now. They could make him do anything they wanted, just by sending pain up along his spine and through his nervous system. That in fact was how they were marching him. His eyelids held wide by the miniature crab bots surrounding his eyes.
***
Get-A-Clue realized the crab-bots swarming over him, each no bigger than a common house spider, were injecting him with something. He felt like he was losing his sense of self. His will to even resist.
The bastards were zombiefying him!
He turned on Sound Man, who he realized now was using his virtual keyboard to find a frequency to disarm the crab bots. The speakers he was wearing all over his body emitted acoustic blasts that shattered the crab bots in a way that they couldn’t reconfigure themselves and couldn’t keep morphing. The sound must have killed that part of their brains somehow. But it did nothing to the crabs all over Get A Clue. They must have been using his own body as a sound dampener.
The rest of the robots fled the sounds coming off of Sound Man before they could be torn asunder by them.
About then Get A Clue lost all capacity for reason. Charged Sound Man, if you could call this Awakened-From-The-Dead Mummy Walk they had him doing a charge. No doubt they’d get better at dancing their human marionette with time. Out Get a Clue’s throat came the Return-of-the-Mummy monster sounds to go with the charge. Sounding brain dead, feeling a bit thick, and walking like the mobility-challenged, he couldn’t help feeling good about himself. If he was going to be turned into a monster, this wasn’t a half bad choice. Even subtracting points for originality, he liked his new look reflected back at him courtesy of the well-polished floors.
Sound Man really had retreated this time, not liking what he was seeing about Get A Clue’s change of attitude. Get a Clue couldn’t say as he blamed him.
***
Sound Man hiked it down the corridor away from the Crab Bots and right into the loving arms of the enemy’s juvenile Nomads. His acoustic gear was set to autopilot at that point and ran the scales of sounds faster than his human ears could follow. Once it found the sound that the creatures most minded, it locked in there and blasted away until the Nomads were running away from him. Courtesy of his own technology, the speakers covering his body everywhere his uniform should, were every bit as flexible as cloth, only, they were actually made of paper. But the paper had been reinforced with nano, making it super hard to tear, and even allowing him some camouflage ability and bulletproofing.
With his assault rifle, he fired his vibroids at the retreating Nomads. Once the shells landed in them, they vibrated the Nomads apart. Like miniature earthquakes that started from the points where the bullets lodged themselves and that kept spreading and climbing the Richter scale until the oscillations exploded their targets. That invention also belonged to him. His vibroids had a lot in common with how his speakers produced their acoustics.
Feeling pretty full of himself and all but invulnerable he turned the bend in the hall. Only to walk smack into the ever-expanding zombie army. All fellow engineers who had made the mistake of firing at the morphing robots. They were armored to the teeth with those things covering them. No way he was that good of a shot to get a shell through the small gaps on the engineers’ surfaces betwe
en the spider bodies. He turned to retreat, but it was too late; the zombies were coming at him up each of the four intersecting corridors.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about being zombiefied. He didn’t care for the look on the natives any more than he cared for it on his peers. He turned his vibroid weapon on himself.
It wasn’t a particularly heroic end, but it beat the alternative.
He squeezed the trigger and kissed oblivion on the cheek.
***
Granger looked away from his surgery to see what was going on throughout the FORESCO compound on the monitors. To say nothing of the security cameras scattered about the inner and outer perimeters surrounding the facility. The live-action feeds coming to them on no less than twelve monitors. The surgeons were no small believers in VR-feedback. Though usually the flat-screens were assisting with the operation, not detracting from it. “There’s no way Leon brought that many people to the party. He had what, four C-5 Galaxies to transport his gear and his soldiers?”
“Seven.” Pressman shifted his attention from the monitors back to his thoracic explorations as he talked. “Three more snuck in during the black of night. But that still wouldn’t account for what we’re seeing.”
“I’m thinking some of our own scientists and engineers are defecting to his side, and taking our toys with them.”
“With what Truman has on all of us? The man can leverage better than a boa constrictor.” Pressman continued digging around inside the opened thorax of the sedated juvenile Nomad.
“To hell with it.” Granger set down his scalpel. Pulled off his gloves. “He might kill my wife and kids, just like he might kill me. But if we don’t join the insurgence, this could be the human race we’re talking about. Do you really want to see it under that guy’s thumb? Or anyone like him?”
“You gonna be such a drama queen, I suggest you join your fellow rebels. Science only has room for a cool head.” Pressman returned to his surgery.
Granger twisted the dial on the tank pumping the anesthesia into the lizard. If he was one of the more gifted sentient serpents, he would have figured out how to counteract it long ago. But this was one of the inbred ones that could die fairly easily. That was precisely why Truman had plucked him out of the forest to bring him back here. Granted, it had taken more than one retrieval effort to find him. The first time they ended up dragging in one whose excretions drove the most intense emotional catharses. The mishap turned out to be sheer dumb luck as they could no more afford to have his kind running amuck either. To ensure that either form of escape was never open to any of the sentient serpents ever again, both Nomads were now safely sequestered away in FORESCO and being intensely studied in order to neutralize their adaptations.
The idea that no one would be free of Truman and his type ever, that not even death or spiritual healing—what these two special Nomads offered—would be an escape because those paths too would be blocked, made Granger’s hairs stand on end. He was doing the right thing. He knew that now that he choked down the last of his cowardice and marched out the door. He was a good deal younger than Pressman. He couldn’t blame the older man for being set in his ways.
Pressman was so embroiled in his work he didn’t even notice the valve.
***
Pressman tilted his head up to give him a chance to wipe the sweat off his brow with the back of his gloved hand before the perspiration spilled into his test subject. That’s when he noticed the juvenile Nomad stir. Before he could reach the valve on the tank the lizard had busted free of the restraints.
The Nomad darted out of the surgery ward, his entrails still hanging out, his chest cavity wide open, dragging his insides on the floor. His talons, trying to find traction on the floor, making mincemeat of the intestines.
“What have you done, Granger?! What have you done?!”
The blood still on his gloved hands, Pressman rushed into the corridor to call after the monster on the dim hope that it would heel like some dog. It ignored him but the other juvenile Nomads didn’t. They smelled the blood on his hands. It didn’t matter that they had obedience headgear on. They decided they could ride out the crescendo of pain long enough to kill him.
They were right.
***
The death gene. That’s what the Umbrage were calling it. Not having the capacity for words that they did, Linus needed the image and the feeling to go with the words before he could fathom what they were gibbering about. The Nomads just weren’t as bright. He knew that and he accepted his place in the scheme of things. Then one of the Umbrage put the images and feelings in his head and he understood. Dying meant no more suffering, no more pain. His persecutors could no longer get to him.
Linus knew many of his kind wouldn’t take the out. Even from this much anguish. They were driven by impulses there was no way a Nomad could comprehend. Few of the Umbrage took advantage of their psychic link to the fallen one to upload his adaptation and modify themselves accordingly. It pained Linus to learn that.
The one that had given them the gift lay dead in the hall so shortly after he’d escaped the tortures they were doing to him, his guts hanging out.
But a lot of the Nomads were taking the out. All ages and sizes. Maybe as many as a third of them. With his final breath, Linus elected to join them.
He morphed his genes accordingly.
And then he fell to his knees and, moments later, keeled over on his side.
He thought, at least he was doing something for the people fighting to free them. In his small way.
And then the lights went out.
SIXTY-FIVE
Leon, wedged into a corner, saw the juvenile nomads closing in on them keeling over one by one.
Cronos, positioned to his side, lending cover, said, “What the hell’s going on?”
“Not sure. But whatever that ill wind is blowing over the land, it wasn’t vile enough for our purposes. Don’t look now but we’re still outnumbered, with our backs against a wall.”
Cronos did a head count of the remaining juvenile nomads and the Umbrage, fighting side by side, and decided there was nothing wrong with Leon’s math. “How are you on prayer?”
“Was never much on taking things on faith. I suppose that goes with my healthy disrespect of authority.” Leon reached over and rubbed Cronos’s forehead and then swathed himself in Cronos’s sweat. He reached under Cronos’s underarms and borrowed some sweat from there to lather himself down with.
“Wouldn’t count on my stench driving off those animals.” Cronos took a whiff of himself, “as bad as it is.”
“Your stench? Try again. That’s your good luck I’m rubbing all over me. You’re the guy that cannot die, remember?”
“Stop reminding me. There’s nothing more unforgivable than a soldier with a guardian angel. Word gets out, I’ll be known as a cheat. I’ll be the shit under their heel.”
“Don’t worry. I can keep a secret.”
“Even if you can’t, I’d say my chances are pretty good the truth is not leaving this spot.”
***
Bowman broke down the door to the armory with one word, “Finally.” He took in the sight of the latest round of superweapons the FORESCO scientists had whipped up. All with Truman’s latest tweaks.
Sparrow, his wing man, surveying the same soothing sight, said, “Truman told us not to use these things unless we absolutely had to.”
“If the chatter on the walkie-talkies is to be believed, I’d say we past that point hours ago.” He pried open one of the cases.
“There’s no way Leon’s forces breach the outer perimeter to reinforce him. Panno and Mudra are there, even the old man. Those three could get the bubonic plague to pull up its knickers and run back to the rats it came from.”
Bowman wasn’t listening. He was just piling gun belts onto Sparrow. He made his way to the next case, prying it open. Truman had just one team of mercs to go with his Ubuku warriors, and it was Sparrow’s poor luck to draw the most irreverent, impossible-t
o-corral Bowman as a partner.
“Doesn’t matter how much headway Leon and his people make inside the compound or even in the inner perimeter, I tell you,” Sparrow continued, his voice urgent. “Once those three finish mop up operations on the outer perimeter, they’ll be able to close the net on OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT. They’ll be outflanked. Nothing left to do but die in the crossfire.”
“Look, kid, you fight as many wars as I have, you learn real quick that nothing gets foiled in war faster than good planning.” He loaded one of the chests onto Sparrow’s arms, bended forklift fashion, didn’t even bother opening the box.
“Worst case scenario, both perimeters crumble, and the triple threat rushes the compound. Something tells me we won’t have to fire another shot after that. They cut off the heads of the opposition, the rest pretty much surrender.”
As a pair of mercs for hire, it was their buzz cuts that had drawn them together. Sparrow’s had tiger claw marks on either side of his head where bare skin showed instead of stubble. Bowman had a maze carved into his head, which Sparrow was currently staring at to settle his nerves.
“Listen to me, kid, it’s not the good that die young, it’s the gullible. The people like you who actually believe the bullshit their leaders are putting down. Now, we’re getting out of here and we’re putting our fate in our hands where it belongs, not in someone else’s.”
Sparrow just shook his head hiking behind Bowman. “Like talking to a stone wall.”
***
“What do you think they use this place for anyway?” Cronos asked, eying the high ceilings and the cavernous interior of the chamber they were in.
Leon rubbed the back of his stiff neck to get some more circulation to his brain before returning the free hand to the assault rifle’s trigger. “If I had to guess, being as the door we came in was precisely the one Truman came out earlier, when he fled the compound, this is where he kept the stuff he didn’t want anyone knowing about, not even his own people.”
Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents Page 53
