The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “Of course I do,” he said. “I just couldn’t stay. I knew we’d talk sooner or later, but I needed time to gather myself. I don’t want to be in rooms where decisions cost lives. When I met you, I thought those days were over. I had to use my military background, but a bodyguard was different than the military. It was defensive. I could rationalize that.”

  “What does that have to do with us?” Cynthia said. “If I don’t help the military, someone else will. I thought I was doing the right thing, I thought you approved.”

  “You’re playing God,” he said.

  Cynthia looked at him bewildered. “Giving someone CPR is playing God.”

  “You don’t know what you’re building, Cynthia. You have no idea. If these things get built, it doesn’t matter if we’re right or wrong, we can force our ‘right.’ And you’re doing it with him.”

  “Evan isn’t as bad as you think,” Cynthia said.

  Sabot made a face. “I know the ‘Evans’ of the world. They are small men with hidden agendas. They are the Dictator’s kids who rape, rob, and kill because they can’t be stopped. I’ve been in these waters far longer than you. And being smarter doesn’t help. You can’t guess what a snake will do when it doesn’t know itself.”

  “Come back,” Cynthia said weakly.

  “I can’t, babe. I love you, never think different, but I’m so disappointed. The life I thought we’d have, it’s not going to happen. And I know the way I handled it was wrong, but you are pushing the world to war and you cannot rationalize your way out of it. ‘Someone else will do it’ isn’t good enough, Cynthia. LET THEM.”

  “I just want you back, Sabot,” Cynthia said.

  “I’ll come back if you stop working with Evan. If I can get back the woman that saved the world and still asked for my advice and comfort, I’m there.”

  “I can’t now. We’re under contract,” she said. Her voice could barely be heard.

  “We could go anywhere and no one could touch us,” Sabot said. “You could walk away.”

  “I can’t,” Cynthia said. The truth was, Cynthia had not been challenged mentally in almost a decade and finally she had a project that was out of her scope and required her constant attention and innovation to succeed. She couldn’t leave that. Without the intellectual stimulation, she thought, she might as well jump out the window.

  Sabot stared at a spot on the table. “That day in the hospital, I saw the future. Cities were on fire, people were covered in soot. Some were holding loved ones that were dead or dying. And I knew that future was true, like God had planted it in my head. I had two options. One was to kill everyone the room. Five lives for a billion, that seemed fair.”

  Cynthia’s eyes were wide with shock. Sabot was serious.

  “If you hadn’t been there,” Sabot snapped his fingers. “It would have been an easy decision,” he continued. “The other was to leave. Don’t think I don’t love you, it was the only thing that stopped me. And don’t think I’m not here for you. If you change your mind, if you need help getting out, I’m the man. But I can’t be around for this. Because next time, I’m not going to hesitate or waver. Innocent people will die from your invention, Cynthia. Next time, I’ll make the right decision.”

  Cynthia walked out of the house stunned into silence. It took her three tries to open the car door. She didn’t remember getting back to MindCorp, but she was on her couch. She cancelled all meetings and turned off all outside communication. She sat, huddled in the dark, neither eating or sleeping, searching her soul and wondering how the most loyal and caring man she had ever known had seen in her something so vile that for a moment, she meant more to the world dead than alive.

  Part II

  “Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.”

  —Winston Churchill

  Chapter 12

  –Three Months Later–

  Xan was unraveling. He looked down at his hands. They shook side to side like he was waving off a play. His eyelids twitched uncontrollably. He sat up in his bed. It looked like his office, down to the coffee maker, down to the red, jagged horizon to the west and the hilly fields to the north. It gave him a center. But it wasn’t real. He had been online for almost four months, with his physical form nestled into a chair at their Core next to S-04, who—against all odds—was still alive and kicking.

  He had meant to come out a month earlier but the physicians that monitored his body and mind suggested that he continue. It would take two weeks to bring Xan back to consciousness, like a deep-sea diver slowly rising to the surface to avoid the bends. And every minute was precious, more precious than his health, more precious than oil. There was too little time. Grain-by-grain it vanished into the trough of the hourglass; when the world would be won or lost.

  His paranoia had been vetted. China’s policies had continued to shift toward those that favored the U.S., and the countries that comprised the European Union had shifted even further. The politicians were being brainwashed. As a Sleeper, Xan shadowed the new Chinese President and his advisors without their knowledge. And this is where he found the anomaly. Of the five thousand micro-frequencies used by the Mindlink to send and receive data, three had been hijacked. They fed deep into the brain. The signals were staggered, the three frequencies combined to make a whole, but they didn’t shove the message into memory. They let the brain connect the dots.

  The messages weren’t blatant. They were tailored suggestions to each individual based on their memories. “Your mother always dreamed of moving to America,” was one message Xan deciphered. This was sent again and again, a thousands times a day, to the new President. Xan researched the President’s mother and found that she had gone to college in the U.S. and she had always wanted to move there. Many times she would tell her son, now President, how wonderful it was. Another he deciphered: “United we can defeat the terrorists.” This was being sent to the military advisor for the President. There were more, but Xan had seen enough. Time was too short to be overly curious.

  As soon as he went under, Xan tagged the top military officials in the U.S. These tags monitored key words or spikes in activity and flagged them for Xan. Three months ago, every military official’s online activity spiked at 2:00 p.m. U.S. Central Time. On the dot. Xan hacked into the files of a Jan Hedgegard, a Navy Admiral who, judging from recent photos, had died and never got the memo. His correspondence to subordinates was unencrypted. He spoke of a ‘Metal giant.’ Jan, in his old age, would fall asleep during the day, sometimes with his Mindlink on. Xan waited like a cat burglar. The Forced Autistic allowed him to easily hack through the security protocols set up for the Admiral and reach into his head. He found the visual memory. Xan saw the giant destroy a Humvee truck and punch through a cement block, rendering it to dust. The creature was beautiful. An engineering marvel. Tall and massive and shockingly graceful.

  He watched a short man with glasses and a goatee field questions. The Generals applauded him. The giant walked up behind him. He was the man Xan had to know. He was the man three rows back.

  Two days later he knew the chubby little man was Dr. Evan Lindo. A week later he had tagged the good doctor and all the staff around him.

  Trends formed. A base in Virginia was important. Xan hacked into their employee database searching for low security personnel. He found a woman named Wendy Schaub who worked in the cafeteria. She delivered food to an atomic bomb shelter every morning. In that bunker she had seen “a man the size of a truck with a huge body and a small head,” she wrote in her personal online journal, password protected with the name of her first dog and her birthdate.

  He continued trolling lightly over the minds of the unsuspecting. A janitor cleaned the bunker. At one point a massive door “like those at a bank,” was closing and inside he saw a “huge blue lava lamp bigger than a wall.”

  A Data Core.

  Xan hacked into the energy grid that fed the base. Seventy percent of its power was diverte
d to the bunker. He hacked into the onsite hospital. Dr. Ian Wilkins was the neurologist. Wary of leaving a trail, Xan reluctantly hacked into his files. These weren’t password protected with an old pet’s name; he was now breaching true security protocols used by the United States. He could get flagged, even traced. But he had to know. It took Xan two seconds to read through two thousand files. One file did not list a name, address, or rank. But it did list sex: Male. And an age: twelve. The symptom: muscle atrophy, ligament and tendon shrinkage. Treatment: Passive physical therapy, stretching, and massage.

  Passive. Not active. Not telling the dude in bed that he had to get off his ass and jog. Passive was for coma patients. Xan knew passive. A camera was pointed on his body, and as he processed this new information, he watched two therapists shake his arms out and stretch his fingers back and forth. A Sleeper was in that bunker. One that hadn’t woken up in a long, long time.

  A boy.

  = = =

  Xan made Mohammed uneasy. Even online, Xan was shaky and unsure. His eyes darted back and forth under heavy eyelids. He cracked his knuckles incessantly. His legs bounced on the stool, shaking the table. He looked like a meth head going through withdrawal.

  They were in a sod walled pub built into a role-playing game. Around them orcs and wizards and knights mingled. Some screamed defiantly at others, grossly offended by a comment or jest directed their way. They would go outside to battle. Clans sat together discussing a quest they had just finished. It was odd seeing a barbarian with shoulders like bowling balls speak with the voice of a girl. It was even odder to hear an adult man recruit a kid to join an adventure.

  “In order to gain sympathy, you have to incur sacrifice,” Xan said. His right eye fluttered uncontrollably.

  “You don’t seem well,” Mohammed said.

  “I’m fine. I couldn’t see more clearly.”

  Mohammed regarded his twitchy partner. “Why so many men?”

  “You can spare eighty,” Xan said. “Look.”

  Xan sent Mohammed images of the Tank Major demonstration.

  “This is what they have now. We devised a way to neutralize it, but we need to see it in practice. What better coming out party for the Western Curse than standing on top of the U.S.’s greatest weapon?”

  President Hu, Jintau’s replacement, had died a week after he overturned a policy to open their oil reserve to the Coalition. He was found halfway off his Sleeper chair. A stroke. It was diagnosed as natural causes and Xan couldn’t tell anyone different. If he had told them and they went online, then the King Sleeper (he’d learn what it was called) would know that HE knew. He checked his frequencies and they were clean. The Core he worked from was off the grid, virtually invisible. Rest in peace, Dr. Renki.

  But it fueled his paranoia. He felt like he was the last sane man on earth. He heard voices all around him telling lies, whispering conspiracies. Was Mohammed compromised? Could he be? He was stupid enough to connect directly in. Xan was connected through another comatose husk in Norway. Was Mohammed real? Was this a trick?

  The doctors told him he had to come out, that his mental health was at risk. He ordered soldiers to take them away. He forbade anyone on the base to link-in. All orders and decisions had to go through him, just in case, somehow, they had been influenced.

  It was the boy, it had to be the boy. There was no other explanation and while Xan was one hundred percent certain it was true, he still didn’t know how. HOW? How can this child do what he is doing? Combined with S-05 (S-04’s heart stopped) Xan was as powerful as any other Sleeper in cyberspace and yet, to the King Sleeper, he was a gnat.

  Xan had found enough schematics and anecdotal information for China to design its own Tank Major. The prototype was in its final stages. It wasn’t as elegant, they didn’t have refineries that could forge the hydraulshock mechanism, but it made up for it with size and firepower. It was fifteen feet tall with cannons mounted to its shoulders and a constricting attack that used its hydraulic-lined back to crush anything it got hold of. Like an American Tank Major.

  It all meant nothing without the King Sleeper.

  Xan pulled himself together. “I’m sorry. You’ve been patient and I know you’ve lost some followers because of this delay.”

  Mohammed and the Western Curse had done nothing since he had first met Xan.

  “You do this and I’ll get you a bomb. Fair?”

  Mohammed leaned in. “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?” he asked.

  “Eight kilotons won’t level a city, but the psychological damage would be immeasurable,” Xan said. “In a highly populated area like New York, it’d kill millions.”

  Mohammed didn’t move a muscle while he processed the trade.

  “Eighty of my men, and the device you’re providing will shut down the bionic?”

  “And the necessary weapons to execute the job,” Xan said. He looked directly into Mohammed’s eyes. “And all the credit will be yours.”

  = = =

  Evan had found a new drug.

  The King Sleeper worked in eighteen-hour shifts. His missions consisted of three different tasks: gathering, destroying, and influencing. Depending on the breadth of each task, he sometimes did all at once.

  Evan liked being Justin’s father. That was a drug and by itself it seemed innocent. But the boy was abducted, his parents were killed at Lindo’s order, he was twelve years old and he had been drugged unconscious for six months, and he, as the boy’s father, was having him influence presidents and parliaments, and kill those who just wouldn’t listen.

  The Reverse Data Push. The ability of Justin’s mindscape to expand rapidly and cause a target’s mind to seize, stroke out, and die. The latest victim was President Hu after he vetoed the bill to share their oil with the Coalition.

  The King Sleeper did this by planting a codec in a person’s mind. That codec behaved like a latent malignant cell. It could be in there forever, never causing harm. Or with a simple data trigger, it could multiply by trillions, overloading neurons and synapses with junk information until the brain choked and fried.

  So if being Justin’s father was weed, for Evan, the Reverse Data Push was crack cocaine. Evan felt the guilt and the excitement all at once, like he was a kid watching porn with his parents just down the hall. But he couldn’t stop himself. The King Sleeper was uploading this codec into the brain of every person online. Six billion people. The King Sleeper was ungodly powerful, but even then, he could only do seventy-five hundred people per minute. In two years, every man, woman, and child could live or die at Lindo’s whim. Evan would be the sickled shadow in the corner of their eye.

  The first five hundred people Evan implanted were his associates. General Boen was at the top of the list, as was the President, the Senators, top military brass, Cynthia and her scientists—and all of their families and loved ones. Anyone that could be an obstacle and anyone that they cared about who could be used as leverage. Evan knew that he couldn’t have the entire Senate drop dead, that he’d need to use some restraint, but the very fact that he would know they had his little string of numbers in their head changed the game. He could be bold and brazen and demanding.

  The boy asked him a question and Evan responded. Not as himself, but as Frank McWilliams, who had died in a shower and then burned with accelerant.

  Evan was fine with it.

  Chapter 13

  During the Great Migration, O’Hare International Airport was converted into a national train station. As Chicago grew out and rail became the de facto mode of transportation, O’Hare was the logical choice. It had pre-existing infrastructure that could easily be adapted and it had land. Fifteen years ago, fields surrounded it. Now it was skyscrapers.

  Antoine Versad was a Frenchman. He had red hair, buzzed short, and a five o’clock shadow that had to be groomed once a day. He spent two years in the French army before getting kicked out for misconduct. The charges were dropped but there was nothing left for him in France. He cam
e to the U.S. by boat hoping to change his fortune, and he had.

  He felt the train slow down as they approached O’Hare from New York. He sat in the first class section of the train. Scattered throughout the other cars were eighty of his associates. Some looked like businessmen, some looked like hippies and students. They were white, black, Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian.

  The common bond between them was the Western Curse and this mission. Strapped beneath each of their seats was a submachine gun with two hundred rounds of ammunition. In the cargo department they had twenty RPG’s, fifty grenades, two M134 mini guns, and one hundred pounds of C-4 explosive.

  The discipline and patience that Mohammed had instilled in the Western Curse had allowed his people to penetrate deep into the arteries of American society. The rail was going to be exploited today. Tomorrow it could be the shipyards or the power plants.

  Antoine was in charge of this mission. The goal was to take over the station, gather as many hostages as possible, and kill one every five minutes until the giant came. Antoine had a very sophisticated computer with him. It created its own network that hacked into anything with wireless connectivity within fifty yards of it. A Chinese operative had passed it to Mohammed, who had passed it to Antoine.

  “This computer is worth twenty million dollars,” Mohammed had said when he handed it over. “Don’t drop it.”

  Mohammed had told him that the hack would burrow into the giant and render him useless. The RPGs, the C-4, the miniguns, all of those could damage it, but the computer was what would disconnect the human from the machine. When that happened, Antoine would stroll up to the man buried in metal and shoot him in the head. They would broadcast it live throughout cyberspace. It was the Western Curse’s coming out party and Antoine would be the star of the show.

  From his window, Antoine watched O’Hare as they approached. He had done reconnaissance on it twice now. It was a huge structure, but they had enough manpower to take over its entrances and then collapse back into its heart and set up the defensive measures.