The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  Janis could hear someone speak to General Boen. It was Lindo.

  “Okay. We have confirmation that their video feed to the web has been cut,” Boen said. “Proceed forward.”

  “What about the hostages?” Janis asked.

  “Eric, they’re gonna kill them anyway. They’ve made no formal demands and they’ve already shot sixty. You’ll have to make the decision between hostiles and friendlies on the fly, but a Tank Major running into the crowd will disperse it. Over.”

  “Over,” Janis said. Ignore the human shield. That was what he was just told. Before his hands thunder down, look into their eyes and decide good or bad. There would be mistakes.

  The greater good.

  We don’t negotiate with terrorists.

  Janis accelerated forward; inertia overcome with the instant torque of his electric motors. Beneath his feet the polished granite floor evaporated into dust, pluming around his feet like pollen.

  Antoine choked when the giant charged. The four hundred hostages screamed in fear and scattered, ignoring the guns pointed at them. The human shield was supposed to stall the military. But instead, the giant closed in as if everyone was declared guilty.

  “Blow it!” Antoine yelled to his second lieutenant. Nothing happened. He turned to see a fat woman scratching at the lieutenant’s face; it was mutiny on a grand scale. The giant had turned an orderly hostage situation rabid. The room shook from his approaching footsteps. Antoine shot the fat woman in the stomach and followed up to the head. “Blow it!” he screamed. The second lieutenant hit the button.

  Behind Janis the floor exploded upward and then tumbled thirty feet below. In front of him, the same thing happened, opening a fifty-foot chasm between him and the terrorists. They were stranded on an island. Janis could jump down unharmed, but the six behind him could not. Thirty feet was too far for them when the ground below was tons of ragged steel and stone, angled and sharp like pikes in a punji pit.

  “We lost Mitch!” Janis heard over the comm. Whether Mitch was dead or alive wasn’t the question. He had fallen below. It was now five soldiers and the giant completely exposed with no exit.

  The wail of miniguns filled the air. A section of crowd exploded into meat, popping and pulsing as they slopped to the floor. A few fortunate souls crawled through the blood and gore to escape the hail of lead. Janis’s armor sparked like flint on steel. They were trying to kill the soldiers huddled behind him. Janis heard Estevan scream as a round tore through her thigh. Janis crouched like a hockey goalie to block the bullets from getting through.

  Janis could barely hear the comm. Lead drummed off his helmet and the miniguns screamed.

  “THEY’RE FLANKING. WE CAN’T STAY UP HERE!” another soldier, Hostettler, yelled.

  Janis saw the terrorists on each side run from support pillar to support pillar. They had assault rifles. He would live but his team, flesh and blood wrapped in Kevlar suits, would get overwhelmed. He saw twenty on both sides, covering and moving, basic military training. His team hunched against his tree sized legs and took aim, keeping their sights between the pillars the terrorists would have to cross.

  Antoine watched from the cover of a men’s bathroom as the giant hunched down to save his companions from the volley of lead. He saw his soldiers flanking, getting past the immovable man. He smiled. The computer had hacked into Janis and it was now uploading the software that Mohammed had promised would end this. From the progress bar, it was minutes away.

  “Hit him with the RPGs,” Antoine said into his walkie-talkie. Four soldiers magically appeared from behind pillars, thirty yards from Janis.

  Janis saw the vapor trail of the RPGs before he registered what was happening. Four RPG’s hit him simultaneously. They rocked him enough that he had to brace himself with an arm against the ground, but they caused no damage. We have to get out of here.

  “Are any of them at our back?” Janis yelled.

  “No. We’re clear on our back.” Hostettler fired on three terrorists perpendicular to the Tank Major.

  “Eject! Hang on to your guns,” Janis said. “We’re ejecting!”

  Ejecting was used to remove “soft soldiers” from situations of imminent death. It had been practiced three times. The first two, Janis had broken the test soldier’s legs and caused a concussion for another. He had to nail it.

  “Estevan, you’re coming with me,” Janis growled.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He could hear weakness in her voice. The minigun shot rounds powerful enough to kill a grizzly. He hoped the round had grazed her but her voice told him otherwise.

  Janis’s upper body moved freely three hundred and sixty degrees from his lower body. This was to dissipate the energy of an unsuccessful hydraulshock attack. He spun around and grabbed Hostettler and Woods.

  “Ready?” he asked. They nodded.

  Throwing them was like a human throwing a cabbage patch doll. They were so light in comparison that he couldn’t go by feel. He threw them low, trying to push them just over the chasm to the other side. Too high and they would fall and break. But a push throw transferred the energy into a roll. They made it over.

  He grabbed Johnson and Bush and did the same. They all hit fifteen feet past the moat and tumbled another twenty. Each soldier rolled prone and immediately fired on incoming hostiles.

  Estevan was as bad as Janis thought. The round had hit her below the knee and her shin was a bent twig, barely attached. A pool of blood beneath her dripped over the side.

  “Hang on Estevan. Hang on,” Janis said. He scooped her in his hands like he was holding a butterfly. Rounds rained on him, hitting his hands, his arms, his body. He felt another RPG hit his back to no affect. Syrupy blood dripped through his fingers.

  “Hang on!”

  Janis jumped down into the rocky debris and rolled to lessen the impact on Estevan. He heard her cry out. He stood up. The dust was thick, but he could see. Support pillars, ten feet in diameter were on each side of the hole. He moved quickly into the dark and put Estevan down.

  “Stay alive,” he said.

  She nodded and tore at her clothing to make a tourniquet.

  “Fuck them up,” she said through her teeth.

  = = =

  Hostettler and Woods covered each other, backtracking and firing on the approaching terrorists. They had the left; Johnson and Bush took the right.

  It was sticky. Hostettler had seen combat where splinters of stone flung through the air, dust obscured friendlies from hostiles, and the only thing you could hear was the ringing in your ears and the thud, thud, thud, of machine guns tearing at your position. This one was up there.

  A terrorist—a young woman—came around a corner with an RPG, he shot her in the head and then shot the man behind her. More came. Johnson cried out, a round got him in the right shoulder. He switched the rifle to his good arm and shot from the hip as the other arm dangled at his side and the sleeve bloomed with red.

  The ground coughed. That was how Hostettler would have described it. As if the earth hacked something free. He heard the echo of what they were trained to ignore, because the sound was so startling that the first time he heard it, he lost control of his bowels. He and the others dropped to the ground.

  The comm earpieces had a low pass and high pass filter built in. These were designed to eliminate frequencies that could disorient them or cause permanent damage. The hydraulshock hit every frequency above and below what a human could hear. Five hertz to fifty thousand kilohertz. Their earpieces limited hearing response from twenty hertz to seventeen thousand kilohertz and rolled off anything above eighty-five decibels, hard limiting at one hundred decibels.

  BAM!

  A pack of terrorists to their left vanished in an avalanche of concrete, granite, and steel, that shifted fifty feet in less than a hundredth of a second.

  BAM!

  The dull roar in his earpiece. On Johnson and Bush’s side, the ground was thrown onto the train tracks. Twenty terrorists vanished, blen
ded into meaty clay by the tonnage of floor and structure that had been turned to rubble.

  They were clear. They looked at each other, shell shocked.

  “Janis, we are clear,” Johnson said. “Thank you.”

  “Watch this,” Janis replied.

  Going away from them, the floor disappeared in a wave. Not from the hydraulshock, but from eight thousand pounds moving at twenty-five miles per hour snapping through each pillar as if they were brittle bones. The men at the miniguns couldn’t react in time. The floor had become seismic, the energy led the charge like a sonic boom. They vanished in the wave of destruction, the floor churning and falling, plowed from below.

  Antoine heard the mechanized monster beneath him and the screams of his comrades extinguished with a deep, thudding impact. The entrance of the bathroom hung at the edge of the abyss and he could see the giant’s murky movement, a tarantula that had caught crickets in its burrow. He sprinted out the other side of the men’s bathroom and ran away from the others that had stood to fight.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay.” But he didn’t feel okay. He was shaking. He had seen the giant up close, he could picture it trudging forward, sniffing for him like a starving dog, smelling his cowardice.

  “Shut up,” he said to himself. He flipped open the computer that he was told would stop the beast. On its screen was a yellow smiley face and “file downloaded!”

  But it hadn’t worked.

  What if it wasn’t meant to work? What if it was for something completely beyond your pay grade?

  Xan would have stood up and slow clapped at the revelation.

  “I’m not expendable,” Antoine said to himself.

  “Get the FUCK UP,” someone commanded.

  Antoine turned into the gray muzzle of Mitch Ratny’s SAW machine gun. When Mitch had fallen into the moat, he moved ahead two hundred yards to get behind the miniguns. His ankle was demolished, but he limped his way back up just in time to see this red headed pussy run away. He hoped Frenchy made a move.

  = = =

  All things considered, Tank Major Janis’s first mission was a success. The female soldier—Lindo had no idea why a woman would want to do that kind of work—would lose her leg. That was the only military casualty. Including the sixty before they arrived, one hundred and twenty hostages died. Janis had killed thirty-five terrorists. The rest of the team killed twenty-five. O’Hare train station would need an extensive remodel.

  The stench of the kill wafted through the train on the way back to Virginia. They hosed Janis down, but red pieces of meat continued to fall out of his gears and drop from his hands. The pressure sprayer took ninety percent of it away, but the other ten percent was like a splinter: it just had to work itself out.

  They had the leader on the train. He was coming back to Virginia with them. At first, Antoine had been smug. “I want a lawyer,” he’d demanded. Evan and the others laughed out loud. The man didn’t get it. He was a ghost. Evan watched the resilience bleed from the man’s eyes as the laughter continued like he had just told the world’s best knock-knock joke.

  Evan was now alone. He found the gentle sway of the bullet train soothing.

  They didn’t know what they were walking into. That was the problem with this mission. They got surprised. While Janis’s open architecture allowed Command to upload or download information and pass this to the team, they had no real-time way of knowing what the enemy was doing. They didn’t know position. They didn’t know movement. Lindo and the others had gone in overconfident. They thought the Tank Major would cause the terrorists to fall to their knees and beg for mercy.

  For his physical military inventions, Evan liked to sketch concepts freehand. He felt there was an art to it. In his lap was a pad of paper and on it was a flying disk. At its center was a turbine blade. Scrawled in the upper right hand corner was a description: “x-ray scope, infrared scope, HD camera, night vision scope.”

  Like the Tank Major, he could clearly see the design. He understood how it was powered and its purpose. He paused and looked at his drawing. He bit on the top of the pencil. And then he wrote “Hover-rover Concept” at the top.

  It would be easy to implement. The majority of the technology needed was already built into the giant two train cars back.

  = = =

  The smell made Janis nauseous. It was like someone had shoved raw steak into his nostrils. Terry, the assistant on duty, was a fifty-year-old hippy with long gray hair, a walrus mustache, and a soft midsection. He was cleaning between Janis’s armored plates and gears with a large hand brush and a power sprayer. The ground beneath them looked like a slaughterhouse.

  Terry took a moment to throw up. He tried to move off Janis, but he couldn’t jump down in time. Stringy green hurl splattered on Janis’s left shoulder and rode down his arm.

  “Sorry, Eric,” Terry said. He pressure sprayed the hurl off.

  “It actually made the room smell better,” Janis said.

  “How was it?” Terry asked. He worked Janis’s fingers and the armor that protected his knuckles. They were matted with thirty different human meats.

  “It was,” Janis thought about it. It was so hard to describe. “It was like I was a kid and instead of playing with He-Man, I became him. You know how’d you have He-Man fight ten, twenty action figures? I used to make their castle out of Legos. And he’d just smash through it?”

  Terry nodded.

  “That’s what it was like. It’s a retarded way to explain it, but it was like I was He-Man. Like I was invincible,” Janis said.

  Terry turned off the sprayer for a second.

  “I know I’m not supposed to ask, but what about all this?” Terry gestured to the pieces of people on the floor, slowly sliding toward the center drain.

  “I used to have a hard time with it,” Janis said. “But we got nine billion people on Earth. If you can’t play nice in the sandbox, then you don’t get to play.”

  Terry fired the sprayer back up.

  “I’d like to see Estevan when we get back to base,” Janis said.

  “I’ll put the request in to Dr. Lindo,” Terry replied. He hoped the water wouldn’t run out.

  Chapter 14

  Xan had been out of cyberspace for three weeks. It took two weeks for him to come up to full consciousness. Even with the electrodes and passive treatments, he needed a week of physical therapy to regain his strength. His first shower had felt like a re-birth. He had sex with a real woman. He ate a bacon double cheeseburger. And he waited for the Western Curse to hijack O’Hare train station.

  From his office (my real office, he thought) he watched the same IP footage as the other three billion voyeurs when the Western Curse took over O’Hare. He waited for the giant. He wanted to see it in action. He had partial schematics and fragments of design taken from his months of hacking and trolling in cyberspace. While it was enough to build a prototype, it was not enough to truly understand how the engineering worked. They knew the American version had drive chains around its waist, but why? They knew the human body was suspended to avoid abrupt G-forces, but how? Guesses had to be made. He didn’t have the technology to gather all he needed. He didn’t have the King Sleeper.

  His mouth hung open when he finally saw it. He believed its size, he understood its proportions, but he was amazed at the way it moved. It moved like a man, no reason to over describe it. It moved with the fluidity of a giant man. A perfect engineering accomplishment.

  The video was cut before he saw its rampage, but he had enough footage for his engineering team to dissect and reverse engineer their prototype to a point of divergent similarity.

  The mission to plant the program in the Tank Major was a success. The Tank Major was on a train currently moving toward Virginia at two hundred and forty-eight miles per hour. It left O’Hare National three hours before. He knew this because the program that was uploaded into Tank Major Janis’s implant was pinging a GPS satellite high in the sky.

  The program had many functions.
The pinging was the simplest and least likely to be detected. For now, it was all he needed.

  On a large monitor he watched a red dot from the GPS move across the U.S. map. Soon it would stop and twelve hours after that, he would initiate the next program. Hopefully within a week of that, then the final one.

  A twelve soldier team was training for a very special mission, possibly the most important mission ever conceived. Xan would go, too. It was good to get back in the field. He wouldn’t lead the charge, he was too important, but he didn’t mind wet work. It kept his mind fresh and aware of the real consequences of war, something that men in situation rooms forget when abstract dots represented platoons.

  = = =

  When Antoine demanded a lawyer and they laughed, he knew he was in a world of shit. The interrogators had beaten him so badly he had pissed himself. Now he was in a jail cell with his back against the wall, whimpering. He understood what it felt like to be on death row. The only difference was that Antoine’s sentence could be short, it could be long, it could go on forever. No one knew where he was, no one was going to save him, and the men who had taken him were certain he had information they needed. A quick jolt of electricity would be welcome. A cocktail of poison in the vein, he would happily administer himself. No luck.

  A boy stood outside his cell. Antoine hadn’t noticed him before. He was lanky with dark hair that bordered pale, freckled skin. He watched Antoine without blinking.

  “Who let you down here, kid?” Antoine asked. He sat against the wall opposite the bars. He smelled the toilet a few feet away. Over the rim he saw splattered hiccups of dried shit. He felt his urine soaked bottom sticking to his skin.

  The boy turned his head like someone was speaking into his ear. For a second, Antoine thought he heard a whisper like a gasp of wind through a tree. It gave him chills. No one else was in the room, but someone was in the room. He knew it.

  “What’s going on?” Antoine stood up and walked to the bars. The boy did not move. He stood six inches away from Antoine, well within arms reach. Antoine looked up and down the hallway. There was no one else in the jail cells. He didn’t notice this before, but there were no doors or stairs leading out.