“We should go as a family next time,” Tiffany said.
“You rest up, have a Mai Tai. Let’s start fresh when you get back. I think I’m going to get a job,” Raimey said. Tiffany raised an eyebrow. “Online,” he explained. “I tested well on the Mindlink and almost all military and police training is virtual now. I could do a lot of things.”
“I hear it’s good for other things too,” she said and winked. She gave him a long kiss. “Thank you,” she said.
“Have fun. Get a massage, lay by the pool.”
He spun around and headed home knowing he had done the right thing. He felt better about what the future had in store.
= = =
It had been two weeks since O’Hare, and Janis wasn’t feeling well. He couldn’t pin it down. The first week he felt fine. They reviewed the footage of the attack, they discussed mistakes, and they drilled new techniques. The engineers pulled him apart to analyze wear and tear from the hydraulshocks. They repainted his armor. The soldiers came into his room dressed in lead aprons to shoot the shit. It was good.
But around a week in, he started to hear things in the night. His room was in the bunker a mile down from the surface. It was a cavern fifty feet by fifty feet cut into rock. The only furniture in it was his maintenance chair. It was a massive slab of metal that he locked into while he slept or when they maintenanced his brain and implant to merge him whole.
He first heard dripping water. If it had sounded far away, it wouldn’t have bothered him, but it sounded like the water was dripping on him. He stood up and searched for the leak. The bunker was carved out of bedrock; water found its way in occasionally. He couldn’t zero in on the leak and he couldn’t sleep with that sound.
The next day someone down the hall wouldn’t stop laughing and they had lungs the size of a zeppelin. They never paused for a breath.
“What’s that guy laughing about?” Janis said, frustrated. It had been going on for hours. A technician was doing his daily diagnostic routine.
“Who’s laughing?” the technician asked quizzically.
Janis gestured, careful to keep his hand away from the man. “The guy! He’s been laughing all day, he won’t stop.”
The technician nodded and finished the diagnostic. Five minutes after he left, two shrinks came down. By then the laughter had stopped. After twenty minutes of probing questions, they went away satisfied. His diagnostic was clean. He was sane.
And then the headaches kicked in. Big ones. No light pressure at the temples, these were railroad spikes through the skull. Doctors drew blood, checked his vitals, and inspected the implant. Everything was fine. They asked if he had a history of headaches, he said no. They gave him a migraine medication and a sleeping aid.
He woke up the next day feeling a little better. Now the headache felt like a bad hangover. Everything he heard had an origin. And Estevan was here to see him. She wore the mandatory lead vest draped over her wheelchair. They couldn’t save her leg. They talked about her physical therapy. She noticed he was closing his eyes hard and grimacing.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The headache’s coming back,” he said. His vision blurred, and for a moment, it bloomed with orange burst. And then the pain ramped full force. He reached for his head.
“STOP ERIC!” Estevan yelled.
He opened his eyes. His fingers were inches from his face.
-This isn’t real you know-
“What?” Janis asked.
“What?” Estevan replied, confused.
“Didn’t you just say something?”
She shook her head. “I’ll get a doctor.”
-You died at the UN-
“What are you talking about?” Janis said to Estevan. He looked pained. He stood up and paced back and forth never taking his eyes off her. His glare frightened her and she cautiously wheeled herself toward the door.
-It’s time now-
“I didn’t say anything, Eric. What’s going on?” She spoke like she was talking him down from a ledge.
-We are taking you where you belong-
His vision bloomed again. It was orange and red. For a second a bony chatter echoed through his skull.
“You’re not saying that? You don’t hear that?” he pleaded to her. He searched the ceiling for speakers. Janis shook his head back and forth like a horse shooing a fly.
“I’ll grab a doctor.” She was already halfway out the door.
“Yeah. Okay.” He breathed heavily. Sweat covered his face.
She left for help. But when she turned the corner and looked at him through the safety glass, her eyes glowed like coals and her smile was so wide it halved her head.
Janis was unaware of what he did next when he walked over to his chair, sat down, and fell asleep.
= = =
Xan planned the drop time twenty-four hours after the third and final stage of the program went into effect. He and his team were now two hours away, flying at ninety thousand feet in an aircraft that was built for a time when fuel was assumed. He and the twelve soldiers wore suits designed for high altitude jumps. While the entrance was grand, they would be leaving on foot.
The second stage of the program gave them the complete layout of the military base and the bunker where they kept the King Sleeper. They had used both Tank Major Janis’s cameras and then the wireless transmitter built into him to hack the security cameras and access computers on the network.
Each of them carried a submachine gun, a pistol, a knife, and a brick of plastique for door breaches, but none of them expected to take the guns off safety.
Xan closed his eyes and pictured what the base would look like at this very moment. He wondered when they jumped if they would see the flames from space. It was possible.
= = =
Janis woke up in hell. His room was on fire, and ghastly creatures had stormed in. Their mouths were stretched long and filled with molten ash. Their eyes glowed like coals and spilled with blood. The demons chattered like snapping bones and their bodies moved in and out of focus, in and out of frame, like they were being projected from another dimension. The room itself boiled and the air shimmered like thermals down a long, hot highway.
Three surrounded him. Janis jumped off the table and fell to the ground. The three demons swarmed him and he screamed in fear and confusion and rolled over two of them like he was playing steamroller at a slumber party.
The other demon ran to a door engulfed in flames, impossibly so, impossible that the door could still be there with the intensity at which it burned. The demon tried to get out but Janis ran over and slammed it down with an open hand like he was squashing a fly.
He moved away from the door. The fire rolled off it and raced across the ceiling. He ran over and grabbed his helmet. He didn’t have hydraulshocks, but he’d have to make do.
Did I die? The voice had said so.
Did I deserve this? he wondered. Did he deserve Hell? He had killed many in battle but it had been for country. Did that admonish his acts? In God’s eyes did that justify what he had done? Was he good, was he bad? He thought he was good, he felt he had done good.
“But here I am, in Hell,” he said. He cackled, sweat beaded on his face and rolled down in sheets. He ran through the door. Demons were all around him, some running toward him, most running away. Two wore white lab coats. Funny. Others wore dark black, others wore camouflage.
Tank Major Janis ran through them all, hunting them down, ignoring their gunfire. But he couldn’t ignore their howling faces, the bone chatter from their mouths and the constant blood pouring from their eye sockets.
If he was going to Hell, so be it. If they were going to drag him into the depths, let them try. But if sins made the monster, he wanted to be king.
= = =
Xan was two minutes from the drop. His body thrummed with anticipation. The world around him felt more intense, more crisp.
“Sir, you need to see this,” the pilot said in their helmet.
“Put it up on the screen,” Xan replied. A flat screen lit up the front of their compartment. The belly of the plane was loaded with telescopic surveillance cameras. Below them was a warzone.
A thick black cloud covered the area, crackling with a lightning storm of orange as gas mains, ammunition stockpiles, and fuel depots exploded.
“Holy shit,” one of his soldiers said. “Is it that powerful?”
Xan nodded. He touched a device on his shoulder that looked like a hockey puck. It blinked.
“The Wi-Fi scrambler is more important than your gun. Protect it at all costs. If it breaks, he will see you.”
Each of them had the device attached to their shoulder. It sent out an individual IP address. When Tank Major Janis received the address, it would vector the vicinity of the transmission and blur his vision to it, blinding him to the location. Without it, they would be demons, just like the rest. With it, at the very most, they would be an eye protein floating past his vision.
They had an extra scrambler for their prize, the King Sleeper. Their transport, parked one mile away, had a more powerful version just in case the giant wandered past the border of trees and found the truck parked at their pre-chosen exit point.
A red light blinked above them and the screen switched to a thirty second count down.
“Opening the bay,” the pilot said in that detached pilot way.
Xan and the others turned on their oxygen and gripped the handholds near their seats. The bay door opened and the atmosphere around them became so hostile that without their jumpsuits, their blood would boil.
“Go! Go! Go!”
One after another, the team dove out of the plane and into the quiet of space. Xan was the last to go. There was no oxygen at this altitude and in his field of view he could see the entire earth and the black it floated in. A GPS tracker in his visor pinpointed their destination. Right now, they were slightly over the Atlantic Ocean. With the spin of the earth, by the time they landed, they would be one mile from the base.
Xan felt like he wasn’t moving. He rolled over. The plane was already a silver dot streaking across space. He realized that while the plane was getting the hell out of there, it wasn’t going up any higher. He was falling.
He and his team descended at six hundred miles per hour. There was no flap in their suit, no push from air, no sensation other than sight as the earth got closer.
Xan began to feel resistance as they entered the thin atmosphere. They were dropping until eight thousand feet, where the parachute would automatically deploy. His team was in a halo formation. They didn’t need any strays.
The wind noise rose to a whipping roar around his helmet. It would be another eight minutes before they deployed their chutes.
“Check,” Xan said. They had broken into the atmosphere.
“Check,” each soldier said around him, indicating they were fine.
The moon was nearly full and that gave Xan and his team enough light to see the white plumes of clouds approaching. They looked solid, and before impact, Xan closed his eyes for a moment, the old brain ignoring the new brain’s knowledge that it was water vapor. It took just a few seconds to get to the other side and then they were looking at earth, their GPS coordinate now directly below them, but completely covered in black.
Their chutes deployed and each person felt the rip of deceleration as their parachutes grabbed at the air.
Xan couldn’t see land. Instead he saw a clearer vision of what they saw on the plane. It looked like they were floating into a volcano. A ruptured gas main was a geyser, spewing a half-mile ribbon of flame and smoke into the air.
“Stay on course,” Xan said. They had no visual on their DZ, but the GPS showed them the way. They entered the toxic black ceiling.
The noxious cloud broke two hundred feet from the ground. In its place was an oily haze. They landed one mile west of the base, detached their chutes and gathered in the cover of forest. They shrugged off their spent oxygen tanks.
“Turn the map on,” Xan said. The air was so thick it felt like he was breathing through a straw. The GPS map on their helmet visors zoomed in to a detailed map of their surroundings. It showed them in relation to their destination and each soldier in relation to each other. It pointed them directly to the King Sleeper.
“Avoid engaging the enemy. They should never know we’re here,” Xan said. The soldiers nodded.
“You understand the priority,” Xan said. The team had been briefed: if any of them got shot and couldn’t keep up, they would be euthanized. If they were trapped with the King Sleeper, they must kill the boy and then themselves.
Their silence was agreement.
“For China,” Xan said. They moved through the forest toward the base. Even from a mile away, they could hear anguished screams.
= = =
Glass was in the bunker, navigating through the gigantic round air ducts that were laced throughout the facility. When Janis went berserk, Glass quickly grabbed a submachine gun and night vision goggles. Within a fifty-foot radius around him, Janis was death. But not above. He had no projectile weaponry. Glass registered this and scurried up into the ventilation system like a rat.
The vents were dark and now the hallways were as well: Janis had destroyed the power grid. Glass flicked on the night vision goggles. The vents were large enough for Glass to move hunched over. They were thick enough that he didn’t worry about falling through. He moved quickly and quietly and with intent.
His mission wasn’t survival. It was to protect the King Sleeper. From above, Glass had watched Janis’s rampage. Nearly everyone was dead, horribly so. But the King Sleeper had to survive.
He got to the King Sleeper’s chamber. The Data Core was dark and so was the rest of the room. The King Sleeper was still there. His little body squirmed in his shackles like a newborn waking up from a long nap. Without being linked in, the King Sleeper would wake. The world he inhabited had disappeared.
Glass was at least eight stories above the floor. He looked for a place where he could exit the vent and climb down. He saw a vent near the Data Core.
He worked his way through the duct over to it and quietly popped open the vent, and pulled it in. He looked down. Fuck, he thought. This was a one-way trip. Once he dropped down, there was no way to get back up. He couldn’t sling the boy over his shoulder and climb eighty feet up the Core. He would either have to hide with the boy or hope that Janis leaves the area. Neither were great options. Janis had night vision, he could see just as clearly as Glass could now. And apparently everything he saw pissed him off.
Glass gripped the edge of the opening and leaned outside with his legs coiled. After a silent three count, he jumped to the closest scaffolding. He made it. He pulled himself in and worked his way toward a large bracket that held the huge glass tube in place. He bellied up to the Core and shuffled his way around it as if he was on the window ledge of a skyscraper. On the opposite side was a large coolant pump. It was ten feet down and a good jump away. He lunged for it and when he hit, its thin metal case shattered the silence. He froze. In the distance he heard someone plead for their life. The room shuddered from Janis’s answer.
Faster.
He hopped down as deft as a gymnast. The boy was nearly awake. Glass began unhooking him from the Data Crusher.
= = =
Xan and his team moved quickly through the base, heading directly for the bunker located on the northeast side. Xan was in awe. The Tank Major had only been in the hallucinogenic stage of the program for three hours and already the majority of the base was in ruins. It looked like the giant had quickly gone for the utilities—power and gas. The exploded gas main was like a sliver of the sun that had been brought to earth. The team tried to stay in the shadows, but the main wouldn’t allow it. The fire followed their every step as if it were aware of their motives.
Remains of people were scattered throughout their footpath. Like shit at a dog park, Xan would avoid the leftovers of a hand just to step into a la
rge intestine ejected from a crushed carcass. Xan had counted fifty dead, but that was just in front of him. All around, in his periphery he saw the ragged remains of soldiers and staff.
The Tank Major had found hydraulshocks. Two of the buildings looked like they had been shelled from above, the telltale sign of this weapon, from the reports Xan had recovered. A Humvee with a mounted turret was torn in half and hammered down into scrap. The hydraulshock, just like a bomb, created a shockwave from its lightning fast movement and the shifting of mass through the air. Soldiers grinned up at Xan with their faces completely peeled off from the wind shear.
They saw the bunker. Blast doors designed to withstand an indirect nuclear strike were torn off their hinges.
Xan saw no one alive but he felt their presence. They were in hiding. Up in trees, underneath rubble, cowering under the force of nature that was unleashed, that they thought they could control.
His team made it to the bunker doors without incident. The dark gaping hole dared them to come in and they took the dare without blinking. It was their mission. The elevator lift was working, but it would take too long and be too conspicuous. They took the stairs down into the unknown.
“No guns, unless absolutely necessary. He will see and register live fire,” Xan whispered into his comm.
The GPS switched to map mode and used Wi-Fi access points to determine their location. When Xan got to the bottom, he immediately turned right and they headed directly toward the King Sleeper’s quarters, a half a mile away.
The bunker was a simple layout, but gigantic in its scope. The hallway was over one hundred feet tall and nearly twice as wide. The rooms that jutted off this artery were massive too, some approaching the size of airport hangars. In all of them were bodies. Some vibrated with last gasps of cellular life. Some open and closed their hands. None made a sound.
Xan had a hard stomach, but even then, he almost gagged when he saw a woman whose upper and lower body had been hyphenated with her organs.
He tore her in half.
They heard the giant and all of them became statues. It sounded like a diesel hammer rhythmically driving a pile into the ground. He was walking.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 23
