The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “No. The suit is highly radioactive. You wouldn’t be able to be with them. You’d be a weapon, John. The most powerful man in the history of the world. For your safety and theirs, they wouldn’t be able to be around you,” Dr. Lindo said.

  “No way,” Raimey said. He turned to General Boen. “What were you thinking, Earl? Do you really think I’d leave my family for this? Bomb the fucking place.”

  “WE CAN’T!” Boen said. “Not with the King Sleeper. I know what I’m asking, John.”

  “I don’t think you do. After all of this, you get to go back to your ranch,” Raimey said.

  “Your wife has cancer,” Evan said. The room went quiet. John’s face crumbled with emotions, blindsided by the non sequitur.

  “What are you talking about?” Raimey said. He looked sick.

  “She went to the doctor a week ago. They did blood work. Abnormal proteins were found that indicate pancreatic cancer cells,” Evan said.

  “No, you’re not serious. You’re fucking with me. You motherfucker, how cruel are you?” Raimey said. He turned to General Boen, but Boen’s head was down.

  “Earl? Earl?!” Raimey said.

  “I spoke with the doctor to confirm, John,” the General said. He couldn’t look into his eyes. “It’s true. They have to do more tests to know the stage, but it’s true.”

  “People beat it,” Dr. Lindo said. “But the military insurance doesn’t cover all treatment options.”

  John was silent. His head hung like it was broken.

  “John, we know you’re signing your life away. That’s why Evan used Eric. But we have it from the President that your wife will get the best treatment, regardless of cost. They will have a military pension for the rest of their lives. And your daughter can go to any school from now through college and it will be paid in full by the United States government out of respect for your sacrifice,” General Boen said.

  “How much for the pension?” Raimey asked weakly.

  “Triple what you are currently receiving,” Boen replied.

  John let out a defeated laugh. “You really know how to put someone in a corner.” He looked up at all of them. “Lucky for you all the bad shit in my life, huh?”

  No one replied. They all stared at their feet.

  “How long do I have to decide?” Raimey asked.

  “Now, John. We have to know the status of the King Sleeper,” General Boen said. “You have no idea how important this is. I’m so sorry it has to be this way. You know I love you, Tiffany, and Vanessa.”

  “I know, Earl. I’m sorry for getting angry at you. You’re a good man.” Tears rolled down John’s face. “They’ll be taken care of for life?”

  Dr. Lindo nodded.

  “She’ll get the best care, regardless of the cost?”

  General Boen looked him in the eye. “The best that money can buy.”

  “Oh, God. God. Please. Fine. Fine. Take me away, do what you have to, but take care of my family.”

  Doctors and technicians burst into the room and took Raimey out of his chair. He was put on a gurney and wheeled out.

  Boen glared at Evan and pointed to the surveillance monitor. There were hundreds of bodies on the screen. “This is your fault, Evan. Keeping the boy a SECRET?! The blood’s on your hands.”

  Boen didn’t wait for a response. He ran after Raimey.

  A surgery that should take two weeks was going to be done overnight. A training period that normally would take one month would be done on the train. Raimey headed into the unknown with General Boen at his side. The General cursed God as they wheeled this broken, proud soldier away from his family, away from any semblance of a normal life.

  After the doors closed, Cynthia stood up to leave.

  “Where are you going? I need you to help,” Evan said. Cynthia spun around and slapped him. He reeled back and put a hand to his face. He glanced between her and Sabot, who had quietly moved away from the wall.

  “Ok, I deserved that,” he said. He wiggled his jaw. “But these things still need to get done.”

  “A boy,” Cynthia said.

  “Yes,” Evan replied.

  “A boy!” she screamed and went after him again. Sabot intervened.

  “I didn’t make him!” Evan said. His upper lip trembled. “What would you do if you were me? Huh? You say to yourself you’d leave him be, but no way. Not you. Look at the way you protect your inventions. If you died, half the shit wouldn’t work because it’s gotta be yours.”

  “You reverse engineered a Data Core,” she accused.

  “Yes, I did! And I’d do it again! You want the common good all on your terms like you’re some pious judge and jury. Well guess what? God didn’t anoint you to divvy out crumbs how you see fit. You’re a part of the problem.”

  They calmed down.

  “What do you need?” she finally said.

  “We need to know what happened to Janis and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen to Raimey,” Evan replied.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll have it by tomorrow.” She and Sabot left Evan alone in the room.

  = = =

  When Cynthia got back to MindCorp she immediately had a military Sleeper send her all implant maintenance records of Tank Major Janis. A Tank Major technician used a maintenance computer daily to analyze the interaction between the brain, the software implant, and the battle chassis. Its most fundamental purpose was to monitor the latency of physical commands and return sensory input. If the analysis came back within spec, the technician had done their job and as far as they were concerned, the Tank Major was functioning properly. It was no different than a patient going in for a routine medical exam. If everything checked out, the doctor would say the patient was healthy, not dive deeper to see if they had cancer.

  If Janis had gone insane—and all signs pointed to yes—then Cynthia was betting dollars to donuts the software implant was the root. A part of her wondered if she was to blame, if she had omitted some crucial bit of code that allowed the brain and the implant to co-exist peacefully. She tossed that notion aside. If the code was corrupt, someone nefarious had found a way in and done a little tinkering. It was the only possibility. She lay back in her chair and closed her eyes. Code scrolled up in front of her filling her mind and senses. She started at day one. On day ninety-three she found a deviation. A line of instruction, miniscule in the sea of programming code, was sending a GPS ping in a timed interval. She checked the date. It was the day the Western Curse took over O’Hare.

  Someone HAD gotten in. Lines upon millions of lines scrolled past her as she floated in front of it. It felt like her own thoughts, but bracketed and returned and terse in the programming language that was as native to her as English. One week after the GPS pinging code, she found a more complicated subset. It turned the battle chassis’s cameras on. She found pages of code that hacked into the base’s Wi-Fi network and its on-site servers. Another command uploaded information. She couldn’t tell what had been uploaded off-site, it wasn’t saved to memory, but she could tell that it had been sent. Espionage.

  She rang up Evan.

  “Yes?” His voice was shaky. She pictured him huddled in the corner of a dark room. Good.

  “I’ve found a rogue, stepped series of code that was inserted into Janis’s implant,” she said. “He was compromised.”

  “How?” Lindo asked. He was instantly more composed. “O’Hare!” he said with a flash of insight.

  “Yep. The first deviation came the day of that mission,” she said.

  “How long will it take for you to understand exactly what happened?” Evan asked.

  “It came easier than I expected. Two hours,” she said.

  “Boen and I will come to MindCorp.” He hung up.

  Two hours later, Cynthia outlined to General Boen and Lindo the subtle progression to Eric Janis’s insanity.

  “This was a complicated and very well executed act of war,” Cynthia said. “Janis was hacked and the code was uploaded during the battl
e at O’Hare.”

  “It was the Western Curse?” Boen said in disbelief. Cynthia and Evan exchanged doubtful looks.

  “I think that group is a pawn to some other interest,” Cynthia offered. “To hack into the Tank Major itself is a huge technological hurdle. To do so and then plant a program so sophisticated that it inserts itself into the firmware code of the Mindlink without causing any malfunction other than the ones they desired.” She shook her head. “There’s just no way. I don’t care how well funded the terrorist group is.” She continued. “They used a three stage code. The first stage was GPS tracking. Very simple and useful. Tank Major Janis was pinging GPS satellites, indicating his location.”

  Code scrolled down a large screen. Evan read it like a child reads The Cat in the Hat. Boen’s eyes got tired and he focused on Cynthia.

  “The second stage used the cameras built into Janis for surveillance. It uploaded the data to the Internet.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lindo said shaking his head.

  “The third stage was what did Janis in. It caused the Tank Major to experience a deep sleep and then the program—Evan, do you see this?” She outlined some code on the screen. “When he was asleep, it uploaded and installed the rest of the program for the third stage.”

  “To drive him insane,” Lindo said. The beauty of the Mindlink was used against Janis.

  Cynthia nodded. “It’s hard to say exactly how it functioned, but there is an uncompressed audio file that activates whenever he detects movement.”

  Cynthia cued the track. It sounded like monstrous teeth chattering in the cold. Everyone squirmed from the unpleasantness of the noise. Cynthia turned it off.

  “There’s also specific code to cause vision to bloom, and certain color spectrums are altered, especially white.”

  Cynthia was done.

  “This is good detective work, but how does this help us right now?” General Boen asked. It was a question, not an argument. Lindo snapped away from his thoughts and turned to Cynthia.

  “Raimey needs to be a closed system,” he said.

  “I’ve already begun modifying the implant program,” she replied. She had predicted the necessary changes. “I’ve eliminated all wireless functionality and I’m building a closed system maintenance program. Tank Major Raimey will be unhackable and completely autonomous.”

  = = =

  The anesthesia took Raimey into a deep, dark dream. He stood on a cliff, looking down into a valley. Small explosions rippled across it. The muzzle flash of ten thousand weapons cracked and popped like fireworks. Two masses converged on each other. A major battle was at its climax.

  He looked down on them unconcerned. The war below held his interest, but he felt no fear. He knew they could do him no harm. Over the massive battlefield, an oily gray cloud spun like a cyclone. It stretched for the horizon, but a crescent slash of a red sun escaped its cover and cast the battlefield in long, deep shadows.

  He was a metal titan down on the battlefield, charging the enemy. There were other giants running alongside him and he recognized them all: they were dead friends and soldiers, men and women he had seen get rippled with gunfire or blown to pieces by an IED. And they had not healed. They were encased in giant mechanized bodies, but their faces were red and raw, eyes out, jaws hanging and though they were running toward an unknown enemy ahead, they all looked to him with a hunger, like he had an answer they desperately needed to hear.

  “How many are we going to kill today?” Janis said to his left. Raimey turned and Janis was there, wearing the battle chassis, just like the others. Raimey didn’t know the intricacies of the chassis and so his subconscious didn’t either. Instead the large frames of the Tank Majors consisted of an absence of light. A visualized form of void and nothingness.

  “I’m coming for you,” Raimey said as they charged forward, unconcerned with the threat downfield, more interested in talking amongst each other, death dealers understanding that what lay at their feet at the end of the battle was meant to die. If not, wouldn’t God have intervened?

  Janis smiled, but his jaw split in half right down the middle. Each side fell wide, like two limp flower petals. His tongue was an eel emerging from coral.

  “You’re going to end me,” Janis said. He shouldn’t have been able to talk, but tell that to the dream. His split jaw slapped down against the top of his metal chest. Droplets of drool gleamed on the dark frame, reflecting the bloody sun.

  “I have no choice,” Raimey said. The dead around him, all giants, echoed his words. “They had no choice.” That’s what they wanted to hear. They had no choice.

  Janis laughed. It was syrupy. He was choking on his own tongue. “You can’t say that now. When you were young and in the ghetto, that’d pass. But not now.”

  “But what about Tiffany and Vanessa? You loved them, too. I’m doing this for them! They can go on to be something. They can go on to live again!” Raimey said.

  Janis gave Raimey a look like he just didn’t get it.

  “Who do you think we came here to kill, John?” he said.

  Janis turned back toward their enemies and Raimey followed suit. In front of him were mothers and fathers, children and grandparents. They were huddled in groups. They were the families of the dead soldiers that Raimey ran with. Each giant was here to kill what was left of their legacy: their children’s hopes and dreams, who prayed for their safe return. A parent’s mortal wish for their children to live long, happy, healthy lives; to never see their gravestone. A wife or husband’s desire to get back their soul mate, who loved them at their worst and their best; a whole, halved, that could never grow back.

  Raimey recognized Janis’s ex-wife, who only left after years of therapy. Janis hid behind humor. It was the callus that allowed him to go into battle never knowing if he would come out. She looked up at Janis and held out a flower. He greeted her by crushing her down, first with a scissor punch from his massive fist and then with his feet, jumping on her like she was a trampoline. His other family members did nothing. Each of them held out a flower, or a picture, or their arms for a hug.

  Raimey turned to the rest of the Tank Majors as they rolled through their families in an orgy of death. The dark black shapes of the dead Tank Majors were covered in rivulets of blood, thick with tissue. Children were matted into the ground like tufts of grass. Grandparents were torn in half, their entrails stretched like an accordion. And all of the giants screamed in unison that they were doing what they had to do. That they did it for them. All the while, tearing the ones they loved to pieces.

  Raimey knew what was ahead of him. He turned and saw Tiffany and Vanessa ten yards away, his long strides covering the distance in four steps. They knelt on the ground in each other’s arms. Tiffany had no hair. Vanessa looked older and tired.

  “We just want you back,” they said.

  Raimey raised his hand up in the air, eclipsing them from the dusk that would not die.

  “I’m doing this for you,” he said.

  And then his arm swung down.

  = = =

  Raimey’s eyes shot open. He tried to move. He heard a whirling and a deep vibration hurt his teeth.

  “Whoa!” someone said. Raimey couldn’t see anyone above him. For the second time this year, he stared at the sickly white of fluorescent lights. He tried to move his hands and legs—he could feel them—but they felt nailed to the ground.

  “Let me up,” Raimey said, still disoriented by his dream. The last image echoed in his head, the shadow of his fist about to kill all that he loved. “Let me up!” Again, something sounded like a chainsaw revving.

  “Shut him down! Shut the diagnostics down!” It was Evan Lindo. The whirling sound spun down and suddenly he couldn’t feel anything. Evan came into view.

  “John, you just woke up from surgery. We need to put you back under.” Evan looked at someone out of John’s view, clearly pissed off. “You’re not supposed to be up yet. We need to keep you anesthetized because of t
he pain. Do you understand?”

  “Tiffany, Vanessa,” Raimey said.

  “They’re in Florida. General Boen has sent soldiers to inform them of what has happened.”

  “Alive?” Raimey asked. He felt the drugs hit and Evan began to float down a shrinking tunnel.

  “Yes, John. They’re alive. Calm down. Go to sleep. You’ll be up soo—”

  That was the last Raimey heard as he drifted into a state just north of coma, a place mercifully without dreams.

  = = =

  General Boen had observed the multiple procedures that turned his friend into a weapon. Throughout the process he had slept in the waiting room like a worried husband.

  The last of the surgeries was done. Raimey’s vertebrae had been fused to rigid bars that ran the length of his shortened spine. He had been mounted into the gelatinous suspension chamber that was itself mounted on shock absorbing rails in the battle chassis.

  General Boen sat on a locker room bench while Evan cleaned up after the final surgery.

  “How the hell is he going to be operational tomorrow?” Boen asked. The procedure was identical to what had been done to Janis, only accelerated. “The spinal fusion won’t even be set then.”

  “Do you have another option?” Evan said through the shower curtain. Boen could see his feet and the slight tinge of pink from Raimey’s blood.

  “Don’t be a smartass,” Boen replied. At seventy he could still break this twerp. “I’ve only been cooperative, haven’t I? It’s a valid question.”

  Evan came out with a towel around his waist.

  “I’m on edge, sorry,” Evan said. He took another towel and dried his hair. “We’ll probably have to go in after the mission and repair the damage. He’ll be on a drug cocktail that will numb the pain, but still keep him aware. It’s basically morphine and crank.”

  “Hmm,” Boen grunted. He didn’t like this. He had known Raimey too long to treat him like a guinea pig.

  “Janis could kill him,” Boen said. Evan laughed. He walked into a changing room.

  “Not likely, even with John doped up. John’s battle chassis is light years ahead of Janis’s.”

  “How can that be?” Boen said.