The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  And I have no fear.

  I lost that long ago. If I kill the Devil, than all of this will be mine, and maybe, just maybe, it can be made into something better.

  Eric Janis, the first Tank Major, turned from the corner, a weary look in his eyes. He stepped over and around the cake of murdered demons. Their mouths chattered in applause for him standing up to their master. Or they cheered for their master, who had finally come to avenge their brutal end.

  = = =

  Twenty years ago Raimey had trained at this base. But everything he remembered was gone. In its place were rubble, fire, thick toxic smoke, and the smell of the dead.

  “The southwest corner of the base is destroyed,” Raimey said.

  “Roger that. The bunker is at the center of the base,” General Boen said. “If you see anyone alive, let us know, but don’t divert from the mission.”

  Raimey slowed to walking speed. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Visibility was fine, the black smoke hung above him in a ceiling. The buildings were trash heaps.

  “Help,” he heard someone say. It was a stage whisper, the sound of a dying man.

  “Got a survivor somewhere in the mess hall,” Raimey said.

  “Got it, we have a team moving toward you. They will not go into the base until that area is clear of the threat,” Boen said. “Keep that in mind, John. I know Eric is a friend, but there are people there that need us.”

  “I know,” Raimey said.

  Raimey weaved through the wreckage toward the center of the base. Two Humvees were rolled onto their sides, the bodies of men crushed in and around them. A small subway train used as a feeder into the larger rails was toppled off the tracks. A fountain of electrical sparks crackled and arced against the cars.

  More bodies. Bodies everywhere. Spent rifle casing around some, useless against giants. Raimey heard moans from another building and called it in. He saw the bunker. The massive doors, taller than a bus is long and wide enough for four, were torn outward.

  Janis emerged from its darkness. Raimey began to cry.

  “You’re on fire,” Janis said to Raimey. They were fifty yards from each other. Raimey didn’t recognize him. His face was thin and weak, like a cancer was winning.

  “Have you come to kill me?” Janis asked. Raimey wasn’t sure what to do. The question seemed directed at him, but he was staring past Raimey.

  “I don’t want to. Eric, it’s me. It’s John,” Raimey said.

  Janis laughed, but it was the laugh found in asylums: a sad, hollow, cackle.

  “Yeah. You’re John.” Janis walked completely out of the tunnel and circled Raimey. “You’d use him against me, wouldn’t you?” Janis hissed. The Devil had come in a suit like his. It was black and bigger. Flames rode its arms and shoulders. Inside the helmet, Eric saw the Devil stare back at him with hot coal eyes and the stretched, chattering grin. The Devil came prepared for war.

  “Eric, you’re sick. You have to stop. You have to see what you’ve done,” Raimey said. Janis stepped on the dead as he circled, cracking their already broken bones without taking his eyes away from Raimey.

  “They were demons, they had to die,” Janis said. “Don’t turn this on me. You brought me here.”

  “Eric, they’ll make me kill you,” Raimey pleaded. “Get face down on the ground, trust me. We can figure this out. It’s not your fault.”

  “Not my fault,” Janis said slowly. “Not my fault. I wake up here, all I’ve done is my duty. I know it’s not my fault! But it was a mistake to bring me here. You think you’re the only fallen angel!” Janis screamed. “I’ve fallen, too!”

  Janis sprinted at Raimey and raised his fists.

  Please forgive me, Raimey thought. He pulled back and waited for his old friend, long gone, to get in range. Raimey braced himself for the hydraulshock.

  WHA-WHAM!

  He felt the acceleration. Going through his friend was like going through a hologram. Suddenly, he stood fifteen feet past where he had last been. He heard pieces of metal hitting the ground around him. Janis’s battle chassis had exploded into thirty chunks and they were falling back to earth. Five million foot-pounds hit Janis in the chest, cracking through his two-foot armor like it was an eggshell and scrambling everything underneath.

  John turned to his fallen friend. A section of the torso just beneath the helmet was still intact. Raimey ran to it and knelt down.

  Janis stared at him with wide eyes. His mouth quivered. Somehow he was still alive. He looked at Raimey, his eyes suddenly sane. The Mindlink had shorted out.

  “I’m better now,” he said. His face shook in death throes. “Thank you, John.”

  Inside the metal head, the real one exhaled for the last time.

  “I’m so sorry, Eric. I’m so sorry. We were supposed to do this together,” Raimey said. The tears hit the inside of his face shield and pooled into the center, bending his best friend’s open mouth into a joker smile.

  Raimey sobbed and stayed by his friend while the teams came in to retrieve the dead. The King Sleeper was missing. Raimey heard it over the comm. He didn’t care. He sat by his friend and thought of nothing but Eric Janis’s life. They had grown up together, they had laughed together, they had shared family pains together, and now they had died together. One heart kept beating on, that’s all.

  = = =

  After four hours, they finally got Raimey back to the train. He stood in front of his seat.

  “I want to see my family,” Raimey said.

  “John, we talked about this. It’s dangerous. You’re radioactive and the emotional trauma . . .” Lindo started.

  “Save it. I just killed my best friend. And you need me more than I need you. I’m fine dying. I wish I would. I need to see them. I need them to know how much I love them. I’m not doing anything until I do,” Raimey said.

  “I’ll set it up, John,” General Boen said over the comm.

  “You promise, Earl?” Raimey said.

  “With everything I have,” Boen said.

  John stared at Evan in a way that made Evan step back. And then Raimey sat down and felt his body lock into the chair. He was so tired and he was in pain and he was mourning. All he wanted was to feel Vanessa’s hand against his skin.

  Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.

  John hated that saying. But he knew the answer.

  Chapter 17

  Xan barely survived. When the giant approximated his location and fired the hydraulshock, the backsplash of debris crushed his body. Eight compound fractures splintered through his skin and an artery ruptured. He almost bled out on the way to the transport. When they got him to the vehicle, a soldier reached into the open wound and found the artery. It had retreated deep inside his thigh. They clamped it off and he was in and out of consciousness the rest of the trip. He felt the truck bouncing onto a dirt road. He heard the plane on takeoff.

  He woke up in the infirmary at his base with tubes snaked up every hole. Doctors and nurses worked and spoke in the room, but Xan was confused, he couldn’t hear them. Finally a doctor noticed he was awake and wrote on a notepad: “Your eardrums are ruptured.”

  Xan tried to speak but he chewed on his breathing tube. The doctors discussed in silence and then pulled it out.

  “I’m deaf?” Xan said too loud. The doctor nodded yes. “Where’s the boy?”

  Minutes later, Xan’s head scientist on the project came into the room.

  “We have the boy under the same drug cocktail the Americans used,” Dr. Kim said. “We understand the dosages and frequency. The boy is in a lucid coma.”

  All of this was dictated on a screen for Xan. His deafness was frustrating, but he didn’t have time to feel self-pity.

  “We found a command log built into the boy’s mind,” Dr. Kim said. “It was implanted there as a checklist, a ‘to do’ list. We’re going through that now to understand all that he’s done, and more importantly, what he’s capable of doing. He’s told u
s some, but he’s confused. He asks for his father.”

  “He’s conscious?” Xan asked.

  “He can be communicated with, yes,” Dr. Kim replied, his words quickly appearing on the screen.

  “Can I speak to him?”

  “We don’t know if that’s safe. He’s contained in a construct that he thinks is real,” Dr. Kim replied. “He has no idea what he’s done. He just thinks he’s sick.”

  “You cannot command him to do complex tasks right now, correct?” Xan replied.

  Dr. Kim nodded.

  “If we can’t use him like they did, what’s the point?” Xan said. “I’ll go in. This is my project, you have my contingency instructions as approved by our President.”

  An armored caravan took Xan to the secretly built Colossal Core. Xan began the build after his first contact with Harold Renki. It had taken over two years and while there was still more to be done, the Data Core functioned properly. Even then, Xan had seen what lay ahead. He had pictured rows upon rows of Chinese Sleepers around the massive Core protecting their online infrastructure. They were the soldiers of the new world.

  The temporary Core Xan had used with the Forced Autistic was built in a hangar. This was built properly underground. It was deep in Beijing, intentionally among the hundreds of millions of people, buried underneath the innocent so that any retaliation would be weighed and measured. The U.S. would not go to war. If the situation were reversed, neither would China. They would compromise. The threat of the King Sleeper’s immense power would drive the world sane. Xan didn’t want war. He wanted a reset button so the world would have a future.

  Xan saw the Colossal Core alive for the first time when the elevator down revealed its glowing, pulsing brilliance. For a moment he felt no pain, the silence was a gift, as he basked in the glow of China’s salvation. He was wheeled over to the boy. Justin was mounted into the crucifix, with the metal shield covering his face and the large blue fiber optic tubes coursing data directly into his brain.

  To the right of the boy was the massive Data Core. It stretched to the ceiling. Behind the crucifix and the boy was the Data Crusher, where the boy was fed the relevant raw data from the Core and where the boy could manipulate that data in return. The Data Crusher was a massive hard drive that spun at fifty thousand rotations per minute. It was an engineering feat more impressive because the hard drive plates were ten feet in diameter. The whole system weighed eight tons. Two tons consisted of a concrete base designed to keep the Crusher from rocking itself off the foundation like an unbalanced washing machine.

  Data was laid on the plates and manipulated real time, only to be pulled off a thousandth of a microsecond later and fed back into the fiber optic core. The process was transparent to anyone in the world.

  When they wheeled Xan to the boy, he felt the powerful thrum of the Data Crusher. They raised his chair and put the Mindlink on him.

  “Are you ready sir?” Dr. Kim asked. There was no monitor, but Xan knew what he said.

  “Do it,” Xan replied. He felt the pull of the Mindlink and then the room around him disappeared.

  = = =

  Xan floated in black.

  “Dad?” a boy asked. By his voice, he was nearby.

  “No, I’m not your dad,” Xan said. In cyberspace he could hear. He didn’t realize how much he already missed it.

  “Who are you?”

  “They call me Xan.”

  “Is that your name?”

  “No. My birth name is Caro Shin.”

  “Why do you go by Xan?”

  “Shin is Korean and I live in China. Status is important here. Xan was the name I used since I was a boy. Why is it so dark?”

  “I don’t know.” The boy was scared. “It went black some time ago. Are you a doctor?”

  “I’m a scientist,” Xan said.

  “I’m still in my coma?”

  “Dr. Kim can you hear me?” Xan asked.

  “Yes, we’re here,” Dr. Kim replied out of the ether.

  “Build a construct; make it pleasant,” Xan said.

  The sun broke on the horizon and rose quickly over distant hills, each one covered in luscious green. A river glistened ahead of Xan, the flowing water and serene surroundings an ideal of the real thing. The boy was to his right, twenty feet away.

  “Your name is Justin, isn’t it?” Xan asked. The boy nodded, uncertain.

  “I’ll leave if you want me to, but we need to talk,” Xan said. “Would you walk with me to the river? Have you ever seen one?”

  Xan walked toward the river. He could hear the rustle of the trees, the chirping of birds, the pleasant white noise of the water flowing away. The boy kept his distance as they walked to the river front.

  Xan sat down, cross-legged. He found a smooth stone and chucked it into the river to hear it splash. He let out a long sigh.

  The boy stood.

  “I wouldn’t trust me either. I wouldn’t trust anyone, anymore,” Xan said. “How long have you been here?”

  “Two days. The doctor and my dad said I was close to being healthy, that my brain was responding to the treatment.” The boy’s face crumbled. “It’s not true is it? Are you going to tell me I’m not getting better?”

  “Worse. But I need you to listen and be tough. Can you do that?” Xan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember when you first got online and flew to the moon? You don’t know it, but what you did wasn’t supposed to happen. The program was specifically restricted from doing that. YOU made that happen. You re-programmed the program.”

  “I just flew.”

  “Your conscious mind, yes. But not your subconscious. Do you know what your subconscious is?”

  The boy nodded.

  “For whatever reason, Justin, it allows you to do amazing things online. You are the only person to ever hack into a MindCorp Data Core. It was considered impossible. Teams of Sleepers have tried and the general consensus was that the Cores were unhackable. You shook down a Colossal Core in two minutes. And the military noticed and they found you. You are the most powerful Sleeper in the world.”

  “I hit my head riding an ATV,” Justin said. Xan shook his head sympathetically.

  “No, you didn’t. That memory was put in your head just like this river. Justin. You have been unconscious for over six months in a medically induced coma. And you’ve been used by the United States as a weapon.”

  “I don’t understand,” Justin said. His right hand slapped against his thigh. Xan had read about this nervous tic.

  “You don’t have to right now. I’m a high up official for the Chinese military. We took you from a military base in the U.S. because they had you manipulating our economy and other nasty things. Evil things.”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Justin said again. He was a genius, but he was twelve and he felt like everything in his head was a lie.

  “I’m going to bring you out of this medically induced state. You are going to wake up in a military base with a bunch of people that look like me. Are you ready for that?”

  “How do I know it’s real?” Justin asked. He looked lost.

  “Take a rock near you and cut yourself, and then decide it should heal,” Xan said. Justin looked at him reluctantly. Finally he took a rock and scrapped it across his forearm. A line of blood budded on his skin.

  “Think it healed,” Xan said and Justin did. The small cut vanished.

  “When you wake up and do that trick, think all you want, but that won’t happen.” Xan stood up.

  “Why are you helping me?” Justin asked.

  “Because I can’t make you do the things I want you to do,” Xan said. “You need to know the truth and then you can decide. You are a weapon, Justin, a unique and masterful work of God and your life will never be normal. Either by your choice, or by force, your fate in this world has already been sealed. I know it’s a heavy thing to hear, you’re a boy, but it is what it is.”

  “You’re leavin
g?” Justin said.

  “Yes. You’ll see me very soon. The real me.” Xan glanced at the sky. “Adjust the construct for real time.”

  “Yes, sir,” the ether said.

  “It will take ten hours to pull you out completely; the drugs are heavy sedatives with unique properties,” Xan said. “The time you feel now will be real. When this all starts to get blurry, just close your eyes and try to sleep.”

  “Xan, are you a good guy?” Justin asked.

  “You’re smart, Justin. I read that. China would think so. The U.S. would want me dead. I have hurt people for what I see as the greater good,” Xan said. “Is that a good enough answer?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Take this time to process what I told you,” Xan said and then he disappeared.

  = = =

  Xan woke up to silence. Dr. Kim was visibly angry and pulled a monitor over to Xan’s bedside.

  “You destroyed the false construct! We could have used that,” Dr. Kim wrote.

  Xan gestured with his good arm for Dr. Kim to come closer. When he did, Xan grabbed him with surprising strength and almost pulled him onto the bed. Xan’s eyes always looked the same.

  “The construct was broken. This is the only way to get the boy’s trust. Never scream at me. Understand?”

  Dr. Kim bowed repeatedly in subservience. Xan released him. His instincts told him he had done the right thing. The boy’s government had murdered his parents, taken him against his will, and used him under the auspice of a gross, inhumane lie. Children are children because they lack reason. They are children because they cannot control their emotions—anger the worst of all. Xan would only have to tell the boy the truth. No lies, no coercion, just hook up the Goliath and let him avenge his family against a David that had run out of stones.

  Xan closed his eyes and pictured the slow rolling river, and tried to feel its calm.

  = = =

  The sedative the U.S. had used and China had replicated was a predictable drug and it was ten hours on the nose when the boy opened his eyes and awoke to the world. When he started to fidget, Xan had him disconnected and moved to his quarters. The boy opened his eyes and saw the man he had spoken to by the river.