The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  Raimey ran toward the building to cut off Mohammed Jawal’s escape. A terrorist froze in front of him and fell backward, uselessly protecting himself with outstretched arms, his life flashing before him as a foot the size of two snow sleds eclipsed his sight. Raimey adjusted and missed the man’s body by inches. The Minors appeared out of the alleys and handled the rabble.

  Raimey tore around the building at twenty-five miles per hour. His hover-rovers led the way, and he could see the fleeing mass of men as they maneuvered through the alleys. They were a quarter mile away and approaching a vehicle. This section of the city was dilapidated and uniquely unpopulated. The buildings in front of him were unoccupied.

  “You see what I’m seeing?” Raimey said. An open comm was built into his helmet. Unlike Minors and new Tanks, it was not wired into his implant.

  Commander Boen’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Buildings are clear of civilians. Do what you have to do.”

  Raimey ignored the sharp turn of the alley and ran straight through the building in front of him. His speed dropped by one mile per hour, but he quickly recovered.

  = = =

  Mohammed heard the giant behind them. It sounded like they were being chased by a runaway train. He felt the dusk of his mortality in those sounds and prayed to live.

  “The truck! The truck!” a bodyguard yelled. One of them sprinted ahead to it.

  The truck was a last-resort vehicle. Mounted on a turret on the back was an old, but very functional, Mk 19 grenade launcher. The Mk 19 was belt-fed like a machine gun. Each grenade had enough velocity to puncture most armor and packed enough power to crater a five-meter hole in the ground. If a grenade hit a Minor, they would explode into oily rags.

  The bodyguard jumped into the turret and quickly fed the ammo belt into the grenade launcher. He racked the slide and aimed the barrel toward the sound of the approaching chaos.

  Mohammed and the others got to the truck. Mohammed was put into the back, sandwiched between two men. The driver got in, fired the truck up, and gunned it.

  Raimey exploded through the last building as they tore off. The man in the grenade launcher momentarily forgot his hand was on the trigger as the giant altered its vector to chase them. The giant’s foot slipped, but it put its massive arm down like a kickstand and kept its legs pumping. It righted itself and barreled toward them.

  “Fire!” Mohammed yelled. The gunner snapped out of his shock and squeezed the trigger.

  The Mk 19 had very low recoil and the shots landed true. They peppered Raimey, exploding against his chest, his arms and legs, in black and red fireballs.

  The giant was undeterred. He accelerated to his top speed of thirty miles per hour. But the truck was faster, and would gain ground in the straights. Raimey made up that ground in the corners, when the truck would have to follow the road and the massive man could blast straight through the buildings. Building after building toppled behind the fleeing vehicle as the bionic forced its seismic will.

  = = =

  The truck kept slipping away and Raimey couldn’t keep blowing through buildings—they were approaching a populated area. He had to knock these guys out of commission. In a populated area, civilian casualties would escalate into the thousands, and the chance of the terrorists’ escape would increase too.

  “How expensive are hover-rovers?” Raimey asked.

  “About twenty million a pop,” Boen said. “Why?”

  Boen, linked in to the hover-rover feed, grimaced when he saw why Raimey had asked.

  = = =

  As the giant faded into the background, Mohammed felt a granule of hope. Ahead was a very populated section of the city. He could see the bedheaded masses walking across the streets, shaking off the numbness of a day linked in, only to go back for more. He heard music echoing down the columned streets. The truck slid around a corner and the driver abruptly swerved.

  Dumpster divers, derelicts that foraged ahead of waste services, spilled into the street ahead, combing through dumpsters for anything that could be recycled. Like a pod of dolphins leading a schooner, they always announced an approaching garbage truck.

  The driver made a quick adjustment to avoid them, causing the top-heavy truck to sway violently, but he got it under control.

  “We lost him!” the driver said. Another mile and they would be deep into the massive city, buried under hundreds of stories and concrete. The dark streets and the disheveled millions would create the perfect camouflage—if they were on foot, anyway, rather than in a jeep with a grenade launcher on its back.

  The granule of hope grew, but they were still exposed as they careened down the street. They had to get to shelter and the underground in order to truly be safe.

  “We need to get out of the open,” Mohammed said. “Where can we change vehicles?” Vehicles were hard to find and conspicuous by nature.

  “We could hijack that garbage truck,” a bodyguard suggested. It was just up ahead. The driver was out of the truck, angrily throwing garbage back into the dumpster.

  Mohammed nodded. “Yes. Good.” It would be a perfect cover.

  The garbage man looked dumbfounded when they veered in front of him, but his surprise was quickly redirected overhead. Before the truck was fully stopped, a shadow rolled across its windshield. Mohammed’s driver leaned forward and looked to the sky just as the hover-rover swung past, arced up, and then accelerated into the windshield like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.

  The driver’s scream was cut off as the aerodynamic disc crushed through his and the other front passengers’ chests, separating their heads below the shoulder. The hover-rover slammed through into the back seat, where it minced Mohammed’s knees. The bodyguard to Mohammed’s right slumped, thick clumps of blood pulsing from his ears. Mohammed was pinned.

  The garbage truck hissed and groaned, reversing, getting the fuck out of Dodge. It bumped into something and stopped. The engine groaned for a second and the back of the truck rattled about. Raimey pushed past it, and with a screech, the wheels suddenly got traction and the truck shot back before the driver could slam on the brakes.

  “Watch your blind spot,” Raimey muttered.

  The gunner fired a barrage of grenades in one last hoorah before he saw either black or a sea of virgins. Black came first. Raimey was too close to the gunner, so when the grenades detonated, shell fragments ricocheted back and sliced the gunner’s skin. And then Raimey grabbed him in his giant fist and pitched him into a building. The gunner’s body slapped into the side of it like a ripe tomato and slowly slid down, leaving a trail of blood.

  Raimey slammed his fist down and destroyed the engine block. The front axle snapped, and the wheels curled into the wheel well. He ripped off the roof. Mohammed and the last surviving bodyguard stared up at him. Mohammed had a trigger in his hand.

  “Die, you devil. For Iran!” Mohammed thumbed the trigger. Ten pounds of C-4 located under the seat detonated in Mohammed Jawal’s last stand.

  The explosion vaporized Mohammed and his bodyguards and turned the car into shrapnel. Around Raimey, windows imploded and the front of the closest building crumbled. The garbage man jumped out of his truck and ran away screaming. The front of his truck was ablaze.

  Mohammed would have been disappointed: Raimey was completely unharmed. He walked out of the fire and waited for his team. A “cycler” came out of an alley.

  “What just happened, sir?”

  It was a boy, fifteen or so. Probably one of the few who couldn’t go online.

  “Just caught a bad guy.”

  The boy scanned the burning wreckage. “I don’t think he made it.”

  Two hours later, Raimey was on a plane back to South Africa. He planned to never come back.

  Chapter 1

  -2069-

  Roberto sat in his prison cell, uncertain. He rubbed his hands together, trying to figure it out while his cellmate, Jessop “Bones” Nixon, yammered in the background about his good fortune.

  “. . . mean,
come on! DNA? DNA got you off. You’re the luckiest motherfucker I know.” Roberto closed his eyes, hoping it would somehow do the same for his ears, but they stayed open, and his roomie’s tale of astonishment continued on.

  Roberto’s verdict had been overturned because of DNA evidence. They said he had been unjustly convicted of his crime, a double homicide two years before.

  Roberto ran this joint. He was forty-three now, twelve years into a life sentence. When he was sixteen, he and his crew had started like rats, working for the Italians. Two years later he had killed them all and taken over. He had taken that criminal network and grown it exponentially. The press called him “Big Baby,” but no one else did. It took five years to finally get him into the pen. Though the turncoats vanished before they could take the stand (many into an industrial-strength meat grinder), the prosecution finally got him. No matter. He ran New York from here, safe and sound. Under his leadership, the gang had vertically integrated into all aspects of society. His food delivery service even had a contract with the prison.

  And now he was told he was getting out.

  “Yo! The King is getting’ out, y’all!” Bones yelled through the bars. The block erupted.

  It didn’t make sense. In the background, Roberto heard the whooping and taunts as guards approached his cell. DNA didn’t make sense, because he was never the one who pulled the trigger anyway.

  The two guards flanked the jail cell and told Bones to get back. He did, eventually, after spitting in one of their faces.

  “That’ll come back to haunt you,” the guard said, wiping his face with his sleeve. To Roberto, he said, “All right, Big Baby, it’s time to leave the nest.”

  Roberto felt foreshadowing. Something wasn’t right. The last guard to call him “Big Baby” had ten guys run a train on him before they slit his throat.

  The guards stepped into the cell, unhappy with Roberto’s pace. One pulled out a baton. Roberto got up.

  The day before, he had asked to speak to his lawyer. They had said there was no need. He had asked to make a phone call, and even the guards on payroll said they couldn’t make it happen.

  Bones hugged him. “Miss you, bro.” Roberto half-heartedly hugged back. He walked out with the guards past the rows of cells, the whooping and cheering. If Big Baby, one of the most notorious criminal masterminds of the last twenty years, could get out on a technicality, maybe they could too.

  The cheers faded as they walked down the hallway. Ahead, through a set of double gates, the word “Administration” was printed on a placard. But instead, the guards took him to the right.

  “Don’t we need to go there?” he asked.

  The guards shook their heads. “It’s handled.”

  They took him down a long hallway that ended with a barred door. The rooms off to the sides were dark, unused.

  “Come on, man. What’s going on?” Roberto asked.

  The guards were quiet.

  Through the barred door was another length of hallway. Unlit. A smudged cataract of light came through a tiny window in a door at the far end—presumably the door that led out. The guards pushed him down to the ground, hard, and quickly retreated behind the door they had just entered through.

  “What the fuck!” Roberto wiggled his jaw. He looked around, but there was nothing to see except that faraway, dirty window.

  “Who’s here?” he asked. Could another syndicate have set this up? He couldn’t think of any with enough clout. The Russians? Chinese?

  He looked back. The guards watched him through the bars, like they were waiting for a snake to swallow the mouse.

  He felt a presence and turned. Two green eyes stared down at him.

  “Roberto Alcantara?”

  “No!” Roberto lunged at the man, and grabbed only air. Suddenly he was up against a wall.

  “Don’t struggle,” the man said. He had a thin voice, with a southern accent.

  “You gonna kill me?”

  “No. But I’ll hurt you if you struggle.”

  Roberto could feel the violent passivity of the man holding him. He had heard of these, but he’d never seen one. The man’s eyes never blinked; a dim green rolled like surf behind them. Roberto tried to move, but the man was as strong as iron. He looked to the door: the guards were gone. A needle pierced his arm.

  = = =

  Roberto woke up to the smell of plastic and burning. He heard a whirling. He couldn’t move. Around him, along a huge expanse of concrete floor, men and women in lab coats and coveralls were going about their jobs. Scaffolding surrounded the walls and a giant black tube. Dozens of orange arcs fell halfway to earth before vanishing. The space was impossibly large, impossibly tall. The black tube was as big as a skyscraper. He looked up and he couldn’t see the ceiling.

  “Hey.” He tried to speak. His head felt like a crown of fire had been forced onto it. He couldn’t feel his hands. He looked down and saw that his arms and legs were attached to metal limbs that cradled his body. He could feel tubes running up inside him. He started to cry.

  “What’s going on?” he moaned. “Why? Why?”

  Through his teary vision, he saw that there were others like him. Eleven pods were arranged like a horseshoe around the giant glass tube; his was on the tip of the right side. Each pod was mounted to its own, smaller, black tube. The tops were capped, and a massive conduit—a semi could drive through it—connected each tube to a thick metal band at the center of the massive one. Two of the tubes pulsed blue. Those pods were occupied, mounted near the center, and he could see the vague shape of a person inside each. The other pods were jet black, and, like his, were near the ground.

  He saw the green-eyed man across the floor. He was putting someone else in the same kind of pod he was in.

  The door on Roberto’s pod groaned shut. Roberto began to hyperventilate. His breath fogged the glass front. With a clang, the pod rose into the air. At least ten stories up, it locked into place. On the ground floor, a team of white coats followed a short, heavyset man to a platform, in front of the skyscraper tube, with big metal boxes that must have been computers of some kind. The short, heavyset man was joined by the green-eyed man, and the group climbed two flights of open stairs to what looked like a metal crucifix. The green-eyed man helped the shorter man into it. The other scientists worked around them while the green-eyed man watched closely.

  A wet fart gurgled above Roberto. A syrupy, pink liquid sputtered into the pod, filling it.

  “No! No!”

  It rose past his feet. He screamed and struggled, but the metal limbs he was attached to didn’t budge.

  The syrup reached his chin, then his mouth, and then, as hard as he tried, it went over his nose. He held his breath. His lungs burned. His mouth pleaded with him to open for air. Through the opaque murk, massive blue forced its way in. The Mega Core was on.

  I don’t deserve this, he thought. No one deserves this.

  NO ONE DESERVES ANYTHING, a rumbling voice said all around him. IT IS ONLY WHAT WE TAKE. BREATHE. Roberto had no control: he opened his mouth and sucked in the fluid. His lungs retched, but the pressure of the gel around him only pushed more in. It filled his lungs. He shook from the sensation of drowning, yet he didn’t die. Finally his body was still.

  What’s happening? Roberto thought.

  YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN, ROBERTO. YOU ARE ONE OF THE FIRST.

  Roberto’s body was paralyzed. He realized he no longer controlled it. Suddenly the metal arms he was attached to began to move his body. His muscles relaxed and contracted at their command.

  The first of what?

  SO MANY PEOPLE DIE. IT IS OUR FEAR, IS IT NOT? BURIED BENEATH ALL THE MYTHOLOGIES, DULLED BY THE INTERNET, BY OUR PASSIONS OR THE FUTURE GOALS WE SET, AS IF TOMORROW IS A PROMISED DAY.

  Are you going to kill me?

  The man in Roberto’s head was appalled.

  NO! NO. I WANT YOU TO LIVE FOREVER, AND IF I CAN FIND A WAY, YOU WILL. YOU ARE A PRODIGY, ROBERTO. DID YOU KNOW?

  I’m
no prodigy.

  BUT YOU ARE. HAD YOU NOT BEEN RAISED ON THE STREETS, HAD YOU ANY OTHER UPBRINGING WITH JUST A SPRINKLE OF LOVE AND SUPPORT, YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN A CEO. ANY SCHOOLING AND THEY WOULD HAVE NOTICED YOUR ABILITY TO COLLATE DATA AND USE IT STRATEGICALLY, AS GOOD AS ANY CHESS MASTER.

  Roberto’s strategies had always worked, whether it was avoiding the cops, expanding drug territories, or eliminating the competition. Only under insurmountable odds did he finally get caught. A part of him had been tired of running.

  I ADMIRE YOU. I DON’T JUDGE YOU. I CERTAINLY DON’T THINK YOU’RE CRIMINAL. NATIONS KILL FOR THEIR INTERESTS, AND THAT IS EXPECTED. WHEN AN INDIVIDUAL TRIES TO LAY CLAIM IN THE SAME WAY, THEY ARE THROWN BEHIND BARS, AND THEY’RE VIEWED AS A HORROR. INTERESTING HOW CIVILIZED SOCIETY IS SURROUNDED BY TURRETS, WITH AN EQUAL NUMBER OF GUNS POINTING OUT AS IN, ISN’T IT?

  Roberto thought of his son. The boy came from one of his prostitutes. It was right before he went to jail. Roberto would have normally forced the termination—he knew how women would use children as a paycheck—but he hesitated. He let her have him. And little Rico had become an hour’s vacation from prison every time he and his mom visited. Sheila had gotten clean. She was raising him good.

  YOUR SON HAS YOUR EYES, the god voice said.

  You can read my thoughts?

  WE ARE ONE CONSCIOUSNESS. YOUR MEMORIES ARE MINE.

  Will I ever see him again?

  NEVER. BUT SOMEDAY IN THE FUTURE, YOU MAY FEEL HIM. IT WILL BE A DISTANT SENSATION, DEJA VU, LIKE A SMELL THAT TICKLES AT A FOND MEMORY. HIS SOUL WILL RIDE OVER US.

  I don’t understand.

  YOU DON’T NEED TO. IN A MOMENT IT WON’T MATTER.

  A blinding white light came from within Roberto as if his eyes had ignited into suns. It spread outward over his vision, pulsing and prodding the deepest parts of his brain.

  GODS CAN BE MADE, ROBERTO. BUT FIRST I MUST MAKE YOU . . . ME.

  For a millisecond Roberto knew who he was, and then he felt someone else leak into his head. It was cold and slippery, frigid water seeping into the deepest cracks. And then Roberto remembered nothing at all.