The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  As they got closer, John realized why the buildings looked strange: they were at the edge of a blast radius.

  “Did they use a bunker buster?” Raimey asked. The pavement beneath his feet felt spongy.

  “Yep. That’s why this area’s abandoned. The ground’s too unstable.” Sabot pointed up to a building that looked like they had stacked the bricks but forgotten the mortar. As they passed, a dozen bricks blew off the top and crashed near them. “Buildings around here collapse all the time.”

  Ground zero was a pile of eight skyscrapers, a million tons of concrete and steel. A hollow whistle filled the air and a sliver of sun peeked through. A group of fluffed-out pigeons sat in its light.

  To John, it felt like he was walking on piano strings. The ground thrummed with instability. “I don’t think this will hold me,” he said. They had climbed over one of the mounds. Ahead he saw where the whistle had come from—there was a sinkhole one hundred yards across. If the floor gave, it was a long way down.

  “It looks worse than it is. You’ll be fine.” Sabot walked ahead.

  Raimey paused for a moment. As if hearing his thoughts, a chunk of cement rolled over the side of the chasm and disappeared. It was a moment until a clatter indicated touchdown. Come on down! You’ll be fine! He looked at the pigeons. They looked back. A saying from when he was a kid popped into his head.

  “YOLO,” he grunted.

  Raimey slowly made his way toward the desecrated pit that had once been the world’s marvel. And toward the woman who had helped create him.

  = = =

  Stefan Barrick never did anything to anyone. Fifty-four, out of shape, losing his hair in an unfair lily pad of patches, it was his birthday today. He was spending it with two virtual hookers.

  He liked talking with real women in chat rooms, but his sexual tastes were a little extreme for most, even virtually. Not illegal, just extreme. He liked to be hit, he liked to slap back . . . consensually, of course. Maybe even get kicked in the balls a bit. His last real girlfriend that he’d actually touched in the flesh thought he was a freak. He was in his early twenties back then, thinner, a full head of hair—a tech for MindCorp right before the bubble burst.

  He wasn’t a Sleeper—he didn’t fit that profile—but he was good with circuit boards and he had a medical tech background, which helped him move up the ladder in the healthcare division. He missed those days: he had made good money, and people had respected him. Now he was fucking fake hookers. Asking a program to stomp his balls. He liked being humiliated—it got him off—but this was humiliating, which was different.

  After the civil war, the Coalition—the Northern Star, Dr. Lindo, whatever you wanted to call it—took over all of MindCorp’s infrastructure around the world. Most of the employees got to keep their jobs, but the government shuttered some divisions, including Stefan’s.

  But a few months after the whole thing went to shit, he had been contacted out of the blue. He was hired off-book to help outfit an underground medical space the size of an auditorium. He knew it was top secret—hell, he could guess who it was for; it wasn’t like there weren’t WANTED messages with her face in every program in cyberspace—but the money was good, really good, and he liked her. He thought that no matter what propaganda was being twisted in the news after, she’d done a good thing.

  “Who’d want to run the world?” he grunted. The world was a turd circling the bowl.

  A small fist wrapped in black leather punched him in the jaw. “I didn’t say you could talk.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  During the job, he and the others had always been blindfolded and escorted to the location. He had recognized the man’s voice who escorted them—a man who’d been with her on tours: Sabot. The place took four months to build, and maybe if it had only been a week he wouldn’t have noticed, but being sightless while walking in a subway, he grew to understand how the blind got keen in other areas. He began to hear things that he normally wouldn’t have noticed.

  And late one evening, on their way back out of the subway tunnels, he came to realize that a sound he had first heard as distant thuds . . . was music. A bar.

  The thuds began to shape, and soon, in his imagination, the rest of the notes filled in. It was Mexicali music.

  His curiosity got the best of him. How many Mexicali bars were there in Chicago? The answer: two. One was far south—he knew that wasn’t it. And the other was in the Loop.

  Stefan was proud of his sleuthing, but he had no plans to squeal. At one point he thought about a little blackmail—just for a second—but then he realized that Sabot could tear his arms off and would have no incentive not to. After all, what did they have to lose?

  Now, Stefan was dressed in black leather. He didn’t like the black masks with the zipper—he was claustrophobic and it made him feel like serial killer—but he enjoyed the rest of it. One of the hookers, a tall redhead, wore a patent leather outfit that let her tits hang out. Her nipples were pierced. Nice touch. He was bent over in front of her. She was working him with a dildo.

  “You like that, baby?” she purred.

  “Yes . . . yes.”

  She shoved it harder. He cried out in pain.

  “You’re not supposed to like it.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t like it.”

  The other hooker was Asian. She was dressed in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform. She was in front of him, her legs spread apart, his face close to her snatch. But he wasn’t allowed to lick—only watch. Their job was to humiliate him, tease him to the brink, and they were doing just fine.

  The dildo stopped moving in and out. It just stopped.

  “I promise I don’t like it,” he panted. The redhead said nothing.

  The Asian who was so rude, so dirty, had become a mute, too. He glanced past her crotch to her belly. She wasn’t breathing. He looked up at her face. Her eyes were closed in pleasure, and she was biting her tongue, but she looked like a wax doll.

  The program had crashed. Fuck. He pulled his pelvis forward to get free of his fetish, then turned around. Yep, the redhead was a three-dimensional photo, too; the big black dildo pointed at him accusingly and her face was frozen in sexual anger. She must have been shifting positions, really about to give it to him, because one of her legs hovered off the bed, stuck on some invisible shelf.

  He stood up and walked past the girls. The room had no exit, just a big bed. It was modeled after a cheap motel room.

  “Tilapia,” Stefan said, very annoyed. Great birthday.

  Nothing happened.

  “TILAPIA,” he over-enunciated. The safe word should have removed him from the sex program.

  Again, nothing.

  “You are fucking kidding me.” This had never happened before. He was stuck. Virtual sweat, cold and uncomfortable, prickled the back of his neck.

  He felt watched.

  A grinding noise shook the room. Across from him, a wall rippled as if it were a reflection in disturbed water, and a milky disco ball floated through. It was attached to a clear tentacle, almost like a giant parasitic worm.

  Stefan scrambled behind the dildo hooker.

  “Tilapia,” he whispered, and the orb laughed. Its good humor shook through Stefan’s every cell.

  This can’t be . . . what could it want?

  “I want information, Stefan Barrick. That is all. You’ll be back to fucking in no time.”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you want with me? I don’t know anything.”

  Stefan thought of the build twenty plus years ago.

  “Ahhh . . . you perjure yourself, Stefan. Tsk, tsk.” The orb drew closer.

  “I would have told you, or a bionic, or whatever.” Stefan was pressed against the corner. “I didn’t know you’d want it.”

  “You’re right: obviously an oversight. The location of the woman who orchestrated a war against the United States wouldn’t be of exceptional value.” The orb’s voice grew sinis
ter. “I CAN SEE YOUR THOUGHTS.”

  The milky disco ball snapped itself around Stefan’s head, muffling his shocked scream. The catatonic hookers watched absently as Dr. Lindo sifted through Stefan’s brain. Evan didn’t care about Stefan’s childhood in Maine; he didn’t care about Tara, the girl he had loved in college, or his uncle’s angry outburst at his grandfather’s funeral. But the Pieces did. The Forced Autism had given their intellect over to Evan, but it had also stripped them of their own identities; and the resulting empty pit had left the Pieces with a hunger that could not be sated. They slurped up Stefan’s memories like a string of spaghetti, leaving the plate clean. They relived his life, his conquests, his regrets, mostly those of a small man who would be forgotten quickly in the world, except by those few that knew him. But for the Pieces, Stefan’s life was a glass of water to a man dying of thirst.

  Evan didn’t care. He could feel them gobble away Stefan’s soul—he could see the memories, too—and he had learned that this was a necessary sacrifice to keep them steady.

  And he had found what he was looking for.

  = = =

  A functioning Data Core provided two ways to get to the bottom: a large elevator and a corkscrewing platform that ran the perimeter of the cavernous structure. Both of these had been decimated by the bunker buster. Raimey followed Sabot as they slowly descended from one teetering slab of concrete to another.

  “They’ll hold,” Sabot reassured.

  Sweat peppered Raimey’s face. His giant hands gripped two warped girders as he sidestepped to a brittle landing where the Samoan stood.

  “This is bullshit,” Raimey said.

  Sabot laughed. “You’re doing great. I wish I had a camera.”

  Raimey made it to the landing, and his weight caused it to sag noticeably. “There’s another way out, right?”

  “Yeah. An old subway.”

  “Thank God.”

  They made it the rest of the way down, and when Raimey’s feet touched solid ground, he felt genuine relief. He didn’t have the body type for spelunking.

  The light from up top made Raimey feel like he was in a well. Sticking with the theme, the floor was covered in a collage of debris consisting of shattered equipment, pieces of the Data Core, and the external buildings that had toppled in when the bomb detonated twenty-five years before. Everything was gray and warped. Inches of silt made the jagged hills furry, reminding John of dead coral. Dust seemed content to float in the air.

  Not everything was broken though. As Raimey followed Sabot, smart mines would rise like groundhogs and retreat back when Sabot thought them to. Old turrets hung willy-nilly around the perimeter at odd angles, but their lights blinked, and Raimey realized it was camouflage.

  Raimey stepped over a piece of thick glass a kid could half-pipe—a shard of the Data Core. “Why here?” he asked.

  “Speed. We had no choice. After Cynthia got hurt, we couldn’t really move. So we made do.”

  They came to a blasted wall covered in shredded girders and chunks of cement. Sabot grabbed a five-hundred-pound slab of concrete and tossed it to the side.

  “I need your help.”

  In two sweeps, Raimey pushed aside debris that, years before, had taken Sabot hours to stack. Behind the debris was an automated door as thick as the door to a bank vault.

  Sabot pulled a tether from his neck and connected it to a nearby terminal. A moment later the door opened to a long hallway that sloped down to another door. The turrets in here didn’t play possum; they followed every movement as Sabot and Raimey walked past. Raimey saw vents.

  “This is a kill room.”

  “Yep.”

  The next door opened into an underground warehouse. John saw a lanky man in his forties whom he recognized immediately. He had the same searching eyes he’d had as a boy. Justin. Above Justin was a screen that could have belonged in a movie theater, and an ageless Cynthia watched him from it. She smiled openly, and while John knew it wasn’t really her—she looked the same as she had when John was forty—the vibrancy she projected was reassuring.

  That feeling would pass when he saw her true form.

  Sabot walked to the other side of the room and checked on the real Cynthia. Justin said something to him and Sabot nodded, apparently content with what he heard.

  “You came,” Cynthia said. It was projected from the screen.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “I thought it was highly possible you would kill Sabot before he told you the truth. Thank you for not doing so.”

  “He caught me on a good day.”

  Raimey walked through the aisles, looking at all the supplies. There was enough armament for a small war. There were boxes of medical gear, surgical equipment draped in clear plastic, crates of food, drums of water. He saw the Tank Major chair.

  He didn’t notice the skeleton man until he had almost passed him. The man was tethered to a gurney with massive cords of steel ratcheted tight by winch. The man stirred slightly, but seemed unconscious.

  “Who is that?” Raimey asked.

  “That’s Mike Glass.”

  Raimey had heard of Mike, but they’d never worked together. Glass was Lindo’s lackey. “Why is he here?”

  Cynthia smiled. “He’s here for the same reason you are. He loved Vanessa.”

  Raimey looked at the charred skeleton again. “How?”

  = = =

  Justin-01 sat in the corner while Cynthia filled Raimey in on Glass, on his relationship with his daughter, and on the subsequent modifications Lindo had made to wipe Glass’s allegiance clean.

  Raimey was much older than Justin had imagined. He had been a child and barely conscious when he had last seen the giant, but he could still clearly picture the tormented man who had let Xinting take him away. The thirty-plus years had not been kind to him. Obviously his body was the same—a remarkable combination of mass and Tetris-like efficiency. But his face sagged, and the skin hung from his neck. He listened with a frown while Cynthia spoke to him, and his gray eyes held the coldness—and maybe loneliness—of a man haunted by the worst actions of humanity. A man who had been a lever for many.

  Cynthia finished. No one spoke for a moment.

  “How are we going to find her?” Raimey asked.

  “We know the Northern Star is in Washington, D.C.,” Cynthia replied. “But we don’t know exactly where. That’s why we need Justin. I need you to escort him to the Data Sump outside the city.”

  “What’s a Data Sump?” Raimey asked.

  “It’s a satellite tower that transmits all data in the region to the ring in space,” Justin replied.

  Raimey looked down at him. “I’m glad to see you’re still around. How’s the woman?”

  “Her name is Xinting. She’s good.”

  “Good. It was one of the few things I’ve done right.” Back to the topic: “What does getting to the Data Sump do for us?”

  “The Sump is completely unrestricted,” Justin said. “It sends dozens of zetabytes per second to the Northern Star and around the globe. I’ll be at full power, and hopefully I’ll find the Northern Star’s tail.”

  “Anything living online has one,” Cynthia said.

  Raimey looked to Sabot. “English?”

  “From the Data Sump, Justin can locate the bunker that holds the Northern Star.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?”

  “Nations have tried,” Cynthia said. “There was a war fifteen years ago, led by Russia.”

  “I’ve never heard that,” Raimey said.

  “You take information for granted, John. Evan controls it. Washington, D.C. is a nuclear wasteland. And anyone who knew, Evan erased their memories or killed them.”

  “What makes us different?” Raimey asked.

  “Had we done this fifteen years ago? Nothing. We would have died before we got started. But fifteen years to you is thousands to him. Evan has grown introverted, uninterested in the world. He hasn’t manufactured Minors or Ma
jors in a decade, except for a few exceptions. Above all—above your armor and strength, above Glass’s speed and aim, above Justin’s mind and my planning—it’s his apathy that gives us the advantage. That is what we will prey on. He doesn’t care for this world.”

  “Tell them about Big Brother,” Sabot said.

  “He does have a one-hundred-fifty-foot-tall bionic guardian called Big Brother that defends the bunker,” Cynthia said.

  “A minor omission,” Justin said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Raimey reassured Justin. “We’ll probably die at the Data Sump.” To Cynthia, he added: “How guarded is it?”

  It was Sabot who answered. “A few Minors, plus the Sleepers that maintain the core. But once we’re there, reinforcements will come.”

  “And after that, how do we get to D.C.?”

  “Only you and Glass can survive that wasteland. A train will take you there,” Cynthia said. “I know I don’t look it, but I’m still very strong online. Justin and I will try to hack the bunker door.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” Raimey asked.

  “We have acquired a seven-kiloton nuclear bomb.”

  “That I can carry.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re good, Cynthia,” Raimey said.

  On the screen, Cynthia curtsied, then turned to Sabot. “Get Raimey refitted and calibrated.” To Raimey, she said, “They reduced you to seventy-five percent after the war, correct?”

  Raimey nodded.

  “Well, it’s time to get you back to one hundred.”

  = = =

  He remembered rising through the murk. His vision was smeared with Vaseline, sounds were underwater, and when he realized he was awake, a deep fear filled his gut and a blotch of movement reminded him of . . . hands. Giant, crushing hands.

  “The boy!” Glass screamed, and the effort burnt his chest. The blurry vision vanished in a pixelated pop. He was in a hospital room, and Evan sat in the corner, reading a chart. Lindo put it down and came over.

  “Calm down, Mike. Shhh. Everything’s okay.” Evan put a hand on his chest. “It’s over. Janis is dead.”

  Janis was the one who had torn him apart. Glass remembered how the Chinese soldiers—the ones who had found a way to corrupt the giant—had watched as Janis ripped through the Data Core to get to him and the boy. The boy . . . the King Sleeper. Glass was overwhelmed with a memory of Janis crashing through the Data Core, raining down impaling shards of melted sand. He could smell his own blood.