Choppers whirred overhead, but the roof blocked their spotlights and he knew that their thermal wouldn’t find him. The human part of his body was too small; he had the heat signature of a dog.
His wife, Tiffany, sat nearby. Cancer had taken her off the earth, but her image had become a vessel of his best traits, as if they had all been bullied into the corner by the bad and rotten, and her likeness had shielded them from being stamped out completely. She had been with him for thirty years. He knew full well she was a mirage, and he didn’t mind one bit. If a pill existed that would take her away, he wouldn’t take it. Her voice was a life vest in a black, rolling sea choking with his crimes. This break in his sanity had kept him sane.
“Cynthia was wrong. You can’t survive the wasteland,” Tiffany said. Her voice was soft yet commanding, a lover telling a truth that a partner must know.
“I can, long enough.” He tossed another rock. She always sat in the corner of his right eye. She was fifty feet away, just visible in the dark, sitting on a rusted loader. He flicked his eyes toward her and she disappeared. When he turned them back to the pile, she returned.
“And you trust her?”
“I trust Justin. He has no reason to be here.”
“She sacrificed herself so you could escape.”
“That too. Vanessa’s alive.”
“This won’t right your wrongs, John.”
“I don’t expect it to. I just want Vanessa free. I want to come through this once.”
She was to his left now, just over his shoulder. He felt her breath. He felt her bile. Because she wasn’t always the voice of reason. The cancer that had taken her had infected his version as well. It was a dying light thrashing against the inevitable end, as vicious as a wolf caught in a snare.
“If you fail, her entire life will not have been hers.”
“I know.”
“You will have failed everyone you have ever loved.”
“I know.”
“It would have been better if you’d never been born.”
Raimey’s shoulders shuddered. “I know.”
“Use what earned you your spot in hell. Use it all until there isn’t a drip left to run dry. Because this is the last stand, John. Take the thirty-five years of failure and put a bow on it. Hand it off through your thunderous fists and your stolen life. Die. It’s okay. You can die. But first, him. And before your eyelids close for good, you see that she is free.”
= = =
Yoshi couldn’t believe his eyes when they walked into the abandoned factory. John Raimey sat fifty feet away next to a pile of rocks. Yoshi almost didn’t see him; his hulking frame blended in with the abandoned machines that were used to tear and parcel steel. But Raimey rose to his feet when they entered, and Yoshi got light-headed at the sight. This was the man who had started the bionic age. He had become a mythical figure. Other bionics would cheer when he arrived on the battlefield. During the Israeli War, he alone had killed thirty thousand soldiers in less than two weeks. During the civil war, he had near singlehandedly turned the tide in New York. He was an ancient beast, and with the rapid march of technology, he should have been antiquated, exceeded—but no. Only two models in, Evan had already reached the pinnacle. And what Evan saw scared him. True, the generations after were terrifying: armies would surrender at the sight of their forms on the battlefield; single Tank Majors ruled boroughs in countries controlled by the Coalition. But compared to Raimey, they were toys. He was war incarnate. The great decimator.
Yoshi could only stare. Raimey stood ten feet away so he could look down.
“Who’s this?” Raimey asked.
“Yoshi,” Justin replied. Glass brought over the gear and put it down.
“I thought we just needed the gear.”
“He needs to operate it.”
“You didn’t say that,” Raimey said. His eyes didn’t leave Yoshi.
“I didn’t know,” Justin replied.
“He’s just a kid.”
Yoshi didn’t press his finger in Raimey’s chest and tell him otherwise. A squeak left his mouth.
Justin smirked. “He doesn’t like being called a kid.”
“When I was a kid, I didn’t like being called that either,” Raimey said. To Yoshi, he asked, “Where are your parents?”
“I live alone.”
“How’d you get involved with Cynthia?”
Yoshi explained.
“That’s a big responsibility,” Raimey said.
“I’m sneaky,” Yoshi said with some pride.
“That’s fine until you’re seen,” Raimey replied. He turned to Justin. “I don’t know how this stuff works. This is your call.”
“I need him. I don’t like it, but I do. When I connect in, unrestricted . . .”
“Cyberspace will shit,” Yoshi interjected.
“Everyone will know,” Justin continued. “Evan will attack immediately. I need an operator to pull me out if the Northern Star gets the upper hand.”
Raimey looked to Yoshi. “I can’t guarantee your safety.”
“Cynthia and Sabot were my friends. If they believed in this, then I do too.”
Chapter 9
The Data Sump was forty miles away, and their ride there had been parked at ground zero—right where Cynthia had detonated four city blocks. Justin and Raimey argued on how to proceed.
“We can’t walk there,” Justin said. He thought they should take a car.
“There aren’t any cars to commandeer,” Raimey replied. “And I couldn’t fit in them anyway. Does anyone know where the city keeps the maintenance trucks?”
No one did.
“What other choice do we have?” Raimey said.
“We’ll be out in the open too long. He’ll see us.”
Yoshi had his hand raised, but no one noticed.
“There’s no other option,” Raimey said. “We’ll have to risk it.”
“We’ll never get there,” Justin said. “Glass, do you remember anything about Evan’s abilities?”
“Excuse me,” Yoshi said, annoyed at being ignored.
Glass thought about it. “With the satellite ring, Evan can see to the ground as clearly as we can, and in a radius of fifty miles.” He twirled one of his fingers. “The ring is in a constant pass, so there is no downtime to exploit. I could get you two there, but John’s too big.”
“Guys!” Yoshi finally yelled. They all turned. Yoshi was supporting his raised arm with the other.
“What?” Raimey said.
“We can use public transport.”
“The ‘L’? Come on, kid.”
“Lines go out to the farm settlements. They even have shipping flats and storage.”
“That’s true,” Justin said. He had grown up on a farm.
“And that won’t expose us?” Raimey said.
“If we wait until late at night, only the bums will be on the train.”
Justin shook his head. “Those trains don’t run twenty-four hours. They run a few times a day, starting early morning. At least they did when I was a kid.”
“Okay, fine. Four a.m., even better,” Yoshi replied.
“Evan doesn’t monitor the trains,” Glass offered. “But he will monitor people that connect in afterwards.”
“So he’ll know,” Raimey said.
“At some point.”
“Will he guess where we’re going?”
“Yes, unless he thinks Cynthia knew where the Northern Star was located,” Glass said. “I’ve been there. I remember the bunker. There was a lake filled with steaming fish. But I don’t know where it is. He may not know that.”
“There are only a few things Evan has to think about, though,” Justin said.
“Hmm,” Raimey grunted. It was too soon for a war. “We need to know what trains to use.”
“I can do that,” Yoshi said. “There’s a stop a few minutes from here.”
“Find the one farthest out, away from people.”
“I need to go back
to the pod for heavier weapons,” Glass said.
“How long do you need?” Raimey asked.
“I can meet you at the train or the Data Sump.”
Raimey shook his head. “Train. I can’t protect them from bullets.”
Glass pulled something off his arm. It was small and round. He handed it to Justin. “I’ll track you. I’ll be with you in . . .” He calculated. “Thirty minutes.”
He vanished without waiting for a response. Justin put the tracking device in a fold of his bulletproof vest.
“Let’s get moving,” Raimey said.
= = =
Glass made it to his pod in fifteen minutes. Inside, in a corner, was a silver column with two glowing rings and an empty socket. Glass reached through his ghillie suit, into his waist, and with a click, he removed a battery the size of a coffee can. He inserted it into the hole and pulled a fresh battery from the charge. Then he pulled down a seven-foot-long rifle and broke it down. The rifle had no specific designation. It was one of a kind, designed by Lindo for the Level 13 Glass. No human could shoot it, not even from a mount. An ordinary man would die: the recoil would pulverize their shoulder into misshapen meat and shock their body into cardiac arrest. The two-thousand-grain smart bullets traveled at four thousand feet per second, and Glass could adjust their trajectory on the fly up to three miles. It was black powder’s answer to the rail gun.
He took five magazines—each sixteen inches long and just as deep—out of a crate and stuffed them into a hard case that housed the rifle. He grabbed two suppressed .50 caliber carbines, which mounted to rails on his back like folded wings, and five hundred rounds of ammunition for them. Finally he removed the other battery, placed it in a sleeve, and put it into the case.
Within five minutes he was out of the pod and tracking Justin, who was now seven miles away.
= = =
As they walked, Yoshi couldn’t help himself. He peppered Raimey with questions.
“How old are you now?”
“Seventy-four.”
“How powerful is your hydraulshock? I heard it feels like an earthquake.”
“Five million foot-pounds, or something like that.”
“I heard that the new ones are only three point five million.”
“Hm.”
“Can you jump?”
“Sort of.”
“How high?”
“A few feet. I don’t know. Shut up for second.”
Suddenly Glass was with them. A huge hard case hung from his back.
“That was quick,” Justin said.
“How fast can you run?” Yoshi asked Glass.
“Fifty miles per hour,” Glass said.
“Cool.”
“You can climb walls?”
“Yes.”
“Very cool.”
Yoshi turned to Raimey. “How much can you lift?”
“I don’t know,” Raimey said. He was trying to focus on the task.
“A woman I interviewed said she saw you lift a tank. You know, a real one.”
“No, I can’t do that. I weigh six tons. I can lift ten or so. Hey, ask Glass some questions—I bet he has some interesting stuff to talk about.”
Raimey turned to Justin and rolled his eyes, but there was humor in them. Justin smiled, but his mind was elsewhere. He hadn’t connected in to cyberspace without a throttle since he was a boy, and he was worried. What if he didn’t have it anymore? What if he couldn’t control it?
“How many people have you killed?” Yoshi asked Glass.
“I don’t know.”
“Never ask that,” Raimey said to Yoshi, his voice firm.
“Oh, sorry.” Back to Glass: “How far can you see?”
“I have a usable range of five miles.”
“Wow. Can you see through walls?”
“Yes, my eyes have an x-ray emitter. But I have to be close.”
“Do you see in color?”
“A little bit, I’m told.”
Twenty questions later they were at an ‘L’ stop on the outskirts of the city. It felt like a pier moored at the edge of space.
With the oil depletion and the failed promise of alternative fuels, electric public transportation was the only way for most people to get around. Train tracks ran throughout the city and out to the suburbs like a circulatory system—tracks stacked on tracks, trains constantly coming and going.
They watched a train pull away. The station was deserted except for a homeless man taking a piss behind a trashcan. Glass swept the station, walking past the man just as he did his final shake and zipped up. The man glanced up into rolling green eyes.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” he slurred, apparently unaware of what was looking back at him. Glass moved on without a word, and the bum stumbled the other way in a drunken fog.
“What do we do now?” Justin asked.
“Find the right train,” Raimey said. He walked up the stairs gingerly, but still ground each step to dust.
Yoshi ran ahead and looked at the schedule. “Red line!” he yelled back to them, tapping the corresponding route.
“I can’t believe we’re taking public transportation,” Justin said.
“It’s very green of us,” Raimey said. “Here it comes. Get to the front.”
The train came to a stop and a young couple stepped out. They paused for a moment, blinked a few times at what they saw, and then the man put a protective arm around the woman and they quickly walked away.
“He’s a keeper!” Yoshi yelled after them.
Yoshi, Justin, and Glass got in and took the first seats. Then Raimey’s huge hands tore through the middle of the cab, peeling the roof back like a sardine can. An alarm started to blare, but Glass poked it quiet with a finger. Raimey stepped through the quivering aluminum walls, and the car bucked and swayed until he centered himself.
In the adjoining cab, heads leaned over and looked through the glass to see what the hell had just happened. Yoshi gave them a thumbs-up.
At the next stop, the train emptied. Five minutes later, Glass sensed what no one else did. “We’re going in the wrong direction.”
Yoshi went over to an illuminated map on the wall. It was a squirrel’s nest of high rail, low rail, ones that whittled to an end and others that looped for infinity. He traced their progress to a blue line, then to a black line that zipped west of the city. “We have to get on the blue line to the service rail. Two stops.”
Justin threw his head back and groaned in frustration. “You’re not serious.”
“This is funny, isn’t it?” Glass asked. He was genuinely curious.
“More pathetic,” Justin replied.
Two stops later they ran to the next train. Same process, but due west. More heads leaned over and looked at them through the adjoining window.
Fifteen minutes after that, the blue line slowed down. Ahead of them were huge grain silos, food warehouses, and factories bunched together as far as the eye could see. They were surrounded by two tall fences woven with razor wire.
The train came to a stop on a high platform. Glass, Justin, and Yoshi piled out, unable to take their eyes off what lay ahead. Raimey wiggled himself out of the car as if it were a wetsuit.
“What is this place?” Justin asked. Smokestacks puffed in the distance. To their left, he could see the two columns of a nuclear reactor.
“It’s a manufacturing prison,” Glass said. “It serves the city. Evan built these when he took over.”
“I’ve never heard of this,” Yoshi said.
“How would you?” Justin said. “Evan controls all information, no one leaves the city, and if you ever found out, he’d put you here.”
“Exactly,” Glass said. “Evan kills less than you would think. I’ve brought thousands of people to places like this. They allow the city to run as it does. Without these, even with cyberspace, the economy would fail.”
Justin thought of his conversation with Cynthia the day before. She had said the world needed slaves, and
at the time it had turned him off to her. He’d thought they were the words of a megalomaniac. But there was an expectation set by privilege, so much so that the very concept of privilege itself became lost among the delusions of “rights.” Fattened calves didn’t care about the world. And here was where Evan produced the feed.
“Do we have to go through it?” Raimey asked. “If we get caught this far from the Data Sump, it’s over.”
Glass climbed up a pole and scanned the grounds. He came back down. “A freight train is at the depot getting unloaded. If we can make it to the entrance, we can jump on as it leaves. We’ll have to be quick.”
Raimey held out his hands for Justin and Yoshi. “Get on.”
Glass led the way around a concentration camp that was hidden in plain sight.
= = =
After hours of fruitless searching, Kove and the other bionics came back to base. Kove was on the last helicopter. The other bionics piled together and headed toward the barracks. Kove went the opposite way toward the shore of Lake Michigan.
The beach had succumbed to neglect: it was covered in prairie and cattails. Mosquitos filled the air. His feet sank in as he entered the first few feet of water. Oil splotches marred the water in port wine stains. He took off his helmet and tossed it to shore.
What are you doing?
“I just want to be alone for a minute,” Kove said. He carefully removed the face prosthetic and felt his tongue loll out. The tiny oil spills reminded him of liquor, and a deep urge hit him. He wanted a drink badly. He wanted to soak away. This day of clarity was enough; it did not make him yearn for more.
NO.
“I’m not going to,” Kove said. “I’ll finish this for you, but after that, I want to be done. Can you do that for me, Evan? Can you let me go?”
What would you do?
“Drink. Really drink. Drink till I don’t wake up.”
I don’t know why you would want that.
Kove leaned over, and the moonlight reflected his grotesque face off the water. “Use my eyes, Evan.” He felt that occur. “Because of this. I’ve lived too long. I’ve been miserable too long.”
Everyone is alone, Alan. Even me.
“But you don’t care.”
I used to. Just moments ago, I felt a sliver of it. It is the human condition. People pad it with cats, and neighbors, and mates, but it is as absolute as death. We are nothing, and you should take great comfort in that, because it is a liberation to do what you please, when you please, without regret. You look at your face and believe that it is why you are miserable; but your memory tricks you. You have always been miserable. You were disfigured before Glass took your jaw, and your addiction is proof.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 83
