“Good pep talk, Evan. I can always count on you.”
Turn around.
“Why?”
Kove felt his body give, and he turned. China Girl walked toward him from the plane she had arrived on. She was uncoordinated, teetering back and forth like a drunk.
Her body is too advanced for me to control, Lindo said.
She stopped in front of Kove with no recognition in her eyes. The compartment on her back opened up.
Kove had forgotten. He pulled the metal orb from the ammo pouch. He looked at it for a moment and understood. In it was everything of her that was human.
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” Kove asked.
You needed to lose something.
He placed the metal orb on her back and it retracted into her. Her eyes lit up. “I died,” she said to Kove.
“Yes.”
“Thank you for protecting me.”
“Always.” Kove looked at his partner in amazement, and felt whole. She would understand what it was to be him. She would understand why people turned away. I’m a good person, Kove thought to himself. The truthful sage in his soul rejected that notion. I could be a good person. The sage remained quiet. Yes, I could be a good person.
But first you must win, Lindo said. And then you two can be together. That is my promise.
Kove felt a quarter century of apathy burn off like the morning dew. In its place was purpose. A way out of the abject misery. Win.
“I will kill them all,” Kove said to himself and to them.
I need Justin.
“Everyone but Justin.”
Then she is yours.
I would like to be deployed outside, if that’s a possibility, China Girl said.
“With me?” Kove asked.
We make a good team, China Girl said.
She was talking combatively; Kove heard it romantically. Her tone-deaf voice was like a text message without an exclamation point or an emoticon, its intent subject to interpretation. As Lindo had hoped. He needed Kove sharp.
I know where they are headed, Lindo echoed in both of their heads. There was some excitement on a train . . .
= = =
The freight train barreled the four stowaways across a landscape that had once been highways and schools and suburbs. Now it was ruins. They had waited a half-mile out from the prison, and when the train rolled past, they hopped onto one of the flat cars. Yoshi and Justin shivered from the cold.
Glass pointed to a black shape in the distance. “I see it,” he said.
The others poked their heads into the rushing wind. Three miles away, the Data Sump sat on a hill. It was the height of a small skyscraper, and even this far away, they could see the energy of its beam with their eyes. The air around it shimmered like a desert thermal. The place looked like an observatory, but instead of a telescope, a huge microwave dish one hundred feet in diameter rotated back and forth, east to west, following the ring of satellites that were part of the Northern Star.
The train track wasn’t heading in the direction of the Data Sump. This was as close as they were going to get.
Raimey spoke over the wind. “We have to get off.”
“How?” Justin asked. They were traveling at at least seventy miles per hour.
Raimey sat at the front. His upper body could turn like an owl’s head. He spun around and ripped the pin from the coupler. Their car detached from rest of the train and gradually slowed to a stop.
“Not everything’s hard, Justin,” Raimey said.
They walked through what had once been a suburb. Wind whistled through the abandoned homes. An old sign said “Naperville.”
“My grandparents lived here after they retired,” Justin said.
“Are you surprised that Evan hasn’t found us yet?” Raimey asked Glass.
“He may know exactly where we are,” Glass said and ran off to scout ahead.
“Not much for conversation.” Raimey observed.
“He’s got half a brain,” Justin replied.
As they got closer, the Data Sump felt more dangerous. A vibration filled the air. It started low, almost as if the earth was shaking, but as they got nearer, it began to resonate in their skulls.
“My teeth hurt,” Yoshi said.
“Mine too,” Raimey said.
The beam itself was invisible, but they could still see where it was by how it smeared the stars, slashing back and forth. And now they could see the dish up top, too. A jackhammer-like buzz echoed all around them.
They walked through a park, past a playground and two soccer goals wrapped in vines.
“I heard how, if Chicago suddenly had no population, the vines are what would take over everything. Like at Wrigley Field,” Yoshi said.
“Are you talking just to talk?” Raimey asked.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to.”
The Data Sump now dominated their field of view. Up top, near the dish, white light crackled and popped, its origin uncertain.
“Get behind me,” Raimey said. “If things go down, stay back fifty yards.”
Justin and Yoshi fell in line like ducklings.
Nothingness became a shadow, and then became Glass. “There’s a concrete fence running the perimeter, and a guard post.”
“How many soldiers?” Raimey asked.
“Only two that I can see.”
“Nothing hidden, nothing out of place?”
“No.”
“Not surprising, really. After all, who would come here?” Justin said.
Raimey nodded. After twenty-five years, security would get lax.
“Should I handle the guards?” Glass said.
“We aren’t killing them,” Justin replied.
Glass looked to John.
“This is no time for morals,” Raimey said. “They’d kill us.”
“You don’t know that,” Justin replied.
“Well we can’t go ask them, can we? Right now, as far as we know, we’re undetected. And that’s the only thing we’ve got going for us.” To Glass: “Do it.”
Justin started to say something else to Glass, but he was already gone. He took two bounding steps and leaped over the fifteen-foot chain link fence. The other three waited.
“This makes us as bad as him,” Justin said.
“I’ve never said I’m not,” Raimey replied.
Glass was back in three minutes. “No one else is around the perimeter,” he said.
Raimey shouldered through the fence and they walked through.
At the guard station, Justin looked in. The men were out cold, but not dead. Raimey saw this too, and said something under his breath as he stomped by. He paused.
“Go on ahead,” Raimey said.
Justin stopped.
“What are you going to do?” Justin asked.
“What do you think?” Raimey said.
“You’re going to kill them?” Yoshi said. The excitement drained from his voice. The men were unconscious, sprawled out on the floor.
“What do you children think is going to happen when they wake up? They’re going to thank us?” Raimey snarled. “Get going.” He turned to Glass. “No more of this shit. We kill.”
Glass nodded.
With his right hand, Raimey casually slapped up at the entrance, tearing a hole in the roof to get inside. As the others walked away, they felt him stomp twice. Justin winced. It was like a man putting a quivering bird out of its misery. Then Raimey was back with them, halfway up the hill.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Justin said through clenched teeth. Yoshi echoed the sentiment with his eyes.
“Don’t tell me about war,” Raimey replied.
= = =
The Data Sump was surrounded by a forest, but the serenity of the tall oaks and elms was destroyed by the ear-splitting sound of the Data Sump’s clatter. A static in the air made Yoshi’s and Justin’s hair stand on end. They had to yell to talk.
When they reached the base, Yoshi and
Justin took a moment to catch their breath. The ground was spongy, and Justin realized it was rubber. Giant iron latticed legs sank past the rubber base. Apart from the structure on top, the whole thing reminded John of the Eiffel Tower. Ground cables the diameter of manhole covers splayed off the legs into the ground. Two of the legs had stairs and a lift. Raimey broke the lock of one and opened it.
“I’ll stay down here,” he said. “Anything big will come on foot.”
The other three entered, but just before the door closed, Raimey grabbed it.
“Justin,” he said.
Justin was still angry about the guards. “What?”
“I’m an old man, and I’m guilty for all I’ve done, and you have every right to despise me. But Vanessa didn’t deserve this.” Raimey slapped his chest; it sounded like two anvils colliding. Raimey spit as he spoke, the self-loathing too bitter to mask. “It’s because of me that this happened to her. Because of ME!”
Then, quieter: “Help me save her.”
Justin didn’t know what to say, but Glass did.
“We will.”
The door closed. Beyond it, they heard Raimey’s waist chains spinning up. The ultimate tell that people were about to die.
= = =
The three of them took the lift.
“Glass,” Yoshi said. Electricity arced over Glass’s body in a thousand inchworms. Glass put his index fingers a half a foot apart, and a continuous arc crackled between them.
“I don’t get how this works,” Justin said.
“It’s microwave transmission. It takes a tremendous amount of energy,” Yoshi said.
The door at the top was unlocked. They stepped through it onto a platform that was over fifty yards wide and across. Glass went first, with the carbines drawn, and circled the perimeter of the Sump. Yoshi and Justin followed, and they were immediately overwhelmed by the kinetic power of where they were. The air crackled and hummed as if they were inside a thunderhead, and the night sky came in and out of view as the transmission dish swung back and forth above them in a constant, rolling eclipse.
“It’s hot,” Yoshi said. In just one minute, both he and Justin were soaked in sweat.
Glass was back. “What do you need me to do?” he asked. “We need to move quickly.”
Yoshi pointed to a platform at the center. The dish was mounted to it. “We need to get there.”
They walked through a forest of ten-foot-tall aluminum heat sinks that covered the entire surface beneath the dish. Electrical arcs danced back and forth. As Yoshi and Justin walked by, the bright white bolts would occasionally find them and bounce off their soft hides on their way to the next metal plate.
The ground was littered with piles of dead birds. There were far too many to avoid, and Yoshi and Justin made faces as they stepped on them. The hollow bones cracked beneath their feet, but there was very little odor. Justin guessed the electricity and the heat had cooked them.
They made it to the base of the dish. It hemmed and hawed with a hydraulic machine-gun racket. A rubber-coated platform sat eight feet above them by the wavering axis.
“The maintenance terminal is up there,” Yoshi said to Glass. Glass looked up, then put one hand down as a foothold. Yoshi went first, Glass lifting him like a feather. Justin followed. They disappeared over the top.
Yoshi’s head reappeared over the side and looked down at Glass. “This may take a while,” he said.
“We don’t have a while. They’re coming,” Glass responded.
“What?”
Yoshi could hear nothing other than the twenty-ton dish slamming back and forth above him, but Glass heard everything. His implant filtered out the dish racket by countering it with a dynamically applied inverse sound wave.
“Helicopters. Hurry.” Glass ran to the northeast side of the Sump. There he kicked down two heat sink slats, broke open the hard case, and assembled the massive rifle. The black hole of the barrel was big enough to put two fingers in. He slammed in a magazine and racked the slide. The metal on metal sounded like a car getting sideswiped.
The rifle had no scope or sight. Glass lay prone and pressed the butt of the gun against his shoulder. His neck lengthened and moved over to the side of the gun. The electromagnet built into his cheek switched on, and his face slapped against the gun. He was the scope.
He magnified his vision to 20x, surveying the sky four miles out. Red trajectory arcs were superimposed over his sight, tailored to the rifle round and accounting for gravity and wind speed—which he gauged from the movement of the treetops. Within three miles, Glass didn’t miss. He waited as the thump from the helicopter blades grew.
= = =
Raimey walked north, navigating gently between the large trees. His gut told him they would come from this direction, and he’d learned to trust it. Muted beneath the churning whine of the Data Sump, squirrels barked above and around him and birds flitted from twig to branch. Raimey guessed they were probably deaf. The Sump was out of place. And so was he.
He sat down beneath a white oak that must have been three hundred years old. It rose a hundred feet in the air, dwarfing even him.
“They’re coming,” his wife said behind him.
He closed his eyes and savored her voice. “I know.”
He could feel the illness in her. This was the cancerous crone. This was the woman he had abandoned.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Hit hard and fast. No hesitation. This is just the start.”
He turned to address her, but she jumped to the right side of his periphery, as she always did. “What do you mean?”
“She is far away, John. What happens here will only set your compass.”
“I don’t know why he doesn’t bomb us.”
Tiffany laughed. “He wants Justin, John. When he has him, he will.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her rub her arms for warmth.
“I wish I could hold you.”
“You do. Every time you think of me.”
“I mean for real.”
“Soon. But first you have to right this.”
He nodded. He knew.
She disappeared again. He heard something scratching above him and looked up—a brown squirrel watched him from a foot away, unafraid. They regarded each other for over a minute, two beings on a blue ball, spinning through an ocean of black.
What have we done to this place? Raimey thought in disgust.
The report from the loudest rifle John had ever heard filled the air.
Chapter 10
Kove followed China Girl like a puppy as they prepped for the assault on the Data Sump. Lindo’s eyes fed them real-time information on the enemy, and while the dish itself created a huge blind spot, there was no doubt that Raimey and the others were there.
Five helicopters were spinning up, and the fifteen Minors and five Majors were loading in, one Major per helicopter to distribute the weight.
China Girl watched Kove tail her. She stopped without turning around. With her eight eyes providing 360-degree vision, the concept meant nothing to her.
“What?” she asked.
He realized what he was doing: he hadn’t even loaded up his hydraulshocks.
“I’m just . . . glad you’re alive,” he said.
She wasn’t used to such a human interaction. She couldn’t physically sense hot or cold, but in its place was not nothingness, but a detachment between her thoughts and her surroundings. When she saw her reflection she knew it was her, but that knowledge held no weight. She had never felt an identity. As Lindo had grown more distant with his god-like knowledge and his inability to relate to humans, so had his creations. And while a human brain was nestled in her back, it didn’t know the body it was born with, or the name her mother had whispered to her when she was first held close. China Girl was what she was, not who she was. Her true self was a question without an answer.
She had never communicated with someone as much
as she had Kove. Initially she’d had a hard time forming words and conveying her thoughts—speech was a rusty tool—but it had gradually come back to her. Now she turned to Kove, because that’s what people do. “Me too. But this is my last body.”
Kove’s eyes darkened like a Great White’s the moment before it tears into a seal.
She is mortal, Kove. Just like you. The metal is a mirage of invulnerability, Lindo said.
“You’ll be fine,” Kove said. He would not let anyone hurt her. Not again.
He loaded up the hydraulshocks and locked on his helmet. A double-bladed chopper waited for them. China Girl hung upside down from the landing sled as it rose in the air. Kove sat in the cargo hold and remembered who he was and why people feared him.
= = =
“It’s almost ready,” Yoshi said to Justin. He was hunched over the maintenance interface connecting the breakers.
“How do you know about all this stuff?” Justin asked.
Yoshi didn’t look up. “This is why Cynthia found me. I’m good at finding information that’s hard to find.” Yoshi stopped wiring and regarded his work. He pressed a switch on each breaker and they glowed. “Know what my secret is?” He connected a full-bandwidth Mindlink—designed for modified Sleepers—to the breakers.
“What?” Justin asked.
“I just asked questions, man. People love to talk. All right, lose the toupee.”
Justin grabbed the front of his hair and pulled it off. Metal patches covered his head. They had spread apart as he’d grown. Some were covered in a haze of skin.
“You haven’t done this since you were a kid?” Yoshi asked.
“No.”
“Well, hopefully this’ll still work.”
Justin lay on the mat, and Yoshi held the Mindlink over his face. “Ready?”
Justin puffed out a few breaths. “Does it matter?”
“No. If the breakers trip from the Northern Star’s attack, but you get away, I can reset them. But you do have to get away. If you’re stuck in in its mindscape, I can only pull you out.”
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 84
