The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “Vanessa is a part of its mindscape,” Justin said. “I have to go in.”

  “Yeah, that’s not the best situation. It’s kinda the one you should avoid at all costs.” Then, trying to recover from his demoralizing pep talk, he added, “But you’re the King Sleeper! So you’ll be fine.”

  Yoshi put the mask over Justin’s face and aligned the sensors to the contact patches around his skull.

  “You ready?”

  Justin gave a thumbs-up.

  “Kick his ass.” Yoshi flipped the switch.

  = = =

  Justin’s mind rocketed through a kaleidoscope pipe as his consciousness separated from his physical body and entered cyberspace. It felt as if his true form had been released from a mortal shackle. Atlas without the burden of Earth.

  He floated in the in-between. Beneath him, Sleepers drifted from program to program, maintenancing, hacking, or just observing. They looked like sperm with a dozen tails. They were ghosts that ninety-nine percent of the population didn’t see. And the higher the Sleeper was in aptitude, the more discreet they could be. It was hierarchical. Justin could choose to not be seen by those below him, just as Glass was invisible to most humans he slithered past.

  In this void, hundreds of millions of portal mirrors— access points to billions of separate programs—spun on a center axis, around HIM. At the center of this manufactured solar system, the Northern Star pulsed and swirled in a ball of white lava.

  The Northern Star was huge, but from Justin’s position, it was still very far away. He had chosen to be inserted on the outskirts of the in-between. Justin exhaled, and what looked like a poison gas rolled off his jelly form. It grew quickly, until within seconds it covered thousands of miles around him. And then his mindscape began to unfold exponentially. His mind shook from both effort and ecstasy as it continued to spill out into a space where he was at home. He could see the Sleepers beneath him; he watched their flowing jig-like forms stop moving. They were looking up. Justin could hear their thoughts like a radio transmission:

  What is that?

  He’s dead.

  We need to disconnect now.

  I was alive when he first came online.

  Many of them blinked away, sensing the danger that was about to unfold. But most stayed, unable to draw their eyes away from the growing sun.

  The portals started to slow, and the ones closest to Justin’s immense gravity began to drift out of their orbit toward him. What was true before was true now: the King Sleeper could rip space.

  JUSTIN, the Northern Star purred. His name echoed through every program. Every person online heard it.

  I’M HERE, EVAN, Justin projected back. Portals shot away from him, smashing into others, creating a shower. Millions of people suddenly woke when their programs were destroyed.

  Tentacles grew from the Northern Star; they were as thick as a moon and millions of miles long. One breached Justin’s mindscape; it immediately blinked out and died.

  I CREATED THE PROTOCOL, EVAN. YOU CAN’T KILL ME HERE.

  NOR YOU, ME, Evan replied.

  I DON’T INTEND TO.

  Time and confidence led to predictability. Justin knew that the first thing Evan would try against him would be the Reverse Data Push. He was right. And it had given Justin the Northern Star’s signature. Now he looked out across the flat plane of portals, and those monitored by the Northern Star shimmered like the conscious orb itself.

  Instead of avoiding them, Justin’s massive presence scorched toward the nearest one and wrapped around it. The liquidity of his shape changed to a mist, and then the mist flowed into the portal.

  The audience of Sleepers wondered—if only for a second—if what they had seen had really happened at all. Because an adversary would never go into the Northern Star’s domain. To do so would be to subjugate oneself to the Northern Star’s rules. Beyond all things, the mindscape was a Sleeper’s ability to manipulate reality—and without it, you were just a soul left to your wits, drifting in an ocean whose only intent was to suck you down.

  = = =

  Evan felt the incursion. Deep underground, his eyes rolled and his mouth curled to show rotting, yellowed teeth. The Pieces on their pulpits squirmed in response to his commands, and the Multipliers around the world shook and moaned as they redirected their search for Justin—from all of cyberspace to the internal network of the Northern Star. The immense horsepower behind Evan’s thoughts made his influence far reaching and indomitable, but it was also slow, and he could feel Justin barrel through his network like a magnum hummingbird, too quick to grasp.

  Evan realized what Justin was searching for. Evan could institute rules as concrete as gravity, but some rules were beyond his influence—rules that were so integral to the foundation of cyberspace that to alter them would be to break the system itself. And one of those rules was that in cyberspace, every living organism had a digital tail. The Pieces whispered:

  Vanessa.

  Yes, it was that. Cynthia and her misfits didn’t know where the Northern Star was located.

  Evan shifted his strategy from trying to trap Justin to cycling ahead of him. But he didn’t know where Vanessa’s tail was any more than Justin did. Justin was ripping through the portals and programs, twirling in, and suddenly a human fear boiled over the cold calculating that had become Evan’s being. Vanessa had little access to the outside world; her life was wrapped up in the Pieces and Multipliers. Where could she put the tail where Evan could not see it?

  Within me, Evan thought. Not within the Northern Star, but within him. She would have known that he would never look there: it was as suffocating as space, infested with self-contempt. An unbridled lacking and unhappiness that had driven him to his conquests. It was the womb that conceived all Fuhrers. Vanessa connected him to his minions—she was an intermediary for his desires—and he knew now that he had been played. They were all his body. The millions of miles of fiber his veins, the transmissions to space a synaptic gap, all bits and bytes filtering through one thing: him. Justin was a clot hitching and tumbling toward the brain.

  Evan had to find Vanessa’s tail before Justin did. He had to end this now. And to do so he would have to look through all the things that made him him—and not flinch at the truth he found behind the words and gloss. Our fears are what make us. The casualty of ideals is how we climb from one rung to the next. And we are our parents’ children.

  We are here, Kove and China Girl said.

  = = =

  Glass spotted the lead helicopter. His eyes zoomed from 20x to 40x and he could see the pilot’s face. The man checked his dials and talked to the soldiers in back, unaware that the red trajectory line in Glass’s vision terminated on the bridge of his nose. Glass pulled the trigger with his mind.

  The report of the rifle was astounding. Within thirty feet, anyone without earplugs would have lost their hearing permanently. Seven feet of burnt powder erupted from the muzzle as the two-thousand-grain depleted-uranium incendiary bullet left the barrel at nearly a mile per second.

  The pilot saw a bloom of yellow light from the Data Sump—and then he saw nothing. His upper body vanished in a red mist, followed by the bodies of the four men behind them as Glass twisted the smart bullet through the cabin. The tail rotor exploded as the bullet flew through it, and the helicopter spun and plummeted toward the ground. The remaining soldiers hung on, screaming on the way to their deaths.

  Get to the ground, China Girl projected. The other three helicopters immediately dropped down and separated, sprinting for the tree line to get out of Glass’s sightline.

  BOOM! Another of the helicopters opened up. The right side of the pilot’s face charred as the passing round turned the air near him to plasma. The Tank Major at the back exploded, and the helicopter’s tail broke away from the main.

  Through the pain and disorientation (I’m blind in my right eye) the pilot did his best to control the descent. Another round punched through the side of the hull, and a Tank Minor turned
into wet confetti. Still another round passed clean through as if the armored hull were a napkin.

  But the pilot made it down. The four Minors dragged him to safety as the helicopter was consumed in flames.

  Raimey could run at up to twenty-five miles per hour, and very little that got in his way would slow him down. He could barrel through buildings and maintain his speed as if God himself were pushing him through. So when he saw the helicopters descend to avoid Glass’s rifle, he covered the distance to them remarkably fast.

  Behind him Glass continued to fire on Lindo’s army, and Raimey smiled. Lindo’s soldiers had heard of Glass and Raimey’s abilities, but they were big and strong too, and had thought themselves as peers. They were now facing the collapse of this delusion.

  Cynthia, you crazy, brilliant bitch.

  His waist chains spun like a buzz saw. He hurtled over and through downed trees. The suspension slats in his thighs flexed and adjusted to the rolling terrain. He saw a spotlight ahead, searching back and forth for a clearing in the forest. The helicopter found an opening and began its descent. Raimey veered toward it.

  “I’m coming, baby,” he said.

  = = =

  When the pilot saw him, it was already too late. The helicopter was ten yards off the ground and descending. The spotlight swept back and forth, but the pilot was focused on the landing. Had he been scanning the tree line, he would have seen the giant running toward them at full speed with his arm already pulled back. The pilot reacted in the same way as thousands had before him: he covered his face with his hands and screamed.

  WHA-WHAM!

  Raimey blurred, and the hydraulshock transferred five million foot-pounds of energy from his eight-hundred-pound fist to the front of the helicopter. It was extreme overkill. His fist sliced through the front of the helicopter, through the pilot, and on its downward arc it pierced the fuel tank. The helicopter erupted into a ball of flames and crashed to the ground. Three Minors and the Tank Major tried to get out, all on fire but alive.

  John charged into the fire and ignored their pleas. A Minor was pinned under the hull; John mixed him in with the soil. One fired on him, half of its body already bubbling from the heat; Raimey tore him in half. The fire made Raimey glow, and he felt the heat as it licked at him and comforted him. It made his face blister with second-degree burns, a baptism he had needed ever since he had agreed to leave his daughter and become this . . . thing.

  He hammered down the last Minor and turned toward the other giant, a version eight-tenths his size. The Major walked backward like a woman about to get mugged, and then turned to run away. Raimey grabbed him—no hydraulshock, no quick death—and pulled him down into the inferno.

  The man screamed and pleaded for his life. Raimey paid him no attention; instead he watched as the blue flames got in. One thousand degrees Fahrenheit cooking the Major like pork. Raimey held him down and watched his face go from pleading, to screaming, to death. He watched the eyes go from sharp to milk, cooking through like hard-boiled eggs.

  If Lindo had witnessed this, he would have trembled in fear. If Lindo had witnessed this, he would have understood the consequences of acting against men who could shuck away morality to the very quick of their soul, who could pull Hell up to earth to appease an end, and make the Devil squirm from their void of mercy.

  = = =

  Yoshi couldn’t see Glass, but his teeth rattled every time the gigantic rifle detonated. It exceeded the chatter of the Sump, and with each shot, the darkness snapped away and the heat sinks grew long in shadows.

  He saw the first helicopter go down in a ball of flames, but he didn’t see the others—it was too dark. Three minutes later, an explosion curled up into the air about half a mile away.

  Raimey, Yoshi guessed.

  Yoshi checked Justin. He was out, unaware of this world. Yoshi took the FN90 and examined it. He found the safety and clicked it off, just in case. Until they found what they needed, Justin couldn’t defend himself.

  Yoshi felt a bat fly by him, and he looked up to find two glowing orbs. Glass was there.

  Yoshi yelped and fell backward. Glass steadied him.

  “Is he almost done?” Glass asked.

  “There’s no way of knowing.” Yoshi pointed to the breakers. “I’ll only know if there’s trouble.”

  “We’re running out of time. At least three helicopters touched down,” Glass said. “The soldiers are on foot.”

  “How many?”

  “Fifteen.” He looked at the submachine gun in Yoshi’s hands. “Don’t bother. If you see them, hide.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down to greet them.”

  Glass vanished.

  = = =

  A quarter-mile east of the Data Sump, Raimey saw another helicopter descend toward a break in the forest. He ground his way toward them, tearing through the underbrush and knocking down small trees. When Raimey was in full motion, he could hear nothing but his body and the things he knocked over. And with his full focus on reaching the helicopter before the drop, he didn’t hear the dual-rotor thump of another one descending behind it.

  He got there too late. The helicopter rose, peeling sharply away to avoid Glass’s sniper fire. Six Minors moved toward the Sump in a team formation behind a Tank Major. Two shots twanged off John’s helmet, and it took him a moment to realize it wasn’t coming from them. He looked up and saw the muzzle flash of a rifle beneath the belly of a massive gunship.

  Raimey had been deployed by these gunships. They called them “Butchers.” They could hold four Tank Majors in the passenger compartment, and they had cannons fore and aft that were immensely powerful and accurate. A Sleeper pilot was integrated into the flight and weapons systems.

  From sixty feet up, Kove jumped from the helicopter. When he landed, his feet plowed into the earth up to his knees. He climbed out. He was fully armored, and mounted on his back was an ammo case with three hundred rounds for the grenade launcher he held with both hands. Three barrels spun like a centrifuge, launching grenades the size of Coke cans at Raimey. Inside each thin metal shell was an evolved form of plastique explosive four times as powerful as C4. The grenades stuck to their target, and Kove’s Mindlink controlled their detonation. He could detonate them on contact or detonate them once a target was covered.

  Kove unloaded on Raimey, the ungainly, heavy gun causing Kove’s arms to vibrate as if he were carrying an unbalanced washing machine. But his trajectory management system was similar to Glass’s, and each shot landed true.

  Plastique blinded Raimey as it covered his upper body, and then BAM! It exploded and sent him reeling. WOMP-WOMP-WOMP-WOMP, the launcher cycled blooping shells onto him, and the explosions blinded him. They knocked him to the ground. They changed the terrain around him.

  The WOMP grew louder; Kove was getting closer. And while Raimey didn’t think the grenades would kill him, Kove’s hydraulshock would. He had to get away. He turned and ran, still unable to see under the coat of explosive.

  = = =

  When Raimey retreated, Kove smiled. So much for the legend, he thought. He continued to batter the giant with grenades, nine out of ten finding their mark.

  Don’t let him recover, Lindo said. China Girl, get Justin-01.

  Kove pursued Raimey into the forest.

  The gunship with China Girl rose toward the Sump.

  = = =

  Glass saw the gunship pull away after Kove hit the turf, and clinging underneath it, he saw his spidery replacement. Glass’s legs were wrapped around the top of a tree in a vise, and his body was completely stretched parallel to the ground. In his hands were the two suppressed .50 caliber carbines.

  The Tank Major and six Minors that had dropped from the helicopter were approaching him one hundred feet below. He ignored the giant for the moment and traced the front two Minors as they came underneath him. He would take the Tank Major on the ground.

  = = =

  Tank Major Panke lumbered in front of his team. Ko
ve had told them to support China Girl. Ahead he saw the Sump. It sat on a hill, dominating the night sky.

  Panke was unaware that his team had just died. In one second, each had suffered a catastrophic headshot. Their headless bodies tumbled to the ground, the soft foliage cushioning their fall, unnoticed by the giant.

  He didn’t even register that something had landed on him: Glass weighed less than a hundred and fifty pounds. But he knew he was dead when his helmet spun off him like a bottle cap and he felt the open air.

  = = =

  Past its intent, the Northern Star was a blizzard of memories. Justin had quickly hopped through a dozen monitored programs to get into the Northern Star’s slipstream, and he found it to be a river of faces and desires, snippets of a billion lives that were monitored—and, Justin sensed, envied. He had dipped low into the undercurrent of command code and protocol, but that wasn’t where the tail would be. It would be up here amid the river of souls that rushed past Justin in an endless stream.

  These people’s thoughts were not precious. Most of them were dull or vulgar, base needs met with digital junk food. But there were a few that caught Justin off-guard; they choked him with emotion and nearly caused him to swim after them, ignoring his mission.

  And he could feel that the Northern Star desired them, too. These flecks of gold among the mud glowed differently than the others. Justin realized that these lives were not of interest to Evan himself—but rather to the Pieces and Multipliers beneath him. Unbeknownst to Evan—or equally likely, ignored—the Northern Star had a sentience all its own, and the more Justin felt it, the more he realized that it was the mind of a child lost in the woods, hungry and wishing for home. It was the mind of the abused.

  And that was how he would find the tail. A glowing fleck passed him, a flimsy gigabyte in a flow of zetabytes. He heard a girl sing. He could tell it was unmonitored by Evan, but not unmonitored below. He reversed course and chased it. And when he caught up, he entered the girl’s mind.