The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  Raimey rocked the slide back using his mind and loaded a round. “Put another round in each magazine,” he said.

  Glass obliged. Fourteen total.

  “I have a memory of Vanessa,” Glass said. “Some of my memories are very clear, but this one isn’t. The others are like I’m observing it. They’re fact, but there’s distance in them. And I realize this distance is how I viewed everything around me. I remember taking Justin and killing his family—I can smell the farmland, see the bodies fall as I fire—but still there’s a broken part of it where I don’t feel a thing. But the ones with Vanessa are different, and this one is filled with red.”

  “What do you mean?” Raimey asked.

  “I didn’t understand what the pulsing red was at first. I thought maybe the memory was bad. I haven’t thought like a person in a long time.” He continued in his thin, mechanical voice. “I dove through a truck and killed a group of soft soldiers. In the back, I saw Vanessa past some more. They shot me, but I killed them all. She was distraught, in shock, and then she screamed and I ducked and Tank Major Kove just missed my head. I defeated him, and we fled.

  “I tore her out of the truck. We hugged, and the red, for just a moment, wobbled away. Over a military band, there were reports that you had arrived in New York. I knew that if we could hide long enough and if we got to you, then she’d be okay. And then I knew what the red was: rage. I had never felt it before; nothing had ever triggered that in me. I lived at a distance, and she brought me in.”

  “Why tell me this?” Raimey said. It was death by a thousand paper cuts. To know that they had sought him out and failed. That Vanessa had hoped for his shape to appear out of the fog of war.

  “Her life mattered to me when no life did, including my own. The red was rage, and my rage was born out of love. I loved Vanessa. I never felt that before, and I’ll never feel that again. I want her back. I want to feel what I feel in my memories, because I’m freezing, and the memory of her warmth is all I live for.”

  Raimey was speechless. Out of Glass came an echo like a cough, but it wasn’t a cough. It was the Reaper mourning. It was Mike Glass looking at his life with his sliver of memories, knowing that his life was done. There were no more takebacks, no fresh starts. There was this, right now. A reckoning. Glass was the same thing he had always been—a tool used to still hearts. That was all he was, all he had.

  Raimey didn’t know what to do. He held his hand out. Glass wrapped his own hand around Raimey’s pinky like a baby. His hollow cry was the purging of a soul so far from heaven.

  After a while: “I talk to my wife,” Raimey shared.

  “But—” Glass started.

  Raimey interrupted him. He didn’t want Glass to state the obvious. Raimey liked to picture it otherwise.

  “In my head. She speaks to me in my head. I see her though, out of the corner of my eye. Or behind me, whispering in my ear . . . always out of reach.”

  “What does she say?” Glass asked.

  “You know how you talked about life? I think that’s the part of me she protects. She helps me see past the red.” Raimey smiled. “Back when I was not this, when we were a family, we’d take long walks around the neighborhood. Her family was a bunch of walkers. And if it had just rained, she’d always pause and pick up the worms and put them in the grass. They’d be drying out, the sun would be on them, and they’d be too far from the soil. I would just stomp over them or on them, not even thinking about it. But she would always stop and save them. Over the years she must have saved thousands. Little heartbeats and pulses, unaware that a higher power had helped them survive another day.”

  Raimey laughed out loud. “Vanessa was so grossed out one time because Tiffany—that’s my wife—she picked up a slug out of the street. It was a real green, boogery one. And Vanessa, who must have been nine at the time, totally flipped out. Tiffany put the slug into a leafy bush and wiped the slime on her jeans, and she told Vanessa that life is special, and that if that slug had been found on Mars, it would change religions.”

  Raimey’s face darkened.

  “I don’t think I ever learned that lesson, even after Tiffany died. Looking back, I don’t know if Tiffany was telling Vanessa or me. Maybe she was hoping I’d hear.”

  The intercom switched on. The pilot’s voice. “We are being targeted. I repeat, we are being targeted. Brace yourself.”

  Suddenly the bottom of the plane became the side as the giant wing banked sixty degrees in evasive maneuvers. Raimey put his hands out against the hull of the ship, and he immediately broke through the interior framing as twelve thousand pounds transferred from his fist into the hull.

  “Shit!” he yelled. “Get my helmet on.”

  Glass moved through the cabin with grace as gravity came and went, the bomber trying to avoid a threat neither of them could see. He grabbed the helmet out of the air and locked it down onto John.

  “Missile lock!” the pilot announced. “Thirty seconds and closing. I repeat, thirty seconds and closing.” The plane continued to roll and bank, veering away from their destination. “No chaff! We have no chaff!”

  “Open the bay door!” Raimey said.

  “Negative, still trying to evade. Twenty seconds.”

  Gravity again vanished. Glass pushed himself past Raimey, floating through space. He grabbed the parachute designed to drop supplies into battle and attached it to anchor tows on John’s back. It was smaller than what John normally used.

  “Is this going to work?” Raimey yelled. The engines strained trying to increase altitude and then the plane aggressively banked right and down. John was dizzy from vertigo.

  “I don’t know,” Glass said.

  He attached the hard case to Raimey’s back. Then he wrapped himself around Raimey’s chest, his fingers intertwined into the footholds that allowed technicians to climb up and around the giant Tank Major.

  “Five seconds,” the pilot said.

  “I’m sorry,” Raimey said.

  The pilot’s voice was resigned. “At least it’ll be quick.”

  Raimey raised his arm to slam it through the metal hull, but there was no need.

  BAM! The surface-to-air missile launched by Big Brother slammed into the plane, which vanished into flames like it was fuel-soaked papier-mâché. Raimey, wrapped in Glass, tumbled toward the earth from thirty thousand feet.

  = = =

  Justin was on his back, pinned beneath China Girl, but his head poked out, and he watched the lights flicker on and off as the trolley made its way to the bottom of the deep tunnel.

  He was numb from the revelation that he wasn’t here to replace a Piece, but to sum them into one. He was the successor, a more efficient housing. What else would Evan have sought except immortality? It only made sense—it was the obvious next step to what he had become. He was a god in cyberspace, but he was also flesh and blood and mortal. The god could, and would, die. But not now.

  Justin hadn’t believed that the technology existed, but who else except Lindo could have solved the riddle that had haunted mankind since it first pressed its handprint against cave walls to triumph against its impermanence? Through history it had been our suffering reality and the impetus for so many of our actions. Some day we will die. And while religions were a place to lay our troubled heads, and their soothing words comforted like a mother’s hand caressing our cheeks, no one really knew. No one had come back. And astronomy and science had only further proven just how insignificant we really were in a cosmos that may have had a creator, or may have not. Religion, science, philosophy—these were figments to battle the boogeyman. Necessary inventions so we didn’t wake up every day and scream in fear and self-pity until blood wet our lips.

  Justin made the next leap. After Evan, Vanessa, and the Pieces were transferred into his mind and his own personality was erased—when his own body was old and withered and itself ready to rest in the earth—Evan’s goal was to let loose the mortal coil altogether, to rid himself of the carbon-based form tha
t had constrained him. To be free of heart and lungs, marrow and breath.

  To be everywhere in the online consciousness of man.

  The trolley hissed and clanked into place. China Girl looked down. “We’re here. Get up.” She chittered ahead of him.

  The massive cavern was exposed stone. A mountain of dusty crates was stacked to one side, and lights were anchored into the rocky walls along with metal supports. They cast uneven light on the ground. Justin couldn’t see the ceiling.

  Ahead of them was what looked like a river dam. It had been poured after the Northern Star was complete. Another blast door was at its center. But this one was much smaller.

  They were watched. As they approached the door, it opened; and when it did, a crackling blue light lit the dirty floor. A whonk-whonk-whonk-whonk filled the air.

  Justin entered the final chamber. The curtain had been drawn aside and the great Oz revealed.

  This was the home of the Northern Star.

  = = =

  The same technology that allowed Glass to rarely miss now pegged their terminal velocity at one hundred and thirty-five miles per hour. Raimey didn’t have air pressure compensation, and he lost consciousness immediately after the plane evaporated, his old lungs unable to pull the thin wisps of oxygen from the air around them. They barrel-rolled until the atmosphere thickened, and then the top-heavy giant corkscrewed headfirst, his giant arms spinning outward like a massive auger bit ready to core the earth.

  Glass hung on to Raimey without issue, and the air compressor that oxygenated his biomass adapted for the altitude. He was designed for these kinds of jumps. He climbed up to John’s back to pull the chute. They were at twenty-five thousand feet. He was going to wait until the last moment: whatever had shot them out of the sky would have no problem finishing the job if they were slowly gliding down to land.

  Just as that thought filled Glass’s mind, tracer bullets from the ground ripped toward them like laser bolts. Glass zoomed in, and saw that the shots came from one source, a walking bionic the size of a stadium. It was twenty miles southwest of them, past a slash of river. But Glass and Raimey were over a city; that would provide them some cover if they could make it safely to the ground.

  An anti-aircraft round hit Raimey, and the auger-spin turned into a cartwheel, flipping sky with earth. More rounds hit, and Glass scrambled to keep his bearings and stay on the opposite side of the strikes. John’s armor could withstand the projectiles, but Glass’s could not; a single round would decimate him.

  The mid-air explosions continued to push them farther from their goal, and now they careened northwest, out of the city. They were entering ground zero, where the first nuclear strikes had taken out Washington, D.C. as the Northern Star had put its first stamp on global control. It was a charred, flat expanse.

  “HOLY SHIT!” Raimey woke to find the earth rushing toward him and explosions all around. Another strike hit them, and they flipped end over end.

  “We’re being shot at,” Glass said, his electronic voice box raised to its maximum volume.

  “Tell me the parachute’s connected!” Raimey yelled.

  Glass laughed. “Yes.”

  “This isn’t funny!” Raimey hollered.

  Glass shrugged. It was at least interesting. “I’ll pull the chute at three thousand feet. I believe the thing shooting at us is Big Brother.”

  “I can’t see it!” Raimey said. To him, the tracers had no origin, they were just streaks of light chasing them from the landscape below.

  “It’s thirty-five miles southwest of us,” Glass replied. The ground beneath them grew more detailed. “Get ready, we’re at seven thousand feet.”

  It was a rude awakening, but Raimey calmed down. He was alive and so was Glass, and the chute was unscathed. He relaxed his body. A moment later, Mike’s voice: “Three . . . two . . . one.”

  Raimey heard the violent sound of the canvas chute expanding, and then his body snapped backward and his feet dropped below him. They were coming in fast. The ground beneath them was a dirty ashtray. On the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, it looked like a pod of whales had grounded. Even in the chaos, John registered that they were battleships. They listed sideways, torn asunder. In the break, a submarine wobbled back and forth, just off shore. The Navy had tried to stop the Northern Star. Acid filled Raimey’s stomach at the sight of the failed firepower beneath him. And then he felt Glass pull on the parachute, guiding them to a safe drop zone amid the molten remains of the nation’s capital.

  = = =

  There was no ceremony, no greeting from the great Evan Lindo, when Justin entered the chamber of the Northern Star. But what he saw nearly dropped him in awe. The Northern Star was staggering in size. Thirteen Colossal Cores horseshoed around one that was the size of a city block. The Pieces hung from the Colossals like gods mounted in the Pillars of Olympus. They were all mounted in modified Impetus machines. Justin had heard of these, but he’d never seen one. The Impetus was designed for Sleepers that never left cyberspace. Mechanized arms attached to the body kept it in constant motion; electrodes triggered coordinated muscle groups in sync with, or in resistance to, the movements. It was the evolution of the Sleeper chair. But these versions were mounted in pods, and the pods appeared to be filled with a liquid. The Sleepers were old and withered, aborted fetuses preserved in formaldehyde.

  Justin saw that one of the Pieces, a man, floated awkwardly in the gel. The Impetus machine continued to manipulate his body, but his arm had been torn from his shoulder. This Piece was dead, and he probably had been for years. The Northern Star was falling apart. It was machines and computers, metal, glass, and somewhere a nuclear reactor to keep it all running. But it was also flesh and bone. And that was the real God’s ultimate prank: all the ingenuity in the world, all the statues to our greatness—none of it would stop us from one day becoming dust.

  Except Evan.

  They walked toward Evan. While the Pieces were hung like accessories, Evan was prominently displayed in front of the largest Data Core Justin had ever seen. He, too, was in an Impetus machine, but he was mounted at the base of the Core, on a platform that could be reached by two flights of stairs. His face, like the others, was covered in metal framing that connected his brain into his Core. Two thick data fibers entered through the front. Two more entered through the back. They coursed blue.

  But Evan Lindo’s ageless avatar—the man with the square glasses, soft chin, and goatee—wouldn’t recognize his maker. Sores covered his body. Maybe he was allergic to the suspension gel, but Justin guessed it was the constant bombardment of radiation. The bunker could protect its inhabitants from a nuclear strike, but could it handle a hundred? Two hundred? The accumulated effect of turning Washington, D.C. into an environment hostile to the heartiest of creatures? Justin didn’t know.

  At Evan’s feet was Vanessa. She wasn’t in an Impetus machine. If Justin remembered correctly, Evan had abducted her when he was losing the war. He had made a miscalculation, and the Northern Star wasn’t performing at its peak. She was a last-ditch effort to win. There had been no time to prep her.

  She was in a pod laid sideways. Fiber from it connected directly to Evan, and a scourge of lines snaked their way from her pod to the Pieces.

  Justin grimaced at what he saw. She was naked, her ribs grossly exposed, her arms and legs tucked to her body, a coma patient decades in. She would not live outside the pod.

  China Girl continued to walk him across the massive expanse. At the other side, Justin saw that two more Pieces were dead. One pod was a snow globe of skin flecks. In the other, the Piece’s head had been bludgeoned beyond recognition by one of the mechanized Impetus arms. Entropy tore at all things, especially empires. Justin guessed that, if they had tried to overthrow Lindo five years ago, they would have been killed almost immediately. But now, this was a compromised god.

  And still, here Justin was, on his way to serve it.

  “Where are we going?” Justin asked. They entered an adjacen
t hall.

  “Prep,” China Girl said.

  Justin had seen the pods. He knew what that meant.

  Ten minutes later, he was naked on a surgical table. A light on an adjustable arm stared down at him. China Girl was shaving his body with one of her retractable knives. The blade gliding along his skin felt like taut fishing line. It rode up his neck, across his face, over his skull, between his legs. He didn’t move an inch.

  Afterward, she wheeled over a piece of equipment and turned it on. It was a dermatology laser. “This will sting,” she said. Her bedside manner was impeccable. The smell of singed hair filled the air, and his skin burnt as she ran the device over him, killing every follicle on his body.

  She held his head down and carefully scraped the scar tissue off the contact patches that were a direct highway to his brain. Instinct caused him to flail, and she pinned his limbs down with hers. He could feel the dribbling heat of blood making its way to the table.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he heard himself say.

  China Girl said nothing. She continued her surgery. He cleared his throat. He was crying.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he tried again.

  Still nothing. She looked at him—or didn’t—just like a Lindo. Just like Glass. A predator examining prey, full from a previous feast.

  “Shhh,” the room whispered. “Soon, Justin. Soon.”

  “You’re a MONSTER!” Justin screamed. “Why do all of this? Why?”

  “Even if I could explain it in terms you’d understand, it wouldn’t matter. I’ve reached a level of consciousness that no words in any language can describe. There is no way to describe to you what I feel. What I think. To use these words to speak with you hurts my head, like a child banging pots and pans in a kitchen. Explain to an ant why you do what you do. The best you could accomplish in that interaction is to understand that it seeks sustenance and give it a breadcrumb. Maybe it would sense your presence, your shadow over it, the massiveness of this “indescribable,” and then it would sense the breadcrumb. It would take it, and you would think that there was an understanding between you and this ant. That not only did you provide sustenance, but that you were gracious. That you, in your size and power and knowledge, let it live. And not only live, but live well.