The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “You would watch the ant carry the breadcrumb along its path, past the others without breadcrumbs, ones that might never get one. And you would lose interest. Maybe you’ve grown bored with the ants and their behavior. It’s so simple, isn’t it? The ant and its breadcrumb . . . where they go and why? Predictable. Pointless. They find food. They take it to the nest. They find food. They take it to the nest. They die.

  “That’s it. That’s all. But you don’t think about it. Because you are me, looking at you. Or you are you, looking at an ant. It doesn’t matter—this is a metaphor. This is a comparison so you can relate to me. What of it? The ant is gone and you stand up so high you can barely see them on the ground. You watch your step because you know—from memory—that they are there. But if you step on a couple, what does it matter? There are so many of them. What does it matter? There will always be more.”

  Justin’s heart raced. He understood Lindo. He understood the logic, because the metaphor was perfect. Of course it was: it was God explaining the mystery. It was God explaining why it/he/she was different from the rest.

  Ker-chink.

  A searing pain ripped down one of Justin’s hands. He looked down: China Girl was implanting the electrode feeds of the Impetus machine. The first was in his palm.

  Ker-chink.

  Another splayed barb entered his forearm.

  “We’ll do this right,” the walls said. Ker-chink. Justin nearly blacked out from the pain. “One day more, Justin. First the transfer, then the helm. You will understand soon enough, and then you won’t have to understand anything ever again.”

  Ker-chink.

  Ker-chink.

  Ker-chink.

  Ker-chink.

  Chapter 13

  Raimey had seen photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bomb. As a kid, he had been fascinated with nuclear bombs, their mushroom clouds, the sheer violence of their delivery. But as with most kids, there was an innocence to his fascination; he was like a child turning a stick into a gun. The abysmal nature of what the bomb really was had been shrouded by the awesomeness of its power.

  But the adult Raimey knew that war was the worst of man, a failure to recognize the sanctity of life, to agree that we should all exist, to allow others a difference of opinion, of values, even if they conflicted with our own. War was a necessity, in the face of tyrants and wayward ideologies, those who looked to expand their empires at another’s expense. And the nuclear bomb was the ultimate sin. Not only did it eradicate what existed; it took away whatever could have been. It was a hubris machine, a mechanism of delusion, whose makers and practitioners ignored all of science and all of discovery, who moved our planet to the center of the universe. Our insignificance should have brought us closer. We are on a raft, floating in infinite seas with no shore to ever break the horizon.

  Raimey tore the parachute off his tow mounts. Glass had moved ahead, scaling a twisted metal spire in the middle of nothing. For a moment, Raimey thought it was the Washington Monument, but that would have been too fitting. It was an apartment building that had somehow clung to its atoms.

  Caustic winds blasted across the planes, enough for John to lean into them, and the sunken buildings around him whistled in inquiry: WHOOOOOO?

  WHOOOOOO are you to come here and make a difference? WHOOOOOO are you to judge what Evan has done? WHOOOOOO are you but a husband and father who has abandoned his post?

  WHOOOOOO?

  Raimey didn’t have an answer. He had been to Washington, D.C. early in his service. He had walked the streets, used the subway. He had looked through the tall pike fences of the White House’s front lawn. He would have never known this was the same place. He would have never thought this was possible. It was a desert now, lifeless. Everything gray and brown, an atomic color correction.

  A green light in John’s helmet turned to yellow and started blinking. It was a radiation sensor. “Give me a few more days,” he prayed aloud.

  The wind responded: WHOOOOOO are you to survive?

  Glass dropped to the ground.

  “What do you see?” Raimey asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What about Big Brother?”

  “We’re forty miles from its last location; none of these structures are tall enough for a sightline.”

  “But you know where we have to go?”

  “Within twenty meters,” Glass replied.

  Raimey stood up. “That’ll do.”

  The concrete and steel—and, yes, flesh and bones—of the capital had been blasted to sand. Raimey and Glass scaled large dunes that were buttressed by the few hollowed buildings that remained. Past one, the ground undulated strangely. John crunched through. Halfway in, he realized he was stepping on the petrified remains of people. One of the mounds had been blown clean, and a person lay there as if sleeping.

  A memory gurgled up: a girl dancing in a club. They had gone home together that night. He didn’t remember the girl’s name, but he wondered if she had died here. Thirty years after, when the Northern Star took over, she would have had a family, maybe even grandchildren. He wondered if they all got snuffed out. All those memories, all that love, all the sacrifice for progeny, cooked crisp by an atomic sun. Probably. Likely.

  Glass came back from scouting ahead.

  “Look at this,” Raimey said, gesturing toward the bodies.

  “There are thousands of them.”

  “You knew?”

  “I can see through the sand. I have an x-ray component to my vision.”

  “Then why go through here?”

  “They’re dead. It’s the shortest way.”

  Washington, D.C. had once been a mega-city, and slowly, as they moved out of ground zero, buildings began to rise out of the sand. They were teetering structures, exposed and wiry. Some of the sections vibrated strangely as if on a fault line. They approached a collapsed road and saw why: there was a subway system below, with sections that were incredibly unstable. It groaned up at them in pain.

  Raimey had never paid much attention to Glass’s agility, but now that Glass was his only companion, he couldn’t believe how easily he moved. Raimey lumbered around large objects, doubling the length from point A to point B because the only other option was smashing through it. But Glass moved in a straight line regardless of what was in front of him. He hopped up and over bus skeletons and through toppled buildings without any hint of thought.

  Through the sliver of buildings, Raimey could see the Potomac River. They’d have to cross it at some point. He wondered what the odds were that a bridge was still intact.

  Raimey was still thinking about that when they turned down another block and walked right into the frozen tableau of an ancient battle. Ahead, a dead Colossus was sprawled out in a downward dog position, its “head” pinned to the ground and its back raised over ten stories in the air. It leaned against two broken skyscrapers. Around it were husks of tanks, helicopters, and airplanes. They looked like playthings compared to the behemoth arched over them.

  “Is that a . . .” Raimey started.

  “A Colossus-class bionic,” Glass finished. “Similar to the one that shot at us.”

  They walked toward it and into what was clearly some kind of last stand. Raimey saw markings on a tank.

  “These aren’t American,” he said. It was Russian. Another was European Union. A Chinese fighter plane was sandwiched into the base of a building. Raimey saw eight full-faced helmets on the ground next to shallow body suits, and he moved around them. They looked like Kevlar snails communing. Two Lindo husks lay near them. Dead Lindos were everywhere, but for each one of them, there were ten of the skeleton soldiers.

  “The radiation level is highly toxic here,” Glass said.

  The light in Raimey’s helmet continued to blink yellow. “This whole place is.”

  The Colossus bionic arched in front of them like a gateway to hell.

  “More so here. They used a tactical nuke to kill the Colossus.”

  On cue, the ye
llow light turned red. Raimey grimaced. “I can’t stay here long.” He couldn’t believe what lay before him. The city was a mass grave of soldiers and tanks, weapons, and Lindos. World War III. How could we not know about this? The entire world had united to destroy the Northern Star, and this was their forgotten legacy. But he knew how it had been kept secret: Evan controlled all information. Not a whisper of this was online. Not a word of this had been typed into print.

  Glass looked around, his green eyes swirling in their pine-colored galaxy. “This was a last stand.”

  They stood underneath the Colossus arch. In one of its hands it held a tank as if it were a die-cast replica. Glass started searching the vehicles, working through them like a drug-sniffing dog.

  He went over to a boxy, light-armored tank that was turtled over. It had one very large gun mounted on it. Raimey circled around and saw that Glass was trying to get into the hatch, but it was obstructed by the road.

  “This vehicle would have fired tactical nukes,” Glass said. He looked at the Colossus, and Raimey’s eyes trailed behind. He understood: they would be facing one.

  Glass moved over and Raimey tried to rock the tank. It shook and swayed, but it was too heavy.

  “Stand back.”

  WHA-WHAM!

  Raimey hydraulshocked the top of the vehicle with a glancing blow. It tumbled end over end and came to a rest on its side fifty yards away, the hatch fully exposed. They went over to it. Glass detached the hard case on his back and slid in. Raimey leaned down.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Hold.”

  Raimey heard something metal give.

  “Bingo,” Glass said. Raimey mouthed the word, surprised it came from Glass’s mouth. “There are two in here.”

  Glass’s hand appeared out of the hatch holding the tactical nuke. It was the size of two stacked coffee cans. Raimey gently plucked it away and laid it on the ground. Glass slithered out with the other one.

  Glass opened the hard case and made room.

  “I can’t believe how small they are,” Raimey said.

  “They should have a minimum five-kiloton yield,” Glass said.

  “How far away are we?” Raimey asked.

  “Twenty miles.”

  Raimey looked at the carnage. “Why would they land here?”

  “They didn’t know the Northern Star’s exact location.”

  They had come knowing they would most likely die.

  Raimey and Glass both fell silent as if paying respect. The toxic winds slid in and over the broken metal of the long-dead machines and the Colossus above them, making them cry out their story in different pitches of emptiness that told it all too well. It was the iron whine of a society gone, confessions of the dead howling in the anguish of their final moments, passing on their secret that we acted too late against the atrocities in the world. And some things are too far gone to ever get back.

  Hours passed as they made their way.

  “We’re getting close enough where Big Brother might sense us,” Glass said. “We’ll be safer below ground.”

  “I don’t have night vision,” Raimey said.

  “I’ll lead you.”

  Glass moved ahead, looking for a way down. Raimey found him standing on top of a hill of rubble. “There’s an entrance beneath this.”

  Raimey pulled seven tons of debris out of the way in five minutes. The mound covered a ragged hole. Peering over, the overcast sky bled enough light to see the bottom: it was a fifty-foot drop to the ground.

  “Can you make that?” Glass asked. Raimey flinched as he thought. The battle chassis could survive, no problem. But he wasn’t sure if his seventy-four-year-old body would. His spine was mounted into a suspension platform that floated inside the suit, but at fifty feet, it would bottom out on impact.

  Glass didn’t wait for the answer. “Wait here,” he said, and he crawled into the hole like an insect. He moved along the ceiling and then down a pillar to the base. A train track was beneath the hole. Two hundred yards away, Glass saw a train car.

  From above, Raimey saw Glass blur by, and then he heard the grinding of metal on metal. Like a strongman, Glass gripped the front of the car and pulled it, using the horizontal slats between the rails as footholds. He dragged it beneath the hole, reducing the jump to thirty-five feet.

  Raimey fell onto the train car like it was a bale of hay. It crumpled around him, cushioning his fall, and he rolled off of it onto the floor.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  The subway terminal was massive. Hallways and train tunnels shot off it in all directions. The ceiling was unstable and broken in places. Large sections hung down, ready to fall. The sickly light from the surface penetrated in laser-like columns, leaving the borders and the in-betweens pitch black. Aside from the creaks and groans of the crumbling ceiling and the echo of dripping water, there were no other sounds.

  “We have to go this way,” Glass said.

  He walked ahead of Raimey, avoiding the light, while Raimey did everything he could to stay within its reach. The darkness was suffocating for John, and he could feel his feet constantly crunching down on round shapes. He knew they were skulls. A few were showcased in the light.

  “A lot of dead,” Glass said. He was up ahead. His vision allowed him to see everything. There were tens of thousands of bodies.

  “They must have come down here to get away from the nukes,” Raimey replied.

  The thousands of skeletons and remains were dried out by nuclear heat and time. Those that still had skin—most were just bones—were like old hides mounted on a hunter’s wall: an approximation of a human, maybe an old prop from a zombie movie. But up close, that cinnamon smell, sweet on the surface and pungent underneath, still remained.

  Raimey stepped on and through the piles of bodies, unable to avoid them. They grinned at him and stared up with their hollow eyes.

  “How are we going to activate the nukes?” he asked. He needed a distraction. His mind was wandering into dark places. Even with all the bodies they had passed, John knew he had killed more. Far more. He pictured the skulls that he had tromped past, cracking their necks to stare at him in judgment.

  Glass’s constant disappearing and reappearing didn’t help. He appeared at the giant’s side and Raimey almost jumped. “They have standard-impact artillery fuzes. Once they’re armed, they’ll explode on impact.”

  “How do you know this?” Raimey asked.

  “They’re weapons,” Glass responded. Of course. The one thing he would know about. “We’re nine miles from Justin’s last known location. We’re close to where the Colossus fired on us.”

  Glass vanished ahead, leaving Raimey to stew in his sins.

  = = =

  Justin watched as the pod of one of the deceased Pieces slowly lowered. He was strapped into a wheelchair, his entire body on fire from the implants for the Impetus machine. The pod ratcheted to a stop, then opened up; the gel and carcass slopped out onto the ground. China Girl walked over and cleaned it up. Nausea swept over Justin as she rocked the severed arm loose from one of the Impetus legs and tossed it aside, along with the aborted remains of what had once been a great scientist, taken against his will—and stripped of it, too.

  She wheeled Justin over and unstrapped him. He didn’t fight. Why bother? She placed him inside the pod, facing out, and he felt her attach the Impetus limbs to his body. He hung in the air.

  His vision went dark when China Girl put the modified Mindlink over his head, covering his face, but he felt the helmet’s synchronous transfer pads connect with his own. Then he heard the pod close.

  In the darkness, he felt the amniotic gel flow in, first to his feet, then his knees, past his thighs, and finally over his head. Panic set in. While he couldn’t see anything, his eyes were still open, and now they spotted from his stress and the lack of oxygen as he held his breath. His body fought to breathe in the liquid and then, finally, it acquiesced. He thrashed around as the ox
ygenated fluid entered his lungs. He gasped and vomited, only to inhale more.

  The pod rose, and his body jostled; he heard a muffled hum as the Data Core behind him crackled into life. Then the real world—the world he had lived in off and on for the last forty-seven years—vanished in a storm of data, as if his brain had expanded over everything in a supernova.

  = = =

  There was nothing alive for fifty miles, but there were things with eyes. While Lindo no longer actively scoured the landscape, Big Brother reported the plane and the parachute to Evan, and he cycled that information over to the Lindos, a separate stream of his consciousness that usually acted independent of his thought, like muscle memory.

  They had spread outward in response to the report, and now they wormed their way into the crevices of the wasteland, looking for the survivors. If Glass and Raimey had had eyes overhead, they would have witnessed thousands of bionics fanning out in their general direction, a murderous search party.

  Glass was well ahead of Raimey when he first saw one: perched upside down on the ceiling just within sight. The Lindo hadn’t yet registered that they were there. Glass didn’t think twice. In a blur, he drew his carbine from his back and fired one shot into its head. It toppled to the ground.

  “They’re here,” Glass said. Raimey’s waist chains spun up as he readied for battle. The quiet before the storm was over.

  “I still can’t see,” Raimey said. Aside from the sporadic shafts of light, the subway tunnels were pitch black.

  “We need to stay below as long as possible,” Glass said. As if on cue, the ground shuddered from a far-off tremor.

  Big Brother.

  Raimey felt something on his back and realized that one had attached itself to him. He pulled it off as if it was nothing more than a burr on a sock. He looked at it for a moment.

  “I’m impressed, John,” the thing said.