The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  Raimey bared his teeth and crushed it into an expensive rag.

  “We need to get across the river, Mike,” Raimey said. There were plenty of offshoots from the tunnel they were in, and now they carried the sound of approaching feet. It was a cavalcade, fire ants rushing through the Amazonian forest, all coming for them.

  They did the only thing they could do: they ran. Glass led the way. Behind them, they could hear the horde choking the tunnels. Above them the ground continued to shake.

  “This way!” Glass veered right. They ran down a black tunnel. Raimey couldn’t see a thing.

  “This way!” Glass yelled again. Three bursts from his carbine and the tunnel flashed in a strobe. Three Lindos fell, and Raimey’s eyes were seared by the muzzle flash.

  Dim light ahead: a break in the ceiling. They entered another open terminal. Behind them the noise grew. The Lindos were talking.

  “You weren’t the first to come,” they all said. “Wars have taken place here. The world tried to end me, and they failed. What did you think you had that was so important? Your armor? Your technology? Your will? Others with far more than you have entered this land and become soil.”

  “Get back,” Raimey said. Glass ran ahead.

  WHA-WHAM!

  Raimey hydraulshocked the side of the tunnel, and the entire roof caved in. He veered out of the way as a torrent of debris collapsed, separating them from the pursuing Lindos. He could hear them hitting the other side with the inertia of a train. The debris rattled from their energy. Already they were tearing it down. Chunks toppled over, and up top, Raimey saw hands raking at the cement.

  “John!” It was Glass. “I found it!”

  Raimey stopped staring and sprinted toward Glass’s voice. Glass was at a tunnel entrance. A dilapidated sign read “Woodbridge Line.”

  The ground shook so hard that John could barely keep his feet. “This will get us there?”

  “Yes!”

  A huge bellow seared the air, and a hand the size of a house ripped the roof off the terminal. A cascade of Lindos fell off Big Brother; Glass shot them down. More Lindos broke through the barricade and out of the adjacent tunnels, and Glass fired on them as he and Raimey retreated.

  The huge arm reached in, just missing John, smearing Lindos like flies. This was an unstoppable army, immune to harsh environments, relentless in its attack.

  “Get in the tunnel!” Raimey yelled. Glass continued to fire, emptying the mag, reloading, and then back at it, dropping them down, nary a bullet wasted.

  “GET IN!” Raimey grabbed Glass and threw him as far as he could.

  WHA-WHAM! Raimey collapsed the entrance and they sprinted for their lives. The ground shook. It was no longer about the Lindos—it was about Big Brother.

  And then, suddenly, what Raimey had done to the Lindos was done to him. The tunnel was crushed under Big Brother’s weight. The icy cold Potomac River poured in, and for Glass and Raimey, everything went dark.

  Chapter 14

  What do you dream about before you die? For John, his mind fed him lies. The sound of the rushing water ferried him toward the next plane. He heard Glass yell, in his hollow way, but the distance was too much, like a flea screaming up at the moon.

  He was whole. He held his wife’s hand in front of the priest. She wore white, her long hair flowing over her shoulders. Her family was present, her father giving her away. He looked to the pews: his family was there too. His dad who came and went, his mom whom he’d never met, Grandma Roz who had raised him. Friends from the neighborhood, even those who had died young. It was beautiful. It was how it should have been.

  The bombing had never happened. His legs hadn’t burned away in the fire; his arms hadn’t been reduced to strands of flesh. He went to the UN that day and came home again. He and his daughter went to the park. The sun was out, even in the fall. Tiffany’s cancer never came to be.

  His daughter grew up and found a man. Raimey grilled him on their first date, but the boy was good. Tiffany watched the interview, making faces at John. After the boy left, she said, “Don’t you think you went a bit too far explaining what you do?” But they laughed and touched, and it went further because no one was around.

  He led Vanessa down the aisle. He nodded to his Tiffany as they passed, and she dabbed at her eyes with roses of white tissue. He sat down next to her, put his arm around her, and watched as the job they were tasked with when Vanessa had entered this world was now satisfied. They had raised a girl who respected herself, who had a future, and who now had a partner.

  They grew old; they became grandparents. John held the baby girl in his large hands. She’d cling like a tree frog, and later she’d run in yelling “Grandpy!” with the fever of life that gets lost with years. Vanessa and her husband asked John for advice, and he gave it.

  It grew harder to get out of bed, but each day they did, saying “good morning” with a little kiss and making sure to tell each other “I love you” even after an argument, because they knew, as good as any, that the next days weren’t guaranteed. John met with his old soldiers, some with canes, some in wheelchairs, and they regaled each other with stories of bravery and toasts to the men and women who had been churned in its quest.

  John died first. It was painful, but the pain was fine. Others wished to go quietly in the night, but John had felt pain—he knew it well—and he’d rather say goodbye to the ones he loved than wake in the hereafter or never again.

  Vanessa was in her fifties, and the grandchildren (two of them now) were young adults actually going to a physical college. Tiffany sat next to the bed holding his hand, and the others stood around him, and they talked about nothing important. But all the same, it was so important because family was everything.

  Everyone else left that night, but not Tiffany. She laid her head on John. His chest was thin now, his breaths shallow, but her presence brought him more comfort than any painkiller. Her touch had always made him whole. Her loving touch was proof from the universe that he had done all right.

  “I love you. Thank you,” she says.

  “You are everything to me,” John replies.

  And instead of going quietly, instead of slipping into the peacefulness that lies beyond life, he hears the rushing of water and the screams of Glass and the realization that his daughter is OUT THERE AND NEEDS HIM AND HE CANNOT DIE. And as is the cruel fate of his existence, he leaves his old, wonderful wife. He rises above the bed, and she hangs on to his arm until her arthritic hands run out of strength and he abandons her anew.

  John Raimey, seventy-four, becomes aware of his surroundings. He is alive. And the tunnel is filling with water.

  = = =

  “Glass,” Raimey said. His throat was thick. “Glass!” He could barely see. The black rolled in waves, slopping against his helmet. He stood up. “GLASS!”

  GUNG GUNG. The water ahead lit up from muzzle flash. Glass was submersed, pinned under debris. Raimey ran over. He ducked underneath the growing tide and grabbed the slab. He wrenched it up. It was heavy, buried under the water, and he felt his electric engines and gears buckle from the strain.

  “Come on.” Raimey gritted his teeth. The implant told him he was at max exertion. “Come on!”

  The slab began to move, and the water slid off even more. Glass slipped out, rushed up to the surface, and climbed onto John’s shoulders. A vent under his arm spewed water and Raimey heard it suck in air.

  “Are you okay?” Raimey asked.

  “We have to get across,” Glass said. Raimey sloshed through the waist-high water. Past the collapse it was just the tunnel, free of debris, and he picked up speed while the water continued to rise. It was at his shoulders when Glass finally saw the exit. Raimey felt the incline of the track, and they rose out of the submerged tunnel to a service station above ground that said “Woodbridge.”

  The city had expanded over the river, and here, like the rest, there was scarred shelter. They made their way into one of the high rises and collapsed.
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  For a while they didn’t speak. Glass continued to make a wheezy sound as if the breathing apparatus still held some water. Finally he stood up and gingerly tested his left leg.

  “You’re damaged?” Raimey asked. He could see wires bunched up at the top and bottom of the leg. Some of the electrostatic tissue had torn.

  “Yes, but I’m fine. We’re north of the Northern Star.”

  “How far?”

  “Five miles from Justin’s last location. We can’t go into the wasteland again without destroying Big Brother.”

  Raimey got to his feet. “I agree. We have to lure him to us.” He had eleven hydraulshocks left. His fists could puncture any armor, but how could he reach Big Brother’s heart?

  The buildings swayed above them, calling with their steely song, longing for purpose.

  Raimey knew how.

  = = =

  It was night: Glass’s time. He and Raimey had split up, each handling their own assignment. Glass moved to the outskirts of the city toward the wasteland—the true one, a forest of melted steel, blowing with dunes made from blasted cement and dirt. He could see far ahead and he knew that the Northern Star was located at what had once been Marine Base Quantico. A distant memory burbled up—more fact than vision: he had been here before.

  The choking horde of Lindos was nowhere to be found. There were stragglers, a few here and there, but he avoided them easily. They had night vision, but theirs crackled and burned from the native radiation that bombarded their sensors with useless full-spectrum data. Glass was unaffected.

  A few of the creatures moved, but most of them were still. They were sleeping. To conserve power, Glass surmised. Evan must think Raimey and I are dead.

  He scaled the tallest point at the edge of the twisted city and found a nook that would do. He assembled his big rifle, loaded it, and laid it down. Then he pulled one of the nukes from the case, flipped it over to find the rotary mechanism that clicked to arm the device, and armed it.

  Glass parkoured down the building, effortlessly bouncing from one level to the next, and when he hit the ground, he wasted no time. He accelerated to full speed with an active nuke in his arms.

  He burst forward at fifty miles per hour. The sleeping Lindos were in packs, like dogs; he would approach them and either swerve out of the way or leap over them in forty-foot-long jumps done at full sprint.

  All things have patterns. And Big Brother, while immense and intimidating, had a human brain at its core. It circled the bunker in a predetermined way: a routine built on decades of habit.

  Glass would place the nuke right in its scouting line.

  He found the spot he had marked in his head with GPS coordinates. He set down the nuke, cone up, and buried all but the tip to hide it amid the rubble. Then he sprinted back to his perch, spitting up wakes of sand behind his powerful legs. No Lindo turned his way. They slept, or Evan was elsewhere.

  = = =

  Justin felt all of them, the billions of people online. Connected in, going about their days, not understanding that they were all a part of a singular consciousness. His mind continued to expand in all directions, like particles of an atomic explosion, flowing out in all directions, into and through everything.

  Justin looked out into the space that was the Northern Star’s universe. He saw not only the programs, but the people inside. If he focused on a group, he could hear their thoughts both past and present, as if they were at a confessional and it was just the two of them.

  “Justin. Rise up,” THE VOICE said. It was a voice he had never heard, a voice that drowned out the millions of yammering and useless conversations that lay before him, that coursed through him as if they were a part of him. But this voice did not flow through. It came from above. And as if hypnotized, Justin acted in accordance. He had no choice: the voice had given him an order.

  He ascended further and further away from the programs, from the people’s thoughts. Their conversations, whether external or internal, withered into a low-powered signal. He looked down and saw the Northern Star, the glowing orb, a giant ball of liquid fire. He knew he was in it, yet somehow, he was above it.

  He continued to ascend. The Northern Star was now the size of a basketball, the programs tiny shards of metal reflecting the sun. He felt HIM, he felt THE VOICE. And it was near.

  = = =

  Raimey stood in the pitch black, unable to see ten feet in front of him, the toxic clouds making the night even darker. He was near the subway terminal that they had come out of, waiting for the signal. When he got it, he would hide behind the buildings that towered over this shaky ground and wait for Big Brother. Glass was going to be the big shiny object that drew the critter into the trap.

  Raimey waited restlessly, checking and re-checking his systems, something he never did. He now commanded seven million foot-pounds of energy through his fists, enough to make a large building tumble like a house of cards—and the weathered ones around him looked more than willing.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tiffany. She said nothing, just waited. Like John, she was unsure what the conclusion would be to this long, taut, thirty-five-year play.

  “He’ll succeed,” Raimey said. He felt her nod. Glass would. His current good deeds could not account for the past’s dead, but neither could Raimey’s. Both of them held a deficit that only a higher power could pardon or punish. Those dead weighed on Raimey’s shoulders, and he felt them watching this final act. He could see them, mashed and mutilated, torn apart by his hands or his chains or vaporized into a meaty mist by his hydraulshock; he felt them all, like they were in a theater with a bowl of oily popcorn and a big cup of soda, waiting to see if the heel got his just desserts.

  But when you kill a person, you don’t just kill them. You kill their family and friends, a punitive act that guarantees the grieved no future reminiscence of events yet conceived. The memories of that man or woman are now done. Any more are acts of wish fulfillment, delusion, or a dream.

  And so behind his dead—already a stadium full—were the balcony seats of the wives, the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, whose husband, dad, or child had been executed at John’s hand. The theater stretched for miles all around, too big to picture as a whole, but in John’s mind, they all found a chair. And instead of looking at John—for they did not know him—they pushed and craned against the upper balcony rails to find the loved ones they had lost, who were now seated below but were too entwined with John’s fate to ever look up, to ever wave or smile or mouth “I love you.” The entire audience was unsatisfied.

  But when Glass’s rifle report filled the air, detonating the contact fuze—when Big Brother was engulfed in nuclear fire and a thousand Lindos were vaporized to dust—they all took to their seats to watch the show.

  And Raimey’s body, whether justly existing or not, ratcheted and roared to life for its final battle. The sky was alive with a makeshift sun, and its blistering light revealed to Raimey where he must go and what he must do to get his daughter back.

  = = =

  Big Brother howled in its foghorn cry and pedaled sideways as the right side of its body was seared by the five-megaton blast. The Lindos that rode it were instantly atomized, and all external armaments were sheared off by the seven-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Big Brother lumbered like a mad cow, standing up and collapsing again, each time shaking the earth around it.

  The two back legs on its right side broke off and toppled like downed trees. It shifted forward to use its bottom arms to compensate, then shuffled in a circle while the quadruplets inside adjusted to their new way of locomotion.

  Glass volleyed gunfire at the dome that housed the quadruplets. He knew his rounds wouldn’t penetrate, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to lure. Glass revealed his location with each burst from his gun. Finally, Big Brother aimed a cannon from its left shoulder and fired on the skyscraper Glass occupied. Its gunfire was erratic and its aim was off; the targeting system was fried.

  Glass attached
the hard case, and with rifle in hand, he scurried down the building in seconds before it was decimated by gunfire. He moved deeper into the city, a quarter mile from his last location. There he climbed up a ten-story building, fell flat, and targeted Big Brother again. It was doing exactly what he had hoped: it was tearing apart the skyscraper he had just shot from. Glass volleyed massive lead at it, each shot aiming true, guiding its attention to him, to the muzzle flash that looked like a giant match head lit time and time again in the night.

  It fired on him, inaccurately. It launched a missile from its back, but its trajectory was queer and shot away, landing harmlessly in the wasteland behind it, pinwheeling like a firework. Big Brother charged, ignoring buildings, blowing through them like they were apparitions.

  Again, Glass slid down the side of the building and ran as fast as he could to the next, the final, location. He ran past the subway terminal, past Raimey, and free-climbed up the side of an old five-story library and flipped into prone position.

  Even crippled, Big Brother moved at tremendous speed, and it was already much closer than Glass had predicted. He opened fire on it, directing it toward him. It howled and fired on the little man two hundred yards ahead of it, unloading its chain gun, using the tracers to find purchase in the heart of its enemy. It wanted to end this.

  = = =

  Raimey stood in the alley of a skyscraper that loomed over the top of the subway terminal. He saw Glass flash by at impossible speed, and at the same moment he felt Big Brother’s approach.

  Big Brother didn’t even notice Raimey as its hands and feet—each the size of a small house—pounded down, their impact causing Raimey to hop into the air.

  The soft subway ceiling was like thin ice, and when Big Brother put its weight down, it crumbled through.

  The trap had worked as planned.

  Big Brother plummeted, fulcruming headfirst into the underground chasm. And with its arms being used as makeshift legs, it couldn’t recover.

  Raimey sprinted to the front of the skyscraper.

  WHA-WHAM!

  Raimey hit the first of eight weight-bearing pillars. It vanished into chalk. Raimey moved down the row, firing off an assembly line of punches.