by Jake Bible
The portal closed and that was that.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We say a few words,” Sandra said.
That’s what we did. We each said a few words over Trish, Jeremy, Laura, and Henry. When we were done, we stood there, all thinking the same thing.
Coz finally voiced it.
“Where are we going to stash these bodies? Not technically real, but in the quantum sense they are. The Center is already starting to stink bad.”
“You’re telling me,” Holo said.
“Laura’s Domain,” Sandra said. “Wuthering Moors. We can dump the bodies in the swamp and make a copy of the CPU there at the same time. Nothing happens in that Domain, so it will be the easiest to get in and out of.”
“Do you know how to get in?” I asked.
Sandra blushed. “Yes.”
“And why is that making your face light up like a bright red sign of shame?” Coz asked, laughing.
“I’m not ashamed,” Sandra said. “It’s just that the Domain is more romance based than fighting based.”
“That’s why you’re such a good kisser!” I shouted. “You’ve been going there and doing it with some tortured Englishman that tears his shirt at every emotional upheaval he faces!”
I laughed for a second then stopped.
“Wait,” I said. “Were you like…? Did you do…? When you were there…?’
“She totally boned some muscle-bound guys when she went there, bro,” Holo said. “Get over it.”
There was a very long, awkward silence in the Center.
“So…? Move some dead bodies and dump them in the moors?” Coz finally said.
“Yes!” we all cried.
Forty
In the end, it took us about six hours to make the journey back and forth and dispose of all the undead bodies. Turned out that crossing the moors was as treacherous as all the old novels and movies made it out to be. We almost lost Kip twice and Coz once when they took a wrong step and ended up to their waists in sucking mud.
By the time we were done, we each were stinking more than ever before and our clothes were damp, muddy, and needed to be thrown away immediately. To my surprise, Sandra stripped down and tossed her clothes through the Wuthering Moor portal before glaring at all of us to do the same.
With Sandra standing there naked, it was Coz’s turn to blush bright red. He couldn’t even come close to looking at her.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Which presented its own problem.
“You might want to stand behind the couch,” Sandra whispered to me. “At least until things…calm down.”
“Right,” I said and took her advice.
“Okay, so here is what we are going to do,” Sandra said. “We are going to each do a quick check of our Domains to make sure things haven’t gone wrong. Only a quick check. You should know within the first step you take into your world whether or not everything is alright or not. If it is not alright, then come back her as fast as possible, understood?”
“Yes, Mom,” Coz said. Still not looking at her.
“At least when we do go through our portals, we’ll get a new change of clothes we can bring back here,” I said from my spot behind the couch. “Sandra? You want to go to Star Fortress first, or come with me to Technopolis and do a little outfit shopping?”
I wriggled my eyebrows at her and she laughed.
“I think shopping sounds great,” she said.
“I’m staying here,” Holo announced. “You have fun, bro.”
“Totally cool,” I said.
“Off to get clothes,” Coz said and opened his portal then was gone to his Domain, Grimm City, an urban fantasy setting where the men are men, the dames are dames, and every supernatural creature has to hire a private dick to get things done. He was gone without a wave.
Kip left for his western Domain, Dodge County.
That left me and Sandra. If it wasn’t for Holo still there, and licking is wound so loud I wanted to smack him, we may have had a little private time. But Holo was there, so…
“Shall we?” I said as I opened the portal to Technopolis,
“We shall,” Sandra replied and took my hand.
We stepped through into my Domain and I smiled at the black leather outfit I wore. Instead of a Dark Blade or Dark Axe, I held a Dark Rifle. I inspected it and was very happy at what I found. With a quick trigger pull, it would shoot a thousand rounds of pure energy a second. Nice.
Even more nice was Sandra standing there in latex and leather. She cocked a hip at me and glowered, “Really?”
“If you don’t like the outfit, then we can find you something else,” I said, “It’s my Domain, so I have infinite credit here.”
We’d appeared in a shadowy alley on the outskirts of the city. And by outskirts, I mean the less densely built area of the planet. Really, the whole place was one big city, so I couldn’t truthfully say there was an outskirts.
I slung the Dark Rifle across my back and took her hand.
We walked from the alley and froze. We’d been so engrossed in each other that neither of us had noticed the obvious signs of trouble.
Like all the screaming and running and latex-clad undead everywhere.
“Son of a bitch!” I shouted and pulled the Dark Rifle from my back. “This is my house, bitches!”
I didn’t even bother checking my stats. In Technopolis, my abilities were quite nice. So, I powered up the rifle and walked towards the fight.
“Steve!” Sandra shouted at me. “We have to go back to tell the others!”
“My house!” I yelled back. “Gonna do some house cleaning first!”
She began to argue again then saw the look on my face and sighed.
Sandra pulled a pistol from each hip, gave me a sly, sexy smile, and we walked into the fight together.
The End
Read on for a free sample of Titan Wars
Millions of microscopic alien life forms escape a sample canister of water from the frigid depths of outer space. Invisible to the naked eye, a menacing menagerie of more than 70 deadly species react to Earth's warm and fertile seas by launching into metabolic overdrive. Waves of gargantuan abominations begin to rise from the sea, transforming our world into a zoo without cages, where humans plunge to the bottom of the food chain.
In dire need of a zookeeper, the Allied Navy turns to "Psyjack", a bickering geek squad with an outrageous plan to hack into the minds of the megafauna with some reengineered neurosurgical technology. The young gamers hope to level the uneven playing field by fighting monsters with monsters, but they couldn't have anticipated how deadly their technology could be, if it ever fell into the wrong hands...
Chapter One
Skyler dragged her ruined legs through a lake of blood and champagne. Didn’t know where she was going, and didn’t matter. Just obeying basic instincts. Instincts that kept her crawling away from what had so briefly been the greatest moment of her life. That moment had passed. So had the lives of all of those people who’d shared in her celebration. All of them were dead. All that remained of Skyler’s research team and their project was one bloodstained sack of canisters. She just kept crawling. Kept dragging that burden into the boat’s darkest recesses where, she supposed, she would die.
The mutilated thing in front of her was Paul, the project’s technical director. It was he who’d first welcomed her aboard the team. Lover of Kansas City jazz music, Italian food, and his dachshund, Peanut, he was now recognizable by his watch, and by the smell of his aftershave. Just another obstacle in her path. Skyler clawed her way over his corpse, and through the shards of a dropped champagne flute.
An empty bottle of the most expensive stuff that a team of government scientists could afford rolled side to side with the boat’s rhythmic pitch, clunking dully against the cabin baseboards to the sluice of China’s Yellow Sea. Lancet beams of sunlight pierced the scads of bullet holes ripped through the cabin walls. The collective
whine of drones was growing louder, as greater numbers of the floating cameras converged on the scene like a swarm of agitated hornets. Every second of the carnage was being recorded, and piped live to the Internet. Their multitudes were grim assurance that Skyler’s life was still hanging in jeopardy, and that millions of viewers worldwide were gawping at their screens, straws to their lips, drinking deeply of the last moments of her life with morbid fascination shimmering in their eyes. Cruel memes were probably already popping up all over social media, mocking her fate, her attackers, and prompting endless threads of inane commentary.
Skyler screeched when something slammed against the steel door that she’d bolted shut behind her. They were coming for her. Another impact struck with such force to brighten the room with a flash of sunlight around the seam. Again and again, the cabin strobed with light as the steel door bent around its deadbolt from the blows of what sounded like a swinging axe. They were smashing their way in.
Hitching her way across the cabin floor like a crushed insect, she painted a bright trail of blood wherever she crawled. There was no place to hide where they couldn’t track her. Scooting behind a console of scientific instruments, she pulled the sack of freezing cylinders onto her lap, wrapped her arms around the bundle, hugged it tight, and stared at the buckling door. Beyond the crash of steel and humming drones, there was yet another sound that added to the chaos. It was a noise that Skyler couldn’t identify, and she hated it. Every deafening roar-grunt was punctuated with the rasp of claws against steel, and what sounded like clattering chains.
“Open the door, little girl. You will live.”
Not likely. Not after what she’d just seen happen to an entire crew of unarmed scientists. Popping corks and jubilation were snuffed by the massive shadow that had spilled across their deck, until a rising wall of blackness eclipsed the sun. As though their scientific triumph had disturbed some oceanic horror from its slumbers, the thing emerged from the briny depths until it loomed against the sky. Awestruck, her team stood paralyzed as their boat was dwarfed by the shimmering tonnage that soaked their decks with cascading water that streamed from its back. Once the massive thing became identifiable as a hull of steel, the submarine’s portholes swung ajar. Men clambered out, and began dropping like a hatch of spiders from their ratlines. Others racked the bolts of mounted chain guns, and swiveled the huge weapons onto Skyler and her paralyzed crew. Without demands, explanation, or a hint of warning, a thunderous fusillade began hammering the flesh of talented scientists into red mist before spewed jettisons of flame and jingling brass.
A hovering drone eyed Skyler through a bullet hole. The little spy studied her through the punctured steel wall with benign curiosity, before whizzing away. Skyler plunged her hand into the wet sack, and encircled her fingers around one of the twelve frosty cylinders. She could feel the precious liquid sloshing against the container’s insulated walls, and her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. This wasn’t fair. She didn’t deserve to die like this. None of them had. They’d worked so damned hard for so many years, and it was right there in the palm of her hand, the answer to the ultimate scientific question: are we alone in the universe?
Another roar-grunt, raking claws against metal. Skyler jammed the canister amidst a rabble of cleaning products, and slid the cabinet door closed. There, her most precious thing of all would hide. Its cooling system contained enough fuel to keep the water sample as cold as the depths of space for another decade, if that’s how long it took for it to be discovered. Skyler’s last and only hope was that her orphaned canister would one day be recovered by someone honorable, and that she and the others wouldn’t have died in vain.
“Oh, God.”
A tremendous blow folded the top corner of the cabin door inward, bathing the room in sunlight. A shaved head filled the triangular aperture. Crazed eyes leered from a face that Skyler didn’t understand. The lower-half of the man’s face was peeled away, showcasing a skeletal grin. The pirate extended his tattooed arm through the opening, fumbled the deadbolt, and flipped it aside. The door exploded inward before a rush of fur and straightening chains, and those roar-grunts escalated to primal screams. Twin beasts, favoring their handler in the skinless aspects of their protruding muzzles, gnashed their bared fangs, and reached for her with splayed claws.
Drones floated into the cabin. The expensive toys of faraway voyeurs jostled one another in their haste to secure positions that would afford the best cinematic angles from which to capture whatever was about to happen to her. Skyler clutched the frigid bundle to her breast, backing into the corner. Nowhere else to go, she could only glower up at the nightmarish face leering over the tussock heads of his leashed baboons.
At this proximity, she could see that the pirate wasn’t exactly disfigured. The skinned aspect of his face was in fact owed to a masochistic system of steel wires that radiated from lip piercings to a common anchor point on the backside of his head. It was like a mask—or rather, it was a mechanism by which his face itself was stretched and twisted into a mask.
“What do you want?” she asked, knotting the bag’s fabric between her fingers. “I have nothing at all.”
It was true. She had no money, and she never wore jewelry. No one aboard this vessel ever carried anything more valuable than a phone or a calculator. Scientists were not wealthy people, and they gave no illusions to the contrary. It seemed a senseless risk and a waste of life for pirates to attack such a boat when the only cargo to be plundered was the treasure of knowledge.
Unable to speak through his facial contraption, the pirate glared down at the bundle in her arms. He hitched his chin, and emitted a throaty bark. The demand was simple enough. He wanted the sack. Whether or not he had any practical use for its contents, it was pretty evident that if she dared to resist him, she would die.
“No,” Skyler replied.
This was supposed to be the day of the big payoff. She’d dreamt of this day, and the validation it would bring to her four years of crushing calculations and code to ensure the safe return of an unmanned probe from the depths of outer space. Today, with the whole world watching, Skyler’s team had managed to recover the cargo pod containing twelve canisters of water drawn from beneath the icy crust of Europa, Jupiter’s frozen ocean moon.
The madman’s jaws sprung wide, and he roared at her face. Loosening his grip on the baboons’ chains, he allowed the vicious animals another foot of slack. This was her last chance, and she knew it. Violent impulses electrified the demon’s eyes.
“I said, no!”
Skyler gritted her teeth, as the thing in the web of wires let chain more links slide through his fingers. Apes lunged at her throat, fangs red and slick with the gore of her fallen teammates, but Skyler refused to relinquish her water samples. She only tightened her embrace. Those canisters were as close to being her children as anyone married to science could ever hope to hold, and if anyone intended to steal them away from her, they would have to pry them from her cold and lifeless hands.
****
Turbines winding down, the Devil Ray settled upon the sea, until the supersonic hovercraft’s underbelly was lapped by the waves. Her stealthy profile was reduced to a razor’s edge on the horizon. In the distance loomed the black mass of the target. The piratical submarine dwarfed the little patrol boat whose crew of scientists had just been slaughtered. A billowing column of smoke spewed from the crippled vessel. It was an ominous beacon that could be seen as far away as Shanghai.
Collin sucked a deep breath through his nostrils, and exhaled through gritted teeth. This was it. The big day had finally arrived. The Nautical Experimental Weapons Team was going to prove to the Allied Navy, and to the world, that the NEWT program was no laughing matter. If everything went off without a hitch, the military would be forced to recognize their little geek squad as a formidable assault force deserving of some respect, in addition to some continued funding. This test would be pass or fail. Botch the first mission, and they’d be handed one-way tick
ets right back to their civilian lives.
“Nailed that landing, buddy,” Takashi said, as J.J. emerged from the cockpit, and joined the rest of his team in the hovercraft’s control room.
“What do you got, Takashi?” J.J. asked. “Any swimmers out there?”
Although their team leader’s voice remained steady, the sheen of perspiration on J.J.’s brow betrayed the anxiety gripping his emotions. Collin could relate. He suspected that they were all feeling the same squeeze. Up until now, their program had always seemed like little more than a realistic video game. Not anymore. Things were about to get very real.
“I’ve got two,” Takashi replied, anticipating J.J.’s next question by opening a pair of hologram windows with his fingertips. The pale glow of his ocular implants often widened and narrowed, but those artificial eyes never blinked.
“Which ones you seeing?”
“Disco and Rowdy.”
“Alright,” J.J. said, clapping twice. He smeared the sweat from his face, and dropped his hands onto his hips. “That’s not a bad start. Let’s go, Rowdy.”
In an instant, tensions throughout the team relaxed by some palpable measure. The first bud of collective confidence began to swell with the assurance that Rowdy was down there somewhere, rocketing toward the scene. Rowdy was the most dominant of their animals, so wherever he went, the others usually followed. Getting them all to a specific location in a short amount of time was the only aspect of a mission that was out of the NEWT’s control. Just like human beings, they could be distracted. Something more interesting than the mission could capture their attention, and there were occasionally those days when they’d rather just fool around than go to work. That didn’t seem to be the case today. Rowdy’s speedy response to the coordinates made it feel as though half the battle had already been won.
“Wait a sec. Here come a couple more.” Takashi’s fingertips manipulated thin air, conjuring brilliant imagery out of nowhere like some sort of a technical sorcerer. Those bionic eyes of his only added to his wizardly visage. “Looks like we’ve got Pepper and Moxie.”
