by M. C. Norris
“Keep your legs out in front of you. Your head and arms are too far forward.”
The squadron swung low, and unleashed a volley of flaming spears. Lancet shafts of smoke and burning cordite screamed through the silver haze of falling rain. This time, they weren’t aiming for the creature’s impenetrable shield of a head. Rockets skirted beneath the armored carapace, and detonated in succession against its vulnerable undercarriage. The Allied Navy was learning.
“Damn it!”
“You’re going down.”
“Don’t you dare drop that sub!”
Smoke billowing from beneath the edges of its shell, the titan reeled on its ragged mess of legs. Tentacles hung shredded and writhing, spurting ropes of indigo blood, while only fleshy stumps remained of appendages that were missing altogether. A great shadow passed over the seaport of Nantong as the behemoth reeled, toppled, and met with the Yangtze in an atomic belly flop. An entire section of the river left the channel as cataclysmic waves that arched high over the harbors, before smashing down upon them. Blocks of structures were flattened by the shockwave. Buildings crumbled as though they’d been sculpted from sand. The Charybdis wriggled in the mud, while incoming water slowly refilled the chasm.
The Psyjack team cowered, as the resonance of the shockwave trembled through the metal panels of the Shanghai hangar. Uproarious cheers and howls were soon to follow, emanating from elsewhere on base. J.J. emitted a moan. He was sprawled on his side.
“Talk to me, buddy. You alright?” Collin crawled across the floor, and slapped gently at the side of J.J.’s helmet.
“He’s unconscious,” Skyler said. “Don’t even say I didn’t warn you.”
“Carl got knocked out cold,” Takashi said. “Dropping all the breakers on cerebral activity during a streaming session is just a little disorienting. That’s all. Wake up, buddy.”
“He’s got to get up,” Skyler said. “The gunships are circling back around. God, they’re going to kill him!”
“J.J.?” Collin shook him by the shoulders, but the team leader only emitted a groan. “It’s no use. He’s out.” Collin popped the mouse-piece out of J.J.’s lips, and flipped the toggle on the side of his helmet to force a manual crash on his nanobot colony. “I’m going in.”
“Don’t go too deep, man,” Takashi said. “That thing is badly injured. You’re going to feel every bit of the burn.”
“Here they come!”
Collin mouthed the controls. He slapped the toggle on his receiver. His spine jolted straight, and his eyes rolled back, as he plunged back into the monster’s head.
Having never piloted another living creature, Skyler could only imagine the freefall, as they referred to that harrowing drop into the mind of the host, when streams of sensory data came pouring in through the mind’s eye, and the pilot’s body image began to blur. Described in their technical bulletins as an expansion of awareness, an outward rush of the pilot’s innermost being, Skyler imagined stardust blasting outward from a supernova’s core. Unlike J.J., who piloted just as casually as if he were test-driving a new car, Collin’s freefall was decidedly harder to watch. He twitched and shivered, grimacing as though in pain. This was what they meant by deep diving. Neurons fired, synapses bridged, and a monster’s cerebral network came online inside his head. When his eyes reopened behind the visor, Collin was the Charybdis.
“Defend yourself! Get up!”
Skyler watched the drama unfold on her phone. The sunken monster beneath the swollen river emerged. Tons of polluted water poured from its vast periphery, as the discus head rose atop that skirt of mangled legs. Mantis claws drawn beneath its hood, it clenched the submarine protectively against its chest. Collin swiveled the great shield in the direction of his attackers, just in time to deflect the deadly barrage meant to put him down. Missiles thumped against the armor plate. The smoldering carapace swung skyward, exposing that vulnerable underside just long enough to purge the stored water in the bladders for a blast of weaponized sound. Skyler covered her mouth, as the squadron of Navy gunships went spiraling out of the sky to become great balls of fire in the streets of Shanghai.
“Oh my God,” Skyler whispered. “We are in so much trouble.”
“They didn’t give us any choice,” Takashi said. “They were going to kill him.”
“Just bring the sub in. Bring it in.”
J.J. moaned, and reached for the sides of his helmet. He was starting to come around. “What happened?” he asked. “Did we win?”
“Yeah,” Takashi replied. “We won, alright, and you can consider this to be our last gesture of good will toward the Allied Navy. It’s time to cut our ties.”
“I can see the base,” Collin said. “I’m coming in.”
“They’ve scrambled fighters.”
“Blast them,” Takashi replied.
“Don’t blast anything! God, would you stop saying crazy stuff like that for just five minutes?” Skyler glared at Takashi. It was difficult enough to discern emotion in his expressions, due to his ocular prosthesis, but deciding whether or not his statements were intended to be taken in a straightforward manner was even more challenging. It didn’t help that he always seemed to be trying to uphold his reputation as being some sort of a wild card in the team. Skyler wondered how often Takashi received bewildered stares after speaking, and what might be the psychological effects of living in that world he’d created, one populated by uncomfortable people. Takashi’s ego seemed to indicate that keeping people off-balance only fueled his delusions of grandeur. She was beginning to dislike him.
“I’m not blasting anyone unless they fire on me first,” Collin said.
“Thank you,” Skyler replied.
According to the personnel files, Takashi’s family were victims of China’s chemical warfare attack on Japan. He was orphaned, and as a result, he’d spent a significant portion of his childhood bouncing around in the system while battling cancer. Skyler supposed he’d suffered far greater anfractuosities than most other kids could even imagine. On top of that, he might’ve struggled to fit in, due to his ocular prosthesis. Skyler recognized all of this, and she tried to cut him slack for his outbursts, but it sure wasn’t easy. Collin, if anyone, seemed to have the best handle on Takashi, as well as the highest tolerance for his penchant for pushing boundaries.
“We need to give them every opportunity to be the better ally, buddy,” Collin said. “Hopefully, they’ll come to see that we’re all on the same side.”
Still trailing wisps of smoke, the pendulous monster lumbered down the Yangtze River amidst a stain of dark blood. Fighters screamed around the behemoth at a safe distance, circling high and wide, as if inviting a test on the range of its sonic weapon. Their white contrails striped the skies over Shanghai.
“They can’t touch you,” Takashi said. “You’re too far into the city. If they drop you now, they’re looking at billions in damage, and probably another insurgency.”
He was almost certainly right. China had remained politically precarious since the last days of the End War, when the combined air strikes of eight countries finally took the fight out of the rogue regime, almost twenty years ago. Any tip to the constant state of imbalance was employed as leverage by the restless cells of underground Jaw-long freedom fighters who seized opportunities to incite another backlash against the occupying forces, and to push the beleaguered country ever closer to the brink of civil war. China was a book of matches floating on a lake of gasoline.
“I don’t think I’m the one they’re after,” Collin replied. “Look downriver. You seeing what I’m seeing?”
Just off the harbor of SWCC field command, in the mouth of the Yangtze River, a strange assembly of monsters was forming in the brackish water. There, a brooding herd gathered around their fallen calf, encircling the little one in a protective wall of wrinkled, pebbly hide. Breakers crashed against their flanks. Fighters rumbled through the skies overhead. Indifferent to the changing mood of the world around them, they caress
ed the body of their lost one with gentle, prehensile snouts, dabbing at the wounds, as if trying to stop the streams of indigo blood.
“It’s that water bear I fought, right there in the middle,” J.J. said.
“Look at the size of those other ones,” Takashi replied. “They’re frigging huge!”
“I didn’t know it was just a baby.”
The creature that suffered the beating had been close in size to the Charybdis. Comparatively, the adult attendants that dwarfed the dead cub might as well have been of a different species. Great humps domed their backs. The herd of water bears loomed over the sea like a rugged mountain range, swinging their great heads from side to side.
“What the heck are they all doing out there?” Takashi asked.
“Grieving,” Skyler replied.
“The hell they are. Those are oversized bugs,” J.J. said. “They don’t have the capacity to feel loss.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Of all the species I’ve studied, the water bears are the most deeply devoted,” Skyler said. “They remain paired to the very end, even in a laboratory environment, and they’re very protective of their own.”
“They don’t sound so bad, when you put it that way,” Collin said.
“That’s because they’re not bad,” Skyler replied. “In a perfect world, water bears are pretty wonderful creatures. None of this was their fault. They just happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
“Well, looks like they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time yet again,” J.J. said. “Those Navy fighters are about to crash their little funeral.”
“That’s an extraordinarily bad idea,” Skyler replied.
“Don’t worry about them, bro,” Takashi said. “You ain’t got a dog in that fight.”
“Agreed.” Collin lifted the captured submarine over the rim of his shell, so he could admire his little prize through his cyclopean eye. “What do you say we crack into this tin can, and see if we can shake out a few pirates?”
Skyler had been trying her best to hold back her excitement over the submarine’s capture, but this moment was huge for her. It was more than just a victory for the team. This was her overdue vindication, and the redemption for which she’d awaited. Her wildest expectations for this team’s assemblage would never had accounted for the possibility of capturing the same bunch of bad guys who’d destroyed all of their lives. This was redemption for all of them. She noticed a smile spreading across Collin’s face, and she wondered if the Charybdis was smiling too.
Chapter Twelve
“Luna, come with Nana,” Diane said, trying her best to maintain some composure. She snatched her granddaughter off of the laundry hamper, and rushed out of the bathroom. “We’ve got to go bye-bye, right now.”
“Dat, Nana?” Luna pointed over Diane’s shoulder. Her sapphire eyes remained riveted to the spectacle beyond the bathroom window. “Dat?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. We have to go.”
Diane grabbed her purse off the back of a dining room chair, her keys from the blue bowl by the door. She snatched their coats from the drying pegs, and backed out through the door, fumbling with her keys. She emitted a shriek when a tremendous impact shook her condominium to its foundation. Sheltering Luna with her arms, she staggered backward into the opposite wall. The keys fell from her hand to the floor. When the building stopped quivering, she reclaimed the lost keyring and bolted for the staircase, leaving her condo door ajar.
Her shoes hammered down the wooden staircase. Another concussion shook the building, closer this time. She seized hold of the handrail. Glass shattered. In the distance, a transformer blew like a cannon shot. The lights flickered and died. Diane’s hand slammed into the brass bar on the exit door, and she burst from the darkened stairwell out into the bracing air of Anchorage, Alaska.
The slight foothold of civilization between looming mountains and a frigid sea had captured her heart the moment she’d first laid eyes on the city, a year before Jill was born. Those were fast times, fueled by the high-octane energy of her once youthful ambition. Ted was moving quickly up through the company ranks. Money flowed. Their future together had never shined so brightly. Those were fun and spontaneous days, when the two newlyweds made love wherever and whenever they kissed. Diane would sometimes throw a stick into the air to determine their direction of travel, and in those days, she and Ted traveled everywhere.
Vancouver had been a weekend whim. There, they’d rented motorbikes, and they’d purred through the rolling streets of the emerald city for two days before deciding to board a ship destined for Alaska’s Middle Passage. It was a voyage of lasting portents, where she’d stood alone and poised at that bow that forever plied through a slurry of floating ice as the sun crested those jagged mountains. While Ted, in his drunken stupor, filled their cabin with his snores, Diane beheld the rising sun, as Anchorage’s skyline was set ablaze, as though the city had just been touched by the hand of some higher power. That moment was to impact Diane’s life to a more lasting extent than the man who’d delivered her there. Two years later, she and Ted were divorced.
“Dat, Nana?”
Diane whirled in the direction of the child’s finger, where thorny legs lifted higher than any mast in the harbor, vanished into the clouds, and pulverized everything in their shadows as they fell. Festooned with shredded tangles of rigging, the legs disappeared and reappeared in thunderous plunges back to earth. Whatever horror propelled those legs was one thankfully hidden above the low-hanging clouds, but its intent was discernible enough. Every devastating step carried the thing nearer to the heart of Anchorage.
A scabrous trunk fell from the sky. Diane spun from its point of trajectory. Clutching Luna to her breast, she ran through the swath of falling shadows toward the condominium’s carport. The giant’s foot spanned the full width of the slushy street when it landed with an impact that Diane felt in the marrow of her bones. She screamed. The jarring fusillade left her dazed and stooped in a cacophony of howling car alarms. Luna began to cry.
“It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”
Everything was not okay. The car was not going to start. Diane knew that, even as she hurtled toward the resting spot of that rusty bucket of bolts that never failed to let her down when she needed it most. When Jill had dropped Luna off, there hadn’t been time to explain to her daughter that she had a less than reliable means of transportation, limited entertainment options, next to no money, and nothing inside the condo was even toddler-proof. Jill had just shown up out of the wild blue, handed over a polka-dot suitcase, a matching diaper bag, and finally her daughter, who was still strapped into the car seat.
“The car seat!” Diane smacked her hand to her temple. She froze, midway between the condo and the carport, unsure which course of action was the less dangerous of the two, until a massive, thorny pillar dropped from the clouds to smash the entire condominium building into kindling. Jets from a fractured water main fountained in the air. Helices of mist twirled over the swelling dust, as the spiny hoof retracted back into the sky, still trailing nets and shipyard rigging. Diane hadn’t even begun to turn back toward the carport before a change in air pressure assured her that it was already too late. A drop in temperature dulled the color of things, one instant before the carport, and everything parked inside it, was flattened against the pavement. A car alarm emitted a single chirp of distress before it was silenced. The pillar ascended back into the heavens.
Diane just hovered for a moment, glancing one way, and then another, as the unseen behemoth tramped toward the skyline of her beloved city. In two steps, the thing in the sky had just deprived her of everything she owned. Goodbye home. Goodbye car. Goodbye all material possessions. She held Luna close, and fought the urge to fall to her knees and cry. There was nowhere to go. Pinned between mountains and sea, there was nowhere to run.
For the last twenty years, even in the beginning, during the ugliest months of the divorce, when Jill wasn’t much older than Luna,
Diane had always been able to see a pretty clear course of action. While Ted lawyered-up and prepared for what he thought was going to be some epic battle, Diane relinquished everything. She gave up everything but Jill, her one precious thing, and she’d returned to her secret place ablaze in the midnight sun.
In Anchorage, she and her daughter had cobbled together something new from their ruinous past. Diane remained in survival mode, where she lived day by day, scraping her way through one week and into the next, with her love for Jill as the only fuel and inspiration she needed to keep plugging away. Somehow, that’s all she’d ever needed. Through it all, she’d always managed to remain sure of herself as a mother. She found that she had a knack for finding her weaving way through life’s forest of obstacles, and that had made her feel pretty proud.
However, things were different now. She felt old and desperate. With her granddaughter crying in her arms, Diane surveyed the wreckage of her world, all around her, and she had no idea know where to go.
***
Jill tapped her phone’s screen to end the call. She slumped back into her seat. It wasn’t like her mom to not answer. She always picked up, anytime night or day. It wasn’t that she was getting nervous about her mom and daughter, per se, but the longer she had to sit aboard the Devil Ray, waiting for her flight to Anchorage to be cleared for take-off, the more time she was afforded to agonize over whether abandoning her team was the right decision.
She was a mommy. Luna was supposed to be her biggest responsibility in life. A child only gets one childhood, after all, and it’s up to mommies and daddies to give it to them. There were no do-overs. As a parent, you had just one shot to be involved, and to fill those priceless years with all the magic and experiences that every child deserves. However, the longer Jill stared out the window at the captured pirate sub sitting on the side of the airstrip, the more she found herself weighing the importance of magic in Luna’s childhood against some greater good for all humanity. Would her duty as Luna’s protector be best fulfilled at her daughter’s side, or right down there, alongside her team? She could see all four of them hovering on the periphery of the crowd, and she wondered if they could also see her. In the distance, gunships circled over the form of their slumbering giant.
