by Lee Bond
Except for the whispering and ghoulish jibber-jabbering and the flickering lights on his bridge, Politoyov was greeted with total silence.
He cleared his throat. “I said, are we clear, soldiers?”
AI systems began tallying acknowledgement signals from the soldiers on the other ships. Everyone on the bridge saluted.
Politoyov grinned. The focus wouldn’t last. Psy Ops were effective. He had maybe a day before he’d have to come up with something new to get his men to concentrate on the task at hand. After that … it was anyone’s guess as to what would happen.
“I don’t know if you can hear me out there,” Politoyov whispered, locking eyes with the one he’d decided was the leader of the impossible quintet, “but if we get in there, you, you personally, are going to suffer agony on a level never experienced before.”
A surge of electric fear lanced through the Offworld commander’s body as the leader grinned back at him, flipping a sardonic two-fingered salute.
Something had to happen. Something had to break. Or they’d all go mad.
Politoyov watched the antics of the five Latelian super soldiers for a few more minutes before heading back to his private quarters. Hopefully –as had happened in the past- they’d get bored and go back to whatever Pit of Hell they’d crawled out of in the first place.
***
Ute read the data report on his prote for a third time, one of his massive hands splayed out against the nearest wall; the tremors were getting worse, and though only the lower levels were experiencing major stress from the rapid vibrations, sooner or later, the whole mountain would start shaking.
“You need to leave.” Ute barked into his prote. Sidra, the bodyguard, stared back.
“I cannot.”
Ute bit back a retort. “We’re evacuating The Peak, si. Whatever is happening with Bravo cannot be a good thing. The man you are protecting is the Chairman. And he is a little person. Pick him up, fling him over a shoulder, and walk through a wall if you have to, just get him out of there!”
A fleeting look of desire flickered across Foursie Sidra’s face before she responded, leaving Ute to wonder what in the hell was going on down there besides a suddenly suicidal Chairman lounging around while several billion tons of reinforced mountain geared up to fall on his balding head.
“The Chairman will not leave his compatriot, Sa Ute. If the … if Bravo explodes with The Engineer inside, the Chairman says there is no reason to continue on.” Sidra’s eyes shone with pride. “This is not a suicidal statement, Sa Ute, or melancholy. He is right. I would not want for him to witness what we will do should Bravo’s occupant die.”
Nor do I, Ute thought morosely. Of all the God soldiers under Harmony tutelage, he was the only one who hadn’t bought into the idea of anarchy and nihilism that lay just under Fenris’ … preaching. It rankled the oldest God soldier sorely, but there was nothing he could –or would- do about it, because the flip side of everything was that Goddies everywhere were learning how to … how to be again.
After –in most cases- thousands of years of being relegated to simplistic tasks and painfully moronic thoughts, men and women he’d watched from the shadows were finally, gloriously capable of holding conversations, of tracking down relatives and standing tall and saying ‘I am Gorrak, your great-great-great to the tenth power nephew’ and being given something every man and woman in the world wants: family.
“Put him on the prote, please.”
A curious smile crossed the Foursie’s lips. “My l… the Chairman regrets to inform you that he is too busy trying not to piss his pants and change his mind. If you have need of … holy motherfucking shit, get down, Herrig, get down!”
Sidra’s prote-feed exploded into static and the mountain started coming down.
Ute let instinct take control. His body began burning with power as fully self-controlled God soldier subsystems came on-line. Strength greater than any other save the original Harmony soldiers flooded through him. Data from his prote began registering on cybernetic implants, filling him with intuitive knowledge. The background tune of Harmony, ever a slender thread keeping the darkness at bay, moved ‘forward’ within him, becoming instead a full on soundtrack to the sudden chaos gripping The Peak.
He started moving. He didn’t know where he was moving, but that was the way it was, now; much like the netLINK system that provided the whole of Latelyspace with unlimited bandwidth and ultimate connectivity, the Harmony suffused everything. ‘It’ knew he needed to be somewhere, and so that was where he was going to go. Ute wanted it to be Herrig that needed his help, but something whispered to the God soldier that the man would be fine, that there was something that needed his attention far more desperately.
Thousands of messages spilled onto and then off his retinal feeds, contact and permission requests automatically responded to by avatar subsets carefully programmed to do so in times of crisis; the fact that he was getting them instead of OverCommander Vasily meant the nominal commander of the God Army was still MIA. The Goddie hoped that the OverCommander was finding peace out there, wherever he was.
Ute ordered the avatars running his cybernetic links to stop flashing him messages that were being auto-filled and grabbed updates on The Peak itself. Data crowded his vision.
Six hundred and five men and women remained inside the mountain stronghold. That number, plus or minus a few, was the bare minimum required to run the base and to ensure everything continued to run ‘smoothly’; as much as he’d hated it, Ute had been forced to leave those integral people right where they were. Unfortunately for everyone, there were systems in The Peak that helped keep Hospitalis on an even keel. Regardless of whether or not anyone thought that was a good idea, it was a thing they had to continue doing until something better came along.
They weren’t all dead, which was good. Most of them were now trapped in their various offices and/or departments, which was also good, given a moderately skewed value of ‘good’; The Peak had been constructed with an eventual collapse in mind. Each main section and some offices devoted to high-ranking officers and staffers transformed into literal crypts the moment a significant amount of structural damage occurred. Of the six hundred and five, four hundred ninety-two were now locked inside well-stocked tombs. They could survive, theoretically and assuming Bravo –which, according to avatar feed, hadn’t yet completely smashed the shit out of The Peak, a briefly confusing turn of events- didn’t blow up, for about six months before dying of dehydration.
Avatars had no data on Herrig. Naturally not. At the epicenter of the abrupt departure of Bravo, everything in range of that initial collapse and imagined energy blast from engines was probably destroyed.
Ute continued moving forward, picking up speed now that he knew he wasn’t likely to run into anyone wandering the halls looking for a fresh cup of coffee. He became a blur or color and his senses gleaming.
A massive load-bearing beam of duronium-reinforced concrete broke loose from the ceiling thirty feet away. By the time Ute got to it, the forty-ton beam was a formidable barrier to progress.
Ute, the Sixth Harmony Soldier, blew through it like tissue paper.
He grinned, wondering not for the first time if this was what it felt like to be a superhero.
Then he remembered that Bravo was busy crashing it’s way out of The Peak and went somber for a moment before realizing that if Garth was beside him, well, Garth would be singing one of those ridiculous rock songs of his at top volume and laughing like a maniac.
Ute grinned again and let the Harmony lead him to where he needed to be.
***
It wasn’t his fault, no no no, it wasn’t his fault. It was was … was their fault, yes, that was the truth. He hadn’t wanted to scream the machines awake, that was a silly thing to do, he hadn’t meant to do that because all those people had died and then the soldiers had come and then he’d had to do whatever he could do to keep from dying and then … and then one of the first God soldiers had com
e, only only they were calling themselves Harmony soldiers.
Hollyoak tried to shift to get more comfortable under his restraints and succeeded only in pulling one of the straps tighter.
They didn’t trust him, no no, they definitely didn’t trust him. The straps were one of his inventions. They pulled tighter. That was all they did. They pulled tighter and tighter and tighter until they squeezed an arm or a leg off. Because he was so small, and the straps were for normal-sized people, he was only held down by two and they covered his whole, pathetic body except for his head, the pressure was like being squeezed.
Hollyoak watched the lights very high on the ceiling far away shake and sway. The Peak was trembling like a leaf caught in a windstorm. He wondered what was causing it. Locked away as he was inside the very chamber they’d once imprisoned Gurant in and subject to incessant interrogation by Fenris, for the first time in his life, Hollyoak didn’t know anything.
Fenris thought he was mad, mad as a hatter, mad as the maddest thing in all creation, mad. Hollyoak wondered, for real and for true, if you were mad, could you even admit it? Could you know you were insane? He didn’t feel insane. The thoughts he had in his head had always been there. His constant companions.
He’d killed a lot of people. No one was happy with him. He’d screamed and the machines of the base had responded with shocking lethality. Hollyoak giggled at the joke. Shocking. More than a few people had died by electrocution. And poison gas. And lasers and bullets and even a few vats of acid.
It wasn’t his fault.
It was OverCommander Vasily’s. And Chairwoman Doans, although Fenris had let slip that she wasn’t anymore, that some fat Offworlder turned Latelian was running things now. That didn’t matter. What mattered was no one believed him when he tried to say how it wasn’t his fault.
If if if … if they’d let him hang himself before being arrested so long ago, none of this would’ve happened. He wouldn’t have panicked and killed all those people.
If … if if if they hadn’t come to him and said ‘we would like to see what you can do for the glory and might of the Latelian Regime’ … he wouldn’t have made the things he’d made, done the things he’d done.
They should’ve known. They should’ve seen the light of madness in his eyes and backed away, should’ve backed away to let that light grow dim.
Hollyoak stopped humming for a moment. Where had that thought come from?
No matter. Why couldn’t Fenris and this new Chairman and even old OverCommander Vasily accept their own responsibilities? You let a mad dog off it’s leash, isn’t isn’t the owner responsible for when it starts chewing the faces off babies?
Except, only, he wasn’t a mad dog and as far as he could remember he’d never chewed any faces off any babies, but he had turned the God soldiers into a pack of raving fools and lunatics and addicts hooked on a terrible, terrible cocktail of drugs and neural inhibitors. He had created the Gunboys and other things, some which were actually technically far, far worse than his poor giant soldiers.
Those worse things were on other worlds, though, and maybe, maybe if he could figure out a way to get free from bondage … maybe he could get to one of them and then exact revenge.
They shouldn’t have come to him and said that the Project was over, that the Chairwoman’s plans to conquer Trinityspace weren’t ever going to work. They shouldn’t have done that, and they shouldn’t have said they were closing up shop.
Just like you don’t take a face out of a face-chewing mad dog’s mouth, you don’t take away Hollyoak’s job, no, no, that was a terrible idea.
Suddenly, and in the middle of designing the genetic template for a dog bred to chew faces off small children, everything went sideways. Walls and ceilings fell in, the world turned chaotic and filled with a furious sound that threatened to shatter the mad midget’s eardrums. Everything went dusty and for a long time, Hollyoak’s only companion was the sound of tumbling rocks.
During it all, Hollyoak was calm. The funny thing was, even though he’d panicked so long ago and killed all those people, well, that’d been because he’d been afraid of losing his job, of having nothing to do, of being separated from all his machines. It was funny because he wasn’t afraid to die. That was the mistake Fenris and all the others who came to poke and prod and ask their stupid questions somehow managed to forget. They looked at him and saw a tiny little madman full of genetic modifications and weird cybernetic enhancements. They forgot. They all forgot.
They forgot he’d survived EOPD, though how how how anyone who was anyone could forget that was beyond Hollyoak. He was the solar system’s most notorious survivor of Shrinky. He’d even developed a kind of cure modeled on the one he’d used for himself, though the Chairwoman hadn’t wanted to release it to the public because because sometimes it worked and sometimes it turned poor little sufferers of Shrinky all the way inside out, and in a hurry.
They’d forgotten, and it was their fault. There wasn’t a survivor in the world who could accurately or even adequately describe the exquisite pain of Shrinky. It drove everyone who had it mad. It was just a matter of whether you came back from that madness.
Lying on his restraining bed while the world continued to go topsy-turvy, Hollyoak reflected that quite possibly he hadn’t come back from the madness of that painful disease at all. Maybe maybe he’d gone through the madness into some darker place.
Either way, they’d forgotten about EOPD and the pain and the suffering and the desperate wish to die that everyone who had it dreamed of, sometimes for days on end. Days on end of feeling your inside scratching and twisting and poking into new and weird genetic patterns, feeling your bones creak and crack and break and heal into tiny versions of itself …
You survived Shrinky, you didn’t fear dying. It was as simple as that. At most, you went through the rest of your life wishing other people could feel that kind of pain, experience that kind of madness, withstand that level of pressure. Hollyoak had been compressed and compacted into a new form, one harder than duronium. Simply by surviving. They’d all forgotten that. He hadn’t. Never never never. No. Never.
The world finally stopped shaking. Whatever had happened was done happening. It didn’t matter to Hollyoak. He was still strapped in and amazingly enough, the straps hadn’t popped his head off like a pimple.
Coughing dry dust out of his mouth, the diminutive dwarf tried to take a look around. Oh my, the damage was most extensive. The whole room was in a shambles. Vasily and the new Chairman were probably going to have to find a new place to hide him and all the other secrets; if the destruction to this room, one of the most fortified in the entire Peak was any kind of sample, well, the rest of the place was ruined.
“Oh my.” Hollyoak licked his lips and stared at the … at the gift. He couldn’t believe it wasn’t decayed at all, though he supposed a few heartbeats later that what Gurant had become could very well have ensured that he body wouldn’t decompose. The magical science that’d transformed Sa Gurant into into into some kind of God would surely want to preserve itself.
Except, except oh except the crashing and crushing and colliding rocks from the falling roof had done something awful, so so awful to the poor dead God’s head. A jagged, splintered spear of solid sharp rock laced with sharper still duronium had severed that massive head clean from the neck, like a surgeon.
Hollyoak licked his lips and giggled a high-pitched giggle. Oh my. A quick check of his paltry cybernetic systems verified that the old mechanisms buried inside his neck and tiny little chest were still operative, if nearly forgotten; once upon a time fifteen years ago he’d been close to building a brand new body for himself. A bigger one, a better one, a stronger one.
The Chairwoman had learned of it and naturally, naturally, she’d put a stop to it. He’d been so angry for so long about that, but then he’d decided to stick with what he had because because he’d survived for so long in such a tiny body but this…
This was a gift. A great big
gift.
Hollyoak began to struggle against the seemingly sentient bonds.
They started to grow tighter. So tight. He found it hard to breathe almost immediately. He kept struggling, wiggling and twisting and shimmying. When his bones began breaking and the room started growing dark, he told his cybernetic systems to come online.
A few seconds later, Hollyoak’s head crawled off his neck, slender robotic legs built from bones and metal teetering and tottering out of the crushed body like a grotesque spider. Mouth frozen in a rictus of concentration, Hollyoak commanded his head to move.
Destiny awaited, it seemed.
***
Vasily’s head snapped around and his eyes automatically sought the source of the sound; long years of practice had him staring at a pinprick blur of motion leaving a thick white contrail of debris in its wake. A few seconds later there was a second massive boom, this one three times as loud. A concentric burst of light and cloud filled the sky.
The OverCommander didn’t reach for his proteus for a number of reasons. One, he knew instinctively that it was Garth; the thing he’d been entombed in, had, at one point, been a space-faring vessel. He didn’t know the whys and wherefores of how the smartest and most destructive man he’d ever met had managed to let himself get trapped inside, or why it’d taken him more than a year to engineer his escape, but watching the blur of light had elicited nothing more than a ‘yes, that makes sense’.
And secondly, Vasily couldn’t reach for his prote. He didn’t have it. It was nowhere near him. In point of fact, it was currently sitting on a desk in his nicely expensive condo in Central City, no doubt to the distraction of the half-million or so people who seemed rely on his counsel day in and day out, even in this, a post-Regime life.
Vasily turned back to what he was doing, mind turning over how much his life had changed. With Fenris and his ‘brothers’ freeing the God soldiers from their chemical dependency and arming them with the tools to deal with their longevity, you’d think they’d have the adoration of the general population, but … that wasn’t the case. In the few informal polls Vasily’d seen before going … going dark, the dark-eyed and scathingly dismissive ancient Latelians were almost universally loathed, even though it was obvious they were the ones responsible for bringing the Goddies ‘back’.
