The Impossible Future: Complete set

by Frank Kennedy

  “Broadman, Muldoon, Carver, Cooper.” Nilsson laid out his orders. “Execute High Cone. Dispersion fire. Light them up.”

  Michael leaped from the ridge and maintained a steady jog as the gravmod boots kept him aloft. Descending at thirty degrees, he kept his eyes on the tree line and the wide, shapely branch where he intended to land. His DR29 followed the approaching targets.

  Two rifters approached from the north, laser blasts incoming. He prepared to feel the searing burn, his body armor consuming most – but not all – of the hits. Handheld weapons were firing from secured positions down below. Few would hit their target. He was moving too fast against a pale sky, a deadly shadow in red and gray. And yet, he wasn’t invulnerable. A direct hit on the transition coil at the base of his helmet might kill him instantly. If his gravmod boots took simultaneous hits, he would fall a hundred feet. He doubted these Mongols had such precision, but Nilsson was right: These animals might stumble into a fit of luck.

  The first time he practiced this maneuver, Michael remembered the day he, Sammie, and Jamie crossed the Interdimensional Fold and beheld soldiers of the Guard leaping from a Scramjet, descending as if on invisible stairs. Then, he was awestruck. The first time he practiced it, Michael felt like a god. It was a rollercoaster ride that was better than advertised.

  Now, he just wanted to kill these bastards and move one day closer to holding Sam in his arms again. He reconfigured his body to respond to enemies arriving from all directions, like Rachel and Maj. Nilsson trained him aboard Praxis.

  *

  “Never allow your eyes to do all the work,” Nilsson told him in the third week of his training. “This is the mistake we see from the indigos. Not only must your mind be working several moves ahead – and independent of your DR29 – but it must command every limb to be an adjunct weapon. Think of it like a dance. The choreography dictates which limb will lead at a given moment. But in battle, a superior Guardsman allows them all to lead at once.”

  “Wait, what?” Michael said. “You’d be like some damn puppet on a string, flailing every which way.”

  Nilsson nodded to Rachel, who flew upon Michael with lightning efficiency. She wrapped herself around him, twisting his left arm into a grotesque backward contortion. He wanted to yell, but Michael learned after his first week of beatings to absorb the agony.

  “A simple move,” Rachel said, “and I’ll snap off your arm at the shoulder, newb. Requires surprisingly little strength.”

  Nilsson expanded the point. “Chancellors born to brontinium extract have the ability to instantly reconfigure our bones and connective tissue for close combat. We demonstrate this ability through kwin-sho. Like the indigos, you lack this augmentation. But you do not lack the ability to command your limbs to act in concert with each other or independently. And you have been given enough Guard synthetics to enhance this skillset. Ready to learn?”

  “Yeah,” Michael groaned. “Can I have my fucking arm back now?”

  In the days to come, Michael did things with his body he never imagined possible and began holding his own against soldiers who were bred for this life. He never beat them one-on-one – they were simply too big, too fast – but fifty percent of his fights closed to a draw. The pain that once tore through him like shards of broken glass now resonated as throbbing aches that diminished after the synthetics soothed and repaired him.

  He reported to medpod daily and increased his dosage. He felt it inside, saw it outside. He was growing, thickening, broadening. By the time he landed at Ericsson Station as a member of the team, Michael was as massive as the others, indistinguishable but for his height. Not even synthetics could give him the extra six inches to look his new brothers and sisters directly in the eye.

  His last act before leaving Praxis was to shave off his dreadlocks. He went for a buzzcut then realized it wasn’t enough.

  “Why all of it?” Maya Fontaine asked when she saw him bald.

  “I’m not that man anymore. The Guard showed me a new way.”

  “I see,” she said. Maya, his comrade during the Solomon uprising, was his closest confidant in the outward trip to Tamarind. She asked, “And what kind of man are you now?”

  “The one I have to be.”

  “Which is?”

  Michael didn’t hesitate. “A man who can kill people and not give two shits about it.”

  “Ah.” Maya looked away with a pursed grin. “An improvement?”

  “I know what you’re doing, Maya. Don’t even try to judge me.”

  “I would never …”

  “I was there when you stabbed a man through the heart. You’ve killed more than a few in your time.”

  “True. But I usually give at least … oh, I don’t know … at least one shit about it afterward.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I will one of these days. But not until after I blow James’s head off.”

  *

  Michael wasn’t thinking about that day as he danced through the air on his way toward a Lebanese cedar, the enemy firing at him from rifters and from the ground. His body danced in many directions. The blast gun on his right arm fired intensive volleys at the approaching rifters while the Ingmar in his left hand targeted Mongols down below. His legs maintained a long stride, holding the angle of descent. Vaguely cognizant of the DR29’s targeting lock on the cedar, Michael scrolled his eyes across the breadth of the new battle, analyzing the tactical positions of his comrades and the rifter formations. He plotted the strategy he’d use after landing in the tree. Thirty meters to his left, Rachel was dancing almost parallel. He linked to her stream and made note of her landing position as well.

  He took a hit in the back but held stride. The Guard proprietary body armor was a thick fabric designed to disperse energy fire through its absorption matrix. Projectile weapons similar to bullets or non-magnetized flash pegs might penetrate but not punch through the fabric. Bruises remained, a minor nuisance. The crimson fabric could not absorb limitless blows, and indigo-improvised rocket-propelled grenades had decimated peacekeepers from time to time. RPGs, however, were not Michael’s concern today.

  He wouldn’t hold out long in the tree. Eventually, he would have to confront the enemy on the ground. Close combat introduced a key vulnerability: the Lin’taava sword. The Mongols’ retractable blade extended to three feet. Penetrating at an upward trajectory, it could tear through the fabric. The Mongols knew it, as did most indigos. Getting close enough to use them was always the problem. They needed to stay alive long enough to draw the Guard in and somehow avoid flash pegs as they attacked.

  Michael studied the Guard’s history of guerilla battles. They revealed a pattern: More than ninety percent of all peacekeeper combat casualties occurred on difficult terrain where airpower and energy slews were not engaged. The Guard bragged about its physical prowess and overwhelming rate of victory, but it brushed over a simple reality: In close quarters, these soldiers were human. Which is why Michael carried two Lin’taava swords on body pouches, taken from Mongols he killed in earlier incursions.

  When he landed firm on the targeted branch, itself as thick as the trunk of the pines that dotted his old stomping grounds in Alabama, Michael reset. He crouched and fired at a rifter turning toward him. These mobile transporters were designed for two passengers with a hold for cargo, but the enemy converted them for combat and built vertical braces for each fighter. All three unloaded on Michael.

  As laser blasts raced past him, skidded off his helmet, and hit him once in the gut and once above his liver, Michael ignored the burns and tore apart his enemy with more precise aim. He cut down the driver first, flash pegs severing the Mongol’s head from his body. The middle fighter took an Ingmar blast to the stomach and crumpled, as the comrade behind him contorted with a chest full of flash pegs. Their bodies fell away, but the rifter did not.

  He calculated then moved three steps to his right. The rifter crashed into the tree, shrapnel splintering in every direction as it erupted in flames. The branch lit
up, the fire working its way toward him. Again, Michael plotted his next move; only one way to go.

  The mountainside blew up in a cascade of laser fire and automatic rounds of flash pegs. From tree to tree, slope to ridge, and back again, rifters hurtling toward Guard positions, some exploding, and bodies tossed. Ground fire intensified. The enemy below was doing exactly as intended: Moving forward while the rifters drew most of the attention.

  Michael looked toward the peaks of a mountain range most people on Tamarind feared. Beyond these rocky crags of burnt orange, the Void shimmered a thousand feet high as an aurora of greens and reds, with splashes of yellow lightning hurtling outward. It was beautiful. It was impossible. It was the source of all this death; of the secrets that might change history; of a path to lead Michael into Samantha’s arms.

  He had waited four months for a miracle. Close, they insisted. We’ll be there any day now, the engineers said. Hold on a little while longer. Michael grew tired of hearing the same platitudes, but not of doing a job he learned to enjoy.

  He reset his gravmod boots and stowed his Ingmar. In its place, he grabbed the hilt of a Lin’taava sword. Then he ran his calculations through the DR29.

  Michael jumped into a rising tide of laser fire.

  “When we’re done with you, and assuming you live,” Rachel told him on the first day of training, “You will never feel fear again.”

  She was right. These Mongols couldn’t kill him, no matter how hard they tried. But he was damned well going to obliterate them.

  3

  E IGHT DAYS EN ROUTE TO TAMARIND, Michael (and those not part of the inner circle) learned the truth of their mission at last. He was among many who openly complained about lack of transparency. The only thing he knew was what Supreme Admiral Poussard told him before he left Earth: “There may be another way in.” Her statement was a sudden reversal, after having rejected all overtures to mount a mission against the terrorists on Hiebimini. Three days into the voyage of the Praxis, the dead arose when Emil and Frances Bouchet walked back into everyone’s lives, their role on this mission unclear but apparently vital.

  Michael and the other Presidium representatives protested the clandestine meetings between Capt. Forsythe, the Bouchets, and a small team of engineers. He never knew whether Forsythe or the Bouchets gave in first, but when he saw what lay ahead, Michael didn’t care. He absorbed their presentation with the same level of stunned incredulity as everyone else made privy to the scheme.

  “This is the Void,” Forsythe said in front of a massive holowindow.

  CVids captured the phenomenon from orbit and in close aerial surveillance. At first, it appeared as if Tamarind had been gashed open to reveal a glowing crevasse one hundred miles long. Closer images doubled down on the notion of an open wound: Mountains rose on either side, as if a god’s knife flayed the land open.

  “Its presence is well-known throughout the Collectorate, but its origin and purpose are not,” Forsythe said. “Chancellory scientists have been investigating it off and on for more than five hundred years. The local population used to send its own teams there, but enough accidents and disappearances compelled them to avoid it at all costs. In fact, they were so terrified by it, more than a century ago, they outlawed inhabitants living within five hundred kilometers. They did not mind if we Chancellors put our own people at risk.”

  “So, what is it?” Michael asked.

  Forsythe turned to the Bouchets. “This is where I defer to the experts who have a long history with the Void.”

  Emil and Frances, the parents who turned their sons into abominations and escaped Earth under cover of a nuclear explosion, glided into positions on either side of the window. Michael did not say ten words to them since they arrived five days earlier, but he passed them twice in corridors. He saw it in their eyes both times: The arrogance, the loathing, the suspicion. He knew it well after almost three years living among Chancellors. It was everything he could do to stow his anger and listen to the “experts.”

  “I will assume not everyone present,” Emil began, “has sufficient quantum background to understand the terminology. My wife and I have graciously chosen to simplify the language.” He offered a curt half-smile that reminded Michael of Agatha “Queen Bee” Bidwell, his former English teacher from hell – the woman whose son Michael shot in the chest with a rifle.

  “The Void,” Emil continued, “is a phenomenon that in all respects should not exist. It is embedded inside the planet, and yet it is not part of the planet.” He changed the view to show a simulated cross-section of the Void, which appeared like a dagger plunging fifty miles inside Tamarind at a sharp angle, as if it had been thrust into the planet. “Our study reveals its energy epidermis makes no physical contact with Tamarind. There is a transitional phase between the Void and planet, equidistant throughout.”

  Michael couldn’t stuff his tongue. “So, I’m asking again. What the hell is this?”

  Frances bared her teeth, unable to withhold a chuckle.

  “Oh, Mr. Cooper. You are as much fun as promised.” She turned to her husband. “Mind if I take this part, my dearest?” He deferred.

  “I find it quite fortuitous you are with us today,” she continued. “You see, Mr. Cooper, you have previous experience with something very similar to the Void.”

  “Wait, wh …?” Then it dawned on him. “Holy shit. You saying this thing is an Interdimensional Fold?”

  Mumbles and gasps rose as Frances regained the room.

  “Similar, yet different function. A brief history, Mr. Cooper. Long before you and your friends stumbled your way here, Chancellor scientists discovered interdimensional tears linking the multiverse. Eighteen altogether, including two on Earth. But those IDFs acted as fixed gateways between universes. Hence, the ability to traverse from one Earth to another, albeit not an Earth parallel in time and technological development. IDFs appear to be natural tears in time and space, likely a lingering malfunction of universal creation itself.

  “I was part of a team that investigated the tears on Earth, and I coordinated with friends who were researching at Ericsson Station on Tamarind. We discovered remarkable similarities in quantum signatures of the IDFs and the Void. But there was one overriding difference. Would you like to guess, Mr. Cooper? Or anyone else?”

  After a few seconds of awkward silence, Michael sighed.

  “Just say it already, goddammit.”

  She smiled. “What was that word? Goddammit? What an interesting rhythm. Your vernacular is endlessly fascinating. But to my point. The IDFs forever link two positions in different universes. The Void links with nothing … but also everything. Every point in the known Collectorate. And likely beyond. It is a gateway everywhere.”

  Michael didn’t care about the science, and for the moment, not even how much he despised the Bouchets. He heard the words his heart needed most.

  Gateway. Everywhere.

  “We stand on the brink of a miracle,” Emil interjected. “We have developed a method for harnessing the quantum signatures of the Void and reverse engineering them into devices we call Anchors. If we are successful, the Anchors will allow instantaneous travel through black matter substrata to any location of our choosing. We will render the terrorists’ mobile wormholes obsolete. We could obliterate Salvation before they know we’ve arrived.”

  A moment of awe and terrifying silence followed. Michael broke through his own emotional excitement to realize what this truly meant. These Anchors would change everything, far beyond Hiebimini. This was insane. Light-years in the blink of an eye? This was much more than Poussard’s proclamation of “another way in.”

  “Perhaps now would be a good time for questions,” Emil said.

  “Yeah, so, I got one.” Michael took a deep breath. “Are you two just a couple of all-purpose mad scientists or what? I’m serious.” He looked around at the dozens of others present. “First, they turn their own kids into cudfrucking monsters. One’s a walking nuke and the other’s got an ar
my of immortals, if you can believe that shit. They sneak the first lot through these IDFs to lay low until the heat’s off. Then right before these two folks get what they deserve, they somehow escape a nuke. Now here they are, apparently with the good graces of all the Chancellor bigwigs, telling us how we’re gonna play hocus pocus with the universe. Seriously? This? This is why we’re heading to Tamarind? Seriously, Captain?”

  The room gave Michael a mixed reception, but a majority also couldn’t believe what the Bouchets were proposing.

  “Michael,” Capt. Forsythe said. “Everyone. Please have a seat. Listen carefully. I was as stunned as you when the Supreme Admiral informed me of this development. And I have as much reason to mistrust the Bouchets as any. I lost family in SkyTower. But I have listened to our quantum engineers and studied the science. I believe it is sound. In theory. Whether these Anchors will perform as promised remains an open question. But we are the best hope for recovering what was lost in this so-called realignment. I ask that we put aside our shared skepticism of the Bouchets and focus on the possible.”

  The audience returned to their seats. Emil nodded to the captain and resumed.

  “We will require no more than one hundred standard days to complete our tests. We were making significant breakthroughs when our sons forced the Ark Carriers from colonial space. When we evacuated, we left behind a skeleton crew to maintain security. They have done an admirable job, but we are returning under perilous, even hostile conditions. Our ability to finish this project and usher in a new future will require everyone’s contribution and fortitude. Including yours, Mr. Cooper.”

  Later, Emil offered Michael additional advice. “If you wish to kill my first-born son as much as I, you will play your part. After all, where else are you going to go?”