by Russ Linton
I sacrifice my good arm to the door sensors and try to keep pace with her. She won't slow, or even look my way. Freaky, like most spooks I guess, she's offered exactly what I had just thought I might need. Operating out from under Xamse's thumb and Ayana's watchful eyes could only be a good thing. I know the outside world has been wrecked, but a little fresh air, a change of scenery, might be good.
There's a mild buzz about the lobby. Employees cluster around the space, chatting, made oblivious to the debris of civilization just beyond the campus. Nanomech is running with a quarter of the original staff, but many have moved into the office spaces here, using the on-premises gym for their showering facility. With all their needs provided for right here, productivity has tripled, or so Xamse is fond of saying.
Fresh food prepared in an actual kitchen. Sugary caffeine sodas provided from whatever black-market syndicate looted all the discount chains last. Power. One hundred percent uptime provided by a campus solar farm, wind turbines, and a government approved emergency connection to the grid. Nobody in the country has a better setup.
Why would I leave?
I hustle after Cantor. Nudges and whispers follow through the crowd. Their CIO loosed from his cage and sporting an arm sling to boot. Too many fucking eyes.
"Maybe I'll think about it. As long as I've got a connection, a workspace, and maybe a car. Can't run to the grocery store in... you know." Though, now that I think of it, I totally would.
Partly turning, her eyes go to the security guard who has her in his sights. She gives a half-smile, but there's more pity than humor. "Supplies will be provided so no need to worry about grocery runs."
"Wait up!" She's relentless on her quest for the door. "What kind of supplies are we talking about?"
She's clearly not comfortable answering my questions here and keeps her voice below the buzz of the crowd. "Whatever hardware and munitions you may need. Any food will be military standard fare." She hasn't slowed, but she gages my reaction. "MREs. We can probably add a few specialty items."
"Woah! Woah!" I say, cutting her off. The guard at the desk gets a view of my back instead of our visitor. "Where?"
She angles her head toward the doors and disappears outside. I step out into a cold, gray day, aware the guard has come to stand and stare on the other side of the glass. Even several employees have come to watch this escaped oddity through the transparent windows and doors. Somehow, Ayana's there, too, arms crossed beneath a fierce countenance.
Cantor looks me up and down, reading the entire situation. She not only knows more than she lets on, she sees more than she lets on too. Pulling her tablet to her chest, she steps closer and extends a hand. I shake it, but don't let go. A plain white SUV marked "Department of Energy" awaits her at the curb. With a subtle hand signal, the driver turns over the engine and needlessly spikes the RPMs.
"The old Augment Proving Grounds," she mutters through a convincing smile. "Outside Las Vegas. It's been empty for decades, but we've made every effort to make it habitable."
"Sounds lovely," I say, making my own go at a poker face.
"It's been many years since I've said this," says Cantor, almost too quiet underneath the engine noise. "I look forward to working with you, Mr. Harrington."
She's off the curb and into her ride, not waiting for me to respond to her blithe request. More manipulation and bullshit. Another bunker to lock me inside. Someday, I'll be the one calling the shots about my life.
"What were you talking about?" Ayana's in my face before I've made it to the door. A beefy security guard looms behind her. "At the curb? In the elevator?"
I'm winding up for a heater when her question strikes me as odd. They've got the building wired. The curb, I can understand. The engine noise seemed too well-timed from Cantor's ride. But in the elevator she must have had something installed on her tablet which masked or interfered with the microphones and or cameras. A directional feedback device aimed at the precise spot? A straight up signal jammer?
"Nothing," I answer. "She's pissed about Tomahawk getting rubbed out. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
Her good cheek crinkles and one eye squints as she scowls.
"Welcome, Spencer Alexander," says the building as I brush past her.
Wait. I look forward to working with you, Mr. Harrington. She's said that before. Cantor wasn't talking about me. She's worked with my father.
CHAPTER 21
XAMSE ISN'T GENEROUS with his disabled player list. Only two days until I'm back on the roster. He hasn't explicitly stated this, but I'm guessing if I don't return, Ayana takes my place, and suddenly I'm dead weight. He might keep me around to entertain his fantasy we're best of buds if I'm lucky. But I don't want to test that theory.
Besides, the new armor, the prototype, is dope. I spend my time in the lab familiarizing myself with the systems. Drake's ideas are present, but he had no plans to continue Project MANTIS. This one was all Xamse, designed in his spare time and using the old platform for the basis of a technological marvel.
Those odd angles along the armor's skin are the seams of individual plates. A reactive sensory system adjusts to the deflection angle based on the trajectory of incoming projectiles. The HUD can track thousands of such pieces of shrapnel at a time. My desperation blast against Tomahawk? This suit would have walked away with barely a scratch.
But there is no gravitational shockwave cannon on the suit, one piece of armament which I always loved from the first minute I disintegrated the automated defenses at Killcreek with it. What makes it even worse is the cannon on the old suit has been damaged, maybe irreparably so. A full rebuild from scratch isn't possible given the manufacturing realities of a similarly fragmented world. Nanos have been crawling all over the wounded arm trying in vain to make it whole.
The internal space, the Scarab, has seen a complete redesign as well. Since the whole suit is smaller, this one fits like a glove and doesn't take a stepladder to reach inside. Apart from evacuating "incidental biological functions" as the old suit, which I've christened Wormfood, claims, this suit offers full life support. You could carry IVs for hydration, enter environments well outside the atmosphere of the planet, and even be intravenously fed if you so choose. Pretty sure I'll be passing on that feature.
Eye tracking in the HUD has become seamless. The full three hundred and sixty degree view feels natural. Exiting the suit after a simulation, it takes a minute to remember you need to turn your head to see behind you.
Sexier and more deadly. With the sacrifice of size and extra space, more than just the Gravitational Shockwave Cannon has been lost. The old suit, designed to round up and drag Augments to Killcreek had a slew of non-lethal options. Tranquilizers, shock lines, and even a charged net intended to both incapacitate and discourage struggling with high voltage. Things like tear gas could be loaded into canister fed launchers along with smoke and fragmentation grenades. Plus, smaller spaces meant smaller, more efficient jets. In fact, I think I could make the Kessel run in the old suit in half the parsecs.
Instead of evasion and non-lethal, the prototype is clearly designed for one purpose—to permanently correct mistakes.
An actual laser fires out of one arm with enough power to cut through steel and a sustained fire mode which could bore a hole through a vault door in minutes. Hands with articulated fingers have a crushing strength exceeded only by one known Augment. Electronic Countermeasures and the reactive armor keep the suit invisible to all forms of conventional detection equipment. Thermal adjusters bonded at a molecular level not only seal and protect the suit from outrageous temperature extremes but can render infra-red and some night vision useless.
Bottom line, I'm in love.
When I load up for the next mission, I make sure Ayana isn't around. I then double check right before Xamse blasts me off into the sky above Nanomech. The few non-lethal options are prepped and ready. Tranquilizers still remain along with a close-range shock option which could drop an elephant. But I'
m less concerned about those than I am the ballistic armaments. Just in case, I've loaded and double checked the special ammunition for this mission: non-metallic rounds.
Any slight adjustment and the new suit reacts with flawless precision. I keep getting closer to how he must have felt. A force of nature who owned the skies, the earth and everything in between.
I didn't say much to Xamse before I left. My focus was on the armor, preventing any sabotage, and getting a dislocated arm back into shape. It still isn't healed, but I've got an uncanny tolerance for pain. Less a super power, it's more of a Darwin Award contender.
Ayana wasn't there when I launched either. My guess, Xamse had her busy elsewhere. He appeared distracted himself and only went over the briefing once, He maintains radio silence as I eat up the distance across middle America.
I'm soaring above Nowhere, Kansas. Property lines are far enough apart, an alien could crash-land here, and maybe three people would ever know. The patchwork monotony which began right after crossing the southern edge of the Rockies continues forever now.
Back highways of fused gravel and pinkish stone appear as barren boundaries, their flanks lined with wooden telephone poles from another time. Over the horizon, a line of semi-trucks come into view. Nowhere, Kansas has become a popular destination. Trailers filled with old, rusted cars and trucks wait in a funeral procession. Their lead vehicle waits outside the gate of their final destination.
Inside those gates, one of the alternating patches of reddish dirt and golden fields has been replaced with a towering edifice of a different sort of consumption. Rubber, steel, carbon fiber, all driven across miles and miles of endless roadway have found their way here to a junkyard where they'll be consigned to scrap and decay.
I can't help but think of the old Beetle Armor, wrecked and beaten, lying defeated in the lab. Every scrap of technology has its day, I suppose. I'll need to tinker on good 'ol Wormfood in my spare time and keep him flying.
I come in low, gliding eye level with the drivers of the trucks. Surprised faces grab for handsets, the car to car radios not reliant on cell towers and satellites. Open communications, eavesdropping on every keyed mike is easy. Their excited chatter spreads quickly. Black Beetle. Here. Hot damn.
FreedomNet had the details about Tomahawk before I'd even returned to base. For public information and business, the system was useless, but it shines as a propaganda tool. No way was Homeland Security going to sit on that story. Pre-recorded, pre-scripted, the return of the Black Beetle from exile was the only headline.
Redemption. That's the story they're selling.
It's doubtful anybody anticipated my arrival here. Well, except Jupiter. He had to know.
Ferromagnetic powers on a modern battlefield—the guy was the ultimate weapon. He could toss tanks in the air or halt the forward movement of a fleet of ships. Suicide bombers? IEDs? He could contain flesh-shredding shrapnel in tiny spheres no bigger than a basketball.
Post Killcreek, he went and got a job.
His salvage yard became the only one in the continental U.S. to experience zero disruptions to their operations. Magnets and car crushers require crazy electrical loads. Yet he continued to operate completely off the grid. When the government went to offer his yard a contract, they saw who they were dealing with. He refused the first offer to return to active duty. Cantor thinks I can change his mind.
I'm lots of things, but I'm not a diplomat.
The maze of discarded frames and engines offers no cover from the air. Jupiter isn't hiding, though. In the open, wearing dirty coveralls and his face stained with grease, he doesn't appear a bit surprised as I descend, jets burning a hole in the shadows between stacked cars.
Jupiter stands under the dormant crane, beside the yawning car crusher frozen in an empty snore. A station wagon rises into the air and crumples like a paper cup, glass spraying onto a growing mound. Without breaking a sweat, he adds it to another pile of sculpted car cubes.
He reaches into a pocket and fishes out a handkerchief. From the cloth, he produces a tin and stuffs a wad of chew under his lip. He hops down from the platform where he'd been standing and tosses the handkerchief aside.
We stare at each other. He fires a juicy brown load against a rusted-out fender. It blends, at first, then strings to the ground.
"It doesn't have to be this way," I say.
"What other way is there you son of a bitch? Killcreek?"
I barely remember him coming through Whispering Pines. I'd freed him then. But we all make mistakes.
"They made an offer," I say, the voice modulator masking every word with the classic beetle intonation. "You should accept."
"Or what? You got a plastic prison for me? Staff it with guards who empty their pocket change, carry wooden batons. You make special prisons for all of us? Goddamn country falling apart and you're going to tell me you've built a place to contain us?"
What do I say to that? No, he had his chance.
I clench my fist, and the armor reacts. Seamless. These powers are my powers, each strength, each weapon. I know life can't ever be normal again. It's taken trauma, unfathomable loss, to get me to understand: nobody connected to this world of weaponized people can ever just be content.
"That's what I thought," he says.
His gesture appears dramatic and empty. An arm flings toward where I stand inside the prototype. In the old tapes taken from Drake's first battle with Jupiter, this flick of his wrist had wrecked an army of drones.
This time, nothing happens.
"Synthetic fibers. Aluminum. Titanium. Ceramics even. We've made improvements." I hear my words, dull and toneless, masked by the Beetle's voice.
His face goes white. Maybe I've got him. Intimidation and his loss of control over the situation might have created enough doubt he'll come quietly. Powerless against this shiny new suit.
But I've been powerless plenty of times. Has that ever stopped me?
He reaches for the wrecked cars, piled high on either side and they jolt, suddenly unstable. Alarms sound in the helmet. Red lines trace possible trajectories, calculating the crushing mass of steel coming my way at any second. Intelligent armor plating won't do a damn thing against that.
No need for dramatic gestures of my own. The targeting reticle has been locked since I landed, weapons readied. Blood seeps through a bullet hole in Jupiter's head before the stacked cars shake off their first layer of rust.
I barely pause as the body crumples. The junkyard shrinks underneath the flare of the battle armor's rockets. The burst of propellant and supersonic acceleration sends a plume of dust skyward. The unseen force strikes the off-balance walls. They collapse inward, Jupiter buried.
"Mission accomplished," I report.
Xamse doesn't answer with away. When he does, I hear other noises in the background, like he's outside in the wilderness. "What of Jupiter?"
"At least you know where he's buried."
I take a long flight back to base.
CHAPTER 22
WEEKS PASS. NO LONGER stuck in the daily routine of sleeping pill, lab, sleeping pill, I'm stuck in a more sinister loop. Augment hunting, pills, Augment hunting. I'm thankful for Xamse's gift of prescription sleep. If I had trouble before, I'd not be able to now.
Sleep.
Thor.
Sleep.
Regulus.
Sleep.
Patriot.
More fall. I stick to the cycle. This is my new normal. How it all must be.
Vulkan remains elusive. Cantor was right, he's disappeared off the face of the earth. Hanging out in the core perhaps with Balrogs and lost scientific expeditions. If only I knew where to dig, the new armor could take him. I'd wrestle him into the hell where he belongs.
The C.E.O. has grown more distracted as I've grown more detached. Several missions, I've launched from Xamse's office without him even being present. Ayana objects and always shows in his absence. But her glower doesn't keep me pinned, and the demilitarized zone ar
ound Nanomech prevents our little rivalry from ending too early.
With Xamse gone more often, he's given me access to Nanomech systems. Ayana refused his request for weeks, claiming her team never got the email then saying she'd assigned it to Abel, Chinua, Johnathan, and Zala until her list of senior security members had run out of alphabetical responses and possible excuses.
She's making the right call. Surely, he can't trust me, although I get the sense he does—enough the thought of betraying him stings. More than that, the idea of proving Ayana right is a non-starter.
In my spare time, I explore. I stroll their digital perimeter and toss a few imaginary rocks at the fence. Nothing serious. To Xamse's, hell, maybe even Ayana's credit, they've got the systems locked down tight.
Hacking into the guts of the systems would set off layers of alarm bells. I'd be better off with an external attack. At the very least I'd need somebody else's workstation. A friendly employee or two wouldn't hurt, but I don’t feel like making friends.
Ayana hasn't allowed another visit from our client. Cantor's last offer sticks with me, though. I'd hated the idea of being shunted into another fucking bunker, but I'd love some space at this point.
As the number of successful missions increase, the time between them lengthens. I don't leave my basement hideout. I don't want to answer questions. Don't want to talk about the job. I want to focus on what is going to happen. When I'm going to find Vulkan.
Nanomech has nothing of interest going on. Their sole effort has been to support the government's attempts to rebuild at all costs. FreedomNet explains away military seizure of power generation plants in Canada and Mexico. China keeps slow playing the necessary parts, sending too little, too late. Even our presumed allies have taken a step back.
With the financial collapse, Europe is struggling too. However, there's something more disturbing. FreedomNet can't be telling the whole truth. They're stalling not just because they too were wounded, but because they've caught a glimpse of the future.
