Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (58 page)

Chapter 63: The Red Zone is for …

Now they began to move with purpose. The last were being birthed now. Banu, minimized and sealed into a cylinder about twenty centimeters across and half a meter long, was rushed to rendezvous. The cylinder had its own power source, and a hardwire optical fiber linked to a gelport in its tip. As it arrived at Vladivostok, the ship it was going to be loaded into was already in the final stages of its unloading from the Russian Resonance Dome, as each of the world’s seven dome facilities completed one last cycle of their aborted production run. This, then, would be one of the last Skalms that would be ready in time to join the fight.

That said, given this particular Skalm pilot’s reputation, this was one that many had high hopes for. In the southeastern sky, a series of lights could be seen appearing. They were plentiful and bright, and they moved fast east to west, overtaking the sky even though they moved far above it. It was the second time the mobilizing starfleet had passed in the last few hours.

Banu could not see it, though. Her mind was in a last moment of silence. The capsule was sealed and shielded, its contents highly pressurized and cushioned in a jelly of oxygenated plasma being slowly stirred around the soft grey tissue. The now-isolated organ had been carefully prepared, pumped full of nutrients and attached to a cycling pump that would feed it from now until the war ended, for better or worse.

The capsule was black, coated in multiple layers of super-conductive plating, radiation shielding, and then more inner plating. The only markings were a sprayed-on id tag saying simply: Captain Banu Annat Mantil, Terrestrial Allied Space Command. As the arriving StratoJet came within fifty feet of the ground, the capsule was born out of the still landing fighter jet by a hulking Phase Twelve, the only of its kind, which leapt clear and was away and running before the StratoJet even touched down.

Hektor did not have much to do anymore. He was occasionally tasked with some policing or protective duty, but for the most part the time for people like Cara, Bohdan, Jung, and himself had passed. They were relics of ground-based conflict that had no place in the new era. An era where wars were between airborne gods, fighting not over land, but over whole planets.

However unwittingly, Hektor had once shared a home with some of these children, these orphan pilots. When he and his cohorts had been acquitted in the tribunal that had seen Ayala and Neal pushed into obscurity, he had volunteered to be stationed wherever the children went, to do his part to help them adjust to their new cybernetic bodies.

He’d had the pleasure of meeting the girl whose casket he now carried on several occasions since then. Even if he hadn’t, he would still know who she was. She had saved him once, as his legs were taken from him on a concrete battlefield outside Pyongyang, and now he was carrying her, not to safety, but to the closest thing she knew to home. A permanent birth near the heart of a craft she had been the first human to tame.

The field around the Skalm was deserted. It was about to get very hot here. As Cara and the others delivered the other orphan pilots to sites around the planet, Hektor ran under the great gantry cranes that held the still beast, under its long, slender, almost delicate-looking arms, toward its spiny heart.

He knew it was already being awoken. The earthfleet was waiting for them, these last few warriors. The defense force was waiting to depart, and they would not wait much longer. So the stellar core at the heart of this beast was even now being prodded, the dragon opening one lazy eye as the fire started to bubble in its belly.

But it needed a brain, a rider, a tamer of the beast, one who could subsume herself in the mad ride and focus the great power starting to churn inside its five hearts.

Hektor ran hard, a timer running now in his brain. He knew where it was, the small slot, so innocent, in one side of one of the great akas. There, ahead, so close to one of the fat nozzles, a place he would not want to be anywhere near in less than a minute.

He leapt in one powerful bound at the scaffolding that had been placed there for this purpose. Whoever had been slated to pilot this craft was no doubt nearby, being informed even now that they had been superseded. When they heard by whom they would probably be okay with it, not that it mattered. This was Banu’s right, thought Hektor with relish as he connected with the top of the scaffolding and began clambering the last meters toward the slot. He raised Banu up as he approached, lifting her and turning her capsule, slowing just long enough to make sure she was perfectly aligned before pushing her home.

The wakening craft knew she was coming. It sucked the capsule inward, pulling it in with magnetic need, until the gelport at its tip connected with the matching one inside it and Banu was released back into the machine, opening her eyes from the perfect silence of her capsulated home into the full spectrum truth of the Skalm’s full contact sensor suite.

She took in the world anew, through multi-phase, self-verifying, panoramic eyes and smiled inwardly. Then the familiar pulse came, a rising chorus as her hearts came online. She longed for it. She called out to the ship, come to me, come to me and join with me. Let us fly. In a part of her that was already falling away, a quickly set aside humanity, she sensed the machine man running with all his might away from the hot death of her might. And so, as life came to her body and she sucked in a great lungful of fire, she hesitated just a moment, as long as she could resist this call of the wild so he could get somewhat clear.

He was tough, she knew, and he was going to have to be, because she could not resist any longer. With a profound ecstasy, she let her returned power explode from her, ripping the Skalm from the ground, shrugging off the cranes and melting the scaffolding, all forgotten and behind her now, like the gravity she could so easily ignore. The Skalm bellowed with joy at its freedom, rocketing straight upward toward a passing cloud before stabbing straight through it, its engines visibly tearing the vapor into a streak of orange as Banu departed the atmosphere for perhaps the last time.

Hektor came skidding and sliding to a halt, his suit having barely saved him, alarms blaring as the heat radiated off him and the surrounding scorched earth. Well, that was one way to see a launch, he thought, before turning his attention skyward.

An old German battle song started to drift from his lips as he watched the rising star move off to join its brethren.

“If it storms or snows, or the sun smiles on us,

The day burning hot, or the icy cold of night.

Dusty are our faces, but happy are our minds, yes, our minds.

“Es braust unser Panzer im Sturmwind dahin,” he said, quietly. “Then roar our tanks in the storm’s wind.”

- - -

Quavoce at John:
‘she is gone, john. she is gone.’

John at Quavoce:
‘i am sorry, my friend. you can still speak to her, though. go, talk to her. we have a little more time.’

Quavoce at John:
‘no, we do not. we cannot wait any longer. it is time we put me to the test. it is time to rejoin.’

John at Quavoce:
‘¿are you sure, quavoce? we can wait, and perhaps should. i can say that i feel almost certain of how the real you will react to your reintroduction, but … there is still a chance.’

Quavoce at John:
‘of course there is a chance. i cannot know what has transpired on the other side, what new allegiances i may have formed. but if i wait any longer, well, then no matter what the real me decides to do, she will still …’

John at Quavoce:
‘¿you hope to save her?’

Quavoce at John:
‘she is, my friend, all that really matters to me anymore.’

John at Quavoce:
‘then, my dear, dear quavoce, i am more than ready to put my faith in you once more.’

Quavoce at John:
‘thank you, john. i can only hope it is well placed.’

And with that they reached out, through Remy, to Minnie, routed themselves through the local subspace tweeter on Hekaton and outward to the moon, where they bounced outward through an already overcrowded subspace frequency to Phobos. Here their signal recrypted itself, reformatting into something alien, something not of Earth, and its tendrils reached out across the void to the ship hiding in the wake of the Armada, and made its presence known.

Chapter 64: Psychotic Conundrum

Sar looked at Quavoce. Was he ignoring her?

“Lord Mantil, the question is a simple one,” she said, but again he merely stared off into space.

After a moment’s wait, where her impatience threatened to once more capsize her mood, he responded quietly, “Something unexpected has happened.”

She looked at him. “Explain?”

He returned her plaintive gaze for a second, then said, “I have just received an encrypted signal from Earth. From the Advanced Team. It carries the rejoining code. It is requesting to merge its memories with me.”

He looked at the group, but they were all pinging the Arbite, seeking confirmation of this stunning turn. There had been two signals, it seemed. One to the Mantilatchi, the other to the Nomadi.

All eyes, including those of Quavoce, turned to Shtat, who was just as stunned as they were. The signals were, by design, encoded to the two men, and to them alone. They had never been intended as communications tools. The IST had been designed for that. This had been solely for the legally mandated rejoining of the Agents’ personalities, an unalienable right by law and treaty alike.

“Those signals are
not
to be allowed through,” said Sar emphatically.

“Why not?” said the Hemmbar, genuinely unaware of a reason one would refuse to receive information, especially from yourself.

“Because the other Agents, including, most notably, my own, have not made contact as well. This is a trick … or … they are …” she paused, staring at Quavoce. She could believe Shtat was a traitor, that she could believe all too easily, if he wasn’t just such a pussy.

But Quavoce. No, not him. Surely not him. He just wasn’t capable of such a deception.

But that her Agent-self would not also be reaching out was setting off alarm bells in her mind. She had accepted the likely destruction of her own Agent as a part of the whole team, it had angered her, but she had eventually accepted it. But if anyone had survived, then why not she? There was only one conclusion, and she kept coming back to it.

“I demand to see that feed first,” she blurted, looking as surprised as everyone else that she had said it.

Quavoce looked at her. Surely she didn’t suspect him? They did not always see eye to eye, but that anyone could think him a traitor was too much, just too much. With a look of indignation that made her stop in her tracks, he leant forward and said, “By international law, and by right of the treaty, you have no right to withhold any Agent’s mind its rejoining. If you wish to audit the feed, I will happily release the data stream for analysis by the Arbite once it is finished reintegrating. But make no mistake, no one, and I mean no one, will have access to my own memories before I do.”

And with that he was gone, his form freezing in place as he opened himself to the data flow and it began decoding itself directly into his mind, merging with his personality as that unique map unlocked its secrets.

Sar looked now to Shtat, thinking to have more luck ordering him about than she’d had with the outraged Mantilatchi leader. But he was as still as his partner as he also began communing with his unexpected other self.

- - -

The process was a long one, taking over half an hour. Nearly ten years of sights, sounds, and smells had been condensed and compressed into an abbreviated language only a matching mind could translate back into decipherable memory, but it still took a long while to flow through.

The recovery took even longer, though. The shock of such a pure flow of experience, following two simultaneous but divergent timelines, was profound at the best of times, but both these examples were uniquely shocking.

For Quavoce, it was a merging of two separate and opposing ideologies that agreed only in the matter of honor. But even that defining part of his ethos was now tested as the unification must, inevitably, lead to broken oaths and the betrayal of ones close to one version of him or the other. The cerebral schism it brought left him reeling, and the process drew out.

Lord Mantil’s medical monitoring AI reported to a waiting and watching Council that he had entered a state of severe shock, and allegations of foul play on the part of the humans began to come. Psychological weapons were not unheard of, it was one of the reasons a connection like this was so personal, so fingerprinted. But they were extremely difficult to pull off, and fear started to build at just the thought that their enemy might have found a way to hack these individual’s inimitable mental fingerprints.

For Shtat, on the other hand, the merging was both stranger and also far more straightforward. The memories came together, but where Quavoce’s clone had sent back an argument, a psychotic conundrum, John Hunt had sent back a piece to a puzzle, a piece that Shtat had not even known he had been missing.

For the memories of John’s ten years on Earth were not alone, they came with an intermittent flow of memories from before the Armada had even departed. They seemed alien at first, like so much of what the hitherto modest man was suddenly learning, but as they locked into place, they revealed to Shtat a truth he’d had forcibly removed from his mind, removed and formed into a whole new person, a counterfeit man who believed himself to be called Kattel, a lowly engineer whose empty cryo-unit was still back with the transport ships.

Shtat Palpatum, the man who had been called coward, who had been called fool, even by the very people whom he had plotted with before the mind swipes had amputated the massive genius of his connivance, opened his eyes and smiled at his peers.

He looked around. All eyes were on him. He was back in the Council chamber. He thought quickly. He had a decision to make. It was not a question of what he was going to do next, no, he knew with a preternatural certainty what he must do next. The only question was whether he should hang around to see whether Quavoce would join him, or leave now, initiate his fleet contingent’s declaration of war against the rest of the Armada, and get busy dying.

“Well, Shtat?” said To-Henton, breathlessly, “what have you learned?”

“Why are you not sharing the data flow?” added Sar.

And then, in a rare moment of agreement, DefaLuta added, “Yes, Shtat, you must open your mind for audit. Arbite, we demand to know what has been sent to the Nomadi representative.”

But they all knew they could not demand such a thing. Their treaty allowed them to see any inter-race communications, but intra-contingent talk was sacrosanct without evidence of malfeasance, and intra-mind talk was most certainly sacred, a fact that had driven the Nomadi … no, Shtat’s plan from the start. He smiled once more. What a smart boy he was. Smart and dead. He laughed.

“Do not worry, my friends,” he said. “All is well. I will reveal the information in time, I promise.” He spoke with a self-assurance that was unfamiliar on the face of the previously feeble Nomadi, and Sar’s eyes narrowed at the man.

But Shtat ignored her and turned to look at Quavoce, asking, “Has he spoken yet?”

“No,” said Sar, simply, still glaring at the suddenly enigmatic nomad.

“Arbite,” she said now, “it is clear that this man has been corrupted somehow. This is no longer the agreed upon Nomadi representative. I demand a hearing.”

The Arbite’s response was non-vocal, and came simply as a note into her mental in-box: ‘no such discrepancy in his mental state has been found by his medical ai. shtat palpatum remains a rightful representative and council member.’

Shtat smiled serenely—no, wait, was that smugness on his face?—and stared at Quavoce. The Mantilatchi man was, Shtat saw, coming around. But behind his calm demeanor, the Nomadi’s finger was already on the trigger. If he saw the slightest hint of false-action in Lord Mantil’s expression, he would loose his ships and take the internment he knew would instantly follow his declaration.

Quavoce looked around, clearly still in shock.

“Quavoce!” said Sar. “What happened? The Nomadi refuses to tell us. Open your data stream. Do it now! Tell us what the hell is going on!”

Her tone descended into a rant and Quavoce looked slowly from her, to To-Henton, and finally to Shtat.

At a request from the Nomadi, the two men stepped into a different place, a quieter place. They knew their conversation would still be monitored but they didn’t care. Quavoce just needed to face this man, now that he knew the full story.

“Hello, Quavoce, how do you feel?” said Shtat.

“I feel like I have been hit by a Skalm,” Quavoce said, and Shtat smiled for a moment before becoming serious once more

“I can only imagine,” said Shtat, then, “I wish we could talk about it more, but I am afraid you have a choice to make, and it is not one that will wait.”

They knew the Arbite’s eyes were upon them, as were the Council’s, watching for the slightest hint of foul play. Though it did not show in their now serene expressions, both men were tensing, like dueling gunmen facing each other down in dusty Main Street, eyes narrowed and unblinking, hands itching by their sidearms.

“There is no doubt about that, Nomadi,” said Quavoce, icily. “A choice must be made.”

“And?” said Shtat.

There was a long pause and then the slightest of smiles appeared on Quavoce’s face. It was not a happy smile; indeed, its sadness was as profound as anything Shtat had ever seen.

Whatever happened next, Shtat knew he loved and admired the man in front of him. But this moment would not wait for them any longer. He was about to draw, to light the whole barn on fire, when Quavoce said quietly, “John, my friend, I fight for my daughter.”

And with that they both nodded one last time and then fell away, triggering events as they went, calling protocols to task, ratcheting treaty promises into place and knocking them off one by one as they severed themselves and their fleet contingents from the whole, declaring themselves rogue. As they reclaimed control of their ships, control that instantly cost them their places in the Arbite’s graces, they sounded the alarm to their respective warriors, countermanding orders as the bonds of the treaty crumbled.

Like any coalition, the allegiance of each member nation had always been voluntary, but on this mission, if you did not stand with the whole, then you stood against them, that was the Arbite’s mandate.

The freedom to renounce had once been the backbone of Sar’s finagling as she had envisioned a world ruled over by her and her friends, and devoid of the likes of DefaLuta and the chairman. But now she could only watch in horror as one of those friends committed suicide. To-Henton was just as stunned, and said nothing for a moment as the Lamati stared ahead and recounted Quavoce’s last words. “Daughter! What daughter! Quavoce, you have no daughter!”

For it was suicide, what they had just done, there was little doubt about that. Even if the combined squadrons of Nomadi and Mantilatchi Skalms could survive the coming fight, which they most certainly could not, their leaders, still in hibernation in the carrier’s hold, were most certainly doomed.

The Arbite’s response was swift and harsh. It had neither compassion nor hesitance as it reset its view of the two men from dignified leaders to damned traitors. No sooner had the two men made their declarations than their minds were cut off and promptly opened up for review, any sanctity quickly violated.

At the same time, the six hundred ten Skalms still loyal to the cause felt a sudden, diametric shift in their spatial awareness. Their visions, previously focused ahead on an earthfleet that now could be seen accelerating outward to meet them, turned inward suddenly, to two sectors coloring red, and the great Armada began to eat its own as the cleansing began.