ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) (38 page)

I trekked through the woods to the nearest highway. I followed the deserted road for at least two hours, and finally arrived at a small French town. I asked for directions to the military entrance processing station. No one had a clue what I was talking about.

“There is no military,
mon ami,
” one of the locals explained to me. “Not anymore. It has been outlawed for years, no? There are no wars anymore, no killing. We do not need a military. That is one thing you can’t deny, about the Invaders. Despite everything, they’ve brought peace to the world.”

“But at what price?” I said.

The local lowered his eyes. He didn’t have anything to say to that, because he knew the price. Of course he knew. We all did.

Our humanity.

After a few hours of trudging unsuccessfully about the small town, I found myself at the bus station. I planned to secure a ride to a bigger city, but as I explored the station I realized all the platforms were empty. No buses. It seemed our humanity wasn’t the only thing the Invaders had stripped away: they’d taken our transportation infrastructure, too. Though that was intrinsically linked to our humanity, wasn’t it?

As I left the bus station behind, who should approach from down the street but Shaw, gripping the underside of her pregnancy hump as if her unborn baby were the most incredible of burdens.

“There you are!” she said. “I was worried sick. Are you happy now? Are you done? Can we go home?”

I banished the guilt I felt. “This isn’t real. You’re not Shaw, and I don’t know who or what you are.” I said those words as much for myself as for her. She couldn’t be real. None of this could.

Yet a part of me knew that it was.

The world had fallen.

Humanity was a slave species.

What I once was—a MOTH, a member of the most elite spec-ops units in the galaxy—I could never be again.

No one could.

“Why do you say such things?” Shaw said. “You promised me you were well. That things would go back to the way they were before.”

I touched my temples, searching for the unseen aReal that covered my eyes, but there wasn’t one. “Whatever you’re trying to do to me, it won’t work.”

“I’m not trying to do anything!” Shaw said, close to tears. “When are you going to understand that? Just stop this lunacy and come back home. Please, Rade, as your wife, I’m asking you. Begging you. Come home. For me. For your unborn son.”

“I’m not going back with you. You’re not my wife.” I turned around, and started walking toward the center of town. The streets were oddly empty around me, as if the residents had shut themselves away in anticipation of some coming storm.

“Please don’t do this, Rade,” Shaw said behind me.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t look back.

The ground began to rumble. Around me, buildings collapsed inward.

The alien crabs from my nightmares emerged from multiple sinkholes. I backed away, but they came at me from all directions.

If I was going to die, I would do it fighting.

I raised my fists. “Come on, you pieces of—”

But the crabs weren’t concerned with me. They passed right by. Their long cords trailed behind them, connected to a slow-moving slug. If they didn’t want me, then what—

Shaw.

They wanted Shaw.

“Shaw, run!” I said.

But she didn’t move.

For some reason I was frozen too.

The crabs halted, forming a circle around Shaw roughly a pace in diameter. Their mandibles clattered at the air and their claws snapped, but they made no further movements toward her. It was as if she was protected by some invisible barrier the alien entities could not penetrate.

The crabs on one side parted, making way for a blue Phant. It floated, in gaseous form. The Phant should have appeared as a liquid under Earth temperature and pressure. Yet there it was.

The glowing vapor drifted closer to Shaw. There was nowhere she could run. She was going to suffer the same fate as Big Dog and Alejandro, incinerated at the hands of a malevolent alien species whose motives I did not understand. Could never understand.

“Good-bye, Rade,” Shaw said, reaching toward the glowing vapor.

“Shaw, no!” I still couldn’t move. “Shaw!”

The Implant log-on window overlaid my vision.

Somehow I knew if I thought my password she would be all right.

Everything would. We’d go back to our home in the woods and live out our lives in peace, left alone.

Our home in the woods . . .

We didn’t
have
a home in the woods.

“It’s not real,” I said.

The vapor touched her.

The scream I heard was very real.

Darkness.

I was naked, cold.

I felt a throbbing pain at the back of my head. I touched it, expecting to find a warm, wet wound surrounded by matted hair, but instead my fingers contacted a cold, metallic knob. About the size of a bottle cap, it was grafted right into my skull. I tried to rip it off, and gritted my teeth at the pain, but it would not budge. I stopped, worried that if I succeeded I’d pull out a chunk of brain tissue in the process.

I clambered to my feet. The floor, or deck, or whatever it was, felt frigid. Not a metal kind of cold. But stone.

I took a tentative step forward and bumped my knee against a hard surface in the darkness. A wall, also made of smooth stone.

I wasn’t on a ship, then.

“Hello?” I said. “Somebody? Anybody?”

I held my breath and listened for long moments. I heard nothing. Absolute silence.

My first instinct was to check my Implant to see if I could bring up a map of my surroundings.

HUD on
, I thought.

I was presented with the log-on screen to my embedded ID.

Wait a second. The device should still be deactivated, guarding against the mind-numbing flood of garbage data from the Phants.

And yet, someone had rebooted it.

Was I still in the dream? And if so, where did the dream end and reality begin?

Again I felt the urge to log on, but I resisted because I knew that’s what my captors wanted. There were devices out there that could monitor the neural clusters that fired when a man thought the words and characters of his password. Devices like the metallic knob attached to my skull at this very moment.

Why would anyone want access to my embedded ID? For one thing, courtesy of the Implant, it contained a log of everything I’d seen and heard since implantation. The data was encrypted and inaccessible without the password. The encryption could be cracked via a brute-force attack, but it took a very long time.

HUD off.

They had tried to get to me using Shaw.

Damn it. She was the one person more precious to me than anyone else. What they had done in my dream somehow cheapened what we had together. They had invented a fiction, and made her my pregnant wife. What a gross perversion of her memory.

She was dead.

She’d never be my wife.

Shaw. My Shaw.

I could hear her voice in my head even now.

“Remember me in the deepest, darkest hours, when you think you can’t go on. Remember me in the storm.”

The first time she’d told me those words was after Basic, as her way of helping me through MOTH training. The second time was before the
Royal Fortune
Gated back to Tau Ceti, leaving her behind in the Geronimo star system, eight thousand lightyears away.

It was the last thing she ever said to me.

They’d constructed a false world in my head to trick me into revealing my password. With the proper tech, reading random memories to use as building blocks for that false world was relatively easy, but extracting something as specific as an embedded ID password . . . well, if you didn’t know the engrams to target, that could take years. There were over one hundred billion neurons in the brain, with an exponential amount of neural connections and pathways between them.

I probed the darkness with my bare fingers. As I did so, I wondered if the chamber really
was
dark, or whether my bio-printed eyes had simply failed on me. Damn that Dr. Banye.

It didn’t take long to map out my surroundings. I was confined to a square compartment cut into the stone. I could barely touch the ceiling if I jumped with my fingers outstretched, and when I held my arms out in front of me, I could only walk a pace in any direction before running into stone.

There was a metallic ring embedded in one wall, with a rope secured to it. Following the rope with my hands, I discovered it looped over an old-style pulley system in the ceiling. The free end of the rope dangled down into the center of the room, capped by a harness of some sort that hung just above my head.

I sat on the floor, knowing the pulley and harness couldn’t be used for anything good.

A narrow slot abruptly opened in the base of the wall across from me, and a blinding ray of light shone inside.

“Hello?” I said, hurrying toward the light, shielding my eyes with one hand. “Hello!”

A bowl slid through the opening, and the slot promptly slammed shut.

“Wait! Where am I?” I felt around in the dark. The afterimage of the light was burned into my retinas. At least my eyes were working, then.

I discovered the featureless metal panel where the light had come in, a panel about the size of my forearm in length and width. I had missed it in my initial probings, due to its proximity to the floor.

I tried digging my fingertips into the edges, but couldn’t find purchase.

I pounded at the panel three times. “I have to use the head! The washroom!”

I hammered it again. “I have to—”

The slot opened a crack.

“Defecate in the bowl when you are finished eating,” a robotic voice said in perfect English.

“Where—”

The panel slammed shut, and I knew only darkness once more.

I groped blindly until I found the bowl, led as much by my sense of smell as anything else. I held it to my lips and slurped the thick contents. Bland, tasteless, watered-down gruel. But it was food.

When I was done, I set the bowl on the stone floor and carried out my other bodily functions. It was true what they say about your other senses being enhanced when you lose sight—never had my fecal matter smelled so bad. I had nothing to wipe with except the edge of the bowl, which wasn’t very effective. I did my best to ignore the itching. I tried to pretend I was back in MOTH training, where the constant itch of sand down my pants from doing the Gingerbread Man felt way worse than this. I could almost hear the voices of the instructors:

Get wet and roll in the dunes! Roll, you dumbasses!

Believe it or not, I actually missed those days.

I relocated the panel in the dark, and set the stinking bowl in front of it. I waited, ready to grab the hand of whoever—or whatever—reached inside to retrieve it.

The slot eventually opened.

Ready to pounce, I squinted in the light.

No hand appeared.

Instead, the bowl simply slid through the slot of its own accord. Magnetized, apparently.

I considered shoving my arm through the slot after it, but I didn’t like the idea of amputation.

The panel sealed, leaving me in a world of darkness once more.

I huddled against the stone wall with my legs bent, arms wrapped around my thighs, head resting atop my knees. I don’t know how much time passed. An hour, maybe two.

And then . . .

The stone walls flared a blinding white, and I was forced to shield my eyes with one hand. I retreated to the far corner, cowering like a caged dog.

I heard the sound of stone grating on stone, like the lid of a sarcophagus sliding open. I squinted, peering through the cracks in my fingers, and I saw a figure calmly waltz into the room. The light from the walls was too blinding for me to perceive anything more than a silhouette. I thought the figure was a woman, though.

“What is your embedded ID password?” she said in the accent of a Sino-Korean.

I didn’t answer.

Before I knew what had happened, I found myself quivering against the far wall, with waves of pain passing up and down my body. I was certain I’d been shot in the belly with an illegal helo-round, a bullet that sprouted six blades and rotated lengthwise after embedding, literally chewing up my insides.

Amazingly, the pain receded.

Without looking, I reached down and touched my abdomen. I felt no entry wound of any kind. I was uninjured.

“This is the Snake,” the woman said.

I squinted at her in the bright light, and realized she held a rod of some kind.

“All I have to do is point it at your body, and squeeze. Then you feel its bite.” She paced in a half circle before me. “Perhaps you have noticed the knob attached to the back of your head? In addition to monitoring your thoughts by piggybacking atop the existing web of carbon nanotubes you call an ‘Implant,’ the knob links the Snake to your brain, giving me direct access to the pain receptors of your thalamus via transcranial magnetic stimulation. Science is such a wonderful thing. With it, one can cure the most horrible of diseases. Or inflict the most horrible of pains. Can you imagine, a device that lets me induce currents in a select mass of neurons via a rapidly changing magnetic field? I’m so glad I was born in this day and age, in this time of wonders. Because the Snake is indeed a wonder. To be respected. Feared.