Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (2 page)

From the line of burned-out hulks still being cleared from the roads in Eastern Hungary, to the apparent coup in Moscow that ended Premier Svidrigaïlov’s reign there, the actions of TASC continue to be absorbed like body blows, both by the nations that once stood against them, and the ones that once stood with them.

Former allies and enemies alike now deal with TASC and its representatives begrudgingly. They may be willing to help perpetuate the lies that the world needs to hear, but it cannot last much longer. Eventually the truth will come out. And soon.

Chapter 2: Mind-er

Neal’s eyes glistened with genuine affection as he greeted the little girl.
“There she is. How are you?”

Banu smiled and ran to him, taking the proffered hug with relish. She was barred from nearly all outside contact these days, her circle limited to Neal and Amadeu, and of course Quavoce, her father, the man who protected her, even as she protected them all.

“Hello, Uncle Neal.”

He held the girl up, a twinge in his back betraying his ever-poorer physical condition, a price he paid for his dedication to his work, he liked to tell himself, but in fact was rooted in a more profound laziness that was common among those that only found purpose in despair.

“How’s my little warrior princess, huh?” She giggled and he spun her a little in the air before her minimal weight became too much for him and he lowered her to the ground once more.

“Do you want to know a secret, my little warrior? I have something for you,” Neal now said, conspiratorially. “Do you want to see?”

“Yes!” she giggled with excitement, and she ran alongside him as he walked the short distance from where he had asked Quavoce to meet him to a heavy-looking door.

A moment’s confusion flashed across Banu’s innocent-seeming face before the door swung open of its own accord to reveal a large room, decorated everywhere in girlish pinkness that went way past garishness and out the other side into the realm of the ridiculous. The most incongruous part, though, was the pictures that lined the walls, for they were not of teen idols or Japanese manga heroines.

They were of owls and hawks, fighter jets, and, of course, the Skalm, stark in its beauty and pure function.

Banu shrieked and ran from Neal’s side into the room. There was a bed and a hammock, a chair and a desk covered in crayons and books; and toys, so many toys, arranged in boxes around the walls. She ran from one to the next, eyeing their contents with a gleam in her eye bordering on ecstasy, and then turned back to Neal with a question in her eyes …

“Yes, Banu, it is all for you. This is your new room!”

She shrieked once more and continued her exploration.

Quavoce came to stand at Neal’s side, his face showing that strange combination of happiness for his daughter and apprehension at the sight of her being spoiled, an emotion that any parent can sympathize with.

“Really, Neal?” he said quietly, as his ward began unloading a mass of toys from a particular box.

Neal smiled and chuckled. He did not look away from the girl as he replied, “Yes, Quavoce, really. And don’t be so alarmed. She’s had enough harsh reality to last a lifetime. This is for her. A small token of our appreciation.”

Quavoce could not argue the point too much, but to him it all still had the bitter aftertaste of spoiled wine, a good thing soured by circumstance. Quavoce was silent a moment then spoke up once more, as if he had been discussing the point within himself. “I cannot disagree, Neal, that she deserves some fun given what we have put her through, and even some distraction from the flying. Something I fear she enjoys a little too much. But …”

“Quavoce, my friend, please. This is not a bribe, and it is not just to make me feel better for sending a six-year-old girl into … well, we both know what we sent her into.”

Battle was a kind term for what Banu had been tasked with. Slaughter would be a better term, and Banu had been wielding the butcher’s knife herself. Most worrying had been that she had enjoyed it a little more than they might have liked. But now, hopefully, they could rely on the threat alone. Now they could return to diplomacy, a tactic that was always far more effective when silently backed by the threat of overwhelming military might.

“No, Quavoce,” Neal went on, “this is both a reward and a distraction. She needs to feel like a little girl again and hopefully she can do that here. She can still spend time in the air, both simulated and in the Skalm itself, and, should we need her to, she can still fight, from here. From this safe place. With you nearby and with everything she needs at hand.”

Quavoce was about to protest once more; after all, he had hoped for more than a one-room existence for the little girl when he had rescued her from the plague-ridden lands of her youth. But Neal was not done, and before Quavoce could formulate his objection, Neal called out.

“Minnie! Are you there?” he said to the air, and a voice replied, his pleasantly smug smile betraying his excitement at this final surprise.

“Yes, Neal. I am here. I am always here.” It was a familiar voice, but it was one that until now had rarely been embodied outside the confines of the ether.

Banu perked at the sound, it was a voice she was as deeply familiar with as Quavoce’s.

“Minnie!” she said, turning, but then confusion blurred her smile. It was the first time she had heard Minnie with her ears, and not from inside her mind. It was like hearing an imaginary friend actually speak, and she seemed most perplexed by the sensation.

The little girl joined Quavoce in staring at the heavy door and through it to the corridor beyond, to where the voice had come from.

“Yes, Banu,” said Neal, “Minnie wanted to be here, as your friend. So she can play with you here, like she does in the ether.”

Banu seemed happy at this, and yet still confused. And then the source of the voice entered the room. She was tall and not unattractive, but she was also stocky, almost masculine in her build. Banu did not notice this, she was too absorbed with trying to reconcile this person with the friend she knew as Minnie.

But Quavoce recognized it instantly as a machine body built not just for work as a would-be nanny. That would have taken the slightest of frames given the power of a mechanical musculature. No, this was a nanny that even Ms. Poppins would have hesitated to tangle with.

But the face on this martial machine was all gentleness, if a little awkward, still learning to see with two eyes and smile without appearing ghoulish.

“Hello, Minnie!” said Neal, with unconcealed pleasure, “It is so nice to see you!”

She turned to Neal with deliberately slow movement, Quavoce noting the way she limited the speed of her actions to more biological timeframes, “Hello, Neal, it is nice to see you too. I am going to go and play with Banu, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all, you go ahead!” said Neal, like a high school coach talking to his star player. And so Minnie turned and walked toward the young girl, who stared wide-eyed at the big woman. But in the nanny’s black eyes was the same deliberate gentleness and infinite care she had once seen in Quavoce’s eyes, one quiet and cold night, and as Minnie knelt by Banu, the little girl began to smile.

Then she reached up gingerly and whispered in the woman’s ears, “Is it really you?”

Minnie did not have to fake the smile that came next, she called on her sense of emotion and love that she had inherited from Amadeu and Birgit, and combined them all with the very real feelings she had for the young girl, and the smile that came to her face had all the emotion of the little girl’s responding grin, both their faces alight at the simple act of meeting in person for the first time.

They hugged, and Quavoce turned to leave, taking Neal by the arm as he did so. Neal took the hint, dragging himself from the touching but very unusual sight and following the Agent out of the room.

“That is a strange thing you have done, Neal. Good, but strange … and, well … dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” said Neal, genuinely curious at what could possibly be seen as dangerous in what he had just witnessed.

“Well, it is not the first time I have seen a child put in the care of a machine. Indeed, it’s not the first time it’s happened to poor Banu, I suppose. But as human as Minnie may seem, you would do well to remember that sentience is not the same as humanity.”

Neal balked, “Careful, Quavoce. You are, without doubt, one of humanity’s greatest friends, but you are not one of us, let us not forget that. Whereas Minnie is born of human parents. Of course she is not like us, but I trust her with my life everyday, as do we all. And …”

“You misunderstand me, Neal. I mean not to question Minnie’s motives. Her heart and purpose are without question. Truly without question. But that is just what I mean to stress here. There is a difference between us and the machines, and it is greater even than the difference between human and Mobiliei. It lies not in an imperfection, but in their perfection. The very singularity of a machine’s purpose.”

Neal seemed skeptical, but Quavoce went on, “You are determined, Neal. Goodness knows you are more determined than any man I have ever met. But that is nothing compared to a machine’s ability to dedicate itself to a task. I have to question every day what my machine subconscious wants to do, what options it provides me in its quest to meet my needs. It is a drug, and it is highly addictive.”

Neal began to nod. He could see where Quavoce was going and he could not deny the wisdom of it, “You are right, of course. I see it in myself too, the more I become dependent on Minnie. I have to actively remind myself that she is, well, she is a tool. An incredible tool, and one I value alongside my very closest friends and allies, but a tool nonetheless.”

He looked into Quavoce’s eyes and added, thoughtfully, “You are warning me against letting Banu become too dependent on Minnie.”

Quavoce nodded. They both thought about this for a moment, and then Neal went on, “Well, my friend, you understand what that means?”

Quavoce paused, and Neal said with a shrug, “It means that we will just have to continue to spend a lot of time with her as well.”

Quavoce laughed quietly.

“As fun as the rest of the people at District One are, I guess we will just have to grin and bear it,” said Quavoce.

They walked off, neither of them sad to think that they had a real need to continue to revel in the simple pleasure of Banu’s company. But neither of them was naïve either. They could see the signs of conflict in the young girl. The cost of exposing her young mind to the harsh truth of the world they now lived in. They needed her. But they must never forget that she needed them just as much, more perhaps.

Chapter 3: Thrum

The wide plain was without tree or shrub. No animal scuttled across its surface, and none ever had. But there was activity there, nonetheless. At the center of the plain, in a deep crater within another much larger and much older one, was a machine. It was a very large machine. And it was digging.

It was not there to mine any resource, not even to reveal some secret or ancient archeological find. There was nothing below but rock: ever harder, ever denser rock as the machine delved ever deeper. And it was this dense core matter that the great machine sought.

It was seeking purchase.

Its ten great, burrowing drills were grinding into the dirt and rock to get to the core of the planetoid.

For this was not Earth. It was a moon. Not ours, that would have been too large even for this machine’s epic need. Too large and too obvious.

No, this was a moon that orbited around another planet, a planet so often featured in our dreams of space. The Red Planet. Mars.

Unlike Earth, Mars has two moons. One very small and more distant, though still much closer than our own. And the other, larger one moving at incredible speed and very close to the planet’s surface. So close, in fact, that if it had been anywhere near the size of our moon it would have ripped the very planet apart.

Phobos. And on it, in it, drilling down into its core, was the other of the Mobiliei’s gifts to our solar system: the last of its kind. The last in a long string of great machines sent out to prepare a highway, not for people but for information.

It was drilling into the surface to construct a massive relay, or rather to turn the entire moon into one. It was drilling to weave its great, nanotube cables through the superstructure of Phobos and attach itself to the moon at a fundamental level. It was a long process, one filled with error and recalibration. The machine had to fine-tune the moon, find precisely the purchase and angle that would allow it to vibrate the great rock like a bell, allowing the machine to send out its signal across the cosmos.

And it was a process that was being repeated by a thousand such machines in a long line back to Mobilius. Some were already complete, having had more luck than most. Some places along the line had not had a planetoid to harness, and so the investment had had to be made in sending a string of larger probes, and the long acceleration and deceleration that had been required to get them into place along the line.

And even then it would not be complete. It would never be complete. For it was a line between two ships that were constantly moving apart, and it would require constant adjustment, paying out, and adding to.

But this machine, large as it was, was still in essence just a relay, a beacon like the hilltop fires of old, a line of flame anchored at one end by the massive hub at Mobilius and at the other by this one, here in our own solar system.

Once the chain was complete, years from now, it would allow the leaders of the race coming to eradicate humanity to have an open line to their new colony on Earth. In the meantime, this particular link in the chain worked with a more immediate purpose, to send a signal to the coming Armada that would soon be within its theoretical range.

To relay news of the Agents that the Armada believed were even now preparing us, infiltrating and weakening us. And from the satellites that the Armada thought still orbited our mass.

Its work was nearing completion. Its anchors were almost deep enough, almost ready. Soon it would be operational.