Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (42 page)

Birgit:
‘¡rob, you god damn idiot!’

Rob:
‘ok then. i sense you are angry with me.’

She went to speak again, but only tears were coming now as he went on.

Rob:
‘now, now, birgit, come on, darling. calm down, please. i had no choice, you know that.’

She ignored the darling part, maybe used it as fuel for her next move. He was floating away. Not fast, but fast enough. With his own tether cut he had put his faith in holding on the wrecker’s, but the pressure had been too strong, and by his own doing he had come loose during the mad minute of collision.

She festered a moment, a tide of obstinacy welling up inside her, then she glanced around the scene once more. They, or rather she, were secure, sort of. What was left of their home was rolling over, slowly, as mini-minnie worked through the other wrecker to attach more tethers. Birgit assessed the situation.

Rob:
‘birgit, talk to me. please, darling. i have hours of air left in this suit. please, talk to me. its going to be ok. you’re going to be o…’

Birgit:
‘…fuck ok, and fuck you, rob. i am coming to get you.’

He was talking still, trying to calm her down, but she was already moving again, bracing her wrecker and calculating. Going to be a close run thing. No time for finesse, though, and with that, the big machine leapt into the blackness.

Chapter 45: Exchange – Part Two

Back on earth, in the depth’s of Milton SpacePort, two men of vastly different backgrounds and skillsets, but a unifying ethos that had destined them to be allies, set off on an errand as important as they had ever undertaken.

Jim came to Neal’s office with nothing but smiles and kind words. The two men, as much as they could, had repaired their broken bridge, and forged onward despite what Neal knew was a fundamental disagreement on the path they should cut.

Neal was still elated, something close to a post-coital bliss filling him. He was still riding the post-launch high, and he felt truly hopeful for the first time in years. He greeted his chief of staff with nothing short of spontaneous laughter. “Jim, my friend! How are you?”

Jim was a little taken aback by Neal’s jocular mood, and for a moment the smile he had crafted in preparation for this meeting stayed unnaturally frozen. But then he remembered himself, replying with admirable cheerfulness, “I’m great, Neal. What a day, huh? What a day!”

They laughed, and came together in a hug, and for a moment Jim’s resolve faltered, and he held the hug a second too long. As they parted, he took the chance to look into Neal’s eyes once more, as friends, as allies, and then turned and walked over to the pantry in one corner of Neal’s private office. Neal watched him go, sensing a pensiveness about his friend.

As Jim poured himself an orange juice, his usual if uninspiring poison, the chief of staff said, “I need to talk to you about something, Neal. Something quite … delicate.”

- - -

As Jim spoke, Amadeu was walking down a corridor in a very different part of the building. He had an appointment with a person he rarely went to see, but who often called on him, either for advice or with a task of ambiguous ethical merit. As he entered her main operations hub, he was greeted by the sight of two fully tooled Phase Fourteens. Not the more diplomatic, civilized-looking Phase Eights, but two undoubtedly militant field-operations automatons.

He did not want to make eye contact with them, but managed a hazy smile, nervous for very real reasons, but no more shaky than he often was when faced with one, let alone two, of these brutal death dealers.

“I have an appointment with Ayala Zubaideh,” he said, surprising himself with the steadiness of his tone.

At an approving wave from one of the lower-level analysts that sat at the entrance to the TASC intelligence service’s headquarters, he moved inward, past the watchful automatons, threatening even when inanimate.

As he then wound his way through the labyrinth of sealed cocoons, each housing one of Saul’s infamous analysts no doubt focused on one or more of their many surveillance operations, Amadeu texted Jim, saying simply, “Good luck with your meeting.” Then he walked on, toward his own.

“You too,” came back, quickly.

So this was it then. No turning back now. They were committed. He walked on, deeper into Ayala’s lair, keeping his head down. He took care not to look at another automaton that stood outside her office. He would be seeing it soon enough, no doubt. Facing it, in fact, either as friend or foe. As he brushed past it into her office, he fumbled with the small box in his pocket, pulling it out.

It was not a weapon. No alarm would sound because of it. In any other situation it would be profoundly harmless. But today, Jim and Amadeu hoped, it was going to change the course of humanity.

He smiled at Ayala, and she eyed him in return, the hairs on the back of her neck rising. She did not even bother to disguise her distrust as she instinctively pinged her security net and checked the many scans that this man, no, this boy, had been subject to since entering her domain. He was clean.

But what, then, was that? She saw the box. She recognized it as one of the childish little trinkets Jim’s people had been handing out all day, but immediately sensed in the boy’s demeanor that this was something more, something hostile. Her eyes locked with his as she opened her mouth to raise the alarm.

He pressed the button.

- - -

Jim saw, or rather heard, the second message from Amadeu. This was an automated one, triggered by the activation of the device. It read simply ‘activated’, and Jim turned back to Neal, pausing only momentarily to glance at Neal’s personal Phase Eight guard in the corner, before pulling his own black box from his pocket. Ayala was always going to be the harder one to get to. He had known he would have to wait until Amadeu was in position.

Now he smiled, maybe the first truly genuine smile he had directed in Neal’s direction in three years, and said, “Have you seen the laser shows I had made to commemorate this occasion?”

Neal looked at the man, puzzled. Jim had given the boxes out the day before to senior staff, and Neal had been there when he had, so of course he had seen it.

But Jim went on, regardless. “Allow me to demonstrate.” And with that Jim turned to the automaton standing just inside the door, pointed the laser at it, closed his eyes and pressed. The light it shone was bright, breathtakingly so. Neal turned away and shouted.

The automaton, a Phase Eight with surprisingly human features, looked confused for a second, then tilted its head and seemed to pause. Jim gathered himself. A part of him that had not really expected this to work said something akin to holy crap, and then he came back to the moment with a jolt. This was it. It had worked. Neal was shouting.

“What the hell was that?” Neal shouted. He was having difficulty seeing after the flash.

“Look at me,” said Jim with authority, and Neal tried to focus on his chief of staff. Jim pressed the button again. This time the flash hit Neal square in the face and the man screamed.

Shit, thought Jim. That scream was loud. Others will have heard. He needed to move. He put the box down on the table he had been standing next to, pointed it at the open door, and double-tapped the button quickly. Nothing happened. Hopefully, though, something would if another automaton came around that corner before Jim was done.

Neal was holding his eyes and desperately trying to reach Minnie, or Ayala, or anyone, via his spinal interface. But nothing was happening. It was silent. After a moment, a timer appeared with a note. It said simply: Resetting.

“What the fu …” Neal went to say, but now he felt hands on his shoulders and neck, and now an unnatural tugging feeling there. Someone was ripping off his interface. A someone that could only be Jim.

“Jim, what the hell are you doing?” said Neal with rising panic. He was blinded. And with the ripping free of his connection he felt mute as well. Mute for the first time in years. It was a horrific sensation.

“Why are you …?”

“Don’t fight it, Neal,” said Jim, suddenly, and with eerie calm. “It’s over.”

Neal was stunned into something close to calm by Jim’s tone. What the hell was the man talking about? Was this a coup?

“Wait … oh my God … what have you …?” The words dripped from his mouth like a fool’s drool. His hands had gone to the ruptured gelport on the back of his neck. A trickle of warm blood was coming from around the violated port. “What have you done, Jim? What is over?”

“You’re over, Neal,” said Jim, sitting down on the floor beside his old friend. “You’re done. The system is rebooting now. Minnie is receiving new instructions.”

“What!” shouted Neal, now anger replacing confusion as the depth of his betrayal sank home. “Minnie! Mynd! Get in here, you bastards! Stop him!”

As if in answer, two automatons did come lumbering into the space, though more out of curiosity at the scream they had heard than in direct response to Neal’s request. Something was wrong, Minnie, knew that. She felt … off. She needed to find out what was happening. What was happening here, in this office that had suddenly gone silent, vanishing from her sensors? And also across the island, deeper in its foundations, in another office where her eyes and ears were also suddenly realigning themselves.

The two newer and far bigger Phase Fourteens came round the corner, taking in the scene as they came. Their Phase Eight stood mute, unharmed but clearly unresponsive. They were almost in view of Neal when they took in a little box in a corner. The flash that came as they sighted it was strange. It was a query. Minnie, focused on the situation as she now was, took in the sensation.

It was a repeat. She had seen it before. She needed to check her imaging. It was a repeat. She had seen it before. She needed to …

And so the two Phase Fourteens stopped as well, stopped and stared. Neal heard them come to a halt and started to truly panic as the situation still failed to resolve itself, as his saviors failed to save him.

Jim stared, wide-eyed, at the small group of killing machines now standing in the door. They looked, well, stupid, all of a sudden. Stupid and harmless. He laughed. He wanted to find out how Amadeu was doing, but he was just as cut off as Neal. The box had called reset to the room’s entire network. Now they just had to wait. It would not last long. Even the hack that Amadeu had so cleverly worked into Minnie’s mind could only last a short time. No doubt Minnie was even now rerouting and overriding their little roadblocks.

But once they were done they would find Neal and Ayala no longer in charge. Minnie would ask, and be told by all who could speak to her in the system, including her own father, that there was a new order. The representatives that Neal had organized as a puppet government would finally have the power that it was supposed to have had from the start.

He waited, and waited, and then, suddenly, there was only silence and blackness. He was alone. He was locked in some kind of cage, a place inside his own head. As his body collapsed to the floor, he looked around but he saw and felt only silence, blackness, and a sense of righteous fury that made him cower.

Chapter 46: Consequence

Rob saw it, even tried to take over the system in the last second. But the system was her world, and she was on a mission. With shocking abandon, the big wrecker leapt out from the moon, unhindered, untethered, straight at him. Not fast, that would have been counterproductive, but fast enough.

Rob:
‘¿what the hell are you doing? you can’t …’

Birgit:
‘what i am doing is saving your life. and yes the hell i can. now shut up and get ready. i am going to try and lasso you.’

Rob:
‘¿i’m sorry, did you just say lasso?’

They laughed in spite of themselves. How the hell had they found themselves here?

But they had found themselves here, Birgit knew, because she was a stubborn fool. She had been a stubborn fool back on Terminus, and that had cost them both their world, and now she had been a stubborn fool about this landing.

But she had taken enough from Rob. Too much, in fact, far too much. She had taken, or rather he had willingly sacrificed, everything for her.

But not this. Not his life. Not if she had anything to say about it.

Birgit:
‘get ready.’

Rob:
‘… but … the distance … what are you planning …’

The line was thrown with power and accuracy, and he saw it lance out ahead of the coming wrecker as it flew toward him. He calculated, and reached out as it came up at him, grabbing at it and pulling it in. It had a small hoop in the end, not much of a lasso, but …

Birgit:
‘close the loop around your wrist. ¡now, rob! ¡do it now!’

He did, and as he pulled it taught he saw what she planned to do, if a little too late to stop it.

The wrecker flew past him at speed. He waited, readying himself. This was probably going to hurt, he thought. He was right. The line went taught with a twang that made his teeth rattle, wrenching his shoulder free even through the suit.

He screamed and Birgit flinched. What was she doing to this man? This man that had saved her. This man that, whether it was convenient or not, she had come to love, in every meaning of the word. But her plan was moving now. They were moving. As the line had gone taught, they had started to spin around each other, and now she started pulling in on the tether.

As she closed the distance between them, they started to accelerate around each other, still moving away from Phobos, but spinning now, faster and faster, as the centrifugal forces built.

She pulled and pulled, the tension gathering, seeking the point where the outward force would outweigh their combined momentum away from Phobos. She wanted to pull farther, but she dared not risk it. The strain was already massive. Rob was ominously silent. That might be bravery, or even bravado, but it might just as likely be unconsciousness as the g-forces built up, and the pressure on his dislocated shoulder mounted.

She saw the moment coming. Every rotation took them farther away from Phobos, farther into Mars’s deadly embrace. She had to do it now.

She released him with tears in her eyes, knowing the pain he must be enduring, but she was not done yet. Leaving the wrecker now to spin away into oblivion, taking its and Rob’s combined momentum with it, Birgit brought her mind back to Phobos, now kilometers away, and reinhabited her body with a start.

After she had caught her breath, she took stock of their position. The station was still not fully anchored. But mini-minnie, despite her many faults, had made herself useful in the minutes since Birgit had gone after Rob and continued securing the base. It would have to do.

She looked around. She could not send the other wrecker out to catch Rob as he flew back toward the moon. Leaving the base unprotected like that would be suicide for them both. She would have to go.

Birgit:
‘rob. ¿can you hear me, rob? i am coming for you. just hold on, ok. just hold on.’

And so she clambered out of the capsule, suited, but unaugmented, and began attaching as long a string of tethers to herself as she could realistically spare. Once the improvised line was secure to her, she flung herself over to the remaining wrecker. She closed her eyes as she went, inhabited the big robot, caught her now limp body, a frail thing in the big machine’s hands, and looked skyward.

There. There he was.

And so she was counting down again, calculating and recalculating an intercept point, and then, once she was confident she had the angles right, she flexed the machine’s big arms back, braced its legs, and hurled her own body into the void like a great hook cast into blackness, hoping to catch the man who she knew would do no less for her.

- - -

Hektor saw Amadeu go by. He had met the scientist on a handful of occasions, usually during testing of new Phase rollouts, or system add-ons for his suit on Deception Island. He was a little hurt, perhaps, that the Portuguese boy did not say hello, or even look up, for that matter, as he walked past. But probably he had no more expected to see a battleskin-clad Spezialist in the heart of District One than Hektor had expected to be here.

He had been stood there all day, bored beyond imagining. Sometimes he veered into the ether via his link, but he could not fully submerge, not into a sim or game. He had to leave his senses open to his surroundings, like listening to music with only one headphone, so he could stay aware.

But aware of what, he had no idea. Where Jung and he had expected to be dropped into some external conflict that Ayala wished resolved, either bloodily or very bloodily, depending on her mood, they had instead found themselves being dropped off here, at the very capital of TASC’s operations, its nerve center, a place where people like him rarely had their existence even acknowledged, let alone were asked to walk around in full-contact armor.

It all felt rather strange, like strolling around a mall in your pajamas. Where you might feel perfectly comfortable elsewhere, here his armor felt so … out of place.

What Ayala needed them here for, with so many Phases around, Hektor could not guess. But here he was, switching out with Cara and Jung, three-hours-on, six-hours-off, keeping close to her at all times.

But now something was, indeed, wrong. A flash, not an explosion, a flash, like an over-bright camera flash, coming from within Ayala’s office.

And now a muffled scream.

Hektor span, coming back to the moment with the immediacy of a warrior. He did not go weapons hot, not yet, not here, but something told him that there was something very wrong. He tried to ping Ayala even as he began rounding on the entrance to her inner-sanctum, but the system was not responding. Local Area Network resetting. Something was definitely wrong …

The image that greeted him as he rounded the corner was almost too incongruous to take in. First there was Ayala, seated behind her desk, clutching her face. Then there was Amadeu, running around the side of the big table, placing some box on its surface as he went and quickly double-tapping a button on its topside. Then there was that flash again, exponentially brighter this time.

It did not fry his sensors, not at all, it would take a flash on the order of nuclear detonation to do that. But it would, Hektor knew, have been powerful enough to temporarily blind unprotected eyes.

That said, something
was
wrong with his sensors. For reasons Hektor could not figure, his visual sensors were suddenly recalibrating, trying to analyze the flash in an endless loop.

What the hell was happening? He needed to see what was going on, and he needed to see it now. He began stepping into the room and sent the open command to his faceplate, raising his hand to interpose it between his eyes and the black box Amadeu had clearly sneaked past the office’s sensor suite.

“Amadeu, Ayala, what is going on? I need information.”

Amadeu looked up. A voice? Whose voice was that? He took in the sight of the doorway even as he closed his hand around Ayala’s interface module. He took in the sight of a Spezialist. Not just any Spezialist, but the best, his best, standing here, faceplate rolling back, his arm raised, flechette cannon mounted and loaded. What was a Spezialist doing here, Amadeu had time to think as he ripped Ayala’s interface module off of her, temporarily frying her personal system as he did so.

He heard Ayala shout a capital order at Hektor. Saw the man hesitate for just a moment, then had a split second to regret putting his precious black box down on the desk, out of reach, before the stream of hypersonic pellets silenced him.

Now Ayala was barking new orders as Hektor tried to take in what he had just done. “Hektor, leave me, I’ll be fine. They’ve done something to the system, maybe even to Minnie. Get to Saul and initiate the Lockdown Protocol. Then get to Neal and secure his position.
Go!
Now!
”

Hektor’s training kicked in. He had orders. He was not here to think, he was here to do. He turned, heading out into the corridor. The protocol was in his system, downloaded and available even when he was offline. He began running, and started using different communication methods.

“All TASC Police units, initiate Lockdown Protocol! I repeat, initiate Lockdown Protocol!” he boomed from the speakers in his side. As Hektor ran along the hallway between Ayala’s and Saul’s respective offices, he boomed it out again, causing a good deal of panic, but also awakening the hive.

Saul heard him coming from a good way off. He was trying to work out why his wireless connection had gone silent. Now it was becoming clear that this was more profound than that, more insipid. He reached out with lightning speed, grabbing at the wired connection on his desk and scrambling to get it connected to his spinal gelport.

No sooner had the tips connected than he was swimming backward into the system, a system alive with activity. The Lockdown Protocol had been already initiated by some analyst out on the floor who had already been hard-wired into the system. But it needed his, Neal’s, or Ayala’s say so before it really kicked in. He gave his assent as a matter of course, and it started a chain reaction even he did not fully appreciate.

- - -

Across the globe, two young boys, separated for weeks now, came together with a start. Pulled from their respective environs, they awoke suddenly in a new space.

Coming online now.

They sensed each other for a moment and then they were apart again, each crying out to the other.

“Wednesday, where have you been?”

“Fri, I’m sorry, I think that …”

But then they were in a new place again. A place they had only heard of. A place they had visited in practice a thousand times before, but now, they knew, they were here for real.

Skalm coming online. Power manifests balancing. Control parameters setting, transition in 0.3, 0.2 …

Friday, shocked at seeing his friend again after so long apart, confused and more than a little angry at the immediate separation again, felt now the irresistible elation as the Skalm came to him, became him, and the unbridled power of it overtook him.

It was too much to resist. It was a pureness of expression that could not be truly simulated or prepared for. This was real. It was a truth he knew instantly, something that invalidated everything before. And so, suddenly, he was flying, above the globe, feeling his wings and firing great spurts of expended energy out of his being as he roared with delight at this sudden ascendancy.

The voice came then. Not Mother’s. A new voice. Inhuman and emotionless.

Lockdown Protocol:

And then he was flying there, igniting his godlike thrusters and firing away around the planet below, a finite thing, a place he could circumnavigate with ease, leave at will. And now he felt Wednesday God once more, far away to the south, coming to life as well in the newly birthed second Skalm. There were two of the machines, then. And this was the world. The real world. Wednesday had been right. It had all been a simulation. But now they were here, and they were free. They were freer and more powerful than they could ever have imagined.

FG:
‘wednesday god! we are free! we are out! come to me!’

WG:
‘i am coming, fri. oh dear leader preserve me, this feeling, this machine, it is …’

FG:
‘i know, it’s amazing. I can’t describe it. use it, wednesday. join me. we have a mission!’

And they were already brimming over with excitement as it came bursting out of their engines. Wednesday thrust upward with all his might and reached out, to the stars, the real stars. He had so much to tell his friend. So much he had learned from an understanding Mother, a person whose real name, it had turned out, was Mynd.

But in the end he knew that this experience was the real truth, the only one that mattered. They were out in the world. They really were the chosen ones, the best. Picked to fight for their true master, the father of the artificial mind they knew as Mother, a man named Neal Danielson.