Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 38
“Say that again?” I asked. The Jabesh AI had the only insight we had to work with. We were literally between a rock and a hard place. Being shy wasn’t an option.
“I would prefer not to say,” he repeated.
“I would prefer you did. Consider that an order.”
Arty turned his head to face me. I couldn’t read his expression. When he spoke, his voice dripped with reluctance and frustration.
“The closest translation would be ‘Unauthorized User.’”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Arty,” I sighed. “Half the time I get an unauthorized user message just getting in the shower. Essentially every time Chief Cochran’s wife is mad at me. Why the big deal?”
“Captain… Admiral… Dare…” He paused before continuing. “This isn’t some shower I’m attempting to enter. I’m a Jabesh master AI. All doors open to me by design. It’s certainly possible for my creators to hide information from me. We have experienced this on a number of occasions. That, however, is not the same as informing me that I am an unauthorized user. The first acknowledges I am less than my creator. The second implies there is another… greater than I.”
I nodded. “I get it. The implication is there is someone who is an authorized user and that someone is not you. It’s a pride issue.”
Arty’s expression went from embarrassed to hurt. I immediately regretted my insensitive mouth.
“I apologize. That sounded better in my head than it did out loud. It’s pride only in as much as you thought you could do all things and now you find you’re just like the rest of us poor sops. Don’t think of it as something that diminishes you. Think of it as a chance to commiserate with a larger family.”
“I feel better already,” my friend said drily.
Suddenly that one lone neuron in my skull that insisted on occasionally firing started going off like a New Year’s Day sparkler.
“I don’t mean to rub salt in a wound, but what are the chances the modifications I’ve been suffering through are intended to ‘authorize’ me?”
Arty paused for a good five seconds, which was roughly forever in Arty super AI time.
“It is possible… even probable. Human DNA is already quite similar to that of my progenitors. The modifications you have experienced narrow that gap even further. I am surprised I did not consider this possibility sooner.”
I smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Just another reason to welcome you to our ‘I’m not perfect’ club.”
I’m not sure when, but somewhere along the line I had decided Arty was my friend, and I would treat him like my friend whether I trusted him or not.
Even though we were all huddled together so as to not create any bigger of a sensor input than we needed to, Matt still managed to inch closer to me.
“I’m betting this means shedding some of your armor.”
I noticed he was speaking on a private channel.
“I should be able to get away with just taking off my gauntlet. If the teleport pad is reading DNA, my hand is as good a source as any.”
“Agreed. But once the gauntlet comes off, so does your cloak.”
I nodded.
“We better be prepared to move fast. Arty, I know this is a private channel, but I assume you have been monitoring anyway.”
The AI chuckled. “Of course, Admiral.”
“If for whatever reason this doesn’t work and we’re all caught out here with our proverbial pants down, I want you to create a distraction. Be flashy. Catch their attention. You’re faster than the rest of us and you have better protection at your disposal. Keep them so busy watching you they don’t see us slipping away.”
“Understood. I will endeavor to keep my pants up in case a need arises to flash,” Arty said with the briefest of winks.
I think Matt missed the wink, because he started to say something. I caught his eye and shook my head. Sometimes it was just better to let some things go.
We explained to the others that, one way or the other, we were fix’n to get out of dodge. Either by use of a Jabesh teleport pad or by a mad dash for the hills. In either case, once things began to happen, there wasn’t going to be a lot of time for discussion.
When everybody was ready, I cracked the seal on my gauntlet. My cloak immediately dropped, and we were committed. I pressed my hand on the surface of the circular indentation on the wall. I felt a slight tingling and then… nothing. As in, nothing more happened. Well, that’s not exactly true.
In the distance there was a deep rumbling sound and the side of the nearest pillbox facing us split open and began to emit a veritable plethora of mechs. For those curious as to what ‘plethora’ means… it’s a polite way of saying a crap load.
All I could think was the bad guys must have been keeping a squad or two on hot standby. Whether this was in honor of our presence on the planet or just normal operating procedure was anybody’s guess.
I looked back at the teleport terminal with disgust. How dare it not work! Even Arty had seemed confident that the mutagenic transformation I was undergoing was key to gaining access to the Jabesh dome. I felt betrayed… not by Arty, but by the ancient Jabesh who had created this facility.
I resealed my glove and reengaged my cloak. Stepping back, I looked up and down the structure. What were we missing? Not for the first time, I pondered the coincidence that every time I turned around, I was dealing with a domed structure. Dome City on Survey One. The buried, ancient Dome City from the future, and now this Jabesh dome.
“We need to boogie, Captain.”
“Roger that, Number One.”
I gave the dome one last evil look as my passengers latched on to my mount points. In case I needed any reminders as to why we needed to hurry, an energy beam suddenly struck Matt full on the chest. I guess our cloaks were no longer providing cover now that the mech aliens knew we were here.
The blast knocked him back a full two meters into the wall behind him. His armor protected him, but he wouldn’t be able to take many more hits like that. In a sense we were lucky he got hit where he did. Had the shot been a little off center it would have easily penetrated the light armor of his passenger’s BDU. As it was, Jack got to act as a shock absorber for when Matt slammed into the wall. It was the type of thing that would leave a mark in the morning.
“Move out,” Matt grunted.
I gave him points for shrugging off the hit. That said, based on the continuous and increasingly profane stream of histrionics coming over the comms from his passenger, Jack, the good doctor, was not going to receive the same generous apportionment of shrug-it-off points.
Initially we tried to make a quick dash to the side. This would take us further away from our adversary, but closer to one of the other pillboxes. In hindsight… which is often my best view of the world… this was a poor choice. It seemed the mech aliens in the new pillbox were just waiting for a chance to pop out and say hello. Hello in this case took the form of thousands of kinetic rounds and energy blasts.
For some reason, the bad guys were shooting behind us. I thought this might be some scheme similar to the trap they had sprung on us during our last encounter, but I couldn’t see how it would work by shooting up the ground we had already run past. I learned later this was Arty. Apparently, he was sending a decoy sensor signal to the bad guys that made it seem like we were twenty feet behind where we actually were. The illusion wouldn’t last, but it bought us some time.
“I think we need to rethink this, Colonel,” I said as we continued to run in a loop around the dome. “I suspect we’re going to see more of the bad guys pop out of that next pillbox coming round the bend.”
“Agreed,” he huffed.
His huffing was a red flag. He’d never say anything, but I sensed he was struggling. To confirm my suspicions, I cycled through the various status displays on my HUD until I got to his armor. As I suspected, the hit he took earlier did more damage than I had realized. Half his systems were yellow-lining. I could kick myself for not checking earlier… not that any of us could have done anything different.
At any rate, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I switched my HUD to give me a continuous group status overview. With the exception of Matt, everyone was green. The Colonel was huffing because his power assist was only operating at forty-six percent. He was literally muscling his way through the run. It was impressive. I doubt many Marines, even those with his military-grade augments, would have been able to keep up.
“Drop your gear, Number One. We need you a lot more than we need it.”
“I’m fine, Captain,” he protested.
“Not a suggestion, Colonel. An order. Make it go bye-bye.”
Rather than answering directly, he hit the release button and about three hundred kilograms of spare ammo, emergency shelters, and medical supplies fell away. There was an immediate and noticeable spring in his step.
I was about to suggest we turn and make a dash between a set of pillboxes. It would be like running the gauntlet, but it had the advantage of not letting the number of mech aliens grow even larger. As I said, I was about to make this suggestion when Jack stopped cursing from his mount point on Matt’s back and instead yelled for our attention.
I have to be fair to the man. It took a few moments for me to start listening to him, since I had previously tuned him out. The whole histrionics thing. It was only when Janice joined in that I took notice of what Doctor Carter was pointing at.
A section of the Jabesh dome was glowing. It was a pulsing blue-green that reminded me of a teleport pad.
“On me,” I yelled.
It took less than ten second to reach the area of the wall that was providing the light show. As I approached the door—I was fully convinced at this point that this was what we were looking at—Arty stopped me.
“If you go through first, there is every possibility that the portal will close behind you… trapping the rest of us.”
“Colonel, Arty… you first.”
To his credit, Matt didn’t argue. Perhaps he agreed with Arty’s assessment. Perhaps he was just too exhausted to care. Scratch that. Matt would never be that tired. In that respect he and Chad were cut from the same cloth. I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat. I was still processing the man’s death.
The others stepped through the portal and disappeared. I took that as a good sign. Of course, it was also possible they had been disintegrated or dumped into the middle of an ocean, but I tried not to think about those options.
By this time, my armor was being bathed in energy beams and plinked with kinetic rounds. The distances were still too great to provide a serious challenge to my armor, but that would change in a matter of a few seconds. To protect Janice, I backed into the portal opening. This way my body provided shielding for her.
An especially hard wallop sent a huge electrical surge through my armor while at the same time sending me flying through the door. My suit’s systems health indicators lit up like a Christmas tree. My armor was going to need some serious love before it was fit for action again.
The teleport was like nothing I had experienced before. It felt rougher and less refined than what I had grown accustomed to with the pads Arty had provided. After what felt like floating for several seconds in absolute darkness, my feet hit a hard metallic surface with enough force to about shake my teeth out. One thing was sure. Wherever I was, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
17
OBLIVION
The feeling of motion had stopped, but that feeling had been replaced with another. Fear. It was absolute and completely pitch black. I’m talking not a single stray dark photon. I fought a sense of disorientation and vertigo. I knew up versus down, but that was about it. I could be standing right next to a wall or a cliff. I wouldn’t know the difference. As a side note for those of you thinking about trying this at home… your body does not like the sudden removal of all visual stimuli.
To make matters worse, it looked like every power system on my battle armor was dead. This contributed to the absence of light. Engineers liked to put little flashy things in complex machines. The more complex the machine, the more little flashy things they try to put in it. None of my little flashy things were doing their little flashy things. That was not a good sign.
Whatever happened during the teleport, it had drained my suit dry. My armor felt like it was stuck in mud. Fortunately, the latching mechanism had a manual override that allowed me to crack the suit open despite the lack of go-go juice.
As my armor split along the seam, I got a whiff of bone-dry stale air. It suddenly occurred to me that the air, wherever I was, may not be breathable. As fast as the thought occurred to me, however, I dismissed it. Whether or not the air was breathable was somewhat of a moot point, because without oxygen rebreathers, or even CO2 scrubbers, the air in my battle armor would be toxic in less than ten minutes. I either was going to be able to breathe the air wherever this was, or I was going to get a worm’s eye view of daffodil roots. In either case, I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it.
As a side note, being helpless… and knowing you are helpless… can be strangely liberating.
“Where are we?”
The voice belonged to Janice. In my headlong rush into oblivion, I had forgotten she was along for the ride.
“Are you familiar with the biblical story of Jonah and the whale?” I asked as I struggled to extricate myself from my dead armor.
“Vaguely. As I recall Jonah… ah… gets… ah… swallowed by a whale.” I could tell by her voice and a handful of grunts that like me, she was busy divesting herself of her light armor.
“That’s the one,” I said as I reached for a chem stick in my right cargo pocket. “News flash. We’re not the whale in this story.”
I bent the stick to crack the glass ampule in the center and activate its phosphorescence. The immediate area was flooded with monochromatic green light.
The good news is we weren’t standing next to a cliff. We also weren’t next to a wall or a door or a staircase or a minibar with fridge. That last was a disappointment. The rest not so much.
As far as I could tell, we weren’t standing next to anything. The light from the chem stick just seemed to fade into nothing. The sole exception was my now-dead battle armor and Janice in her equally dead BDU light armor.
Janice, or rather her condition, was going to be a problem. She had a broken leg. Medical nanites were helping to knit the bone, but it would be several days before it would be easy for her to walk on it. Up to this point, her BDU had stiffened around her leg and acted as a splint. Whatever leached the power out of our suits had put an end to that… meaning we needed to come up with something or I was going to be forced to carry her.
I scanned the area in the dim light of my glow stick. As far as I could tell, we were fresh out of any “somethings” that could be useful. I’d like to think I’m a creative out-of-the-box thinker, but medicine is not my forte. Fortunately, Janice is a gifted doctor and not limited by my lack of medical knowledge, procedures, or imagination.
“We need to splint my leg,” she said, apparently not realizing this was the very problem my brain bucket was working on.
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that,” I replied with what I’m sure sounded like exasperation. “I’m not seeing too many trees or sticks laying around. You got any ideas? I don’t suppose an imaginary stick would work?”
I made another effort to look around our landing zone. I couldn’t think of another name to describe this big patch of nothing we had arrived at. Nothing was exactly what I saw. Why the Jabesh teleport device had landed us here, and why the others weren’t here as well, were all questions racing around my noggin. I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach that I really wasn’t going to like the answer.
Janice was blithely unaware of the depressing nature of my thoughts. That said, the doctor’s smile was vaguely and fittingly macabre in the monochromatic chemical light.
“I think we can do better than an imaginary stick.” Her smile intensified. “But it is going to require that you do some surgery.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later we were on our way. The surgery was complete, and while the subject of my ministrations would never walk again, the doctor was doing just fine.
Janice had me strip the interior lining out of the right leg of my battle armor. It was designed to fit very loosely so it could be inflated to exactly conform to the size and shape of the pilot’s leg.
Taking the liner, Janice proceeded to slip it over her injured leg. Using a Velcro band that she had harvested from her own defunct BDU, she sealed off the end nearest her ankle. The result was a big, billowing sausage casing fitted around her injured leg.
Next, the good doctor had me harvest several of the emergency sealant foam canisters from my armor’s interior mechanism. This foam was designed to expand and then solidify inside a soldier’s armor should it be penetrated. This kept the Marine from bleeding out and also sealed the breach which, in the event of a hard vacuum, was critical to the soldier’s continued survival.
We filled the space between the lining and her leg with the expanding foam. Once it hardened, we would have a reasonably good splint. It would be a royal bitch to get the foam off her leg later, but hey… one problem at a time.
“Any idea what we should do now?” Janice asked as I rapped on her leg with the rapidly dimming glow stick. The solid sound verified her splint was ready to start “splinting.”
I cracked open another chem light and tossed the faded one a few meters away. Cupping my hands around my month to make a sound funnel, I yelled, “HELLO!” at the top of my lungs.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand, five one-thousand, six one-thousand…
“helloooo…”
I turned ninety degrees and repeated the experiment. This time the echo took only four seconds to return. I repeated this two more times. In both cases I didn’t hear a return echo, even with my augment-enhanced hearing.
