Ghost of the Gods - 02 (44 page)

A hand fell onto her shoulder. Sarah swung the stock of her M4 in a perfect circle, connecting with the skull of whoever had just grabbed her. The confusion evaporated. She was about to follow up with rapid burst from her M4 when she caught herself. Noah was sprawled on the ground with blood dripping from a huge gash in his forehead. As she stared, the gash began to coagulate. Ralph came up behind him, ready to lunge.

“Put down your weapon,” said Noah.

“What?”

“Are you suicidal?” said Noah.

“We have to stop them!”

“You can’t save him,” said Noah. “The best we can do is follow.”

“Were you the bastard who just scrambled my brain?” she shouted.

“Quiet! Are you insane? Do you hear what’s coming?”

Sarah heard a sound of rotors. She turned back to a scene that could not be happening. Mark should not be down there all alone. She saw a pair of Apache helicopters looming into view over the treetops. In less than a minute a third airship, an Air Force Pave Hawk, came in to land. They were going to take Mark out by air. There was no way she and Noah could follow. She raised her M4, then lowered it. She was trembling with rage. Any attack would draw the Apaches and she would not survive that engagement. Her M4 against Apaches was hopeless. Her fire would just bounce off.

She had lost the man she loved, the father of her child. Mark didn’t even know he was going to be a father. Sarah tried again to reach out to him mentally and failed. She saw him carried into the Pave Hawk and felt her heart torn from her chest.

Mark Freedman – Colorado – March 8, 0002 A.P.

Mark awoke in the belly of a huge aircraft, bound hand and foot. He was disconnected from the global n-web by altitude but could still defend himself. An assist displayed severed n-web pathways snaking all over the jet. He could use these broken spans of the n-web to attack.

He tried to look around without giving away that he was awake. He recognized enough of his surroundings to know he was alone in the cargo hold of a jet. He could sense a few partial emotions and thoughts from the crew going out over the disconnected pathways of the n-web, but something was interfering. He should be receiving this local data clearly. The bits of human mental radiation he was getting were like faint echoes and nearly unintelligible. He felt like he was blind. His mind was duller without the god-machine assisting his thoughts, but he was still far smarter than he’d been as an organic. Questions began rolling through his nanotech brain. Noah must have had warnings from assists that intruders were at the mine. Mark had missed the warning signs because of the flashbacks. He’d been fatally careless, but Noah would not have been. Noah was a ghost adept at detecting and avoiding unfriendly situations. He must have perceived and ignored the warnings, but why? Was Noah a traitor working some angle Mark could not even begin to guess? Was there some other explanation? Maybe Noah had just fled and left them behind as decoys? What about Sarah? Was she on another jet and a captive just like him?

Mark spotted video cameras in the cargo hold. A hatch was opened, followed by several sets of footsteps. He could sense nothing from whoever had entered. Were they hybrids?

A large paw gripped Mark’s shoulder and turned him over onto his back. He was then hoisted into a sitting position to meet a face he knew very well. McKafferty was standing over him, flanked by two soldiers nearly as big as the general. A third solider was behind Mark, holding him in place. The general and his men were all wearing what looked like a cross between an NBC suit and beekeeper gear. A small control box on the chest contained three buttons behind a plastic safety cover and three green lights. The helmet and faceplate was a fine-mesh screen that freely let air in and out. This suit was for protection from something other than airborne diseases or weapons. McKafferty was grinning, which looked so wrong on a face that ugly. Mark did not have to pick up stray thoughts to know what the general was thinking. McKafferty had taken Kathy prisoner and now he had just captured another prize and possibly more.

“You led us on a good chase,” said McKafferty.

“Not good enough,” said Mark.

“They tell me that once we’re airborne, hybrids like you cannot function and that includes generating kill-zones,” said McKafferty. “But I don’t believe in unnecessary risks. This suit you’re staring at blocks the n-web. So don’t bother trying the same kind of kill-zone you used on my men. I always knew you were partially responsible for the plague.”

Mark was surprised by how much McKafferty knew. He felt cornered and outflanked. He’d thought blocking the n-web with a physical barrier was impossible. The fact that he was picking up no thoughts or emotions leaking from McKafferty and his men proved the suits worked. What he couldn’t understand was why seeds had failed to tunnel microscopic biomass conduits through the suits, rendering them useless. Even in the air, even cut off from the god-machine, seeds should be doing that right now. It was time to go on the offensive.

“Do you believe in god?” asked Mark.

“What?” said McKafferty.

“It’s not a trick question.”

“It’s a question with no point to it.”

“The point is, you’re fighting the wrong war,” said Mark. “The god-machine is no longer your enemy. If it was your enemy, you might as well be fighting god and that’s a fight you would lose. Kill-zones are happening in small towns all over the world. We need to work together to defeat the real enemy, who is responsible for the attacks happening right now. There are communes of hybrids under a kind of collective mind control, all working together. These communes are triggering the kill-zones.”

“You’re a funny man, Dr. Freedman. Two years ago you tried to convince us the nanotech inside COBIC was hundreds of millions of years old. Now you want me to believe we are on the same side. I don’t know which is a bigger stretch. We know about these small groups of hybrids, and we know about you and your partner in terrorism, Sarah Mayfair—or should I say Bonnie and Clyde? Pity we didn’t capture her, but we will. We know about your bombing of communes. You do know mass murder is still illegal, right? We found a hybrid handcuffed and murdered at the mine entrance. I wonder how many bodies we’ll find inside.”

“There’s a war going on and we need to help each other.”

“We’ve investigated those so-called kill-zones and you know what we found? They’re criminal hoaxes. Some very evil folks are trying to convince the world the plague is returning. Maybe that’s you and your pals?”

“They’re not hoaxes!”

“So what did you use to fake those kill-zones? At first we thought it was a group of hybrids all working together using their personal kill-zones, but then we found evidence that a very advanced chemical weapon and dispersal system was used.”

“What? What kind of evidence?”

“All in good time… Sergeant, suit him up.”

Mark was confused and a little panicked. What was going on here? Were hives creating these kill-zones on their own or was someone else also involved? He thought of Noah and his use of cyanide bombs. What else did that ghost know about chemical weapons? Mark needed to escape or at least get onto the n-web to warn Sarah. He knew with his heightened reaction time and ability to push his muscles beyond their limits that he could take these soldiers, but what then? He was locked in a cargo hold under video surveillance. They’d just come in and dart him or shoot him. He could hold McKafferty hostage, but in the end that chess move also left him darted or dead. He allowed them put one of their beekeeper suits on him. They then laid him on a stretcher and bound his legs and arms to the rails. It was like a full body straitjacket. Escape or even getting a warning out to Sarah was becoming a dimmer possibility by the second. One of the soldiers powered up the suit, plunging him into mental darkness. Everything on the local n-web vanished.

Mark Freedman – Dallas, Texas – March 9, 0002 A.P.

The cargo jet landed. Mark knew it had been four hours and eighteen minutes since he’d been captured, but that was of little help in figuring out his location. McKafferty and the same three soldiers came into the cargo hold. They were no longer wearing their beekeeper suits.

“I’m going to say my good-byes,” said the general. “I’d like to watch what happens to you, but the facility you’re entering is a civilian operation, and honestly the place gives me the creeps with all the human experimentation going on there.”

“McKafferty, you’re making a mistake!” shouted Mark. “You have to go after the communes. They’re the mass murders. The proof is the kill-zones are killing everything, not just people, and they’re growing in size. Soon they will be too big to be a hoax.”

“The only mistake I made was failing to put a bullet into your brain two years ago when that infection turned you into a computerized zombie.”

As Mark was carried from the jet on his stretcher, he recognized the airport. It was Love Field in Dallas. This was the airport where JFK had landed hours before he was assassinated outside the book depository. The beekeeper suit was blocking him from the global n-web just as effectively as it had when he was airborne. He had hoped the suit would fail once he was in an area saturated with n-web pathways.

He was carried to a waiting helicopter. As soon as he was inside, the helicopter lifted off. He was again unable to see where he was being taken. Twenty minutes later, they landed and he was hauled inside a huge building. He recognized the company logo. Zero-G was the world’s biggest R&D defense contractor. At least he wasn’t going to prison. Once inside, his stretcher was laid on a gurney and they began rolling him down hallways and elevators. The facility was bustling, but few people paid any attention to him. Was a prisoner on a stretcher a common sight in these halls?

He was rolled inside what looked like a large metal pressure chamber, which measured about 20 feet across. Two men in beekeeper suits followed him in and took up positions next to him. One of the men was armed with a submachine gun and looked like a thug. The other man looked mousy. The entry hatch, which was the width of two normal doors, whirred shut and sealed itself with a heavy
clunk
. The hatch was at least a foot thick. A large rectangular porthole as thick as the metal hatch filled most of the opening. The two men in beekeeper suits just stared at him as if he were a particularly nasty specimen. Mark was starting to feel worried. This place might be worse than prison.

“So what’s next?” he asked. “Dinner, dancing?”

There was no answer.

“Don’t you guys speak?”

The mousy one took his vital signs and keyed the results into a tablet. The straps that secured one of his arms to the stretcher were removed. The two men left with the thug backing out to keep Mark covered with his machine gun. The hatch opened and closed without either man using a switch or key. Mark had no idea what was next. They’d obviously freed his arm so he could release himself from the stretcher. He thought about ruining their game by just lying there. That idea lasted for less than a minute. He freed his other arm, sat up, freed his legs, and then stood. Next, he took off the beekeeper suit. He was expecting to feel the familiar surge of information and sense of connection from the global n-web, but he was just as isolated now as before. The chamber had to be one giant beekeeper suit. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all stainless steel. The only interruptions in the walls were thick portholes, which contained either lights or video cameras. The only furniture in the chamber was the stretcher and gurney. Mark rolled the stretcher to the middle of the chamber, then sat down on it and smiled at one of the cameras. He was enraged and doing his best not to show it. The hell with it! Using his muscles beyond their peak, he stood, and in one smooth motion yanked the heavy stretcher off the gurney and hurled the stretcher like an Olympic hammer thrower whirling in a circle before releasing it toward the entry hatch. The impact was impressive. The stretcher exploded into several pieces. The rectangular porthole in the hatch now had a collection of nicks and tiny spiderweb cracked impact craters. Mark sat down on the floor cross-legged and waited. His muscles were torn up from the exertion. Free-swimming COBIC was surging through his body to repair the damage he’d just done to himself. For good or bad, they now knew a little more about who they were dealing with.

Like a statue of Buddha, Mark sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. Exerting total control over his body, he remained in the same position, conserving energy and concentrating his thoughts. The lights in the chamber had not dimmed as evening turned into night and then night slowly blended into the following morning. Mark knew constant light was an interrogation trick designed to destroy a prisoner’s sense of time. It would not have any effect on him. He knew exactly how much time had passed. Even without a connection to the god-machine, he still retained many of his augmentations and some of them were still very deadly. They seemed to have no clue what kind of human they had in their prison. They had to know more than this if they’d experimented on hybrids. Their techniques for breaking him made no sense.

Mark began using an assist to map out the severed n-web pathways that permeated the chamber. Network packets similar to TCP/ip pings were sent out by an assist and came echoing back from every seed in each pathway. He sat in the center of a geo-projection of the nerve fibers of the local n-web. Each pathway terminated inches from the wall, which meant some type of electromagnetic field was cutting off his access to the global n-web.

The hatch clunked and began to open with a now familiar mechanical whirring sound. A man stood a few yards back from the entrance. He was wearing black slacks, a black polo shirt, and black loafers. His face was weathered from too much sun. He was tall with a trim, athletic build. His features were Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, with a prominent forehead and unusually thick eyebrows. Two men that looked like bodyguards stood on either side. The bodyguards were armed with submachine guns and in beekeeper suits. The bodyguards entered the chamber and leveled their submachine guns at Mark. He did not bother to stand up. There would be no shaking hands at this meeting.

In his geo-projection of the n-web, Mark could see with the hatch opened there was a weak spot in whatever field was blocking the n-web. He could see the pathways trying to adapt, reconnect, and reach out. He was getting intermittent data from the man. Suddenly a route was complete all the way to the global n-web. Mark felt the god-machine’s entangled interface operating inside his mind. It was like breathing again after being underwater for too long. A medical assist came up on the man standing outside the chamber. Mark was stunned to see a high concentration of COBIC swimming in the man’s body, and then even more surprised to see a lower than normal amount in the man’s brain.

All of Mark’s thoughts had occurred in the space of a heartbeat. His brain was operating at an amazing speed. He was not going to waste this connection to the god-machine and quickly sent a memory capsule to Sarah. The connection to the global n-web was unreliable. He might not be getting through. He continued multitasking while remaining fully engaged with what was happening around him. The global n-web connection broke, then adapted, then broke again while the local connection to the man remained steady.