Peace in an Age of Metal and Men (26 page)

Bracing myself against the spin, I prepared to throw her far as I could. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I slammed her down hard on the floor of the cruiser, hoping it was enough to stun her.

It wasn’t.

She was up in a crouch as fast as I could blink. A couple quick jabs sent me reeling. She grabbed a handful of my hair, rage in her eyes. She pulled back for a punch that I knew would knock me out if it didn’t kill me.

A gunshot sounded. Trish clutched her shoulder and dropped me.

Below, Abi stood with her rifle aimed in our direction. The gunshot gave away her hiding spot. Kivas leapt up to surround her. The console was still too far away.

Abi backed away, firing her rifle at one Kiva after another. There were too many.

It was all happening so fast. The cruiser spun around and around. Trish stood up, recovering from the shot. She lunged at me.

I jumped.

The plan was to hit the edge of the broken dome, use it to slow my fall, and then deal with Francis and the remaining Kivas. It almost worked.

I missed the dome, clipping it as I passed and spinning out of control in my fall. I struck the floor hard, my fall softened only by the wires on the ground and the snapping of bones in both of my legs.

Waves of molten pain surged through my body. My breath came in labored gasps. I was too far back to shoot Francis. The angle was wrong to help Abi.

Abi screamed. Gunshots.

“Do it, J.D.,” she shouted.

Grabbing the floor with the metal arm, I inched myself forward. If I could only round the end of the console, maybe I could get the shot I wanted. It was too far. Already, the edges of my vision darkened. Pain threatened to overwhelm me. It was too much. Too much. Despite my effort to be at peace, here violence had snatched my life away again. Zane. Zane was gone. Maybe Abi too. Everything I fought for was ruined. Every time. My shoulders slumped and I fought back sobs.

There would never be peace for me. At the end it was easy to look back and see the mistakes of a hard-fought life. Of course, there couldn’t be peace. The world would never allow it. Anyone resembling a righteous man would never see peace in a world like this. Not for one minute of one day. The world was full of such violence and hatred and pain that any second spent at peace was complacency. Every idle moment, a guilty pleasure. There would never be peace in Texas. Not in my lifetime.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t worth fighting for.

I calmed myself and looked down at the floor. Right there, under my hand, was the Umbilical, just like the one Court had talked about. It ran from the console back into the main computing center, but there was another branch on this one. It ran straight down into the floor. With an agonizing effort, I pulled my way forward with my metal arm. When I got there I ripped open the floor and saw what must have been a maintenance slot. It was a connector much like the one on my skidder.

Francis stood next to me with a revolver inches from my head.

“Don’t mess with my shit, old man.”

“Who did you meet? Who told you this was the right thing to do?”

His eyes narrowed. The gun in his outstretched hand stayed steady.

“The way I see it, you had your ideas, but you didn’t act until you met someone smarter than you.” Outside, lightning flashed across the sky.

“He is not smarter than me. Nobody’s smarter than me.”

“Maybe. But there are things you don’t understand and he helped you get your head around it. Helped you cope.”

“So what if he did? He let me cope with all the wrong you did. You killed Ma. You’re the one who needs justice and the whole world is going to get the peace it deserves.” His gun didn’t waver. He kept it steady in his outstretched hand, and even when I shifted to the side it stayed trained right at my face.

“Ben got worried when you left. He’s the one who told you that the world needed peace, wasn’t he? He’s the one who said I needed justice.”

Francis didn’t move.

“He was right,” I said. “But the world doesn’t deserve the peace you’re giving it, and there’s no way to make me suffer enough to make up for what I did to your family.”

“What makes you think I won’t shoot you down right now?”

A long moment passed. Lightning lit up the sky again, flashing up above in the dark clouds. The cannon fired again. “You’re not armed,” I said.

“I’d be a fool to walk around without a weapon, wouldn’t I?”

“A fool or a child.”

“I’m not a child.” His muscles twitched and he seemed to grow taller. “I grew up the moment you killed my Ma. I grew up when I looked around and saw Texas was broken.
Your
Texas was broken.”

“It’s the best we could make it.”

“But not the best
I
could make it. I’m bringing peace and an end to all that shit you people have felt the need to deal with all along.”

“Like freedom?” I propped myself up against the console.

“Freedom? You call that freedom? People will feel free when I have this working. People will feel loved.”

“What about the kids you hook up to the machines? Will they feel free?”

He twitched. “That’s a prototype. It won’t always be like that.”

“Now you’re hooked up to that same machine. You’re driving it, aren’t you? It’s using your brain to drive its alternate reality.”

He winced. “It needs imagination.”

“I bet.”

In my good eye I could see that he wasn’t next to me at all. He wasn’t holding a gun. The starved, sickly boy was cowering against the other side of the console. His face was glistening with sweat and his hair was plastered against his head. He’d gone pale. The bundle of cables ran from the back of his head to the console.

The blackness almost took me. I slipped, put too much pressure on a broken leg, but recovered.

I let the shield drop from my arm and jammed my hand into the console on the floor.

My awareness burst with information. I was the building and every bit of tech in it. The weapons outside felt like the bristling hairs on the back of my neck. The Kivas wandering the halls were like crawling bugs on my skin, but I could also see through their eyes and control their bodies. The antenna was a sense all its own. Through it, I reached the world. The eyes of everyone around became like my own senses. Their ears became my whole world.

In a split second, my focus moved to the cluster of Kivas nearby. Four of them dragged a kicking Abi down a curved hallway. I could see through her eyes and I could feel the adrenaline coursing through her veins. The sights of the Kivas were there for me too, but I had more control over them. With a mere thought, their hearts stopped and what was left of their brains shut down. Relief washed through Abi as she freed herself from their grip.

There was no time to linger. Another presence exerted its control. It was a stony presence, an unmovable will that stood like a tower in a field during the chaos of battle. It was Francis. He was still connected and now via the machine his mind was working against mine.

He was frightening.

The battle raged outside. The sense of it nearly overwhelmed me. A few seconds were all I would need, but if I dropped the building’s defenses I might not get that. Cold, calculating logic told me to leave those defenses up. Solid logic told me to let the army suffer a little longer for the greater good. It was undeniable.

But that logic didn’t come from me. It came from Francis. His mind was closer to mine than I thought possible. His thoughts echoed in my head, and for a brief second I felt what it was to be Francis. It was frightening. He didn’t have the logic and reason I’d always assumed. His mind crawled with pain and fear. His life was an inability to cope with the raw emotion of being alive. Whenever something hurt him, he killed the part of himself that was hurt. Over and over again he crushed himself until the only thing left was a monster, and then he moved on to do the same to the world. His mind was strong and his logic was sound. He almost convinced me to step back.

But stubbornness beats logic any day. I shut down the turrets.

Far below, Tuck fought back a wave of coyotes. He was injured and bleeding, but the look on his face showed both rage and satisfaction. It was his moment of revenge. Tuck cut down one coyote after another, wading through the makeshift defense of something on the ground floor. Something nearby…

He was headed for a power generator. If he took it out, power would drop in the entire facility. That would take everything down hard. Francis’s cold logic told me that the hard collapse of the field might snap Goodwin’s tower all the way over in Austin. It would also cause a dangerous crash of my own hardware, possibly killing me.

I denied logic again. The coyotes that had hardware in their heads dropped dead. The rest fled like the scavengers they were. Tuck pulled the pins on a couple grenades and tossed them into a hole he’d already punched in the side of the generator building.

Seconds remained.

Far away, I could sense another force. Instinct told me to fight it, keep it at bay. This must be Goodwin’s tower. Goodwin’s field encompassed all of Texas. Zane had told me this, but now it made sense on an instinctual level. My smaller field existed as a thorn in Goodwin’s side, constantly drawing power and constantly posing a threat.

What a threat too. An increase in power, even a slight one, could set off a resonance that would bring both fields down. Both towers would be slag in the aftermath. The sub-quantum net would cease to be. Technology as we knew it would be done. Person-to-person communication would stop. It would be impossible to mentally control cars or machinery. Prosthetics like my own might cease to work. The nanomachines would stop.

Tech would be set back hundreds of years.

If I powered it down, the tower would likely never be active again. It was unstable. I could feel it at the edges of my fingertips. The field would collapse soon, even if I did nothing. Getting it started again was not something that could be done through this facility. Not anymore.

An age seemed to pass in a single second. Outside, Cinco Armas poured into the console room. They swarmed the surrounding buildings and obliterated what remained of their enemies. The deputies still alive rode side by side with brutal outlaws in the assault on Quintech. They’d destroy everything soon.

A world without tech would be better. There was no doubt in my mind about that fact. How much pain came from the horrors of technology?

The iron logic that Francis poured into my mind told me that people would die when that field dropped. Cars would fall from the sky. Society would collapse. People who had modified themselves with technology would be ruined. I would be crippled, maybe killed. Logic told me what I knew already in my gut.

He was right. The cost was too much.

With my last second connected to the machine, I lowered the field gently. With as much ease as I could muster, shutting everything down.

All I needed to do then was disconnect from the machine.

The explosion took out the generators, dropping the whole place into darkness. Like a jarring kick to the head, I was booted from the system. It felt like a large hunk of my own brain was cut out of my head with a rusty knife.

When my eyes opened, the room was dark. Somehow, disconnecting had sent me flying across the room, though I didn’t remember much of the flight. Francis shifted on the floor just before the blackness came. Dully, I realized that I should do something about the boy before I slipped away into unconsciousness.

The last thing I was aware of before I slipped away was fat, warm raindrops falling from the sky.

The cemetery outside of Dead Oak was a quiet place on a hill surrounded by wrought-iron fence and shrubs that had died ages ago. Too many of the graves were fresh. Too many were my fault.

Josephine’s headstone was a simple slab of steel etched with her name. Abi had arranged it after she took over the junkyard. After the attack on Quintech, she’d returned to help Ben handle the longhorns. She had a talent for it, but it would be a long time before Ben’s ranch was fully operational again. She’d done well handling Ben’s stubborn streak. Now they had each other and maybe there was hope.

Zane’s grave sat apart from the others. It was a simple plaque, reflecting the red of the setting sun. It had his name and the day of his death. An inscription read, “A hero of all men.” He’d certainly been a hero to me. He had been hope to me. My love for him had proven that life in the wastes could be something more than gunfights and starvation. His love for me had shown me that there was something worthwhile left in myself. He was gone, but I’d carry that love with me for the rest of my life.

Not all of my failures rested in that cemetery. Broadfeather had been buried with my people, near Overpass. Mina led them now, and they were better for it. Broadfeather was a wise man, but a damn fool for thinking I could lead the Hopi. Others of the tribe had been buried near him, all of them gone too early.

The Navajo returned to their nation in the north. They’d proven themselves to us and we had proven ourselves to them. No, they wouldn’t poke bears, but they wouldn’t feed them either. Maybe one day Mina would move the Hopi up to join with the Navajo Nation, but not yet. Not until it was the last option.

A month had passed since the fight at Quintech. My legs were nearly ready to shed the braces that allowed me to walk. I’d stood trial for the bank robbery and the attack on Quintech. Even though every damn soul at the hearing knew I was doing what was right, the judge ruled me guilty. After Cinco Armas looted Quintech—their goal all along—and Francis escaped punishment, the judge said he had no choice but to send me up the river. Hell, I almost agreed. The rule of law needed some support from time to time, though I suspect the judge was taking a good portion of his pay from Charles Goodwin himself.

“What’ll it be?” Sheriff Trish said from the base of the hill. I hadn’t heard her approach.

Zane’s grave hurt the most. The thought of it still made rage boil in my gut, but I knew she wasn’t to blame. She couldn’t have known.

Why hadn’t I trusted him? No, that wasn’t it. Why hadn’t I trusted myself? It had always felt right, being with Zane. When we were together we’d always worked. Why had I doubted it so much?

Goodwin. It was Goodwin I didn’t trust and I’d eliminated the one thing that really posed the corporation any real threat. With the tower gone and Quintech destroyed, Goodwin would be free to exact whatever cruelty he wanted on the people of the outlands.

It was time for my prison sentence to start. That morning was my last hour of freedom, granted to me so that I might set my affairs in order. It was a special compensation, granted to me out of respect for my time at war and my service as a sheriff. It was given to me out of trust, since they knew I was a man of honor.

I turned to Trish. She waited patiently for my answer. On one side of her was her cruiser, the honorable path to a life of hard labor in the Iowa wastes. The other side was my skidder, the path of dishonor. The life of an outlaw waited there for me.

She stepped up to me, looked me in the eyes, then hugged me. She hugged hard, and sobs welled up in my chest.

“I’m sorry, J.D.” She squeezed me tight. “I should have known it wasn’t Francis. I didn’t notice the change.”

“You couldn’t have. He was subtle. Quick.”

“A person can’t put a gun against someone’s head if they’re not willing to fire. It’s just…”

“I know.” Of course, I understood. She had pulled the trigger of the gun that had killed Zane, but it wasn’t her fault. It was Francis. The boy was broken inside. He wasn’t a sad boy to be pitied anymore. He was a ruthless killer.

“Zane was special, wasn’t he?”

“We were going to make something of it.” I swallowed back a sob. “After.”

She stepped away from me and looked me over. “There’s never an after, is there?”

“Nope.”

“I won’t come after you. Someone else might come, but I don’t think so. Not right away, anyway.”

“Be careful,” I said. “There weren’t long-range launchers anywhere around Quintech. When I was in the machine, I would have felt them. There was nothing that would have dropped those bombs on Ben’s ranch.”

“You think it was Goodwin?”

“Or another player entirely.”

“You think there’s a war coming, don’t you?”

“Not if bombs fall on us every time we gather and talk about war. If Quintech could listen to us through our headgear then Goodwin can do it too. All they need to do is track where we are and what we’re talking about. It wouldn’t be hard for their computers to do that without even making people listen in.”

“That’s either a sobering thought or conspiratorial nonsense.”

“Oh, and one more thing to get you thinking.” I smiled. “I owe Court a favor.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I owe her a favor. Whatever she wants.” I basked for a moment in the setting sun. “Thing is, though, she needs to ask first. If I keep moving, I’ll be fine.”

Trish turned, hopped in her cruiser, and started pulling away.

“You’re needed out there.”

“I know.”

My skidder sat there, ready for me to leave. I powered it up, programmed a destination, and set it on its way. If there was any law out there, it would track the skidder. Farther downhill, Muffin stood tied to a tree. She whinnied when I approached and I smiled a sad smile and rubbed her nose.

Once we were on our way, I turned her north and gave her the lead. We’d go to where the hills became mountains. The law wouldn’t bother us north, in the Yellowstone wastes. It’d be harsh, but I’d make my life there as a free man and for a time the heavy weight of the world wouldn’t rest on my shoulders. It was worth it for the freedom. I’d given up everything for my honor, and now it was honor itself that I was tossing aside in favor of freedom. One day I’d return to rebuild that honor.

Until then, freedom would do.