Point Apocalypse (27 page)

"Probe readings?"
I heard the senior neurotech's voice dampened by his mask.

"
Normal," the assistant answered.

"
Scanner?"

"
Mnemocapsule clamp confirmed."

"
Commence with the extraction."

I felt it even though t
he pain overpowered all sensation. As if a hand had slipped into my skull, squeezed my brains and pulled them back out slowly and deliberately.

My teeth
ached. My eyes bulged out and my mouth filled with blood. It trickled down my nose into my throat. I wheezed trying to spit out the clots and didn't understand what was happening.

"All done
," the assistant's voice pierced the droning in my ears. "Do I update the wetware or..."

My brain erupted
. I lost control of all sensation balancing on the cusp of pain and pleasure. My consciousness separated from my inner being escaping the glass room with its equipment and neurostaff. For a second, I hung in a void. Then everything changed.

Varlamov looked down on
me from above, his eyes smiling. There were no general's stars on his chest: instead, he sported a lieutenant colonel's pips. He eased up the legs of his pants and squatted in front of me. It turned out I was sitting on a stool in a corridor with light-colored walls and a threadbare carpet runner. A desk stood next to me. Behind it, with her hands clasped together, the principal sat patiently waiting.

The
principal of what?

"Take it, Mark," Varlamov smiled
as he handed me a toy gun. He looked younger - a good twenty years younger. He patted my cheek and pinned an elite paratrooper's badge onto the pocket of my favorite checkered shirt.

I beamed with joy and glanced at the
principal - the principal of the orphanage - and gave her a goofy smile. "I now have a father. Finally you've come!"

His face looked at me again but now he wore a
dress tunic with rows of medal ribbons and glistening general's stars on his epaulettes. His white-gloved hand jerked into a salute. Inhaling the fresh ocean breeze, I, Master Specialist Mark Varlamov, commander of the cyber troopers section, having graduated from infantry school with honors, heard my own resolute voice as I reported my arrival at the Fort for further military service. My father was proud of me and the successful start of my career. We were back together again.

The breeze was still here, but now my father was gone. I stood on an open
platform observing the Fort's construction from above. They were pouring concrete into the shuttering around the atomic reactor. The arms of cranes and scaffolding towered over the Fort's outer wall which was just starting to grow.

The platform offered a good view of the ocean, the Continent and
the L-shaped pier. A ferry boat with prisoners had just cast off. Below, the projected territory of the Fort resembled an ant hill. Workers in bright safety vests and construction helmets busied themselves with jackhammers; excavators and bulldozers roared as they cleared the space for the new base buildings. Officers were issuing orders to the workers; armed soldiers and combat vehicles were moving along the coast.

A new face now. This time a woman's. We lay in bed
, her fingers touching my shoulder as she whispered sweet nothings, words of love. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of warmth toward Mira. Mirabella Neumann. She was a chemist-biologist and the Professor's daughter. She'd arrived at Pangea not long before and my father - as if he knew beforehand that we would be together - entrusted her to me. I resisted his decision in every possible way. Idiot. Now I was laughing but when I had gotten his order I'd very nearly submitted a transfer request. I seriously believed that it was better to go back to Earth than be a babysitter for this cyber she-nerd who only showed interest in test tubes and chemical reactions. That way I could easily lose all my combat skills. But I was mistaken and now I was grateful to my father for his wise decision. Because Mira proved to be different. She liked the military; she was interested in guns and told me that she dreamed of an officer's career. We became friends and even closer. Now I couldn't imagine myself without her. I wouldn't want to part with her even for one moment.

She stretched and laughed, then
threw the edge of the quilt over my head.

Darkness
. Light. Bright lamps, flashing. Far-away voices. A total confusion in my head. Where was I? Where was Mira? What had happened to her?

For a
n instant my eyesight became clearer. The figure of the masked neurotech loomed before me, stapler in hand.

"He's come
around," his assistant said. "This boy's tough."

Without further ceremony, he took me by the chin and turned my head aside, then
pierced my cheek with an injection gun. The stapler touched my chest and clacked a few times fastening a deep incision.

There was practically no blood. The air stank of surgical spirit. I tried to unglue my lips and ask them about Mira's whereabouts.
But my head swam.

We were together again, me and my father, standing
on the Fort's walls leaning against the parapet. I listened to him, shattered by the truth about Pangea. No one was going back to Earth. Neither the deportees nor the military garrison. Even he, the general, didn't have the right of return. We all had a one-way ticket: the Professor, Mira... why her?

The reason was simple: the government was afraid of
infections and pandemics. The swamps deep on the Continent were rife with incurable alien viruses which could wipe out humanity in one fell swoop. The Central Public Health Inspectorate had analyzed Mira's reports and concluded that the New Pang pandemic had been provoked by malignant bacteria brought in by people from the swamps. A secret order had arrived at the Fort forbidding all servicemen and civilian personnel from returning home to Earth. An open-ended quarantine was declared while the Inspectorate developed vaccines against the unknown disease.

There was a way out though.
A universal solution: biocyne. Mira had proven that biocyne was capable of not only identifying and repairing DNA breakage and chemical damage, but that it also showed resistance to all alien viral activity. The only problem was to extract the pure biocyne from carula in a field environment. Mira's laboratory needed the latest equipment but Earth answered in the negative to the base commander's request. We'd become prisoners of Pangea through no fault of our own.

Father
had told me about it in order to hear me out although he already knew what he was going to do. He was the only person with the key to the jumpgate and the possibility of a unique communications system with Earth that engaged his cyber modifications. Which meant that he, General Varlamov, was the only person on Pangea who could send and receive messages to his associates among the top brass.

After having consulted his sources, he
learned that only society's elite used biocyne on Earth and that it was impossible to produce it in sufficient quantities. Which was why the government had taken this tough but efficient measure.

The Fort found itself between a rock and a hard place. On one side, the Continent with its thousands of deportees. On the other, Earth that kept sending them new
prisoners. We both knew that sooner or later this information would leak out to both sides resulting in a stalemate; the garrison could mutiny and the outcome would then become unpredictable.

Father couldn't
accept the government's policy that left his men stranded on Pangea. Neither was he planning on spending the rest of his days there. He had never abandoned his soldiers in the field of conflict. He was a professional who could foresee complicated situations and preempt them. He'd planned and accomplished dozens of secret missions. Also, he only trusted himself and believed in me. He'd always said that I'd become the best - a new caliber in cyber staff evolution.

I
had high neural functionality criteria in all four classifications. Varlamov didn't have a family. He'd spent a long time scouring children's homes for a unique kid like myself. In any case, that was what he impressed upon me when he'd picked me up from the orphanage. Then came college and infantry school. Father wanted me to continue his cause and his dynasty. He wanted me to be worthy of General Varlamov's name and take pride in bearing it.

"
What course of action are you going to take now?" I asked him.

My own voice
resounded strangely echoing and distant. It dawned on me that we were communicating through the memory chips using a closed narrow channel switched off from the signal amplifying network that connected all the base's cyber staff to the general. Third parties couldn't listen in. That's why the words reached us with a delay creating the echoing sensation.

The general glanced at me and continued his story. Apparently, Professor Neumann had not received government funds for a long time.
It was my father and his highly-placed associates who had financed his research. They planned to overthrow the government but in the event of failure, to find shelter on Pangea.

To that I objected
that we couldn't just shut the jumpgate down. The two worlds could collapse and we'd all die. The government, too, wouldn't tolerate this turn of events. It would send in troops to obliterate the garrison and hunt us down all over the Continent to exterminate us.

Father calmly listened to me and told
me that Neumann had found a Forecomers' machine in the old city. All we needed to do was to start it up but we needed to hurry and find a way to do it. He didn't let me in on the details of its construction and purpose. He only said,

"It's our trump card.
We'll sever contact with Earth and deprive them of biocyne. That way we'll play for time."

He had everything ready for that scenario.
A camp had been set up in the old city in strict secrecy and the necessary equipment had been installed. Clones were drafted in for this purpose. They still hadn't built their republic in the foothills and were gallivanting around in the eastern part of the Continent bushwhacking, risking being wiped out at any given moment by local clans.

Captain Rustam Blank
, the general's confidant and the camp foreman, as devoted to Varlamov as a puppy, pulled the wool over the clones' eyes by promising them the latest sequencer that could extend their limited lifespan. He provided them with weapons and rations, and things got moving.

The next day after this conversation with my father, Mira, myself and
a squad of cyber troops set off for the old city in order to accomplish two objectives. First, the squad had to strengthen the security of the location where the Forecomers' machine was situated. The second objective: someone had to risk his life and venture out into the swamps in order to retrieve fresh samples of the malignant bacteria from which Mira would then try, under field conditions, to extract the vaccine. We had literally one drop of unpurified biocyne and now we had to decide on a volunteer to administer it to before sending him to the swamp.

So there we were in the City of Forecomers. It was my first time on the Continent. Mira stood next to me and I didn't need anything else.
The cyber staff patrolled the area in three shifts. Clones were sent to guard the camp's perimeter. The ubiquitous Blank kept ordering neurotechs and operators around growling at them to hurry them up with the equipment installation and tuning. We had to get it all done within a week. Professor Neumann alone was thoughtful and spoke little but instead spent a lot of time by the Forecomers' device - the rods under the gasometer's dome, directed toward the matt black semisphere underneath. The sparks from the exploding bolts of lightning above showered his gray head. The device functioned even though it seemed to be idling.

Once we'd finished installing the equipment,
the engineers commenced with the building of the optical membrane which had to divide the gasometer's hall in two and protect the Forecomers' machine from unauthorized access. I had little idea of how the membrane worked. It appeared to be made of fiberglass, only crystal clear, its fibers less than one micron thick invisible to the human eye. The fibers integrated a communications network that could be tuned to a specific cyber trooper's personal channel allowing the signal controller to let a particular person through to the machine. If you attempted to get through the activated membrane without authorization, the best scenario was that you could lose a limb, and the worst, you could be killed.

I thought that father would
entrust the membrane control to me. But Blank told me it was none of my business. He booted the professor out of the hall and cast a predatory glance at me when reprimanded. He didn't risk answering me back knowing that if ever we came to blows he'd lose: what with my latest implants, my combat potential was two units higher than his.

Temporarily put on the sidelines, Neumann and myself we
nt out for some fresh air (I wanted to check the sentries and get the patrols' reports). The professor became talkative. He told me of the purpose of the rods being scattered all over the Continent and their connection to those installed in the gasometer's dome. But first he speculated on the origins of the Forecomers on Pangea. It was only a hypothesis, of course, but I believed him. It sounded plausible enough.