The Apocalypse Ocean (21 page)

The other two men jumped back, shooting uselessly as it turned to face them. It jumped up and wrestled them down, maw snapping them up in gulps. Jaws dislocating to accommodate the screaming, bulky men.

One of the injured, limping wolves struggled to its feet and looked at Tiago with glowing blue eyes.

Tiago held the knife up at it. A useless gesture.

“Tiago!” It was Nashara. She sprinted down the corridor toward them both. She shot twice and the wolf snapped to face her, then started loping forward at her.

The other one looked over, then back at Tiago.

He looked at Nashara and held up a hand. Not sure if he was waving bye, or asking to be pulled free of this nightmare, and then the wolf jumped into the air.

The long jaw extended, slowly growing larger and larger as Tiago watched it descend on him. There was nothing but blackness surrounded by teeth. Nothing he could see but that descending maw.

That wave of blackness struck him as he stood there, swinging the knife in the air at it, screaming.

Kay ran recklessly down the mountain, tripping and falling several times. She’d heard the whoosh of another RPG round, and then a thud, and then howling. She hoped it had been the wolf-thing in pain and not Pepper. 

Tumbling down and rolling, standing and hopping, and running down even faster. The worst of the rain abated so she ripped her fire-protection suit off, glad to breath full, deep lungsful of air – even if it burned and seared her with leftover mist.

She ran into League soldiers halfway down. Grim and serious men in green uniforms, they captured her and took her to their commander within minutes. The silver-haired but barrel-chested man looked up from a map he had open in his hand. He looked her up and down with a dismissive glance.

Digging deep, projecting calm authority and the snap-crisp sort of pronunciation that would dig through his state of mind, she said “Sir, the
Saguenay
, the ship you’re trying to recapture, is up in a valley. I can lead you to it faster than you can meander this mountainside hoping to find it through sheer, stupid luck.”

“How do you know about the ship?” he asked. She had his attention.

“I was part of the crew that took it,” she told him casually.

“You’re just a young girl,” he said with a frown.

“And you’re an old man in a green uniform sitting on a rock.”

They stared at each other.

“I’m sorry, what?” he asked.

“Oh – I thought we were just stating obvious facts to each other. It’s a fun game, but right now, the question is: will your team be able to get to the ship anytime soon? Or will you ignore me and end up wasting a lot of time and lives. How many men do you have here? Are they prepared for overwhelming combat odds against aliens with extraordinary skills and advanced technology?”

The commander blinked. Who was in charge here? He was moving to catch up, realizing that his first impressions had failed him. “My men are good fighters, but what aliens are you talking about?”

“Up in that valley are wolves with wormholes in their mouths, high-speed drones with some sort of energy weapons, and possibly, other things I can’t imagine. You will need to react quickly. The men you are hoping to chase, Nashara and Pepper, and the clockwork cyborg called Thinkerer, these are actually your allies. Not your enemies, as you’ve been told. They’re trying to stop the invasion of an alien force through a wormhole buried in the valley. Ally yourselves with us, and our worlds will survive. Delay, and you harm only yourself.”

He looked up the side of the mountain toward Fire Valley.

“Look,” said Kay, leaning in close and throwing everything she had into her voice. “The fate of this world, Sir, is in our hands. If not possibly the fate of other worlds if this gets past us. Now, are you going to follow me? Or dick around and screw us all?”

The commander looked around wearily, then pointed at two men. “Bring mortars,” he ordered. “You, head back to Theascots, tell her to bring her squad forward and meet up on the ridge. And have her send back someone to explain that we’re following a local scout to the ship’s location. They’ll want to converge on it. Let them know friendlies are in the area. Go.”

He stood up with a grunt and folded up the map.

“Well, then, young lady, you have yourself a detachment of the League’s best fighters. If you’re blowing smoke up my ass, or trying to walk us into an ambush, your life is about to get pretty fucking hairy. But we do know the
Saguenay
headed up in this direction.”

Kay nodded. She ached. She was bruised everywhere, her left ankle throbbed from a fall. And for a split second, she considered the fact that she should just point the League in the direction of the ship and let the collision of League, Xenowealth, and Thinkerer take care of the Doaq and its impending invasion.

But then she wouldn’t personally see it all through with her own eyes.

She turned around and waved them along. “Let’s move.”

#

It took longer to get them up the mountain than she would have liked. The mortars were heavy. Ammunition was being carted up along with them. But they struggled on behind her.

At first they were wary, but as the climb continued, they fell into focusing more on the problems of carrying their equipment along with them.

On the crest she could see that the battle had lulled somewhat. The fires raged around the destroyed trees and among metal wreckage on the streambed. The
Saguenay
had been shot out of the sky and rested on the other side of the valley. It had plowed and rolled through fire trees until coming to a rest. More fires raged around it.

Kay saw two familiar shapes loping their way around the trees toward them. “There,” she said to the man nearest her. “Wolves.”

A three-man fire team dug a machine gun’s baseplate into the dirt and mounted a heavy gun on it. Another team huffed along the ridgeline, moving over a couple hundred feet to get a different angle.

The wolves were a hundred feet away, mouths dropping open, when they opened fire. Just as before, they opened their maws further, swallowing the bullets and speeding up to a full run at them.

Just as the nearest wolf leapt for the machine-gun crew, Pepper flew from behind the nearest tree. He struck the wolf and snatched it out of the air. The sound of rent metal filled the air and the sparking, twitching corpse of the wolf was thrown clear back down toward the valley to tumble lifelessly among the fire trees.

Turning to face Pepper, the other wolf snarled. And as it exposed its side the two machine guns ripped into it. Startled, it jumped away, crawling on forelegs to try and retreat to safety. Pepper walked down the hill and caught up to it. He stomped its head in with a boot until there was nothing but a mangled mess. All that remained was a one-foot-wide black disc in the ground. A tiny wormhole, just lying there.

Pepper walked up to the League soldiers.

“Hello, Pepper,” Kay said.

“Hello, Kay,” he looked around at the weapons approvingly. “I’m happy to see you brought some new friends along with you.”

The commander of the men walked forward. “I’m Commander Apherton, League Forward Team Crimson Zee. Any other day we’re supposed to shoot you on sight for crimes against the League. But I just had a wolf with what looked like a wormhole in its mouth try to kill me, so I’m guessing the girl wasn’t lying to us, and we have to put that aside for now?”

Pepper looked at Kay with a microgrin, just for her. Amused that she’d once again chosen truth to get her way. “You should pay very close attention to what she says,” he told the commander.

Very funny
, she thought. But said nothing.

“We killed the Doaq,” Pepper said. “I thought you would like to hear that.”

Kay nodded, but found that she had nothing. Where was the triumph? She dug around inside herself for it, but there was nothing there. Not even grim satisfaction.

What did that mean?

This hadn’t been for nothing. They’d done something important here. They’d changed the balance. They’d killed the nearly unkillable.

She’d done it.

And that was it.

Pepper was still talking. “We’re holding off the automated defenses it put in action. Of course, Commander, we wouldn’t turn down your help. But I’m really out here trying to find Thinkerer. Is he with you?”

Kay stopped and thought. “I haven’t seen him since we split. When the wolves attacked us and you told me to run.”

“Me either,” said Pepper.

They both stood there, surveying the entire valley.

“Should we be worried?” Kay asked. Had he already died? Been swallowed by one of the wolves, or the Doaq?

Pepper frowned. “It bugs me,” he said thoughtfully.

In the floor of the valley, the ground convulsed. Another cloud of yellow spheres floated up into the air, looking for targets.

Tiago woke up.

That, in and of itself, was a startling and suddenly terrifying thing.

He lay in a soft, white bed. He sat up and put his feet over the edge and touched a floor that wasn’t too cold, nor too hot. He stood up and looked around.

The room was colored a featureless white on the walls, which had small cubbyholes filled with strange purple plants for decoration.

He kept turning, and stopped as he faced the last wall.

It was clear glass. It looked out onto a vast spiral swirl of an entire galaxy that was tilted slightly away from him. He could make out individual stars that hung free of the central glob.

He looked up. The roof was also transparent.

Something massive hung overhead. It was … artificial. Like the picture in a magazine he’d seen of a massive orbital space station. But he couldn’t quite grasp the scale. Behind it was something else, stretching out near a star. A wisp of something leading back from a star.

He blinked.

No, there was a star, and the filaments reaching out around it were structures. And deep inside of them other stars glowed, as well as black discs of wormholes. The stars had been rearranged, wormholes moved around, and it was a megastructure of some sort. He could glimpse patchworks of sky and earth on some of the insides of the wisps. Whole entire worlds carpeting them.

Flickering firefly lights bloomed and blossomed randomly in the distance. Tiny pricks of light.

“Welcome to the Overwatch,” said a chorus of voices behind him.

Tiago turned around, and took a step back. Five bipedal creatures with completely transparent skin had appeared out of nowhere. Faint luminescent sparkles rippled around under the skin.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Where am I?”

“We are a speaking individuality of the Structure attached to the Overwatch. We are assigned to your Concern. Our speaking individuality has decided to call itself Workgroup Black Tusk by consensus.”

“My concern?” Tiago asked, screwing his face up in confusion.

“The worlds you came from. The network of wormholes you live amongst. We are the Overwatch for your Concern. We are Workgroup Black Tusk,” the five members said.

Tiago stepped back, suddenly thinking about those moments he could remember from right before the moment he’d woken up. The wolf leaping into the air, jaws extending to swallow him. “You’re with the Doaq. It eats and kills us.”

“These are physicalized subroutines and constructs of the Overwatch. They gather raw intelligence for the Overwatch. The Doaq, as you call it, is no more than the subroutine that self references as Director of Acquisitions for your local Concern.” There were silicone bones deep under the Workgroup Black Tusk’s transparent skin. Silver and bronze filaments filled their insides. They all had heads, filled with more swirling translucence. Like permanently stirred-up snow globes. No eyes. No mouths. The sound of their speaking came from deep within their chests.

Tiago didn’t like it. “I was
eaten
,” he insisted.

“No, you were brought to the Overwatch via wormhole. In order to understand your race, we have brought many of your kind here. The Structure seeks to study and understand you. Acquisitions gathers the physical data we need. But there is a problematic side effect.”

“What’s that?” Tiago asked, his insides flipping.

“No one voluntarily leaves the Structure once they have encountered the neural mimetic structures of it. It has always been thus,” Black Tusk all said together to him, as one.

“No one ever leaves the Structure,” Tiago said, and looked around. That sounded like a threat. Like going over to the League, where they tried to make sure you could never defect to the Xenowealth. The League was totalitarian.

This Structure sounded far worse.

“Not voluntarily,” they told him. “We could force an individual out of the Structure, but the Consensus is that it would be cruel and unusual. There are some who volunteer to be on standby, in the event it is necessary against an imminent threat to the Structure. They would have to be willing to bear lower bandwidth and social isolation. But unless the Structure was threatened, who would voluntarily trade immortality and the Structure? It is madness.”

Tiago didn’t understand half the things they were telling him. But he’d been struggling to do his best. He remembered some of the things Thinkerer had said. “You are all zombies, with your minds all connected together by machines, right? Like the ones that tried to take over the planet Chilo?”

“That was a militarized Structure spore. It was cut off. Isolated. Barely cognitive. Connected via improvised low-bandwidth. What was done to it was an abomination. The Structure, however, is the result of millennia. Hundreds of species coming to the apex of their technological development.

“It begins with voice. And then pictographs and paper. Press. Electrical communication. Bandwidth increases. More can be communicated. And then, it explodes, accelerates. Neural bandwidth, direct cognitive exchange, where minds can speak to minds using machine interfaces. The mingling of consciousness accelerates; it’s no longer mimetic concepts but pure will that is exchanged. Commonality becomes made real. That is the Structure.”

“It sounds terrifying,” Tiago said. “You’re going to suck me into that?”

“It looks scary from the outside. We accept this. The Xenowealth, however, looks similar to you from your viewpoint of Placa del Fuego. They have live votes and techno-democracies using technology, and it makes them look machine-like and over-invested in a dream world you can’t even see. You are to the Xenowealth as it is to us, but on another scale. But most importantly, you need to understand that we are at peace with ourselves, and at peace with you.”

“Then why are you invading us?” Tiago asked.

“We’re not,” Workgroup Black Tusk told him. “If we’d wanted to invade, we would have walked among your worlds and offered you a chance to plug into the Structure. The Overwatch has been here for years without invading. We have offered individuals a chance to taste the Structure when brought here by our agents, which has allowed us to understand and study your kind. We prefer to keep your area of the wormhole network as a … wild area. A place for ideas to gestate and be sampled. And as individuals, you do have the right to exist in a manner of your preferring. We acknowledge and grant it.”

“Then why the fighting around the fake wormhole?”

“The area is weaponized. There are individualist civilizations that exist in the Structure. Huddled, nationalistic clumps that have linked up. They believe the Makers found a different path to technological transcendence, and they believe the Structure is a threat.

“But even their own members slowly join the Structure. Because of that willful attrition, the individualist’s models show them that the extinction of individualism will happen within a century or so. They’ve decided to preempt the extinction of individualism with a war, while they can still make one.”

Tiago thought that sounded familiar. “That’s the Rebellion. That’s what Thinkerer told us.”

“Two months ago the individualists lost their bid to control a major portion of the Structure’s physical assets and isolate themselves on the existing infrastructure. So now their plan is to break through the Overwatch and into your worlds, and take them. They can retrench, isolate themselves, and rebuild if they cut themselves off. We are currently defending against this thrust, but have been cut off from support.”

As if to drive this home, something boomed in the distance. The entire room trembled slightly. One of the Workgroup Black Tusk members screamed and slumped to the ground.

“We’re under multiple levels of attack,” the remaining four said. “It won’t be long before the individualists invade your worlds again.”

“Again?” Tiago held onto that world. “What do you mean, again?”

“The last time the Overwatch failed, the race you called the Satrapy tried to break off into this area. We began a bid to regain this area. We invested five percent of the entire Structure’s productive output as a civilization to launch a new wormhole back into this Concern. It was a controversial Consensus, and nearly failed to become Consensus. But we arrived to find you’d overturned the Satrapy, and Consensus was to leave the Concern fallow. But now the individualists are coming again.”

The Satrapy was the worst thing to reave through the Forty-Eight worlds. More of their types were going to rip through this wormhole.

It had taken so much to throw the Satraps off. And everyone was still recovering. What was this next wave of aliens going to be like?

“So what are we going to do about them?” Tiago asked, looking at the now four members of Workgroup Black Tusk.

“There are three likely simulated outcomes. One: they break through into your worlds and take them for their own. The Structure comes later and roots them out. Collateral damage would be extensive. Two: they break through and shut the wormhole down behind them. The Structure would not vote to use five percent of its gross output again to go after them. Three: your civilization shuts down the wormhole and leaves us all alone. There is a small, ten-percent chance the Overwatch will beat back this attack. But these individualists are fanatical, and far more dangerous than the Satraps ever were.”

“Then let me go,” Tiago said, “back to my people. To shut down the wormhole. They have a device to do it with, left over from the Satraps. What do you need to do? Absorb me to the Structure? Give me what I need to go back.”

“If we absorb you it would be unfair to send you back as an ambassador. That is why we’re here to talk to you. A low-bandwidth conversion. An exchange of verbal positions, and ideas, for you to carry back. By not making you a part of the Structure, your own people on the other side should trust that you were not compromised or coerced.”

“That sounds great,” Tiago said. “Thinkerer already has the wormhole destroyer in place. Just send me back.”

“You would like to explore the option of returning immediately?”

“Fuck yeah,” Tiago said.

“Then be aware, the device you call Thinkerer is not your ally. Do you understand this? It seeks to close the wormhole only after the individualists come through, when they break through the Overwatch. You must act quickly. You must argue our position, and look for the false actions of Thinkerer. It will be dangerous. If you feel this is too dangerous, we can offer you access to the Structure. You can join the Overwatch. Even with our battle here, we will not die. Our consciousness is backed up in real time to other locations. But if you return to the other side, you may lose your consciousness in the events that follow. Do you accept that risk?”

“Let’s go,” said Tiago.

His friends needed his help.