Raddocks Horizon (Godyssey Legacy Book 1) Page 24

  Zillah would also be furious about being incarcerated for so long. She was incapacitated without her prior knowledge or approval. There were concerns that she wouldn’t comply with the plan. Caufmann is starting to think she may have been right to have her reservations. Either way, the last thing she remembers might be betrayal.

  No, too risky.

  Caufmann winces inwardly looking back at Antares. She worked excellently in team-based operations during the war so, by logical extension, she’s the only real choice. Xelxor Akcoda would have far too many questions. Caufmann secretly acknowledges that Xelxor is an ideal choice but he is overwhelmed by curiosity about Antares.

  He presses the ‘Wake Unit’ button. The blue lights of the tank turn green and the water begins draining. Several wired plugs are still attached to her, shocking her mildly to provoke a natural muscle spasm. The pillar case opens, and she falls out onto the floor with a cough.

  After a moment, her neon-green eyes flutter open. The first thing she does is look at the back of her left hand. She regards her own body, clad in a rudimentary two piece undergarment, and stands up slowly, taking careful account of her own progress as if scared she’ll fall.

  Her back is to Caufmann only for a moment. She spins to face him with eyes that are almost psychotic, causing the doctor to wonder if he can draw his gun before she dives at him. He decides to slowly raise his hands, to show he means no harm. He removes his glasses to show her he’s like her.

  Antares seems to relax a little. “Medtech…” she says taking a breath.

  So her memory is intact. “You’ve been asleep for quite a while.”

  “Where am I?” she says completely still, but her muscles are fully tensed, ready to spring on anything perceived to be a threat.

  “Godyssey Genetics Laboratory, we-”

  At the mention of Godyssey her eyes brighten. She leaps straight at him, pushing him up against a wall. Even her long period in stasis hasn’t affected her strength. Caufmann can hardly move. Her eyes dart over his uniform then focus on his face.

  “What are you doing in a Godyssey installation?” she asks so calmly it makes his skin crawl.

  I should have woken Xelxor. “I’m head of research here, and have been for ten years.”

  “What year is it?”

  “October 18th, 2319.”

  “Where’s my husband?”

  That completely stumps Caufmann. “Husband?”

  She grips his neck, hands tightening like a vice and bares her teeth. “You were one of his confidants, and since you’re still alive you’d know.”

  Caufmann represses the rapidly increasing urge to defend himself. “Whom are you talking about?”

  “Forgal! Where is he?”

  For the second time in half a minute Caufmann is absolutely speechless. He blinks a couple of times to take it in. “He was never married. He’s an android.”

  “We had a daughter.” Her eyes have a maddened look, but there’s also absolute certainty.

  Caufmann thinks for a moment. “That’s impossible.”

  “I traced my daughter’s whereabouts towards the end of the war, but when I went looking I was captured by Van Gower. He kept me locked up in a bunker. Couldn’t erase my memories but he found me amusing. Disabled my combat protocols, used me as an experiment.”

  Caufmann’s head was starting to swim but not from being strangled. “Why?”

  “He hates us. He’s scared to death of us. He was so convinced that we were going to turn on him, he tried to make me his pet. Then from me, he’d know how to enslave us all. He chose me because Forgal saw me as his equal during life, and through me he might gain an insight into him. That’s the only reason I was converted in the first place. He was so sure Forgal was self-aware that he constructed me to prove it, as some kind of test. It failed, he didn’t know me.”

  No, there was something else about you that warranted your conversion. “But you knew him.”

  “I retained almost everything. In the mayhem of the Jupiter Sieges I deserted. I detonated my craft to simulate a crash, then went looking for my daughter. I did eventually find her,” she trails off for a moment before regaining her focus. “She died aged eighty-five, over a century before the war started.”

  “How did you get caught?”

  “How didn’t you?” she asks glaring at him, with very real fury in her eyes.

  Caufmann undoes his jacket and shows her the sea of scars that was once a torso. “Satisfied?”

  She looks him over, her face completely unreadable. She releases her grip around his throat. “I’d almost escaped Austria. I was captured crossing the border into Germany.”

  “Germany?”

  “CryoGen Industries began there. I had reason to believe it holds knowledge that I could have used.”

  Caufmann shakes his head. “To what end?”

  She points to her chest.

  The Instinctual Cluster. “You want to remove it?”

  “I want to destroy it.”

  “You can’t do that. If you do, it will disrupt the synchronicity with your other major and minor systems. Your programming is designed to predict IC emissions when none are present. If you destroy it, your computer mind will continue to predict your actions and drives with increasing inaccuracy.”

  “It has to be taken out. It’s how they’re going to enslave us,” says Antares.

  “Us?”

  A realisation dawns on Caufmann.

  She doesn’t know about Venus III.

  “Captain—”

  “For six years I was in that pit. I couldn’t attack or so much as think of attacking someone without being punished. They laid traps inside my mind that followed my thought processes,” she interjects, gritting her teeth. “Van Gower kept at me, grinding me down, until he was sure I had no avenues left for hostilities towards anyone deemed an asset. I was put in thousands of simulations. Forced to kill on command. Over and over.”

  Caufmann feels sick. This exact scenario always scared him. He can’t help but feel glad it was her, not him. He inwardly admits that he wouldn’t feel this empathy if she had been human. “How did you escape?”

  “He failed to consider one thing. I couldn’t hurt people. After a while I stopped seeing my captors as such. Once that happened, I killed them. It seemed so much harder than in the war. It was difficult to break them, even in my frenzy. But they’re dead now, the guards, the researchers.”

  “You mentioned Van Gower was there,” says Caufmann.

  “Not when I escaped. I turned that bunker inside out,” she says.

  “He seemed genuinely horrified when I told him about your distress signal.”

  “He should be,” she says bitterly. “When I got out I was wounded. I just ran and ran until I couldn’t make it any further.”

  “But if Van Gower didn’t know you were there, who—”

  “No more questions,” she says facing him fully. “Nexarien… Where is my husband?” she asks, her voice cracking slightly.

  Caufmann’s head lowers. “He’s dead. He died a year after you went missing.”

  Her shoulders slump immediately and she begins to cry. Caufmann has never seen an android cry. It is one of the things he has always thought to be impossible, but there is a strange sense in it. Looking at this poor thing, this poor person. He understands something about true sentience that hits him like being struck in the face.

  Each android built holds something individual, that survives conversion. Xelxor Akcoda’s sense of duty crossed over into his android life, Sephirlin Darrad’s anger, and Caufmann’s own hunger for knowledge. Zillah and Saifer both share pain. Though something more carried over with them, Saifer was loyal even if disobedient at times, and Zillah believed in sacrifice. Sacrifice of herself for the betterment of all.

  Like Saifer and Zillah, Forgal also brought pain. Pain from the grief of loss. But Amber Antares brought her love with her. It must have been very present in her mind at the time of her conversion. She
loved her husband. Still loves her husband. Her shining eyes remain closed and her posture is one of complete and utter defeat.

  “How did it happen?” she manages.

  Her loss doesn’t merely consist of her partner, alone. She has lost everything. Worse still, it was taken from her very purposefully by an all-encompassing corporate entity fuelled by a dead heart. She has lost her family, her parents, and her child. Forgal was the only thing left, the last vestige of hope. And now that’s gone, too.

  Caufmann relays the whole story of Venus III’s aftermath, how he was to retrieve the bodies one by one. He explains that Forgal and Saifer both died very suddenly. “They went off my scanners about half an hour before their life signs went flat. I looked for them, believe me, I looked. I spent weeks investigating the wreckage of their last mission but the whole area was just a crater.”

  He takes her by the arm and leads her to Forgal and Saifer’s tomb pillars.

  “This was where I was going to store them until the time was right. It was rather pointless bringing the empty chambers here once I was established in my position and had built this tomb but they serve now as memorials, I suppose, so at least there’s someone to remember them and what they tried to do.”

  She’s still crying, “Why did you wake me and not the others?”

  Caufmann isn’t sure if he can bring himself to ask anything of her. But he has to. “There’s a very sick android I need taken out of the city.”

  “His name?”

  “Arca Drej.”

  “I don’t have any data on him.”

  “When I delete the restrictive programs in your mind I’ll update all your general knowledge. For the moment I’ll just say he’s a HolinMech.”

  “They’re building HolinMechs again? Those are the slaves Godyssey want as their pets, why should we help one of them?”

  “It’s not his fault he is what he is. Just the same as it’s not our fault we are what we are. That didn’t stop the Gorai Aurelia wanting every one of us dead. Let’s not be like them, shall we?”

  ◆◆◆

  The first of the contaminants to be out during daylight emerges from an apartment complex in the Centre-city District. It was formerly a young man by the name of Michael Troy, who contracted the disease through his girlfriend.

  She is back at the apartment and very hungry. She can no longer pass for human. The further she fades from humanity, the more control she seems to have over Troy. He can barely remember what she looked like before, but she had the most beautiful sea blue eyes. Yet that is not all he’s lost.

  Troy can still think rudimentary thoughts but every hour there’s less and less. He’s tired after being out most of the night looking for food. When he eats, a surge of energy picks him up and he doesn’t understand how he could ever feel tired. However, the longer between food, whether it be leftovers, road-kill or fresh skin and bone, the more exhausted he becomes.

  It won’t be long before he can no longer pass for human either. Another day, and the black veins snaking up his neck will be protruding all over his face. The colour in his irises is also rapidly clouding.

  Troy limps out of the darkened doorway, instantly spotting a man carrying a briefcase, walking quickly on the sidewalk of the nearly deserted street. He’s dressed in an impeccable suit, his head down, moving in quite a hurry.

  He doesn’t notice the once human creature; his mind is focussed wholly on a very important appointment with his accountant. He has never been late in his life and has no intention of starting now. Troy is hungry and so is his girlfriend. That is all that matters to him.

  He can feel something at the far recesses of his mind trying to resist, but with each new infection his own mind becomes less and less dominant. The wants of one are insignificant to the wants of them all. Each new infection gives a new voice to the mass of minds he can hear. All think, feel and become each other. His memories are already bleeding into others, as those bleed into his. He can hear the ones that are sick very vaguely, but when they became like him they would be heard clearly and proudly. Accepted.

  The man begins to walk faster. He can hear someone behind him, but Troy is already very close. The contaminant jumps, landing on the man’s back, sinking his teeth into the back of his neck. The man screams in pain at first but after the first chunk is torn out he begins to quieten down, very quickly subsiding into unintelligible gibbering, interspersed with pitiable begging.

  Troy still understands most words but he can’t stop himself tearing the flesh to pieces and swallowing it in whole chunks. By the time he feels healthy enough to drag the rest home to his girlfriend, the man is bleeding everywhere, still muttering. “But I’m going to be late,” he manages, his expression utter disbelief. The shock from his wounds has left him a mess.

  Another chunk is taken for good measure.

  “I have an appointment.”

  Troy grips him by the ankle.

  “My accountant…” he says groggily staring out into nothing.

  Troy starts to drag him.

  “I have an appointment,” he struggles out one last time.

  Troy feels happy now. He feels ecstatic, even. When he eats he feels like he can run around the world. His girlfriend will be happy too. They can be happy and eat. They can eat and eat for days with this whole body. Children are easier to carry but they just don’t last. The pair of them have eaten a full child in just over a day, not even enough time for it to begin spoiling.

  A click from behind gives him a fright. He turns around to see the face of a soldier. A huge individual with black skin, strong frame and piercing onyx eyes. Demon Coal-something, Troy recalls. Voices of others react in fear, they know him too. Another voice, still with most of its original Separate senses, speaks the name into Troy’s mind: Damon Kowalski.

  Troy feels a horrible fear as three bullets tear through his chest. The pain isn’t very intense, but the force knocks him clean off his feet. Damon Kowalski. Troy takes a spasmodic breath and looks upwards as the soldier’s face comes into view above him. No, he thinks, Demon, he’s a demon.

  There’s a flash from the Demon’s gun, then nothing.

  ◆◆◆

  Rennin is in his apartment, digging through his cupboard. He throws his old S-type CryoZaiyon armour onto his bed. Beneath his old war boots he finds a case, precious to him, containing his very illegal sniper rifle from the war.

  This rifle, unlike the one he has at work, can shoot further, zoom closer on any target; and is undetectable by x-ray. With a few of the parts from his rifle at the lab, this weapon will be more efficient with a larger magazine. Even as it is, this rifle is completely outlawed to civilians, mostly due to its stopping power. A graze can shatter bone. He was supposed to hand it in when the war ended, but he hid it instead. Five years later, he has found himself dragging it back out. Since he’s military again he can take it out and carry it around everywhere just as he used to.

  A knock at his front door draws his attention. In recent memory he can’t recall anyone ever coming to see him, and the sound of a knock on his door is almost alien. If they had thermal-vision they could just shoot through the door when he comes to open it. He shakes off his paranoia and steps silently over to the entry.

  He presses the transparency button, revealing someone he never thought he would see out of the lab: Mepida Rethrin. He opens the door, and she doesn’t wait for an invitation to enter. She barges straight in, instructing him to shut the door behind her.

  “Oh please, come in. Should I get you something to drink?”

  “Look, Farrow, I didn’t want to come here, but I can’t be seen at the lab since I gave up all that information to the press. You’re the only one I can think of.”

  “For what?”

  She holds out an A4 sized envelope. “William needs to see this, it’s important.”

  “What is it?”

  “You can open it if you like, but it might not make much sense.”

  “Why do I have to deliv
er it?”

  “I can’t mail it, the postal service is discontinued since the virus and I can’t risk anything digital, there’s just too many eyes around.”

  Good to see he’s not the only one who’s paranoid. “I guess it can’t hurt. I have to go to the lab to pick up my rifle, so I’ll drop it off then.”

  “No. Give it to him. It must be placed in his hand, not left on his desk.”

  She looks serious but there’s definitely a plea in her words. “Alright.”

  “You’ll make sure?”

  He holds up his right hand. “By the power of Greyskull, I will see to it.”

  She nods, visibly relaxing. “Thank you.”

  Obviously she has never seen He-Man. “Anything else?”

  “No,” she says, and her gaze goes distant. “I have to get to the Skyhook.”

  He nods and looks at the envelope. “What happens if I’m caught carrying it?”

  She remains quiet for a moment. “Get it to him quickly.” After that she leaves.

  Rennin stays by the front door staring at the envelope. It isn’t long before he can’t help himself and has to open it. He takes it to his dining table, placing the single piece of paper inside face up.

  His fascination evaporates when he sees it. It’s an A4 printout of Forgal Lauros. It’s a nice picture, he admits, really captures his arms and glowing eyes, he thinks with a smirk.

  He’s wearing a suit of armour that’s grey rather than his usual black. He’s also holding a pulse rifle. It looks to be security footage from somewhere or other.

  He shrugs to himself, turning to grab himself a drink from the fridge. He opens it and takes a few swigs, then freezes, feeling the hairs on his arms stand on end. The drink is still tilted, continuing to pour down his front but he doesn’t notice, he just turns to face the image on the table.

  He puts the drink down roughly and walks back over to the picture. He picks it up looking closely at it. Forgal looks exactly how Rennin remembers him. He increases his scrutiny, knowing something is out of place. The armour configuration matches his memory, as does Forgal’s face. It’s when he looks at the gun that something clicks in his mind.