Future Unleashed Read online

  “Don’t move,” I said, though that seemed obvious. Naturally, they disobeyed, and the left hand Proc drew his own weapon with inhuman speed, firing off a round that shattered the decking under my feet like a bomb had gone off. His aim was shitty, but the concussive force was impressive, and I found myself staggering sideways as I fired my own weapon in answer. My round went wide, howling away into the open chamber to explode on a distant wall with the fury of an artillery shell.

  As I collapsed to the decking, I rolled forward, eating up the ground between us just enough that the remaining Procs had to change their aim, and that took just enough time to let me change my own plan. I shifted my gun from them to the cart, raising a brow as if to dare the bastards to shoot me.

  “Twitch, and the goodies go up in flames. Fucking try me,” I said without raising my voice. A chill calm was upon me, and I’d never been as sure of anything as I was in that moment. The Procs would not leave this chamber with their stolen life. I might die here in this stinking dock, but they would too—just slower, and of natural causes, which to them might be their own version of hell.

  “You won’t, Bowman,” said the one on the right. Her voice was mild, even friendly, and it made me even crazier to think that she regarded me as some kind of amateur. I didn’t just want to kill these Procs. I wanted to punish them. She held her own gun on me with unerring aim, but I paid it no mind. My blood was singing with the need to kill these beings, and not even her new gun gave me pause.

  “I told Korac I wasn’t a torturer. Looking at you miserable fucks, I think I might have lied.” I held the gun steady on the cart, my hand beginning to shake as my wounds continued dripping blood and precious ‘bots on the worn steel decking.

  “What you are is immaterial, though I admit wasting all that precious tissue seems a shame. What are you going to do with us? Shame us into staying?” she said, and her partner actually smiled, patting the cart like it was a favorite pet. “So many years of life. We’ll outlive you, and come back when the time is—”

  My shot took her between the eyes, cracking her skull like a walnut. A second later, her nerves caught up as she pulled her own trigger, shattering the cart and setting the contents spinning away into the void.

  The last Proc looked stricken, but he was already diving into the open drill hatch, shouting orders to an unseen crew as the tip spun up into a blur. They were going to punch through to freedom, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

  As the tip of the drill reached a blur, the entire vehicle shot upward with a deafening crash, skewing into the steel dock and shredding the metal into white-hot shrapnel. With a howling whine, the drill began to slow, then stopped. Underneath them, the drill piloted by Aristine continued to lift drill number one, blocking it from any movement at all as I rushed to the hatch, pointed my weapon, and fired at point blank range.

  The door collapsed inward just enough to get the barrel of my gun through, and I fired three times into the drill’s interior as sparks and fire shot out in a lethal crescent, lighting the chamber with the brilliant glow of chemical flames. In seconds, four Procs tore the door open and dove howling onto the ruined deck, their skin and clothing a smoking mess as they staggered around, bleeding from an array of wounds that were surely fatal.

  But they were still alive to understand justice.

  Aristine, Yulin, and Neve boiled out of their drill in a rage, guns drawn and pointed at the wounded Procs. Aristine looked at me with the kind of anger that can scald, but then her lips twitched in the ghost of a grin. “Sorry about the collision. Easy to drive. Not so easy to stop.”

  “You got through the Memrock section of the walls, I take it,” I said, never shifting my eyes from the wounded Procs.

  “After a fashion. The city is ours. We’ve taken over a hundred dead, and we’ll lose more tonight despite Beba’s best efforts. It was a battle, Jack, but we won. The people are coming around. They’ll need time,” Aristine said.

  “They’ll have it. The Procs won’t,” I said, casting a gimlet eye on the four creatures before me. Three stood, swaying, but one was on his knees, bleeding from a dozen wounds. He was going to die first.

  “Wha—what is the—” The Proc wheezed, falling to one knee, his knuckles white against a slat of torn steel.

  “Watch this,” I said to the others. “Eyes on me. If they avert their gaze, shoot them in the foot. We work our way up with knives from there. Do you fuckers understand? I want you to see this.” I pulled my shot knife, it’s edge scalpel bright, then kicked the kneeling Proc to his stomach. In a single cut, I had the remains of his uniform off, revealing pale skin bruised and streaked with blood. He had bizarre knobs on his back, and his chest heaved with the effort of every breath.

  “I said watch,” I hissed. Aristine and Yulin took a step closer, with Yulin going so far as to put the barrel of her weapon in a Procs mouth, using it to turn his eyes toward me.

  “Do you think this is frightening to us, Jack?” The voice was light, even mocking. It was a female Proc, her uniform a torn mess like the others, but still on her feet and seeping arrogance.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  That brought her up short. “He was always soft,” the Proc said with a dismissive glance down at her wounded relative. “If we’d been more disciplined and hadn’t hunted the Legacy to extinction, we could be safely away, but here we are, despite the reality of your kind.”

  “Legacy?” I asked.

  “Mmm,” the Proc mumbled, looking away. I shot close enough to her that it carved a runnel in her ribs, and she gasped in pain despite the wound cauterizing itself from the round.

  “Care to chat now?” I asked her.

  Where there had been anger in her eyes, there was now fear. She was right to be afraid of me, because my mercy, like my patience, was done. I knelt and placed the tip of my knife at the base of the Proc’s neck, drawing a jeweled bead of dark blood. Looking up, I asked the female Proc, “Why hunt here? What’s the reality of my kind?”

  “You’re—” She felt around in her mouth for a word as if it was lost, then spoke in a tone like a patronizing teacher. “You always make more of your kind because you’re animals. We hunted the Legacy because of our own folly now that time and changes have made us more than human. To you, we’re monsters, but to us, you’re little more than cattle. Pigs, maybe, although they can be rather fun as pets. I don’t see you serving in that role, especially since we’re designed to resist the very virus that left your kind broken and . . . changed.”

  Silence stretched between us. “You made the virus?”

  “Yes, of course. We are the Hegemony, after all. It was for the best. Zone by zone, the virus was supposed to thin the herd, but as with any great idea, there were wrinkles,” the Proc said.

  “You call the death of eight billion people a wrinkle?” I asked, fighting the urge to kill her with my bare hands.

  “At most, a design flaw, but yes—a wrinkle. It was a fire that needed starting, and we were positioned to advance our cause, even though the results might be extreme,” she said.

  I put the knife back on the wounded Proc’s neck, touched him, then drove it through to the steel deck. He shivered once and fell still, quite dead. “Was that extreme?”

  “No, that was expected. Your kind does nothing out of the ordinary. You eat and fuck and breed and fight. Animals, as I said, but the Hegemony will live on, though I do regret the loss of our drills. It’s hard to recreate certain items when your next meal comes from blood spun in a centrifuge,” she said.

  “That’s what you did with the Legacies? You spun out their blood for the nanobots because your generation won’t work in non-humans?” I asked her.

  The Proc smiled, revealing her sharp teeth again. If there had been anything human left in her, it was long gone. “Now that you put it in those terms, it does seem rather harsh, especially since we can make nanobots, if in limited amounts.”

  “Why?” I asked her.

&nb
sp; “I told you all the reasons. It’s hardly worth repeating,” the Proc answered.

  “If you need nanobots, and you retained the ability to make them—then why? Why rend people and steal their organs? Why live as ghouls?” I asked her.

  She leaned forward, as if confessing a great secret. “Because we can.”

  My knife took her in the throat, and in seconds, all four Procs were dead and at the bottom of the underground hangar, their broken bodies never to see the light of day again.

  We stood as the weight of an impossible truth settled onto our shoulders about so many terrible things—the virus, the Hegemony, and the existence of Legacies, who carried ‘bots with them from birth. Once again, the world had gotten bigger right in front of me.

  “Do we really hold the city?” I asked.

  “We do. The ones who don’t want us yet will come around, now that the truth about what the Procurators were and what they offered comes to light. Believe me, in a day or two, the city will be at rest, and we can begin the business of finding out what’s next,” Aristine said.

  “The next thing we do will be to go home,” I said, as our feet rang on the shattered steel dock. Home. It seemed a world away down there in the dark. I felt a pang so real it was painful, and Yulin caught me as I wavered. “Guess I’ve got a couple more wounds than I thought.”

  “Let’s go get patched up. We can leave the drills here,” Aristine said.

  I cast a glance over my shoulder as we exited into the stairs, thinking of the Hegemony and what they might be. “For now,” I said, “but I’m going to need you to teach me how to drive that thing.”

  “Why? I told you I could drive,” Aristine protested.

  “Until you hit something,” Yulin mumbled, but we were all too tired to laugh.

  Epilogue

  “Why am I going here again?” I asked Breslin, who gave me a secretive smile. In his huge hand the tablet looked small, its screen pulsing softly with a single line of text.

  “Trust me. I haven’t steered you wrong, and I won’t. Enter these coordinates on your tracker, and go. You’re going to handle diplomatic relations of a delicate nature, and you don’t have time to waste.” He looked up at the sun, judging the daylight left. “If you average thirty klicks an hour until the turnoff, you’ll make it just before dusk.”

  I knew he and Lasser had been planning something for me after healing from the—well, from the battle. That’s what it had been. Not a raid, and not a skirmish. A chaotic mess of a battle with sights and sounds that I had no interest in sharing with the world again, even as I knew in my bones that we were far from done with our fighting.

  “I’ll take your word for it. What about my—”

  “We packed your go-bag. So go,” Breslin said, waving down the path to the resurrected section of roadway striking off to the north.

  “Well, since you put it that way,” I said, and pulled away, wincing as my ribs or leg or some part of me—it could have been one of fifteen injuries, at least—twinged with pain as the small truck bumped up onto the roadway. Then the tires began to hiss and I turned north in silence, leaving the outskirts of the Oasis behind in minutes. We were growing at a rate that would have made me nervous if not for the steady hands of Silk, Aristine, and everyone else in my inner circle.

  I drove, alone with my thoughts, past the outer farms and channels, which were sparkling with water in the brilliant afternoon light. I waved to some people close enough to see me, but their faces were obscured by distance and speed, and in a second, I was past them and streaking toward a place that was a mere dot on the map.

  My comm chirped. “Jack? It’s Lasser. I’m tracking you by Condor, and—”

  “Tracking me? Not that I’m not glad of the eye on me, but why?”

  “To keep you on course. Your target is small, and you’ll need the contents of your bag for more than just food and drink. When you stop, open it up, but not until you reach the following point—pinging it on your tablet now. Don’t go past that junction before you check the bag, okay? Need you back late morning, so you’ll have to leave your target at dawn,” Lasser said.

  “I—okay. Not sure what this has to do with some random recon, but I will.”

  He clicked off and left me alone again, surrounded by the land and its secrets.

  The tablet chimed softly and hour later. I was there, or here, or whatever the place was, so I touched the brakes and pulled sideways, overlooking a long, gentle descent to a creek valley that began gaining altitude some five klicks away. There was a dark shape on the hill, and a pair of lights glimmered on either side of it, like torches or lamps. Even with my augmented sight, I couldn’t make out any details.

  I opened my bag, pawing through the contents until I saw the one item that didn’t belong. A key. It was cut from hard metal, polished, and looped with a leather thong. On it was inscribed a single letter J and nothing else.

  “This is it, but what is it?” I asked myself, but then I knew the answer was on that hill. I put my foot down and accelerated away down the slope, curious to see what was coming next. As I drove on, the sun fell, but the shape clarified into a fence surrounding a structure with a low roof. There were sunflowers growing, tall and heavy, the heads bent down toward the earth in conversation with the soil. A scent of flowers and vines hung in the air even as I approached, and there was a trail leading directly to the center gate. The fence was split logs, three meters high, and built to run with the contour of the hilltop, enclosing several hundred square meters or more. I could hear running water, and down the slope I saw the telltale cut of a small stream vanishing into a grotto. There were flowers everywhere, but they didn’t look tended. They looked wild and free.

  I parked and let the evening settle over me just as the dust from my tires fell back to earth. In seconds, the night was quiet, the first stars blazing forth in the east. I heard nothing, but sensed no danger, either. Instead, there was a sense that this place had been built with permission from the land, rather than by violent construction.

  On the center left door was an inset lock, with a long handle over the top. “Easy enough,” I said. I inserted the key and turned it with a distinct click, and the handle moved freely in my hand. Pocketing the key, I pushed the door silently inward to reveal a kind of oasis in which the jewel was an open-air cabin with a fire blazing in the center pit. It was part tent, part cabin, and a curious blend of elegance and living simply, hung with thin curtains that moved in the evening breeze.

  “Glad you could find me,” Valor said in a warm tone. She wore a green dress, no shoes, and a wide smile, her auburn hair in ringlets that framed a face lit from within by wild beauty.

  “I’m glad I did, too. No wolves?”

  “They’re hunting. We’ve got the place to ourselves,” she said, blue eyes filled with mischief.

  “And what, exactly, is this place?”

  She approached me, taking my hand and leading me into the main room, which was filled with a bed, cushions, and not much more. “You recall that I said no one would ever own me, but you could have me for a while? Well, now is a while. Plus, there’s more to it than a simple—in your time, I believe it was called a booty call? Forgive me if my term is wrong. I asked Andi, and she told me that.”

  “I—um. Well, yes, the term is right, although I’m not sure I want everyone knowing my schedule for sexual escapades, especially out in the desert in a love shack made of timber. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far more than a shack, and no one would ever confuse being with you for a booty call, but still—”

  “You’re wondering why we’re here? Besides the fact that I want you?” she asked me. Her fingers were playing along the line of my collarbone, and the air was getting distinctly warmer. It had nothing to do with the firepit, either.

  “The thought occurred,” I said. My arms slipped around her thin waist out of instinct, hands resting at the top of her round, muscular bum. The dress was very thin, and I could smell vanilla in her hair.


  “This is diplomacy, but in a way that we can both handle. You’re building a nation, and my lands will be surrounded by yours, eventually. You have the Oasis growing so fast you’ll be in five cities by spring, and women cling to you, Jack. I know I do, and I already told you I don’t want to be owned. I have responsibilities to my people and myself, but I won’t always be Lady Valor, the woman with the wolves.”

  “What will you be, if not the queen of this place?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. I’ll—I’ll molt, like some bird, and I don’t know what plumage will be waiting underneath. I’ll be a different person then, wanting different things. Until then, I wanted to give my people stability, and a leader they could trust to make friends, not enemies, but this is more than friendship, isn’t it?” she asked me. There was a tilt to her lips that felt somewhere between a kiss and a smile.

  “It was from the beginning,” I said.

  Her breath was warm on my neck as she exhaled, leaning back and stretching against me. I could feel every inch of her body, somehow muscled and soft all at once. When she lowered her head, her eyes locked on mine, and there was an inner spark that verged into danger. Valor was more than a challenge or a puzzle. She was an experience waiting to be shared, if I wanted to find out.

  I did.

  I kissed her, slowly, and she pulled away to regard me with eyes gone round from joy and interest.

  “I want to watch you. Every time we’re together, here or anywhere, I want to watch you so I can carry it with me. Do you understand?” she said.

  “I do. You’re . . . it’s more than sex. Is it your ‘bots? Is it mine?” I asked.

  “I’d say so. It’s being an empath, or maybe what the old stories called a succubus, even, though I have no shame about wanting you during the day. I’ll have you at night, too, but I have no shame for my desire to be with you when and where I can. We fit, and now, we have to figure out what that means,” she said with a shrug.