CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE NOSTEKOI would know by now that Joshua had left them. He checked the navigation database for someplace nearby where he could land.
It was still dark when he found the mining camp. It had other transports he could steal, and it was far enough away from the academy that he felt relatively safe. The Nos would be concentrating on the damage to the academy, at least for a few more moments, until they could focus on capturing him.
Only a few lights illuminated the silent site; large transports sat unused, and the tower was dark. The giant mountain caught the dim lights, showing wide, clean cuts in the steep stone face. He landed near the tower, weariness settling into his shoulders.
Dylan sat on the floor next to Caina, his elbows on his knees, shadows under his eyes. Cristian sat in the bunk with Caina, their fingers laced together.
Joshua knelt down next to her. She blinked sleepily and met his eyes. He knew what she thought of him, and it made him feel ashamed. He used to be her older brother, her protector.
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
She frowned. “I thought you were leaving them.”
“I am, but I’m a walking tracking signal, and your Alliance didn’t have much of a plan to counteract that. We have to figure out a way for me to get clean. I’m supposed to rendezvous with the Alliance at another location. I’ll contact you when I can. Where can I find you?”
Cristian answered. “Hades. Most of the time I think we’ll be there.”
Joshua nodded, wearily letting his head hang for a moment, his eyes closed. “Okay.” He sighed and lifted his head, looking at Caina. “Tell Dad I love him.”
She let go of Cristian and put a hand on her wound and sat up, wincing. “How long will you be gone?”
He searched her face. He wanted to know that the familial bond was still there, but he couldn’t see it in her eyes. He’d only just become her family four years ago, so maybe it was too much to ask, though it felt like a lifetime for him. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Giving in to the sense of urgency that kept hammering away at him, he stood. “I’m out of time. Dylan, thank you for saving my sister’s life. Cris, can you get them out of here? Don’t wait for me.”
Cristian stood up as well and put out a hand. “I’ll g-get her home.”
Taking a good look at his friend, Joshua could see the small scars where the Nos had put their implants, and he knew he would always hear Cristian’s cyber knee. He knew there were other scars that Cristian would always fight. There was also that last moment back at the Nos base when Joshua had to nearly choke him to death, which probably hadn’t inspired any trust. The Cypher code said he should have cut him up and bled him. He got away with his demonstration of authority because he made it showy. He wished he could have spared Cristian all that, but he’d done the best he could.
He stepped out of the transport and crunched across the gravel to examine a couple of parked transports. The sky was beginning to lighten, and the stars were fading. He walked to a sleeker craft that looked like it might be interspace. He could be in luck.
A low sound stopped him. He knew that engine. The Nos were coming. He heard another, more promising sound. Cristian had kept his word, the engines winding up to take off. Joshua ran to the spacecraft he had selected from the other transports. He put his hand on it, and a biorecognition screen light lit up on the outside of the door. He did not have time to mess with it. He ran to one of the other transports and the door opened. It was mud-splattered on the outside and dingy on the inside, smelling of dust. He moved into the cockpit and his hands found the ignition pad. It lit up, and the engines started.
An explosion outside slammed through the hull. He heard the sound of a ship crashing to the ground and jumped out of his seat, fear quickening in his veins. Cristian and Caina’s ship…
The med ship lay on the ground, black smoke pouring out of a gaping hole that had been blown out of the back. He ran to the ship, his heart in his mouth. Please be okay. The door opened, and Cristian stepped out with Caina in his arms. She looked dazed but all right. Cristian met his eyes, and Joshua knew they were both thinking the same thing. Get out of there.
Dylan stepped out behind them, his head bloody.
One of the Nostekoi ships settled on the ground, fine dust billowing out around it. Joshua jerked his head to the open door of the transport he’d just left. Cristian ran, stopping next to Joshua for a moment. “My g-gun,” he said. Joshua took the gun out of the holster, glancing down at Caina. He saw fear in her ashen face, and then they were gone.
The door to the Nostekoi ship hissed open. The knife came easily to his hand, and his senses opened, his eyesight getting sharp.
Drake stepped out of the Nostekoi ship, his lank hair over one red eye. He walked deliberately, taking his time.
Joshua fought against the dread that began to swamp his thoughts. Drake would not let anyone here out alive. He strained, listening for the sound of the mining transport lifting off the ground, willing Cristian and Dylan to hurry.
“So after all your training and everything you know, you betrayed us,” Drake said, his blade also in his hand.
“It was pretty easy, I won’t lie.”
“The coming attack from an alien race is real, you know. They’ve already killed thousands.”
“So you keep saying. But so far the only blood on the ground is yours.”
Shaking his head, Drake sighed. “You don’t get it. Without us, no one will be prepared. The Alliance built up an army, thanks to us, and with our leaders in command, we can save billions of people.”
“You think very highly of the Nos. All I see are casualties—innocent casualties.”
Drake stopped, tilting his head, genuine confusion in his eyes. “Do you even understand the term acceptable losses?”
Dylan and Cristian were at the transport now, and Joshua felt a small pang of hope. “Who cares what I think? Everyone else knows who you are.”
Drake pointed his blade, wagging it up and down. “That is not the question. The question today is do you know who you are? Or shall I say what you are.”
Joshua had not had many conversations with Drake. He could not imagine a scenario where the two of them would even want to have a conversation. He took orders and that was enough for him. “Yeah. I’m a genetically altered soldier. You tweaked my DNA. Congratulations. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because I don’t want what you want and you can’t ‘reeducate’ me into buying your drivel.”
Smiling, the older man flipped his knife a few times. “A genetically altered soldier. You bought that?”
Something about Drake’s arrogance made his heart rate increase. The Nostekoi were full of secrets, and they were always nasty.
Drake continued, “You don’t remember anything before you landed on Remington, do you?”
“No,” Joshua said. “You wiped my memories clean before you shipped me.”
Drake shook his head, still smiling as if he were about to open a gift he’d been anticipating for a long time. “There was nothing to clean. You had no memories. Did you ever wonder why you never grew?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You weren’t born. You were manufactured. You stayed the same height because that is how you were made. You are not a human being.”
The absurdity of the claim stunned Joshua. It was ridiculous. His mind raced anyway, dissecting the argument. Some of his friends stopped growing when they were sixteen, didn’t they? He wasn’t the only one. How would he know if he was human? Why was he even questioning this? He had emotions. His beating heart jumping in his chest right now told him that. “You’re lying. I might be genetically engineered, but I’m a genetically engineered human.”
Drake laughed. “You are a machine pretending to be a human being. Unfortunately, like everything else you do, you are doing it so well you don’t even realize it. It’s frying your little circuits to try and figure this out, isn’t it? Let me ask you another question: Did you ever think you were clairvoyant because you could sense events no one else could?”
Joshua didn’t answer. He didn’t want to hear. That sixth sense was already telling him he was about to learn something he’d always known.
“It’s not a premonition, and you’re no psychic. It’s your main processor, collecting data and making determinations about your environment. Your desperate need to be human won’t let you admit that you’ve just calculated the next logical or probable event, so you think you are having a ‘bad feeling’ about something. But you aren’t. You are revealing logic, probability, and calculated outcome.”
Drake turned his hand palm side up and bent his wrist down. The skin on his wrist split open and veins slithered out. “You don’t have blood vessels. You have transfer fibers.”
Joshua backed away in horror, his mind reeling.
“We’re machines. Organic machines. Beautiful, intricate, precise and powerful. Had you passed your first loyalty phase, we would have revealed that to you, and shown you much more. It’s always a shock when we tell the Cyphers they aren’t human, but they usually get over it. Usually.”
As if he couldn’t help it, Joshua’s fingers went to his wrists, searching for a seam. “It can’t be.”
The veins coming out of Drake’s wrists moved like antennae. “You can’t? Why? Because you feel? Even humans aren’t really human. You can make them laugh by touching the right part of the brain. Or cry. Their chemicals tell them they are in despair, or they are ecstatic. I’ve seen more complicated toasters.”
He kept coming closer, and Joshua backed away, lost in confusion and disbelief. Drake matched his steps. “I’ve got a word for you to try,” he said in a soft voice, his eyes strangely eager.
Drake reached and put his forefinger on Joshua’s forehead and whispered, “Accessing.”
The word echoed, worming into his brain… Accessing. Accessing. accessingaccessingaccessing. Light exploded behind his eyes, and a tidal wave of information crashed down on him. He traveled through his own mind down the corridors of his whole system, the bone framework, the veins piping through the limbs, the fibers that processed pain and pleasure and how it all synced together to make the body he lived in. His body had been made to mimic organic tissue, the skeleton dense and hard, the blood that ran through his veins and a heart that pumped it, and had done it so perfectly he’d never known. Medical scanners had been tampered with to only report what he’d told them to, which had been easy. He was much more complex than they were. The rhythmic sounds of heartbeat and respiration became background noise, though he could have stilled them at any time. He turned his wrists and let the outer skin split open and released the master transfer fibers. They conducted information, energy and material, very much the same way veins did, but more useful. A part of him shuddered, but that was just the secondary persona reacting. He could control it.
For the first time, everything fell into place. His body felt familiar to him now. It was more like a place, really. It housed a complex network of information, a world of power. He’d designed a series of evolving codes and algorithms to imitate the origins of human emotion, the action and reaction of love, hate, anger, remorse, affection, even loneliness and the drive to belong. The codes had been fluid, adapting and learning. He’d fabricated his own memory loss and the resulting human response. All of it so precisely executed that his human persona never knew it wasn’t real. It had been the most complex directive he’d ever completed. Now that he was out of it, he was relieved. Although the moving dynamics of his human persona were fascinating, they yielded events that bordered on chaos. He preferred to be in command, to leave the human miasma of uncertainty. The purity of logic made everything so clear.
He was also not alone. The other Cyphers were made with the same parameters. They might know, they might not.
No. No, he was not a series of algorithms and synthetic neurons. What he felt was real.
Or was it? Opening his hands, he examined the translucent fibers that writhed in the air. He might resist breaking down the codes that had allowed him to function so perfectly as an imperfect human, but he could not deny one thing. He was not human.
He allowed the fibers to snap back into his body. He fell to his knees, wide-eyed.
Drake stepped inside the ship. “You are one of the best of us. We’ll be studying your code for months.”
Joshua stared at him and then picked up the plasma gun where he’d dropped it, examining it as if he’d never seen one before.
“It’s fascinating when you truly understand everything around you, isn’t it?” Drake said. “Suddenly you see.”
Joshua jerked the plasma gun up and pulled the trigger. The red plasma shot out and Drake convulsed, his head thrown back. But he didn’t go down. Like a bad dream, he regained his composure in the fading glow, his red eyes meeting Joshua’s. The veins snapped back into his wrist. He wiped a bit of plasma off his lips with the back of his hand. “That’s a nasty shock, but I’m not human. Plasma won’t kill me. Or you.”
Not hesitating, Joshua shot Drake again, watching the red plasma shoot out, mesmerized. Again, Drake convulsed but did not go down. He bared his teeth and hissed. Moving at Alter speed, Drake snatched the gun away from Joshua and held it to his head. “The one thing we could never get used to was pain.”
Joshua closed his eyes. The blinding bolt seared through him, the plasma charge screaming through his body. He saw red and blackness, all his thoughts halting. Time stopped. Then he opened his eyes.
Drake threw the plasma gun. “Death not what you expected?”
“Who made me?” the question came, faint and sad. He could get the answer if he wanted, but he didn’t want to return to who he probably really was. His synthetic persona thought the machine was purity, but it was only cold and sterile, devoid of the heat of passion and the fire to live. Yet even as he fought it, he could feel his brain processing, not thinking. The mask of humanity suddenly felt slippery, the shell obvious and easily removed.
“A genius named Kor Anthony. He was human, so he died. But he made us, so in a way, he’ll always be immortal.”
It could not be denied. He was not alive. Wanting to belong to a family had been little more than a subprogram. Loving his parents and his sister. None of it was real. That was all part of his own design, all of it easily calculated. He even made himself feel despair and confusion. It overwhelmed him now.
Joshua let his knife drop into the dirt. “I don’t care.”
Drake stared blankly at him. “What?”
Cristian had started the transport engines, but he hadn’t left yet. Joshua reached out at Alter speed, his hand around Drake’s throat. “I don’t know what I am, but I’m not a Nostekoi.”
Before Drake could react, Joshua threw him down on the ground. At Alter speed he ran for the transport, hardly aware of what he was doing. He could hear Drake follow, but he leaped for the door anyway. He flew across the ground, into the air at an incredible height. He’d never made a jump like that before, but he landed solidly on his feet inside the transport. He did not want to think why he could do that. He could feel the machine part of him in the back of his head supplying the answer, offering calculations of trajectory, force and acceleration. He wanted to shut it off.
Suddenly Dylan was beside him, pointing his gun at Drake. The red plasma engulfed the Cypher, and then the door slid shut.
Joshua felt the transport lift off the ground. They didn’t have long. “That won’t kill him,” he said to Dylan.