Wild-Side
Piper sat on the edge of the table and rubbed the spot on her arm where blood had been drawn some twenty minutes before. There wasn’t so much as a mark left to indicate the bodily invasion and she hadn’t felt the sample as it had been extracted. Some kind of device was used to pull the blood from her body without so much as breaking the surface of her skin. No needle, no puncture, not even the slightest pain. Everywhere she turned, this place seemed infused with subtle yet unmistakable technological improvements that separated it from home in subtle but unmistakable ways. She looked at her hand resting on the table’s surface and made yet another observation. The table was made of stainless steel, but the texture and temperature didn’t feel right. She had been informed that it was a metallic-ceramic composite, which was, apparently, commonly used in construction here. It was lightweight, strong, and versatile. It could be formed in small amounts using a mobile fabrication device similar to the 3D printers she had seen at home, or it could be employed on a larger scale to create components for building-sized structures.
“Incredible,” she heard herself murmur.
“What’s that?” Lacy asked as she passed by, holding a circular ring the size of a dinner plate in her hands. She handed it to Gray.
“Your technology,” Piper said. “Everything from the augmented reality to the particle fabrication units. I’m just blown away by it all.”
Lacy’s face seemed to beam. She nodded to Gray and asked whether the ring-like device met his specifications. Gray appeared satisfied. Lacy then returned her attention to Piper. “Gray had the same reaction initially,” she said. “Your world is primitive in a lot of ways, but you have so many things we don’t.”
“What could we possibly have that you don’t?” Piper wondered.
“Art,” Gray said, slipping the collar around his neck. “Wild-Side has enough science to put Our-World to shame, but they have no understanding of the arts. No music, no painting, no poetry. They don’t even know what fiction is. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of writing something that wasn’t scientific or historic.”
Gray tapped a button or manipulated the corner of the ring he’d placed around his neck, and Piper gasped as a helmet materialized from the thin ring of material. In less than two seconds, particles grew, moved, and formed into a hard shell that surrounded his head in the shape of a conventional, albeit high-tech looking helmet.
Piper was on her feet, moving in for a closer look without realizing she had slid from the edge of the table. “That’s incredible,” she whispered, resting her hand on the side of Gray’s head.
Gray placed two fingers approximately where his temple would be. The smoky black visor dematerialized to reveal his eyes and nose. Only then did she notice how sleek and form-fitting the helmet really was. It added just about an inch to the overall diameter of his head while offering very little padding. Given what she had seen of the tech from this place already, she suspected the helmet was far more protective than anything from her world.
“Amazing,” Piper muttered.
Gray tapped a button on his wrist, and the helmet seemed to disintegrate. She quickly noticed that the material was deconstructing and receding back into the collar that originally housed it. While Gray seemed satisfied with the experience, he didn’t appear blown away by the exposure to the technology. “That’s good,” he said to Lacy. “The rest of the suit works the same way?”
Lacy nodded. “We modified the standard environmental suits we use in the Badlands so it wasn’t—what did you call it—reinventing the wheel? Tripp helped me update the deployment regulators to meet your specifications, and Doc Cormac altered the nano-graphene composite to increase protection.”
Wheeling a cart to the edge of the table where Piper had been sitting, Lacy placed a series of small rings on the surface. As she did, an AR image began to glow on the table. It projected the locations and uses of the rings as she positioned them precisely. The AR image depicted a human torso. Lacy placed a small ring at each of the figure’s wrists and ankles, while a larger ring was positioned at belt height. She placed a band around the center of the chest and then collected the collar ring from Gray, placing it at the corresponding spot on the table. Finally, putting her open hand over the center of the AR display, she closed her hand into a fist. As the fist formed, the nano-material moved in slow motion from each of the ring-like bands. It appeared in a semi-transparent state, hovering in virtual space above the table’s surface, but Piper found the demonstration both beautiful and creepy at the same time. The way the particulate nano-material swept across the body of the human figure felt…just wrong. It resembled some kind of insect-like swarm devouring the body.
“That’s at twenty percent normal speed,” Lacy said as the suit completely formed over the figure. The supine three-dimensional figure was entirely wrapped in black, form-fitting armor. It resembled a blend of a blackout football uniform and some kind of ceramic motorcycle leathers.
Gray leaned over the table and studied the image. He seemed to be paying close attention to the elbow and knee joints. “What about my mobility?”
Piper observed how the suit appeared to materialize from a series of separate rings situated at various parts of the body. It could deploy with tremendous speed and harden into incredibly strong shapes, all based on variables, allowing the suits to adjust to the forms of the individuals who would wear them. To her, this seemed like only partially fulfilled potential. At least a dozen questions began to jockey for position in her mind as she examined the AR projection.
Lacy shrugged. “Tripp promised you could do that dance everyone was talking about in the vid-stream last month. What was it called?”
Gray was already dismissing the comment. “Good enough. Thanks.”
“Wait,” Piper protested. “What dance? You guys dance? I thought you don’t have music.”
“We didn’t have music or dance,” Lacy said. “Gray has been bringing vids over and sharing culture from his world—well, your world, I suppose I should say.”
Something about this made Piper feel she needed to dig deeper. Maybe it was the way Gray wanted to move past the comment. Maybe it was the way he suddenly seemed reluctant to meet her eye. “What’s the video, Gray? What’s the dance.”
Gray muttered something that Piper couldn’t make out. She was ready to ask him to say it again, but it turned out that wasn’t needed.
“Oh, yeah,” Lacy giggled. “That’s right. Footloose.”
Doc Cormac walked into the room, displaying no interest in the armored human figure projected in AR on the table at its center. Instead, he handed a glass-like tablet to Lacy.
“It’s what we expected,” Lacy said after a brief examination of the tablet.
Cormac nodded, but he appeared troubled by the data despite her words. “That doesn’t explain the transmission vector. We designed the technology specifically to prevent transmission.”
I didn’t like how they talked as if Piper and I weren’t in the room. I could see it making Piper even more uncomfortable than she was. “Care to fill us in?” I pressed. “Keep in mind Piper just got here, and she knows even less about your tech than I do.”
The frustration on Cormac’s expression dissolved when he looked at Piper. “Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that this becomes more concerning when it doesn’t work. If Gray’s blood has the ability to spread our nanotech, it could have unforeseen impacts for your world. Your presence here could just be the beginning.
“Sometimes, I overlook the human aspect of the problem when I focus on the bigger picture. I don’t intend to cause you undue concern. We’ll figure this out. We just need to understand the transmission vector.”
I was holding Piper’s hand. Cormac didn’t understand her stress the way I did. However I’d done it, I’d brought her into this world. A world filled with dangers I couldn’t protect her from. At the same time, I couldn’t explain to her that her mistaken ability to cross over like this was the single biggest risk to her safety. She’d somehow accomplished what only Breslin and I had done so far. It was the secret Breslin would do anything to uncover.
Through all of this, Lacy continued studying the tablet Cormac had given her. “The tech was sexually transmitted,” she said suddenly. “It had to be. It’s the obvious common denominator.”
Cormac was already shaking his head. “Can’t be,” he said. His tone resembled an exhausted man who didn’t want to waste time on the obvious. Still, there was a touch of impatience in his voice. He was worn out yet willing to listen to anyone searching for a solution. “Look at the version of the release used on Gray. Rev 45.23.765 was introduced so he could communicate with us. But before he returned to his world for the first time, we updated to Rev 45.23.771. Rev 771 was the first barrier against sexual transmission.”
Piper leaned close and began whispering in my ear. “They’ve been using this tech for how long?”
“At least a hundred years,” I whispered back. “It’s probably much longer. There’s a lot you need to know about these people.”
“I’ll concede that. My point is, why did they only add a patch to prevent sexual transmission when you arrived?”
There was a lot to unpack. I didn’t think this was the right time or place to try to explore the Seeley’s long lifespan, culture, or their complete inexperience with the concept of sexual intercourse.
Lacy pointed her tablet toward the wall and swiped the content to a large screen for everyone to see. It appeared to be some kind of software change log. Apparently, even across worlds, the need to document code changes was universal. I couldn’t be sure if this was a positive sign for the multi-verse.
“Rev 771 protected against sexual transmission as we understood it then,” Lacy explained. “That transition protocol was updated with Rev 45.23.869 more recently when our understanding of sexual intercourse evolved. Gray’s tech wasn’t updated until his visit three transitions ago.”
Cormac walked slowly to the table where the helmet and body armor were still projected in AR. I waved my hand, and the projection disappeared. Cormac didn’t seem to notice. He lowered himself wearily onto a stool and absently slipped off his glasses, rubbing slowly at the bridge of his nose. I’d seen him do this more times than I could count. He did it when he was processing information related to a concern he took very seriously.
“Hold on,” Piper said as she slid off the table beside me. “When you say your understanding of sexual intercourse changed, what does that mean? How does sex change?”
Lacy was about to speak, but I raised a hand. I wanted to frame the conversation first. She wasn’t likely to start from square one—at least not as Piper required it. “The Seeley, as a race, don’t reproduce. Until I explained the mechanics, no one here had practical experience.”
Piper gazed at me with what I can only describe as a slack-jawed expression. “Do they…”
I grinned. “Their anatomy is the same as yours and mine. It’s their culture that’s different. The biology seems to be there; the biological imperative is different.” I wanted to explain how this was just the tip of the iceberg regarding my questions about Wild-Side’s overall architecture. But there was too much to unpack; much of it was a private conversation I wanted to have. In many ways, the people and culture of Wild-Side were genuine and pristine. People were what they seemed to be. But there were a few dark corners to their culture—corners I intended to explore, as they stood to impact me, and through me, maybe even Our-World. I needed to be careful.
“We didn’t have familiarity,” Lacy corrected. “Until the videos. That’s when we realized there was a transmission vector we hadn’t accounted for.”
“Videos?” Piper glanced in confusion.
I waved my hand at Lacy to end this part of the conversation. I wished it had been that easy. The look on Piper’s face told me it wouldn’t happen, so I explained. “Wild-Side—The Seeley,” I clarified, “have a very different culture.” I was trying to frame this just right but already knew it would look very bad for me. “They have no art or music. Their people excel at science and mathematics but have no concepts of architecture, painting, sculpture, or fiction.”
Piper stared at me. “And?” She somehow stretched the single word into three syllables.
“I can’t bring anything with me during the crossing,” I continued. “Nothing physical. But data is merely information, and I can transfer metric tons of that thanks to the nanotech,” I tapped the side of my head for emphasis. “Music, movies, books, comics, digital copies of art? You name it. I guess you could say it’s the biggest theft of intellectual property in history.” I shrugged. “I like to think it was for a good cause. The people here ate it up.”
I left out how some people didn’t appreciate my exposing them to culture from another world. For every two people who embraced what I offered, there was at least one who criticized it. I had more than my share of detractors on Wild-Side.
Piper studied my expression as if she were waiting for something. “So, when you say they learned about sex for the first time, was that from the movies and books you shared?”
I nodded.
“And, when you say you shared movies and books, what exactly do you mean?”
I shrugged and avoided her gaze. I believe that was my downfall. “Feature films and television. Books and film from across history.”
“Amazing material,” Lacy said. “But it was the pornography that allowed us to fine-tune Rev 869.” She said it with such upbeat enthusiasm that I actually saw Piper do a double take before she glared at me.
“Pornography.” Her tone was as rough as gravel. “You’re the ambassador to an entirely new world, and your contribution is to share pornography with them?” Like Cormac, she was now rubbing her eyes with a weary expression.
Lacy appeared puzzled. “It’s among the most popular content,” she said. “Everyone’s talking about it.”
Piper crossed her arms and glared at me. “No doubt.” She looked at Cormac and then at Lacy. “What exactly about the smut caused you to update the tech?”
Cormac appeared to have taken a proverbial knee in this conversation. I don’t think he was relishing his place on the sideline. It was more that he was clever enough not to participate.
Lacy looked confused. “Smut?” She laughed. “Oh, I get it. Once we realized how creative you all can be with your lovemaking, we understood that conventional intercourse wasn’t the only means of transmission.”
Piper now appeared confused.
I groaned and averted my eyes. I’d realized where this was going some time back but didn’t see a way to pull the ripcord. There was no way this would end with my dignity intact, so I leaned into it. “Oral,” I said. “Until they saw the dreaded porn, the idea of oral sex had never crossed the virgin white of their pure, untainted minds.”
Piper looked me square in the eyes, offered a slow, dramatic shake of her head, and then walked slowly out of the room.
I glanced at the Doc and stuffed my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans. “Well, that went well,” I said.
He looked shocked. “You think that went well?”
I forgot. I also brought sarcasm to Wild-Side.
Tripp’s eyes were wide and shining like polished coins. He stood behind something low and wide, draped with what must have been a bed sheet. I think he had been watching too many videos from back home because the idea of an unveiling was childlike and dramatic in a way that seemed to confuse Doc and Lacy. For her part, Piper just seemed confuddled.
“I matched your specifications precisely,” Tripp was saying. “The idea of a gyroscope was interesting, though a bit quaint. The central processor made it entirely unnecessary, but the way you explained it helped me understand what you were aiming for in terms of ultimate functionality.” He seemed at a loss for words for a long second as his eyes wandered into the distance in thought. “And more importantly, how you might manipulate those functions. That was the hard part, actually.”
The Doc succumbed to his puzzlement and attempted to lift the draped corner of the sheet. Tripp swatted his hand away and shooed him with a wordless, harsh scowl.
“With all due respect for your showmanship,” I said, “I think you should get on with the show before you lose your captive audience.” While I respected Tripp’s pride in this matter, the clock was ticking, and I needed to leave for Oakland as soon as possible.
Lacy was about to speak when Tripp took a deep breath and dramatically pulled the sheet away from the large object in one triumphant motion. The low-slung device showcased smooth curves and contours, colored in subtly varying shades of matte black.
Piper glanced between me and the device, her voice barely more than a whisper. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
The Doc walked slowly around the device, pulling off his glasses as he moved. He stooped low and squinted at the machine as if trying to discern its purpose or mentally dissect its design. I waited for him to speak, but he was slack-jawed until he completed an entire circuit of the contraption.
The machine sat on the floor, featuring what resembled a seat and handlebars that were akin to a blend of a dirt bike and a snowmobile. A short windscreen and fender extended from the front of the machine to deflect and shape the wind. However, unlike a dirt bike or snowmobile, it lacked a conventional drive train. The vehicle was situated at the center of four large, bladed fans, with one positioned at each quadrant of the machine’s circumference.
I couldn’t help but smile. Tripp had truly outdone himself, and judging by the expression on his face, he was aware of it.
“It’s…” Piper mumbled, appearing to search for the words. “A quadcopter bike?”
Tripped seemed to hop in place where he stood. “Oh, not bad. I was going with Hover-Airbike, but that’s good, too!”
Doc Cormac looked at me, his face completely pale. His bushy brows knit together as he spoke slow, deliberate words, as if testing them for validity. “You intend to ride that?” He pointed vaguely skyward with a shaky finger and looked as though he might become sick at any moment.
“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line,” I said. “And the fastest route to Oakland, without teleportation, is by air.”
The Doc walked over to a stool and sat down. He seemed to have aged suddenly.
Lacy simply stared at the Hover-Airbike, not having moved or commented at all.
Piper slid up close to my side. “Is this the first time you’ve seen this thing?” she asked in a quiet voice. There was neither concern nor apprehension in her tone.
I nodded.
“But you designed it?”
I nodded again. “My ideas, Tripp’s engineering.”
“You didn’t think he’d pull it off, did you?”
I had to pause for a moment to consider the question. Tripp was brilliant. He’d transformed some of my most outrageous ideas into reality. What had I been thinking when I sketched this one up for him?
“He might have finished it a bit faster than I anticipated,” I admitted.
Piper rubbed her chin in mock consideration. “It’s a radical idea. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Any sane person would put it through extensive testing before risking their life by actually trying to fly it, you know?”
I nodded but said nothing.
“But that was the purpose of the helmet and armor you just showed me, wasn’t it?”
I shrugged. “I always wanted to be a test pilot.”
Lacy glanced at me and Piper. “This is from one of those videos where the hungry dog was chasing the roadrunner, right?”
A hand going to her mouth to cover a toothy grin, Piper said, “sums this up perfectly.”
I twisted the throttle, and the Airbike shot instantly vertical as if it had been launched from a cannon. The muffled whirr of the four props slicing through the late afternoon air was surprisingly quiet. Since the powerful motors were battery-operated, it was the only sound to be heard. Unless you count the gasp of excitement that escaped my lips as I watched the entirety of Portland shrink below my left foot pedal.
The throttle was controlled just like every motorcycle I’d ever ridden, easily adjusted with a twist of the right handlebar grip. I let off just as I noticed the altimeter that had been added to the corner of my HUD. I’d passed five thousand eight hundred feet in a matter of seconds, which explained why my ears had popped with a headache-inducing ferocity.
The key thing to remember about this contraption is that it is in no way beholden to the laws of aerodynamics. That is what makes a quad-rotor system so ingenious. The front left and rear right rotors spin in one direction while the front right and rear left spin in the opposite. It isn’t obvious to the pilot, or even anyone watching the machine in flight, but by precisely controlling the speed of the rotors, the craft can hover in place or power through the sky at remarkable speeds. In many ways, it has the ideal performance characteristics of both a helicopter and a fixed-wing plane.
A typical quadcopter gains forward momentum by pitching forward. The faster the craft flies, the steeper the forward pitch. This is also true for Tripp’s craft, but with some mitigating effects. He built a subtle tilt into the rotors and the fourteen-inch-high ducts surrounding them, so when I accelerated—at least in the low and mid-range of the performance curve—the fans tilted by up to ten degrees. The idea was to prevent me from feeling like I was riding the inclined side of a seesaw when traveling at moderately high speeds.
“Did I just hear you giggle?” Piper’s voice came through the com channel in my helmet.
I brought the Airbike to a hover and marveled at how well it balanced itself. Fortunately, Tripp got that part of the design right on his first attempt. I had flown radio-controlled quadcopter drones that operated under almost the same principles. When the auto-leveling controls malfunctioned on those, it often resulted in aggressive and catastrophic crashes. Since I was then sitting at just under six thousand feet, my crash would have put all my past crashes to shame.
“I’m pretty sure what you heard was a manly grunt of appreciation for Tripp’s engineering skills,” I said with a grin so wide it had to be visible over the audio channel.
The sound that escaped from Piper resembled a grunt more than any noise I had made. She began to speak, but Tripp interrupted her.
“Ah, Gray? Did you mean to go that high?” he asked. “Because I can’t see you. Is my telemetry accurate? We talked about you staying close to the treetops for the test run, right?”
Piper cleared her throat. “That’s my recollection of the conversation.”
I continued to hover and turned the handlebars to the right. The Airbike spun slowly on its axis, resembling the tiniest doughnut in the world…six thousand feet in the air. “This is amazing,” I mumbled to myself.
“Gray?” Piper said. “Can you hear me?”
I was observing the Airbike. The propeller blades spun so quickly that they were nearly invisible. All the model drones I had flown featured props that shrieked and ripped through the air. They sounded like banshees whenever they did anything more than idle on the launch pad. These were surprisingly quiet despite their size and evident power. I wasn’t an engineer, so the experience left me wondering if Tripp had done something to minimize the noise. Perhaps it was a result of these props being orders larger than I had experienced.
“I’m here,” I said. “Just taking in the sights.” And I was. Rolling hills of forested land stretched out in all directions as far as I could see. Portland was still directly below me, so as far as control went, I was doing great. I hadn’t strayed off course with my hover. The city was a little larger than a coffee cup in the distance below me.
“We know,” Tripp said. “Remember? We can see what you see?”
I grinned once more. They had access to a point-of-view feed from my helmet, which live-streamed everything I looked at back to them in real time.
I spun faster, turning my doughnut into a pirouette. I wanted to see what the Airbike could do—where its performance hit a wall—so I would know what was possible. That turned out to be a bad idea. The machine spun far faster than I could tolerate, and I had to stop the spin after just a few seconds.
“Well done,” Tripp said. “You provided some excellent performance analytics from that maneuver. What else are you capable of?”
“Huh,” I replied. “That’s a good question. Here, hold my beer!”
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Piper and knew she was about to object to the idea. Like me, she understood it was already too late. Shoving the handlebars forward, I feathered the throttle. The Airbike performed exactly as I expected. It felt like I had just launched off the top of a bobsled run with a booster rocket strapped to my ass.
The rebel yell that tore from my throat was as involuntary as it was fitting for the experience. The altimeter in the corner of my HUD spun like a national debt calculation, only in reverse, as the trees north of the city rushed to greet me. Voices filled the comm channel, but I couldn’t process the words. My senses were on fire with so much tactile and visual input that something had to give. Listening to backseat drivers was simply out of the question.
I’m sure the G-force I was experiencing was displayed somewhere on my HUD. In this case, it would be more like a negative G-force, as holding onto the Airbike during a power dive took everything I had. With a white-knuckled grip on the handlebars, my knees pinching the sides of the seat, and my feet pressed as far into the steering toggles as I could manage, I suddenly understood what it felt like to ride a bullet.
As I reached two hundred feet, I eased back on the handlebars. The front of the Airbike responded instantly, and I was flying level and parallel to the forest canopy. It took me several seconds to realize I’d done it, but I had adjusted the throttle as I pulled out of the dive. The Airbike’s control system was completely intuitive.
Building on the idea, I gently turned to the right. Normally, this would have spun the Airbike completely in place. If this happened by itself and was turned far enough, it would have spun me like a top and left me flying backward. This wasn’t the way I wanted to turn the Airbike to navigate a corner. To do that, I needed to add some roll. That required me to slightly lower my right toe. With the roll added to the right turn of the handlebars, the Airbike cornered as if I were using a banked highway exit ramp.
“Nice!” I heard Tripp laugh over the comm channel. “You picked that up quickly. I wasn’t sure you could do that without an automated assist.”
Since they weren’t intuitive, we discussed allowing machine intelligence to manage the combination of turning and cornering maneuvers. He mentioned that the technology would make the machine much simpler to fly. I contended that the higher-level automation likely wouldn’t operate in the dead zones. I’m not entirely sure he grasped my second point, but there was no arguing against the first. Navigating the dead zones was a primary requirement for this new aircraft type, so he built the flight controls to my specifications.
I turned back toward the city but slowed to half my previous speed. Leaning back from the handlebars, I let go and sat upright on the seat. The Airbike slowed quickly and came to a hover, maintaining altitude with what seemed to me impressive precision.
“The gyroscope works like a top,” I said.
Piper laughed, but Tripp missed the joke. “I guess analog tech has its uses after all,” he admitted.
I looked down at my torso and suddenly realized why holding onto the Airbike during the power-dive had been easier than I expected when the machine first dropped out from under me. A pencil-thick tether had somehow appeared from each side of the seat and connected to small D-rings on the back of each hip. These D-rings hadn’t been on my belt when I first climbed onto the bike.
“Hey Tripp,” I said in a calm, completely non-confrontational tone. “Did you forget to tell me something about my gear and this machine? Maybe it has to do with the two conspiring to tether me into bondage?”
Something came from Tripp that could have been “Huh?” Then, I heard laughter. It was followed by what sounded like hushed words. I can only assume he was talking with Piper.
“No kidding?” Piper was saying a few seconds later when she seemed to be coming back on the line. “Tripp’s afraid you’re going to be mad. I told him that’s not the case. I might be, though. He said you activated an emergency restraint system. Apparently, it’s a feature designed to engage only if the machine is—” her tone sharpened “—out of control and about to crash. It was a safety system, so he didn’t think it would be necessary.”
I considered explaining that I needed to know these things. If it engages in the wrong conditions, it could work against me instead of for me. Then I reconsidered. Tripp had done amazing work, and in fairness, I was giving the machine a tougher test run than I had agreed to. It just performed too aggressively; it was hard to see it as a Prius when it was more like a…Ferrari.
“If you need to override the restraint,” Tripp said, “you can tap the big red button on the dashboard display. It will appear as soon as the restraints engage. Hit the button and the restraints will disintegrate. You’re stuck with passive safety measures after that.”
“Wait,” Piper interrupted. “What are passive safety measures?”
“The big red button is a fantastic idea,” I told Tripp. I didn’t want Piper worrying too much about the safety of the Airbike or what we called safety measures. I was hoping Tripp could read between the lines. “I was just thinking that an emergency release would be ideal.”
“And if you can’t get to the button,” Tripp continued, “the system will respond to a verbal command.” The words eject, eject, eject scrolled across my heads-up display. “I suggest you don’t say them out loud right now.”
“You must be joking,” Piper mumbled.
I laughed. “Tripp and the Doc have watched Top Gun at least half a dozen times. By the way, speaking of the Doc, he’s been quiet. What does he think of the maiden flight?”
A few seconds of silence followed. I was about to repeat the question when Piper said, “He ejected about ten seconds after you launched. I don’t think the idea of air travel agrees with him. He wasn’t looking too good—airsickness, if I had to guess.”
I nodded. “He watched most of Top Gun with his eyes closed.”
Piper started to say something but decided not to finish.
I circled the city three times, each lap faster than the last, then took the Airbike in for a landing.
As I stepped off the machine, Piper was there. She threw her arms around me the second my helmet dropped back into the ring at my collar. “That’s amazing,” she said.
“Which part? The hoverbike or the magic helmet?” I said.
“Both,” she said. “All of it. This entire place. I have nanotech in my blood, so I can understand another language.”
“And speak it. You’re speaking Delsh, now.”
Her brows knitted. When she spoke, she seemed to be tasting the words. “I am? I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t realize it for a while either. It had to be explained to me. The technology makes it all so natural that you don’t even notice it after a while. At first, the tech does the work of translating. Before long, I guess our minds start doing the work on their own. It becomes natural in a way that we don’t even notice the transition.”
She stared as if trying to decide if I was joking with her.
I shrugged. “I felt the same way. There’s more. Tripp, Doc Cormac, Lacy, and the others? You know that those aren’t their real names, right?”
That really confused her.
“For all intents and purposes, we’re on an alien world. Well, it’s a world alien to us. Does it make sense for the people here to have names like Steve, Bob, and Tom? Do you think names are that universal? They aren’t back home. Different nations have different naming conventions. Tripp, Lacy, and the Doc? Those are names I sort of mapped to them as part of the rationalization process.”
With that, she simply looked concerned, possibly about my sanity.
“I didn’t come up with the name; this is what they told me. Apparently, it’s just how it works. Our minds need a way to sort things out—a way to rationalize all the new information. There’s a new language, with new writing and spoken words. It takes months for even the most intelligent and talented individuals to process this information and learn it. Technology simplifies this with shortcuts. Some of those shortcuts map Delsh names and words to those we already know. This allows our minds to focus on the big picture instead of struggling with written and spoken language issues.”
Piper watched my eyes intently as I spoke. I could see the wonder in her expression. “I don’t even know what to do with that. How do I process that?”
I shrugged. “Don’t. If I hadn’t told you about it, you wouldn’t know any different. But given the precarious position we’re in right now, the better you understand the tech of this world, the better your chances of understanding the people. They only know their tech. Their culture is based on science and technology. They’ve only recently begun to grasp art and culture.”
“And pornography,” she muttered. “The crowning achievement of your humanitarian mission. How do you feel about that?”
I was twenty minutes into the flight and already comfortable with all the new information available on the perimeter of my HUD. Since it was specific to piloting the Airbike, it appeared only when I was in the air. Stats detailing my airspeed, altitude, and less critical information like temperature were readily accessible. The temperature didn’t directly impact me early in the flight thanks to the flight suit. It was better described as a cross between armor and an environmental suit. The tech was originally designed as an environmental suit, but it resembled motorcycle leathers—only without the leather. It was far sleeker and more comfortable than any hazmat suit I’d ever seen, and so far, it had protected me from the cold temperatures at high altitude. The air was thin at fourteen thousand feet, and according to my HUD, it would have been uncomfortable as well. This was important because, once I reached the dead zone, I would lose the use of the suit, my HUD, and pretty much all of my tech.
For now, I focused on the thin orange line in my HUD that indicated my flight plan and enjoyed the experience. I maintained a steady one hundred seventy miles per hour and had yet to reach the maximum range of the Airbike’s throttle. One seventy was the limit of the comfort zone for sustained flight, at least at my current altitude. Any faster, and the buffeting force of the wind became fatiguing, even with the protection of my suit. Once I reached the dead zone, I would have to fly lower and slower.
I also needed to fly line of sight. It reminded me of the unpleasantness just before my departure.
Doc displayed the aerial map with Portland in the lower right and Oakland in the upper left. Between the two lay nearly three thousand miles of semi-mountainous terrain and plains, blanketed in endless forest. A valley lay almost at the center of the map, bisecting the journey and depicted in a foggy green. “The ion storm has stagnated over the dead zone,” Doc Cormac explained. “On its own, this is not unusual. What is unusual is the size of the storm.” He spread his hands over the surface of the table to enlarge the video of the three-dimensional map. “The surface area of the storm has grown. It now covers more than just the dead zone. This suggests it won’t be dispersing in the near future.”
I nodded. “So, my trip is on?” I confirmed while glancing at the countdown on my wrist display, which showed forty-nine hours and sixteen minutes.
The Doc seemed to be reading my mind. “For once, it feels like time is on our side.”
He thought I had time to reach Portland, interview Mara, and return before I bounced back to my world. It was a solid plan. I, on the other hand, was more concerned about what would happen to Piper when that moment came. I started to express this, but the Doc raised a hand to cut me off. “Take care of the interview,” he said. “Let us figure out what’s happened to Piper. We need to conduct more tests. My suspicion is she will either rebound back to your world when you do, or she will stay here until we find a way to manually trigger the transit. I can’t say for sure until we gather more information.
“Until we gather more data, all you can do is wait. If we understand what Mara saw, we might finally begin to understand what caused all of this to unfold.”
I met Piper’s gaze. She gave me a weary smile and a slight nod. If she was okay with the plan, who was I to argue? Besides, I’d been waiting months to talk with Mara. I had a feeling she was the key to understanding Breslin.
Lacy pointed to the orange line projected on the map. It was a winding route stretching from Portland, entering the amorphous green cloud over the dead zone and extending out the far side before leading to Oakland. “Here’s your route,” she explained, spreading her hands over the table to draw closer to the map. The display focused on the point where the line entered the cloud of green haze on the right side. “When you enter, as you know, all of your tech will fail. Navigation will become a problem.”
“I’ll be stuck with line of sight,” I said.
She nodded. Cormac and Tripp looked distinctly uncomfortable with this part of the plan, just as I expected. The people of Wild-Side were entirely dependent on their technology. The thought of having it taken away was like losing the senses of touch, taste, or smell. It was a part of them. “It’s why you have to enter the zone here,” she continued, sliding the map across the table so more of the dead zone was visible. “This ridge line starts approximately seventy-five miles from the border. If you follow it,” she gestured to shrink the map, “it will lead you out the far side.”
Piper and I both leaned in over the map. The geography of Wild-Side was obviously more unfamiliar to us than it was to everyone else in the room. I observed as Piper’s eyes navigated the gnarled path of the rocky ridge, snaking and twisting west and northwest across hundreds of miles of wilderness. It somehow remained visible through the dense thickets, so calling it a ridge might be an understatement. Some of this land could be classified as a low mountain region. This realization made me appreciate Tripp’s work on the Airbike even more.
Piper turned the display and zoomed in on a small teardrop-shaped lake less than a third of the way across the dead zone. When she did, a fuzzy gray region became apparent a short distance just north of the lake. It resembled a glitch in the map’s rendering or a loss of resolution. “What’s this?” she asked.
“The Lergorn-Besht?” Lacy asked, her expression filled with confusion.
The Doc zoomed out the view until only the teardrop-shaped lake and the orange line directing past the nearby ridge were visible. “That’s not important,” he said, glaring at me. “You’ll be traveling at night, and your tech won’t be functional, so it’s crucial to move as quickly as possible.”
The brusk response from the old man was uncharacteristic. I could see the concern on Piper’s face. She knew she’d touched on a taboo point; she just didn’t know how or why. I shot her a smile that was more reassuring than I felt. I’d never seen the Doc react like that before. I could see the question on Piper’s lips, so I gave her the slightest shake of my head to warn her off. Concern grew in the pinch of her eyes, but she let the subject drop.
“We know the Elend are aware of our inability to observe these regions,” Lacy said. “So it’s safe to assume they will have a presence.” She looked pointedly at me. “Minimize your time in the zone. Get in and out as quickly as possible. Without your tech, you won’t stand a chance.”
A brilliant, transparent barrier of red light appeared on the horizon, and I smiled. “Nothing subtle about that,” I muttered to myself.
“Did you say something?” Piper’s voice crackled over the com channel. Conversation had faded some time ago, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. No one wanted to voice it, but the anxiety surrounding my trip into the dead zone was palpable. To me, the stress was unnecessary. The Airbike was my secret weapon. As long as I was airborne, the Elend couldn’t reach me.
“I’m just enjoying how they idiot-proofed the border of the dead zone,” I clarified.
“I’ve been thinking about that. It should be visible any moment now.”
Pushing the handlebars forward and twisting the throttle, I entered a slow power dive that reduced altitude and narrowed the gap to the border in just over a minute.
After communicating my intentions to the team back at the Portland base, I double-checked my entry vector and breached the barrier. The wall of red existed only in my HUD, so it vanished the moment I broke the vertical plane. All visual feedback from my HUD went dark. In the same instant, the panels of my suit disassembled—which means the nano-component construction withdrew into the bands at my neck, wrists, waist, knees, and ankles. Until that moment, I’d assumed the gear would reactivate once I reached the far side of the dead zone. With all my technology suddenly gone, I felt exposed and vulnerable. I’ll admit to feeling a small degree of anxiety when I considered what would happen if it didn’t reappear at the other end of the zone.
Losing my HUD wasn’t so bad. Even having my suit dissolve around me didn’t make my skin crawl. But experiencing all of this mid-flight was a little problematic. If I hadn’t been prepared for it, things could have gone poorly. The gloves on my hands felt like they had vaporized. They were there one second and gone the next. It was as if the size and shape of the system controls changed ever so slightly in the span of two heartbeats. The boots I wore weren’t nano-generated. I had prepared for this, and going barefoot wasn’t an option, so aside from wearing jeans and a t-shirt, I also wore conventional boots instead of the type that were part of the automated suit.
I’d also take more practical precautions, slowing to a walking pace and flying at an altitude just a few feet above the tree tops as I crossed the border at the edge of the dead zone. Taking time to catch my breath for the first thirty seconds, I ensured that the Airbike was still fully functional and checked to see if I’d stayed on course. To be honest, the Airbike was in perfect shape, but when I double-checked my position, I discovered I’d drifted a bit. Apparently, I’d been more distracted by my dissolving uniform and evaporating tech than I realized.
Gaining altitude, I pushed deeper into the zone. After a few minutes, my eyes adjusted to the ambient light of the waxing half-moon. The forest a hundred feet below me seemed to roil in foggy shadows as my Airbike whispered onward. It took almost ten minutes to find the start of the ridge line that would serve as my path through these badlands. Once I had located it, I donned a pair of transparent safety glasses, throttled up to ninety miles an hour, and focused on the air before me and the ridge below.
Almost an hour after entering the dead zone, the teardrop-shaped lake came into view. I accelerated at the sight. My HUD was gone, but I had found a refreshingly old-school instrumentation dashboard at the center of my handlebars. A small panel of what I had taken to be flat black plastic blinked to life a couple of minutes after I entered the dead zone. It promptly played a short recorded video of Tripp’s smiling face, explaining how he had found a workaround for my lack of conventional AR tech. Apparently, he was inspired by what he referred to as the quaint technology I constantly carried around in my pocket back home.
He was talking about my mobile phone. Mimicking the size and shape of the screen, he turned it sideways and attached it to the bars of the Airbike. It included magnetic compass navigation, barometer, altitude awareness, and a clock. He was thoughtful enough to explain that this represented all the primitive technology he could fit into the outdated form factor. Silently, I wished he had thought to consult me before unveiling the surprise. There was probably some type of analog communication system we could have similarly integrated. But as I looked out over the lake and headed north, I reconsidered. I wasn’t about to miss the chance for an unsupervised visit to one of the restricted Outland locations. Anyone who knew me should have expected as much.
In my mind, I envisioned the grayed-out location on the map. It was eight-tenths of a mile north of a specific feature at the lake’s northern perimeter. The moonlight and the cloudless sky made the lake a perfect landmark, so setting my northerly course was trivial. The navigation system on the Airbike didn’t track the eight-tenths of a mile as precisely as I’d hoped, but it got me to the general vicinity. Unfortunately, no landmarks were visible from the air in the dark, so I descended through a small break in the trees that, by my estimation, should have put me within spitting distance of the low-resolution blob represented on the map.
The darkness beneath the tree canopy initially seemed absolute. I couldn’t see a foot beyond the edge of the Airbike’s rotor ducts. The silence of the night grated on my nerves. Landing in the middle of the wilderness made me feel vulnerable, and I suddenly became very aware that something could snatch me from the darkness before I even knew it was there. My landing had been quiet but far from silent. It had been enough to disturb the nearby wildlife, so the creatures remained silent and still until they figured out what to make of it me.
Long seconds passed—maybe even minutes; it’s hard to tell. Finally, my eyes adjusted. Seemingly at the same time, the sounds of natural life returned to the surrounding wilderness. The bump and skitter of small feet had never been such a relief. This was probably the moment when my heart should have been racing, but it wasn’t. I was acutely aware that my tech was offline—no augmented night vision or hypersensitive hearing. It reminded me how reliant I’d become on the bio-mods. At least I still had the borderline psychopathic stress response that kept me calm under pressure, which was all my own.
Yay, me.
My gun belt was stored under the seat in a compartment just like the one I had on the first motorcycle I ever owned. Along with it, I found a small first aid kit, three boxes of ammo, and two flashlights—one large and one small. Tripp was as practical as he was smart. I had asked for the gun and the ammo, but the rest of the gear was entirely his idea.
As I began to walk away from the Airbike, it struck me how easily I could lose the machine in the thick underbrush and foliage. Stepping just a dozen feet away, it became invisible in the darkness and overgrowth. If I got even slightly turned around, it might be morning before I found my way back… if ever.
I set the timer on my phone for sixty minutes, turned the volume to maximum, and wedged it in the crook of the handlebars. In a worst-case scenario, I would make a ruckus that could completely compromise my position, but I would find my way back. Hopefully, I could evacuate before anything unfriendly in the area got to the Airbike before me.
After about ten minutes of stumbling around in the dark, I’ll admit I started to question my motivations for this midnight excursion. I knew something was out here, but I was coming to terms with the fact that I didn’t know what it was. The Seeley had been frustratingly vague when it came to any explanation of what the Lergorn-Besht was. I noted some association with the Outland locations I’d seen on maps, but the little information I had provided no clues about what the sites represented. I’d assumed they were significant locations, but they could be anything. Ideas I hadn’t considered flooded my mind as I tripped over vines and crawled over logs in the dark. This could be a gravesite, the location of some rare vegetation, or the spot where an artifact was discovered… my mind began to run wild with possibilities. Almost all of them ended with scenarios where the object of my search was either invisible to me because I wouldn’t recognize it if I saw it, or it was long gone since the Seeley had collected and recovered it long ago.
The mark on the map might have indicated anything.
Still, this location wasn’t the first Outland spot I’d seen on a Wild-Side map. It was the first I’d had direct access to, so it seemed unwise to pass up the chance to gather more information. At the same time, I was on the clock. I couldn’t burn too much time wandering in the woods. I needed to reach Oakland and talk with Mara before I bounced back to My-World. If I didn’t, too much time would slip away.
I was deciding whether to keep looking or start making my way back to the Airbike when I walked into a wall—a literal wall. It was composed of rough-hewn stone blocks and mostly covered in thick green lichen. In daylight, I might have passed it by, as the color was so well camouflaged with the jungle. For me, the wall had been invisible in the foliage and the dark, so I only noticed it when my skull rebounded off a small section of exposed stone.
Needless to say, a stone wall in the wilderness is not a natural occurrence, so I instantly knew I was onto something. Since the wall disappeared into a swell of rapidly rising earth fifteen feet to my left, I followed it to the right. Fifty feet later, the ground fell out from under me, and I took a tumble.
I didn’t fall far. I found myself on a path cut into the steep slope of the hill to the north. The path resembled a wide gutter filled with years of composting debris. The scent of the decaying vegetation was sickly sweet, and I was standing in it up to my knees. As I shifted my feet, I expected the ground beneath me to squish and move, but it didn’t. I was standing on stone. I could feel it beneath the soles of my boots. As I slid them forward and backward, then side to side, I could feel seams in the bricks that made up the path at the bottom of the accumulated mire.
I was on some kind of path. The jungle was behind me, so I focused my attention on the yawning black space I’d taken for a recess in the wall that seemed to border a sizable swell in the earth directly to the north. I’d been hesitant to use my light. One flick of the switch while out in the woods would give away my position to anything within hundreds of yards. As I slipped into the mouth of what I suddenly realized was a tunnel, that concern faded away.
The walls of the tunnel were made of brick, the same rough-hewn stone block I’d face-planted on to make this discovery. The stone was less overgrown with lichen, if only by half. The path was wide enough for maybe two people to walk shoulder to shoulder. In that scenario, I imagined they wouldn’t need to high-step through the remnants of rotting vegetation to do so. The smell was pungent, but whatever the plant matter was, it was sweeter than sour. That was something. Plus, the slimy vegetation was growing less thick as we moved further into the tunnel.
The path was sloping upward at a steep angle when I reached the door. It stopped me in my tracks not so much because it was an obstruction, but mainly because it was a literal door. This thing was made of steel or something similar and had technology integrated into it. Mounted in the door frame to the left was what could only be a biometric palm reader. Incongruous, a dinner plate-sized spinning release handle was positioned in the middle of the door. It resembled something stolen from a Cold War-era fallout shelter, upgraded with biometrics.
Most troubling was the logo etched into the steel. A patina of wispy mold covered the metal surface of the barrier, but the logo was relatively easy to see. The sans-serif letter R, turned backward and pressed back-to-back with the letter B in the same typeface, served as the logo for a company well-known for its development of high-end bunkers and panic rooms since sometime in the nineteen-eighties. Radon Brucker had even made headlines for a time when they began purchasing old, decommissioned underground missile silos and transforming them into luxury doomsday prepper retreats for the affluent mobile.
But that was back on My-World. Seeing the RB logo on a bunker door on Wild-Side was… unsettling.
I placed my hand on the biometric scanner, but nothing happened. There was no surprise there. It looked positively ancient. Even though it didn’t make sense, judging by the corrosion on the non-corrosive surface, this door had seen better days. It had either been sprayed with some kind of caustic fluid or was just old—very old.
I turned the wheel at the center of the door. It resisted, but it moved. This also felt somehow wrong. I had to strain to turn the wheel, as the mechanism seemed to operate on brittle or long-corroded gears. Knowing what I did about the company that built this system and the purpose it was designed for, either they had cut corners in the construction, or something unusual had occurred here.
Then again, I was looking at a bunker from My-World, and it seemed to be embedded in the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere on Wild-Side. I had more questions than answers. A lot of math just wasn’t adding up.
The calculations only got worse when I opened the door. I found myself in a small vestibule that turned out to be an airlock. On the other side, I found a door exactly like the one I had just opened. It also had a biometric panel and a spinning handle. Thankfully, the biometrics of the second door had been disabled as well, so I made short work of it. The mechanism of the second door functioned more smoothly than the first, but it was stiff and seemed to have suffered from a distinct lack of maintenance, if not so much exposure to the elements.
After passing through the airlock, I found myself in a large room divided into aisles by crude slotted booths. The floors were smooth steel plates that reminded me of a ship’s decking. The ceiling was about twenty feet overhead and made of more steel plates. The room was massive. The near wall resembled a ship’s bulkhead, while the distant walls were far enough away to be beyond the reach of my flashlight beam.
I walked slowly across the cold metal floor, panning my light over the strange aisles and rows of booths that divided the area into orderly sections. The stalls had an air of familiarity, though it took me a moment to reconcile the incongruity. Finally, I stepped into a booth and examined the feeding trough hanging from the wall at the far end. I had seen this same configuration on a much smaller scale when I visited a friend’s family farm as a kid.
Cows?
Someone was raising cows on Wild-Side?
I’ll admit to seeing some strange things in the last two years. Waking up naked in another world, making friends with a race of people who, despite my best efforts, don’t seem to like me no matter how much of my blood I spill trying to protect them, and technology the likes of which I haven’t even read about. But somehow, the idea of cows is throwing me for a loop in a way that will be the last straw.
Last straw…you might think that’s a cow joke, but it got me thinking. I swung my light across the floor and wished I’d brought the larger light from the Airbike. The beam didn’t reach very far. There are at least three rows of stalls, but I sensed the space is immense. I taped my light to the stall frame and heard the clang echo. Scratch that. The space is cavernous. If it’s all stalls, we’re talking about a crapload of cows. But that’s the other problem. Turning right, I swept the light left and right across the floor.
It’s the cleanest barn I’ve ever seen.
I’m no farmer, but there’s something unsettling about this place that goes beyond it simply being abandoned. The floor is scuffed and marred, as if it has witnessed years, maybe decades, of use. Some kind of foot traffic, likely from cattle, based on all the evidence. But aside from that, there are only the troughs and the stalls. The rest of the area is spotlessly clean—cleaner than I’d think anyone could get a barn once it had been in operation for any length of time.
I mean, cows are not clean animals. They shit and drool. They piss and they smell bad. Once you have dozens—I played my light across the seemingly endless aisles as it faded into the murk—hundreds, if not thousands…it would take a hazmat team with atomic disinfectant and the patience of monks to clean up a mess like that.
And if there were cows on Wild-Side, where the hell did they go?
A stripe on the floor caught my eye. It was distinctive and painted yellow. It had a worn, long-trodden appearance, but I thought I understood its purpose, so I followed it. I’d seen similar lines in the Kansas missile silo. They helped people navigate large, confusing spaces. If I was right, it suggested this place was larger than I envisioned thought.
I followed the line to a wall. It was a massive steel bulkhead with a pair of sliding doors that met in the middle. Elevator doors, judging by the call button to the right of the frame. There was only a down button, suggesting I was on the top floor of whatever this place was. Naturally, the call button didn’t work, so I forced my fingers between the doors and pried them apart. This might not have been possible under normal circumstances, but thankfully my enhanced strength was still present. As I was told, my nano-tech wouldn’t be operational while in the dead zone, but its changes to my musculature and bone density were permanent. The tech wouldn’t be able to boost the oxygenation in my blood or alter my endocrine system on the fly as I was used to.
Popping the doors on the old elevator was absolutely no problem. I jammed my fingers into the gap, spread the doors, and pushed one all the way to the wall. What I found inside was the bigger issue. There was no elevator car, which wasn’t so bad. Unfortunately, the elevator shaft was flooded with inky black water, and my opportunity to explore was over.
It might be just as well. The alarm I’d set on the Airbike was minutes from sounding. Once that happened, I needed to clear out. I couldn’t say whether there were hostiles in the area, but if there were, the alarm would be like ringing a dinner bell. All of this was strange, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I’d run out of time. I was going to put an end to the excursion when the edge of my light caught the corner of a short, jutting wall not far from the elevator. I panned the beam and found what seemed to be a small work alcove notched into the bulkhead. It was protected by a pair of short, chest-high walls extending from the steel wall, which reminded me of an office cubicle’s walls.
There was a desk-like surface about level with my belt buckle, though there was no chair. The steel floor was scuffed and worn, suggesting that it had been used for years, perhaps many years. The work surface of the desk had long since been picked clean. The wall behind the desk was similarly barren, except for three things. The same logo that had been etched into the door at the entry of the facility was prominently displayed over the bulkhead, as if branding the workspace. It had been burnished perhaps two and a half feet wide. This version was more deeply etched, with the logo more protected and resilient to the ravages of time.
Two strange displays remained alongside the logo, each encased in a protective glass case and suspended from the wall on either side of the space framing the LB logo. One display featured an ancient flintlock pistol, while the other showcased an antique cutlass with a mahogany pommel, worn smooth by both age and use. Some type of card had clearly hung in the inside corner of each case, but both had disintegrated long ago. This was evident from the dry pile of fibers collected in the corners of each display, directly below the discolored rectangles that indicated where each tag once hung.
A growing list of questions accumulated in the corner of my mind. What was this place? How old was it? What was with the LB logo? The fact that the space resembled a barn for cows was the last thing I expected to see. I was running out of time. If the pistol or sword could be identified, they might provide clues to what was happening here—more likely who was involved in the operation of the place. The artifacts appeared significant to whoever once used this workspace. I couldn’t imagine why these were the only items left in a facility that had been cleared out to the point of almost being sterilized. It was yet another question for my growing list.
I thought I heard something in the distance—a gentle scratching sound. It was likely a mouse or something similar. More than likely, my mind was working overtime, nudging me to get moving. I stepped onto the desk, slammed my elbow against the glass surrounding the flintlock, and heard the glass crunch. I brushed it away and pulled the pistol free.
Then I heard the scratching sound in the distance once more.
I smashed the glass on the larger sheet protecting the cutlass. It shattered in a shower of splinters that shot into the air and cascaded across the floor, clattering loudly in the tomblike silence.
I heard the sound of something heavy striking the steel floor somewhere in the distance. Spinning from the elevator, I turned off my light as I grabbed the sword from the case. The slight glow of moonlight coming from the entrance about sixty yards away looked about the size of my thumb if it were right in front of my face. The echo of the initial sound still reverberated in the vast space when a second impact, this one close to me, sounded.
Shit.
I wasted too much time and literally managed to corner myself.
I wanted to try the old trick of throwing something one way and running the other, but there was nothing to throw. The place was spotless, and nothing had been left behind.
Another sound came from my left. Something was between me and the exit. I was almost positive it was a second contact because the original sound had come from deeper in the room and more to my right. The exit was on my left. My fingers tapped the pistol on my hip. My targeting system was offline. It meant taking these things down would be orders of magnitude more difficult. A shot to the eye would require extremely close range now.
Two slow breaths to prepare myself were all I could afford. They would vector in on me using scent and perhaps sight. Once they had a feel for the space, the sterile environment would make it easy for them to identify me. Plus, they had better low-light vision than I did now. I flashed my light twice in a pair of quick bursts. This would play hell with their more sensitive night vision, while mine would have a chance to pick out shapes in the flashes.
As I had hoped, the flashes revealed a pair of Elend. One was a low form of a Crawler, already heading in my direction from my left and being the closest of the two. It emitted a growling hiss that indicated it didn’t appreciate the light strobe. The other was either a Drake or a Jay, with its wings folded; I couldn’t tell which it was in the flash. That one was maybe a hundred and fifty yards away and at my two o’clock.
Lacking a better option, I sprinted forward and split the difference. I bolted down a row of stalls that, if my quick estimation was correct, placed at least two aisles between me and the Crawler on my left and one aisle between me and the Drake on my right. The Drake had more distance to cover, but it would have an easier time crossing the rows. This was confirmed when I heard the crashing, blunt-force impact of the Crawler on my left. It was trying to smash through the stalls to get to me. I was already passing it as I charged deeper into the darkness.
I heard the skittering of talons on steel somewhere to my right and knew the Drake was attempting its attack. It would make short work of the cubicles. The only question was whether it would come over or under the obstacle in its attempt to reach me. It must have had its blood up and not been thinking clearly yet, because I heard a crash as it hit the barrier almost directly to my right.
The pale light of the exit was almost exactly at my nine o’clock, so I grabbed the edge of the next stall and swung into it at full speed. I tucked my knees up and slid on my hip under the troth and into the stall on the other side of the aisle. Without wasting a breath, I was on my feet again. I dove headlong for the stall on the other side of the aisle, beneath the trough, and came out the other side.
As I bolted for the door, I heard a pair of primal screams that told me my efforts had not gone unnoticed. The sounds, however, were not right at my heels, so at the first of the two steel doors, I grabbed the plate-sized locking wheel and pulled the door shut behind me. With effort, I spun the wheel just in time to feel a considerable impact from the far side.
I took a deep breath, just in time to hear the alarm sound on the Airbike. My one hour had expired.
The klaxon chime of my cell phone alarm was set to full. When I first began to wander from the Airbike, that had seemed like a good idea. I thought I would likely be near the machine and lost by the time the clock ran out, so closing the distance and taking to the air would be a matter of seconds. It was unlikely any nearby Elend could find me before I was safely in the air.
Reality check.
Given the muffled, distant sound of the air raid siren, I had wandered further afield than originally planned. On a positive note—pun intended—the alarm indicated that the Airbike was somewhere in the distance at approximately my two o’clock. Something large was already moving in from my right. The crashing, smashing, and not-so-subtle devastation of small overgrowth told me it was moving quickly, so I did the same. I jumped over a fallen tree, ducked under a series of arm-sized hanging vines, and sprinted for the Airbike with everything I had.
I’d only made it a couple dozen yards when the sounds of aggressive pursuit I was hearing from my right were duplicated from my left. Cursing not-so-under-my-breath, I dug deep and redoubled my efforts. The sound of the klaxon was getting louder, so I knew I was getting closer to the machine. Unfortunately, the sound of the approach from my left was getting louder too. The attack was getting nearer. And there was a tonal incongruity to the assault on the devastation that didn’t match what I heard from my right. I was reasonably sure at least two Elend were approaching from the left while one was moving in aggressively from the right.
My gun remained in its holster as I ran. I could only grasp the sword and flintlock. They held value, but not worth dying for. I could still use my hands to brush aside and parry the vegetation blocking my path, yet I questioned if I was sacrificing precious speed to solve a mystery that could ultimately cost me my life. If I tripped—
That’s when I tripped.
I face-planted so hard that I thought the cracking sound came from my arm or ribs. It turned out luck was on my side. My foot snagged on a tangle of roots just a second before the Crawler charged out from the trees on my right. It must have lowered its head, ready to take me out, just before I fell because it blasted right past me and into the underbrush on my left.
Back on my feet in an instant, I felt a grin spreading across my face. My clumsiness had saved my ass in a way that would make a Saturday morning cartoon character proud. I estimated I was less than fifty yards from the Airbike, and all the threats were now on my mind left—
Shit!
The flintlock was gone.
There was absolutely no chance to stop and look for it.
The tree cover beside me burst, and a three-taloned claw the size of a catcher’s mitt tried to eviscerate me. I dodged right, but at least one of the talons must have caught the edge of my shirt. I heard fabric tear and felt a blast of chilly air beneath my left arm. I did some kind of diving spin to my right. Something big broke onto the trail even as the world blurred and I tried to find my feet.
It was a Crawler, and it was motivated.
I raised the sword without a moment’s thought. As I brought the blade down, three of the creature’s talons lay in the battered undergrowth at my feet feet.
A keening shriek rattled my ears as I looked at the blood dripping from the blade in my hands.
Damn!
The creature’s remaining foreclaw swung at me with a renewed and savage ferocity. A swung the blade again and heard it shriek. There was a blur of pale gray scales as the jaws lashed out at me. I spun away to dodge, turning quickly and feeling my feet slip. I slashed down with the blade and put every ounce of force behind the slashing effort when I dropped the blade. There was a sickening wet splat, and I dropped on my ass in time to see the lizard-like head of Elend separate from its neck and pinwheel into the vegetation.
My eyes were still unblinking when the corpse disintegrated into at least seventy pounds of particulate matter. It was something I’d only ever witnessed after inflicting a mortal wound to a creature’s eye.
I’d just fund a new way to kill the horrible things.
And, somehow I was on my ass again.
I straightened up just in time to catch another mitt-sized claw as it came down on me from the left. A gaping pair of jaws lunged toward my face.
Apparently, there was no time to celebrate my victory.
The double set of triangular, razor-sharp teeth of the Jay posed the real threat, so I pressed my feet into its wide chest for leverage, bared my left elbow to keep the distracting swing of its claw at bay, and slid the blade from my boot with my free hand. The creature had another set of talons on the other arm, still unaccounted for and lurking somewhere. I needed to make my move before it could use it.
My blade slipped into the underside of the creature’s jaw just as the teeth came within inches of my face. And while the Elend are impervious to bullets, they can be injured by a well–honed blade. My boot knives are twelve inches long, and a blade on the outside of each boot for just such an occasion can inflict great pain on the creatures. Unfortunately, the blade can only be lethal in the same ways that a bullet can. This makes a blade a poor weapon for close–quarters combat, regardless of the situation.
I had enough force behind my upward thrust to slam the Jay’s mouth closed and even pin it. For better or worse, the knife tip was embedded in the roof of the creature’s upper palate. With a muffled scream of pain, the beast sent me flying into overgrowth. Presumably, it was trying to sort out the pain and sudden inability to open its mouth. As I went flying ass over teakettle, I saw the Jay’s wings flare with expressive abandon. They thrashed wildly, battered and smashed at the thick, constricting vegetation. They also caught the Crawler full in the face just as it emerged from the forest with a clear intent to rejoin the fight. The Jay was much larger than the Crawler, who was caught with what must have been a powerful wing stroke because I heard what sounded like the distinctive sound of breaking bone and the plaintive cry of a wounded animal. It was somehow very different from the shrieking distress emanating from the thrashing Jay.
The Crawler snarled and lashed out at the Jay. The two became entangled in a thrashing, screeching mass of scales that dissolved into the overgrowth. There was something almost comical about it all, but I wasn’t out of the woods yet. Not figuratively and certainly not literally, so I turned back toward the persistent sound of the alarm signaling the position of the Airbike.
I ran headlong into a Drake. It was taller and thinner in body than the Jay since it lacked the folded wings the Jay typically kept collapsed at its sides. The Drake, on the other hand, had powerful muscles in its front and back legs that made it look like the powerlifting version of its cousins. It had a longer snout and wider eyes. This one had eyes that seemed to shine with added intelligence, which matched what I observed in its sneaky approach and its decision to let the other two of its kind take the first crack at me.
The Drake approached me slowly, using the game trail and stalking forward on all fours, even though I knew it was just as capable of walking on its hind legs. I stood my ground, allowing the creature to bide its time as I could hear the chaotic sounds of the other two still engaged in some kind of combat, their bloodlust now at my four o’clock
“You’re the smart one?” I said in a calm, soothing tone.
The creature continued to close the distance, slow and methodically. The Elend weren’t accustomed to the people of Wild-Side fighting back, yet most of them knew who I was. I couldn’t tell if this one had identified me yet. It was more likely to press its advantage if it knew I would fight. Perhaps it didn’t see what I had done to the Jay?
I ducked low to pull my remaining blade from my left boot. The creature bristled at this, tension causing the muscles to ripple across its front. The lips drew back, and teeth similar to those of the Jay became visible. I held the matte black blade of the foot-long knife out to my left as if I was about to drop it in an act of submission. The creature’s almond-shaped eyes were focused on the blade with clear, savage intent.
That’s when I drew the pistol and fired three shots as fast as I could pull the trigger. I didn’t have the advantage of my HUD-based targeting system and was never more painfully aware of how I’d come to rely on it. However, thanks to the close range, two of my shots struck the creature’s right eye. Its mouth sagged, and then its body dropped. By the time I was sprinting for the Airbike, it was already crumbling to dust.
As I jumped onto the seat of the Airbike and tapped the power button, I noticed that the sounds of distant violence had already faded. The Jay and Crawler had either settled their differences or put them aside to finish me off first. Either way, I twisted the throttle and yanked back on the handlebars. The Airbike shot into the sky, perfectly vertical, like a rocket launching from the pad. My stomach dropped into my crotch just as my nuts were violently sent crashing up into my abdomen from the impact with the seat.
The immediate reaction to the aggressive launch was painful yet ultimately timely. Gasping in pain, I glanced at the left foot pedal. Blinking away tears and struggling to breathe through the pain and rapid ascent, I saw the Jay and Crawler bounce into the clearing, flattened by the Airbike’s rotors.
I brought the Airbike to a hover at seven hundred feet and slid back on the seat, much to the relief of my manly bits. Below me, the Crawler stomped through the forest, clearing an area in an obvious display of dissatisfaction with my escape. Strangely, the Jay stared at me stoically for several long seconds. Just as I was ready to move on from this experience, the beast reared up on its back legs and spread its wings wide. It thrashed and beat at the air in a slow, rhythmic cadence, and I saw the surface of its wings expand in a way I couldn’t explain.
Then the Elend did something I had never witnessed before. It flapped one more time and soared into the air.
Sonofabitch.
I knew those damn things could fly. I knew it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: what’s the point of wings if not to fly? Doc can rationalize it all he wants, but the sight below me suddenly made two things crystal clear. The random disappearances all over Wild-Side suddenly made sense. City walls were the only defense against the Elend, and that wasn’t much protection against an enemy that could fly in at night and snatch people from the streets at will. The occasional missing persons reports had been a prelude to Oakland going unresponsive. Once Breslin had enough Jays for the job, he’d taken an entire city. Opposition to my wall-mounted point defense system would finally be a thing of the past. There was no arguing with the flying Elend.
An ear-piercing shriek from below pulled me back to my immediate concerns and the second pressing issue. The Jay beneath me was quickly gaining altitude and closing in. Its call sounded familiar, too. It was calling to others, so it was likely only a matter of time before they joined the hunt.
I pushed the handlebars forward and twisted the throttle. The rotors howled briefly as they bit into the air, and the Airbike took off like a turbocharged hummingbird. Scanning the treetops for signs of additional threats, the glassy surface of the nearby lake came into view in the distance. I feathered my left foot pedal and banked smoothly towards the lake. The now-familiar broken stone protrusion of the ridge line that was my path through the dead zone quickly came into view.
Another Jay broke from the tree canopy two hundred yards ahead of me, moving like a surface-to-air missile. A glance over my shoulder confirmed that the last hunter was still in pursuit, though it was pacing me. I was going one hundred and forty miles per hour, and it was just keeping up. The one closing in from below appeared to have a smaller body, but its wingspan looked wider. Something told me it would be faster than the one behind me.
The Jay moving from below had yet to make a sound. Unlike his noisy, chunkier brother behind me, he appeared to be an ambush hunter. In my mind, I tagged him as Sneek. Similarly, I named the loud attacker Gabby. These rationalizations assist with the storytelling, but they also help me sort the characteristics of each in a practical way because those attributes are almost always the key to killing them.
Sneek was flapping hard as he closed the distance, and I’ll admit I watched his efforts for longer than I should have. I had never seen these creatures fly before, and their flight was almost entirely unlike that of birds. Their wings were much longer and thicker, featuring obvious rigid bony structures articulated in two or three places between the shoulder and the tip. A scaly, skin-like memBrane clung semi-rigidly to the framework of internal bones. I was reminded of bat wings, but on a massive scale; even that didn’t seem quite right.
Somehow, he managed to gather great speed even in his vertical ascent. Then, suddenly, Sneek folded his wings tightly against his body to complete the surface-to-air missile analogy more closely. The shift in strategy caught me off guard. I was instantly facing a massive gaping maw at the end of a javelin-shaped body that was aiming toward my course at what must have been two hundred miles an hour.
I swallowed hard and pressed my body tightly against the seat and frame of the Airbike. My nose nearly touched the small LCD control panel as I twisted the throttle, stomped my right toe down hard, and pulled back on the handlebars. The Airbike barrel rolled to the right for a roll and a half. Halfway through the second roll, I was pulling back harder into an inverted dive that sent me plunging toward the tree canopy below. Lacking the benefit of the automated restraint system, I was pinching the sides of the seat with my knees in a death grip that matched the one that tightened my sphincter the moment I hit the accelerator.
Committed to the dive as I was, I controlled both the throttle and pitch to convert the inverted dive into a power loop about thirty feet above the tip of the nearest tree. This maneuver wasn’t the first of its kind; I’d executed it at least a hundred times with radio-controlled five-inch drones. As far as I know, it was the first time it had ever been accomplished on a manned equivalent in an aerial combat situation.
According to the dashboard display, I was moving at just over two hundred twenty miles per hour. This explained why it felt like the skin was stretching across my skull and why my eyes were watering, even with protective eyewear in place. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed that both of my pursuers were still in the game, though the closest one was about four hundred yards behind me.
The battery readout on the Airbike was at eighty-three percent. The technology keeping me in the air was a combination of conventional battery chemistry from My-World blended with what was considered arcane chemical engineering from Wild-Side. Together, the two function in the dead zone, though not as effortlessly as their power tech did under normal conditions. Cormac had tried to explain that technology to me more than once, but it was so far beyond me that I’d taken to calling it witchcraft. He failed to find the humor I’d intended.
I reached behind myself and manually latched the seat restraint to the rear of my belt on the left and right. It was a clumsy alternative to what Tripp had designed as an automated restraint system, but after my high-speed acrobatic maneuver just moments ago, I didn’t want to become a victim of my own ingenuity.
The Elend are fierce ambush hunters. In my experience, once they catch a scent, they will follow the target until they locate it, trap it, and kill it. I’m one of the few—perhaps the only one—to have ever survived multiple encounters with them. This has been due to my willingness to run away when possible and to stand and fight when necessary.
With two flight-capable Elend on my trail, it was possible that I could reach the end of the dead zone before they caught up with me. However, the first Jay had already summoned another to join the chase. If this continued, who knows how many would be after me by sunrise? While the Elend prefer to hunt at night, they can tolerate daylight. With their blood running hot, I’d be gambling against long odds that they would turn tail and simply let me be once the sun crested the horizon.
The creatures I had faced repeatedly were oblivious to nearly everything once they had prey in their sights. This left me with few options. Pulling back on the handlebars, I started to gain altitude. It was no surprise that Sneek and Gabby kept pace with me. I concentrated on maintaining at least a three hundred yard gap between us as I attempted to formulate some kind of plan.
Describing it as a plan might be a bit of an exaggeration. I was climbing vertically while trying to keep as much forward speed as possible. By this point, I still hadn’t discovered the limits of the Airbike’s performance envelope. I was, admittedly, hesitant to push it to the ragged edge this deep into the wilds, particularly without the benefit of my tech. No armor, no communication—hell, I didn’t even have my HUD. I felt more than a bit underdressed. Not to mention, I was a little over seventeen thousand feet up. Even with the moonlight, the Earth appeared as a featureless carpet below me.
I’d hoped the Jays wouldn’t be able to fly this high, but apparently I was wrong. I had to add more throttle to the props, the air considerably thinner at this extreme. It should have been cold, too. Unbearably cold. Apparently, the residual benefits of the nano-tech were still paying off because what little plan I had would require dexterity and a clear mind.
The primary benefit of bringing the chase to an extreme altitude was isolation. It was the only way I could prevent the Jays from calling others of their kind to the chase. Between the height and the effort they were putting into the chase, they were clearly working harder to maintain flight in the thinning air; they couldn’t afford the energy to call in reinforcements. Two against one were not great odds, but it was something if I could keep the probability from deteriorating.
My plan is to climb hard and fast to twenty thousand, then circle around on my attackers. Best case, I catch the front runner—Sneek—off guard. There’s been almost no turbulence, so with a little luck and enough lead, I have better than even odds of scoring a fatal shot on his eye in time to get evasive and stay out of Gabby’s teeth.
As far as plans go, it’s terrible, and I knew it. But I had a nearly full magazine, several spares, and a distinct lack of options as long as I was in the dead zone. I’m not one to do something foolish just for the sake of doing something…but sometimes you just have to nut up or shut up.
I began my quick climb and felt the slow throttle response from the Airbike for the first time. It’s the low air density, I understood instantly. Twisting the throttle further, I watched the altimeter jump as expected. I also saw a flash of light that sent me rocking back in the seat. At first, I thought one of the battery cells had blown and immediately started trying to sort out a contingency plan for the rapid elevator ride back to the ground floor that was sure to follow.
But then the progress bar blinked to life on my HUD, indicating that it was coming back online.
“What the hell?” I mumble to myself.
Instead of circling at twenty-thousand to initiate my attack run as planned, I continued on my previous heading. I may have cleared the dead zone, although I was fairly certain that’s not the case. Even at top speed, that should take several more hours. I had another suspicion.
The moment my HUD was back online, I checked my map. I was no longer anywhere near the course I had planned to follow. I had lost the ridge line when I picked up my aggressive tailgaters, but I was heading in the right general direction. As I suspected, the edge of the dead zone was still hundreds of miles distant.
I’d found some sort of upper boundary for the phenomenon. We never considered how high the distortion might reach. Though, twenty-thousand feet is pretty damn high. It might be too high to be helpful in any practical sense.
Then I grinned.
Except one.
The onboard batteries began recharging. As soon as all the high-tech systems powered on, the chemical batteries became secondary systems again and started picking up charge from the primary power core. That was good news, even if my limited clearance from the effects of the dead zone was temporary. This got me thinking about my HUD. It could be reliable at this altitude, or this could be a fluke. Either way, I could use it now in a significant way. I slowed and spun the Airbike one hundred eighty degrees as I brought it to a hover. Slipping the pistol from my hip, I felt time slow. The gun rose in my usual two-handed grip, and the targeting retinal appeared instantly on my HUD. The first of the Jays was two hundred twenty-three yards away and closing. I squinted my eyes as my optics zoomed in on the creature’s head. I could see mist billowing from its nostrils with each exhaled gasp. The veins in its dragon-like head ripped as blood coursed through its heart, head, wings, and lungs. I noticed the shift in the set of its eyes as it realized something about the scenario had changed. Its lips pulled back, exposing a mouth clamped shut but filled with razor-sharp teeth. It looked like a feral smile, or a threat.
Whatever the expression meant, I’ll never know. I fired a single shot. It split the creature’s right eye, and all bodily functions ceased instantly. The creature turned, began to tumble, and started to disintegrate as it left my line of sight. The sound of the shot was strange in the wide-open expanse. Maybe it was due to the unusually thin atmosphere? Either way, there was nothing to absorb or reflect the report, so it caught my attention.
It’s also when Gabby came into view. As Sneek tumbled away, I swear I saw surprise on the serpent-like expression of the larger Elend. The beating of its wings began to slow. I don’t know if this was out of confusion or recognition of the threat it now faced. Maybe the creature was taking a moment to reevaluate the situation. Maybe it was about to turn tail and retreat. Either way, I fired before it had the chance. This time I loosed two shots since the creature was starting to move erratically. I don’t know which was the kill shot, but the flesh began to ossify before gravity even took hold. It would be a cloud of ashes before it reached the ground far below.
The brass from my double tap must have hit one of the rotor blades because there was a horrible metallic twang, and something whistled past my ear close enough for me to feel it. I don’t mind telling you that I ducked…or that a few seconds later, I was glad I hadn’t needed Plan A. That plan would have required me to dump a magazine or more at each of the Jays, hoping to score a hit on one of their eyes. While I was reasonably sure I could eventually make the shot as the distance closed, I hadn’t anticipated ducking from the return fire of my own spent casings. That might have been the flaw that cost me the game. If the Elend didn’t get me, gravity would have.
