GENESIX: THE TRILOGY Page 29

  “Don’t worry about how it works,” Rick had said. “It runs out of juice, I’ll just go pilfer another one.”

  Quentin’s response had been, “Don’t go getting cocky. You had the element of surprise in your favor this time, but a wrong move can cost you your life. We are too few in number and can’t risk the loss of one member. Even one as foolish as you.”

  At one end of the concourse was an escalator, now long dead. It was now no more than a glorified metal staircase. Below, beyond the reach of the cube light, was lost to darkness. The concourse had many small rooms that opened onto it. Rooms that had once held small stores to service jetliner passengers. Newsstands and such. Now they were largely empty and served as sleeping quarters to the group.

  Some survivors were sitting on the floor at the center of the room, kind of informally gathered around the lighting cube. Sitting with her legs crossed in what Jeff could only think of as Indian style, with her spine erect and a look of serenity on her face, was Mother. The Iroquois woman who was essentially their spiritual leader. Her hair was long and was dark but with silver sprinkled throughout. Her face was gently lined. She looked maybe early fifties, but Jeff knew she was actually much older. Mother was a healer, and had saved the life of many a survivor who had suffered from an ion blast. This was an invaluable service because there was no medical help available beyond basic first aid. Her healing abilities also served to slow down her own aging process. Quentin speculated she was close to a hundred and eighty years old.

  She looked at Jeff with a gentle smile. “All is well?”

  Jeff nodded, a little more gravely than he intended. “As well as can be, I suppose.”

  “We are alive. And we are free. Indeed, all is well.”

  A woman came to Jeff’s side. Her hair was long and a sort of cross between blonde and light brown, but with a hint of red. Strawberry blonde, she called it. Jeff was no expert on the names of the various shades of hair color, but he thought it sounded sexy, and sexy suited her. Her figure was curvy in an aquiline sort of way. She had once been a dancer and moved with a light, fluid grace.

  They kissed lightly and he took her hand in his.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Sara,” Jeff said. “I missed you.”

  Quentin rolled his eyes. “Please. Do I have to ask you two to get a room?”

  Quentin was trying to muster up a semblance of his old cynical nature. Something he had once been known for. At one time Jeff would have been annoyed, but now he found himself smiling at the memory of the old verbal sparring matches he had once had with Quentin.

  “Maybe we should,” Jeff said.

  “Still thinking with your glands, I see,” Quentin said, though he found himself also smiling.

  Jeff clamped a hand onto Quentin’s shoulder.

  A young woman was sitting beside Mother. She looked to be maybe twenty. She wore an oversized khaki sweatshirt that had been appropriated from a military supply store, and baggy sweat pants. She was barefoot. Her hair was long and dark, and she never was far from Mother.

  She looked a little scared. Jeff thought she often did. Probably with good reason. She was the only one here with no meta-ability at all. The only other non-meta was Sammy, but he was an android who could think super fast and had enough gigabytes of memory to choke a horse, and had physical strength and agility at least double that of the average human.

  She said, “Has anyone seen the Darkness?”

  Jeff couldn’t help but smile. He didn’t quite know what the Darkness was. A meta, obviously, but somehow mutated beyond any definition of human. And yet, as improbable as it could sound, Sondra was in love with him. And it seemed the Darkness was in love with her.

  Jeff gave her a smile. As little as he understood what she and the Darkness had, he had to admit he admired it. In this world, love was a sign of warmth. A sign of life. A sign of hope. No matter where you found it.

  “He’s fine,” Jeff said.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No. But he’s probably in the least amount of danger out there. The nullifier fields don’t seem to work on him.”

  Truth was, Jeff figured the nullifier fields probably actually would work on the Darkness, if they could actually envelope him in one. But when you are an incorporeal energy field capable of traveling great distances at the speed of thought, wrapping you in a nullifier field was easier said than done.

  Mother reached over and took Sondra’s hand. “He’s find, child. I doubt anything the aliens can throw at my son could hurt him.”

  Sondra nodded.

  Jeff found himself smiling at what Mother called Sondra. Child. Sondra was actually close to a hundred years old, herself. When the Darkness somehow took her into his energy field—a process Jeff had no scientific understanding of at all and doubted anyone did—she emerged with any injuries or illnesses gone. She was physically remade in the image of her twenty year-old self. Any sign of age was gone. Mother was probably the only one among them who was actually older than Sondra, and who could get away with calling her child.

  Sammy said, “All quiet. The chopper is approaching.”

  Within seconds, everyone else could hear it, too. The low hum of what was not actually a chopper but a hover craft approaching the airspace over the now dilapidated airport.

  Sara leaned close to Jeff and said in a whisper, “Are you powered-down?”

  Jeff nodded, but said nothing. Silence was necessary. Though the fly-overs didn’t involve intense scanning devices, as that would be a waste of resources in patrolling a city believed to be deserted, they did a rudimentary scan for sounds that might seem out of place. And for zeta energy emissions. Though Jeff glowed with the stuff anyway, even when fully powered-down, but it wasn’t enough to give a positive reading from the sensors within the hover craft.

  He stood silently with Sara. She had leaned in close to whisper her question to him, so he pulled her in for an embrace. She rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes as the humming sound from above grew louder. He wrapped his arms more tightly about her.

  He tried to fight down the fear he felt rising. He could probably get away from the aliens, if he managed to power-up before they could engage a nullifier field. Or, an even faster escape route would be to simply slip away through the strands of time and space. Even the aliens couldn’t follow him when he took that route. He could probably take Sara with him, though he would have to be careful. The strands of time can be dangerous if you don’t step through them the right way, and it was difficult to bring anyone with him. He had done it before, but it took a lot of concentration. He could bring along maybe five or six and still maintain a margin of safety, but any more would be risky.

  He had thought about possibly finding a place in the past, away from harm’s way. A remote corner of the Earth in some earlier time where he could take Sara and a few others. Then return to the present time and bring another handful, and so forth. Sort of act like a living taxi until he had brought this entire group of survivors safely from this time period. Or, better yet, maybe he could simply go back to a few weeks or months before the invasion began and warn his father and Scott. They could mount a defense and then maybe this terrible future would never have even happened at all.

  Mother and Quentin both talked strongly against this. Trying to alter the time line could have disastrous effects. Akila’s world was always used as the example.

  “There’s a moral issue to it also,” Mother had said. “Think about it. There are people alive today who possibly wouldn’t be if we were to go back and alter the time line. What right do we have to deny them life? Children who have been born since the invasion. There are some. Who are we to play God?”

  Jeff had been about to give a rebuttal. Didn’t great power bring with it great responsibility? Hadn’t a philosopher said that once? Was it morally right not to stop this invasion? To end the miserable existence life on this world had turned into? But then she had hit him with that line about playin
g God.

  And so he kept silent. He focused his attention on the here and now, and not possibilities about how he could use his ability to reshape the time line. Instead, he focused on working with Quentin, Mother and Sammy toward keeping this band of survivors alive and trying to find some way to fight back against the Machine. Maybe liberate the few humans who were still alive and try to find some way to drive the aliens away.

  The task seemed daunting, and Jeff had to admit he didn’t really know where to even begin.

  The few humans who survived, maybe five percent of what the population had been before the invasion, worked as slave labor in agriculture camps. Former cities like New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris had been turned into gigantic POW camps. Some smaller cities were used like this, too. The alien empire that had conquered Earth apparently stretched over a large part of the galaxy. There had been wars, as the empire never seemed content to just negotiate a treaty or cooperate with other worlds, but instead simply moved in and took over. And with an empire, there were always rebellions and uprisings. As such, there were POW’s from many different alien races, and the empire needed a place to put them. Earth was one such place.

  As Jeff stood with Sara, listening to the hover craft hum its way past overhead, he felt discouraged. And with discouragement came fear. Fear that he wouldn’t be able to keep this little band of survivors alive much longer. That sooner or later, they would run out of time.

  He didn’t want to feel this fear. He sure as hell wouldn’t let anyone except maybe Sara know he was feeling it, because he had fallen into a sort of leadership role among these people.

  As these thoughts went through his mind, he also found himself thinking about how good Sara’s hair smelled. He had first made this observation the night they met. Years ago, at a college party Chloe had invited him to. He had spent the evening talking with Sara. Having drinks with her. She liked white wine, and he had always been a beer boy. He walked her back to her dorm and gave her a kiss and she gave him an incredibly sensual hug, and as she did so, strands of her strawberry blonde hair had drifted into his face. He remembered thinking, God, her hair smells great. Funny, what occupies the mind.

  The humming from the hover craft outside was now intense. A little like the sound an old microwave oven used to make, filling a kitchen. They called these things choppers, but they were really nothing like a helicopter. They were small, oval shaped ships, and like with much of the alien technology, Jeff had no idea how they really worked.

  Mother sat with her eyes shut. Quentin stood still, but glancing upward with his eyes. He was probably reaching out with his mind. The craft was probably being flown by robot drones, but if there were any living beings aboard, he would want to try and catch any stray thoughts. Sondra’s hand was still in Mother’s, and she looked petrified. Sammy was simply listening. Gauging the distance the hover craft was from them, the altitude it was flying at. Maybe even the size of it. All from the sound. And Jeff was holding onto Sara.

  Jeff was thinking about how he wanted to get Sara alone. They had made their quarters in an old supply closet a little ways down the hall from the central concourse. He wasn’t thinking specifically about sex, though that would probably happen. It seemed to happen a lot with them. Her libido was as insatiable as his. But at the moment, he was thinking about just lying with her, cuddling beneath the blankets. His head on a pillow, her head on his shoulder. It was times like this when they could pretend, at least for a short while, they were just a regular couple living a regular life. In bed in their house. Building a life together. The way couples did Before. For at least a little while, they could forget they were part of a band of meta-humans on the run from an alien race that had conquered the world. Killed off more than ninety-five percent of humanity and used the rest as slave labor to grow food for their vast empire.

  “They’re moving on,” Sammy said.

  Jeff nodded. The microwave oven sound from the chopper was beginning to grow dimmer.

  Quentin said, “Henry reports all is well.”

  Jeff said, “I’m going to go to the front and get a visual on it. Make sure it continues moving along.”

  He hated to break his embrace with Sara, but as someone with a position of leadership he felt a responsibility to the rest of the group.

  Sara said, “I’ll come with you.”

  Jeff didn’t complain. There would probably be no danger. The hover craft was gone and they wouldn’t be sending in any robot drones unless they somehow suspected something. And with Sara along, he could save the batteries in the mag light.

  Jeff and Sara started down the corridor to the gate that would lead out to the tarmac. Her hand was in his.

  Sara was in a tank top and snug fitting jeans, and wore a blaster holstered at her right side. She wore the holster low on her leg and tied down Old West style so she could pull the weapon quickly. She was one of the most proficient among the band of survivors with an ion blaster. But she carried no flashlight. Her meta-ability was not nearly so thunderous as Jeff’s. Her power was simply that she could see in the dark. Her eyes, normally a shade of green that was a little unearthly anyway, would glow when she turned the power on.

  She did so now, as she and Jeff walked along through the dark tunnel that led out of the gate. Not much of a power as far as drama goes, Jeff thought, but it enabled them not to have to use the flashlight. Once their supply of batteries was exhausted, then there would be no more flashlights, and life for the survivors would get just a little harder.

  There had been a time when this tunnel would connect with a jetliner, and passengers would step from the tunnel through an open door and past some stewardesses smiling and welcoming them. Now, however, it opened up into nothingness. Jeff pushed aside an old battered tarp that hung over the opening, and they looked out onto Boston harbor. In the distance, out over the city ruins, were a couple lights blinking weakly in the sky. They were from the hover craft as it pulled further away.

  The breeze from the harbor touched them. It was a little cold, and Sara couldn’t hold back a shiver. She was not exactly dressed to face a chilly ocean breeze. Jeff put his arm around her, partly to give her a little warmth, but also because he loved touching her. He loved everything about her. She snuggled in. Partly for the body warmth and partly because she liked Jeff touching her.

  “How long can we keep this up?” Sara said. “Ducking and hiding from them. Avoiding choppers. Raiding what’s left of these old cities for canned goods, or anything else we can find.”

  Jeff shrugged. “As long as we need to.”

  “Don’t you ever get scared?”

  He said, “I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise that.”

  She nodded and smiled at the sentiment. “Even though they have an energy field that can neutralize zeta energy?”

  He returned the smile. “They haven’t caught us yet. Because, my main strength is actually my mind. I’m a clever bastard.”

  “No. Your main strength is actually your heart.” She placed a hand on his chest as she spoke.

  He looked out over the water. The wind was getting colder. Dark clouds were gathering.

  “A storm is coming,” he said.

  She nodded, and rested her head on his shoulder. They stood, looking out at the approaching clouds.

  THREE

  2017

  Akila ran in her bare feet. She had tried using running shoes like April did, with names like Adidas or Nike attached to them, but they just made her feet feel heavy and unnatural. For years, in the Egypt of her world, she had trained in her bare feet. She had run through the desert sands and along the banks of the Great River, which was called the Nile on this world. She was most comfortable training in the old-school way. Barefoot.

  She and April ran along beside each other this morning. Akila’s black hair was tied back into a tail, and she wore a black sports bra and spandex running shorts that were as high cut as possible. In her culture, which was much more sexually permissive t
han this one and with many fewer hang-ups about the human body, she had tended to wear as little clothing as possible when she trained. Even now, she found it uncomfortable and even binding to have her legs, arms or shoulders covered with fabric when she was working out.

  April had gone so far as to design Akila a battle suit that provided minimal coverage. She had to wear shoes when going into battle, but the shoes had an extremely lightweight and flexible sole. Her legs were bare, and there was plenty of open midriff. Not that Jake complained, of course.

  April was in a pink tank top and white running shorts and Nikes. She wore ankle-high socks with little pompoms just above the heel. She had added blonde highlights to her hair, which she had cut recently. It was now not quite shoulder length. However, she had discovered very quickly, on her first run, she didn’t like hair hanging in her face, but it was now too short to effectively tie into a tail. So, she now wore a baseball cap pulled tightly over her skull.

  They normally did laps every morning in the gym. But this morning, they were running down a mountain trail. The natural earth felt good beneath Akila’s bare feet. Even Scott, in all his scientific glory, said it’s good to get some fresh air once in a while.

  Pines stood tall at either side of them and the mountain air was cool and clean. Even so, sweat glistened along Akila’s neck and was beading on her forehead.

  Each girl wore a wrist band that served as a communication device and also monitored their life signs, which were continually fed into the central computer at the facility. They could also program their wrist band to act as a timer, which was what Akila had done now.

  Her wrist band began to buzz, and she came to a stop and shut off the alarm.