Minotaur was screwed. He straddled the trike in the carpark trying to figure a way out. Brags thought he was doing him a favor by slipping him noise on the hole in Volition security. Fact was the news had yanked the rug out from under his feet.

For a moment he’d thought he might turn things around. The DNA was a trump card. Minotaur felt sure it was a breakthrough on the case. He’d assumed it would give him the bump he needed to get back on the steady.

The way things looked now, the evidence was as good as useless. The code might lead him straight to the killer but he damned sure couldn’t log it. Logging that call was signing his own death certificate. Yet until he logged something he’d continue his status slide – all the way down to the Low.

He realized he had entered a death spiral when his online credit rating started eating into his personal status on Netspace. At this stage, Minotaur could take out the Arabian Peninsula and the points would barely slow the seep. He was losing face and there was nothing he could do about it. Refinancing the trike or subletting the apartment would only advertize the fact that he was in dire straits and undercut what little confidence his bullhead brand still inspired.

Screwed, screwed, screwed. He’d seen it happen to other people. He never thought he’d get sucked down the hole.

It had to be a fault in the system, he reflected. That this kind of thing could happen to an honest contractman – it was more disturbing than any glitch in the VOLICOMSAT. When the Volition Party had reignited pod culture in the Sprawl five years ago, distributing the personal units far and wide, the idea of a networked status system uniting personal, professional, and cultural achievements seemed like a great idea. Like old-world pod culture, it enabled people to build their brands and faces, and make their living on Netspace (previously Sprawl Online). Minotaur had burst from the blocks ranked in the upper twentieth percentile on Netspace thanks to his bloodletting as a team leader in the Volition revolution, a diverse network of contacts, and the intrinsic cool of his profession. Yet in these past five years, Minotaur hadn’t kept up. When pod culture started up, with Initiative Four and the launch of Netspace, anyone with some talent and initiative could start a business. But since Volition had campaigned for Initiative Five, the hive mind had gravitated towards democratic utopianism, and dissenters had become rough edges that seemed to be smoothed off by the power of consensus. Minotaur’s mistake had been to let his innate distaste for House of Representatives, and everything that it represented, bleed into his status updates. He’d given up voting, or even keeping up with what was going on.

Friday week, the Sprawl would vote on the fifth and final Volition initiative. All the polls said that Dorien Xiao would cream it. The world was on the brink of a high-tech democratic revolution. And Minotaur was an old-school contrarian. It was the wrong time to be caught in a virtual death spiral.

Everything he’d worked to achieve. Everything he’d dreamed of achieving.

Look ready soldier. It wasn’t over yet. He synced the pod with the dashboard feed and checked the files Brags had uploaded for him. Sure enough, Volition was preoccupied with concealing the anomalies in the VOLICOMSAT from the media. Minotaur figured he could make use of the confusion. It was time for some detective work. It was time to figure out what really happened at Volition House last night.

He checked the files of the deceased. Davidson, the psychiatrist, was a Volition insider. So too was Undersecretary Lewis, who looked like a powerbroker in the Sprawl. Admiral Dixon was a dark horse. Dixon’s file was a maze of restrictions and truncated narratives. This made Dixon the decisive variable in the equation. But it didn’t indicate a way ahead.

The other clue was Seritus Wetectronics. Minotaur’s initial search didn’t turn up any record of the company. He sent out posse of autobots but registered no hits.

His avatar appeared carrying a flashlight.

‘Are you lost, Minotaur?’

‘Trying to find Seritus Wetechtronics’.

MINO3GRAFXX30 looked pensive. ‘Not on file, I’m afraid’.

‘This is why I’m lost’.

A business party unfurled from the elevator shaft in a snarl of voices. The security contingent kept lock on Minotaur as their clients climbed into an armored vehicle and drove away. Minotaur returned his attentions to the portal. He entered Brags’ security codes and dived through the hypercoded flows of Netspace. For a quarter hour he trawled a series of low-level servers dating from the Federation era. He dived again. Each search led him further from the online architecture of the Sprawl.

Soon he was in the strata of the old internet. There he found the Seritus homepage, rotting like a fly in the tattered framework of the World Wide Web.

Legend, the body text declared. Hardly any of the graphics were working. The site hadn’t been updated since 2030. Minotaur clicked FAQ. Seritus was: a provider of genomic services and nanotechnological solutions. Looked like any number of wetectronic companies that sprung up in the biotech boom of the twenty twenties.

Wetech – what did he know about that? Fisherman was offline. Minotaur struggled to recall what he’d picked up over the years. Wetech was biotech meets nanotech, something like that. It got going when biogeeks started using nanobots to recode DNA in situ. When Minotaur got cancer from the rad-bomb in Afghanistan, the medics had used a nanostimulant to trigger a genetic pattern that helped fight the disease. Everyone knew the case of Justin Tsimfuckis, aka chick3n little, who used wetechtherapy to change his looks and went onto a career as an award-winning actor and talk show host.

Wetech changed a lot of things, back in the twenties. It changed the way people thought about race and ethnicity. It changed the way people thought about human nature.

Minotaur had spent most of that decade on duty overseas, and he lived on camp between sorties. But he watched the military channel as he worked out, and joined the chat feeds on the holocrom, and the changes that he saw taking place in US popular culture confused and depressed him. Things had gotten wild, back in the twenties. Part of him wondered if they had been lucky to have been wiped out in the Change. Given another decade, who knows what the human race might have done with itself. NuFlesh was a mausoleum of freaks who still experimented with wetechnology. If things had kept on, Freddy the Fly and the lizard-girl might be normal average citizens.

He checked some more links on the site. Seritus’ customers included the Department of Defence, USHealth, and select US government agencies. With a client list like that, Seritus wasn’t just any company. It was contracted to the most high-tech military in history. The CEO and board would’ve been tight in Washington, in there with Cleaver’s circle. If those people had survived the Change, they could have easily forged connections in the Council of Marshalls, who knows where else after that.

He browsed the product portfolio. Whatever lay behind the alluring titles of Seritus’ various wetectronic innovations – like Sericonin PDRI® Reagents: Blast from the Past!, SWARM2 Metabolic Enhancements, and the award-winning SYNCRON4000 Nanopacifier – the links were lost in time. Minotaur noted that Seritus had a local headquarters – Curtis Bay, Baltimore, now under the greater DC area.

He was punching in a TripQuest when a title to the corner of the holscene caught his eye. Autonet. It was listed in a section of the site devoted to new R&D projects. The page link was down.

Minotaur thought hard. Autonet. Where’d he seen that name before? Following his instincts, he scrolled through Leopold Lewis’s file. There it was: Autonet. Autonet was a private corporation attached to the United Eastern Federation Centre for Democracy, a proxy for the progressive arm of the Volition Party. Its mission was ‘the enabling of civil synergies through technologically-facilitated virtual processes’. Minotaur knew the rhetoric. This was what Xiao and his cohorts called democracy.

The question was whether the name was a coincidence, or if it indicated some deeper connection between Seritus and the Volition Party. Minotaur checked the Autonet offices, off Columbia Pike. He fired up the trike. He’d call in at Autonet to ask a few questions en route to the Seritus building.

——————————————————

‘Let me explain what we do here, Minotaur. Autonet is not a service organization. Strictly speaking, Autonet is not an organization at all. Autonet is a group initiative. The initiative has a political mandate and a democratic mission’.

Atticus Williams studied Minotaur though the psychedelic play of the holoscreen. He’d barely begun speaking and he wanted Minotaur gone. He was between appointments. He’d given him five minutes. Atticus sat on the thither side of a buffed obsidian desk, elbows on the surface, his chin rested on the steeple of his manicured fingers. As he considered each of Minotaur’s questions, the peak of the steeple ascended to his lips then descended again to the chin as he offered his answer. The performance was as natural as the holoscene vista behind him, which showed a yellow sun dipping behind ice-cream mountains.

Minotaur was confused. He coughed. ‘You, what, build online platforms? You design spaces’.

Atticus smirked. ‘Take a helicopter view, Minotaur. Since the birth of society, human beings have organized themselves into groups driven by common values and visions. Sometimes this has had a political aim. Sometimes it has just been aimed at the preservation of social life. Here at Autonet, we make no distinction’.

Graphics danced in the air between them as he spoke.

‘We treat all forms of collaborative activity the same. Collective action unfolds in a common vision. Masses of people learn to swarm. We call this process: “symbiotics”‘.

Atticus made quote marks in the air with the tips of his fingers. From where Minotaur sat, it looked like he was placing devil-horns on the sides of his head.

‘And symbiotics is democracy, right? Democracy 2.0′.

‘Symbiotics is democracy. Not some new democracy, but true democracy, democracy as it is and has always been. Autonet is not trying to bring democracy to the masses. We are not trying to instruct people how to behave. We provide tools. Autonet provides platforms for collective democratic activities. Our mission is to enable civil symbioses, regardless of what expression these symbioses may take’.

Atticus’ face solidified in a smile. Minotaur sensed he was being asked to leave.

‘How is Autonet related to Initiative Five?’ he asked.

Atticus deconstructed his steeple of hands.

‘Autonet is the architecture for Initiative Five’. A holocard slid across the desk. Autonet is Internet Five Alive! it said.

‘I assume you haven’t been keeping up, Minotaur. The fifth initiative has been debated on House of Reps for months. The vote is Friday week. Once Initiative Five becomes law, Autonet will take over a large part of the day-to-day administration of the Sprawl. People will use the platform to run their lives and govern it: triggering initiatives, debating policy, even with the power of attorney. We are completing the revolution. This is what Volition has always been about’.

‘Point-click democracy?’ Minotaur smiled.

‘You’re not in favor of the reforms?’

‘I’m not political’.

‘That’s you’re prerogative. It’s a free Sprawl’. Atticus waved his fingers in the dimension cloud. It exploded in puffs of fractals.

‘Democracy has always been the goal the Volition Party. It is there in the Freedom Manifesto: democracy is the political expression of volition, the principle ambition of any legitimate administration. To this extent, yes, one could say that the Autonet system has always been central to the Volition agenda. You might even say that Autonet is Volition – a slogan I have suggested to Representative Xiao on numerous occasions, to which, I must say, he is beginning to warm’.

Minotaur synced the holocard and placed his pod on the obsidian top of the desk. He placed his hands to either side of it. The stone was cool and centering under his palms.

‘What exactly is the legal relationship between these two organizations, Autonet and Volition?’

‘Autonet is a private company contracted to Volition. As a start-up, we were incubated under Volition, but we were privatized in 2042. Alongside Organix, Minutiae, a whole range of companies’.

‘Autonet and Minutiae, back in the day’.

‘I don’t know what you mean by that, Minotaur’.

Minotaur took his hands off the desktop.

‘I have just a couple more questions, Mr Williams. I’ll try not to take up much of your time. The first question concerns one of your, uh, users, who was killed in an incident at Volition House last night. You may have heard…’

‘Tragic. Leopold Lewis was one of our most active and innovative contributors. He was with Autonet from the start’.

‘The question that interests me is whether there might be any connection between Undersecretary Lewis’s murder and his involvement with Autonet. The vote on Initiative Five is, as you say, just around the corner’.

‘Friday week’.

‘And there is a heap of controversy surrounding the final initiative. Do you think there’s a possibility that Leopold Lewis may have been targeted on account of his being a democrat?’

Atticus placed his fingers on his lips.

‘May I speak off the record?’

‘For sure’.

‘Admiral Dixon never made any secret of his opposition to the Volition initiatives. I think this is unsurprising. Dixon was the product of the US Marine Corps – a hierarchically-organized and highly individuated social system. He was not exposed to the horizontally-distributed forms of autonomy characteristic of true democracy. Dixon’s opposition to the Volition Initiatives was strong and vehement. He tried to block public funding for Autonet’s activities at several points. And he clearly bore a grudge against key figures in the Autonet community. I wouldn’t want to go on record suggesting that Dixon was carrying out some kind of vendetta. But off the record – it is possible’.

‘Though I suppose if he were carrying out a vendetta, Representative Xiao would have been a more obvious target’.

‘Assassinating Xiao at this point would have worked against him. He would have created a martyr. It would have shored up support for Initiative Five’.

‘OK. Last question. Have you heard of a company called Seritus Wetectronics?’

‘I can’t say that I have’.

‘You can’t say that you have or you haven’t?’

Atticus looked displeased. Paydirt. Minotaur suppressed a grin.

‘What is the point of this question, Minotaur?’

‘I’m interested in learning whether Autonet is in any way related to the activities of this company, Seritus Wetectronics. In any way at all’.

‘Minotaur, as I explained to you, Autonet is a private company. If you are interested in checking our accounts from 2042, I’d advise that you should contact…’

‘I’m thinking more of the technology that you use here at Autonet, Atticus. Where it comes from. Who made it’.

Atticus deconstructed the steeple and put his hands on the desk before him. The interview was over.

‘I have to apologize, Minotaur, but I don’t have the answers to these questions. I’d recommend you direct them to our legal team. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go. It is a long commute. House of Representatives screens in two hours, and I do not intend to miss my chance to vote’.

————————————————

Fisherman’s reply came through as Minotaur was leaving the building.

‘Good and ready’, it said.

Minotaur mounted the trike and summoned the encrypted site they used to exchange information. He downloaded the file and decoded it on the dashboard system. It was a vidiclip. It changed everything.

Fisherman had just come inside. His oilskins glistened wet.

‘Minotaur’, he said. ‘This time you have met your match! It is a genuine monster. Humanoid, it turns out. There are traces of homo sapiens in the field structure, but it’s not human. Periodic isoforms indicate baboon, cat, reptile, and protoplasmic origins, all in one beastie. Go figure. I hope this is a failed science experiment, Taur. It’s an impressive architecture, I have to admit. Quote me on saying it is gloop and I’ll deny it‘.

Fisherman fetched a beer. ‘Reason I’d say it slips under the VOLICOMSAT is because it’s too subtle for the system’, he gasped between gulps. ‘This is alien stuff, man, a generation or two ahead of where we were in the twenties. I haven’t seen wetech like it. Like any design, you don’t see the action until you get into the strands of the double-helix. Here you find the chemical pathways enabling the viruses to swarm. The weird thing about this structure is that it’s flooded with nanites. I kid you not – the rungs of the double-helix are crawling with nanobots! Don’t ask me what they’re doing there. You don’t put people in an architecture, right? You apply architecture to build a hotel for people to stay in. Same way, wetech designs are just architecture. They open trails and pathways for the nanotriggers; they don’t host freekin nanobots.

‘Good news is, if you wanna find Dr Frankenstein, the DNA has a patent, coded into stable phosphate groups between the nucleotides. Ever heard of a company called Seritus Wetectronics? They were big in the 2020s. Couldn’t miss them if you were working in my neck of the woods. You were probably applying their biowarfare portfolio to the Chinese at the time. Anyhoo, Seritus owned the IP, so Seritus is your lead. I ran a search – seems they closed their books in 2030, same time as everyone else’.

Go to Chapter Nine: Old Glory

Back to Lord of Swarms

Back to main page

Minotaur woke with a sense of defeat. Fisherman snored in the dark. He dropped from the hammock and stumbled to the bathroom. Gave some water, took some back, popped an Amphal and a Trill to take the edge off. In the blue light, his eyes looked hard as stones. He grabbed some joe from the pot and took it upstairs while Fisherman slept.

It was raining outside. Minotaur sat by the door and logged onto Netspace. He skimmed the morning traffic coming off the Central hub, checked his mail, cruised the C-lists for opportunities. Nothing, as expected. He had entered a virtual death spiral. He needed to advance the case or score a major win on BATTLEFIELD to turn it around.

His avatar showed up to deliver an update. Some good news, some bad.

‘Volition Data reports you’ve gained twenty points for getting traction on the BUTLER3010PP murder in advance of network release’, it informed him. ‘Deductions as of May 28: rent, sixty five credits; passage, thirty credits. Return on services, eighty one credits. Negative accretion ratio: eight point seven percent’.

Minotaur thumbed: INFO: HBBRAGS/MINO3GRAFXX30. No new developments. He stared into the rain.

‘Maintaining full-spectrum professional services coverage, central and coastal districts’, the avatar said. It snorted and thrust at him with its horns.

Minotaur checked the Representative reel. The Central feed led with an article on the Fifth Initiative. Dorien Xiao was on every major news channel selling the agenda. A pretty sylph invited him to check into the House to cast his vote. Minotaur didn’t have the stomach for it. He’d do it later. He was only voting for points, in any case. He logged onto BATTLEFIELD and sleepwalked through the siege of Riyadh instead.

———————————–

The gas and goods convoy pulled out of Roanoke an hour later. The rain had abated. A crowd of children ran alongside the trucks as they left the supply center. At first they laughed and waved, splashing through the puddles and mud. They started begging as the trucks neared the outer perimeter. ‘Please mister. My daddy died in the Freeze’. Minotaur pretended not to hear them. The convoy rumbled through the razor wire and the children vanished in the drizzling haze.

Minotaur had drawn the short straw and assumed the task of lookout for the first leg of the trip. He sat alone in the glass canopy on top of the truck. Fisherman had given him an endorphin shot before he’d left, which had killed the hangover but reactivated the cocktail of chemicals in his system. Wired and blinking away the occasional hallucination, he studied the Sprawl through the rivulets of rain on the glass.

The Sprawl was a vast favela of slums and dormitories extended like a cancer down the east coast of the former United States of America. On a good day it was a garden of human misery. Wind farms loomed like skeletal flowers over the ruins. Rain beat on iron and plastic roofing that stretched to the horizon. Outside of DC and Upper NYC, the citizens were clustered into regimented precincts, surviving on a weekly drip-feed of hydrocrystal and meatstuff from the centers. They harvested the ruins of neighboring towns for materials, building the new world out of the old. They harnessed wind and solar and sold it on the grid. In the Thaw, when the weather was mild, they grew vegetables in pits irradiated with solar lamps. When the soil went bad, they used the pits to burn their trash and bury the dead.

The gas and goods convoy rolled past Crepshaw B, where children played in the carcasses of cars. Minotaur returned the hollow gaze of the gunmen above the gates. When he met them on BATTLEFIELD, he’d kill them all.

This was the remnants of America in 2055 – a stinking sea of prefabs choking the horizon, crammed full of hungry folk in wool hats, ski-parkas, and military-issue thermals. The eternal rambling campscape of the Sprawl. The Sprawl hunkered low on the weathered coast, focused inwards for the most part, struggling to sustain the flame of life.

A team of jets screamed over the convoy heading north. Minotaur watched them disappear into the browns and ochres of the northern horizon. It was hard to believe that the most desirable real estate in the Sprawl lay under that pallid sky. The domes and tunnels of North Sprawl supposedly represented the future of society, for those who could afford it. Life was cheaper, in all senses, in South Sprawl, where residents carved out a precarious existence in and above the inland tides. The North attracted citizens with knack for capital ventures. The South was home to a different sort of adventurer, committed or condemned to a different order of reward.

Most of the population of the Sprawl lived between these geographical extremes, in the chunk of land extending from DC, on the coast, two hundred and fifty miles inland to the foothills of the Appalachians. This was the Central Sprawl. Central Sprawl was the only home that Minotaur had left. He knew that success or failure in the region depended on how you plugged yourself into the network of service providers that formed the beating heart of the camp system. Fall into the cracks and you were good as dead. The Desolate zones dotting the landscape between camps were a grim reminder of this fact. Here faceless communities lived and died in shanties built in the sides of endlessly burning mountains of trash. Their sinuous spires strafed the morning sky, sending an SOS to a world incapable of answer, locked as it was in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of desolation across the campspace as a whole.

The logo on the gun turret waved and morphed. Minotaur was loose. He studied the logo, focused his thoughts: Cherrycom is a company contracted by Volition Supply to service the Manassas 16 to Roanoke 7B route… It was an old route, set up in the early years of the Change under the Seaboard Federation. After the revolution, Volition had commercialized the entire aid operation, turning it into a line of business. More shit changes, Minotaur thought. Through the forties and fifties, competition between different convoys had thinned out the competitors, reducing the number of supply routes by a third. No doubt the revolution had improved the lives of people living in the big camps and centers like DC. But whole sectors had fallen off the grid in the twenty forties and no-one knew what happened to the people in them. Some moved on, some stayed and dealt with it. Minotaur couldn’t think about it. Life moved on.

The C30 Road was quiet. Minotaur studied the ruins of a passing urbscape. Reinforcing beams lay like dead trees, mired in debris. Next, a slope of burning tires slid by. Beyond the tires, framed against a steel-grey sky, a red brick mountain of shipping containers was hung with nets and ladders. People draped laundry from gunshot windows. Minotaur could see Best Buy on the horizon, surrounded by tent slums.

How did this happen? asked a voice in his head. How was it that less than thirty years ago, this land had belonged to the wealthiest, most kick-ass powerful nation on earth? Minotaur’s thoughts drifted back to another time, another world. Eyes on the horizon, he remembered the Change.

———————————–

He signed up on St Patrick’s Day, 2019. Mosdef Junior, a.k.a. Minotaur, was ready to serve. Training for war took Minotaur’s mind off everything that was falling apart in the world. Everywhere you looked it seemed that things were going from bad to worse. Global warming had set in faster than people expected. By twenty eighteen, NASA scientists were saying that ninety five per cent of life on the planet was doomed to extinction. By the time the US-Eurozone coalition went to war with China, in November 2018, the Amazon jungle was in flames and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-shelves were falling into the sea. Fifty million Americans, mostly ex-farmlanders from the Midwest, were making a bitter pilgrimage to the east, where the government had built the first generation of camps to house them. Minotaur’s neighborhood in west Atlanta was part of a strip that was razed to the ground to clear space for the camps. The campscape would spread like mould up the flank of the Appalachians the following decade. After the Change, it was all there was left.

Minotaur got the hell out of there before he became a camptramp himself. Age eighteen, he had no fixed abode, a minimal education, and zero prospects for the future. He decided that, if the world was going to hell, best place to be was in the army. Least you got a gun. Nice thing about the forces is that they censored the media, so you didn’t have to deal with the endless feed of bloggers telling America how bad everything had got. It was like America invented a new profession in the twenty teens, the celebrity expert. Know-it-all assholes got us into this mess, yo. Minotaur had seen through those experts from the start. Scientists and experts didn’t see it coming, did they? No one saw it coming, the Change.

The Atlantic Gulf Stream had kept the northern continents of the world in a climactic sweet spot for eons. By 2025, it had slowed considerably. Rising global temperatures were warming the seas, which contained the planet’s cooling agent – ice, in the form of frozen water. As the ice caps melted, cold water flooded the Atlantic and Pacific basins, transforming the dynamics of these thermal hubs, and the operation of the Atlantic conveyor. Everyone knew the tide was turning. No one thought it was a big deal. President Cleaver notoriously suggested that the Gulf Stream’s shutting down might actually be a good thing for the United States, in that it might knock a few bars off the thermometer and give people on the beaches of Miami some relief. Sure enough, with global temperatures going up, the economy in recession, oil prices on the hike, and protesters knocking down the gates of every waste-of-time climate summit in the world, there seemed to be more important things to worry about than ocean currents. No one thought that the Atlantic Ocean would turn around. No one even knew it could happen.

Legend has it that a Danish frigate aligned with the fifth fleet, stationed off the South Sandwich Islands in preparation for the offensive on Buenos Aires, first reported surface water agitation north of Antarctica on New Year’s Day, 2030. By the time the story made it out on Wikileaks, the impossible had already occurred. Major undersea flows were colliding in the southern Atlantic, where the ocean rolled and threshed like a hot tub. The entire ocean conveyor was turning around. No computer model had predicted it. It was a singularity, an unprecedented event.

The Change threw Mother Nature into chaos.

Minotaur was with the Fighting 24th north of Madrid when news of the Change came through. He’d watched early reports on the holcrom unit in his headpiece. The military channel played up the state of things back home and dismissed what it called ‘disinformation’ about the fall of the government. He didn’t find out the truth of what happened in the US until later on.

Fact is, when FEMA forecast a climate shift on the horizon, US society fell apart. It was mid-April 2030, things were barely holding together as it was. The news of an impending climate shift triggered an apocalyptic fervor up and down the campscape on the Eastern Seaboard. People wept, clutched at Bibles and threw themselves off the top of buildings. Chanting mobs stormed shopping malls and waged open war with security staff in Walmart and Sears. Members of the Manhattan Shanhayaa Buddhist Church staged a mass immolation in New York’s Central Park. The fundamentalist Christian group Hosea 8:7 shuttled congregation after congregation straight to heaven in a grisly series of fire-bombings down the east coast.

A week after the Atlantic reversal became public, the skies across North America turned purple-back and the thermometer dropped below fifty. An ominous rumble filled the air. The people in the eastern camps stopped and listened to that sound. It was like a giant hole had opened in the Midwest and the entire continent was crashing into the pit. Then the wind picked up and the rain came down in black fat drops that morphed into hail and then blocks of ice were crashing from the sky and nothing out of cover was safe.

The Big Freeze had begun.

Tornadoes ripped through the campscape and left it in tatters. Tenements collapsed and cars flew about on the street. Giant waves battered the coast and floods swept whole suburbs into the sea. People hunkered down where they could. Millions were dying and nothing could be done. President Cleaver and his advisers were taken to a secret bunker in Virginia, where they spent three days blasted on pills and booze before being dispatched in a coup d’etat by a team of officers with the backing of the General Staff. These actions marked the end of the legitimate constitutional administration of the United States of America. They marked the birth of the brutal, short-lived, American Seaboard Federation.

———————————–

The blast of a horn and the guard truck below him burst into life. Minotaur shook sleep from his eyes. He’d dozed off. He struggled to get his bearings. They had reached the stretch of road on which they had seen the band of figures the day before. In front of the convoy, about a mile ahead, a similar group was blocking the highway. Minotaur could make out a mix of people in a sorry state. A man in a red jacket was at the head of the group walking down the center of the highway towards the convoy. The man waved a rag on the end of a stick.

The convoy shuddered to a halt. The windows of the front truck bristled with guns. A squad of troopers sprang out into a defensive formation upon the road. There was a burst of automatic fire. A mechanical voice instructed the strangers to halt.

There was banging on the side of the truck.

‘Hola. Anybody home? Little help here’.

Minotaur dropped down the ladder and fell into formation with the other men on the road. They jogged to the head of the convoy. The armed troopers had corralled the strangers into a circle in the center of the highway. They had them on their knees, hands behind their heads.

The captain of the convoy was a barrel-chested man with a scarred face. He sweated in the breeze. He mopped his forehead as he looked the map that was laid before him on the road. His second in command came running back from the prisoners.

‘They’re not Zoners’, said the lieutenant. ‘They say they’re from Baystone Camp’.

‘I thought it was collapsed into Fairview?’

‘Fairview? That’s miles away’.

The Captain scowled at the map. ‘And we’re not commissioned for it either. Christ, we’re not here to hand out food parcels. You there’, he yelled at Minotaur. ‘Go find out what the story is. And you – call Central. Who’s delivering to Fairview?’

Minotaur walked towards the circle of prisoners with troopers to either side, weapons at the ready. The group was in a bad condition. They were malnourished and underdressed; some were wrapped in blankets and shredded sheets of tarpaulin.

‘Baystone or Fairview?’, Minotaur asked no one in particular.

The man with the flag spoke with a stammer.

‘We w-was raided’, he said. ‘In th-the Thaw’. He gestured towards the mall further down the road. ‘We need medicines’. His mouth was a jagged hole under his beard.

Minotaur saw bandages under the rags. The soldiers to either side lowered their ventilators.

‘What kind of sickness you got?’ he choked. The smell ripped a hole through time.

‘W-w-what do you think?’ The man coughed and spat a bloody oyster on the road. ‘W-w-war pox. What happened to the c-c-convoy to W-wood Creek’?

Minotaur glanced back at the trucks.

‘We’re not carrying medicines’, he said. ‘You people have to get off the road’.

‘We was relyin on the Wood Creek c-convoy’, the man said.

A woman rose to her feet, oblivious to the dozen rifles suddenly trained in her direction. The scarf about her head made her look Islamic. There was a child staring up from her skirts.

‘Please sir’, she said. ‘We got a girl who is sick. We need medicines’.

‘Baystone or Fairview?’, Minotaur demanded. His voice came from far away.

‘B-Baystone’, said the man. ‘W-w-we were the last ones there’.

Minotaur marched back to the convoy. ‘Stragglers from Baystone’, he said. ‘Which probably makes them Zoners. You decide’.

As the officers fell to arguing, he walked about the back of the truck and blew vomit through his fingers and nose.

———————————–

Mecca had fallen and the siege of Riyadh was proceeding. Minotaur sat in the guard truck, hunched over his pod, bathed in a holoscene glow. He slid in and out of levels, commanding units on the ground before pulling up for a helicopter view, taking in the battle as it played out across the Peninsula. He was ranking well and scoring hits. It was enough to see him into credit in zero minus five, though not enough for the bonus.

His avatar flew over.

‘You should attend to more immediate matters’, it told him. ‘Creditserv are threatening to cut you off. If you don’t settle your account in the next twenty four hours, you’ll be disconnected’.

Minotaur flew to Riyadh. MINO3GRAFXX30 followed.

‘You need to close the case, Minotaur. Close the case and you are out of the red. I’m telling you, this is the only way you are going to get out of this hole. You need to go back to basics, start building again. Think about it. You are scoring well on BATTLEFIELD. The syndicates are watching and they are always looking for new players. You’ve had a string of bad luck, Minotaur. But you’re in a good position to turn this around. Hope. Strive. Desire. You know you can do it’.

Minotaur logged off Netspace. BATTLEFIELD was nothing compared to real life.

Ten minutes later he was online again. WORKIN FOR A LIVIN, he thumbed.

They hit traffic after Brandy Station and the convoy slowed to a crawl. Low-rise prefabs gave way to tenements and stacks. They were passing through Sweatshop Alley to the west of DC, the home of the manufacturing industries that had sprung up after the second round of Initiatives in 2044. The decade since had seen a surge of migrants to these areas, where an able-bodied citizen could earn enough to join the waiting list for dormitory quarters, or qualify for a day-pass into the city.

The convoy drifted under an overpass crowded with workers’ squats, seething with color and life. Everywhere you looked there were people. Two hundred fifty million, the fifty four census had said. Given the state of things, it was hard to credit that five hundred million had clogged the coast in the early years of the Change. Looking back, Minotaur couldn’t believe that anyone had survived this period at all. He thought of frozen corpses lined in pits. For a moment there, they’d teetered on the brink of extinction. If the latticework of supply lines had collapsed, the Federation government would have fallen fast as the US administration, and the Badlands would’ve stretched to the sea.

That was how it went down in the Eurozone. Minotaur barely got out in time. When the Spanish skies darkened and the population surged south away from the storms, military operations in the region fell to pieces. One morning Minotaur was a Captain in the Fighting 24th. By evening he just was another foreigner in uniform, battling his way through the crowded streets looking for a way out. He’d made it to the sea and managed to secure work on a gunboat doing supply runs about the Andalusian coast. The crew, a mix of Spanish navy men and Somali pirates, worked hard and tight, and after a night of drinking and shedding blood, he’d gathered those about him he trusted and let them in on his plan. Three weeks later they’d hijacked the gunboat in the port of Cádiz and rode it through the mines into open water. They broke though the refugee flotilla one hundred klicks offshore and ploughed the garbage soup all the way to the USA.

Minotaur would never forget the day that he laid eyes on the Sprawl. They’d come into Virginia Beach on a massive swell, At first he thought the coastline was encrusted with snow. As they drew nearer, he’d realized that he was looking at a sea of plastic on top of a landscape of modular huts. There were masses of people in ski-jackets huddling together in the sideways rain, crushed about kettle drums on the beach. Squads of soldiers in black uniforms crouched behind sandbags, machine guns at the ready. Minotaur didn’t recognize the insignia. He couldn’t see an Old Glory anywhere.

He’d asked a Federation trooper the moment they’d made landfall: where’s the Stars and Bars? The trooper raised his rifle to knock him down. Minotaur dodged the blow but the implications hit him hard. That was when he knew it was over. That was when he knew that the nation that he’d loved was gone.

The Federation offered him a position in the Homeland Guard, but he’d turned them down. Ever a patriot, he said. A patriot without a country. Turning his back on the military, he had focused on staying alive. He bunked in stadiums and clustered dormitories. He spent days and nights queuing for rations in the wind and the rain. He picked up construction work when he could get it, though there was nothing regular. He froze and starved and watched the men and women in that ugly uniform crush every expression of revolt. Minotaur probably wouldn’t have survived without the hate. His carbine kept him safe and the heart and enhancements kept him solid. But it was hate that got him out of the rig in the morning. Hate and anger stronger than grief.

Meanwhile the weather raged through a miscellany of unforgiving conditions. Hurricanes, flash-floods, tornadoes and blizzards launched themselves on top of one another in violation of all known meteorological logic. When the storms drew breath, thunderheads in the western skies grumbled from morning to night. But already things were starting to settle down. It wasn’t long before the people in the camps realized that the climate had settled into a new equilibrium. The pattern was clear from 2032. November to March brought the cruelest winters that the continent had seen for ten thousand years. They called it the Freeze, after the Big Freeze, the drop in temperature that had signaled the Change. In April came the Thaw. The blizzards turned to sleet and rain, and temperatures rose to a balmy fifty degrees. On a good year, the Thaw lasted to October. At the height of the season, the residents of the camps would pull off their parkas and sunbathe in the frosty glow. Mid-afternoon it was straight back into the thermals. Mostly, the climate was wet and cold, and worried by an evil wind. They said it was a Siberian climate, befitting the new American Gulag.

The Seaboard Federation didn’t have a shred of legitimacy and it knew it. Opposition to the Council of Marshalls – the military junta who had seized control in 2030 – became louder and more reckless with each passing year. Things came to a head in 2035 when the Homeland Guard turned their machine guns on rioters in DC. After that the soldiers on the street took on the air of an occupying force. When, in October thirty six, on the brink of the Freeze, the Council announced further cuts to the gas ration, the popular discontent boiled over into massive protests across the camps. The mob, by this point, had nothing to lose. They ran amok with molotovs and carbines. They raided and looted, sang, drank, and screwed in the mud. The Homeland Guard was presented with an impossible situation and restrained itself to using gas and rubber bullets in response to the protests. It was a strategic mistake. When the fires had died and the dust settled down and the protesters returned to their camps, all that anyone could talk about was what an amazing time it had been.

News media at the time was tightly controlled, so it was impossible to know the true scale of the riots. But no one in the camps had any doubt that it was the largest single political event in the history of the continent, if not the world. Almost by accident, the residents of the camps had discovered that they could be more than just a mass of aching bellies, but an awesome political force. It was the spark that lit the fires of revolution.

A week after the riots, Minotaur saw a placard bearing the slogan: VOLITION. Within six months, Volition Party agitators were spiriting copies of the Freedom Manifesto from camp to camp, and Dorien Xiao, the leader of the movement, had called for a citizen’s referendum on the future government of the Sprawl.

Three years of bloody guerrilla warfare ensued. The revolutionaries were branded terrorists, but everyone knew it was the junta who was responsible for the crimes. By the time the Volition armies stormed Capitol Hill, with Xiao at their head, the revolutionaries had united the campscape into a single entity under their red and blue flag. When the new administration was sworn in, on July 4, 2040, Xiao’s first act as leader was to give official status to the campscape name that had become coinage for the rebels: the Sprawl.

Truth be told, the Sprawl was born earlier than this, in the Thaw of thirty seven, when the Freedom manifesto was first circulated about the camps. If the revolution had succeeded, it was not just because the Volition Party opposed an unpopular and illegitimate government. It was because it reaffirmed values and ideals that had defined the old America, which many assumed had died in the period of the Change. The Freedom manifesto was a new beginning for the residents of the east coast camps. The spirit of democracy had returned, and with it, hope.

Minotaur could remember the Freedom manifesto world for word. He recited it below his breath as the campscape rolled slowly by.

The Council of Marshalls has declared that sovereign authority resides in you, the military government of the Sprawl. But it seems to us that we, the people, gave you this authority by an unspoken consensus, and in doing so we became a sovereign body with a far greater right than your own. We are well assured that the governance you have provided has preserved our lives and safeguarded the future. But we are equally assured that the future exists only so far as the present is given to change and that volition is the right of all.

We present the following truths as incontrovertible. First, that volition is the wellspring of human happiness and virtue, and should be enshrined in a universal legal code. Second, that democracy is the political expression of volition, and should be the principle ambition of any legitimate administration. Third, that free enterprise is the economic expression of volition, and the underpinning of a sovereign state.

Friends, any less than these principles is an affront to the legacy of this land. We offer you the chance to join us in realizing these principles or to break before the power of our common vision.

VOLITION!

Back to Lord of Swarms

Back to main page

Part I: Minotaur

1. Roanoke Nitelife
2. Aftermath
3. Welcome to DC
4. NuFlesh
5. Dixon
6. Wetlab
7. Blankety Blank
8. Democracy 2.0
9. Old Glory
10. House of Representatives

Part II: Behemoth

1. Outside
2. Basing into Heaven
3. Badlander
4. Temple City
5. Humble Pie
6. Schizoscope
7. Weather Overground
8. Beneath Temple City
9. Behemoth Rising
10. The Organon

Intermezzo: Edith’s Dream

Part III: Chimera

1. Freak
2. Leaving Temple City
3. Pittsburg Pirates
4. The Birth of Chimera
5. Funny Business
6. Into the Labyrinth
7. Revolution of the Saints
8. Chimera at the Gates
9. Shiva Awakes
10. Festival

Epilogue: The Eye of Brahma

Go to Prologue: Feast of Keres

Security Station Keres stood skirted by wind-farms on a jagged thrust of granite fifty miles northwest of the Sprawl. Tucked into the elbow of the mountain, the station looked west over a barren landscape of tundra and ruin stretching into the Badlands. Keres was a lonely outpost, barely accessible by road, isolated in the Freeze when icestorms threshed the peaks. The turbines studding the face of the mountain were its only companions. Their collective roar, like a horde of demons, swept up over the walls of the station and was carried east with the flow of electric power to the sea.

The staff at Station Keres fell into two groups. Most of the soldiers were new recruits, counting the days until they got away. Others in the station had forgotten the day that they’d arrived. For many soldiers, the rugged wind and roar of the turbines became increasingly harrowing as time wore on, until the nightmares set in and things began to slide. Others found equanimity in the experience and a kind of release. Many of the senior staff of the Keres station fell into this category. They were somber individuals, who kept secret histories hidden from the world, and sometimes even from themselves.

Half Nelson was in a class of his own. Nelson’s fate was to have been born between the Change and the resumption of p-godding programs in the forties. Before the Change, he would have been ‘intellectually disabled’. Nelson’s current title depended on who was dispensing the honors. In the armory and ablution blocks, he was Captain Shit-for-Brains. The boys in the storerooms called him Curdled Milk, in reference to the games they’d have him play on lonely nights. Privates Hamilton and Beers, who manned the security post at the eastern gate, had a different game for Nelson, in which he’d earned the esteemed titles Venturer and Poet. Nothing much moved through the eastern gate except for the wind and Nelson on his ventures. Hamilton and Beers spent their days smoking blunts and playing ball in the courtyard behind the gates, using the security system to monitor the movements of officers. Not infrequently, the ball would fly between the top of the gates and the wall in which they were set.

‘Go get the Poet’, Beers would snigger, and Nelson would be summoned for a venture.

Nelson knew that Hamilton and Beers were fooling with him, but he didn’t mind the gaming. They were a funny couple, these two – always grinning, joshing. Nelson appreciated the chance to demonstrate his hardiness and skill. He would plough out the gates into the wind, down the slope in search of the ball. By the time he’d come back, his hands would be frozen and his breathing coming fast and shallow. He’d stand in the courtyard hopping and shivering as Hamilton and Beers fell laughing about him.

‘Say Nelson’, Beers would inquire. ‘How cold’s it out there?’

‘Yeah Poet’, Hamilton’d say. ‘Give it to us in verse’.

‘Numbly. Numbly Jumbly’, Nelson mumbled. For the soldiers, this was the payoff.

‘Numbly Jumbly! Word ‘o the poet!’

Nelson didn’t mind their laughing. He was grateful for the morsel of respect.

The wind was hard and cruel on the morning of the thirtieth and when Nelson came back from his venture, his lips were blue and he fudged his lines. Beers threw a blanket over his shoulders and kicked his ass in the direction of the stove. When he turned around, a stranger was standing inside the gates. He did not carry a weapon. He wore black thermals without an insignia on the shoulder and breast. There was something unsettling about the absence of rank, an unfinished quality that pervaded the whole person.

‘Damn, where’d you come from, dude?’ Beers said.

‘I came from outside’, the stranger said. He looked at them with a neutral expression. It was like he was waiting for something.

Hamilton tugged his pistol from its holster and leveled it at the stranger’s chest.

‘Genscan’s malfunctioning’, he muttered. It wasn’t right. ‘ID, unit, hey? You deaf? Motherfucker. Beers, check the system.’

Beers shoved past the stranger into the control room. The stranger continued looking at Hamilton. His eyes dropped from the gun to the knife on Hamilton’s belt.

‘I like your knife’, he said. ‘May I have it?’

It was a golden moment, like the first toke of the day. Time slowed, the wind died, and a ray of sunlight pierced the titanium mesh of the gates. Hamilton knew that he’d never met the man before. He’d never met anyone like this man; yet he had always known this man, as if the stranger was a reflection of his deeper possibility made visceral and true. Fact was he wanted nothing more than to give the stranger his knife. He holstered the pistol and stepped forward, passing the weapon to the man, handle first.

The stranger took the knife, examined it briefly, spun it in the air and caught it again, so it pointed downwards in his fist. Placing his left hand on Hamilton’s shoulder, he rammed the blade into Hamilton’s stomach and gutted him like a pig.

————————

Joy Squad Fourteen were kitting up in the tool room when the alarm sounded through the station. Private Walker pulled his holocrom into place and stammered out a report to Corporal Smith.

‘Sir! Security violation on the ground floor, sir! East gate – shit, I mean sir! We got action, sir, coming up the stairs at East three, sir!’

Smith sprang into action.

‘OK you cluster-fucks, into formation. Bennet – get those boots on! This is not a drill! Alpha unit! I want a defensive formation at East three-zero in ten, nine, eight… Beta unit! I want backups at locations twenty-oh-two and twenty-oh-seven, on the double!’

Hoisting cannons, slamming in clips, fumbling with straps, belts and boots, Alpha unit charged down the corridor and threw themselves into position about door E three-zero at the mouth of the stairs leading up from the gate. Sounds of a ruckus echoed up from below: Beer’s bellowing voice, staccato bursts of machine-gun fire, the piercing chime of rounds on metal.

With a mad clap of boots on stairs something burst from the door.

‘Friendly!’, Walker cried.

Private Beers fell into the arms of the awaiting troopers, rifle clattering to the floor. He was bleeding from cuts to the head and chest. Beta unit dragged him about the corner as the others resumed their formation.

Corporal Smith dropped down beside him. ‘Report Private. What’s the situation?’

Beers struggled with the arms that held him down, hands slipping in blood.

‘It changes shape’, he spat. ‘Don’t you see it? It could be any one of them!’

Smith’s jaw started working left and right. He blinked and bugged his eyes.

‘Corporal?’, Private Walker demanded.

Smith’s eyes rolled back in head.

‘Corporal’, Walker repeated, coming at him. It was all he got out. Smith hoisted his rifle and blasted Walker in the chest. Spinning about, he unloaded his weapon into the soldiers, hollering like an animal. Private Bremner took him down. A mesh of bloody explosions embroidered the Corporal chest to thigh. A handful of bullets threaded through to Webern and Anders at the forward post, knocking them to the floor, and Jones, assuming they were under attack from behind, threw himself about and squeezed off a series of rounds, forming a fatal cross-stitch in the closed space. Suddenly a voice was screaming: ‘Fire in the hole!’, and Spalding, in the forward group, was kicking at the grenade that was rolling in his direction. With a boom that punctured time, the corridor was strewn with soldier-parts and the conflagration was on.

Anders shot Bremner and Walker shot Jones. Shelly, who had to that point not fired a round, was shot in the stomach as Jones went down, and did the same to Marshall as she collapsed. Marshall, to the end the most cautious member of Joy Squad 14, folded to the floor without shooting anyone at all. Overwhelmed, the remaining members of Joy Squad disengaged, flapping and writhing in retreat from the scene.

Private Marshall sat slumped against the wall in a widening pool of blood. The undulating wail of the siren merged with the pain into a feverish experience of motion and speed. When Marshall closed his eyes, he was on a rollercoaster going down, down, about and around, crushed by the g-force, shot into the air… He forced his eyelids apart. Across the hallway, Beers had shifted into a sitting position. Marshall watched as his flesh began to shiver and change; blood seeping into his skin like rivulets of mercury draining into cracks. When he turned to look at Marshall, he had no face at all. Marshall opened his mouth to scream. But the faceless creature shimmered and smiled and soon Marshall was smiling as well.

————————

In the command and control room on level two, Captain Jean Dalton watched in horror as one by one, the squadrons on the floor below collapsed into chaos. Moments earlier, she had been orchestrating the tactical retreat of Anger Management Nine. Now the line was dead and, if the evidence of the security-cam was to be believed, so were the members of the squad. Dalton had yet to see any sign of an invading force. It was like a collective psychosis were infiltrating the units on the floor, throwing them into violent disarray.

Composing herself, she patched through a call to First Lieutenant Stenson, who was escorting the station Commander, Brigadier General Hicks, to the Operations Centre at the top of the building.

‘Stenson – Dalton. Gimme the General’.

Muffled voices, then: ‘Hicks’.

‘General, we have a situation here. Three units on ground floor down already and it’s unclear where the damage is coming from. Request permission to pull back the remaining forces on level one and regroup on level two’.

‘Request denied, Captain. We have reached the Operations Centre and we are reviewing the situation. Hold your men in position until my command. Repeat: do not withdraw; hold your positions’.

Dalton acknowledged the order and stared numbly at the bank of screens before her. Now Heaven Seventeen was getting it in the neck. Private Tommy Thompson was screaming something at the security-cam as he was cut down from behind. The corridor filled with smoke and the bodies faded from view.

‘Shit! Shit! Motherfucker!’

A deep, resounding boom sent a shudder through the room. A second explosion followed hard on the first. Dalton seized the edge of the table.

‘What in hell… Wilson?’

Private Wilson stood at the security console, legs spread like a champion slugger preparing to take a swing. His fingers flew across the keypad as images of fire, smoke and destruction filled the screens.

‘We’ve lost contact with ground floor seven to thirteen. Could have been the armory…’

A third explosion, this time from behind them.

‘Scratch that’, he said. ‘That ain’t the armory’.

‘It’s mortar or artillery fire’.

‘Mines’, Wilson corrected her, stooping over the console. ‘No damage to exterior walls. Hoo-wee! Those babies just decimated everything from the front gates to the central stairs. Uh, including Squadron Fifteen, who were on the stairs at the time…’.

‘So the stairs were booby trapped?’

‘Looks like it, ma’am. But that don’t make sense if the assailants came in from the east gate…’

‘Unless they’ve been in here before’.

‘That’s a hypothetical, ma’am’.

‘Or were inside already. How bout that for a hypothetical, Private?’

‘Can’t deny it’s possible, ma’am. But right now, it’s pretty much everyone getting fucked down there. Ain’t clear who’s doing the fuckin. Your terrorist singles himself out, just before he goes apeshit. This is more like some crazyness getting into people…’

‘That’s what I’m thinking. Some kind of virus, perhaps. It makes sense. Individuals moving between groups, sparking the conflagrations’.

‘Which means that we need to separate out the squads, ma’am’.

‘Damn straight, Private’. Dalton grabbed the mike. ‘Attention all units. This is a general order. All remaining units on level one to fall back to defensive positions. No physical contact between units. Repeat: no physical contact. Spread out and go to ground’.

The call came back immediately. ‘This is Taylor, God Squad Seven. We’re already behind our position, coming up the east stairs to level two. We have casualties, in need of medical assistance’.

‘Taylor, hold your position. That is an order’.

‘Sorry Captain. Already behind the line. We hold, my men are gonna bleed to death. Coming up’.

‘Goddammit!’ Dalton swung about for her helmet and gun.

‘Once more into the fucking fray. Wilson, you’re in charge here. Toddy, Ambers, Raoul – come with me. Raoul, bring the first aid kit. No one else is to move, you got it? I want this place like ice’.

They sprinted for the east stair and reached the door just as God Squad stumbled through. Only five of the twelve troopers remained. Only three remained standing once they’d made it through the door. Corporal Taylor tossed off a salute.

Dalton stuck her head in Taylor’s face. ‘You disobeyed a direct order, Corporal’.

‘So sue my ass, Captain. Might get me the hell out of this station’.

‘Did you see what hit you?’.

‘No idea, ma’am. Could’ve been an accident. Brady’s gun went off, then everyone started up’.

‘No accident. The same thing’s been happening across the station’.

Dalton called Wilson. ‘OK, God Squad is up. How’s the situation below?’

‘Like ice ice baby, ma’am. Reports coming in. Nothing much left to move down there. Heavy casualties, ma’am’.

‘OK, send two squads of medics down the north stair. They stay down there until I say so, got it? What’s the word from the General?’

‘General’s sitting tight, ma’am. No word whatsoever’.

Dalton shook her head. She’d known Hicks to be taciturn, monosyllabic. But she’d never thought he’d freeze up under fire. It seemed that the situation, for better or worse, was in her hands.

‘Cap’n?’, came a voice. Dalton looked about to see Private Gooding propped against the wall with an adhesive balloon clutched to his gut. She immediately realized what was missing from the scene.

‘Shelby. Where’d she go?’

‘Don’t know, Cap’n. Her knee was fair blown apart. Heh. But she just up and left’.

Dalton glanced about the corner. A trail of blood ran five years up the corridor and ended. Nothing else to be seen.

‘OK, Toddy, Ambers – Taylor you fuck – get over here. Wilson, do you read? I think Private Shelby has the virus. Lock everything down and gimme a report. Where is she and where’s she headed? We’re gonna flush her out and take her down’.

————————

Shelby was walking into a trap. From the command and control room, Wilson watched as she advanced through Central four-oh-three to five, taking out the Genscan and security-cam units as she went. Her expressions ranged from serenity to elation. Sometimes she didn’t look like Shelby at all. Wilson didn’t mention it to the Captain. He was too busy relaying commands, helping coordinate the weave of the operation, and admiring the elegance with which Dalton prepared the coup de grâce.

Shelby disappeared on West six-oh-two. Dalton surmised she’d either broken into the lift shaft on six-oh-three or holed up in the armory. Either way, they had her cornered. Bunched together, Dalton’s team crept towards the armory. They ran into Heavy Duty coming the other way at the corner of six-oh-three. The unit was kitted up with enough rad-hoods for the whole team. Dalton passed them around. She instructed Wilson to lock the lift doors on levels one and two. The Double Happys, on the level above, were to sweep the shaft on her command. First, though, they’d flush out the armory. If Shelby was planning a last stand, this is where it would be.

The armory doors stood slightly apart, as if the room were drawing breath. The soldiers flattened themselves to either side of the entranceway.

‘Shelby! This is Captain Dalton. Are you coming out or are we coming in?’

No answer. Dalton nodded at Toddy and Clarke. From either side, she and Toddy pulled the doors apart so that Clarke could pump a gas grenade through the middle. There was a crack and hiss. Dalton and Toddy hauled the doors wide and Heavy Duty went charging into the room, a team of gargoyles behind ferro-plastic shields. The others followed suit.

They made it to the foremost row of shelves without incident. The soldiers took up position behind pillars, crates, and boxes but nothing came at them. Dalton waved for the advance. Through the infra-red lenses of her rad-mask, she watched her team fan out down the rows.

‘Stick together, nutt to butt’, she hissed into the mike. ‘You see Shelby, take her down but do not approach. Stay clear’.

The troopers reached the end of the shelves. Before them, a row of upright lockers loomed above tables and pallets stacked with inventory. Most of the battle-rattle was locked away. The only weapons that Dalton could see were knives and bayonets, plus some picks and drills against the wall.

Dalton gestured towards the lockers, signaling for troopers to close in from either side. The others took up firing positions from behind the shelves.

‘Shelby, this is your last chance’, Dalton called. ‘Surrender now or, so help me, I’ll bring all hell down on your head. I’m giving you three. Three … two…’

A voice came from the central locker. A cracked falsetto.

‘Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you got a cootie shot. Circle, circle, square, square, I don’t…’

‘Half Nelson? Is that you?’

Silence. Then:

‘I’m okay. I’m okay here. You jus go bout cha business. Don’t cha worry bout me’.

‘Je-sus!’ Dalton signaled for the troopers to close in. They charged the locker and threw open the door. Half Nelson tumbled out onto the floor. He writhed like a worm, keening in the gas, burying his face in his hands.

There was nothing for it now: ‘The other lockers – go go go!’

The soldiers charged from left and right. Within seconds, the locker doors hung open, but Shelby was not inside. Dalton’s hunch had been wrong. She glared at Half Nelson, sobbing on the biocrete floor, snatched a mask from a shelf and shoved it in Corporal Taylor’s face.

‘Goddammit Taylor, can’t you see Shit-for-Brains is in a state? Here on, you are playing nurse’.

The lift shaft became the focus of operations. Dalton conferred with Wilson as the soldiers split into groups, standing in the dark or wandering through the shelves as if searching for something they’d missed. No one minded Nelson as he wobbled to his feet and shuffled in the direction of the door. Took off his mask and bent down to pick up a steelsaw hidden under some sacking by the wall. Shut and locked the door with a click. Smiled and vanished in a milky haze, impervious to infrared light.

The soldiers looked about. The steelsaw sneered into life.

‘Numbly jumbly’, said Nelson, coming down the aisle. He was into them before anyone knew what was happening.

————————

The troopers outside heard the gunning snarl of the saw, accompanied by a volatile chorus of shrieks, howls, screams and machine-gun fire. They threw themselves against the locked doors. In the command and control room, Wilson struggled to override the manual locking system. Within a space of moments, the doors snapped open, and the soldiers heaved themselves across the threshold. Not one made it into the room. As the doors flew apart, something shot out between them, bowling over the soldiers like kingpins. It bounced off one wall and then the other, all the while showering them in a hail of bullets. Those who survived described it as a translucent bubble or sphere the size of a beach ball, motley-hued in the chromaticity of blood, flesh and semen. There was something folded-up inside the sphere like a pupae or fetus. It cackled as it cut them down. What was truly horrific were the objects protruding from the surface of the sphere. Blossoming forth in all directions was a gory thicket of disembodied hands and limbs clutching automatic weapons that chattered and roared and released their payload until all were spent. By this point, most of the soldiers were either dead or in flight. The sphereoid whirled and spun down the corridor after them, the insane laughter echoing through the station long after the shooting had ceased.

————————

‘General, I think we should go inside’.

Brigadier General Adam Hicks stood on the edge of Station Keres, staring into the Badlands. The sound of the wind turbines ground the air like a squadron of bombers. Plumes of smoke belched from the buildings below. Hicks stared into the middle-distance, eyes empty and unfocused.

‘General?’

From the Operations Center, Hicks had retrieved his military dress blues, adorned with medals from years of service. He hadn’t worn the uniform in fifteen years. It still fit OK, but the wind cut right through it.

‘General?‘

The concrete shuddered beneath their feet as the giant hanger doors built into the roof of the station started to edge apart. The service elevator was coming up.

Hicks turned to First Lieutenant Stenson. His peaked cap caught on the wind and sailed over the far edge of the station.

‘Go back to the Operations Center, Stenson. That’s an order’.

‘I’m not sure I’m willing to obey that order, sir. With all respect, I’m not sure you’re in your right mind, sir’.

Hicks looked levelly at his subordinate. ‘Do it for me, Billy. Do it as a friend’.

Stenson hesitated and glanced at the hanger doors. A CA-190 Vampire was emerging from below, its long metal blades singing in the wind. Stenson saluted the General, turned on his heel and departed.

Hicks continued his vigil at the edge of the building. He didn’t acknowledge the footsteps behind him. He did not flinch as the creature moved to his shoulder, leaning close, breathing in his ear.

‘I wanted to kill you last’, it said. ‘The others I enjoyed killing. For you, I feel some tenderness … and respect’.

‘I’ve been waiting for you’, said Hicks.

‘Do not think of me as a friend. I am a creature of judgment now. The others, they played their part and they reaped their reward. The measure of retribution was easy to divine. But you – you refused our gifts. You came here to squander your life in this place. You wallowed in misery and regret’.

‘I have never believed that I deserved a reward for what I did. I’m not sure it was worth the cost’.

The creature stood before him. Hicks looked away.

‘Don’t', he said.

It gestured out into the Badlands. ‘Then look at the world that we have created. Do you see the order, the orchestration, the beauty?

Five hundred miles of plains, rotting urbscapes, empty freeways.

‘Come’, it said. ‘It is time to fly’.

Hicks took its hand and they stepped to the edge of the building. For a moment they stood together, balanced, cradled by the wind. Then they stepped out over the drop.

Only Hicks fell. The creature hovered, riding the wind, looking down at his body with a bitter smile on its lips.

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