Mozari Arrival Page 18

  “What kept you back there?” Hammond asked when they slowed at the vehicles.

  “I forgot to grab the rope at one of the rope swings and fell. Ripped the skin off my knee, and then...” He found it unbelievable to say, but then he remembered that they had all seen something similar happen with Althaus, if to very different effect. “Then the suit kind of... smeared over it, and it was fine. No wound, and no hole in the suit. This stuff’s amazing, whatever it is.”

  Hammond tapped him on the shoulder. “The stuff is nanotechnology, West: tiny sub-molecular machines. That’s about as much as I can follow of the specifics. They’re entirely self-repairing, nanites and suits both—and when you’re wearing it, so are you, if it works right.”

  “Me?”

  “Cuts, fractures, anything like that. The suit bonds with its wearer as far as the nanites are concerned, so they’ll repair that sort of damage to both. And that’s assuming you manage to take any damage: That sort of slow-velocity fall, or trying to cut the suit, will get through and make for brief damage, but the higher velocity the impact, the more the suit reacts.

  “But when I fell, it tore pretty easily.”

  “Trust me, if I shot you in that kneecap, the suit would harden at the point of impact without letting the bullet through. Damage only occurs if the thing that causes the damage is below a certain kinetic energy threshold. Like Zoombang.”

  Daniel had heard of that. Zoombang was a shear-compression material used for protective gear for full-contact martial artists, motocross riders, and such, which solidified under impact, but you could press a finger into it without much resistance.

  “A large enough caliber hit will still hurt, though,” Hammond warned him. “The laws of physics still apply. It’ll just be transferred through to bone, like being hit in the ribs with a baseball bat. But if anything breaks, the suit will repair it.”

  Daniel got the idea, though it sounded weird. “Have any suits been tested in combat?”

  “By the Mozari, maybe. By humans... It’s always our night to be on the red carpet premiere, huh.” General Carver and Dr. Martino came over then, interrupting any question Daniel might have asked next. “Feeling OK for more, then?”

  “Actually,” Daniel said, “never better. This is pretty amazing.”

  Martino consulted a tablet computer. “Your vitals and your arrival time all look good; right within the range of efficacy the original Mozari suits give.”

  “So, now that we’re here, what’s next?”

  Martino pointed to the weapons case. “You’ve had the XR-01 demonstrated to you?”

  “Yeah. And classes on the specs. We all have.”

  “Then let’s try it out with the suit.”

  Daniel and Hammond followed him to the weapons crate. This time, Hammond lifted the weird-looking weapon out and helped guide Daniel’s arm into the sheath. He tensed, leaning back a little to get leverage ready for the tremendous weight of the weapon. The inside of it clicked together with his suit and settled around his hand. Daniel almost fell back as the huge weight failed to materialize. Then Hammond guided the fingers of Daniel’s other hand into the slots ahead of the spiky ruff that was its magazine. The weapon was heavy, but didn’t feel like seventy-five pounds.

  Hammond noted his expression and poise, and chuckled. “Feels a lot lighter today, huh?”

  “It is lighter!” Daniel exclaimed.

  “The nanites in the suit spread out the mass somehow, so it’s more manageable. That’s why anyone who doesn’t wear an Exo-suit is in for a surprise if they try to use one.” Hammond led Daniel to a firing position from which he could see the remains of the M1 Abrams that had been used for target practice earlier.

  Under guidance, observed by Carver and the others, Daniel aimed the end of the railgun at the wrecked tank. And then he paused, glancing to Hammond. “I don’t feel a trigger.”

  “It works by neural impulses,” Hammond said. “Once you’re lined up, you just decide to fire.”

  “Decide?” Daniel echoed. He flexed his hand and fingers, trying to make the weapon understand that he wanted it to fire. Nothing happened, and Daniel aimed again, taking the weight of the long rails with his left hand. He forced his right hand to relax, pointing towards the target and imagining firing, imagining a bolt shooting out from the weapon... and then he knew it was firing. He still couldn’t help trying to clench his right hand, to make some sort of physical firing action, as if to physically signal his decision. The railgun jerked his right arm and the whole upper right quadrant of his torso back, and a projectile dug into the earthen bank below the wrecked tank five hundred yards away.

  Daniel stared at the steaming crater in the bank, which looked as if a mortar round had landed there. He shivered at the amount of damage even as a thrill ran through him. “Wow. That’s quite a kick.”

  Hammond gave a gruff chuckle. “Just be glad you’re wearing the suit. Nothing’s broken. Try again.”

  Daniel fired again, and this time, being ready for the recoil, the dense metal bolt that was launched flew more true and clanged into the wrecked tank. “Can I have another go?”

  “Please do,” Carver replied. “Indulge yourself, Lieutenant.”

  Daniel nodded, lined up again, and something clicked in his head. Without warning, it was as if he was zoomed-in dizzyingly on the tank, which loomed larger in his vision than it should have at this distance. It was also a slightly different color and seemed clearer and sharper than the rest of the surroundings on the range. It was almost as if it was drawing itself to him, wanting to be hit. And he wanted to hit it—at that thought, three bolts whispered out from the railgun, smashing into what was left of the tank’s turret.

  Surprised by the three-round burst, even though that was perfectly normal for the regular military weapons he had been training with, he wondered whether the weapon would go full auto. He aimed for the tank’s wheels and tracks, and he loosed a stream of rounds that sliced clean through half the length of the tank, carving the wheels clean off and sending track linkages flying in all directions. Startled, he tried to pull back even as the fire continued, but now the bolts were a little slower or weaker, as they hit the forward wheels and bounced off metallically, like regular rifle ammo would have.

  His breath taken away by how awesome the power was, he ceased fire and said, “You never mentioned it could do that, Chief!”

  “Gotta walk before you can run, West.” He looked at Carver and the scientists. “Got what you came for? West would probably be lighting up a cigarette now if he could.”

  “I don’t smoke,” Daniel said, though nobody took any notice.

  “I think that’s a pretty good result for today,” General Carver agreed. “We don’t want to push either the suit or Lieutenant West too far, and I’m sure DARPA needs time to analyze the telemetry they’ve got. Do you agree, Martino?”

  “I do.” He looked like he’d just seen his new favorite movie ever. Until the next one, Daniel thought, and felt a little uncomfortable about being the center of attention. “Except for one thing. Not a physical test. There’s something else we’d like you to take a look at.”

  Daniel thought about the phrasing, still not entirely trusting the doctor. “A look?”

  “Well, examine it; give us your impressions.” Martino beckoned to a technician standing next to the solid gunmetal cube, perhaps two feet wide, two feet high, and two feet deep. If Daniel had needed to judge what it was made of, he might have guessed aluminum or steel. “It’s a box?” he commented as Hammond and one of the technicians took the railgun from his arm and returned it to its crate.

  “No. At least, it isn’t hollow; as far as we can tell, it’s a solid-state object.”

  “As far as you can tell? You mean you didn’t make this?”

  Hammond, standing behind Daniel, said quietly, “Right.”

  “It’s Mozari?” Daniel said.

  The technician nodded. “It came down in one of the pods.”

  O
K, not aluminum, then, Daniel thought. “What’s it for?”

  “That’s a little difficult to explain. Just reach out and touch it, and... then you’ll see.”

  Daniel hesitated. How many times in sci-fi movies did somebody say something like that when trying to lure a new victim in to be possessed or taken over by some parasite or machine-driven intelligence? Too many for his liking. “You touch it first,” he challenged the man.

  “Sure,” the technician said, and he put the palm of his hand against the box. “See? It’s not electrified, or a bomb, or anything dangerous.”

  Daniel still hesitated. “Then why do you need me to touch it?”

  “Because it reacts to the nanites in the suit technology,” Martino said. “This is a test of the suit’s connectivity, not the cube.”

  That seemed sensible enough. “OK.” He stepped over and reached out for the box.

  “Oh, one thing. If you meet the Librarian, there’s a word we’d like you to ask it about.”

  “What? What Librarian? Is he or she coming here?”

  Hammond and Carver looked at each other. “Not exactly,” Carver said. “Just.... You may experience an encounter soon. If you do, just ask about the word Doctor Martino gives you.”

  Daniel looked at them warily, not seeing much rationality to what they were saying. On the other hand, so much of his recent life sounded bizarre. There was a quotation about the military that Daniel remembered: ours not to question why, ours but to do or die. Right now, he would have changed the second line to ‘ours but to just roll with shit.’ “What word?”

  “Gresian,” Martino said.

  “Huh?” Daniel knew he had a pretty good vocabulary, and not just in English. There were a lot of words that turned up in Law which had been forgotten or replaced by simpler colloquialisms in everyday speech, but this wasn’t any word he’d ever heard of before. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Just ‘Gresian,’ OK?”

  Daniel held the scientist’s gaze. “What language is that?” His skin tingled with the thought that it might be the first nonhuman word he’d ever heard.

  “Just roll with it,” Chief Hammond said. Daniel stiffened; had the chief heard his thought? Or was he just using a common phrase?

  Martino grimaced. “Just ask about ‘Gresian.’”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means you’re asking the wrong person, and I just told you who the right... person, to ask is. Repeatedly.”

  “Which means you don’t know.” Daniel tried not to laugh at the expression on Martino’s face. “Ours but to do or die,” he muttered. He turned to the cube and stretched out his right hand. The surface of the cube was smooth and metallic, but Daniel’s fingertips paused an inch away, trembling slightly. The he took a deep breath, and forced his hand down onto the top, his heart skipping a beat, his breath catching in his throat...

  Everything went black.

  Daniel knew he wasn’t unconscious. It was a literal blackness that surrounded him, like when his vision had gone out briefly when he’d first put on the suit, and so he figured that this was due to a similar cause.

  The suit was doing something to his senses.

  He could no longer feel the cube under his palm. In fact, there was no sign of it anywhere; he was somewhere else, in an endless darkness. Suddenly, he began to wonder if he’d actually been transported somewhere, beamed up like in Star Trek. He turned around in a complete circle, seeing only blackness. There must have been a floor, though, at least, as he could feel smooth solidity beneath his feet.

  “Welcome,” a voice said. A woman emerged from the darkness, though there was no light source for her to emerge into, and yet somehow she now seemed to be illuminated by normal daylight. Nothing else was illuminated—only her. She was slightly androgynous, wearing a simple, floor-length white robe like a classical Greek statue, though lights seemed to flicker somewhere in the fabric. Her hair was a neutral brown that could belong to any race or color, and Daniel couldn’t really tell what nationality or ethnicity she was; her skin was a shade that could have been deeply tanned or from any of half a dozen ethnicities. She was neither particularly thin nor fat, beautiful nor ugly, and he couldn’t tell how old she was, either. In fact, she seemed to be an embodiment of the perfect averaging-out of all the ranges of human morphology. She couldn’t possibly be real flesh and blood, he knew. No-one in life was so artificial.

  “Where am I?”

  The strange, unreal woman answered in the clearest and most accentless voice he had ever heard, “In the Library.” He almost wondered if the accent she held was a blend of all of the voices and accents, in just the same way her appearance was surely an artificial blending.

  “Who are you? Or... what are you? You can’t be a real pers—”

  “I am the Librarian. And, I am the Librarian.” That was logical, he supposed, and of course, he had been told he might meet a librarian, and so felt a little foolish for being so surprised, and for asking the question.

  “You speak English very well,” he told her.

  “I serve and disseminate information; an inability to communicate that information appropriately would be counterproductive.”

  “How did you learn it?”

  “I was given the ability to disseminate information upon request to those who access the Library.”

  “I was told to ask—” He stopped; he was supposed to get information, not give it. “What does the word ‘Gresian’ mean to you?” He only hoped he and Martino had pronounced the word correctly.

  Stars suddenly flickered into being in the darkness—vast distances away, but shining bright and clear.

  Something tumbled past Daniel, and he tried to turn to get a better view of it and found himself spinning smoothly, but with no sensation of turning his head, or using muscles to turn around. The floor he’d felt had now vanished from under him. It was like not having a body—just perceptions. The object he’d sensed had undoubtedly once been mechanical, and perhaps part of a vehicle. Now, it was a hollow fragment among a vast three-dimensional field of floating wreckage, one piece of metallic tube ripped from a larger form, trailing cables like veins as it spun off to his left and away.

  Something changed nearby, and space twisted as if bubbles were forming and then being imploded; where the bubbles erupted, they left behind solid structures. Sprawling like cancerous coral reefs, they were all roughly the shape of something somewhere between a spider and octopus, but with a wide range of individual variations as the coral-like surfaces had pushed and pulled and twisted into different forms. Behind the arachnid-shaped bodies, four pearlescent petals bloomed, and then the spider-things were peeling away past him, reaching out to grasp him in their claws as the petal-like device tumbled on in a straight line towards a shimmering globe that was approaching from below. Not approaching, he realized, his stomach lurching: He was falling towards it.

  As the planet grew in his vision, Daniel thought he was looking at lava flows spreading across the surface, but then, as he fell closer, he realized that the rocks through which the molten slag flowed were just a little too regular, a little too patterned, to be natural. This was not lava, but embers of glowing metal simmering in the paths and streets between some form of buildings. He couldn’t hear himself scream, but he felt his lungs pushing the air out in one. When he was out of breath, he drew another, and then realized that if he could draw breath, he wasn’t really in the vacuum of space, falling towards a planet. He was seeing and experiencing something not real.

  He began to look more closely at the smoldering ruins below, now that his nerves and breathing were back under control. The designs and layout of the buildings made no sense to Daniel, even though it felt like something he had seen before, but they were definitely artificial. These were the molten remnants of cities that had burned on a world under a very different sky. If this experience wasn’t real, though, he realized, someone had created it. Whether it was a memory or a simulation or a fictional
creation, he had no idea, but if the opposite of real was artificial, which he was sure to be true, then someone had created it.

  The planet wasn’t the only one in the creation, either. Stars spun around him, throwing up globe after globe—cratered, burning, devasted beyond any ability for life to flourish on any of them. He was seeing planet after planet murdered, and all he had done was use the word Gresian...

  Suddenly, terrifyingly, there was pressure on his shoulder; an impossible touch of a hand gripping him like—

  He stumbled backward, away from the cube, the blue sky above him almost blinding him as he gasped for breath. He felt as if he’d been dropped into icy water from a great height, but he managed to stay upright and on his feet. “West,” a voice snapped, “you OK?”

  It was Chief Hammond.

  Daniel was solidly back on Earth, on the Farm’s firing range. Hammond was giving him a quick look-over like a mechanic eyeballing a car for any damage, and General Carver and the various spooks and scientists were standing around with a mix of bemusement, concern, and excitement. Mainly, it was Martino and the techs who seemed excited.

  “Uh, yeah,” Daniel said. “I’m... I think I’m physically OK. Thanks, Chief.” He sat on the edge of the tailgate of a Humvee and looked at his hands, which were shaking.

  “Looked like you were having a seizure or something,” Hammond said.

  Daniel pressed his hands against the tailgate to stop the shakes. “I was...” He stopped, unable to find the words. “Somewhere else. The Library, I guess.” He shook his head to clear the cobwebs out of it. “I really felt I was physically in another place, and there was a person there. A woman, I’m pretty sure, but not like any woman actually alive.”

  “The Librarian, huh?”

  “That’s what she said. And then, when I asked about that word, Gresian...” He blanked on the words again, uncertain how to describe moving from one unreal place to another, when both felt as real as the firing range did now. “When I asked what the word Gresian meant to her, I was somewhere else again. In space. No gravity. And I think I was given—” Daniel hesitated. Given was the wrong word, but he wasn’t sure what the right one was for what had happened, or even if there was a correct word for the experience. “No, I think I was shown. I was made to feel as if I was floating in space, and shown... Destruction. Obliteration.” There was a murmur from the people around him. “I saw wreckage of what must have been spaceships. Planets being bombed from orbit....”