Seed (40 page)

Geometric patterns of frost formed instantly on Doss’ visor. Everything seemed suddenly slow, diminished by the scale of things. She saw clouds, the broad convexity of brown earth above her. Stars shining through a thin veil of blue sky between her feet. A diamond sun, close enough for her to cradle it in a palm. For an Icarian instant, she knew bliss.

The Falcons peeled over backwards, showing black bellies as they returned the way they had come. They would slam back beneath radar. Angle at Satori’s northern fields and wind turbines. Pop up, fire missiles. A second feint. Hopefully Satori would defend its perimeter.

Momentum carried the Rangers upward for a few seconds—Doss’ altimeter peaked at 82,367—then they fell. Forty-five Rangers, ceramic-and-titanium spores given to the wind. Someone screamed long and hard, paused to fill their lungs, kept screaming.

“That’s Chalk 3, Jake,” Doss said.

“Eleven,” Jake growled. “Cut that fucking mic.” The scream ceased.

“Sorry,” came a small voice.

A series of snaps sounded along Doss’ drop suit as short alloy wings deployed. A hard jerk as flaps articulated, leveling her out.

“Got you on the rope, five by,” Chen reported—Riley’s computer steering them west in a steep glide at the laser point the overwatch drone had painted atop Satori’s dome.

Doss could see it forty miles out: the two massive tortoise shells of Satori’s domes, one half the size of the other, both the color of geranium in the morning sun. The black grid of the old city spread out from it, a charred ruin even from up here.

The blue squares representing her Rangers stacked up single file in her display, Doss at their lead. Her airspeed climbed. Her altitude fell.

Thirty-five miles to laser paint. She checked the drones, counted seven. As she watched, one turned to an X. Simultaneously, a tiny explosion flashed far below over Satori’s rectangular outer wall.

“Ops, do our drones have any info on what Objective’s air defenses are?”

“Ah, sensors indicate turbulence just before they go offline,” Chen said. “Getting some radio feedback, too. That’s all I got.”

“Copy.”

Twenty miles out. Denver filled her visor now. Cul-de-sac exurbs like dead E-coli formations, charred foundations where houses had once stood.

Something flashed white to the north. A plume of orange flame rose, mushroomed over a desiccated industrial district adjacent to Satori’s wind fields. Beneath it a star burned, bright as a welder’s arc among long grey skeletons of old turbine factories and warehouses. Doss knew instantly what it was—a fire that would burn for a long time.

“Falcon 2 is down,” came Chen. Doss cursed, gnashed teeth with Go Pill rage, chinned her mic.

“Falcons 1 and 3, bug out to safe distance. Standby for cleanup.” The pilots copied.

Fifteen miles out. The air shimmered around Doss. Radio feedback rang in her ear.

Two blue squares turned to Xs on her visor. Her display chimed an alert: two Rangers in Chalk 3 with abruptly negative vitals. A girl’s voice, shrill with fear, sounded in Doss’ ear.

“Twelve and Thirteen just got tore apart up in front of me!”

….

The migrants waited for something. Hundreds of them, starved faces turned to Satori. Satori sensed their eyes, felt the press of their bodies against its walls. It observed them with great curiosity.

The complexity of their social organization was what set humans apart from other primates. More than symbolic thinking. More than their fine capacity with tools. Individual humans could not help but become part of a group organism. Mostly these collective organisms behaved of simple volitions: amoeba-like affinity for sustenance, aversion to pain and damage. The bigger they grew, the simpler they became.

This was the model upon which the Fathers had designed Satori. Satori understood its mind, Sumedha’s mind, to be fundamentally human. It understood its structure to mirror the human group organism. Its children were primates. Satori produced seed. Its children worked the fields, reaped the harvest, and in turn fed Satori. Satori, though, a closed system, existing in conscious balance with its environment.

Satori had come to regard itself as the highest form of life ever to exist.

It kept its attention idly on the gathered migrants. The migrants watched Satori’s children manning the outer wall. Satori’s children watched them. The migrants’ silence indicated nothing good. They’d ordered themselves into groups of twenty, each led by a red-splashed member of
La Chupacabra
.

A signal went up among the migrants. Some drew pistols and rifles pitted by rust. Others hefted chunks of concrete. They let loose on Satori’s outer wall, on Satori’s children who stood atop it.

Satori sensed the damage. Bullets pocked its wall. Two of its children went down, dead. A third fell wounded. The rest took cover.

All of this was insignificant. Satori simply watched, waiting for the migrants to tire and run out of ammunition. But more of them, riled by the noise, began trickling in from the surrounding city. Satori sensed their tension, their need for release.

It reevaluated the situation.

The human group organism, what little of it remained, was hungry. Satori understood itself to be food.

Best, it assessed, to end this aggression before it spread to the thousands of migrants in the surrounding city. Inflict pain and damage. Give the human organism something about which to feel averse.

It flexed open the dome’s entrance. Its toughest children flooded forth, headed for the gate in the outer wall. It roused five advocates, who slept fetal in pods deep in the central tower.

“Beautiful children,” Satori whispered into their minds. “Today is your day.” Awake, the advocates emerged from their pods, trembling with lust and rage.

“Thank you, Father.” They ran naked along the city’s scale-covered streets, out into the day. Predators, wet from deep amniotic sleep. The gate in the outer wall flexed, unfurled for them. Migrants crowded there, thinking they had gained entrance. Instead, the advocates raged forth, followed by their lumbering brethren. They laughed and shrieked as they ripped into the migrants. Satori admired their efficiency. He loved them so much it almost hurt.

Pain and damage. Yes.

Something tickled the edge of Satori’s senses. Electroreceptors, braided into its helix from the DNA of sharks, tingled under the dome’s skin. Detected penetration of Satori’s farthest bioelectric field. Its aura.

Neurons hummed, memory banks gurgled as Satori sought to identify the intrusion.

Flying machines, several of them. X-12 unmanned drones, powered by small fission reactors. Inbound.

An attack. In concert with the migrants. The humans were indeed coming.

The Sumedha mind recalled the Fathers—with love, and not a little pain. They had been smart. They had seen this eventuality, and prepared for it.

Pores in the flesh of both Satori’s domes stretched open. Flexed themselves into spiraling cones the shape of rams’ horns. Satori felt its skin pinch tight around them. Inside the cones, fine cartilage fibers began to vibrate, then to reverberate.

Bats, the Fathers had called them, though Satori considered this an incorrect parallel. Bats emitted ultrasonic frequencies for echolocation. The cones emitted phased, high-intensity ultrasonics, directionally specific. Their purpose was catastrophic disruption.

Satori’s electroreceptors tracked the drones. The bats reverberated, spit their frequencies like whips, their shockwaves bending the air. One by one, the drones shattered. Satori detected more targets. Flylights roaring in low across the prairie, crossing now the exurb ruins.

Above and behind them, their payload. Tiny human soldiers in their gliding armor.

One Flylight climbed for altitude, launched missiles. They tore past the old factories to the north, slammed into Satori’s wind fields.

Satori experienced a moment of euphoria as electricity surged through its nervous system. The word for this floated serenely into its consciousness: a seizure.

Sumedha’s mind separated, rose to the fore. He soothed Satori, stilled the animal fright. Then receded under a wave of fury. Satori ordered its children to the walls, reacquired its targets.

Then it roared, its voice bellowing out, destroying everything it touched.

….

“Rangers.” Doss spoke coolly into her mic through grinding teeth. “Stay on the rope. Do not go manual. I repeat, do NOT go manual. Ops. I need evasive action.”

“Roger that,” Chen replied.

Doss’ suit instantly contorted, twisting her body against awkward Gs as Riley’s computer swung her into a hard arc. Her Rangers followed the trajectory, a long S-curve of blue squares in her display.

“Tsol says his people are bugging out,” Chen announced.

“That didn’t take long,” Gomez said. Doss heard disdain in the sergeant’s voice.

“They’re pretty torn up,” Chen said.

“They didn’t need to do much,” Doss fervently hoped. A distraction, a red flag before a bull. Enough to pull Satori’s people away from the main dome. Away from the Fathers. So that her Rangers could be the unseen sword.

Riley’s computer pitched her into a steep dive, then made her climb, brought her into another short, high-G turn. Satori’s domes grew fat in her visor.

The air around her warped again. Her suit shuttered. Feedback lanced her ear and her display flickered. When it came back up, four blue squares had X’d. Shrill gibberish erupted over coms as several green Rangers began reporting in at once.

“Radio silence,” Doss ordered. “Speak only when you’re address—” Feedback devoured her voice. The air shimmered.

“Fuck!” someone called through the static. Someone else sobbed.

Doss checked distance. Nine miles to laser paint. She made a quick calculation, more instinct than math.

No good.

“Boss,” came Gomez on his private channel. “It’s the only call.”

The moment grew still, filled with the analogue hiss of the open channel, awaiting Doss’ order. Another shimmer. Another square X’d. Doss gave the command.

“All Rangers. Go manual.” A second passed. Blue squares on her display began slipping off Riley’s rope, their trajectories suddenly chaotic. “Everyone try to stay on my ass. Those who can’t, rally on your closest superior. Falcons 1 and 2, standby to collect any Rangers who land outside Satori’s periphery.”

“Roger that,” chimed one pilot.

“Roger,” came the other.

Blue squares began to disperse, falling away like meteor fragments as inexperienced soldiers tried, and failed, to maintain their glides. She could do nothing to help them. Her Rangers. Her kids. They were fucked.

“Good luck,” she told them. Then chinned off her mic, and screamed.

Below and ahead, Satori grew in her visor, untouched. Rage, hot as a reactor fire, cleansed her mind.

“Manual,” she hissed at her suit. It bucked, then steadied as she took it under control. The air warped off to her right, followed by weird thunder audible only to her bones. Another blue square turned into an X. Doss arched her body, fought for altitude, then dove, aiming straight at the laser paint on the top of the main dome. A missile with seriously bad intentions.

“On you, Boss,” Gomez said. His blue square twinned to her own. She chinned her mic, realized she had no order to give him and simply laughed. So did he.

The airspeed readout in her heads-up display ticked its way up to 281 kph, the numbers superimposed over the dome swelling in her visor. The air bent around her. Silent thunder rippled through her body. She ignored it, kept herself nose-on to Satori. A half-mile out. She leveled her glide.

“Ready to go vert,” she told Gomez. “We drop straight through the chimney, as planned.”

“Roger that.”

Far beneath them, six of her Rangers slammed like bullets through the dome’s side. Their squares X’d.

When the laze was four hundred feet directly below, Doss bellied over, just as the Falcons had done, going vert. Her airspeed climbed. 284 kph. 289. 291. The outlines of thick geodesic bones, then individual pink veins, grew clear. Doss saw pores in the dome’s bestial skin, some of them puckered and quivering like earlobes.

She raised the breach gun. The dome came at her. She fired.

It was like getting hit by a truck. The gun cranked in her hands as a heavy-det charge exploded in one barrel, spitting forth a raw shockwave designed to batter doors, break walls. Her heads-up display flickered in the concussion.

Meat and bone and skin shattered around her. For an instant, she thought it was her own. Then realized she was still falling.

A skin wall blurred past beside her, ten feet away. A building. Satori Tower. She’d missed.

Old Denver reached up for her, part brick and glass and steel, part flesh. Doss had the impression of something being absorbed. She spread her arms, turned so she fell feet-first. Checked her airspeed: 297 kph. Far faster than the drop suit’s official max impact velocity.

The certainty of imminent death made her smile. She leaned back. Fired the breach gun’s second barrel through her feet as she slammed horizontally into Satori Tower.

CHAPTER 27

’m glad you came,
hermano
.” Pollo’s voice hovered sourceless in the air around Brood.