Authors: John Koetsier
And was that man an enemy? The enemy that Hermes had warned me about? Why had he known me … if he was an equivalent warrior on an opposing side, why did he seem to know more than I did about who and why we were fighting?
Too many questions, and too few answers, and I knew that Livia and I would be heading back to the mirror hall tonight.
Later, when we had a chance, each of us slipped away. I left first, heading to the s.Leep room as if I was tired and needed extra time in the pod, and Livia a few minutes later. I don’t know why we were hiding our relationship from the others, but something instinctively told me it was important. How long we’d be able to keep this special thing between us I didn’t know, but for as long as we could, it simplified our lives in the group. And my life, I admitted, as a leader of all.
We slipped through the servitor’s chamber, and found ourselves once again at the desk, the biggest desk, where we had seen that image of not-quite-ourselves.
This time, I was patient. I scrolled through documents, examined photographs, and combed through hierarchical collections of files, zipping up and down the … filesystems … the word appearing on the tip of my tongue.
“I think I’m a construction engineer of some kind,” I finally told Livia after an hour. “Or a scientist.”
She raised her head from another desk where she had been doing the same.
“If it’s not crazy to suggest, I’m starting to think that I led a team of people who built this place. The ‘god’ we know as Hermes was on that team, perhaps, but I’m not sure if you were.”
“At the very least, that would explain how you had left a password of some kind in the servitors,” said Livia. “It sounds crazy, but I don’t think it is.”
She turned back to her own desk.
“I’ve tried a number of desks and I can’t find any record of myself,” Livia said. “I can’t even get very far into the system — it just lets me have access to basic, sort of generic computing capability: no personal files.”
“Sort of like guest access,” I said, tasting more unfamiliar concepts rising up in my brain.
We both continuing digging through file after file until we felt our safety margin was up, and then returned to our side of this vast complex. That maybe I had built, I thought with a shiver. And perhaps still had significant access to … and control over, if only I could remember, or relearn. As we were walking through the servitors’ room, I told Livia something that I was just starting to hope to believe: that I might be able to control this place. And that we might be able to visit the city of the gods to learn more there.
The next day, of course, everything changed.
That night I dreamed of the city of the gods. s.Leep was not supposed to allow dreams — we almost never dreamed — but I dreamed. Floating as if disembodied, I surveyed the glorious god-city from several hundred meters in the air, gently swooping down from time to time, but always progressing inward. As I flew towards the center, passing the swooping, soaring tentacle-like living towers, dipping under the serpent-like loop of one as it curled high into the air, I felt like I was diving into long-undisturbed chambers of my brain. In my dream I recognized places, remembered friends, and, as I came closer to the floating glass tower at the epicenter of the city, remembered a job, a task, a mission.
Then I woke, of course, retaining nothing but the sense of knowing. But my pod did not open.
Not really sure if this was another dream or not, I rubbed my face and re-opened my eyes. I could see little but softly glowing status lights, and could not move much in the pod. Tubes were still attached to my body, and the padded lid was not far above my face. I had begun to feel an entirely novel sense of claustrophobia when finally I heard Hermes’ voice.
“Come out,” he said, and the varipod finally began to open.
The tubes detached and I was able to sit up, then swing out. I took a moment to breath slow and deep and calm my heart rate, and then I got up. The s.Leeping area was deserted but for me; everyone else was still in their pods. So I dressed and walked out to the hall. There was Hermes, standing. No lights, no show, no super-sized body.
“We need to have a little talk, you and I,” Hermes said, and my heart nearly stopped.
The gods, after all, had resources I knew nothing of. Perhaps ways to track us in this place, means of knowing when computer systems were activated, or when the portal between our part of this complex and the command portion was opened. Or ways of observing Livia and I, conversations that verged on treason or, perhaps, apostasy.
I calmed myself again, and answered.
“Of course, my lord Hermes. What do you want to discuss?”
“You need to prepare for the next mission,” he said, his words betraying no knowledge of things I wished to keep secret and flooding me with relief. “It may be your last mission.”
“Our last?” I asked, intrigued and still a little worried. “In what way?”
“We have discovered the home base of our enemy,” he said. “In space and time. And now you will strike them without mercy and without failing.”
“If,” he continued, “you are successful in this mission, the danger may completely pass, and there will be no more need for war.”
He looked almost aged when he said that, not in appearance but in manner, in demeanor. And I could tell, suddenly, how intensely this conflict had weighed on him.
“And if there is no more need for war,” I asked, choosing my words carefully, “What of the warriors?”
Hermes did not, of course, answer that. He was not in the habit of answering questions from mere mortals, unless the answers served his purposes. He simply had me go back to s.Leep, to wake up later with the rest of the team, with no explanation for why he had woken me, specifically, to tell me nothing of any consequence.
That was the last day of training, and we spent it with projectile weapons, submachine guns, pistols, sniper rifles. Tonia — who had of course fully recovered from her fractured foot — and I were the best shots, consistently hitting targets from two or three klicks away in calm air conditions. I suspected that our aim was aided by tiny control vanes in smart bullets, but said nothing. And we practiced small team fire tactics in urban environments: door to door fighting, fighting inside buildings, through walls, in offices and warehouses.
Hermes supplied tactical combat suits that he said were vastly superior to the ballistic vests most soldiers of the era we would be fighting in possessed. The suits covered almost our entire bodies and, though soft and supple in ordinary use, immediately stiffened up under impact, such as a bullet or projectile would cause. He grabbed a pistol and, before I even imagined what he was going to do, casually shot Livia in the back just to demonstrate the effectiveness of the suits.
She was immediately thrown forward by the impact of the bullet and I almost threw myself on Hermes, but then she laughed and turned, unhurt. I paused, looked at her, and she warned me off with a nod of her head.
We continued the training, and later that night I asked her about it.
“It didn’t really hurt at all,” Livia said. “It kind of punched me forward, and I felt an impact over all of my back, but it wasn’t painful. It’s a good suit.”
I breathed out threats against Hermes, knowing that if the shot had been only a foot higher, above the suit, Livia’s head would have been the target. And something told me s.Leep couldn’t fix a hole in the head. But she put her hand on mine, and I calmed down, with something of an effort.
Then I told her what I had been thinking since last night in the control room. Something in the day had jarred it, clarified it. Or maybe something I had known all along was finally coming to the surface.
“I think I can learn to use the control room,” I told Livia. “To go places, like the city of the gods … the same way Hermes sends us places to fight. I think I remember how.”
“If you could do that, we could maybe find out why were are here,” Livia said slowly. “And who we are!”
That’s exactly what I thought too, and I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately, tonight was our last chance before our next — and perhaps last — mission, and I did not want to risk transporting ourselves now and not being able to come back … leaving our companions alone on probably the most dangerous mission we would ever undertake. So we went to s.Leep like grumbling but obedient children.
The next morning, we woke up on mission.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
- Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
That night I dreamed that I was speaking to our enemies, the enemies of my team
, and the enemies of Hermes and his, maybe our, god-city. I was in some kind of military base, something like the one in which I lived, and the man I had killed outside the gates of Ur was there. Others in odd uniforms were there.
They were pleading with me to listen, to understand, to stop, and to talk, but I did not stop and I did not talk, and I cut them all down with a old-fashioned twentieth-century machine gun, their bodies jerking crazily as the bullets tore through their bodies. The last one to die was a man with a hooked beret, something an artist and not a soldier would wear, and as he died he pleaded with me, saying
Geno if you only knew what you should know
, and then he died.
I woke unsettled, and discovered that I was not in a varipod and not in the chambers of the hall of the gods, but was in some vast empty space on a hard concrete floor. The team was all around me, still sleeping but clearly about to wake, and I looked around in the dim light filtering through high small windows.
Old pieces of machinery littered the floor in varying stages of disassembly, with little piles of trash and dust and dirt here and there on the floor.
“We’re in an abandoned factory,” Kin said, sitting up and wiping sleep from his face.
I nodded, seeing the others stir and come awake as well. When they were all awake, we sat in a circle, eating a breakfast of sorts from rations we found with our gear, and I briefed the group, telling them what Hermes had told me.
“This may be our last battle, friends,” I started. “Hermes has located the home base of the enemy, and our job is to attack and take it out.”
“The enemy?” Tonia said excitedly, “The ones who started this whole war, and have been messing up all times and places? Finally!”
I nodded. The others started smiling, slapping each other on the backs. It was what we had all been told — that the enemies of the gods were disrupting our history, trying to destroy us before we were born. Trying to win by sneaky warfare what they could not accomplish in straightforward battle, and that we needed to stop them. They thought that this could be the end of the war, the end of the battles that we had been fighting.
Like everything else, I had my doubts about who and why we were fighting, but … no real hard information to disprove what we had been told. Although the words from the enemy soldier at Ur and the words from my dream last night rippled through my brain.
“So where are they and what’s the plan?” wondered Sama out loud, and I forgot my doubts.
“They have a base in 20th century Europe, right under the Acropolis in Athens, Greece,” I said, “and here’s what we’re going to do.”
It turns out that the ground beneath the Acropolis is riddled with tunnels and chambers, probably initially intended as burial catacombs for the ancient city, but since expanded and extended by the enemies we were hunting. All were shielded by both natural rock formations and stealth-dense walls from discovery by 20th-century technologies such as ground-penetrating radar, which was why the base had so far gone undiscovered. And with most traffic in and out of the base presumably handled by a machine like ours that transported people directly where and when they needed to be in the continuum, there was no need for a large or well-used entrance that would over time be noticed.
Hermes had told me they had discovered the base during a routine check, and mapped it as best they could with only a single neutrino sensor sweep, to hopefully avoid being noticed. I laid out the ghostly tunnel map — oddly familiar, I thought — in front of the team and explained the plan. Then we geared up: full body armor, submachine guns, pistols, radios for communication, wraparound night-vision glasses, and a few key pieces of electronic equipment.
We left the abandoned warehouse more desolate than when we came to it. One of us would die in the next thirty minutes.
The approach was from the rear of the Acropolis, far down the hilltop on which it was planted, via a small building fronting as a market for typical tourist trap crap. The crap was real, but the store was fake; its primary purpose was a secondary ingress/egress point for the enemy base. Hermes’ rough neutrino scan told me it had a direct link to a small room at the rear of the headquarters.
As I checked the map one last time, something niggled at the back of my brain again, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Shoving it aside, I moved out, gesturing the team into motion. It was predawn, statistically the least alert time for sentries and men, but I did not expect guards anyways. We were alert for them, and for alarms that could be triggered by our presence, but Hermes did not think they had any sort of guard system posted, relying on secrecy in the vast millennia of the ages for safety from us, and superior cloaking technology for anonymity amongst the masses of the twentieth century.
After all, did we mount a guard at the Hall?
Something told me that this might be foolish thinking, so we approached with caution, slowly, even at 4AM. Over our military-style fatigues we had thrown contemporary civilian dress. A few, myself included, were street bums with torn, ragged clothing. The women were North African Muslim, with full head-to-toe burqas equipped with small mesh-covered slits for sight. Helo was a police officer, making the last rounds of his night shift, and we all approached at slightly different times, from varying angles, at different speeds.
When Livia and I were in place, with the others still a few minutes out, I pulled out a super-sensitive EM sensor and ran a passive scan at the base of the building. Sure enough, there was a wired connection exiting the lowest story that did not go to the city power grid or some media-delivery network. That probably meant a live video feed and maybe more, so I bumped the power just a little and ran a very brief active scan, not more than a few milliseconds. And caught a secondary alarm system which I recognized.
This particular system used normal-seeming geological features — low-grade deposits of iron ore, and the earth’s natural magnetic field — to slowcast a constant steady signal. It was extremely low-power and would be overlooked by all but the most sophisticated scanners, and it was extremely low-fidelity as well, consisting of just the most simple on-off signal, probably just sending out a continuous OK message. Interrupt the circuit, or trip an alarm in any way, and the steady-state all-clear would be interrupted, signaling an intelligent system at the other end to alarm the base.
For the first, most obvious wired connection, Livia set a mole loose. The tiny mobile electronics package, no bigger than a small mouse, quickly burrowed down through the dirt at our feet, reached the wire, connected, recorded thirty seconds of dark and empty rooms inside and empty streets outside, and then inserted itself into the circuit and re-broadcast its recorded signal repeatedly. The package was smart enough to renew its video from time to time as the sun rose and light entered through windows, while never revealing our presence.
The second sensor was going to be more difficult.
Since it had no physical circuitry to interrupt and re-route, we couldn’t simply follow the same route as with the live feed. And since we had no idea what sort of sensor package and artificial intelligences the alarm was hooked up to inside, we could not assume that spoofing the video feed was going to be sufficient. We needed another plan.
Casting about in my mind for ideas, I noticed Livia pointing to a wooden telephone pole about a block away, teetering under the load of too many wires loaded on with too little planning. I followed her gaze, then caught her meaning.
“Smart …” I breathed, understanding.
If we couldn’t be certain we could maintain or spoof this alarm’s all-OK signal, we could interrupt it intermittently, making it an unreliable indicator and dismissible by security staff. Especially if we provided an easy explanation to why the alarm was malfing.
“Sama, Helo, drop that telephone pole,” I signaled. “Make it look natural, but make sure some of those wires break. We need random electrical discharges into the ground.”
I received an OK signal, but didn’t see them moving toward the pole. After a few minutes I was just about to call them again when I heard a car’s engine, first just starting, then loud revs, and then tires shrieking as it burst into view, turning out of a side street. The driver was on the far side, but I thought I could see a door opening and a person bailing out, rolling into the middle of the intersection as the car continued on its course and smashed dead center into the telephone pole, shearing the aged wood in half and ripping at least half of its load of wires, which immediately sagged to the ground, sparking.
“Perfect,” I signaled.
I quickly connected with our bug on the video systems, reviewed the live, actual feed for the outside, confirmed that at long range it did not show the driver exiting, but did show a fairly natural-looking accident and the resulting broken wires, and patched that through to the enemy base. Then instructed our bug to resume a live feed for that camera, and that camera alone.
“Meet us at the building,” I signaled Sama and Helo. “Approach from another angle — I’ve got a live feed from that accident scene up right now.”
In sixty seconds they and Tonia and Kin joined Livia and I at the building. Without hesitation I silently broke a window, and we all slipped inside, dumping our disguises. The all-OK alarm was definitely signaling not-all-OK right now, but it was probably also a fairly dirty, ragged signal. The guards would be looking for explanations, and an apparently silent, empty interior with a car accident and significant electrical discharges a block away would almost certainly tell the right story, from our point of view.
Almost
certainly.
I pushed the team hard as we ran through the house quickly, not bothering to find any more sensors or alarms, going down to the basement, to the rear of the structure, where our scan told us the tunnel to the enemy’s base lay. We locked gazes, clasped hands, and opened the closet doors which concealed the entrance.
The doors opened to a forest of clothing, jackets and coats, which we just picked up and dumped into the room, and then a small door, with a lock. I motioned Helo forward — he was the best of us with locks — and he jumped up with a pick in his hand.
Only to have the knob of the door instantly explode, tossing his body back clear across the room, and knocking the rest of us down.
“Helo!” I shouted, jumping to my feet and stumbling to him.
He looked up, a curious expression on his face. Body armor had done its job and there was no mark on his torso or arms, but his bare hands were shredded stumps gushing blood. A little spasmodic grin flickered over his face, and he opened his mouth to speak, and blood flooded his teeth and spilled out over his chin. Such a powerful explosion so close must have given a hammer blow to his lungs and internal organs, even if it did not penetrate his suit.
“I guess … I guess you’ll have to do this one without me, G,” he said.
There was no hand to hold, so I held my palm to his face. Helo shook once, then he died.
Pulling myself away in agony and anger I yelled at the team to get moving. Now our presence was certainly discovered, and now the enemy would be attempting to escape or preparing to fight. I wiped my bloody hands on my pants, turned, and ran through the now-blown door, heedless of further booby traps.
As expected, it was a long corridor. As we ran through it, lights flickered on in recognition of our presence. I saw another door at the far end of the hall, coming up quickly, and unsafing an AM grenade, I tossed it as hard as I could. There was no need for subtlety now.