Enemy Read online

and, in the end, a seemingly out-of-place memory:

  a man, jumping into an orb of stars...

  RICHTER.

  West shook with the force of his silent scream.

  Richter.

  The signal was received.

  Shiva woke from his slumber.

  It was time.

  He slowed his pace.

  black

  IT IS READY((?))

  YES. STRIKE FORCE AWAITS DEPARTURE. OUR PATIENCE NOW BEARS OUR REWARD.

  PURPOSE BE. PROCEED.

  the Enemy once more set about the hunt.

  Patra.

  She was torn.

  Even floating in this foggy state of uncertainty and unreality, Patra could feel the division within her. She could feel the struggle between the remnants of her humanity and the foreign, incomprehensible force of the Enemy threatening to shred her very soul apart.

  She could do nothing in this dream state.

  What had she become?

  More Enemy than human, more web than flesh, could she honestly trust herself to fight for these people, these Judas? What if the Black within her became overpowering, forced her to succumb to its force?

  She would die before that happened. She pledged.

  And suddenly—

  —READY((?))

  YES. STRIKE FORCE AWAITS DEPARTURE. OUR PATIENCE NOW BEARS OUR REWARD.

  PURPOSE BE—

  —whispers forced their way into her mind. She gasped in the darkness, helpless against the agonizingly intrusive, violating voices.

  The Enemy.

  Patra’s mind raced. It had to be the web within her that allowed her to witness that terrible Voice.

  The Enemy was near.

  Patra tore at the mental bonds that held her motionless body in hibernatory stasis. She had to warn the Judas. Something disastrous was about to happen.

  The Enemy was coming.

  Simon was watching his passengers with mild interest.

  He wished he could dream. Sometimes.

  Simon read the patterns of his four passengers. Strange, he thought… Within the last decem the patterns of the two refugees he had rescued from the Fourteen-seven When had experienced a dramatic increase in emulated heartbeat and respiratory rates and adrenaline levels. Nightmares.

  Can lines of code have nightmares?

  So they were having a touch of stasis shock, maybe a rough transition to their new lives. Worse things than nightmares had happened in this war. Worse things had happened to newly-coded Judas. Simon dismissed the issue and went back to waiting.

  Not long now... Soon, they would emerge from the Stream into a When where chaos held sway.

  External monitors opened, Simon pondered the Stream, the swirls of non-existence, the gunship Shiva—

  ((shiva, what is it?))

  No answer. The gunship had slowed his pace, dropped below Simon. His weapons nacelles began to shimmer as they charged with the power of the Shadow.

  ((shiva—))

  [she was a traitor, simon. that’s why she had to be eliminated. that’s why we killed her.]

  ((what do you—))

  [she was a weak link, simon. just like you.]

  Shiva began to channel the Shadow’s fury.

  [the purpose will be prevented.]

  He fired.

  Hell became reality.

  The Enemy tore into the Stream.

  so slow

  a swirl of events

  so this is how it will end for me

  a reflex

  fading

  Patra felt the Enemy rip into the Stream, heard infinite voices screaming, commanding, weeping. She sensed the bliss of impending bloodshed.

  Helpless, she cried out in horror as the Enemy killed Shiva in a fit of ecstasy.

  Helpless.

  Simon.

  Time became fluid.

  Shiva fired.

  So this is how it will end for me, Simon thought.

  He braced himself for the end and

  —BLACK BLACK BLACK IMPOSSIBLE BLACK SO SO MANY—

  suddenly the Enemy strike force was upon them, emerging from the past, killing, thrashing, diving.

  The deadly arc of light intended for Simon emanating from Shiva was cut off as an Enemy flew directly between them. The Enemy shattered, and Simon reflexively shifted as the debris tore through the Stream. A great black and silver shard severed the tether that held Simon within the Stream, and he shifted into an unknown When with a violence that threatened to tear him apart. Shiva spun around, confused, as the Enemy fleet bore down upon him.

  Completely caught off guard, Shiva was dazed.

  This isn’t supposed to happen. The Purpose must be prevented.

  He bore the brunt of the attack. He paid for it.

  As the Enemy emerged from the past they flew at full speed directly at the unsuspecting Judas. The collision was spectacular as the colossal mass of an Enemy vessel slammed with incomprehensible force into the main cockpit hub of Shiva, shattering the center of the vessel, severing the weapons nacelles, leaving them to spiral off in opposite directions.

  Shiva was silenced forever.

  The Enemy vessel, destroyed by the collision with Shiva, was carried by the momentum of the impact into the path of several other Black, which tried to avoid the fiery debris but were ensnarled in it.

  The rest of the armada deftly avoided a pileup in the wreckage and swept ominously onward through the ancient pasts.

  Upward through time. Upward to Command.

  Oh god. Oh dear god.

  With no bioneural flux to focus the Shadow, severed from his pattern tether, Simon faded from the Stream with force enough to overload his mechanicals. Locked up from the reflex of the emergency Shadow break, Simon drifted dazed in an unknown When, an unknown time in an unknown space with unknown stars coldly dotting the stark night sky.

  They had been so close... Was this the correct When? Simon could only hope. With the last of his energy, he activated his homing beacon. If Malachi were near, he would detect Simon’s call. And then—

  No.

  So dark...

  Must warn them.

  So very dark…

  Michael!…

  He fell into the void. Darkness became him.

  Arik Mandela felt the vessel shudder, heard the emergency sirens roar to life, knew something was tragically wrong even before his pattern was completely downloaded. The hypoderm arm of the stasis chamber pumped his newly-formed body full of stasis-release chemicals and adrenaline. The chamber covers slid open and he found himself thrust into a frigid world of noise and confusion. All around him in the massive room other men and women also looked around, dazed. He had to assess the situation.

  A ripple of timesweep washed through his image, for a moment obscuring Mandela in a haze of static. That can’t be good.

  “Shiva? This is Mandela. What’s going on?”

  ...

  “Shiva, report.”

  silence.

  “Bloody hell.”

  He calmly arose from the recess of the chamber, grabbed a handhold as his momentum struggled to pull him into the core of the spherical room. He could sense the vessel move beneath him in a seemingly random pattern. He had to assume that Shiva had been neutralized. Something terrible had happened.

  He shifted his mind and close-combat phase armor materialized around him. “Suit up, people. Let’s handle this by the books.”

  Mandela used his suit’s grav shifters to swim to the door of the stasis chamber. He spun to face his troops.

  “Alpha squad. We have to get to the hub to assess the situation. Shiva’s com lines are down, so he doesn’t answer. It appears we’ve lost nav. Now this could just be a simple malfunction, but we can’t take any chances. We’ll secure the hub first and go from there.”

  He reached out with his mind and the chamber door activated.

  The corridor was dark, with only the emergency lights online. The group swept outwards, using the grav shifters to help them
traverse the blackened terrain of the gunship nacelle. Within a few minutes they were at the pivot point door to the hub.

  Mandela palmed the opening mechanism. Nothing. He attempted to trigger the mechanism with his thoughts. Still nothing.

  An automated emergency computer voice intoned: NO ENTRY. FORCE LOCK IN PLACE. ACCESS DENIED.

  Force lock? But a force lock would only be activated if... Mandela maneuvered to a sensor pad on the wall. With minimal power, the readout was dim, but he could still activate the internal video system. There. Beyond the force lock—

  There was nothing.

  Mandela gasped. The monitor showed a swirl of stars—No, not stars. Shards. Of Shiva.

  There was nothing beyond the force lock because Shiva had been split in half. Some horrendous force had shattered the cockpit hub, and the nacelles floated freely in the Stream. He could see the other nacelle pivoting slowly away. What the hell had happened?

  He could see—

  no.

  Black.

  The Enemy vessel enveloped the other nacelle, to take it apart, no doubt. To take the pattern cache. To harvest souls.

  He saw other Enemy gliding among the wreckage, but where was Golgotha Simon? Had he also been destroyed?

  Or had he—

  Mandela thrust the thought from his mind.

  A sudden flicker and an Enemy vessel was upon them.

  Icy cold fingers—

  “Shield yourselves! Block them out!” Mandela screamed as the mind-essence struggled to engulf them. He shifted his mind up, locked out the hell of the Black.

  An arc of light blinded them as the Enemy warriors began to cut their way into the nacelle with a phase shifter. And then Mandela was barking orders, struggling to return to the stasis chamber, frantically ordering the automaton computer consciousness of the dead Shiva to secure the hull, to activate shields, force doors, anything that would impede the progress of the Enemy.

  By the time the group reached the stasis chamber, the soldiers within had been alerted of the situation, and they sealed the shield door as soon as Mandela and Alpha squad were through.

  Shifting his arms into deadly weapons, Arik Mandela faced the door with a steely resolve and made a plan.

  The Judas secured within their vessel, the Black were upon it, cutting, prying, forcing their way into the inner spaces where the prey lurked. The mind-essence knew that contained within this simple metal shell they would find the pattern cache and perhaps the cure to the Judas virus. With that vital information secured, the Purpose would be theirs. Finally, the location of Judas Command would be revealed and the last hidden den of the Judas would be overrun and uploaded… Omega would be complete. The souls contained within the cache would be patterned into Omega. They would become one with the Purpose.

  With the singular mind-essence that the Enemy shared, they calmly observed the boarding party on the other Judas nacelle traverse the inner maze of the vessel and find the prey, contained all in one massive compartment. The boarding party on the other nacelle shrieked with rage. The prey were dead; the cache had apparently been compromised in the collision. Maybe this half of the vessel would reap greater rewards than thousands of useless download generators, empty of their precious souls...

  They breached the hull and stormed through the clean-cut hole into the interior, guided through the labyrinth by the minds of the first boarding party.

  The Enemy reached the door of the stasis chamber, a behemoth of solid-cast polyalloy. The warriors set about cutting it apart. If this were a ruse, if this chamber also held a damaged cache with no souls to reap, it would be a sore disappointment.

  But if they found the viral code… It could be heaven.

  The door fell before them, drifted into the zero-grav stasis chamber. Within, ghostly emergency lights flashed upon a seemingly endless stretch of depressions on the wall of the spherical room, individual stasis compartments, where countless droptroops had been downloaded and reconstituted before.

  With an unspoken order from the Black mind-essence, a strike force of warriors surged through the door into the chamber, swept outward, floating, surveying the expanse before them.

  The compartments were empty.

  A flicker of a question was beginning to form within the Enemy mind when the strike force erupted in a stark flash of silver and black.

  Arik Mandela began the killing frenzy.

  He had issued the orders, and then his warriors had lain in shift as the Enemy drew closer. He had drawn first blood, and all hope lay in that first strike. If his plan fell through, then they were all damned.

  When the Enemy strike force had stormed through the hole cut into the door, they had not expected the Judas to be shifted. For their mistake, they were summarily torn apart.

  Now the stream of Black flying into the chamber had been cut off. So they know where we are now, Mandela thought.

  Power play over.

  The mind-essence slammed into him with unspeakable force, struggling to make him shift down. His mental defenses were rapidly crumbling.

  It’s now or never. He jumped into action.

  In the lapse of time before the inevitable second wave, he led his elite Alpha squad to the corpses of the Enemy drifting languidly in the aftermath of the initial strike. His warriors were like an extension of himself, following his unspoken orders exactly.

  Mandela said a silent prayer for the innocents, for the martyrs, for the infinite dead. He knew what he had to do to end the Enemy Purpose. With Shiva destroyed and Simon gone, the Enemy fleet was now travelling Upwhen at an incredible speed unchecked.

  Toward the Judas. Toward Command.

  They had to get to the comnet to dispatch an emergency beacon to warn the Fleet. If they couldn’t get a message through, if the viral code could not be updated before the Enemy found it, all was lost.

  He looked over the brave Judas warriors before him, and screaming the war cry with which they had followed him into battle countless times before, he thrust himself through the door, using an Enemy corpse as a shield into the midst of the damned.

  Kill time.

  The Black horde was slow to react at the sight of their own dead comrades returning, but that changed as the corpses were thrust aside and Alpha squad emerged.

  The Judas met the Enemy in an insane clash of death.

  Mandela threw aside the bulky Black corpse and used his shifted arm to smash through the skull of the Enemy closest to him. He dispatched two more Enemy warriors before feeling a sear of agony as most of his left leg was cut from him by the deadly flicker of an Enemy’s phase weapon. Silver tendrils began to encompass the cauterized wound. He spun around in the zero-grav and tore through the faceless helmet of the Black. The Enemy were slow to raise the massive phase weapons they used in the cramped confines of the corridor, and the Judas cut madly through their lines. The Black were caught off-guard.

  Mandela became faint from the sheer agony of his leg wound and found it increasingly difficult to shift as the Enemy mind-essence unceasingly struggled to infiltrate his mind. Mandela saw that the members of Alpha were quickly succumbing, unable to withstand the Enemy mind, unable to shift. The Enemy were gaining ground.

  He signaled to the two Judas closest to him and they broke from the Enemy lines, speeding insanely down the empty corridors to the nearest available comnet. Their departure not unnoticed, a flood of Black poured after them.

  They knew it was suicide.

  Mandela maneuvered himself to the comnet panel, guarded by his two fellow Judas, who deftly dodged the searing beams of silver light emanating from the writhing mass trailing them. The command codes entered, Mandela screamed above the din of the battle to relay his message.

  “Mujahadin Shiva has been destroyed! I repeat, Shiva’s been destroyed! The viral code’s been compromised. You have to update the Program Seven command codes!”

  One Judas fell. In a flash of gore, his other guard erupted.

  Blood that looked and felt all-too-
real stippled Mandela’s face in a crimson palette.

  “They’re in my fucking ship! I repeat, the viral code’s been compromised! Update the program before they find you!”

  Message completed. He entered the encrypted coordinates and sent it Upwhen, hoping against hope. Looking down the corridor, he could see the Enemy pour into the stasis chamber. Screams of pain and horror. He felt their deaths as painfully as he sensed his own impending erasure from the program. His warriors were no more. He was alone. One of the damned exited the stasis chamber holding a round object that could only be the pattern cache of the nacelle. Mandela realized with a morbid fascination that his pattern was contained within that phased piece of metal, along with the patterns of millions of other people.

  The Enemy only feet away, the mind-essence finally breached the mental defenses of Mandela. He was flooded with terror like none he had felt before as countless fiery claws tore at his soul. The Enemy knocked him aside and swept over the communications panel he had just accessed. Silver tendrils of metal crawled over and into the surface of the array. A flicker of light and all the information the mind-essence needed had been retrieved. The Enemy turned to face him.

  Mandela forced himself from his reverie and focused every last bit of strength into shifting his arm.

  He would never be a part of the Purpose.

  He would never give them his soul. He would never give them the souls of his soldiers, his friends, his family.

  He reached out with the last of his strength and the pattern cache held by the Enemy erupted in a burst of phased energy. His soul was no more.

  The Enemy at the end of the corridor reacted in confusion as the Judas who had stood before them vanished in a burst of static and light. The mind-essence reacted with fury as the pattern cache ceased to exist.

  Arik Mandela’s war was over.

  Black

  REPORT.

  THE PATTERN CACHE HAS BEEN LOST. WE HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO LOCATE THE VIRAL CODE AS OF YET. WE HAVE HOWEVER INTERCEPTED A COMMUNICATIONS BEACON.

  WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED((?))

  WE HAD NOT YET—

  THIS BEACON WILL BE THE KEY TO LOCATING THE JUDAS PROGRAM. THE JUDAS, IN THEIR TERROR, HAVE CRIED FOR HELP. THEIR CRIES HAVE NOT BEEN ANSWERED.