Ghost Book Two: The Death Machines

– Chapter One –

I woke up to Athalia watching me.

We had taken to sleeping a little apart from the others on our three–day trip to Sleeper One, at first just laying our bedrolls side by side and talking in low voices after dark, then holding hands until we fell asleep, but last night… well, even though we’d found ourselves a little alcove in the cave where we’d all camped, and even though we’d tried to keep it quiet, we’d probably kept the others awake.

Now she was sitting naked, back against the cave wall, her knees tucked up to her chin. In the dim light from the other chamber she looked sad and faraway.

“Shit,” I said. “I wasn’t that bad, was I?”

A smile slowly crinkled the lean lines of her face. “For a ghost? Not bad at all.”

I sat up and looked around for my pants. “So why so glum?”

“Did I look glum?” She started dressing while I stole looks at her hard, tattooed slimness. “Not really awake yet. Guess I was just staring into space.”

Well, if she didn’t want to tell me, I wasn’t going to push it. Never liked it when anybody pushed me about that kind of stuff.

It came out a minute later when we were picking up our gear to join the others.

“Ghost, do you… do you ever think about not being a ranger?”

I chuckled. “You know I do. You stopped me from putting a bullet in my head, remember?”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant… doing something else. Going somewhere else.”

“With someone else?”

She flushed and shouldered her pack. “Well… why not?”

Yeah.

Why not.

I stood there for a moment, thinking about it. I wasn’t the same guy I’d been back when I was a ranger — literally. I was that guy’s clone. No. Not even that, I was the clone of that guy’s clone. And every day I seemed to have less and less connection with the people I — or rather he — had known. On the other hand…

On the other hand, there was still some unfinished business to take care of.

“Maybe after this,” I said. “When it’s all over.”

“Sure,” she said, but it didn’t look like she meant it.

We walked out into a storm of razzing and cat calls and slaps on the back as Angie, Vargas, Hell Razor, and Thrasher let us know that they had heard us during the night.

Ace just looked relieved.

It wasn’t easy walking back into the Sleeper Base. Not like it was a battle or anything. There was nobody left to fight. The mutants Athalia and I had killed the last time we were there were still dead and weren’t any trouble except for the smell. It was the other bodies that hurt.

I showed the others the corpses of my old squad — Franny, Brockleman, and old Spider — all shot to pieces by robots the first time I’d come to the base, and they mourned them just like I had — harder, probably. They had full memories of them. My memories were as full of holes as my old squad,, which hurt in different ways. Standing around listening to Angie, Vargas, and Hell Razor reminisce about my squaddies, telling stories about how Brockleman had pranked me with a dead gila monitor, and how Franny had won Spider’s boots in a drinking contest and wouldn’t give ‘em back even though they didn’t fit her, and not being able to remember even half of it just drove it home all over again that I wasn’t actually the guy who had led that squad, or had a gila monitor fall out of my locker on me so that I’d pissed myself. I felt like I didn’t have the right to any of his memories — like I was trespassing in his life.

I also showed them the corpse of the clone I’d been cloned from. Poor guy was looking even worse than he had the last time. He’d already been shot, stabbed, and had his head caved in by a blunt object, and a week’s worth of decay hadn’t done him any favors. Nobody mourned him, though. They’d already mourned the original back in Darwin. This guy just seemed to make everybody queasy.

“Huh. Another one,” said Hell Razor, who never had been the most tactful of men.

“Can’t believe he made it all the way from Darwin like that,” said Vargas.

Angie shook her head. “So weird.”

Ace looked from the corpse to me, and for the first time his attitude toward me seemed to be something other than suspicion. Of course, pity wasn’t much better.

After a long, awkward minute, Hell Razor broke the spell by stepping over the body and pressing his nose to the glass door of the cloning chamber which lay behind it.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Maybe we should all clone ourselves, just to be on the safe side. Goin’ against all those killer robots, might be good to have spares lyin’ around.”

I grunted. “You don’t wanna do that. Trust me. Nobody knows what to do with the leftovers — not even the leftovers.”

“He’s right.” Angie shivered. “There’s some shit the ancients did that should have stayed buried. Who’s got a hand grenade?”

Athalia looked shocked. “You’re going to blow it up? But the technology! It’ll be lost.”

Angie gave her a look. “Ask your boyfriend what he wants to do with it.”

Athalia looked to me.

I shrugged. “Sorry, I’m with Angie on this one. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It’s as weird and wrong in its own way as what Finster was doing.”

Athalia sighed. “I… Okay. I guess I understand.”

Thrasher dug in his pack and pulled out a hand grenade, then tossed it to Hell Razor, who waved us back.

“Better get around the corner. This is gonna be loud.”

We all backed into the main chamber and a few seconds later we heard Razor shout, “Fire in the hole!” He came running out like his hair was on fire.

The whole base shook with the explosion and smoke billowed out of the hallway like it was exhaling on a cold day.

“Alright,” said Vargas, when we could all hear again, “Let’s go find that armor.”

We all held our breath when Vargas pressed the sec pass against the card reader by the frosted glass door. What if it didn’t work? What if all the madness we’d been through in Darwin had been for nothing?

But it did work. The light on the card reader flashed green, the door slid down into the floor as smoothly as butter and a row of armor stands awaited for us in the room beyond, all lined up in ranks and standing at attention like they were on parade while beyond them was a weapons rack with a few LAW rockets and a big–ass energy weapon of some kind.

“Jackpot!” said Hell Razor.

Vargas agreed. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Wait,” said Thrasher, and before anybody knew what he was doing, he drew and fired his side arm into the chest of the closest set of armor.

The armor rocked back and toppled against the others so that it looked like a drunk being held up by his buddies, but the armor didn’t have a scratch on it.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Angie, Vargas, Thrasher, and Hell Razor stepped forward, tugging off their boots and shucking down to their skivvies as they went, then started pulling the armor off the stands to try it on. Ace, Athalia and I were a little slower and a little shyer, but inspired by the others’ example we stripped down too. I suppose when your squad shares a locker room, little things like modesty go by the wayside pretty quick, but I couldn’t remember for sure. My memories of that time were fragmented to begin with and seemed to be fading faster with every passing day. I was on the outside now, with the rest of the tagalongs.

I stepped up to one of the stands and took a closer look at the armor. I’d seen ceramic armor before — big, bulky stuff bolted onto heavy–duty leather — but this stuff was something else. The overlapping plates were as thin as window glass and bonded to what felt like a slim Kevlar suit as fine as spider silk. It seemed impossible that something so light and supple could protect like the heavier stuff, but Thrasher’s bullets had proved that looks could be deceiving, so I was willing to give it a try.

I pulled the torso armor off the stand and slipped it on. It fit close and seemed to cinch in even tighter as I zipped up, almost as if it was grafting itself to my skin. The plates covered my soft bits and overlapped at the joints to minimize exposure. I waved my arms around and twisted at the waist. It all felt easy and natural. Next came the legs, just as snug and protected all the way down to the ankle, and just as easy to move in.

I looked around at the others. They were all doing the same. All suited up in our skin–tight new gear we looked like some shiny superhero team from a pre–apocalypse comic book, which wouldn’t do at all. It was more embarrassing than going around naked.

After a shared laugh, we quickly got dressed again, pulling on our dirty jeans, leathers and boots over the pseudo–chitin armor until we looked like our old selves again.

Much better.

The big energy weapon we’d found was missing some parts, but we grabbed the two LAW rockets, then split up to explore the rest of the base, and me and Athalia took that as an excuse to go off together alone. At least that what I thought we were doing. Athalia seemed to have decided it was a race, and was pacing ahead of me, moving down the dark hallway almost at a trot, her rifle at the ready.

“Hey,” I said, calling after her. “What’s the hurry?”

“Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t slow down. “Now that we’re geared up, I don’t see the point of searching anymore. We should be heading for Cochise. I just want to get it over with and go.”

“Yeah, but you never know what you’ll find in these places. We found the sec pass to Darwin in here, remember? If all the bases were part of the same government organization, we—”

“I know. I get it. I just get anxious is all. All those robots are still killing people out there. I feel like we’re—”

She broke off with a squawk as she peeked through a door, then backed up and fired a burst from her AR into the room.

I ran forward, gun up. “What? What is it?”

She waved me back, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I… I thought it was a robot.”

I leaned in for a quick look through the door. It was an office. There was no robot. She had shot a computer terminal. I looked around at her.

“Are you okay?”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “We were talking about robots. I… Sorry. Just jumpy, I guess.”

I didn’t get it. She was never jumpy. Even when I’d dragged her into situations where she should have been screaming and diving for cover she had been as cool under fire as a marble statue. So what had changed? Was it us getting together? Was she trying to protect me or something?

There was no chance to ask her about it, because her shots had brought all the others running. They came into the hallway from both ends, guns at the ready.

I held up a hand. “False alarm. Stand down.”

Vargas holstered his piece. “What happened?”

Athalia hung her head. “I shot a computer. I thought it was a robot.”

Angie grunted. “That’s not so good. We need to look in those things. See if they’ve got any info we can use.”

We stepped into the office with the shot–up computer. There was a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet and a poster of a kitten clinging to a rope with the words “Hang In There!” printed across the bottom.

Vargas motioned at Athalia and me. “You two check the desk and those files. We’ll keep searching.”

Athalia looked hurt. “But—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll call you if we find any robots.”

I gave her a pat on the shoulder as the others left the room. “Forget it. Nobody died, right?”

She sighed. “Right. I’ll take the files, you take the desk.”

“Sure.”

There was nothing important in the desk, just a stack of “Employee Orientation Packets,” a sheaf of “Non–Disclosure Agreements” and a book of cartoons about a sad–sack office worker whose boss was a dog. At least I think that’s what it was about.

Athalia slammed closed the bottom file drawer.

“Nothing,” she said. “Employee records and tax information. Also an empty bottle of—”

A piercing whistle interrupted her, followed by Vargas’s shout.

“Ghost! Sister! This way!”

We ran out of the office, ready for action, but when we found the others they were in another office, standing around another computer terminal.

Vargas waved at Athalia. “You’re good at this kind of stuff. Make it work.”

“Just don’t shoot this one,” said Angie.

We stepped around the desk and looked at the monitor. It was on, with a window in the middle of it that said, “Enter Password.”

Athalia held up her hands. “I can read and write code, and I know what to do if a computer is broken, but I’m not a cryptologist or a hacker. I can’t guess a password for you.”

“You can’t get around it somehow?” Vargas asked.

Athalia shook her head. “Sorry. Not my thing.”

Vargas sighed. “Alright, fine. Maybe we can find one without—”

Thrasher cut him off with an upraised hand. “Stop.”

We all stopped and looked around at him. Thrasher spoke so rarely it was always a bit of a surprise when he did — like hearing Bigfoot talk.

“Que pasa, Gilbert?” said Vargas.

Thrasher pulled the desk’s top drawer all the way out and turned it over, dumping the contents on the floor. Taped to the bottom of the drawer was a three–by–five card with a single word on it. “Mellon.”

“Try that,” said Thrasher.

Like I’ve said before: hidden depths to that boy.

Angie sighed as she sat down at the desk. “Stupid guy didn’t even know how to spell melon.”

She typed the word into the password field and there was a friendly “Bing!”

The desktop appeared and Angie opened the file structure and started poking around, then looked up at the rest of us. “This is gonna take a while. You keep searching.”

“I could do that, if you want,” said Athalia.

Angie shook her head. “It’s fine. I’ll call you if I run into any problems.”

Everybody except Ace — who stayed with Angie to protect her? help her? canoodle with her? — filed out of the office and split up again, wandering around in the dark halls of Sleeper One, digging through closets and lockers for anything interesting.

Well, there was only one more interesting thing down there, and I’m the one who found it.

It was in a big room marked “Simulation Training Department” which looked more like a computer workshop or a lab than any training room I’d ever seen. There were workbenches with bits and pieces of computers all over them, as well as soldering irons, tools, goggles with wires running out of them, gloves with battery packs taped to them, things that looked like white plastic wands with light bulbs on the ends, and more tiny little screws than you could shake a stick at. The interesting thing, however, was in a shed the size of a bank vault in the center of the room.

Athalia and I peeked inside the shed, expecting I don’t know what, a robot? A giant gun on wheels? Instead we found something that looked a lot like an old pre–apocalypse kiddy ride like they used to have outside supermarkets back when there were supermarkets. It was a cockpit of some kind, with lots of controls and gauges and switches, but it wasn’t connected to any vehicle. Instead it was sitting in the center of some kind of gyroscope–ish structure that looked like it could turn the cockpit in any direction, and all that was connected by heavy cables to a computer set against one wall of the shed.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well, it’s a Simulation Training Device,” said Athalia. “Obviously.”

“You got that off the sign on the door,” I said.

“So?”

I ducked through the arms of the gyroscope and took a closer look at the cockpit. The seat was pushed forward into a locked position that made it so you couldn’t sit down, and lying beside it were a pair of headset/goggles like we’d seen in pieces out on the workbenches in the lab. I picked them up.

“Turn it on,” I said. “I want to see how it works.”

Athalia hesitated. “Ghost, it might be dangerous.”

“You forget who you’re talking to. I’m the guy who can’t remember why danger is a bad thing.”

“I…” Her voice caught. “I thought maybe you might have reason to remember now.”

I looked over at her. She was right. Since we’d got together, danger had lost some of its appeal, as had going off half–cocked. I had something to live for these days. Still, this thing looked cool.

“Come on, it’s a training tool. How dangerous can it be?”

She sighed and flipped the switch. “Fine. Have fun.”

I pulled on the goggles and the shed was gone.

I was standing outside the cockpit of a delicate little helicopter on the runway of a small airport. The heat was intense, coming off the tarmac in waves. Not even the wind from the slowly whumping rotors above my head could drive it away. Then a voice talked to me through my headset.

“Hi, I’m Major Taft Beckman of the United States Air Force here at the Davis–Monthan Base in Tucson Arizona, and I’m gonna be teaching you how to fly a Helicopter. Now, the first thing I’m gonna show you is how to unlock the seat so you can sit down. Just reach underneath it and feel for the lever, then pull it to the left. Got it?”

I did. The seat back flipped back and I climbed in. This was cool.

“Great. Now get yourself strapped in and comfortable and when you’re ready, just speak the word “ready” into your headset. And don’t worry, we’re gonna have some fun today!”