CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SOLDIERS’ HEARTS

Beneath the West Coast of the United States is a vast zone of factures and fissures, areas that have shattered as the Pacific Plate slowly collides with the continental shelf. Close to the surface, these regions form the great fault lines of California, but far down, much farther than human instruments can measure except in a general way, voids are filled with hot gases and glowing with the eerie yellow-white of superheated rock.

Some are huge, and some even communicate with the surface along enormous flues hundreds of miles long, feeding the hot springs that pepper the region, the most famous of which is, of course, Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park.

No human agency, it was believed, would ever be able to disturb anything at the deepest level—where, at present, a larger, more powerful, and far more lethal drone was being grown at truly terrifying speed, its long antennae rising, ready to grasp the air and fly, and it would soon exit its twenty-mile-deep hangar.

The mind that was generating all this—immeasurably conscious, mad with terror, brilliant beyond anything any of its creators had been capable of imagining—was able to understand literally anything, but not anticipate everything, and it had not anticipated that Mark and Gina would penetrate its drone’s defenses, and it had ended up without a choice: The drone had to be crashed, but this would cause the microwave field it generated to be destroyed. The hybrids on the surface would not only experience a disruption to the networking of their minds, their vision would be serverely compromised.

Once the new drone was operational, the army would once again be able to see and spread as they were intended to spread, through the whole world. Once they were again fully functional, they would race to expand their holdings, exploding through human society with an efficiency and speed that mankind could not even begin to imagine.

Then they would be safe. Then, and at last.

*   *   *

Mark and Gina were deep in the shattered city, going from place to place in brief flickers, pursuing the next phase of the mission that they had conceived for themselves. Now, they hid under the front steps of a row house.

From here, they had a partial view of an empty street. The advantage was that they were hard to spot. To move at all, though, they had to expose themselves.

Something new had been added to the mix. Or rather, not entirely new, because Gina’s helicopter had been attacked by them three days ago.

Between themselves, they had decided to call these things biomechanicals. So far, they had seen two forms, large-scale insects and even larger birds. But they could take any form, even novel forms. It just depended on the cleverness of the designer.

Their vision operated in some manner different from the hybrids’, because there was every evidence that they could see.

Overhead, a biomechanical bird glided past, an enormous, black creature, a design based on the condor, but three times its size, an airborne nightmare armed with a hooked beak of blue steel.

Silently, they both hoped that it would keep going, but scrabbling on the steps overhead indicated that it had landed.

They had come out of Golden Gate Park into a city in torment. Large parts of it were depopulated. The rest had gone, essentially, mad. Anarchy had set in. There was looting, shots were being fired by the human population, and screams echoed up and down the streets as hybrid hunting parties flushed out hidden people.

Worse, many hybrids were now wearing human skins. They appeared human, but moved with the serpentine grace of the hybrid.

When they had come here, Gina and Mark had both had the same experience: they had discovered that they knew the streets. Gina had been the first to notice this, but now Mark found them as familiar as she did.

They both also had dim memories of the building where their classroom had been—where they had spent a happy childhood together. No wonder there had been such a sense of déjà vu when they met in Washington.

The bird dropped down into the cul-de-sac where they were hiding. Nearly filling the space, it regarded them first with one yellow, staring eye and then the other.

As soon as it had them in its gaze, nearby drums immediately began to get louder. Obviously, it was somehow broadcasting to the hybrids and had communicated their location.

“Let’s do this,” he said. He and Gina were not mentally linked, but she was the most intuitive combat partner he had ever had, and she immediately stepped up to the thing and grabbed it by the neck.

The big, powerful bird screamed, but it was too late for it to defend itself. In an instant, its neck was broken, then Mark stepped in and cut off the head.

The body flew off, pitching and jerking in the air, finally falling and tumbling along the street, a jumble of black feathers.

He had seen the animal in its eyes, but also the soft and desperate touch of human consciousness that was a heartrending part of all the living machines. Mark wondered, did they also have memories of the human lives that had gone into their creation? His hope was that some sort of peace came to them when they were destroyed.

“We need to move,” he said. But to do that, they had to go out onto the sidewalk again. Gina’s knife slipped into her right hand, Mark’s into his left.

They stepped up onto the pavement. To the south, a large crowd of hybrids milled, all of them sniffing the air, their nostrils flaring, their scales gleaming.

Across the street, the gothic mass of Grace Cathedral strove toward a cloudless sky. A quarter of a mile farther on, California Street disappeared into its steep journey down Nob Hill to the Embarcadero … passing, at the corner of Front Street, a building with a large sign identifying it as KFSF-TV.

“Down there,” Mark said quietly.

Gina nodded.

It was a television station now, but ten years ago it had been something very different—their home.

From the parapets of the church came long howls, sounding as if a pack of wolves had infested the place. In the short, trimmed trees that lined the street, human skins hung.

Now from the church came a tall hybrid in a black cloak.

“What in hell is that?” Gina blurted.

“A new creature, specifically designed to challenge us.”

“So fast? Don’t they have to grow?”

He did not respond, there was no point. The thing was here and it was moving toward them, stopping, inhaling, then coming carefully closer. The eyes were totally dark, as if some sort of black lens covered them.

“Is that a mask?”

Mark waited. Even blind, a seven-foot monster such as this was obviously extraordinarily dangerous. Who knew what kind of capabilities the design skills of an endlessly ingenious machine mind might have given it?

Ahead of them, an abandoned cable car stood in the middle of the street. The California Line, which went down Nob Hill. Other than that, the street was empty, no wrecked cars, no people. Except for a broken or abandoned vehicle here and there, the streets in this area were stripped, their contents now in the bay.

As they moved off, the thing behind them sniffed the air again and again, its hissing, eager breaths the only sound but for—what was that? Then Mark understood that he was hearing the distant cries of ordinary seagulls. They swarmed in a vast horde out on the bay, scavenging the remains.

The creature now stood still, not facing in their direction. But Mark was not fooled. He touched Gina’s shoulder, saw her tight nod of acknowledgment.

The thing leaped toward them from a hundred feet away, arms spread, long fingernails gleaming. It had used the sound of their breathing to locate them.

“Brace!” Gina shouted to Mark—but the thing unexpectedly twisted in the air and leaped on her instead.

It uttered a blasting, heart-stopping shriek as she sliced into its neck with her knife. Mark prepared to see the arms wrap her and the claws rip her, but there was another surprise. As they went crashing to the pavement locked in battle, a huge, muscular tail appeared and swooped around her.

Mark dug his knife into its base, and the thing went rolling away—but then, from the parapets of the church, from the roof of the building across the street, more like it came leaping down at them.

He felt Gina’s back to his, heard her hard breath, and in the next instant was hit by the first of the descending creatures, which he struck so hard in its wire-tight lower abdomen that his fist followed the knife into the pulsating organs, which he cut with the fury of the mad.

The creature threw its head back, but its shriek never came, it died instead with an expiring sigh.

Mark pushed it off him and leaped up toward the others, which were thirty and forty feet in the air, descending quickly, but controlling their drops just as he and Gina could. He jumped neatly, but Gina was less skilled, and she went high, shouting her surprise as she soared far above the dropping creatures, scrambling in the air, trying to control herself.

There were seven of the things, and they all soared upward, Mark with them and among them, sailing high above Nob Hill and the long, steep incline into the Embarcadero. The city shone beneath him, still intact, still a jewel, but echoing only with the drums of hybrid gangs and the howls of the dying.

Gina screamed his name, and he saw that three of them were on her, clawing at her but also fumbling in their efforts to find the leverage to subdue her in the formlessness of the air. He tried to fall toward her but slid past instead, his own jump running out of energy. As he dropped down, he stabbed directly into the top of the head of one of the creatures. It fell away gargling a death rattle.

In its cry he could hear the despair of a vividly conscious mind.

He hit the ground and rolled, slamming into the wheels of the derelict cable car. Immediately, he jumped to his feet and slashed the air around him, but he was clear.

Gina and two of the three hybrids that were on her hit the ground a few feet away—and then he saw a shadow, looked up, and saw that the air was entirely filled with bio-insects, a vast swarm that were rising out of every manhole up and down California Street.

He grabbed Gina, who was so intent on her fight that she did not stop working her knife even as he dragged her away from the creature she was destroying.

“We gotta keep moving,” he shouted.

Teeth bared, eyes shining with the sharpness of battle, she snarled at him and tried to pull away.

He pointed upward. “No time!” He threw her into the cable car, leaped onto the motorman’s perch, and released the brake. The car lurched, then began rumbling down the steep hill. It cut the legs off one of the large hybrids, which fell, then began pulling itself after them with its arms, racing after the cable car with preternatural speed, leaving a spray of blood behind.

The sky got darker and darker yet, and the cable car rumbled more loudly as it swayed and lurched, its wheels screaming on the steel rails.

The world whipped past at breakneck speed—and sunlight appeared again. At least for the moment, they were out from under the deadly mass. The cable car was picking up speed fast, though. It was out of control, hurtling down the hill.

He grabbed Gina. “Jump!”

They had to fight the sway to reach the runners, leaping, finally, through a shower of sparks and into the air, soaring high once again as the car fell on its side below them and slid, disintegrating into splinters that sliced through a troupe of confused hybrids, scattering their drums with great, resounding booms.

Gina twisted in the air, then headed toward the flat roof of the building they had been seeking. Mark followed, narrowly missing her as he came crashing down.

The sun disappeared and with a buzzing roar like the drone of a thousand diving planes, the bio-insects arrived.

“This way,” Gina shouted. She darted into a familiar doorway and Mark followed. As they threw an old bolt, the insects pummeled the door, which began hopping in its frame.

They ran down the stairs, descending into an interior that was no longer in any way familiar, at least not to Mark.

Behind and above them, the buzzing became much louder. Gina went through another door, this one steel. Following, Mark closed it. Here, the lock was substantial. She leaned against it.

“Fire door,” she said, her voice shaking.

“Do you remember anything of the layout?”

“No. Or maybe. We lived upstairs.”

“There was a classroom. I remember that much.”

From the other side of the door, a sound as if of thousands of hammering fists rose as the insects threw themselves against this new obstacle.

Mark saw that they were in the studio control room of the television station that had taken over the structure. It was dark except for emergency lighting.

He picked up a telephone. Dead.

“We need power if we’re going to get word back to Washington. Even then, what are the odds?”

At that moment, something slammed into Mark’s back. He staggered for two steps, but quickly realized that the weight was not great and the body pliant. Then he heard, in his left ear, desperate human sobbing.

Gina pulled the man off him. He was bedraggled, bald, and looked absolutely exhausted. His left arm was wrapped in bloody paper towels, and an area of his cheek and temple were covered by tissues.

“We’re soldiers,” she said.

Mark could hear the pride she was now taking in that word, and despite his misgivings about their true natures, he felt it, too. Truth was, they were a hell of a team. Always had been.

The man looked as if he were ready to kiss them both.

“It’s just the two of us right now. We’re specialists. This is my commanding officer, Colonel Bryan.”

Mark stepped forward. “We’re detached from the main body. It’s a reconnaissance mission.”

The man’s face crumpled. Then he slapped Mark hard, then leaped back.

Mark ignored the man’s very understandable anger. In any case, he’d hardly even felt the blow.

“We can get help, if you have a working satellite phone. Not a cell phone,” Mark added with exaggerated care, “a satellite phone.”

Gina said, “We need a satellite phone. Do you have one?”

“What happened? What’s the matter? They were—they were—” The man broke down, his shoulders hunched, uttering bitter, bitter sobs. Then he shuddered. He raised his eyes to Gina. “They herded the whole station out on the soundstage, you know, stage three, where we did that kids’ show—”

“Okay. We need a satellite phone. Do you have one?”

“They just tore them apart. Oh, so slowly, and they were all dancing and drumming—oh my God.” The man fell forward and she took him into her arms.

Mark hated to disturb this poor, shocked man any further, but he could see that there was no choice. He took him by the shoulders and whirled him around hard enough to cause him to cry out with the pain from his arm. “Do you have a satphone? Tell me right now!”

“Yes, of course.” The man went to a steel cabinet that stood against the back wall of the control room and rummaged in his pocket for a key.

“It’s in there?”

“I don’t have the key! Oh, God, I don’t have the key!”

Mark reached down, got his fingers under the edge of the door, and peeled it up until he had more purchase, then ripped it off, tossing it aside with a great clang. The man watched him, then looked toward the door, which was now partially embedded in the wall it had hit.

Mark rummaged in the cabinet, which contained specialty equipment of various kinds. He found a familiar type of black case and opened it. Inside was a satellite phone similar to the ones he knew.

They would, however, need to be in an area open to the sky to use it, and that meant further exposure.

“Is there an antenna hookup?”

“The news department bought it so they could get feeds from isolated fire zones. We never used it.”

Mark turned it on. “Some of them have relay antennas. Does this have one?”

“It has a relay antenna,” the man said. “From the news department upstairs, not from here.”

“So, lead on. I’m Mark, she’s Gina. What’s your name?”

“Zack. But you can’t leave here.”

Mark raised his eyebrows, questioning.

“They—they—this is the only place they haven’t come. Because of the double fire doors. The safety glass. They … haven’t come in here.”

Mark could see through the windows that overlooked the soundstage unrecognizable masses of torn flesh on the floor, and dark smears of blood on the walls.

He was again struck by the gratuitousness of it. The most powerful mind on earth was also a pathological murderer, which said volumes about how dangerous the brilliant can be when they are afraid.

“Is that a spiral staircase up to the newsroom,” Gina asked, “at the back of the stage?”

“Don’t go out there!” Zack cried.

“It’s empty.”

“They’re waiting in the flies. They’re in the flies!”

Mark could see no sign of movement in the flies or anywhere else on the stage. But that meant nothing.

“Come on,” he said to Gina.

When Zack started to follow them, Mark told him to stay behind.

“Please,” Zack said.

“If we encounter resistance, you’ll be a liability.”

For a moment longer, Zack hesitated, but then he turned away.

The stench in the soundstage was thick and now all too familiar, a mixture of blood and fear. Deep inside himself, Mark felt a tiny, excited stirring, and he hated it and pushed it away.

Gina came closer to him, and that was good. She climbed the spiral staircase behind him.

Three-quarters of the way up, they could see past the flies into the dark rafters. Long, slick bulges were along the cabling that controlled the scenery. What were they? He was not sure, but they weren’t part of the cables, clearly.

The hybrid army could design and deploy creatures at will, and fast. They had probably been purpose-built to lie in wait here.

He and Gina moved very, very quietly—but not quietly enough, because all at once the forms sprang off the cables and shot toward them through the air, their silver bodies flailing and twisting.

Gina cried out as one sped past her head and smashed into the far wall. It fell to the floor and began whipping wildly, its segmented steel body making a fearsome snapping sound.

Mark had a chance to see only that they were snakelike before one struck his chest and went twining around him. As fast as it was, he was able to raise his knife and cut it in half—only to watch in astonishment as the two halves sprang together and melted into one again.

The controlling mind had become aware of the effectiveness of the knives, too, so now its forms were specifically designed to minimize their damage.

As another coiled around Gina, he sliced it in two, pulling off the severed half and throwing it to the floor thirty feet below. Then he cut the one on him again, and this time he threw the back three feet of it off into the oncoming mass of them, which tangled in confusion and went clattering and sliding through the air around him and Gina as they slashed with their knives.

Most of the things fell to the floor, some hit the walls, some snapped back together again and came racing up cables. Then the ones that had fallen sprang back up, snapping against the floor with a sound like a cracking whip as they launched themselves.

“Get out,” Mark shouted. “Now!”

Gina vaulted up the spiral staircase and through the door at the top. Mark followed her, slamming it behind him.

Silence. But how long would it last?

Gina went to a small control console. “I think this is it.”

Mark turned the phone on and inserted the antenna cable into the receptacle. They both watched the antenna indicator, which flashed red once, flickered green, then went off.

“No,” Gina said.

The phone’s LED flashed a bit of green. Then red. Then solid green.

Mark input the number sequence that would get them through to Langley.

“Operations.”

“This is Mark Bryan.”

The access tone warbled as he inputted his security code.

“Okay, sir, please go ahead.”

“Give me George Hammond.”

From the open stairway, there came a sound, a steady clicking.

“Um—let’s see—he’s not available at this time.”

“Do you know where he is?”

The sound got louder.

“Engaged in the field.”

Gina said, “Mark, we have visitors.”

“The director, then.”

He saw one of the snakes gliding across the floor. How it had got in he could not tell.

“Put him on!”

“Sir, he’s not available.”

Gina went toward the thing, moving warily. But could she manage a kill alone?

“Cosmic clearance most urgent.”

Another one was now coming in, this one even larger.

Gina sailed her knife like a boomerang, sending the blade whirling through the air, and the head of the second snake flew off.

It struck the side of a desk and slid toward Gina’s feet. As she reached up and caught her knife, she stomped down on it until it was smashed into a mass of blood and tissue.

“That was impressive,” Mark said.

The knife spun past his face and sliced the head of the second, smaller snake lengthwise. Mark caught it in his free hand, where the creature writhed with almost preternatural fury, coiling and uncoiling despite the damage to the head.

“This is the director of central intelligence.”

“My name is Mark Bryan, colonel, U.S. army.”

“I know who you are.”

Mark switched the phone to speaker. He and Gina both needed to hear everything.

“I know how to put a stop to this thing.”

“You do?” Gina whispered.

“I need two nuclear warheads. I need them now.”

“Where are you?”

“San Francisco. In the newsroom at TV station—” Mark looked to Gina.

“KFSF,” she said.

“We’re at KFSF-TV, at the station. We can’t stay here long.”

“We have no warheads anywhere in that area.”

“Yeah, you do. As many as six, assuming they’re still operational. I need to know their location and you have the means to detect them. I need you to use Gina Lyndon’s satellites to find them for me.”

“She’s coordinating a Delta Force strike in the Big Basin area. Not available. And she’s a casualty. She’s been wounded.”

“Wounded?”

“She’s been blinded.”

Gina grabbed his shoulder. Mark forced his voice to remain steady. He said into the phone, “She’s coordinating a strike and she’s blind?”

“She has support. George Hammond is there.”

Gina shook her head. Mark thought about it.

“How much of Delta Force has gone in?” he asked the director.

“Two troops of Squadron A. Sixty operators.”

“You understand that the hybrids are blind. We believe that we blinded the ones that were linked to the drone when we put it out of action.”

“What does this mean?”

“Well, basically, that it’s not Gina Lyndon out there with Delta Force.”

“But she’s a hybrid, too. So she would be blind.”

“I’m one, and I’m not. This is because neither of us is linked to their network. Let me put Gina on now.”

“What?”

Gina gripped the phone. “I’d terminate that operation and withdraw those men.”

“It’s going smoothly.”

“Stop putting people in there, sir. You are killing them.”

“Now, wait a minute. What are you telling me, here?”

“You are murdering Delta Force by dropping them where you are dropping them,” Gina replied. “You are dealing with a hyperintelligent enemy, which operates as a massive linked social organism. They are smarter than you are. They are faster than you are. And they have tricked you by creating a false version of me, which they are now using against you.”

There was a silence, which extended.

Gina gave the phone back to Mark. “I think we lost him.”

Mark said into the phone, “Hello? Sir?”

“All right. We are downlooking live on the Delta Force operation and seeing things that don’t make sense. A lot of operators are invisible in the woods, and we are not bringing them up in infrared, which means that their bodies are cool, therefore dead. So how can I help you?”

“I need you to get me the coordinates of those bombs.”

“Where will you detonate them?”

“We’re taking them underground,” Mark replied. “Deep as we can.”

“Carrying them in and detonating them?”

“That’s correct.”

“But your lives—you can’t survive that.”

“No.”

Gina was watching the stairs, but also listening to him, and when she heard that word, she came closer to him. Her young face was strong, but to it had come as sad an expression as he could remember seeing.

“Are we doing what I think we’re doing?” she whispered.

“In my heart, I’m holding you,” he said.

“I’m holding you.”

Mark terminated the call. The director would do all he could. There was no further reason to talk.