Zosma Read online

  Assuming the soldier’s communication had been routed through Cynque, he watched their formation restructure. Hand gestures commanded action from the cavalry, and they scampered to new posts, preparing their weapons to shoot whatever came through the cloud. Their expressions, hidden beneath helmet visors, failed to shroud their uncertain voices. “Get ready!” Allister heard a different man scream, holding back none of his frenzy. They’d gone through rigorous training in preparation for C20’s retaliation, but perhaps they didn’t train for him.

  The elemental distraction had backfired, in that now, they’d dispatched to the middle entrance he’d planned to use.

  More running. A slight pivot to the side, dodging a plasma blast, fast enough for it to miss, slow enough for him to feel the burn as it passed his ribs. An uppercut to the gut knocked the wind out of the attacking soldier and he doubled over. One down. Another soldier came at him, feet behind the first. Allister threw an elbow at his face. The soldier spun out and landed on his back. Two down. A third soldier swung a right hook. Allister blocked the punch, evaded a blast, crushed the weapon’s barrel, and threw the soldier over his shoulder. Three down. He served violence cold, zipping through to the middle, taking out soldiers as they filed in to halt his infiltration. The last thing he’d wanted was a brawl, yet, after five minutes, he stood surrounded by dozens of unconscious bodies and subsiding winds.

  He hopped over the U.S. soldiers, ever cautious of their recovery or the chance he’d missed one in his haste. He clambered up a dune to a somewhat submerged window. Whoomph. His palm hit the concrete wall. Allister’s hand stung from striking it, but he needed the grip to keep from sliding backward. He heel-kicked the window’s edge. It splintered. In the same fashion, he kicked it once more. Fractures wove a web on its surface, and the glass shattered.

  A true gentleman, he let the sand enter first then lowered his head to peer in. Empty. Hesitation harnessed around his waist, he hovered at the edge as the hourglass in his mind ran out of sand. He had to keep moving.

  His shoes crunched against the sand ridden floor. His breath shortened. His stomach tightened. It sank in. He’d volunteered to revisit the place where he’d lost the pillar of his being, Dolores Edna Adams. Two months prior, April 2052, C20 had captured his mother, Dolores. Allister led the charge to C20’s doorstep to rescue her. A noble effort complicated by the organization’s motives. They wanted him to come. And they wanted him to come alone.

  His colleagues, Dr. Florence Belladonna and Lieutenant Leesa Delemar came after him, even when they were ordered not to. The showdown ended with the devastating energy pulse from Leesa, which neutralized the base, Florence’s imprisonment and...

  He pressed his hand on the nearest wall. The woozy sensation derailed his progress. If he closed his eyes, he’d see the heart-wrenching moments in high-definition, so he kept them open until they dried from the heat and blinking became reflex. An unexpected reunion with facets of his humanity that had been destroyed there—his purity (if nothing else).

  Allister told himself to keep moving. And he did, one foot, then the other, and again. There was less at stake this time around, still, he found himself performing the same choreography as the last visit. Lukewarm, sheeted metal protested his heavy hand’s need for support as he traversed the musty hallway, heading opposite the dome. The creaks were normal, a result of a foundation built on shifty earth. His vision adjusted to darkness revealing a canopy of wiry, metal nooses and a field of jagged steel scraps, bordered by a forest of dented paneling. Leesa’s telekinetic handiwork.

  The wall creaked louder, shouting at him. He swiveled to it and the wall creaked again, not shouting, he’d misjudged. It was warning him to move farther, faster. Its distress brought his attention to the rotting wounds, creases in the metal wall gaining weight and folding over themselves, spreading past him into the dark. As a result, the ceiling slid closer to his bun’s curled tips, clanging in its own aggressive anger at the wall’s unwillingness to try.

  Hint taken, he swapped caution for speed. The floor caved and tumbled soon after. As if fueled by their own preservation, each knee lifted double time to carry him out of danger. He dove onto sturdier ground, rolled and thumped a door as the wall and the floor’s final slabs crashed below.

  He spent seconds on his bum; skull rested against the door, staring at dust and debris-riddled air. Catching his breath, knowing he could spare seconds at most, he felt a full minute’s burdensome and unwarranted arrival. More seconds passed. He said goodbye to another wasted minute. Time continued to slip from his grasp, it fell and unraveled like yarn, while he, the kitten, pawed at it, hoping to bring it closer, to reclaim it as his own. He needed to keep moving.

  Allister rebounded to his feet, faced the door, and was confronted by a name placard affixed to the office’s frosted glass: Captain Jared Brandt, C20’s leader.

  “Lying son of a—” He punched at the glass. It didn’t put up a fight and broke down the middle, leaving fragments in its corners.

  Unimpressive contents. An overturned acrylic chair, wheels up. Captain Brandt’s medals of honor scattered, victims of distress. “I can’t believe it,” he gasped, rushing over to an intact... not a desk, a miracle with a built-in hard drive. He brushed sand from the touchscreen monitor, bringing the device to life. A halo of light basked his face and the office in its hopeful glow. Tiny red dots touched the left, right, and center of his wrinkled forehead.

  “No... no... no, no, no, no, no,” he repeated. Additional dots connected by gridlines, outlined his lean face and square jaw in a checked pattern. They scanned his hazel eyes, and picked up texture in his arched eyebrows and patchy beard.

  “Warning, facial identification invalid,” an androgynous voice boomed. “Warning, facial identification invalid. Deleting files.”

  Allister kneaded the base of his neck and dipped closer to the computer. Forty percent complete. Now it was his mind’s time to shine. His brain activated microscopic x-ray vision, penetrating the CPU’s hardware, winding through a computer chip maze for the logic board’s data storage file. His pupils, less than a foot from the device, reflected the binary code of its security grids running opposite directions. He’d found the backdoor to its hard drive, memorized the passwords, and walked in the front door instead.

  A loose hair fell from behind his ear. “Open folder, Children of Andromeda,” he said.

  “You do not have authorization to access this folder. Deleting files,” it replied.

  “Access code is... D... H... E... DHEX470BCE.”

  “Access code accepted. Welcome back, Dr. Rabia Giro.”

  He covered his face, prepared for another scan, and thought, Dr. Giro? What?

  The computer kept going: “You have two hundred thousand files remaining, what would you like to extract?”

  Of course, C20 kept its content on a private server that didn’t link to Cynque’s public network. Extracting data to his Cynque would be too risky, would set off alarms. But he could read. He could memorize.

  “Access file Mission: the Andromeda Project ruination, view only mode.”

  Rectangular holographic projections ballooned up from the screen and expanded in a semicircle around him. Individual bios on anyone who had ever been associated with the Andromeda Project, their names, ages, occupations, powers (if any), and status were etched in Helvetica bold next to the featured subject’s flickering image. He examined them, drawing closer to the ones resonating. One employee, in particular, shared his nose, brow structure, and cleft chin.

  Patrick James Adams. 33. Senior engineer. Superior intellect. Deceased. Next image. Nicolas Delemar. 58. Former General. None. Inactive.

  “Inactive,” he murmured. “Bullshit.”

  Distant shouts. Heavy duty wheels rumbling over dunes. Helicopter blades chopping through the sky. He’d flipped the imaginary hourglass over too many times. The sand had run out. The storm was over.

  “Access folder, Z Protocols, view only mode.”

&
nbsp; “Folder Z Protocols requires additional clearance,” the computer responded. “Please provide the access code.”

  “Um.” He pressed into his temples and massaged them in rapid circular strokes. “It’s in there somewhere.”

  A voice, lower than the lowest human octave spoke, “All-Allister.”

  Allister sprung against the wall, hands flattened on its surface. “Neight!” he exclaimed, then glowered at a creature by the entrance. “Neight, what the hell, you’re alive? Where’s Zosma?”

  Neight Caster, the fallen alien king of a planet called Uragon, was close to seven feet tall and doused in grey armor. Creating an astral projection required incredible mental power, and it often resulted in an outlined transparent shape. But he was translucent. If one could imagine a person without their smooth, epidermal cloak, the cloak that concealed the interconnectivity by which the body is governed, they’d see, as Allister saw, that Neight’s intricacies were unmasked, sketched in precise detail.

  Smeared the color of muddled lavender, striated muscles in his long arms rose up like identical shield volcanoes and dipped, mimicking an unsuspecting flatland below, then rose again near the forearm, and flattened into three claws that clenched his side. Neight knelt as though he carried the burden of Atlas, boasting shoulders that could, if sentenced, hold up the heavens.

  “Rabia,” he began. Instead of meeting Allister’s anxious gaze, his pupils traced the talons on his feet. “Rabia... wants... ” Neight’s image faded and returned to luminescence.

  Allister resorted to shouting, as if the louder he got, the higher the probability he’d get an answer. “Come on, keep it together. Rabia wants what?”

  “The Z-enerarrrrgh.” The alien’s head reeled back, and the astral projection vanished, a soul called back to Hades.

  “Wait, how do I find—”

  Boots pounding steel reverberated through the compound.

  “Neight,” Allister muttered and clutched his forehead.

  The computer boomed, as if with anger for having to repeat itself: “Folder Z Protocols requires additional clearance.”

  “Right, the access code. Um, let’s try... ZCW96.”

  “Access code accepted.”

  “Yes!” One at a time, the rectangles were vacuumed into the computer, and in their place, was a text file. Allister skimmed the first paragraph.

  Feet shuffled down the hall. His skin tingled and he listened for their action. Windows were smashed. A door was kicked in. A young sounding woman said in a high-pitch, “Not in here, sir.”

  “Keep moving then,” a growling voice responded alongside the whirr of charging weapons.

  Allister ducked too fast, teetered and fell on his hands. Hushed but firm, he said, “Resume file deletion.”

  “Are you sure, Dr. Giro?”

  “Resume!”

  “Preparing to delete.”

  Light beams from their Cynques and the stench of prolonged perspiration swam over Captain Brandt’s office. “Did you hear that?” the female soldier asked. Quiet as she’d thought she’d been, he deciphered the whispers in her throat.

  “We suspect the intruder’s in Captain Brandt’s office, Detective Steele,” a man said in the same gruff tone from earlier. “Some files may have been compromised. We’re going in.”

  No chance in hell the U.S. government was taking him in. He reached for the chair and slung it by its legs. It barreled over concrete like a bowling ball. The computer met its end in a chaotic burst, littering the floor with flakes of glass. Safety mechanisms on three weapons snapped to release. Plasma beams blew holes in the walls and incinerated anything in the room with a low enough melting point. A fatal flaw in the weapon prototypes was their need to juice-up like heroin addicts in order to function. The shooting’s pause answered his desperate prayer.

  He didn’t wait to eavesdrop on the soldiers’ next moves. Allister’s uneven strides thumped through the pitch-black tunnel, thanks to a piping hot new burn on his thigh. Whimpering, he grasped the area above the pain and slammed into the wall. Sand trickled from the ceiling as soldier after soldier ran across the base to catch him at the exit.

  His body trembled. White energy output erupted from his left hand, dashed up his arm, and across his shoulders. He looked at the heptagon-shaped gems on the back of his hands and the dangling fabric which had concealed them. Temporal (time) energy defeated the muffling darkness and, in reverse, redrew a memorial mirage so vivid, a cave reappeared.

  It was the cave. The cave Dolores died in. Amazon’s Spring 2051 perfume—Preservation—attacked his nasal passages. It had been his mother’s favorite—a mix of honey, ginger, and primrose. He’d inhaled it as she cradled his head for the last time, handcuffed to a bare, wired bedframe inside that cave.

  “I’m sorry, Allister,” her voice whispered from behind the memory’s shimmering door. An apology she’d uttered after she revealed untold stories of his childhood. “I hope you can forgive me... for keeping this from you.”

  Reliving the memory, Allister swore he felt the heat and smelled the cinders, as the detonation of the bomb strapped to his mother’s waist swallowed the sweetness of her last words on their way to his ears. The tunnels collapsed in real time, and C20’s underground shimmered, returning to its present damage.

  Cringing, he whispered, “Mom.” The one syllable word set his escape in motion. Allister’s skin lost its luster, as the energy swirled back into him. The Transporter gems dismembered him limb-by-limb, cell-by-cell, nucleus-by-nucleus.

  Detective Hunter Steele

  Abandoned C20 HQ, Former Middle East

  “Detective Steele, sir, I don’t know how he escaped, we went at him from both sides,” the general said, standing at attention in a row of nervous soldiers.

  “I can live without your excuses,” Detective Hunter Steele said. “You’re all fired anyway.”

  “Sir, you don’t have the authority to—”

  “You talking back to me?” he asked. Their collective head shaking ended with lowered chins. “Good, that’s what I thought.” He sauntered around Captain Brandt’s ransacked office, thick leather boots crunching atop glass, and frowned over the gaping hole in the floor. “Clever little fuck, isn’t he?”

  Detective Steele was a mid-thirties, broad-shouldered figure, rocking a sleazy goatee and impeccable frame. Much of Hunter’s ambiguity lay in his coal black eyes and in his imperceptible accent—he had no qualms or curiosity about his ethnic heritage and used quips to dodge invasive questions like “What are you?” and “Are you mixed?”

  “A-a-as the general said s-s-sir,” the female soldier stammered, “we sent a u-u-unit in from this hole here and had a second unit w-w-waiting for him at the end of the t-t-tunnel.”

  Hunter’s eyebrow raised. “You’re telling me Private Adams disappeared?” He studied the failures’ faces, seeing fear, defiance, remorse, confusion, each expression dressed up in sweat and sand. They couldn’t answer before he guffawed, one hand pressed against his abs, and slapped the general’s back. “Man, good one.” He pretended to wipe a tear from his eye, laughed deeper, and straightened up. The grin faded to a sneer. “In case I wasn’t clear, you’re done-zo. Pack your shit up and get your team out of here.”

  “You heard him, move!” The general adjusted the light on his Cynque and led the others out.

  “Look on the bright side, you’ll get to spend time with your kids, or pets, or whatever!”

  Round and round went the loading circle of dots chasing each other on the Cynque’s screen: large circle, medium circle, small circle, loop. Repeat. Their best tracking software wasn’t getting a reading on Allister’s device. Mid-search, his Cynque accessed its vocal programming, “Apologies for interrupting, Detective Steele, you have an incoming call from President DeVries would you like to—?”

  Hunter answered the old-fashioned way and pressed the green phone button on the screen. “What’s up, Prez?”

  “No updates, Steele?” President DeVries asked.<
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  “Buddy, I’ve been here four hours. You’ll get news when I have it.” He muted the Cynque, and while the president ranted about urgency, standard operating procedures, and respect, climbed out of the facility. The Cynque’s rim lit up in spurts, on par with President DeVries’ nagging vocals. “Stupid people and their stupid problems,” he muttered, un-muted the device, then interrupted, “Hey, hey, Mr. Hysterical. Zip it for a sec. Do you know if the mines we planted here are still online?”

  “They should be. Why do you ask?”

  “Hold.” Hunter scrubbed off unyielding specks of sand sticking to his clammy torso and neck and took a panorama of the base. “I say we bury this place. Make it look like an accident, the region was too dangerous, or you got ambushed. Get your weasel to spin a story out of it.”

  “You’re not authorized—”

  “Authorized to what? Cover your ass?”

  “I hired you to bring in Allister Adams without using violence.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?” Hunter snorted. He fanned himself with his red leather coat. “Here’s some advice Prez, you don’t want anyone knowing you’ve got a superhuman running around the world breaking border laws.” He paused to rub his slick bald head, then shook the sweat from his hand. “Plus, this kid’s your best weapon against C20. The more he knows, the more dangerous he gets, and his chances of helping you go way down.”

  “There’ve been some developments stateside which need attention.”

  “Can I be honest? It’s hot as sin here. I’m annoyed, and I can’t coddle you right now,” he countered, and added a smirk, “Don’t worry, Allister’s Cynqued. I swear on your life, I’ll have him home by dinner tomorrow.”

  “Treat him like an asset, not a criminal,” President DeVries ordered and hung up.

  “One day he’s a criminal, one day he’s an asset, Jesus frickin’ Christ!” Hunter held up the Cynque and announced, “We’re clear,” over their shared comm channel. “The GI Joes gone?”

  His loyal crew of ruffians sat in a matte-black Boeing Osprey helicopter, “Steele” painted in giant grey letters on the side. The pilot saluted him, and the helicopter’s twin engines sang with the harmony of 15,000 horses. It rose into the air, angled southwest toward the setting sun and their next destination.