Ghost Book One: The Earth Transformed Read online

  GHOST BOOK ONE: The Earth Transformed

  Mike Stackpole and Nathan Long

  Copyright inXile entertainment inc. 2014

  Published by inXile entertainment inc.

  Publishing at Smashwords

  GHOST BOOK ONE

  – The Earth Transformed –

  By

  Mike Stackpole and Nathan Long

  – Chapter One –

  Floating.

  Lighter than a feather on a warm spring breeze. Just hanging there.

  Blue and green. The colors of life.

  Peaceful.

  Then, clouds. Terrible clouds.

  I didn’t see them — didn’t hear any thunder — but they had to be there. There could be no other explanation for the lightning that shot through me. One bolt, straight down from the top of my skull and out through my soles, splintering as it went, stabbing out through every neuron, every pore.

  My body tensed, muscles spasming, back arching almost to the breaking point. My bones burned. I tried to breathe, but something sour filled my mouth. Nettles dragged across my tongue. I jackknifed up, liquid splashing around me, metallic air cold on my skin.

  It didn’t quench the fire in my cells.

  I flailed for balance as the world moved under me, then I fell to a freezing floor, all metal and slippery with viscous glop. I tried to get up, but my hands slid away. I coughed up a throatful of something foul, then swiped a hand over my face, clearing thick gel from my eyes. I had to squeeze it out of my hair.

  That exhausted me, so I lay there for a bit, just breathing, eyes closed against the bright light. My mouth tasted like I’d drunk from a spittoon. I couldn’t remember how I knew to make that comparison.

  Finally I opened my eyes. One at a time. For a few unfocused moments everything was green, a glowing pond–scum green. I lay in a puddle of it. A stronger, deeper green rimmed a glass door just past my head. A green button pulsed, set waist–high in the wall beside that door. The glass tank I’d fallen from glowed green too. It was about the size of a casket, and had green fluid in it — a shade never seen in nature. A curved glass lid had split in the middle and fallen back on each side. The fluid had stopped sloshing and the conveyor belt that had risen and dumped me out of there had sunk back beneath the surface.

  I had no idea what the tank was, but I didn’t like it.

  I didn’t like that I was buck naked and unarmed either.

  That unarmed part really bothered me.

  Being naked made taking a survey easier, though. I appeared to have all my parts. Fingers, toes, other extremities, all in the right places, and in the right number. Nothing missing, and no spares either.

  Why would I have expected otherwise?

  Vague memories were starting to form in the back of my head, but I couldn’t bring them into focus. It was like the two halves of my brain were trying to talk to each other in the middle of a noisy bar.

  Being careful not to slide around, I got to my feet and pressed my back to the cold steel wall. It was a wonder to behold. No rust. No dents. No grime. Like no human had ever touched it.

  It creeped me out.

  I hit the green button.

  The glass door retracted. Hot air rushed in at me like an assault team, drying my skin. I stayed where I was, listened for trouble. Didn’t hear anything — nor see, nor smell. The door closed again with a whoosh of air. I waited, listening. Still nothing.

  Time to make a move.

  I hit the button and dodged out and left.

  And tripped over my own feet.

  Literally.

  No, not the feet at the ends of my legs. The feet at the end of the legs of a body that looked just like the guy I usually saw in the mirror. He lay stretched out in the dark corridor just out of sight of the doorway. He’d been shot, chopped up, and gnawed on. Even so, I recognized the face.

  My knees took a time out and I slid down the opposite wall. Pieces of things started to come back, but not many. That dent in the dead guy’s skull, the one that had been bound up with soiled rags, might have been the reason why.

  I knew I was in some place called Sleeper Base One, and I knew somebody had told me and my… my friends? gang? squad? to find it for a very important reason, but I couldn’t remember the reason. I also knew that something had gone wrong for us — maybe not here, but somewhere — and I had hurried back here to clone myself so I could finish the mission. Whatever the mission was supposed to—

  Wait.

  Quick rewind.

  Clone myself?

  I looked back through the glass door into the room with the glass tank.

  Cloning chamber.

  I’d cloned myself.

  How did I know how to do that?

  More memory lost to that dent in my head.

  Er, my former head.

  I — I mean he — must have died while waiting for my current self to decant out of the green goo.

  Poor bastard.

  Still, he had clothes and I didn’t, so…

  I peeled him, starting with his boots. Can’t go anywhere without boots. Then the jeans and shirt. I didn’t take his socks or shorts. I think I was more uneasy about leaving him utterly naked than I was about corpse cooties. His body armor was worse for wear but better than nothing.

  I wondered why he didn’t have anything more lethal than a combat knife on him. Wasn’t like he’d been looted. Everything would have been gone if he had. A few choice cuts of meat likely would have been gone too. Maybe I’d shucked all that stuff on the way here from wherever I’d come from. Maybe I’d been too weak to carry it all.

  He still wore a battered star–shaped badge on the sheath of his knife. The star of a Desert Ranger. My star. I flicked dried blood off it as I slid the sheath onto my belt, then I froze.

  I didn’t know who I was.

  My mind could see a man with sergeant’s stripes shouting my name, but I couldn’t hear him. I could feel the lips of a redheaded woman whispering it in my ear, but I couldn’t hear her.

  I looked at the back of the star. That’s where Desert Rangers usually scratched their names. Nothing but the pin. It was blank.

  I fought down panic. I told myself my name didn’t matter. Who I was didn’t matter. The badge told me what I was, and that’s what mattered.

  I was a Desert Ranger.

  Now all I had to do was figure out what my mission had been, and how to complete it.

  Then a woman screamed, and I moved “figuring out my mission” down to number two on the list.

  ***

  The metal corridors of the base made tracking the shouts and crashes a bit tricky, but I got there in the end. Four mutants had the woman surrounded. They looked like shaggy dogs wearing ragged clothes — growled a lot too — but no dog in the world ever smelled that bad.

  First one I reached had ten fingers, seven on one hand, three on the other. Lots of space where the spares had been manicured down to the knuckle. Maybe he needed the extra fingers for picking all three of his nostrils. They ran like a sewer all down into his beard.

  I grabbed a handful of matted hair and yanked back, then pulled the combat knife across his throat. Apparently old me was diligent about honing his knife to a razor’s edge. Blood jetted and his head almost came clean off. Well, I say clean, but nothing about that lice rancher was anything but foul.

  The spray of blood turned the second one toward me. I wished it hadn’t. He had skin like a shedding rattlesnake and something had taken his right eye, leaving just a tangle of scars. He’d wired a bayonet to the open end of a sawed–off shotgun. It was swinging in my direct
ion.

  I stepped into him. Caught the muzzle on my left hip. He stumbled back, trying to buy himself enough room to stab me. I got there first. Eight inches of steel right between ribs. Hot backsplash told me I’d found one of the big arteries. He was out before he fell, dead before the second bounce.

  The third guy charged me empty–handed. He’d been making grabs at the woman. Apparently he had plans for her that required her to have a pulse. Big man with bigger fists. Each one was the size of a small–block engine.

  I flipped my knife around so the blade lay back against my left forearm, where he couldn’t see it or grab for it. He roared in swinging. There was no blocking a punch like that, and if I’d ducked it, the rest of him was right behind it, all four hundred pounds of him. I would have been road kill. Instead I spun to my right, outside his roundhouse, and stuck my knife out as he went past. Opened up his leathers like paper and left the rags underneath dripping red.

  I stopped and turned, thinking I had all the time in the world, but he was faster than I expected. Before I was halfway around, he had me up off the ground with his arms pinning my elbows to my sides and his biceps tightening for a bear hug. I could hear my bones creaking, and suddenly breathing was no longer and in–out–in–out process. There was no in. There was only out.

  I twisted my knife around and felt it cutting through more leather, but without leverage I was never going to reach anything vital.

  “You fucking musk–ox!” I growled. “I didn’t come back from the dead to die like this!”

  He just laughed.

  And then he stopped laughing and started toppling forward.

  I rolled free as his arms went loose, and just managed to get clear as he crashed to the ground, stone dead.

  That was a murder mystery I didn’t have time to ponder at that moment. I rolled up, knife out, back to the wall, knowing there was one more I had to deal with.

  But there wasn’t.

  The last guy lay on his back, his neck bent at an angle that made me queasy to look at. I glanced back at the musk–ox. Strangely, he had died in exactly the same way.

  I raised my eyes. The woman who had screamed stood in a picture–perfect fighting stance, fists cocked, and fire in her monitor–blue eyes. I couldn’t see much of her beneath the grey robe she wore, but her face was lean and her expression defiant. There were two more dead mutants behind her.

  I lowered the knife a little and raised the other hand, showing her it was empty. “Did you really punch those guys hard enough to break their—?”

  “Kick.” She said. “I kicked them. Steel–toed boots.”

  I shook my head. “And here I thought you were in trouble.”

  “They surprised me.”

  “I bet you surprised them too. Damn.” I edged back. She hadn’t relaxed her stance. “Uh, are we cool?”

  She gave me a quick once over — checking for extra fingers maybe? — then dropped her fists and stood, nodding. “We’re cool. Sorry. Can’t be too careful.”

  I dropped to a knee and began to strip weapons and satchels off the mutants, but I still kept an eye on her. Cool or not, she was obviously lethal, and I didn’t know what she was doing in a place most people didn’t even know existed. Time to use some subtlety and find out.

  “So,” I said, upending a dusty courier bag and pawing through the contents. “Why are you here?”

  She shrugged and joined me in looting the dead. “Same reason as you, probably. Hunting for relics to help combat the robot menace. My order learned of this location and sent me to scout it out.”

  A plug fit into a socket in my brain. A light came on. Flickering, but there. Was that my mission? “Robot… Menace… Yeah. Death machines, coming out of the desert. A never–ending army.”

  “That’s the one.”

  I glanced up at her, took another look at her duds. “You’re a novice with the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud, right?”

  “Right. From Vegas.” She pried the bayonet–shotgun from the little guy’s hands and cracked it. No shells. No wonder he hadn’t fired. “Things are pretty bad there. Robots in the sewers. More surrounding the walls. The Church is doing what we can to help out.”

  “And so you just happened to find this place the same time I did.”

  “Actually, I probably wouldn’t have found it at all except I came across a trail of blood and limping boot prints. I tracked it back to here, hoping to help.”

  I nodded toward the dead mutants. “Guess they tracked it too.”

  “Guess so,” she said. “But what about you? I only saw one set of recent boot prints going into this place, and you’re not limping or bleeding.”

  “I, uh…” I looked away. I hardly wanted to admit to myself that I was a clone, let alone tell anyone else. “I heal fast.”

  She gave me a long look at that, then extended a hand. “Remarkably so, it seems. Athalia. Sister Athalia.”

  I shook, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out.

  “You aren’t afraid of telling me your name, are you, Mr. “I didn’t come back from the dead to die like this?”“

  So she’d heard that. Great.

  She smiled. “I could always call you Ghost, I guess.”

  “I prefer Revenant. It’s a better fit.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  I looked at what I had pulled off the corpses. A few shells for the shotgun, a nine millimeter pistol with a couple of clips, three dull knives and, surprisingly, a half–dozen red sticks of TNT. That last discovery caused me to take another look at the room. Three of the walls were made of a translucent crystal, and beyond the southern panel lurked a handful of silhouettes that appeared to be full suits of some kind of high–tech armor. Whatever it was, it was sure to beat the shit out of the flea–infested leathers the mutants had been wearing.

  “I don’t know if that will work,” said Athalia as I hefted the dynamite. “The Church told me that according to their scouts the only way to get through that glass is with a security card. Maybe we should see if we can find one.”

  Another plug and socket. I started slapping the pockets of the jacket and pants I had taken off the previous me. “I… I have one, I think. Here it… no, that’s a map. Wait. Here!”

  I dug out the card and we spent a minute searching the room for the slot we were supposed to stick it in. Athalia found it in the molding that framed the glass panel. Not a slot — just a black plastic box with the icon of a card on it. I placed the card on the box. A red light came on. Nothing happened.

  Well, almost nothing. Another light came on in my head too.

  “Wait. I’ve done this before. It didn’t work that time either. In the end we found a note in a desk — it said the key cards that opened this door were actually in some place called Project Darwin.”

  Athalia frowned. “Why would the key for a door in this facility be in a different facility?”

  “That was in the note too,” I said. “The guy with the key went to Darwin for some emergency and didn’t make it back before the bombs fell.”

  She sighed and turned towards the door. “Well, that’s that then. I guess we’re going to Project Darwin — wherever that is.”

  “It’s right here on this map, but not yet. We haven’t tried Plan A yet.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And what’s Plan A?”

  I waggled the dynamite at her and grinned.

  ***

  Plan A went over like a wet fart. Athalia had been right. Blowing the dynamite didn’t do anything to that glass wall except change its description from frosted to smoked. But the plan did reveal something else. A couple things, actually.

  At my insistence we had dragged the mutants out of the room, not because I was worried about damaging their already damaged corpses, but because cleaning a thin, red paste off all that lovely armor wasn’t my idea of a good time. And while we were looking for a place to dump them, Athalia went right when I told her
to go left and ended up looking down at my body — my former body, that is.

  She gave him the once over twice, then slid a look over at me. “Twin brother?”

  “Something like that.”

  She looked into the room with the glass casket. “So, it’s not a fairy tale after all. The ancients really could clone themselves.”

  “Based on personal experience, I’d say yes.”

  “I understand Revenant now.” She looked at his wounds. “And the bloody footprints.”

  “I don’t suppose you understand why he died?”

  She looked around at me. “You don’t remember?”

  I pointed at the dent in his head. “Corrupted data.”

  “Maybe it will come back to you.”

  I looked again at the battered, bloodied corpse that had once been me. “I don’t know if I want it to.”

  ***

  Five minutes later I was sure I didn’t want to.

  Oh well, too late.

  In the fourth room we searched we found the remnants of another fight — a jumbled pile of dead bodies and broken robots — and I found another little chunk of my memory — a hard, black, bitter chunk.

  The bodies were all Desert Rangers, and every face I looked at lit up another corner of my mind and opened another chamber in my heart. Franny, Brockleman, Spider. The names and faces hurt — like a flood of jagged knives, like salt in wounds. And the worst part was, I knew this was the second time I’d grieved over these people — these friends — because when I looked at the robots, another memory opened up, red and white and bright with the strobe of muzzle flash.

  I had been here when these rangers had died. I’d fought alongside them. Stood back to back with them, blasting and hacking at that tide of relentless killing machines as they poured out from the depths of the facility.

  I’d been the only one who hadn’t died.

  The memory was clear, but I couldn’t place it in time. Had this just happened? Was this where my former self had been cut to pieces? No, his wounds were fresh. The blood here was dry, the bodies decaying. They had been dead for days.