Jack stumbled into the anomaly, rubbing her eyes. The last week had been a tight sequence of jumps and she hadn’t gotten much sleep. Nor was she likely to over the next two weeks, what with Druce staying behind to deal with an emergency. It was frustrating, but Jack knew better than anybody what some of the alternatives could have been. Then her link to Wolf’s visual cortex was suddenly severed and her vision went black.
Her heart skipped a beat. For half a moment she hoped it would flicker back in, but when she reached out for him, he wasn’t there. He had entered the anomaly but had not exited with her.
Jack took a deep breath and forced herself to think. She needed to survive long enough to get back to help. She stretched out with her other senses to search for immediate danger. Nothing stirred. She grimaced. She knew she could fight a Mech with no sight but it was going to be difficult to find it without her tracker.
Footsteps sounded down the corridor. Jack turned towards them, wishing she could see who she was dealing with.
“What are you doing out here?” a voice said sharply. “Where’s your Handler?”
“This may sound strange,” Jack said, “but can you tell me where I am?”
The only answer she got was harsh laughter. Then something hit her skin and electricity coursed through her body. Her muscles convulsed uncontrollably and she blacked out.
Everything felt strange when she came to. She could see again. Someone must have reactivated her ocular implant. She was wearing some sort of reinforced suit and cradling a huge gun. The ground beneath her feet was vibrating, as if in motion. Her left arm moved suddenly without her permission. She tried to move her head. Nothing happened. Panic rose in her chest and began clawing at her throat. Someone had control of her body.
The lift jerked to a halt and two large doors slid open. A man stepped forward from beside her. He was big. Tall. Muscular. And her quick eyes noted the tech bulging on his spine at the base of his skulls. He was a cyborg. Like her.
Her legs moved forward and she stepped out onto a barren landscape. The sky was black, not blue. What planet was this? Maybe it was all a really bad dream.
They began walking across the barren landscape. But Jack had had enough of being someone else’s puppet. Someone had remotely hijacked her. She connected to Wolf in a similar manner to borrow his eyes, but he was just a robot. Whatever was going on here was not okay.
Jack backtracked the connection to its source and found the mind that was sending her body signals. A man was strapped into some sort of virtual reality equipment, using her like a drone. He wasn’t aware of her, and his body continued to move mechanically. Before she disconnected she did a little digging through the programming and was suddenly flooded with the answers to her questions.
This wasn’t a dream. Or an alien planet. This was Earth. Another nightmarish alternate reality. Only this time the world had been decimated by aliens instead of homicidal robots.
How had another rift opened up? She had enough to deal with keeping her space-time from falling apart. She would focus on this second rift later. The first step was getting back there.
She and this other biobot, G4S59, had been deployed to meet up with a patrol on the surface. Jack weighed her options. If she disconnected now, her User would immediately know something was wrong. What was standard protocol? Would G4S59 turn on her? She stole a glance at his profile. His face had hard edges but there was a softness deep in his eyes. He didn’t deserve to be a slave.
Hot anger rose up inside of her. There had been a time in her life when she had felt trapped. Imprisoned. Like her free will had been taken away from her. She had had her mind invaded. Had been forced to experience other people’s memories. But at least she had had a childhood. Had a family now. He’d lived this life of slavery since he was a child. He didn’t know what love was.
A burning desire filled her to head back to the Bunker and turn the place upside down. But then she heard a voice in her head say the one word she most dreaded since it entered her consciousness through the data download: Wrecker. There it was looming over a hill just to their left.
The Users were talking. Weighing strategies. Calling for reinforcements. She didn’t much care. If she was about to face down a Wrecker, she was going to be in control of her own body.
The Wrecker charged and she severed her User connection. G4S59 and his Handler didn’t seem to notice. He was laying down heavy fire. Jack emptied her own weapon as the monster approached. It was massive. At least twice her height, with four bulging arms, a skull-like face, and gaping jaws. Its mouth was opened in what must have been a fierce howl, but the sound was lost in the nearly non-existent atmosphere. At least that was something.
Then Jack felt something new. Paralyzing fear surged through her veins, nearly crippling her. No wonder the head haunchos back at the Bunker had to pilot their army remotely. These aliens had a mean hunting mechanism. Fortunately Jack had faced something like it before. She stood her ground until the monster was almost right on top of them, then rolled deftly between its massive limbs, narrowly missing a swipe from its claws. She popped up on the other side to see G4S59 take a nasty hit.
Jack opened fire from behind and the Wrecker turned on her in an instant. She ducked and dodged just ahead of it, leading it back and away from the fallen cyborg. If she didn’t have a synthetic pair of lungs, she would have been gasping for air by now. Her energy was waning fast and the Wrecker was getting angry. She bided her time until she had the right angle, and then emptied her magazine into the roof of its mouth, straight through to its brain. It collapsed in a heap nearly on top of her.
Jack lost her balance and fell backward onto the packed Earth. Her hands were trembling and her legs felt like jelly. But something familiar shimmered in the air about a hundred feet back toward the fallen cyborg. An anomaly. A way home. Possibly her only chance. She forced herself to her feet and ran around it to G4S59. He was dazed and bleeding. Not dead, though. She knelt beside him and checked his wounds.
“W-who are you?” he stammered. Was that his Handler? Or was that really him? There was something in his eyes that made her think his connection had been broken. But could she be sure?
“Are they sending someone for you?” she asked.
He nodded.
She glanced back toward the anomaly. She wasn’t supposed to be here. A rift between their realities would prove deadly for both their worlds. And the only way for her to figure out a way to shut it was from the other side. With her team.
She turned back to him. His eyes were glazed and confused.
Figures appeared on the horizon. A whole platoon from what it looked like. At least he’d live through the day. She took his hand.
“Listen to me…” She fought for words–for something to say that would mean something. All she could think of was what Sutton had said to her years ago. “They want to scoop out everything that’s inside of you and use your hollow shell. They think that if they suck your soul out, they won’t face any danger. But there will come a time when you will find the balance of power in your hands, and you’ll be able to make your own choices…You’re strong enough to make it. Don’t give up!”
The platoon was getting closer. She couldn’t risk them getting within shooting distance. By now they would have figured out that she severed her connection. And if they took her, she may never get home.
Jack squeezed G4S59’s hand one more time, turned and ran through the anomaly.
She landed on the Cassandra right where she had left Druce. Wolf sat at his feet.
“What happened?” Druce asked.
Jack looked around her in confusion. “You tell me.”
“You and Wolf stepped through the anomaly, and he popped right back out again. But we’ve been waiting for you for almost three minutes.”
She frowned. “That’s never happened before.”
“Must’ve been a fluke,” he said, leaning forward to check the tracker on her wrist. “Let’s not complain when the universe finally throws us a bit of good luck.”
“Better have Greg run some tests anyway,” she said as they walked down the corridor. Something pricked in the back of Jack’s mind, like the wisp of a dream slipping away.
