Three days passed on Earth 329 before everyone was through.
Colt and Clay ran the portals, back and forth, group by group, while Marcus organized his people inside the hangar. By the second day the corrupted had found a weak spot. The section of gate they’d patched with the RV hadn’t sealed clean on one side and by morning they were filing through the crack one at a time, slow and steady like water finding a low spot. Colt stood at the gap and put them down as they came. It wasn’t clean work but the Puha was there and he needed it. By the last run he’d put down enough to make the upgrades he’d been grinding toward.
By the time the last of Marcus’s people were standing in the hangar looking up at the mechs, Colt had what he needed.
Marcus walked him to the cave entrance on the last run. The boneyard was quiet, the grass moving in a slow wind off the bluff. Dani was a few steps behind. She walked up next to Clay and set her sister down.
Marcus stopped at the cave mouth and turned to face him. He put his hand out.
Colt took it.
Marcus gripped hard and held it. Not a quick shake. He stood there with his jaw set and his eyes on Colt’s, the kind of handshake that said things a man like Marcus didn’t put into words. Colt held it and let him.
“Eye scanner should work for all of you now,” Colt said. “Got it configured. Anyone puts their eye to it, it’ll read ’em and log ’em in.”
Marcus looked at him. “How’d you manage that.”
“Kevin walked me through it.” Colt tapped the side of his head. “Got a contact line built into my brain. Like a telegraph but inside my skull. Took maybe ten minutes.”
Marcus looked at him the way he’d been looking at him since the hangar. Like he was still catching up. His grip loosened but he didn’t let go yet. “You brought us out of that.”
“You kept your people alive long enough to be brought out,” Colt said. “That was you.”
Marcus held his eye a moment longer. Then he let go and stepped back and looked out over the boneyard, at the tree line beyond, at the sky going blue and clean all the way to the horizon.
“We’ll figure the rest out,” he said.
“I know you will.”
Colt looked over. Clay was crouched down in front of the little girl, saying something quiet that made her smile. Dani stood beside them watching. Clay stood when he felt her looking and touched the brim of his hat.
“You need anything,” Clay said. “Anything at all. We’ll come back.”
Dani looked at him for a second. “I know you will,” she said. Same words Colt had just used but different somehow coming from her.
Clay looked at his boots.
Colt opened the portal. The blue-white light washed across the cave mouth and Marcus looked at it the way he always looked at it now, not afraid but not comfortable either. Maybe that was the right way to look at it.
“I’ll be back,” Colt said.
He stepped through.
***
The HUB settled around them and Colt let out a long breath. Clay dropped into the chair and stretched his legs out and stared at the ceiling. Kevin stood at the desk, eye already tracking them.
Clay reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two shinkis. He held them up between his fingers.
“Pulled these off them ninjas we cleared in the hangar,” he said. “Before we left.” He tossed them across to Colt.
Colt caught them. “Good thinking.”
“Couldn’t find the third one’s.” Clay shook his head. “Couldn’t even find his head. Smashed to shit.”
Colt absorbed both and checked his count. He had enough for two more upgrades. More than enough after the three days of farming. He opened his status screen.
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PROJECT: LAST STAND v1.11
Puha: 228.4
“Debrief,” Kevin said.
Colt went through it. Earth 612, the coyotes controlling everything west of the Mississippi, the compound, the three way fight. The breach charge on the dead coyote’s neck, how it blew before he could figure out what it did.
“Gone,” Colt said. “Blew up with the cylinder. Nothing left to equip.”
“The module was single use by design,” Kevin said. “The detonation was the function.”
“Figured.” Colt moved on. Kevin already knew about the survivors and Earth 329 from the scanner configuration.
Then the one-eyed ninja.
Kevin’s eye went dim for three full seconds when Colt described the wounds sealing. Longer than Colt had ever seen it go dark. When it came back it was slightly brighter than before, like something had kicked on inside him.
“You are certain,” Kevin said. “The wounds closed completely.”
“Watched it happen,” Colt said. “Four bullet holes. Violet light at each one, pulled inward. Gone in maybe ten seconds.”
Kevin’s head tilted and stayed there.
“I do not have data on regenerative capability among ninja operatives,” Kevin said finally. “This is new information.”
“Figured.” Colt opened his status screen. “We’ll dig into that. Right now I wanna upgrade.”
Next Upgrade: v1.12 — 85.5 Puha
UPGRADE TO VERSION 1.12 — 85.5 PUHA?
“Yes.”
That cool sensation spread through his chest and down into his limbs as the thin bar filled, there and gone in a few seconds.
PROJECT: LAST STAND v1.12
Puha: 142.9
Next Upgrade: v1.13 — 89.8 Puha
“Again.”
UPGRADE TO VERSION 1.13 — 89.8 PUHA?
“Yes.”
PROJECT: LAST STAND v1.13
Puha: 53.1
Next Upgrade: v1.14 — 94.3 Puha
Clay looked over. “How much you got left?”
“Fifty three.”
“Not enough for another one?”
“Need somethin’ like a hundred and ninety before I get to one point one five.”
Clay nodded.
Colt closed the menu. He looked at Kevin. “We’ll pick back up on the ninja thing in the mornin’. I need sleep.”
“Affirmative,” Kevin said.
“Hey Kev,” Clay said from the chair. “Turn on that overlay.”
The walls shifted. The hard white softened and the light pulled back and the HUB stopped looking like the HUB. Wooden walls. A low warm glow like a fire somewhere out of sight. The smell hit a second later, smoke and hay and pig shit.
Clay let out a long breath. He pulled his hat off and set it over his face. “There it is,” he said. “Right there.”
Colt pulled off his boots and lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.
Sleep came fast.
***
The lab was cold.
Colt stood in the middle of it and knew he was dreaming the same way he always knew, that thin layer between him and everything like a pane of dirty glass. He could see it all but he couldn’t touch it.
White walls. Lights recessed into the ceiling, too bright and too even. Machines lining the walls, screens glowing with numbers scrolling too fast to read. Something chemical in the air.
A table in the center of the room.
Something on the table.
Colt moved closer.
A baby. Small and still, eyes closed, chest barely moving. Tubes running from its arms to machines along the wall. A faint violet glow pulsed under its skin, irregular, stuttering, like a fire trying to catch in wet wood.
Colt knew without being told. The way you know things in dreams.
That was him.
Kevin stood beside the table. Newer somehow, the single eye dimmer and slower. He was looking at the screens on the wall, his head making small adjustments the way it did when he was processing something.
A man stood near the far wall with his back to Colt. Tall. Dark hair going gray at the edges. Hands clasped behind his back, looking at a screen of his own. Colt didn’t need to see his face.
Esa.
“The corruption index is still elevated,” Kevin said. His voice was the same but flatter, something in it not yet developed. “Projected stabilization is unlikely within acceptable parameters.”
Esa didn’t turn around. “How elevated.”
“Twenty percent above threshold.”
Silence. The machines hummed. The baby on the table pulsed violet and faded and pulsed again, slower this time.
“We don’t have time to make another,” Esa said. Quiet at first, almost to himself. Then he straightened and his voice came out flat and certain. “Destroy it.”
Kevin’s eye flickered. He looked at the baby on the table. Stood there for a moment that lasted too long.
Then he turned toward the door.
The door burst open.
Isapa came through fast, robes moving around him, face hard.
He looked at Kevin. Looked at the baby on the table. The violet glow pulsing weak and irregular under its skin.
Something moved in Isapa’s eyes when he saw it. Not surprise. Something that looked more like recognition.
His mouth opened.
***
Colt came up out of sleep with his hand on the Conduit Dagger.
He lay there breathing. The HUB hummed around him. Clay was still on the floor, snoring softly, asleep.
Colt stared at the ceiling for a long time.
Kevin stood at the desk the same as always. Head slightly tilted. Waiting for nothing in particular the way he always waited.
Colt sat up. Put his boots on. Stood.
He walked to the desk and stopped in front of Kevin.
Kevin’s eye focused on him. “You require something.”
“Yeah,” Colt said. “I need you to tell me about Esa.”
Kevin’s head tilted. “Esa is the designation for the primary architect of Project Last Stand. Creator of the bioweapon program. His current status is—”
“I know all that,” Colt said. “I want to know about you and Esa. Specifically.” He held Kevin’s eye. “I want to know what you were doing in that lab. The one with the vats. The one where he gave the order to destroy the weapon on the table.”
Kevin went still.
Not the processing still. Something else. Something Colt hadn’t seen before.
“I do not have data on—”
“You were there, Kev.” Colt’s voice came out flat. “I saw you.”
Kevin’s eye flickered twice. Dimmed. Came back.
The HUB hummed around them both.
Kevin said nothing.
Colt stood in the silence and waited. He had all the time in the world and Kevin knew it.
