Chapter 63 Sixty three
We rode into it blindly. The headlights of the Interceptor and the Sovereign cut through the smog like dull knives. My Geiger counter was clicking frantically, a rhythmic staccato that synced with the headache pounding behind my eyes. But it wasn't just radiation poisoning; it was data-sickness. The fog was full of "Ghost-Packets" fragmented whispers of deleted emails, corrupted voicemails, and static from dead channels, all forcing their way into our skulls.
"Dax," I choked out over the short-range comms, the signal full of hiss. "The bikes are overheating. The air intake is clogging with static."
"Keep moving, Mia," Dax’s voice came back, sounding ragged. "If we stop, the tires melt. We ride until we hit clear air or we hit the Citadel."
He was riding aggressively, leaning the heavy Interceptor into the invisible drifts of the fog with a reckless disregard for the terrain. He was a man possessed. The Warlord’s words about Tank and my mother were burning a hole in his chest, and he was trying to outrun the guilt.
Suddenly, shapes emerged from the purple haze.
They moved silently sleek, jagged silhouettes that didn't roll on wheels but hovered inches above the ground on "Mag-Lev" plates that groaned with magnetic stress. They were riders, but they looked wrong. Their leathers were fused to their skin, a grotesque biomechanical mesh of flesh and Kevlar. Their helmets had no visors, just smooth, black glass sensors.
"Contact!" I screamed, racking the slide of my shotgun.
They didn't flank us like the Iron Wolves, and they didn't swarm like Scavengers. They moved with the terrifying, synchronized precision of a shoal of piranhas.
The Feral Guard.
These were what became of the Luna Guard who had stayed in the wastes. Without Sienna’s leadership and without the stability of the Vanguard, they had resorted to splicing their bodies with the corrupted tech of the Radiation-Sea to survive.
A harpoon fired from the fog, trailing a cable of crackling green energy. It slammed into Dax’s rear fender.
"Dax!"
The cable went taut. The lead Feral rider, a massive figure whose chest was an open cage of glowing engine parts, yanked back. Dax’s bike fishtailed, the heavy iron frame groaning.
Dax didn't cut the line. He slammed on his brakes.
The sudden deceleration caught the Feral rider off guard. He flew forward, the cable going slack, and Dax spun the Interceptor around in a cloud of radioactive dust.
"You want to tether a Wolf?" Dax roared, his voice amplified by the rage he’d been holding back. "Then you better be ready to get dragged!"
He gunned the throttle, launching the Interceptor directly at the Feral rider. The collision was sickening metal on meat on chrome. The Feral rider was thrown from his hover-sled, his mag-lev plates sparking and dying.
But there were more of them. Six shadows circled me, their silent engines humming a discordant note that made my vision blur. They were trying to hack the Sovereign’s ignition remotely, using the static fog as a conduit.
"Access Denied," I whispered, my hands flying over the manual override switches I had installed during the rebuild.
I didn't try to outrun them. I used the terrain. I spotted a jagged ridge of crystallized data a "Glitch-Spire" jutting out of the fog. I banked hard, driving the Sovereign up the vertical face of the spire. The Feral Guard tried to follow, but their hover-sleds couldn't handle the sharp incline.
I reached the peak and turned the bike, looking down at them. I pulled the trigger.
The shotgun didn't fire lead. It fired EMP-Slugs shells packed with condensed Origin-Code I had synthesized in the garage.
BOOM.
The blue flash illuminated the purple fog. The EMP wave hit the Feral Guard like a physical hammer. Their mag-lev plates failed instantly. They dropped to the ground, their fused cybernetics seizing up. They screamed not in human voices, but in a screech of digital feedback.
I skidded back down the spire to where Dax was standing over the leader he had dismounted. Dax had his boot on the creature’s chest, the iron gavel raised high.
"Where is she?" Dax demanded, his amber eyes burning through the fog. "Where is the Red-Queen?"
The Feral rider coughed up a black, oily substance. He reached up, his hand trembling, and tore off his sensor-mask.
Dax froze. The gavel didn't fall.
The face beneath the mask was ruined, scarred by radiation and data-rot, but the eyes... the eyes were familiar. One was violet. One was grey.
"Kael?" Dax whispered.
It was Sienna’s lieutenant. The young rider who had helped us defend the Spire five years ago. He looked like he had aged fifty years.
"Pres..." Kael rasped, his voice a broken speaker. "You... came back."
Dax dropped to his knees, ignoring the radiation burning his skin. He grabbed Kael’s shoulders. "Kael, what happened? Where is Sienna? Where is Tank?"
"Gone," Kael choked out. "The Red-Queen... she didn't just kill them, Pres. She... uploaded them. She took their minds. She’s building a CPU... made of souls."
My stomach turned. Uploaded. It was a fate worse than death. It meant they were trapped in a closed loop, conscious but powerless, fuel for some warlord’s processor.
"Why are you hunting us, Kael?" I asked, kneeling beside them.
"She controls the frequency," Kael wept, tapping the metal fused to his skull. "We hear her in the fog. She told us to stop the variables. She said... the Architects were returning to delete us all."
"We didn't come to delete you," Dax said, his voice thick with grief. "We came to free you."
"Too late," Kael whispered. He looked at Dax, a flicker of the old loyalty returning to his ruined eyes. "Don't go to Vegas, Pres. The city... it’s not a city anymore. It’s a Server-Farm. And she’s waiting for the final piece."
"What piece?" Dax asked.
Kael looked at me. "The Ghost. She needs the Ghost... to unlock the Mother-Board."
Kael convulsed, the black oil bubbling from his lips. The cybernetics in his chest sparked one last time, and then he went still.
Dax stayed on his knees for a long moment, the purple fog swirling around him. He reached out and closed Kael’s eyes. When he stood up, the rage was gone, replaced by a cold, terrifying clarity.
"She has them," Dax said, looking at the distant, glowing haze of Neo-Vegas. "She didn't kill them. She harvested them."
"She wants me," I said, gripping the shotgun. "She wants the Origin-Code in my blood to finish whatever she’s building."
"Then we give it to her," Dax said, mounting the Interceptor. He didn't wipe the oil from his hands. "We ride into her city. We let her think she’s won. And when she tries to plug you in..."
"I crash the server," I finished.
"We crash it all," Dax vowed.
We left the bodies of the Feral Guard in the dust. The Radiation-Sea seemed to part before us now, as if the fog itself was afraid of the two riders who were no longer running from the past, but charging headlong into hell to take back their family.
Ahead of us, the neon glow of Neo-Vegas pierced the night a glittering, poisonous jewel in the center of the wasteland.