Chapter 94 Ninety four
The loading sequence was a masterclass in wasteland efficiency. We didn't have time for comfort; we only had time for survival.
"Leo, you're with me," I said, grabbing the oldest of the Code-Born boys by the shoulder and steering him toward the Sovereign. "Keep your head down, wrap your arms around my waist, and whatever you do, do not let go. If you feel the bike get cold or turn blue, just hold your breath."
Leo nodded, his jaw set in a hard line. He scrambled onto the pillion seat, his faint sapphire veins pulsing against his pale skin.
Dax hoisted two of the smaller kids onto the elongated saddle of his Interceptor, securing them with a heavy cargo strap. Sienna and Reaper took the remaining three. Captain Reyes, her sleek white-and-gold armor stark against the mud and grease of our pack, climbed onto the back of Tank’s massive trike, locking her plasma rifle into her shoulder pocket.
"Everyone strapped?" Dax roared over the idling engines.
"We're tight, Prez!" Tank hollered back.
Before Dax could give the order to roll, the ambient noise of the glowing jungle shifted. The erratic, echoing cries of the Origin-Beasts were suddenly silenced, replaced by a sound that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
It was a high-pitched, oscillating whinelike a jet turbine spinning up, but clean, synthetic, and completely devoid of the mechanical friction of the old world.
"Incoming!" Reaper shouted, his sniper scope already trained on the southern ridge. "Fast movers! They aren't touching the ground!"
Through the dense, bioluminescent canopy of the crystal-leafed trees, they descended.
They were the Sun-Hounds.
There were twelve of them, riding sleek, aerodynamic hover-bikes that looked like polished ivory daggers cutting through the air. They didn't have wheels; they rode on localized anti-gravity repulsors that scorched the glowing blue moss beneath them, leaving a trail of dead, smoking black ash in their wake.
The riders were clad in the same pristine white armor as Captain Reyes, but their faces were hidden behind featureless, golden visors. And in their right hands, they didn't hold rifles. They held Plasma Lancesnine-foot poles of collapsible durasteel tipped with a crackling, superheated blade of yellow plasma.
They were high-tech knights arriving for a slaughter.
"They’re using the trees to funnel us!" Captain Reyes yelled over Tank's shoulder. "Their repulsors give them the high ground! We can't outrun them in the mud!"
"We don't need to outrun them," Dax grinned, the amber fire in his eyes reflecting the blue glow of his dashboard. "We just need to out-ride them. Wolves! Diamond formation! Keep the kids in the center! Drop the hammer!"
We dumped the clutches.
The heavy, aggressive roar of our Origin-Code engines shattered the synthetic whine of the hover-bikes. We tore out of the clearing, our massive, deep-treaded tires throwing arcs of glowing blue mud into the air.
The Sun-Hounds immediately gave chase.
Riding through the terraformed jungle was a chaotic blur. Massive, crystalline tree trunks flashed by at a hundred miles an hour. The Sovereign’s suspension groaned as I launched off exposed, glowing roots, Leo’s arms crushing my ribs as he held on for dear life.
"They're flanking!" Sienna warned over the comms.
I glanced in my mirror. Two Sun-Hounds were gliding effortlessly above the mud on our left, their hover-bikes ignoring the treacherous terrain. They were gaining fast, leveling their plasma lances like jousters preparing to strike.
"Tank! Reyes!" Dax ordered. "Clear the left side!"
Tank didn't even swerve. He just yelled over his shoulder. "Hold on, Captain!"
Reyes stood up on the rear pegs of the trike, bracing herself against Tank’s massive back. She leveled her heavy plasma rifle and squeezed the trigger.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.
Three bolts of searing golden energy tore through the jungle. The first two missed, singing the bark of a crystal tree, but the third caught the lead Sun-Hound dead in the repulsor engine.
The ivory hover-bike didn't explode; it simply lost its fight with gravity. It dropped like a stone doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The front nose caught an exposed root, launching the rider over the handlebars to smash violently into the trunk of a massive tree.
"One down!" Reyes shouted.
But the second Hound on the left flank didn't flinch. He accelerated, the whine of his engine reaching a fever pitch. He closed the gap with Sienna, pulling back his plasma lance for a fatal thrust.
"Sienna, break right!" Dax yelled.
Sienna didn't break right. The lone wolf of the pack was never one to run from a fight.
She hit her brakes, intentionally putting her bike into a violent, sideways skid. The Sun-Hound overshot her, the burning tip of his plasma lance missing her helmet by inches. As he flew past, Sienna didn't even draw her gun. She drew her phase-knife.
She activated the sub-ether frequency, the blade glowing an unstable, iridescent blue. With a flick of her wrist, she hurled the knife.
It struck the Sun-Hound right in the center of his golden visor. Because the knife was phased, it bypassed his kinetic armor completely, solidifying the moment it breached the helmet. The rider went limp, his hover-bike spiraling out of control and crashing into a ravine.
"Show-off," Reaper muttered over the comms, though I could hear the smirk in his voice.
But the celebration was short-lived.
"Ghost! Above you!" Dax roared.
I looked up. Three Sun-Hounds had used their vertical advantage to climb into the canopy. They were dropping down directly on top of me and Leo.
"Hold your breath, kid!" I screamed.
I slammed my thumb onto the red switch on my handlebars.
Phase-Shift.
The Sovereign and its riders turned an iridescent, ghostly blue. We slipped into the sub-ether just as the three Sun-Hounds descended. Their plasma lances passed harmlessly through my chest and Leo's back, splashing against the glowing mud where we had been a microsecond before.
But I couldn't hold the phase. The extra bio-electric mass of Leo on the back was draining the Origin-Code reserves in the engine too fast. The blue aura flickered, threatening to drop us back into solid reality while the enemy was right on top of us.
"I'm losing the shift!" I yelled, dropping the phase manually to avoid a catastrophic merge.
We solidified. The three Sun-Hounds instantly swerved, boxing me in. One on the left, one on the right, and one riding my rear fender.
"I can't get a clean shot!" Reaper called out, his laser sight dancing wildly as we wove through the dense trees. "They're too close to the kid!"
The Hound on my right raised his lance. I couldn't dodge. The trees were too thick.
I couldn't hack their bikesCaptain Reyes had warned me their systems ran on a closed-loop Founder AI, immune to remote intrusion. But as I stared at the glowing, sapphire veins pulsing on Leo’s arms wrapped around my waist, I realized I didn't need to hack the machines.
I needed to hack the world.
I took my left hand off the handlebars. I reached out toward the massive, bioluminescent trees blurring past us, tapping into the raw Origin-Code vibrating in the jungle air.
< OVERRIDE: ENVIRONMENTAL GROWTH >
I didn't fire a weapon. I forced a command into the earth itself.
A massive, subterranean root of a crystal tree on my right violently erupted from the mud. It grew fifty feet in a microsecond, bursting through the soil like a breaching whale.
The Sun-Hound on my right slammed directly into the solid wall of mutated wood. His bike compacted like an accordion, the golden plasma lance spinning harmlessly into the brush.
"Holy hell," Reyes breathed over the open channel, watching the earth weaponize itself.
Dax saw the opening. He cut the Interceptor hard to the left, crossing right behind the Sovereign. He drew his heavy SMG and unloaded a point-blank burst of explosive rounds into the repulsor engine of the Hound on my rear. The bike detonated in a shower of sparks, dropping into the mud.
The final Hound, realizing his squad was being dismantled by a biker gang and a hacker who could control trees, banked hard, pulling up into the canopy to retreat.
"Let him go!" Dax ordered, checking his mirrors. "Keep pushing! The perimeter of Coldwater is only five miles out!"
We burst through the final, dense thicket of the jungle, hitting the flat, hard-packed dirt of the outer industrial zone. Ahead of us, the towering, ruined skyscrapers of Coldwater stood silhouetted against the setting sun.
We had survived the ambush. We had the kids.
But as we slowed our approach toward the city limits, my data-deck vibrated again.
I looked down at the screen. The single Sun-Hound hadn't retreated to run away. He had retreated to call in the cavalry.
On the horizon behind us, emerging from the tree line of the glowing jungle, wasn't another squad of hover-bikes.
It was a Prime Forge.
It looked like a crawling city block. A colossal, treaded walking factory, belching black smoke into the pristine air, its massive cannons rotating to lock onto our coordinates.
"Prez," Tank said slowly, bringing his trike to a halt. "We're gonna need a bigger gun."
Dax stared at the approaching mechanical leviathan. He reached up, pulling his bandana up over his nose.
"Get the kids inside the city walls," Dax commanded, his voice cold and absolute. "Mia, wake up the Red-Queen. Tell her we brought guests. And tell her it's time to turn the Phase-Shield from a wall into a weapon."