Colt stared at the post.
Four lines carved clean into the wood at the base. Deliberate. Someone had taken their time with it.
“1111,” Clay said from behind him.
“Yeah.”
Clay bent down and ran his fingers across the numbers. “This suppose to mean somethin’ to you.”
Colt straightened and turned it over in his head. The system used numbers for Earths. Kevin used numbers for Earths. Every portal destination on his map had a number.
“I think it’s an Earth,” Colt said.
Clay looked at the carving. Then at Colt. “Toyahdoh left this.”
“Had to.”
“So he went there. Took his people there.”
“Maybe.” Colt pulled up his map. It was still sitting on Earth 265, the way it always defaulted to wherever he’d last been. He looked at the village location, at the plains surrounding it, at the violet spreading out from the fort. He moved his eyes across the map looking for signs of where a group of people might have gone.
Nothing. Just the land and the violet eating into it from the northwest.
If Toyahdoh had moved his people they were gone. No trail on a map. No marker. Either they were somewhere else on 265 or they’d found a way off it entirely.
Colt searched for 1111.
Nothing.
He tried 1110. It popped up. He scrolled to 1112. It was there.
1111 wasn’t.
“Hmm.” Colt narrowed his eyes.
“What,” Clay said.
“1111 don’t exist on my map.”
Clay stood up straight. “What do you mean it don’t exist.”
“1110 is there. 1112 is there. 1111 is just gone.” Colt closed the map. “Kev’s gonna know what that means. Or he’s gonna know why he doesn’t.”
Clay shook his head. He looked at the hide flap hanging half off the door frame. “We still got a problem out there first.”
Colt nodded. He crossed to the door and pulled the flap aside an inch.
Three corrupted in the open space directly outside. One of them close, maybe ten feet out, head down, moving in a slow circle. Two more further back near the collapsed outer lodge.
He let the flap fall.
“Seven total,” Colt said. “Last count.”
“We ain’t ropin’ all of them in the open,” Clay said. “Not without one of them makin’ noise.”
Colt looked around the lodge. At the posts. At the open floor space. At the single entrance.
“We bring them in here,” he said.
Clay looked at the door. At Colt. “One of us goes out.”
“One of us stays in.”
Clay pulled his rope off his shoulder and started working a loop. “I’ll go out.”
“You sure.”
“I’m faster than you think.” He grinned.
Colt took up position behind the door frame, back flat against the wall, rope in both hands.
Clay slipped outside.
Colt listened. Footsteps in the dirt. Clay moving easy, not running, the way you move when you don’t want something to bolt. A low sound, not quite a voice, just enough to pull attention.
Then the footsteps changed. Coming toward the door.
The hide flap moved.
The first one came through and Colt dropped the loop over its shoulders and yanked. It went down and he had the wrists before it could make sense of what happened. He dragged it to the nearest post and tied it off.
He was back at the door before Clay brought the next one.
They worked through five of them that way. Quiet and steady. The corrupted didn’t call out to each other, didn’t warn each other. That was the thing about them. No coordination. Just the hunger pulling them forward one at a time into whatever waited.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
The sixth was harder. It came in fast and Colt had to use his weight to take it down, both of them hitting the dirt floor, the thing snapping at the air near his face before he got the rope on it. He dragged it to the post and tied it next to the others and caught his breath.
Clay appeared in the doorway. He had his hand on the last one’s shoulder, steering it forward the way you’d guide something you didn’t want to spook.
It was a boy. Ten maybe. He came through the door and Colt stepped out from the wall and the boy stopped. His head came up. The violet in his eyes was thin, almost not there, and underneath it something else moved. Not recognition exactly. More like the last part of him that was still him, pressed up against the inside of something he couldn’t get out of.
Colt held the rope but didn’t throw it.
He thought about the museum. That kid with the cowboy hat tilted sideways and the toy revolver on his hip, walking through those exhibits like he owned the place. The ninjas had taken him same as they’d taken everything else. Didn’t matter how old he was. Didn’t matter that he was just a boy who’d never done anything to anybody.
The coyotes were the same.
Neither side cared who got caught in the middle.
He crouched down to the boy’s level.
The boy looked at him. The violet flickered.
Colt tied his wrists slow and walked him to the post and sat him down against it. He checked the knot twice. Made sure it wasn’t cutting into the skin.
He stood.
“We’re coming back,” he said. To the boy. To all of them lined up against the posts.
He didn’t know if that was true. He said it anyway.
Clay was at the door. He looked at Colt and didn’t say anything. Just waited.
They went out into the dim violet afternoon.
Clay had found a gap in the wrecked outer wall where the timbers had collapsed outward. He stood beside it looking through.
“Ready?” he said.
Colt looked through the gap.
The arch was still glowing. Those beasts moved through the valley in slow lines, the giants on their backs directing them with long poles. The fort walls ran the whole perimeter now, stone and timber, torches burning in the towers even in the daytime dim. Hundreds of ninjas moving between the buildings. Hundreds more he couldn’t see.
He tried to put a number on it. Tried to imagine what it would take to fight through that. Every upgrade he’d ground for, every module, every skill point. The revolver. The dagger. Dead Eye.
None of it was enough. Not even close.
“Colt,” Clay said.
He pulled his eyes away from the valley. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
***
The HUB settled around them and Kevin’s eye was already tracking before the portal closed.
“Toyahdoh,” Colt said. “You got anything.”
“I have been monitoring Earth 265 since you departed,” Kevin said. “The Wolf Band is no longer present on that Earth.”
Kevin’s eye dimmed for a moment. Something in the way it did felt different than processing. It felt like the closest Kevin could come to sitting with bad news.
“They left a clue,” Clay said. He crossed his arms. “Number carved into a post in the lodge.”
“1111,” Colt said. “We think it’s an Earth number. But it’s not on my map.” Colt sat at the table and plugged into the computer. He pulled the map up and turned it so Kevin could see.
“1110 is there. 1112 is there. 1111 is just gone.”
Clay looked at Kevin. “What do you know about that.”
“I have no data on Earth 1111,” Kevin said.
“Figures,” Clay said.
Colt looked at the gap in the map where 1111 should have been sitting. He thought about Kevin’s memory. About the gap there too. About the lab and the baby on the table and whoever had decided what got deleted and what got kept.
“It was removed,” Colt said. “Same as your memory was removed. Somebody went through the database and pulled it out. Just like they pulled out whatever you knew about that lab.”
Kevin held still. His eye flickered once.
“That is a logical conclusion,” Kevin said.
Colt closed the map and opened his full menu.
PROJECT: LAST STAND v1.13
Stats *
Status
Map
Armory
Module Bay
Skills
Help
?????
?????
?????
He looked at the asterisk next to Stats. Three AP points sitting there unspent. He opened it.
Stats:
Strength: 24 (?)
Speed: 20 (?)
Endurance: 15 (?)
Perception: 15 (?)
Willpower: 10 (?)
Resonance: 5 + 5(?)
Luck: 10 (?)
AP: 3
He looked at the numbers. Thought about those beasts in the valley. Those giants. The arch still glowing.
He closed it without spending anything.
His eyes dropped to the question marks at the bottom of the menu. v1.15 was still a long way off. Whatever was locked behind those question marks was going to have to wait.
He closed the menu.
“Kevin,” Colt said. “If 1111 isn’t on my map and you can’t access it, how do we get there.”
“Via ship,” Kevin said.
Clay’s head came up. “Ship. One of them things that goes in the sky.”
“Precisely.”
“How the hell do we get one of those,” Colt said. “And how would I even fly something like that.”
“The interface would become clear once you are seated at the controls,” Kevin said. “The same way the mech’s controls became clear when you operated it.”
“The mech was running on fumes,” Colt said. “Five percent when I got in it. Thing died mid-fall. What’s gonna power a whole ship.”
“The mechs operate on isolated power cells,” Kevin said. “Electrochemical storage that degrades over time without active maintenance. Thousands of years dormant, those cells depleted to near zero.” He paused. “The ships use a different system. A cold fusion reactor. Self-sustaining. It generates more energy than it consumes as long as the reaction is maintained.”
“So it won’t die,” Colt said.
“Affirmative.”
Clay looked at Colt. “Even if we got one. We still don’t know where 1111 is.”
“The right ship would retain navigational coordinates in its system,” Kevin said. “Earth 1111 may have been deleted from your map. It would not necessarily have been deleted from a ship that had been docked there.”
Colt and Clay looked at each other.
The hangar on Eart42h 329. The damaged ship with its hull blown open and the scorch marks running up the side. Twenty mechs in rows. And somewhere in that in ship were smaller ships.
“The ship on 329,” Colt said. “It took damage. Heavy. It’s not flying anywhere.”
“A vessel of that class would carry secondary craft,” Kevin said. “Smaller ships housed in an internal bay. Single or dual pilot configuration.”
Clay looked at him. “Why would a big ship need smaller ones.”
“Reconnaissance. Rapid deployment. Combat operations where the primary vessel cannot maneuver or land. The secondary craft operate independently while the larger ship remains in position.”
Clay nodded slow. “Fighters.”
“A reasonable designation.” “
Clay looked at Colt. “Marcus is gonna love this.”
Colt almost smiled. Almost. “We go back to 329. Find the bay. See what’s in it.”
“And if one of those fighters has the coordinates,” Clay said.
“Then we go find Toyahdoh.”
The HUB hummed around them.
Kevin’s eye held steady.
