“Give me one good reason not to fucking kill you right here and now!” Rokos said. He certainly didn’t look like a forum mod. He was a grizzled man with a shaved head, a thick Aussie accent and a handgun that was pointed right at my temple.
“Rokos, man, please. You were right, okay? I fucked up.”
“You ’fucked up?!’” He looked stunned that I’d said that. “Kid, ‘fucked up’ doesn’t begin to describe it. I told you not to back out of the chat. You did. I told you to stop posting shit on Reddit. You didn’t listen to me then, either. And now things have gone nuclear! The compound. Oh, Christ. The compound is - its gone! Its just fuckin’ gone, mate. We barely got the Terminal out in time.”
“Wait, what? W-what compound?”
“Its where the resistance against MIRAGE is headquartered. See you’d have known about this already if you’d just followed my instructions!”
“And what's the terminal?”
“Its the computer where we’ve located the Box, with ADINN insi- wait, why the hell am I explaining anything to you, mate?! I should’ve put you out of your misery the second I walked in this ro-.”
He stopped abruptly and looked at my hand.
“What is that, mate?”
“What?”
“In your hand, obviously. What is that?”
I looked down at the key.
“I, uh-”
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Y-yeah. Yeah, it is.” I lied. I think.
He lowered his gun and pulled up his walkie talkie.
“Rokos here. Found the kid. He’s got the Macguffin, too. Lucky Break, I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. No. Yeah, that’s the one. I know. Where are you? Good. Keep a lane open, we’re comin’ through.”
He grabbed my collar and pulled me along behind him, whirling the gun around to look for contacts. After confirming we were alone we thundered down a blinding white corridor with screens and panels and side passages.
“What, you're not gonna kill me?”
“No, I've got something worse in mind for you, kid. This the way you came in?”
“I don’t know! They just abducted me this morning and I woke up in that room! I don't even know where I am.”
“Figures.” He shot the only guard we found as we headed in the direction of the fighting. Eventually we burst through broken sliding doors and into the open where an enormous battle was taking place just outside the titanic facility. There were helicopters and tanks and armored support vehicles and hundreds of MIRAGE footsoldiers firing wildly on a scrappy group of lightly armored militants who I assumed to be Rokos’ resistance fighters. There were bodies everywhere, and the survivors were hunkered behind assorted barrels and crates and the smoldering wreckage of destroyed trucks.
“What the hell is going on?!”
“Keep your head down and your mouth shut, kid. Benny! Exit point still open?”
“Its open, but its hot! If we’re gonna move we gotta do it now.”
“Everyone! Load up, now! We’re gettin’ the hell out of here!”
We climbed into the truck and the resistance troops stood up and beat a fighting retreat to the few vehicles that were still operational. Seconds later, MIRAGE forces made a breakthrough and began barrelling towards us.
“Now or never, Benny! Get this fuckin’ thing moving!”
Benny gunned it and we took off down a path away from the facility that was littered with enough smoking wreckage and mutilated corpses to rival the Falaise gap. I nearly vomited and my heart was pounding out of my chest - this was not how I envisioned this day going. Behind us were six other resistance trucks, and behind them came MIRAGE in all their tanks and choppers and weird, creepy crawly land engines running on god only knows what kind of alien power source. Rokos picked up a wired mic and patched himself into the other trucks.
“Alright ladies and gents. This is it. Over this ridge, make your split, lose ‘em as best you can and meet up at the rendezvous point. Out.”
We cleared the hill in question and immediately veered off to the right and into a small path in the woods. Behind us I saw the other trucks make similar maneuvers in random directions, and then the small army of MIRAGE vehicles moving off in a disorganized pursuit. Then the view was shrouded by trees and sunset. I leaned back into my seat and looked sheepishly at Rokos.
“Uh. Thanks, I guess. For the rescue.”
“A ‘rescue?’ Don't flatter yourself, mate.” He plopped down in the seat across from me. “That was a reconnaissance job with an ‘if-practical’ order to kill you while we were in there.”
“Okay. So why didn't you?”
“Because of that.” He nodded in the direction of the key, still in my grip.
“You have any idea what that is?”
“It's just…. something I found while I was in there.”
“Oh, is that a fact? Then give it to me. Shouldn't matter to ya in the slightest if it's ’just something you found.’”
I gripped it visibly tighter.
“Yeah, that's what I thought.”
“Well why don't you just take it and kill me then, asshole?! I mean if its this you're after and you already promised to off me then you might as well shoot me now and take the damn thing.”
He snorted.
“I'll tell you why not. Because something happened in there that I need to know about. I also wanna know why you have that thing, what you know about it and what the bloody hell you plan on doing with it. And I wanna know why the hell MIRAGE just let us waltz out of that facility in one piece. Don't think I didn't notice that. Believe you me, if those bastards wanted us dead, we'd be fuckin’ dead. They let us escape and put up just enough of a fight to make it look like they gave a damn.”
“Look.” I said. “I don't know about any of that. All I know is that they just showed up at my house as soon as I backed out of the chat with you - just like you said they would. Then they knocked me out, took me to that facility and were about to interrogate me when you guys showed up.”
“Bullshit.”
“I'm - I'm telling the truth, okay?”
“Are you?”
“Yeah? I mean, for the most part.”
“Shit, you fold like paper, kid. Here’s how its gonna go down. We’re gonna meet the others at the rendezvous point in about five minutes. Then you’re going to hand over that arming device and tell us exactly what the hell happened in that room. If I like your story, you just might keep your head.”
We pulled up to a clearing about three or four minutes later. Two trucks were waiting there, and another was coming up the opposite road. A few of the resistance fighters were milling about, waiting.
“Here’s good, Benny! Cut ‘er off.” Rokos hopped out of the truck and motioned for me to follow, which I sheepishly did. A woman approached us, dressed like the others in a worn brown uniform with a patch on the left shoulder that read ‘Basilisk.’
“This the kid?”
“Yep. Its him alright.” Rokos grabbed my wrist and snatched the Device from my hand before I could react.
“And look what he was holdin’ when I found ‘im.”
The woman grabbed it immediately and cradled it in both palms like a precious jewel.
“Holy shit. This - this is it.”
“I know.”
“I mean, what the hell are we waiting for? Let’s head back to the Terminal and end this god damned war!”
“Not just yet. Something’s fishy about all this and I want to find out what it is.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Kris, did you hear the part about me just finding him holding it? I didn’t exactly have to hack a mainframe and kill a bunch guards to get my hands on this thing. He just had it.”
By this point the other trucks had arrived and a few dozen other resistance fighters had circled around us.
“And beyond that - did anyone here not notice how easily we got out of Far Hollow?” Rokos now addressed the group. “MIRAGE has how many thousands of buggers manning that facility? Ten? Twenty? More? I mean, yeah, we lost some fine blokes, but we should’ve been cut off and fuckin’ massacred within minutes of showin’ up there. I think they wanted us to find the kid. And I think they wanted us to find this.” He held up the device, and the small crowd erupted into harsh whispers.
Kris spoke up.
“Aaron, you’re paranoid. We have the Device! What the hell else matters? We can finish the bullet and kill the box and end everything. We did it. We’ve won.”
“Oh, we have, have we?” Rokos yanked me into the center of the circle. “Well I’m not so sure about that. Say hi to Jason, everyone!”
I looked at the crowd, and they glared back.
“Alright, kid. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us how the hell you got your hands on the Device.”
“Okay, everyone just calm down. Okay?” I said. “I didn’t ask for any of this. I just found some weird thing online and I had no idea I’d get swept up in some kind of fucking war for the future of mankind simply because I posted it on the surface web. Alright? I don’t know what the hell is going on and I don’t know what that thing is, and-”
“Save it, kid. You’re in this to the end, now, whether you like it or not. Now tell me, right now - whoever gave you this device. What did they tell you it was?”
“A ‘key.’ Okay? A fucking key. And before you think this is all one big trap just know that he did not want you guys to find it.”
“Wait, who didn’t want us to find it, mate?”
“Vexx.”
I’m not sure if I’ve ever regretted saying something more than I did right then and there, when every eyeball in the group nearly fell out if its respective socket.
“Kid - did you just say what I think you said?”
“Uh, I-”
“You talked to Vexx? Like, the actual Vexx?”
“I - I think so. I mean, that’s what he said his name was.”
“That’s fuckin’ impossible, mate. Vexx is dead. Has been for years. Kris? You know what this means, yeah?”
She nodded. Then, before I could respond or defend myself, Rokos spoke again.
“Alright. That settles it. We take the kid to the Basilisk. Now.” He put the Device in his breast pocket. “And I’ll hold onto this.”
We drove through the night and arrived at the Basilisk’s camp at dawn. I was instantly struck by the scene and how different it was from MIRAGE’s Far Hollow facility. Instead of a towering structure of glass and metal, it was a collection of tents and shacks, with wounded men and women laying in stretchers all over the sides of the dirt roads. They were screaming for help and water, and a handful of exhausted volunteers ran back and forth and distributed what precious supplies remained. At wooden outposts around the perimeter were armed guards, although they were clothed in tatters and armed with weapons that paled in comparison to the advanced equipment I’d seen at Far Hollow. And there were frighteningly few of them.
“God. What happened here?”
“Not here, kid.” Rokos said. “MIRAGE sacked the old Compound a few days back. Came outta nowhere, and turned the whole place upside down, lookin’ for the Terminal. Luckily, we’d moved it the day before, to here. But we couldn’t let them know that. Poor bastards guarding that place never had a chance.”
“And these are the survivors?”
“Yep. One’s who managed to make it here, anyway. Some of ‘em couldn’t shake MIRAGE off their tails en route, so they followed their oaths and blew their fuckin’ brains out before they got captured.”
“Jesus.”
“I know. But they knew what they were getting into when we found ‘em. Every last bloke and lass that joined our cause was smart enough to have hacked their way far enough into the deep web to find that old warning. Then we'd reach out to 'em, fill 'em in on MIRAGE and put 'em to work. Found plenty of fresh recruits that way. But only one of us has ever known where the Box was."
"You mean the Basilisk. And wait - warning? You mean the original message, from Dr. Greene?”
“That's the one.”
“So I’m not the only one, then.”
“Far from the only one. ‘Cept you didn’t find it in the traditional sense. You found a copy of it on a forum that was never supposed to’ve been posted there. Basilisk sent me to take it down, but by the time I got to it, you’d already gone an’ posted it online.”
“I’m - I’m sorry about all of this. Really, I am. I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into. I didn’t want any of this.”
He looked at me and for the first time placed an affectionate hand on my shoulder.
“I know, kid. I know you didn’t mean for it. Just stick close to me, yeah?” He smiled just a bit as the truck came to a stop in a garage, just before the other five behind us did. The crew inside was applauding wildly when we got out. One of the workers ran up to Rokos.
"Rokos, sir - none of us thought you guys would make it out of there! None of us! And we heard you got the Device, too.” He leaned in close. “The Basilisk - he's waiting for you.” He looked to me, standing with my back up against the rear of the truck. “And him.”
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