Chapter 9 – Far from the Front Line

Denis Koyu - Rage

xxxx

Earth, early 2011

"I think I can get enough speed up to clear it!" He yelled, ruffling the short brown hair with one hand before donning the black and gold motocross helmet. The seventeen year old human bounced excitedly on his snowmobile as he secured the helmet and adjusted the goggles one more time before reaching to fire the machine up. A pull-started engine. It only took one pull for the 600cc engine to rumble to life, louder than most machines due to the numerous modifications.

It had already been a long day in the Colorado mountains. Despite being only 16:00 hours, the sun was already down, the narrow valley well engulfed by shadow and temperatures were dropping for the night. So it went in the very beginning of January.

They had been riding all day, since the sun had cleared the peaks to the east. Countless kilometers had been logged, as well as numerous sketchy spots where either part or all of the team had been stuck while blazing trails through waist-deep snow. Even on snowmobiles, travel was a challenge. Yet that challenge was fun to them.

There were only two of them; the boy and his father. The elder sat back and watched, not without worry, as the younger took off again and rambunctiously made his way across a ravine and up a hillside. Perhaps with fifty-two years experience came some wisdom – or at the very least a willingness to steer clear from incredibly dangerous, high-consequence stunts that would break someone regardless of whether or not they pulled it off.

The younger had not reached that point. He still had something to prove, to the world, and to himself. He still had to see how far he could go before the breaking point was reached.

So the kid in an all-black snow jacket and pants was just starting to turn around far up the hill. He paused there, looking down and scoping out the line one last time. For several seconds the black snowmobile with the white hood idled down. Then the decision was made. He pinned back the throttle, engine screaming back to its full velocity and he began charging down the hill.

This was Forrest Jackson in his element. Rushing towards a pile of rocks covered in two meters of snow with the intention to defy gravity long enough to clear a deep ravine and land on another, smaller hill 45 meters away.

Adrenaline had already kicked in for Jackson, and all he saw was the in-run to the natural terrain jump. Everything else was gone. Every thought was shut off. Even his vision narrowed and left room only for the essentials.

He hit the curvature of the first pile of snow, powder blasting out of the way. Suspension compressed before leaving the ground.

It was then, the very moment that the snowmobile left the ground, that Forrest knew that he had made a terrible miscalculation. The hill where he had intended to land fell away, far below the temporarily airborne man. He tucked in, able to do nothing as milliseconds passed and it became increasingly clear that he had overshot the entire jump.

Feet scrambled against aluminum running boards and he braced himself as the short target landing disappeared. Flat ground was coming in. Impact. Every last instinct told him that he was fucked, yet he held on tighter than ever.

Then the snowmobile slammed back into the ground, into the flat where nobody in their right mind would attempt to land. Forrest's knees buckled from the force, his hands slipped on the handlebars, and his head smashed forward.

By the time the stars cleared, Jackson was sitting on his snowmobile, rolling forward slowly out of the crater left in the snow. His grip was limp on the bars. He shook his head. The numb of adrenaline faded away. A trickle of blood came down from his nose, the taste of blood strong in his mouth.

"Oww…" Forrest bemoaned as he sat there. Disgruntled, hurting. He unclipped the helmet and dabbed at his bleeding nose with his glove. He couldn't tell if it was broken or not. It felt like it was.

"You alright?" The elder Jackson called out from twenty meters away.

"I think so." The younger shook his head, shutting off the snowmobile engine and digging through his pack before digging an old bandana out of his pack.

"Your back ok?"

"Yeah." Forrest replied, flexing his spine to make sure. "Didn't get it this time."

His face had taken the worst of the impact. Even the full-face helmet couldn't deflect the entire impact. It might have been the helmet, not the handlebars, that smacked back into his nose.

"Alright, well…" The kid with the broken nose said as he pressed the bandana against his bleeding face. "Let's just get home."

xxxx

The nano-sized robots carried on with their work, trickling along organic nerves.

The activation signal had been received.

The nanocells had two tasks for the time being. First, integration. The microscopic technology had only manifested itself in core pathways. The spinal cord, critical nerves. The nanocells were programmed to spread out, integrate into the organic structure, and ultimately convert the entire process into a synthetic reproduction that mimicked the original so closely that even the most precise medical scanners would be fooled.

Secondly, the nanocells distributed element zero in long paths, integrating it into the nerve structure and imbedded synthetic cells. With power provided by the host, the eezo strands could provide limited biotic abilities.

The element zero also allowed an essential architecture for establishing an uplink. While nanocells controlled the input and output signals, they were not sufficiently durable to conduct the sheer power provided by remote conduit coils.

The process had not been easy. Each nanocell had to be created individually. Designed and programmed. Set to interact seamlessly with other synthetic cells. There was likely a reason that such a project had never been undertaken before.

A reason why cruder methods had been employed.

A reason why a standalone Reaper Sentinel had never been created.

xxxx

He watched, waiting in the darkness, perfectly still and blended into the dust of space.

Watching the galaxy unfold. The new cycle was unlike those in the past. It was not dominated by a single race or government. No, the three major races had begun to work together. It was not perfect – nothing pertaining to organics was. Nonetheless it was a strange twist.

One major race had not yet joined the galactic community. He had focused there, attempting to subtly introduce a larger community view to the planet-confined race. There was no telling how well it had worked, but every simulation suggested that they would integrate sooner or later. Once they managed space flight.

Simulations and calculations formed a synthetic imagination. The sole Reaper took every bit of information he could find, fit it together, and tried to predict the outcome of the cycle. It was difficult to tell anything past the noise. There was far too much useless data; there were too many unknowns. He could only imagine the outcome of contact between the major races as he waited.

Waiting for headway to be made. The nanocells implanted in subject seven had been activated, but until they had completely integrated there was no way for him to see their progress. He was blind for a time.

Azarith did not worry whether or not the nanocells would work or not. They would work. The only concern was damage to the host. Avoiding neurological damage was the whole reason why he avoided simple indoctrination and cybernetic implantation in the first place. The synthetic cellular network was supposed to preserve the organic functions. Organics were tricky, though. Things didn't always work as they were supposed to.

The Sentinel… Azarith knew the very basis of the project was risky. Due to scale and energy availability, the nanocell network would only be able to run a few processes. While it would be a standalone unit, it would never compare to a Reaper. The Sentinel was a simple creation that could serve its purpose, but never could it replace the processors that housed billions of tasks that formed each Reaper mind and the complexities stored within that coding.

There was still the matter of placing the Sentinel. It did little good to leave the protector on a secluded homeworld while larger threats lurked in the Terminus (or so the organics of the cycle had taken to calling the space far from the Citadel).

To curb progress of other races, husks had been created. It was more a scare tactic than anything else. In small numbers, they were more of a nuisance then a threat. They carried out their purpose, though, keeping research teams far away from key artifacts and data caches. Husks were a primitive means of manipulation, one that the Reaper disliked. He knew he was destroying the very thing he set to protect.

The Humans would find the Mars cache in due time. Azarith's calculations showed that introducing space-travel technology before then would end disastrously.

Relay 258 would remain open for some time. There was a possibility of luring another race in, only a select squad, to happen upon the Sentinel. It was extremely risky to leave so much up to chance, but Azarith noted that high risks often drew organics together. A strange behavior.

One squad had caught Azarith's attention two years prior. A squad of Asari commandos. The leader didn't always operate in accordance with standard protocol and usually worked on the outskirts of the space discovered by the inhabitants of the current cycle. There were only three combatants; a fourth would make an ideal squad (the Reaper's calculations showed that a squad of four organics was the most effective size). They were organics and they had their oddities, but they appeared willing to take on risks.

Azarith had planted the area coordinates to Relay 258 aboard the Asari vessel, and the launch vectors in the relay. Even the most experienced organic programmers would not be able to trace the information; it would appear as though it had been entered by the organics themselves.

The Reaper's plan worked. Shortly after discovering the coordinates, the Asari set a course for the sector of unexplored space, found the relay and the launch vectors, and set out.

Well, there was one contingency. One of the Asari aboard the ship sent the relay coordinates to an address nestled far back in the Terminus, muddled by obscurity and 'advanced' encryption. Azarith was able to track the message; he had not a location but a name.

The Contractor.

xxxx

Forrest Jackson leaned back on the wood bench, getting his spine to pop in several places before he looked up at the clear night sky. After staring into a campfire burnt down into the snow, it took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the blackness and begin to make out the dull flicker of faraway stars.

The young man stared for a complete minute. The campfire began to die down, and so he lowered his attention and threw a few more pieces of wood in. It was a cold night, even huddled against the fire. Everyone else – only his parents and the family dog – had retired for the night, retreated to the cabin a few hundred meters away.

So there Jackson was, sitting alone, cold weather gear on, gloved hands folded in his lap as he exhaled towards the sky. Campfire light illuminated the plume of spent air as it rose skyward and dissipated.

He chuckled. There was something about space that had always intrigued him. The kid couldn't quite figure it out. A need to explore, to pioneer? It had always been there. As long as Forrest could remember, he had looked skyward with the hope of someday surpassing the limits of Earth's gravity. As his knowledge increased, so did the possible boundaries. He'd always dreamed about that kind of thing, been fueled by other's dreams. For countless years it had been Star Wars. When that faded away, or rather when he had memorized each of the movies, he moved on to the next endeavor, the next view, hoping to gain some insight or see an opportunity to launch outward.

Forrest looked back to the fire and rubbed his hands together idly. Space was only a dream for him, limited by his own connections and abilities as well as the technology available. So he made do, figuring out other ways to fulfill the need to pioneer. It was early January; in a few months he could apply for a job in Antarctica for several months. He had contacts there, a potential 'in.' About as close to space as I can get… he thought, envisioning the perpetually cold and hostile environment where life was confined to structures. Either that or go off to university right away. He still wasn't sure.

The campfire continued to burn and cast its amber light on a small radius of snow. The only draw to present. As he stared into the fire, Forrest thought back to the ride earlier that day. It had been a good one, injuries aside. Nearly 90 kilometers logged, which was a decent ride for the Colorado backcountry. There had been some pretty good jumps, one cliff drop that he had been scoping out for a while. He had made it out in one piece, and so had his snowmobile. All things considered, it had gone well.

His nose, while glued up and no longer bleeding, still hurt from the crash.

xxxx