CHAPTER 32

2010

Tanadad Front City

Earth

The five mystery men lay on the ground unconscious, twitching as Garth stared down at them. He walked over to Riley and bent down in front of him.

“Who the hell are you?” Garth asked.

Riley, with one hand clutching his chest, looked at Garth, then at the mystery men. He couldn’t believe the same men who had almost killed him three times had been so easily incapacitated by Garth, who wasn’t even wearing any armor. Riley’s eyes scanned Garth’s body, trying to find anything out of place, a band, ring, or any wearable technology he might have used, but he found none.

“Riley,” he finally answered. “Riley Karlsson.” He watched Garth closely as he said it but there was no sign that he had ever heard the name before.

Garth stared at Riley for a moment. His eyes moved down to the band on Riley’s wrist, then he walked to the men. One after another, he picked up their guns and tossed them away. He walked back to Riley and held out his hand. Riley grunted, then took his hand and Garth helped him to his feet. Garth patted Riley on the back and started down the road, motioning for Riley to follow him. Riley, holding his ribs, looked around the neighborhood. Everything the mystery men destroyed had already fixed itself. Riley looked at their unmoving bodies, sighed, then limped after Garth toward the van.

“You know, you and I are quite similar,” Garth observed.

“How do you figure?” Riley asked.

Garth chuckled. “We’re both in a time we don’t belong.”

“How did you know?”

Garth stopped walking. “You see how everything around us is frozen in time? That’s because it belongs to this time.”

Riley stopped, even as Garth continued walking. “When are you from?” Riley asked.

Garth stopped again. “What you should be asking is, who are those guys, and why are they after you? They call themselves the Children of the Corn. They’re from the future, and if they’re after you it’s because of something you did or something that you’re going to do.”

Riley looked back at them. “They’re from the future?”

Garth chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not that simple. Now, why did you come here?”

“What do you know about Exoginos?”

Garth stared at Riley, then looked over at the Children of the Corn. “They won’t stop, you know, not until they get you.” Garth raised his hand and a breach opened in the middle of the road. “Get rid of them, then find me.”

The breached sucked Riley in, then sucked the Children of the Corn in after him. The moment the last of them passed through, the breach closed and time flowed again. Garth walked to his van and got in, then drove away.

The breach opened about twenty feet above the ground in the middle of a desert. It spat Riley out, and the Children of the Corn after him. Riley landed in the sand, while the Children of the Corn, who had woken during transit, activated their thrusters and landed on their feet. As soon as Riley heard them land behind him, he focused on the band, trying everything he could to make it activate, but it didn’t. A hot pulse hit the sand next to him, turning it to glass. Riley rolled to the side and raised his head. All five men were charging toward him, firing their rifles without giving him a moment to breathe. Riley stood up and ran as fast as he could. If the men caught up to him before he could get the armor to activate, it was over. An energy projectile the size of a fist flew past Riley, grazing his arm. He fell on his face but immediately rolled up and kept running.

Riley thought back to when the armor first activated and knew what he needed to do. He needed to feel genuine fear. Riley couldn’t remember the last time anything truly terrified him. Even now that he was being chased, he was not afraid, at least not as much as he ought to be. To him, running for his life was just another day. He needed to be scared. Terrified. He glanced over his shoulder. The men were so close. Riley looked ahead and realized he was running toward the edge of a cliff. A smirk crept onto his face. He closed his eyes and growled, putting extra energy into his strides. The leading man’s hand was just behind Riley, about to grab him when Riley ran off the edge of the cliff. He hadn’t realized just how far it was to the ground below when he jumped. Now that he saw it, Riley’s eyes widened as he realized he might have made a huge mistake. If he was wrong, if the armor failed to activate, he would be dead for good. He might have only succeeded in making the men’s work easier for them.

The Children of the Corn stood at the edge of the cliff, communicating angrily in beeps and blips.

Riley spread his arms as he fell in silence. The closer he came to the ground, the faster his heartbeat, and the more his chest hurt. He looked at the band around his wrist. It hadn’t changed.

Shit, I’m going to die! The thought exploded in his mind and for the first time in as long as he could remember, Riley felt terrified. He didn’t want to die, not when he was so close to finally getting answers.

Riley felt something cold around his wrist. He looked at the band and saw it bubbling. He furrowed his brows, wondering why it was bubbling instead of armoring him. Riley looked down and when he saw how close he was to the jagged rocks, he shut his eyes and raised his arms in front of his face, counting in his mind.

Five. Four. Three. Two.

Riley couldn’t bring himself to count any further. In a moment, his entire life flashed before his eyes. As he approached the Earth, the last thing he saw was an image of himself standing over his friends with blood on his hands. He let out a scream like thunder.

Eventually, he realized that he was no longer falling. He opened his eyes and found he was hovering just inches above a sharp rock, his entire body covered in metallic armor. The armor felt different from the first time. It now seemed bulkier, and Riley felt safer than he had before.

Riley gasped. I’m flying.

“Sky!” he called.

A face appeared on the lower-left corner of his heads-up display. It was a blonde woman with icy blue eyes. For a moment, Riley thought it was his mother. Even when he realized it wasn’t, there was a definite resemblance.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Who do you think?”

Riley squinted. “Sky?”

Sky nodded. “Who else would it be? I know what you’re going to ask next and the answer is yes. I constructed this face using years of data gathered from your cerebral cortex. In essence, this is what you imagine when you think of me, but that’s irrelevant right now. There are five men up there looking to kill us and very capable of doing so.”

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Riley frowned. “If we both survive, we’re going to talk about this.” He looked up toward the edge of the cliff but it was too far to see. He wished that he could see to the top, and suddenly his vision zoomed in on the top of the cliff. He could see the five of them looking down from the ledge.

The man with the ax was looking through a scope, trying to find Riley. As they looked, the first thing they heard was a sonic boom. Before they could react, Riley punched the man in the face, crushing the scope against it. The blow sent the man flying back, away from the edge. Riley landed with a wicked grin on his face. The others staggered back as Riley’s landing threw sand into the air.

“This won’t be like the last time,” Riley grunted as he dashed out from the cloud of dust. He grabbed the nearest man with one hand and threw him from the cliff. He turned around, ready to rip through the remaining three men. Instead, Riley took a blast to the face. The force sent him through a boulder, then he landed face down. Riley groaned as he pushed himself back up. The mystery men considered him a threat now and would allow him no time to recover. Riley, from his knees and hands, flew straight forward as a massive hammer came down at him. The hammer missed him by an inch. Riley rolled forward and got back to his feet. He barely had time to catch his breath when he saw more burning projectiles hurtling toward him. He planted his feet and braced himself with his arms in front of him. Nanites poured from his body and formed a golden shield over his arms, deflecting every projectile. The three men fanned out, shooting at Riley from every side. Without realizing it, they had made it easier for him to take them down. Riley lunged at the man to his left. He tackled him on his hips and took him on a ride. Riley slammed him against a boulder and immediately followed up with multiple punches to the face. As he stood over the man, pummeling him, Riley felt a faint cold in his ribs. It was a strange feeling but he had felt it before and remembered what followed. Riley heeded the warning and jumped away from the man. A bolt of green lightning intended for Riley struck the man, instantly vaporizing his head and half of his torso along with it.

Riley turned to the others and charged at them.

Sky cleared her digital throat. “You know you can shoot projectiles too, right?”

Riley grunted and ignored Sky. He continued toward the men at full speed. The man directly ahead of him pulled out a flash-bang, dropped it in Riley’s path, and jumped out of the way. The grenade attached itself to Riley’s face and exploded, releasing a blinding burst of light directly into his eyes. It felt as though needles were being stabbed into them. He crashed to the floor and held his eyes. Temporarily blinded, Riley knew he was vulnerable if he stayed down. He stood back up with his fists raised in a combat stance, hoping it would deter the enemy for long enough to regain his sight. Unfortunately, the Children of the Corn were not so easily fooled. One of them charged with an enormous ax and swung it at his face.

“Duck!” Sky shouted, but Riley was stunned and didn’t have time to react. The ax struck his face, shattering the armor protecting it. Riley tumbled several meters before he bounced off a boulder and finally came to a stop.

As he laid on the ground, everything turned numb for a moment, and Riley lost all sense of self and his surroundings. As he gradually regained his senses, he touched his face and found that the armor had repaired itself.

The mystery men were charging toward Riley with their guns raised, firing at him. Two shots struck his chest before Sky activated a shield to his front. The man in the middle slowed down, took out a small device, and attached it to the side of his gun. He raised the weapon and shouted something at the others. They stopped shooting, looked back, and moved aside.

“I’m detecting gamma energy, Riley,” Sky warned. “Don’t let it hit you.”

The man’s gun buzzed for a few seconds, then fired a white energy pulse at Riley. The impact shattered Riley’s glass-like shield, but Riley was no longer behind it.

“I’ve sufficiently mapped your synapses,” Sky said. “We should now be able to synchronize successfully.”

Riley sighed. “Sky, I'm in a middle of a rock and a hard place here. I'd appreciate it if you would lay the details out, since focusing on two things doesn't come easy in a situation such as this one.”

“The Vindex armor no longer functions as it used to. Our synapses have to synchronize perfectly for…”

“Do whatever you’ve got to do,” Riley interrupted her.

Sky shook her digital head and started the synapses synchronization process. “Remember,” she said, “keep your mind open to me.”

A loading sequence appeared on Riley’s display and, in seconds, the process was complete. Riley shot up into the air like a rocket and then, at the peak of his ascent, turned and fell headfirst toward the ground. The Children of the Corn looked up, startled by the speed of his movement. They opened fire. Riley landed fist first, creating an electromagnetic blast that knocked the four men off their feet with damaged suits. When the dust cleared, Riley gasped. It was hard to believe Sky took them down so easily. Riley maintained a combat stance, ready for a counterattack, but none of the men were getting back up. Riley lowered his hands and relaxed. He approached the men as Sky scanned them. Parts of their suits were torn open and Riley could see their skin for the first time. As he suspected, they were human. Two of them had passed out, while the other two were conscious and struggling to get back up. All four had lacerated limbs, with numerous fractures.

As Riley walked closer to the men, panting for air, his left hand transformed into a cannon buzzing with energy. He raised the cannon, ready to end their lives, but something made him hesitate. It had been a long time since he last took another man’s life. In all of Riley’s years, as far as he had traveled, he had killed more vilis than he could count. However, only a handful of times had he found himself in a situation that necessitated taking another man’s life.

“What are you waiting for?” Sky asked. “Finish them off!”

“No,” Riley replied and lowered his arm. The cannon retracted.

“I don’t understand. They are the enemy.”

Riley lowered his head. “We can’t know that for sure. You heard what Garth said; they’re trying to keep me from doing something.”

“Riley.”

Riley looked around the desert as far as he could see.

“What does are you doing?"

Riley sighed. “Maybe one day, you’ll understand. They came through a portal. Can you reopen it, back to wherever they came from?”

“I can try,” Sky answered.

Riley scanned the mystery men and Sky highlighted a red object in their pouches. Riley walked to the nearest man and took the device from him.

“It’s a time marker,” Sky explained. “It’ll open a breach to the same ring they came through when you press the button.”

Riley pressed it.

“You know that if you send them back, they’ll know you’re not dead and send more men after you?”

“They’ll know either way,” Riley said. He threw the marker several meters away from him. The sky suddenly turned dark and a powerful bolt of lightning came down. The bolt struck the marker and exploded into a spinning orb. Twisting and swirling, the orb changed into a breach, drawing sand into it. Riley grabbed the men and threw them into the breach, one after another. He took the remains of the dead man and tossed him in the breach with the others. When just one man remained, Riley dragged him to the breach, then crouched beside him and shook him awake. Part of the man’s suit was open and Riley could see his face. The man opened his eyes and stared at Riley’s blank metallic face. Riley retracted his helmet to reveal his face and glared down at the stranger.

“I don’t know who you are or why you’re after me,” Riley said. “But if you come at me again, I won’t show mercy. I will hunt down every last one of you, and I will wipe you out.”

Riley picked up the man and was about to throw him into the breach when he suddenly froze, unable to move as countless images flooded and overwhelmed his mind. Initially, Riley thought he was experiencing another vision as he had in the Field of Mirrors, but that wasn’t what they were. He had seen these images before. He hadn’t known it then but he knew it now. The sound, the smell, all of it. It wasn’t a vision at all; it was a recall of what he saw in the Field of Mirrors.

Riley didn’t know how long he stood there, holding the man by his belt. Eventually, he released him and fell to his knees. He clenched his fists as his body trembled, fighting against the searing pain in his brain. He wanted the images to stop but knew they wouldn’t, not until they had run their course. At first, the images seemed random but Riley began to notice patterns. Hidden within those flashing images were three distinct visions, and at the center of them was Garth Andrews.

Riley stood up. The stranger was on his knees, trying to do the same. Riley grabbed him and tossed him into the breach. As soon as the man entered the breach, it closed. Riley scowled. For ten years, he had wondered what Garth Andrews had to do with anything, how his mech ended up on Exoginos, why he was so important that Isaiah sent Riley to find him. The answer had been in his head the whole time: it had always been Garth. All the time he spent jumping around, enduring hell over and over, trying to save the world, Garth was behind it all.

Somehow, Riley knew that when he found Garth again, it wouldn’t be like the first time. He cracked his neck, frowned, and hovered up into the air.

“Sky,” Riley growled. “Take me to Tanadad.”

Sky accelerated the air molecules around the armor until they were sufficiently charged, then pushed them against every part of the armor. Like a bullet shooting from the mouth of a barrel, Vindex in Machina burst out of the desert, leaving a massive cloud of sand and dust in its wake.