Page 9 of Shadow Boxed (Shadow Warriors #2)

Chapter seven

Before Aiden even dropped to his knees and reached for Benioko’s neck, Wolf already knew the Old One was gone—traveling to the web of his ancestors. Nothing left behind but a well-used, empty husk, lying crumpled on the kitchen floor.

He stared at the shell the Taounaha had left behind.

The long, thin, silver braid. The frail body, looking even thinner and more fragile against the cold white of the stone floor.

The thin face, with the crevices and dips laid out like a map to a forbidden or mysterious place.

Sunken, milky eyes—now vacant and staring.

The Shadow Warrior’s earthside mouthpiece was gone. Or at least the spirit of him had left its earthly shell.

Shock hit first, thick and heavy. It muffled the world around him.

Voices—Aiden’s and O’Neill’s—came from a distance, inaudible, wavering in and out like an AM radio channel out of range.

His knees, as they hit the floor beside the Taounaha’s husk, felt swaddled in bubble wrap.

Even the floor seemed to sag beneath him, as though it couldn’t hold the weight of this catastrophe.

He’d lost people before. To death. To tragedy. To their own demons. Jude for one, then Samuel and Jillian. Each loss left a raw, aching wound. But this death...Benioko’s...it felt different. Like an endless, crumbling void. One that hollowed him out, left him shaken. Uncertain.

Unprepared.

Benioko had been the one constant in his life. His North Star. His well of wisdom. He’d been guiding him for as long as Wolf could remember—guiding Shadow Mountain. And now he was gone.

The shock morphed into horror.

How could he run the base, guide Shadow Mountain’s warriors, without the Taounaha by his side? Without the mouthpiece’s connection to the elder gods? How could they defeat this new enemy, one unlike any they’d faced before, without Benioko by their side?

Shadow Mountain had lost their connection to Tabenetha.

Disbelief crashed through him. How could the Shadow Warrior let this happen? Had a trickster pushed their way into the waking world and forced the mouthpiece to vacate his earthly shell? If so, why hadn’t Wolf’s danger gift activated? Why had he not seen Benioko’s death in time to prevent it?

He’d known Benioko had aged, grown thinner, and weaker...more lined and withered. He’d known the Old One’s spirit had started to drift, barely tethered to its mortal husk. But he hadn’t expected the Shadow Warrior to recall the Old One’s spirit—not before a new mouthpiece stepped into the role.

He’d been certain they had time...time for the Taounaha to train a new mouthpiece...time to stop the world from imploding...time to keep the apocalypse at bay.

Instead, the Shadow Warrior had recalled his mouthpiece, on the eve of the Wanatesa, as humankind headed into its final battle. He’d left the Kalikoia deaf and blind when they needed the elder gods’ guidance most.

Day 26 Washington, D.C.

Clark Nantz settled into the Pininfarina Xten office desk chair, smiling as the Technogel upholstery conformed to his body.

Without doubt, this ergonomic chair was worth every penny of its one-point-five-million-dollar price tag.

An eight-hour stint in this chair, while hunched over his laptop, didn’t even put a kink in his back.

He scooted the die-cast aluminum base and polished arms under the African blackwood desk and reached for his laptop, pulling it closer.

The screen was already up, the programming module’s cursor blinking at him, a coy, even smug, blink blink blink , as though the computer already knew this new virus wouldn’t work either.

Which wasn’t much of a leap. The two previous viruses he’d uploaded into the nanobot programming module hadn’t shut the NNB26 prototype down.

But then, he’d engineered his little prodigies to resist computer viruses.

At the time it hadn’t occurred to him his bots would go rogue and refuse the kill switch programming.

Or that they’d prove impossible to destroy.

He tried everything from heat, to freezing, to EMPs and acid washes to eradicate the technology.

And finally, two different computer viruses.

Nothing had successfully terminated the little bastards.

But this final virus would work. It had to.

He’d gone outside the company this time, reached out to brilliant computer genius through clandestine hacking forums via the Tor browser.

A freelancer. Someone who prized anonymity and was simply known as TermX.

Someone whose unorthodox programming was creating an enormous stir throughout the programming universe.

TermX excelled at creating revolutionary computer viruses.

He or she approached programming from unexplored angles, creating viruses that shut the target down and kept it inoperable.

There was no repairing what a TermX virus broke.

Nor did the secretive hacker have morals or agendas.

For the right price, they’d create whatever the customer asked for.

And Clark had offered a fortune to create a nanobot virus to shut his little prodigies down...permanently.

Authors and artists had their own distinctive voices.

A unique perspective or style that set their work apart from others.

Programmers had something similar—a unique coding script that varied from programmer to programmer.

Clark had programmed the NNB prototype in his own unique script—just as he’d created the code for the earlier virus attempts.

All three projects carried his own distinctive voice—for want of a better word.

He’d also—foolishly—created the bots to evolve, to learn, to adapt, to survive. Which they excelled at. Over the past month, they’d evolved into a sentient, highly reactive entity.

Those first two virus attempts could have failed because the bots had recognized the scripts during the upload process. They could have recognized his coding voice, identified the potential danger, then moved to protect themselves by corrupting the download.

If that was the reason behind the earlier failures, this last virus would circumvent that. They wouldn’t recognize this script—thus, they wouldn’t identify the danger. Which meant this last virus should work. It had to.

If not, he was all out of ideas.

He grimaced and hit the execute key. Until the virus fully uploaded into the NNB26 programming module, he was living in a computerized version of Schrodinger’s cat—with the virus simultaneously successful and a failure.

As the virus uploaded, he accessed the atomic force microscope atop the prototype’s testing tank.

Beneath the one million magnification, the bots looked like a colony of gunmetal gray, semi-translucent ticks strewn across the bottom of the tank.

But even as he watched, the bots formed a tight huddle and started to swell.

A familiar buzzing came through the tank, via the laptop’s speakers.

Interesting…they hadn’t huddled and buzzed since their attack on Lovett five days ago. Not even during the first two virus downloads. The vibrations deepened to a guttural hum and the ball got thicker. They must have been reacting to the virus upload.

After Lovett’s electrocution by the little bastards, Clark had locked the nanobot lab and the NNB26 holding facility down.

The only room currently staffed in the basement was the morgue.

He’d restrict access to the morgue too if he didn’t need Doctor Comfrey to continue her research.

No, he didn’t expect the bots to electrify the entire basement, but he wasn’t taking chances either.

The damn things had proven far too ingenious; God knew the trouble they could get into.

Still, the active bots were safe enough in their sealed room. They couldn’t escape their tank. They’d be right there waiting for him when he deactivated them for good.

Out of habit, he clicked over to the atomic force microscope mounted on top of the holding tank in the storage facility. He didn’t expect to find any movement through that microscope. Although these bots were also the NNB26 prototypes, they were inert. Unprogrammed and inactive.

Or at least they were supposed to be. Only this time, when he pulled up the screen to the atomic force microscope, movement caught his eye.

Scurrying bodies. The window must not have switched from the testing tank to the holding tank.

Before he could hit the key to switch windows, he caught a good look at the scurrying bodies and his fingers froze.

These were not the same nanobots. They were black, rather than translucent gray, and ant-shaped rather than tick-like. These were not the bots from the testing tank. These were their unmutated brethren… their inert, unprogrammed counterparts.

Only…not so inert now.

This was not possible. He’d never programed these bots. They could not be active. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. He must have imagined those black scampering bodies.

Slowly, his gaze returned to the screen. They were still black...still ant-like...still scurrying around. Still not the bots from the testing tank. But now they were huddling more than scurrying. He leaned closer to the screen, watching the huddle tighten and expand.

A deep buzz suddenly rattled the laptop speakers. Like the testing tank bots, but louder, deeper, and angrier. Which made sense. There were trillions more bots in the holding tank, than the testing one. More bots meant more vibrations and buzzing.

Could he have accidentally activated the prototype in the holding tank?

He glanced at the upload screen; the new virus was fifty percent complete.

The upload was going slower than he’d expected, which did not inspire confidence, but it gave him time to hop over to the holding tank’s programming module.

After a quick systems check on the programming module, he sat back and shook his head. There was no record of him programming the inert prototype in the holding tank. No record of anyone else programming them. The programming module sat empty.

Somehow, the bots had activated on their own.

How was that possible? A computer program couldn’t turn on by itself. And his NNB26 prototypes were simply an itty-bitty, advanced computer system. He switched back to the upload window—fifty seven percent—and then back to the holding tank window.

He shook his head, watching as the cluster of black, ant-like shapes shivered and swelled. Their buzzing escalated to a threatening rumble.

Could the new virus, as it downloaded into the programming module, have activated the inert bots?

He shook his head again. That made no sense.

Even if the virus could activate them, it was downloading into the testing tank module, not the holding tank.

Its upload shouldn’t affect all the bots, only the ones he’d specifically targeted.

He switched back to the upload module, double checking he’d only clicked on the testing tank for the virus upload.

Yep…he’d only tagged the prototypes in that one tank.

Not that it mattered, because both tanks were now active—clustering and buzzing.

One set—the smaller set—sounded like a hive of agitated bees.

The other—the larger one—rumbled like a jumbo jet ramping up for takeoff.

He switched back and forth between the two atomic force microscope screens, studying his prodigies, assessing them, watching them swell and buzz.

What were they doing? During the prior incident with the testing tank bots, when they’d electrocuted Dr. Lovett, the swelling and vibrations had appeared to electrify their container.

They seemed to be protecting themselves from Lovett’s attempts to eradicate them.

Were their AI microchip brains sensing the virus currently downloading as a threat too?

He switched the screen back to the programming module.

According to the upload bar, the virus was at 61% complete.

It had been over five minutes since he’d started the upload.

According to the instructions TermX had sent him when Clark received the eradication virus, the upload should have occurred within minutes. Yet here it sat, frozen.

His chest tightened. Was the program defective?

That didn’t seem possible. TermX had a reputation for excellence.

He wouldn’t chance tarnishing it by selling defective coding.

Perhaps there was a more malicious reason behind the upload failure.

Was the bastard using the virus to scrape data from the NNB prototype itself?

He twitched at the thought, but quickly calmed.

That scenario was even more unlikely. If word got out that the secretive hacker had stolen from his clients, his business would wither and die.

Nobody would hire an untrustworthy programmer.

Besides, he hadn’t told TermX much about the NNB26 prototype, just enough for the virus creation.

The guy wasn’t aware of just how revolutionary his prodigies were.

The download failure had to be an anomaly.

Glitches happened sometimes, no matter how meticulous the coding was.

Five minutes later, when the red bar hadn’t budged, he hit the cancel button.

He’d have to reupload. However, the red bar didn’t vanish.

It just sat there, lighting up the screen, mocking him.

The program had frozen.

He’d tried a full stop cancel. Nothing. Damn it. He’d have to shut his entire system down and restart. Before doing so, he took a quick peek at the testing tank.

What?

His gaze narrowed as he leaned closer to the screen, scarcely believing his own eyes.

From the right edge of the bot ball, a thick, grayish tendril extended toward the top of the tank.

As he watched, it thickened, looking more and more like a cable rather than a tendril.

The bot ball shrank as the cable grew thicker and longer.

The bots were flowing from the ball, into the cable.

What about the holding tank? Were the bots there doing the same thing?

He switched over to the other atomic force microscope.

They sure were. The only difference between the two screens was the color and size of the cable. One black—with a thicker cord—and one translucent gray and thinner. But both cables were stretching to the top of the tank.

What were they up to? Were they trying to escape? Was the cable being created to force the lid off their tanks?

Before he had a chance to do anything, although what the fuck could he do anyway, the smell of burning wires filled the air. He started, shoving his chair back. His laptop’s screen burst into white fuzz, and then the blue screen of death. The smell of burning intensified.

And his laptop exploded.