by Nick Cole
Most of what was written was anti-Republic. The war, long ago as it was, still left a bitter taste.
At the base of the mountain, the trams entered the central station—a shining piece of architecture thirty years out of date, built during the days when the Republic promised wealth and prosperity, even inclusion, for Sinasia.
Rechs stepped out of the tram car into the city proper, ignoring the beggars and gangs who watched for easy prey. Seeing as he was carrying a hand cannon, a medium blaster with a scope, and the carbon-forged machete strapped to his back, along with a few fraggers, he was clearly the opposite of “easy prey.”
Rechs knew enough about Taijing to figure out what temple was spoken about in the reports. It had no grand spire of opulence or beaten gold-fronted minaret offering salvation through the donation of wealth. Rechs had seen many of that sort of holy site serving the hundreds of other faiths that wandered the galaxy, promising much, and taking much more.
But this temple was an old, squat pagoda. Dark and shadowy on the inside.
An old woman, brown wrinkled skin and flashing green eyes, smiled at Rechs as he approached the temple’s entrance. The street outside was quiet. Crowds and music could be heard from distant blocks, but in the temple’s residential neighborhood there was little noise beyond the old man sweeping the temple steps.
The top of the steps revealed a wide, empty duracrete floor, clean and smooth from lifetimes of constant sweeping. Across that floor, in the back, stood an old man lighting joss sticks before a hulking statue.
Rechs crossed the sharp line that divided light from shadow. Passing from the wan, yellowish daylight into the inner darkness. He felt the chill through his armor. His footsteps echoed through the empty temple. Each resounding step a sort of sacrilege in this quiet inner sanctum.
He arrived at the statue. An idol, some might say. But Rechs knew the statue for what it once was. It was real. Not some likeness. But a thing that was real. And, a long time ago, deadly. Something that laid waste to legionnaires by the score.
“You come seeking wisdom?” asked the man, small and spritely, lighting the joss sticks before the statue.
Rechs answered through his bucket, his voice made ghostly and even more gravel-laden by the bucket’s external comm. The sound matched the mood and the darkness of the place. But the tech itself was out of place in the simple temple. And especially at odds with its idol.
“I’ve come for the Dragon.”
The old man, bent and small, laughed like a maniacal little demon who knew all secrets. Held all the cards.
“Then you do not come for wisdom. Because only a great fool thinks he comes for the Dragon. The Dragon comes for you.”
Rechs remained silent. Listening for something he wasn’t quite sure of.
“Everyone comes for the Dragon now,” the old man mused. “The price is very high. His head is worth much. But his soul… it is worth more. So much more to people yearning to be free.”
The old man pronounced the word “soul” like it had more syllables than it should. Like it was a whine instead of a word. Or a song instead of a thing.
“I’ve come to save him,” said Rechs.
The old man laughed in the off-pitch, singsong way those who don’t speak Standard as a first language think that laughing must sound. Only he genuinely seemed to be laughing.
“That is very funny. You save the Dragon.” The old man’s face turned to stone. “You are just a man. He has killed thousands of men. What makes you think he needs to be saved?”
Rechs didn’t answer.
The old man continued. “Maybe he has gathered all of his enemies in one place,” the old man poked a finger against the flat of his hand, “so that they might die together. Is that not merciful, fool who seeks the Dragon?”
“Maybe.”
“To die alone is the way of the galaxy. A noble heart would never wish such on one’s enemies.”
“I’m not an enemy,” insisted Rechs.
“Saying so much is easy. Living as a friend… is very hard.”
The old man waddled close to Rechs, and it became apparent that he was blind. His aged face was badly scarred from some ancient horror. “This temple… is illegal.”
“I know.”
“You could call the Republic about us. Tell them we are worshipping our ancient tech in this place. That we are a cult. Then I would talk.”
Rechs waited. There was something happening.
“I flew her once. The VF-71 Samurai.”
The old man was close enough to touch Rechs’s armor, and so he did.
“Ah! Iron. I wore such once. Iron sharpens iron.”
Still, Rechs said nothing.
The old man, his ruined eyes looking off toward the ground, rested his hand on the old Mark I armor. “When men wore iron, they were men. Now… Now…”
He sighed.
“Now everything is different,” finished Rechs.
“You know the Confession of Hiro?”
“I do.”
“Those days are long gone, when once we flew into battle like demons against you legionnaires. Great days. Great battles. Great foes were the Legion.”
Rechs waited, but the old man said nothing further, his scarred eyes roving as if he could still see all the carnage and destruction of that last battle.
“I was there,” said Rechs.
“Nooooo,” exclaimed the old man in a long sigh of disbelief.
Rechs searched his mind to find the memory he sought. “The base. When it came down, in pieces, smashing into the sea… I jumped at seventy-five-thousand feet and listened to the Confession of Hiro over broadcast until impact. He never finished the last line. The history books just add that part about knowing the end all along.”
The old man’s blind face was a mask of amazement. “You were young then and so as old as I am now?”
“Older,” replied Rechs.
“How?”
Rechs answered by changing the subject. “The Dragon will die here if he doesn’t have a friend.”
The old man nodded once. As though the ice of his disbelief was now beginning to melt.
“I can help him,” continued Rechs. “I can take him away. All that waits for him here is death.”
“Everyone dies sometime.”
“Not him. Not yet. He’s is young and he’s never lived.”
“Who ever truly does?”
Rechs said nothing.
The old man’s gnarled hands fretted with his robe. “We trusted in our mecha. Thought we could beat you. Fell for the lies of the Savages. We were… wrong.”
“Time is running out. They’re searching the city for him.”
Rechs waited for a long time as the man considered his words. A wait that felt interminable given the need for haste in finding the Dragon.
“Yes. They are,” agreed the old man after an eternity. “But they will not find him after the sun falls. By then he will be gone. Upriver to Shangri-La. He will unite the clans. We will be great again. Strong again. Free again.”
“They’ll kill him.” Rechs didn’t bother explaining why. He knew why. What the Dragon had planned was something the House of Reason could never allow to happen. “Where can I find him?”
“You are… a friend of the Dragon?”
“I am,” said Rechs, thinking of that raven-eyed boy in the forest.
Ball.
“Ball,” Rechs had answered as he handed it over to the child in the forest. He watched the lad run back into the field where the other little ravens played. Watched the boy tell them in their code language of the strange man in the forest.
They’d come looking because they weren’t afraid. They weren’t bred or built for fear. They’d been made for other doomsdays.
They were made to fight. And to explore. And to conque
r. And to never give up. And to fight. Always fighting.
“Dan Dan Plaza. Up the Street of the Blue Lotus on the island. Chung’s Pit. You will find him there this afternoon. It will be your last chance.”
Rechs turned, running from the Temple of the Giant. He hustled down the steps, tapping into the city maps. Trying to get a handle on where Chung’s Pit and the Street of the Blue Lotus were. Because time…
Time was running out.
In the galaxy, time was not a luxury.
Even for Tyrus Rechs.
The old man knew that Rechs had left. He begins his shuffling walk back to the idol in the darkness. Back to burn the joss sticks. To the idol where the candles had been lit for all these years. Dripping their wax down onto the silent frame of the ancient war machine. Making it seem like some iron giant, resting in the darkness. Its blasters long gone silent. Its missile pods and racks long empty. Its markings a thing of the past.
Its glory hidden in the shadows.
17
Rechs was running fast into dark territory. And that was something no bounty hunter should ever do. On a good day, the odds were stacked against him. And that required preparation. Surveillance. Planning. Execution. Doing those might not even the odds, but they made them a whole lot better. Enough to get the job done.
But running in blind? Maybe the old man had been right about Rechs being a fool. Or at least having foolish tendencies. But this was what needed to happen.
And this was no bounty hunt. It was different, so much so that it was setting off a fire inside Rechs. He felt a deep urgency as he ran down dirty alleys. Navigating crooked and maze-like streets no city planner would ever approve. He crossed rickety bamboo bridges that connected the main city flotilla to expanding islands beyond the docks and water’s edge.
There was no direct route he could take off the island to reach Chung’s Pit, which lay in a place where visitors to Taijing were warned never to visit. To ignore that warning was to take your life into your own hands.
“Bounty hunter!” shrieked a young man in threadbare clothing, his gold tooth gleaming as Rechs moved along a filthy dock.
“What?” Rechs slowed, unnerved that the spindly man would call him that.
“Yeah, don’t play dumb. You bounty hunter for sure.” The young man looked from left to right. “Lotsa bounty hunters coming through the lilies now.”
“The lilies?”
“All these islands. We call them lilies. You bounty hunters be careful. Don’t run into each other and start shooting.”
“What’re you talking about?” Rechs felt a rising sense of concern. Gabriella had said that the hunters were all on a different trail. So why was this kid saying otherwise? Had she flipped? Sold Rechs’s courtesy as information?
“No one want to share the Dragon.”
Rechs stared at the young man. When no further words came forth, Rechs started moving again toward the next island—the next lily.
“You pay me money,” said the kid, following Rechs. “I show you way in Chung’s no other bounty hunter know about.”
Rechs stopped again to better study the young man. In lieu of carefully farmed intel, the local stuff would have to do. And if nothing else, this word on the street confirmed what the old man at the temple had said—that something was going down at Chung’s Pit.
But whether that something was a trap, or something else…
“All right,” Rechs agreed. “Lead on. You get paid when we get in.”
“Half now. Half in Chung’s when you see Dragon.”
“Fine. Show me your card,” Rechs ordered.
The kid erupted into a happy grin. He produced his card from some secreted fold within his faded yellow shirt like a street magician, and proudly held it out for Rechs.
“How much?” asked the bounty hunter.
“Twenty too much?”
“Okay.”
And the transaction was complete. The kid checked the numbers on the card’s face, smiled, and with another sleight of hand made the card disappear. He took off at once, sandals slapping on the wet walkways that occasionally dipped into the water, leading Rechs along.
“Avoid the bridges,” the kid said. “Gangs control those. They would’ve shook you down at Sen’s.”
“Not worried about the gangs.”
“Worry that they slow you down, though?”
“Yeah.”
“I know better way that avoid all these problems.”
Some of the islands—the lilies—were so close together that you could leap from one to the next, leaving one junk-made island world for another. Rechs could have made some of the larger jumps easily by using his jump jets, but with the Legion and Nether Ops running constant scans in search of the Dragon, his jump jet signature was sure to show up somewhere. Which would introduce complications. For as long as possible, Rechs wanted to remain just another armored treasure hunter, looking to collect on the target everyone wanted dead. A kind of ally to the Republic so long as no one bothered to look too closely. They were all too focused on their primary target.
Which for once, wasn’t him.
But he’d gotten mixed up in it all the same.
Leaving the last lily, Rechs followed his guide into a tunnel that led into the main floating platform. Rechs recognized the tunnel as belonging to an old astrodrome from the early days of space flight. They’d been common on worlds that didn’t have a lot of wide open spaces. A sea-based starship support facility.
Of course, as mobility and rugged improvements in private starships increased enough that they became capable of landing almost anywhere, such places had fallen into disuse. The Sinasians had built a city around theirs.
Rechs didn’t spend much time wondering how many of them even knew what it had once been. He’d long ago tired of such mental games. Games in which he counted what he knew, or recognized, or caught a glimpse of in the old architecture of some now ancient place, and how few observers in the rest of the galaxy actually knew the same.
Tyrus Rechs could have been the galaxy’s foremost historian and archaeologist.
Instead he killed people for a living.
The tunnel was one of the old fuel resupply connectors meant for the ships that would come alongside the astrodrome for refueling. Now it was a twilight bazaar of lotus dens. The smell of the fuel had probably hung around for centuries though. Rechs imagined that he could still smell it now.
Dead-eyed men inhaled from long pipes at their kiosks—small desks and bars that guarded dens and warrens farther in and beyond. Places where the smoke drifted before paper lanterns to make strange shapes and shadows along the walls. Music, simple and ethereal, drifted from the depths of such places. Gongs and wooden wind chimes. Bowls that sang like aliens most of the galaxy had never heard.
Sleepy-eyed beauties—all of them Sinasian, no foreigners—watched them pass with a kind of quiet contempt. They were barely clad, and beautifully tattooed with dragons and stars. Each marking a work of mastery of the art, competing for space on the ample delights of flesh. But Rechs could see in the girls’ eyes that there was nothing but the lotus. The need for more of it was there. The hopelessness of it all was there too.
“Dragon change all this,” said the young man as he led Rechs off the beaten path. He whispered, “Slaves to lotus. Dragon going to kick the Republic out and make us free. He become great khan and samurais will fly once again. We ready. Time is now.”
And that’s when Rechs decided he wasn’t being led to Chung’s Pit, or wherever else the Dragon was. He was being led into an ambush. And he’d even paid this kid to do it.
The Sinasians, they believed in the Dragon. Because that’s what Dark Ops had taught the Dragon to do: make true believers for the war effort. Only now the Dragon had come home to do it in a place where the Republic had no desire for such things.
Now the war would be with the Republic.
There was an old saying Rechs should have remembered. About Sinasia and the worth of a promise there.
But he couldn’t, because he was diving for the floor the moment what few lights there were in this section of the tunnel went out. Going down just before the blaster fire started.
They were on the verge of entering an old chamber. A well of sorts. High up were the yellowish skies of Taijing. But down here, along the walls, were a dozen kids sporting blasters. Sinasian gang members. And all were pulling and firing. Because freedom was at hand.
Rechs reached up and grabbed the kid who’d led him into the trap by the hem of his shorts. He flung him through the opening, right into the center of the chamber. The fire came at him from every direction, and the kid was riddled with blaster bolts.
Someone barked in a language or dialect that Rechs didn’t know. Probably to say that they were shooting one of their own, because the firing stopped.
Fang was the dead kid’s name. Someone was screaming and saying that name over and over.
It was too bad. Rechs held no ill will for the kid.
What came next was also too bad.
Rechs took advantage of the lull, firing slugs from his archaic sidearm. He first dropped the gang leader, the one who was shouting that they’d killed Fang. Twice in the chest. The kid went down, his face snarling and twisted with pain as the two fifty-caliber bullets tore his body to shreds and sent him spinning.
The others returned fire, but only as they ran. Like jackals with no heart. In the end it was as though they’d never been there. Only the sound of their sandals slapping ancient metal in distant tunnels could be heard.
Rechs got to his feet, still feeling the broken ribs that had only just begun to heal thanks to the voodoo the Savages had done to him long ago. Technological wonders the galaxy’s finest scientists had only begun to discover.
