by Nick Cole
The same dark magic that had made him outlive everyone. Whether he wanted to or not.
That’s not entirely true, is it? If you wanted to die…
Rechs pushed the dark thought from his mind.
The process of this advanced healing and longevity was a miracle. But it still took time. As some miracles do.
The bounty hunter stood in the darkness with two corpses. There was no easy answer to this. No wins. No battles where the last redoubts were stormed. No explosions of some formidable dreadnought brought to bear in the crucial tide-turning moment. No breaking of the enemy’s will.
This would end with a lot more dead people face down in the worst kinds of violence the galaxy had to offer.
The Sinasians wanted the Dragon because he might be a messiah.
The Republic wanted him dead for the same reason.
And Rechs…
Well, everyone should have a chance at life. Even if they never knew it.
He continued along the tunnels. In time he found his way out by following the roar of a crowd. Something big was happening.
The Dragon was happening.
18
Chung’s Pit was a hidden fortress at the center of the old astrodrome. A walled citadel made like a piece of art from some lost age the galaxy hadn’t known for a thousand years. A time when mythical monsters curled about wizard’s towers and heroes were needed to slay them. With the sorcerer inside, always watching.
Even with the scarcity of room in the astrodrome, Chung’s Pit had a nice wide avenue between it and the other recycled buildings in the area. But what most people would have called a street, Tyrus Rechs called a kill zone.
Groups of men armed with blasters, illegal for the disarmed Sinasians, smoked lotus as they stood gathered at measured intervals all along the walls. Rechs studied them from the darkness of an alley. And somewhere beyond the guarded walls, adorned with ancient symbols, beyond the long, curling, thin-bodied dragons topped by statues of tongue-lolling dogs reminiscent of Sumorian war hounds… beyond all this, an unseen crowd roared in waves. As if there were a championship match taking place inside.
Rechs’s options for entering the citadel were limited. Strolling into the fortress from the street like just another Sinasian was a non-starter. He still wasn’t willing to use his jets to fly over the wall. And storming the place meant fighting everyone all at once.
For now, he decided to work his way along the back alleys toward the entrance of Chung’s Pit. He passed old women cooking multi-tentacled lobster-like creatures in big woks filled with boiling oils over gas fires. They refused to see the bounty hunter traversing the maze, entering their world and disappearing like an unclean and lost ghost not of their people.
They didn’t want any trouble. Just to keep on living. Surviving.
An old bot sat in the darkness of a massive, looming apartment house with a bridge cut through its center. The bot’s outer covering had been stripped off, but one working optical assembly followed Rechs as he moved through an alley that had been transformed into a sort of shop full of bizarre curiosities. Wind chimes made of the indeterminate bones and the shells of those flash-fried crustaceans hung in the breezeway, causing Rechs to duck to avoid their hollow songs.
“Oobabi tu watangu oso?” asked the bot. Its vocal modulator hadn’t had a tune-up in years. It spoke in a slow and ponderous voice.
But Rechs recognized the old dialect. It was a bot-mummra pidgin from out near Cestus. Rechs had overseen a Legion campaign against the Savages who’d traveled to that world. The mummra were the natives who had almost entirely been turned into living nightmares by the Savages. Rechs had fought alongside the survivors to liberate them.
“No, I don’t need a wind chime.”
“Oosaba booo,” said the old one-eyed bot sadly. “Meto saadz.”
Rechs stopped. Old bots turned invisible in most societies. Often degrading down into a sort of senile runtime until one day they just stopped working—either from the sands of time or the hands of scrappers—and were scavenged. Locals in some cultures were superstitious of stripping them down until their last bit of power had faded.
“What’s going on in there?” asked Rechs, tilting his head in the direction of Chung’s. The crowd within had erupted in shouting, the sound one of shock and disbelief. As though they were witnessing the unbelievable, and finding it to be all too real.
“Dragaroom untato all Sinasia. Makastapa tada… tada…” The bot searched for the right word.
In Mummrasi there wasn’t really a good substitute for the word the bot needed. But Rechs knew the answer from context, and he supplied it in Standard. “One.”
“Tada one,” the old bot agreed.
That was the word. One. In Mummrasi there was no word meaning one. Or individual. They were a truly symbiotic species. The large, bat-like creatures had on average more than five other sentient beings either physically attached or mentally linked to themselves. Each mummra, so to speak, viewed itself as all of these. They were always we or us. Never one. At least, not until the Savages came and starting to carve them up…
“The Dragon is uniting the Sinasians into one,” Rechs repeated.
The sad old bot nodded slowly at him in the dark beneath the bridge, and its lone unblinking optical assembly brightened in confirmation.
The machine clearly didn’t have much left to its runtime. The light in its optical sensor was flickering a slow march to nothingness. Soon. Not now, but soon.
Rechs selected a chime and took it down from where it hung.
“I’ll take this one.”
The bot’s lone eye flickered happily.
No credits were exchanged. The change of ownership for the thing the bot had made, another machine of sorts, was simply enough. It had passed itself on to the galaxy.
Rechs moved on. He stopped beside an old abandoned building, crumbling and condemned by whatever local government ran things on Taijing. Warning sensors and hazard flags clearly marked the building as off-limits. It climbed high up, several stories. Almost reaching the rim of Chung’s Pit across the street.
It would do nicely.
He entered the building, finding sleeping lotus users spread out in the darkness. One of them shifted and rolled over, disturbed by the noise of the wind chime that hung from the bounty hunter’s carbon-forged machete.
Rechs followed a central stairwell leading up into the heights, its railings missing. The steps creaked and groaned, threatening to finally quit as Rechs ascended, passing doors on each landing that lay open like gaping mouths shocked at the destruction of the long-abandoned living spaces that had once housed happy families.
The stairs led all the way to the roof, a wide and open space, hot and burnt by the last of the fading sun. Rechs took the wind chime and hung it on an old bent nail sticking out of the roof access shelter.
The light in the sky had turned everything a bloody red, causing even the yellow haze that had lain over the world to halo and bleed as Rechs studied the street below. The clusters of gang members stationed along it looked to their left and to their right. But not above.
They never looked up.
Elaborate sectional dragons made from nylon were strung on taut cords that spanned the width of the street, undulating in the wind. It was for these cords that Rechs had made the climb to the top of the condemned building. They were anchored to the edge of the condemned building’s roof by heavy-duty tension bolts, and on the other side of the street, they connected to the outer wall of Chung’s Pit.
Rechs walked by each decorative line, testing them with a hard pull as he went. When he settled on just the right one, he swung his feet out over the rooftop ledge and wrapped his arm around the cable, hanging upside down like a Leegan spire sloth. With arms and legs wrapped around the wire, he pulled himself out over the street. He crossed quickly and unnoticed
, the sentries below too busy talking and smoking, or gambling and smoking, or merely smoking. Looking to the left and right.
But not above.
Reaching out with his lead hand, Rechs grabbed the uppermost ledge of the fortress known as Chung’s Pit, his legs still wrapped around the cable. Ten feet above lay a series of wide, almost transom-like windows beneath the curved roof of the fortress. It was through these that the thunder and roar of crowd noise escaped to sweep out across the district in triumphant ululations or angry groans of despair.
Working slowly, Rechs retrieved a grappling needle from his cargo pocket and raised his other gauntleted arm above his bucket, willing his body to become one with the wall. Blindly, he fitted the grappling needle into the left bracer of his armor and waited for the pneumatic hiss that meant it had locked into place.
He picked out his target. Guarding two of the transoms was an old, hand-carved lion—or maybe it was a dog—just like the ones along the roof.
Some form of Sinasian gargoyle, thought Rechs as he aimed for the thing’s chin and sent the bolt straight through its stone head. The grapples deployed out the other side of the snout. The hold was good.
Rechs didn’t trust the old stone not to crumble, so he resisted the temptation to let the armor simply winch him up into position. Instead he free-climbed, using the nano-cable to bear some of the weight. Upon reaching the window he released the cable, leaving the grappling bolt in the gargoyle. He had two spares and no time if what he saw below, inside Chung’s Pit, was to be believed.
Dragon Identified read a display on Rechs’s HUD.
Rechs had downloaded the non-guild termination contract, of course. That had been virtually step one in his research. Now, it seemed that the program had encrypted some sophisticated bio-scan data purposed with telling any hunter or assassin on the trail that they had the right target. He should have put in the time to decrypt it, but it was obviously a tough nut to crack.
But there it was, plain to see.
Dragon Identified.
And if that wasn’t a mistake, then the Dragon was in a lot of trouble.
Rechs slithered through the transom onto some kind of maintenance catwalk above the crowd. He moved quickly behind a sculpted support pillar curling with serpentine dragons, the gold leaf flaking from their snarling jaws.
Row upon row of Sinasian men, shouting and angry, sweaty and desperate, roared in the small arena below. A pall of cigarette smoke hung in the room like a storm front as vendors moved through the crowd taking bets or selling steaming bowls of fried rice.
On the floor of the arena lay several men. Some clearly had had their necks broken. Others lay with busted arms. Some had been gutted by blade. Exotic weapons lay around them, sometimes within reach of the twisted and forever broken bodies. As though in their last moments the dead’s last hopes had been just tantalizingly out of reach.
Four men were alive. Three wearing red headscarves and black pajamas, each carrying a melee weapon, circled the one identified as the Dragon. He was shirtless, with deep brown skin.
And he was unarmed.
One of the men whirled a ball and chain. He launched the weapon from its deadly orbit above his head, straight at the Dragon.
The Dragon dodged, bending like a cobra rearing to strike in order to avoid the weighted ball. He reached up and grabbed the trailing chain as it passed by.
Even to Rechs, who was rightly rumored to have some of the fastest reflexes in the galaxy, the Dragon’s agility was incredible. He pulled the chain from the man’s hand with a mere yank, then raced forward at him, knotting chain lengths around both fists.
The attacker seemed stunned into immobility, as if nothing in his mind had ever prepared him for this turn of events. Who could have imagined such an unforeseen and rapid counterattack?
The other two men, one holding a short tanto-style sword with a red cord and feather, and the other a gleaming, wickedly curved tomahawk, seemed just as stunned. They stood dumbfounded as the Dragon passed the chain over the first attacker’s neck, executed a cartwheel, and snapped the man’s neck.
The chain was dropped from the Dragon’s hands before the dead man’s body hit the arena floor. Resuming a fighting stance, the Dragon thumbed his nose and bounced slightly up and down on the balls of his bare feet.
The crowd erupted in cheers.
Regaining themselves, the two remaining attackers came at the Dragon with swift, economical cuts. They clearly weren’t amateurs when it came to blade fighting. Working as a team, they kept the Dragon shifting at the waist to avoid blows. With each cut through the air, the Dragon gave ground in short, staccato steps.
And then, almost unbelievably, the Dragon threw a blindingly swift jab into the windpipe of the tomahawk-wielder. Rechs thought he could hear the crunch of the busted airway.
Instantly the man went from attacking to struggling simply to breathe. The panic Rechs knew all too well showed in his eyes.
The Dragon turned away from the flailing man, content to let him die fighting for one last breath.
The remaining swordsman flowed into a series of twirling cuts, never allowing the blade to stop threatening its target with sudden jabs and thrusts. His body stayed in motion from a seemingly limitless supply of energy.
Again the Dragon gave ground. And then he simply reached out and grabbed the swordsman’s forearm mid-stroke. Rechs could see from the way the shirtless man’s muscles moved that he was not fighting the blow, not trying to break the arm. He wasn’t forcing anything. Instead the Dragon simply redirected the blade’s next pass into the lower abdomen of its wielder.
All in the blink of an eye.
The force of the twirling body drove itself down onto the sharp tip. The man was still standing, run through by his own weapon as the Dragon walked away, rolling his sweaty shoulders and shaking out his fists.
As the swordsman fell over to die, the crowd erupted once more in a gleefully ecstatic wave. Any groans of dissatisfaction were all but absent now, save from those few who took the wrong bet.
Rechs had thought the Dragon was in trouble. He was wrong. The Dragon was the killer. Like a wolf among lambs who thought they were lions and discovered only too late that he was impossible to kill. Because he wasn’t just a wolf… he was a Dragon. A thing that surpassed understanding.
The Sinasians had no idea what Project Phoenix had done to the Dragon. What it had made him into.
But Rechs did. He knew what the plan had been all along. He’d just forgotten it. Because he’d had to. Because he’d wanted to.
He’d allowed it to happen. Even saw it once. But to interact… would have ruined it. At least according to the researchers.
Still… there had been that day in the forest. In the rain.
Ball.
They had wanted to make their own Rechs.
Now, thought Rechs, forgetting all those mad scientists and their plans, the rightful heirs of the Savages, how to get the kid out of here?
Who?
Ball.
The kid.
How to get the kid out of here?
He scanned the crowd looking for the catalyst of it all. The colonel who showed up as “redacted” on all those secret memos and files. Ajax. The one who had seen the potential and whispered what really needed to happen.
Ajax. Another piece of Rechs’s memory fell into place.
If Rechs was right… if the Dragon really was leading a new Sinasian revolt… then Colonel Ajax would be here.
But so far there was no sign of the legendary Dark Ops commander. Everyone Rechs could see was Sinasian. Almond eyes, dark hair, skin tones that ran from ashen gray to an almost glowing brown. Long ago they’d been a dozen different races throwing in together to get off the nightmare that Earth had become. Now, two millennia later, they’d all tell you they were simply Sinasian.
N
o gaijin, thought Rechs, wondered how he’d first learned that old word that meant “outsider” in its less polite form.
Another tale from another time.
And then he spotted her. An unexpected player. A blonde. Ponytail sticking out from under a ball cap. Tac vest. Cargo pants and boots. Mirrored shades. In the back. Under the shadows of the upper levels. She was watching too.
Bounty hunter?
Not one of the bounty hunters Rechs knew. No armor. Not carrying every weapon in the world. Maybe she was strapped on her thigh, but Rechs couldn’t see her that far down. Her body was below the crowd, shielded by a sea of faces. But she still stood out, despite the hat and sunglasses.
Dark Ops?
Maybe. Nether Ops, more likely.
Rechs was turning over the question of how to get the kid out of here, off Taijing, and to a place where the House of Reason couldn’t have him killed, when four more contestants—this time wearing royal blue and carrying staves—entered the arena.
In short order, even as teams of men were still dragging the bodies of the recently deceased away from the center of the corpse-littered floor, the Dragon set to work on the newcomers.
Because Rechs knew that’s all it was to the Dragon: work. Even though others might have called it art. To the ones charging it was a fight to the death—for love or glory or money. For any of the reasons men think up to justify a death match. But to the Dragon it was work.
In no time he was breaking bones with powerful kicks, shattering the whirling wooden bo staffs of his opponents and dodging gut-busting thrusts that passed harmlessly into the thin air the Dragon once occupied.
A succession of three twirling roundhouse kicks shattered three jaws, sending blood spraying and teeth flying. The closest any of the new attackers got to harming the Dragon was when one landed a bell-ringer upside the Dragon’s head. That blow would have stunned most men, or at least made them sit down and see double for a few minutes.
But not so with the Dragon. He threw a series of punches, badly aimed but enough to drive his foe back, until he regained his focus and landed a flurry of whirlwind haymakers against his lone remaining target.
