It was far enough down for me to realize that I could get the key or the door but not both at the same time. More time carefully added to extend my journey. I put my hand on the key and realized it was stuck to the surface. I had to pull hard to free it which put a panic inducing strain on my lungs. I pulled it free and made the surface with no extra time. Trying to curse and breathe at the same time is difficult but actually impossible. Holding the key ready I got ready for the dive and realized that the water had turned murky, I could no longer see to the bottom. I would have to dive and find the door.
The pressure of the water as I pushed down felt greatly increased from the pevious dive, there seemed to be a resistance to my movements. I concentrated on seeing myself opening the door and escaping this watery pit. I touched the bottom and moved my hand around to find the outline of the door. I did so just as the limit of my lungs was being reached. With a finger on the keyhole to guide me I inserted the key and turned it. The door opened downward and the water rushed out pulling me along with it along a circular pipe. My lungs had passed their capacity and were forcing my mouth to open to take in something, water or air. I emerged from the pipe at some speed, flipped over so I was travelling upright and upside-down and trying to cram air into my lungs at the same time. I hit the wall with enough force to drive the breath from my body as I slid slowly down and stopped in a bed on damp comfortable moss looking at my back and legs still stuck to the wall.
My feet were much faster to understand than my brain. They moved sideways and I was off the wall, upright and running before I was conscious of the scratching of claws, grunting and snarling echoing from behind me. The rest of mr caught up and I realized that Mr. Hennessey might want me to arrive alive to have his fun, Action Group 5 wanted me dead now.
18
Action Group 5 were not the only group operating in the shadows across the systems and I was deep in the territory of one of them running for my life. I had crossed paths with The Parallelogram years before when Arran Sindar and I had broken into their library. The Parallelogram had some class of religious devotion to the Empress Ingea and they were fantastically well funded. What interested me was the fact that they also had a deep interest in Brewing and had the biggest collection of information in the systems on the topic. Access to this archive was by invitation only and the only lifeforms invited were also top ranking members of The Parallelogram.
Arran Sindar wanted access to some of the secrets of The Parallelogram for reasons he never shared any more than I shared mine whim him. He had managed to steal the identity of a suitable member and had patiently worked his way into getting an invitation to the library. There was a problem, what Arran wanted was not in the library and he needed a warm presence in the library to cover for him while he got on with his real work. We encountered each other in a air vent where I was lying still trying not to attract the attention of a security patrol on the other side of the thin metal cover. A foot tapped me on the head followed by a comms cord. Having no choice I plugged it in and Arran introduced himself. We chatted for the next two hours that the security patrol remain camped in the location. In the course of the conversation Arran probed me gently about the possibility of breaching The Parallelogram. I agreed to join him and we spent the rest of the time settling some details.
Arran would bring me into the library inside the aura of his notetaker. Any security check would register two lifeforms, when Arran departed on his mission I would step out and two lifeforms would remain in place in the library. It has no possibility of succeeding given that it was exactly the sort of plan that any self respecting security organization would be planning against. Arran had a secret weapon. He was a lucky man, when it counted circumstances favoured him and he was sure that would do so this time. I was desperate enough to agree, absolutely no other way of getting in had appeared.
At the agreed time I met the notetaker, a two meter tall skin covered skeleton who wore a dark green full length cloak and hood. Silently it lifted the cloak with one arm and ducking under it I entered into the space. If I could have jumped back out instantly I would have done so, it stank. I could feel the stink settling on my skin and hair as I crouched to fit. The notetaker had an awkard gait and I was rattled in the space. I heard Arran’s voice as he joing us, I cold not distinguish the words. We walked for an unknown length of time before we started to climb a set of stairs. Then we stopped for the first security audit.
When I heard the sniffle of the guard hounds I was suddenly grateful for the stink, it covered me completely making me invisible to their searching nostrils. Some more movements later and the notetaker opened the cloak and I fell out onto the floor of the most beautiful room I have ever seen. The walls and domed roof were all Airshire glass that shed comforting light while calming colours flowed around them. The floor was real, actual grown in the earth wood, polished and slightly ward to the touch. Individual reading desks with wooden privacy screens wre grouped in a circular area in the centre, a stunning spiral of shelves packed with books, manuscripts, loose pages, maps, technical drawings and academic journals. An army of locators, stick like bodies, tiny heads and extra long arms and legs scurried all over the shelves getting and replacing documents requested by readers.
I sat at a desk and gave my list to the retriever who appeared as I sat. I buried myself in the documents and completely forgot about Arran until an armed response team burst into the room and the notetaker grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to the ground. Following the notetaker and keeping as low as possible I moved as quickly as I could towards a small gap in the shelves that I would swear had not been there before. I fell into a large tunnel and saw a body fall into it just ahead of me. That body landed on its feet, turned and waved me forward and started running. I followed it as I could hear a full scale security alert rising above us. We reached a fork and we took the left hand turn. The notetaker stopped, dropped the cloak to reveal that it was heavily armed. I heard the blast of bolts as I ran and finally we reached and passed the boundary of The Parallelogram’s location. Arran threw a charm down and we stepped out into a quiet alley off a busy street. Arran nodded to me and took off in one direction while went another. That is how we both earned permanent places on The Parallelogram’s shit list and also that when Action Group 5 had dumped me there to be killed they had managed to be too clever for their own good.
Large predators are territorial, intrusions by another large predator into their hunting ground is serious and get a serious response. If The Parallelogram got the idea that I was an agent of Action Group 5 my current break in alog with my previous incursion would have a very different context. They would want to talk to me before they killed me. The problem I had was being taken alive, the standard approach was to kill any intruder and ask questions later. I had to convince them to capture me rather than kill me. Begging Lanken for a wisp of Arran’s luck I tapped my comms unit and spoke.
“Cleanblood, cleanblood, extraction needed over” Silence, wait for three heartbeats and repeat. Cleanblood was an old Action Group 5 call sign that I knew they had abandoned after it got leaked into the wild. Action Group 5 would ignore it which was important; I did not want more of their attention. The Parallelogram probably knew that it was an abandoned call sign but they would want to know why I was using it. The various groups were always probing each other and someone would want to be sure about who I was. I was in the middle of repeating the call when I was netted from above, swept off my feet and up into a restraint pod. Immobilised in complete darkness I was emptied into a bare cell with no doors or windows. Fuck, this was a problem I did not have the time for. I needed to get to the central control room in the next minute or Petra might be lost forever. I needed to escalate the situation dramatically, have enough value to be pulled out of isolation into an impromptu interrogation.
All those hours spent imagining myself in difficult situations and how I would creatively get out of them were going to finally pay off. I knew it was not just idle dreaming
no matter what that sliver of my mind told me. I put my left hand to my mouth and bit into the fleshy basre of my thumb. It hurt a great deal but I cracked the capsule I had implanted there. Instantly tendrils of blue and green smoke started to rise from my body and my breathing and heartbeat stopped. The response was everything I could have hoped for. The walls of the cell disappeared and a lifeform in a hazmat suit ran to me and stabbed me in the back of my hand with a needle attached to a small glass bottle. My lungs and hears started again, I let go of my hand and spat out some blood. The some had stopped. I was wrapped in a blocking blanket, pushed into a wheelchair and taken at speed to the main control room where the shift commander was waiting.
Captured agent from any group have their own distinctive suicide protocols, this is done as a final Fuck You to whoever captured them, making clear that they have just lost a valuable asset. I had just mimicked the Action Group 5 protocol, much better proof than an obsolete call sign. I was pushed at speed along a number of blank corridors before we entered one that had windows on the right hand side showing into offices where staff worked in cubicles. None looked up as we rushed past. The next corridor we turned int ended with a pair of security doors with a array of scanners mounted above them. We stopped in front of the doors while the scanners ran a check on us. I could feel the faint tickle of charms as the examination was carried out. I was sure that they had traces of me from the last time and they were being checked and organized for the shift commander. The doors opened and I was wheeled into the command room. The shift commander was standing beside her desk and looking directly at me. All of The Parallelogram’s staff were naturals and she was a nice example. Standing two meters tall, with black hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, perfect nose and full lips she was a testament to carefully regulated breeding. Not even remotely the same thing as bottle breeding I hasten to point out, absolutely no points of comparison I have been told more often than I could ever count.
The commander waved at me and I was pulled up out of the chair and the blocking blanket was removed. I farted. It was an appalling fart, I could tell from the damage it did on the way out. All the naturals in the room dropped to the floor or slumped at their stations as the stench did its work. I now had ninety seconds to act. I stepped over the commander, thumbed the emergency button which isolated the command centre. It was very kind of her to have left her terminal open for me. I keyed in the tracker code into the terminal and located the final signal. Sent the coordinated to the transfer station across the room and then released a worm into the system. The Parallelogram had really nice equipment, the best I had ever come across and it was a shame to wreck it, still I did not want to have them following me or to be retaining any details about me at all in fact.
The transfer station was the way The Parallelogram send staff to a desired location and I stepped into it and found myself somewhere that I recognized at the smuggler’s niche where Jovial had made his attempt on me. The worm must have kept the station active as the blast in the control room smashed pieces of equipment into the wall beside me.
This location made sense. Action Group 5 would have been very interested in someone with Jovial’s skills and had used him to their advantage. Jovial was as slippery as they, and would have known there was more going on than was being shared. He’d have tracked them here, which explained why Jovial jumped me here—because there was a power source he was drawing on, not a smuggler’s niche but an interstellar portal. The rules were simple: more work needed more energy, and more energy needed a bigger charm. Whole buildings were set up as charms to provide enough energy for the required work. The big barrier was interstellar work, for which a system charm would provide coverage, but the charm had to be so big as to be wholly obvious. Breeding Stations were in interstellar space and of a suitable size. They were active transit points for all sorts of traffic, all of which carefully went unnoticed by the other. The portal in front was an entry point to this network and all I needed to do was activate it.
I stood in front of the portal and remembered that the last time I was here I had died after Jovial had launched his attack. The attack was not random; it had been triggered by the location. Jovial would not have been given an access code, he was a singular talent with biological charms using one to hack the access was just a theoretically impossible as the rest of his work. I was guessing that there was a key to the portal somewhere around the location that looked like an entirely natural part of the local flora and fauna. The problem was that there were no actually natural creatures or plants here in the shitpots. If they were when they strayed into the drains by accident staying here warped them after a short while and a couple of generation rendered then something completely new. I was going to have search Jovial for what I needed.
I was sure that Jovial had been neutralised after the fight in the bottle farm he was still a tricky fucker and there was the possibility that he still had something in reserve. Muttering “Shit or bust” I reached for him and stepped into his memories. Using the sight of the location and the details I could see of the location as a filter I tried to steer directly to the relevant memories. There were a lot, I found out that Jovial had suspected that there was something useful here and had crafted a series of very small creatures to track visitors from the farm to the location. All of his spies were destroyed at the portal by the defenses that were activated by whoever was using it. It was a broad spectrum defense, it simply eliminate anything that could be a threat.
Jovial identified that the defense had a threat threshold, any creature was eliminated, the simple plants that grew there were unmolested. I also discovered that nothing excited Jovial like a challenge, he set about developing a suitable plant life that would also be a camouflage for his probing. With my own limited knowledge of brewing I could appreciate just how extraordinary Jovial was, the work he did was astounding. A damp stain that covered the walls of the niche was actually various strains of a, barely, multi-cellular plant that had reached sufficient physical mass to act as a passive recorder of the actions of every lifeform that passed through the portal. I had my key now I just needed to turn it in the lock.
I stepped into the niche and taking a glove off my right hand placed it on the correct spot to get the information. Jovial had no idea who physical body he would be using so the key was not encrypted. The code blossomed in my mind and I felt the cold power as the portal activated and I stepped through to the other side. I was standing in a wide corridor that six lifeforms could comfortably stroll side-by-side down, without brushing walls. The walls, floor and ceiling were mottled gray, with webs of barely visible cracks scattered randomly on every surface. The most visible feature was Mr. Hennessey pinned to the wall by a metal spear with a finely-etched wooden handle half as long as the blade. The handle had a rope attached to it so the spear could be pulled out from the prey and used again. He was very dead, his head hanging, and his feet resting in a puddle of blood that had dripped down the wall. The weapon that had fired the spear was across the corridor from where he was pinned, probably set to fire when he’d emerged. Wholly mechanical, he’d not have had advance warning.
Petra and the jewel box were gone, so I assumed that they’d been taken by whoever had been waiting for the delivery. As there was no track to follow, one direction looked as good as the other. I started to run. The corridor continued with regular openings on the sides. I stayed in the main one, since I saw nothing to tempt me down any of the others. With my Running-Man shoes, I was fast and I ran for two hours, but saw nothing, just an unchanging corridor until I came across a piece of wood sticking out of a wall opposite the weapon that had fired it. I was back where I’d started. The difference: the body appeared to have been absorbed into the wall. This was a labyrinth … a carnivorous labyrinth.
As I realized where I actually was, the muscles in my left thigh started to pulse and my right arm started to spasm. Every sentient lifeform in the systems knew about the carnivorous labyrinth; it ate everything that came into it, a
s it was designed to do. Touch any surface and you’d stick to it and be pulled under the surface. Cut your hand off and bleed on the floor, and your feet sank under you even faster. With Running-Man shoes, you’d float above the surface; it would wait till you dropped from hunger, thirst, and/or exhaustion. This was the belt around the Sickle Quadrant, the loop that kept whatever was on the inside from getting outside … the lock on the prison.
The Sickle Quadrant was the Empress’ Plan B. She’d been fleeing here when she was stopped, planning on opening the lock and unleashing the contents on the systems. If she couldn’t have the Empire, then no one could. Most inhabitants of the systems assumed that the prisoners of the Sickle Quadrant were other lifeforms, designed for destruction and chaos, but still recognizable as lifeforms. They weren’t; they were sentient biological weapons, self-directing diseases that consumed and re-grew their hosts for unknown lengths of time. No one knew how they traveled or interacted, or how they did anything beyond what was in the scattered note found in the Red Halls. That information had been enough to frighten everyone who’d read it, required reading for every elected politician and appointed bureaucrat above a set seniority level in every system.
There’d been plenty who saw opportunity, but none had ever been able to open the lock. Those too open with their thoughts had been dispatched to explore the labyrinth. Now, I was here and so was my daughter, and I had no clue how to find her. I could spend a dozen lifetimes chasing down every corridor and still have only searched a fraction. I kicked out so hard that I turned upside-down, was suspended in air, staring at the weapon that killed Mr. Hennessey. I noticed a fine thread hanging from the underside of the weapon. It fell to the floor.
Bottle Born Blues Page 21
