Letting out a sigh, I reached up behind my right ear and clicked the hard switch there before keying a command into my wrist-terminal. The sigh turned to hissing as the pressure seals in my helmet relaxed. The black titanium and ceramic casque broke into pieces that folded flower-like away from my face before coiling into the collar of my hardsuit, and for the first time I looked down on Faber with my own eyes.
With a rough hand, I pushed back the elastic coif that covered my head and shook out curtains of ink-dark hair. Coming to within two paces of Faber’s chair, I crouched to put us at a level. “You were a soldier, you say. Then you know we can take the answer from you. I would prefer not to have to.” Reaching out, I seized Faber’s clenched hands with my own, looking like some parody of the vassal kneeling before his lord, of the devoted son before his father. I squeezed. “Who hired you to betray your brothers?” I glanced back at the dead man behind me. I could see Faber was looking.
Then his vision shifted and we regarded one another eye-to-eye. “You don’t understand. These people. The things they can do...”
But I had been to Vorgossos, to the lowest dungeons of the Undying. I knew full well what horrors, what abominations mankind was capable of in the name of science, of progress. I had seen the body farms, the surgical theaters. I had seen armies of puppet SOMs larger than this, and had seen machines to violate every natural law. I knew exactly what the Extrasolarians were capable of—knew it was every bit as vile and unthinkable as the rape and pillage the inhuman Cielcin carried out as they conquered our worlds. And worse. Worse because the Extrasolarians were human, even if they tried not to be.
“Give me a name, Faber. Please.”
The man swallowed. “You have to take my people out of here.”
“You are in no position to be making demands,” I said, standing, my finger in his face. I turned my back on him, pondering what to say next.
“You misunderstand, Marlowe. That’s not a demand. It’s the terms of my surrender.” I stopped mid-step and turned around, hands back at my sides. I waited him out. The man had been in the Legions, surely he knew that the Empire would put every one of his men in a prison camp for the rest of their lives. Surely he knew his own life was forfeit. For an officer of the Imperium to take up arms against the Empire was a grievous crime, one the Emperor would never forgive. “Passage out of here for every one of my men, even if it’s to Belusha,” he said, naming just such a prison planet as I’d imagined.
“What are you so afraid of, Captain Faber?” I asked. “Your employers, plainly, but why? The fortress is ours.”
The older officer glanced at the dozen or so of his men again, then once more at the SOM dead at his feet. “MINOS, they’re called MINOS.”
I blinked, “Like the Minoan king?” Minos was a character out of ancient myth, the ruler of vanished Crete. It was he who had built the labyrinth into which Theseus had ventured to fight the Minotaur. Thinking of Theseus brought a grim smile to my lips, and I saw once more a stony shore. A black lake. Slippered feet standing on the surface of the water. And against a wall of bare stone a tall red fountain rose dreadfully distinct.
“The what?” Faber said stupidly. “No, I—I don’t know.” He wrung his hands, eyes fallen. I let him take the time he needed; could sense the stripped, exhausted gears in his mind still turning. “Have you ever heard of the Exalted?” he asked, voice very small.
“Yes.” The Exalted were amongst the most dangerous of the Extrasolarian tribes—if tribes was the right word. They had abandoned their humanity—they would say transcended it—replaced their bodies with machines, altered their neural chemistry to suit their whims, discarded their humanity like so much rotting meat. They crewed massive interstellar vessels and never set in to port, fleeing from the Empire and the Holy Terran Chantry as shadows flee from the sun. Many had lived for eons preserved like medical specimens in jars of their own making. It is the Exalted every little boy and girl in the Sollan Empire grows up afraid of. It is they we imagine when he hear stories of the Extrasolarians and the things they do to innocent sailors.
“MINOS makes them. Designs them. And they make...” he nodded weakly towards the SOM still lying at his feet, “...those things.”
“And they hired you to acquire materials,” I said. “They’re building an army. For whom?”
The Dardanine captain screwed his eyes shut. “I don’t know. I don’t know. On my honor.”
“Your honor.” It was all I could do not to sneer. “Your honor, M. Faber? Just what honor do you think you have?”
“Enough to plead for my men,” Faber replied without hesitation. “Do with me what you will, but get them out of here. And get out of here yourselves. If you know what the Exalted are, you know what trouble you’ll be in when they arrive.”
“They’re coming here?”
“Most of the MINOS staff fled the moment your ship came out of warp, but not before they summoned the others.”
Petros barked a laugh, “At warp? That’ll take years!”
“No,” Faber said flatly.
Petros hadn’t been with us at Vorgossos. He didn’t understand.
We might only have hours. Maybe less.
All at once, Captain Faber’s surrender took on a more dire cast. It was as if the sunlight had changed, or the sun itself had gone behind a cloud. “This has gone on long enough, captain,” I said, falling back on the aristocratic sharpness with which I’d begun our little meeting. “If what you say is true then we haven’t much time. If you want your men to live, you will surrender any of these MINOS people still on base and for the love of Earth and all that’s holy you will tell me where my legion is.”
THE LIVING FAILURES
It was so cold in the depths of the fortress warrens that I’d had to put my helmet back on. Frost misted the air and massed on the coolant lines bracketed to the walls, reminding me of veins in the limb of some giant. Far above, bay doors of steel and reinforced concrete stood closed to the yellow sky. Through that aperture—hundreds of meters long—the Dardanines had lowered dozens of troop transport units: ugly, rectangular pods each holding two centuries of Imperial legionnaires.
“How many are left?” I asked.
“Thirty-seven, lord,” Petros replied.
“That’s what? Seventy...four hundred soldiers?” I drummed my fingers against my side as I ran the numbers. It wasn’t even a third of the full legion. I tried not to imagine where those other men had gone. Turning to where two of Petros’s centurions stood near at hand, I said, “One of you: head up top and signal the Tamerlane. Tell Aristedes to deploy the cargo lifters, double time. Are we any nearer finding the controls for the bay doors?”
I directed that last bit to everyone in the vicinity, voice amplified by my suit’s speakers.
A decurion answered in a thin voice, “My lord, we’re locked out of the control room.”
“Where?”
“Here, lord!”
The door looked to be solid steel, the first in an airlock that separated the landing bay from the inner fortress when the roof was open to the sky. Just as my man had said, the control panel beside the door was blacked out, dead as old stone.
No matter.
“Stand back!” I said, holding out one hand to fend my soldiers away. I drew my sword, kindled the blade. The highmatter cast spectral highlights—white and blue—against the brushed metal walls. Its cutting edge was fine as hydrogen, and I plunged the point through the reinforced steel as easily as through wax paper. Moving steadily, I carved a hole in the door just large enough for a man to step through. The door fell inward with a slamming sound like the unsealing of a tomb, and—sword held out before me—I stepped inside.
Into darkness.
I activated my suit lights, revealing abandoned banks of control consoles and inert projector plates. My men followed me over the threshold, and behind them I heard someone—Siran, possibly—calling for a scout drone. The device whizzed over my shoulder, emitting a faint, ultraso
nic whine as the scanning lasers fanned across the room before vanishing through an open door at the far end.
Pausing, I tapped one of the consoles. It flared to life, holograph readout filling the space above the desktop. “Get the techs,” I ordered one of the others, “tell them to get those bay doors open. We need to lift the survivors out, double quick. The rest of you: with me.”
Captain Faber had said the MINOS staff had fled the base when we attacked. That had been a lie. We would have noticed any ship attempting to leave Arae when our assault began. There had been none.
They had to be down here somewhere.
I have seen more than my fair share of dark, demon-haunted tunnels in my life. I have said before that light brings order to creation, and that in darkness order grows ever less. The magi teach us that before the First Cause and the cataclysm that birthed the universe there was only Dark, and that it was from that darkness—the infinite chaos and potential that exists in the absence of light—that anything might happen. And so everything had happened, and the universe had emerged, birthed not—as the ancient pagans would have it—by the declaration of a deity, but born of the limitless chaos that comes in the absence of light.
That is why we fear the Dark. Not for what it contains, but for the threat that it might contain anything. Aware of this fact, I pressed down the hall after the drone, following the path laid out in the display at the corner of my vision. Doors opened to either side, revealing store rooms and offices and what reminded me of nothing so much as medical examination rooms. Cold sweat beaded on the back of my neck. A powerful sense of dread settled on me, crouching like a gargoyle. It was almost like being back on Vorgossos, in the dungeons of the Undying.
“My lord!” a voice rang out from behind me, and as I turned the soldier added, “Over here!”
I joined the man in the arch of a broad doorway opening on a round chamber. The roof above was supported by a single central pillar, and the floor was a tangle of cables, as if someone had pulled apart and rewired several machines in a great hurry.
And then I saw them, sitting in seats around the outer wall, each slumped as if in slumber, hands unfeeling in their laps. There must have been three dozen of them, men and women alike.
None moved.
“Dead?” Siran asked. “Earth and Emperor protect us. What is this?”
Lowering my sword but keeping it lit, I approached the nearest corpse. She didn’t look like an Exalted. None of them did. Each of the dead men seemed human enough. On a whim, I flicked my suit’s vision from visual light to infrared, saw the cooling nimbus of life’s heat fading in her core. “Still warm,” I said, and fingered the braided metal cable the dead woman still grasped in both hands, tracing its course from the floor all the way up to the base of her skull. “They’re not dead,” I said, and with a vindictive turn of my wrist I slashed the cable with my sword. “They’re gone.”
Two the soldiers nearby made a warding gesture with their first and last fingers extended. One asked, “What do you mean, gone?”
“Synaptic kinesis. I’ve seen it before,” I pointed to the column in the center of the room with my sword. “That’s a telegraph relay. This lot wired their brains in and broadcast their minds offworld. Probably to a ship. They’ll have new bodies waiting for them.” They’d discarded their old ones like sleeves, abandoned them here to rot. The eels churned within me once again, and I turned my head. It was easy to imagine the Exalted growing these bodies for just such a reason: to wear for a time and discard. I was prepared to bet my good right hand that the true owner of the flesh before me was some brain trapped in a bottle up in the black of space like some foul djinni. “Once we get the soldiers out, bring atomics down. None of this can be left. And don’t touch anything. Who knows what they’ve left behind.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth then a shot rang out, and turning I saw one of the bodies tumble from its chair with a smoking hole in its chest. “Hold your fire!” I called, raising a hand.
“I thought it moved, sir,” the soldier said, voice higher than I’d expected. “Like the ones up top.”
“No, soldier. We’ve nothing to fear from these.”
Have I said the universe shares my love of theater?
Something shot out of the darkness and sliced clean through the armorweave at the base of the man’s neck. There was no noise save the sigh of impact and the dull smack of blood against the wall behind him, no crack of gunshot or crash of bullet against the wall. He took a moment to fall, and in that space whatever it was hit another of my men.
“Shields up!” Siran bellowed into the sudden stillness.
I saw a flicker of movement out the corner of my eye—the trailing hem of a robe. I started after it, Siran close behind. Had some of Faber’s men not surrendered with the rest? Or had one of the MINOS personnel remained behind when the others fled by their unholy road?
The tunnels ahead were a labyrinth still incompletely mapped. We were near the bottom of the fortress now, almost to where I guessed the geothermal sinks and the power station must be. All the world was low ceilings and blind turnings in the dark, the walls lit only by the rare sconce, fixtures yellow with neglect. I could just make out the sound of soft footfalls on the ground ahead, and skidded round a corner in pursuit. Once or twice I saw a human shape round a bend ahead.
There!
A stunner bolt flew over my shoulder from Siran’s hand. Was that a gasp of pain?
“Missed,” Siran spat, making the word a curse.
She was right. It must have been a glancing blow, for when we caught up to the next bend there was no one there, but I knew what I had heard. There was a door up ahead on the left, and it stood open. Inside, the shadowed hulks of nameless machines stood in rows.
“Reinforcements are right behind, Had,” Siran said. “We should hold.”
“And let them escape?” I said, brushing past. I knew what Siran was thinking, that this was some kind of trap. But if what Faber said was true, this whole thing was a trap and the Exalted would be on us in hours.
I stepped inside.
Immediately my shield flashed as the strange bullet impacted against it.
It flashed again. Again. Held. The icon in the side of my vision indicated the shield was still blue.
“You should have hired better mercenaries!” I called out, not seeing my quarry among the slumbering machines. “Your Captain Faber’s surrendered!”
“He bought the time we needed!” a cold, high voice returned. “You see my fellows have already escaped.” I scanned the darkness ahead of me, but save the tongues of chilly fog twisting in the air, nothing moved. I swept the beam of my suit lamp ahead and above me, searching the narrow catwalks and raw plumbing.
Nothing.
“You work for MINOS?” I asked, signaling for Siran to cover my back.
“I’m certainly not one of Faber’s little boys,” came the reply. “And I know all about you, Lord Marlowe. The Emperor’s new pet. Killed one of the Cielcin clan chiefs did you? Is it true you twisted the Undying’s arm to do it? The Lord of Vorgossos does not bend easily. I didn’t think he could bend at all.”
Behind my mask, I smiled.
After a moment’s silence, I said, “Who did you sell the legion to?”
No answer.
No surprise.
I tried a different tactic, anything to keep her talking. The longer she kept talking, the better the odds were my reinforcements would catch up. “MINOS produces the Exalted?”
“Abstraction. Body modification. Yes,” the voice floated down from above. “We provide design and fabrication work for the captains and the clans. Life extension. Maintenance of the cerebral tissue—some of our clients are thousands of years old, don’t you know? Whatever they dream—and can afford—we make real.”
Still searching for her, I passed a bit of machinery like a vast, squat drum. Frost rimed its surface, but something there—a glimmer of movement, perhaps?—caught my attention. If there
was something inside I could not see it, but I sensed something there the way the swimmer senses the passage of a fish in dark waters.
“What are these?”
“Prototypes,” she said. “Failures.”
“Failures?” I drew back.
On our private band, Siran said, “I see her, Had. Up and left. She’s limping.” I looked, and seeing understood why I hadn’t seen her sooner. She was far too cold to be human, and my suit’s infrared pickups nearly lost her against the awful chill in that room.
“Progress is never without loss.”
“On the contrary,” I said, and it was my tutor who spoke through me, a response out of childhood, “any progress which is accompanied by loss is no progress at all.”
“Spoken just like an Imperial dog.”
“Or like someone who reads.”
Siran fired, stunner flash splitting the gloom. She struck true, and I heard a clatter as a body hit the catwalk above.
“Good shot!” the woman’s voice rang out. “You got me!”
Siran froze before she could start her search of the room’s perimeter. Over the comm, I heard her whisper, “What the hell?”
“Some sort of nervous bypass,” I answered over the private channel. “Kept her conscious. Is she moving?”
“No.”
“Get up there and lock her down before she recovers.” That at least had explained how the woman had kept running after we shot her in the hall. “We’ll put her in fugue and bring her back with the rest.”
Not so fast! The woman’s voice crackled over the speakers inside my helmet—over the private frequency. Damn these Extrasolarian demoniacs and their machines! It’s you who won’t be going anywhere, Lord Marlowe!
I switched off my communicator with a glance, sealing my suit off from Siran and the datasphere. The last thing I needed was this Extra woman crawling around in my armor’s infrastructure, shutting off my cameras or my air. I had visions of being trapped there, locked and blind in my suit, waiting to be found by the Extras Faber warned us were coming. An unceremonious end to Hadrian Marlowe, Knight Victorian.
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 31
