“Hungry?”
Diamond turned. Behind him was a skinny man, his smile aged by years of direct sun. Around his neck was a string of brightly painted beetle wings. He held up a hunk of bread and a steaming mug of fish stew. Diamond nodded and took them.
“Is this, one of these guys?” he pointed at the fish followers. He sniffed his mug. It smelled like leeks and onions.
“No. The pilgrims won’t eat the fish from here.”
“The fish are sacred?”
“The fish are not, but they eat the blessed beetles, the Servants of the Eye. There are lots of Servants here, along the shores and in the trees. That’s why there are so many fish and why they’re so fat.”
“That necklace there, those look like they came from Servants.”
The man looked down at the necklace as if first noticing it.
“I bought this from an urchin on the shore. Children wade into the water and collect dead beetles before the fish eat them. Pilgirms buy them for luck. Sometimes, Servants mass together and go into the lake, drowning themselves. There will be thousands.”
“So if the fish eat them, what eats the fish? I know there used to be crocodiles on Paradiso.”
“Croco Diles!” The man proudly held up his forearm, showing off a faded tattoo. It seemed the artist had never seen one, but inked it from a description. “You can still find them if you look hard. They live in the old, abandoned canals. You won’t find them here.”
“How come? Crocs should thrive in terrain like this.”
“The river gods chase them away. The water here is full of them.”
Diamond nodded.
“The river gods aren’t dangerous to us, are they?”
“No,” the old man leaned against the railing. “They get by on the fish. It’s easy food for them. People are too much trouble, though sometimes worshippers try to swim across the river or the holy lake to test their worthiness. If they get eaten, they just weren’t worthy.”
“You’d think the priests would discourage that.”
The old man shrugged.
“No. I’m not a religious man, but my family has ferried pilgrims since I was a little boy. From what I’ve seen of them, if the most passionate want to kill themselves, you should always let them. There are few things more annoying than someone with a bit too much faith.”
“I know what you mean. So, you’ve been doing this since you were little?”
The old man tapped the dark hull of the junk with his knuckles.
“This is an old boat, from before the Nautiloids came. My grandfather told me this wood was somehow made from oil, the same kind the desert nomads find. I’m told it even travelled the seas before they dried out. And yet, my whole life, I only know going up and down these waters, from El Cuidad to Kashi. There are always pilgrims here. There are always so many pilgrims.”
“Do you know how many years ago that started?”
“More than seventy. My grandfather was one of the first to start this route. There were already pilgrims coming, on foot or on small rafts. A lot of people would die in those early days, their boats were so crude. The river gods would eat them.”
“What was Kashi before the Nautiloids came?”
“Nothing. There was no Kashi. It was the Nautiloids who founded the holy city, not humans.”
Diamond looked back out over the water. In the distance was a chain of brown, karst, spires.
“We will reach the spires by tomorrow,” said the old man, reading his mind. “We will go around them and reach the holy city just after dawn.”
“Any stops?”
“Wasn’t planning on any. I’ve asked Maria to have the evening prayers on deck.”
“I’ll see you in the morning then.”
“Son of a bitch!” I bolted upright and smacked at my leg. It was the size of a rodent. My hand sent it across the room. It struck the half-open portal and landed on the sill. The moonlight streaming through illumed it. It was a servant. A different species, its wings much larger, its mouth parts bigger. They were still red with blood.
The bite on my leg throbbed, it was an acid pain. Whatever venom or microbes it must have gifted me with wasn’t a problem; my nano-immunity would be able to handle it. Having a chunk bitten out though, that would have pissed me off. I reached for my flashlight and turned it on the wound.
Two dark, deep, punctures. The military-grade clotting agents were closing it up, but I didn’t need to be wandering around a holy city with a limp.
The servant clacked its green, ladybird wings and began climbing. It crawled up the portal, escaping the way it came. That’s the problem with the tropics. Just crack a window for ten minutes, and some fucking six-eyed wasp decides to come in and lay eggs in your face.
Fucking insect. I’ll show you religious respect.
Boot in hand, I hobbled over to the portal to set the Hearts and Minds campaign back by six months. The beetle spooked, skittered, and flew into the humid night.
I opened the portal fully and looked out over the dark water. The waves were almost still, they gleamed in the moonlight. We were much further out – I could barely see the lights from the shore.
The river god was staring right at me.
It had four, yellow, eyes, each as big as a plate. Two were on the sides of its head: excellent for studying surroundings. They belonged on a skittish creature – or a hungry one. The other two eyes were bigger and faced forwards. Facing right at me.
I couldn’t see the submerged body behind those huge eyes, but the ridged hump of its back jutted above, gleaming and black, the stuff of old monster sighting photos. What I could see were the four black tentacles, thick as tree trunks, which were holding on to the junk.
We stared at each other, across light years and eons of differences. I felt around behind me. My hand closed around a pistol grip, it whined into life.
The hunter let go suddenly, the junk shifted and creaked. The beast immediately began falling behind, but its eyes never wavered from mine. At twenty meters, it sank into the water and disappeared in an expanding wave.
After more than fifty stars, it was the first time I had ever seen an alien. I sat looking out the open portal, it was a good twenty minutes before I realized it had been opened from the outside.
I awoke to streaming sunlight and pain.
My whole body ached. I felt weak, I could barely move but to shiver, my teeth chattering. I reached for my forehead – it was a furnace. I had never had a fever before; I could see now why it had such bad press.
I pulled off the sheet and looked at my leg. My whole calf had swelled up and turned red. The scabbing around the punctures had turned a bright, mineral green. It smelled too, like milk gone very, very, bad.
I was relieved.
The green was a marker, a deliberate feature of any military grade, nano-medical immune system. It told the subject that this was no dinky bacterial infection, no harmless Ebola or Influenza.
I tapped awake the commbead clipped to my ear.
“Battlefield Control, this is Diamond. Nano-weapon attack in progress at Kashi. Repeat, nano-weapon attack in progress at my coordinates. I am Patient Zero.”
Tennyson, Part III
81 Years Ago
Most of my feeds were dead or jammed: I ramped up my auditory and switched to infra red. It was the break we needed: the battle shells were optimized for frontline combat, not stealth: they showed up moving in teams of four.
One was moving right towards us.
I pulled out a grenade and keyed it to my helmet’s infra red.
“Wait till they pass over you.”
“Wilco,” said the grenade, and I rolled it into the middle of the street. Arghavan and I took cover on opposites sides of the street.
The squids emerged into view from behind the street corner, searchlights stabbing out from them and feeling over buildings. Their screeching tilt-rotors made little vortexes in the fog, their weapon pods panned slowly from left to right to left.
The grenade self-triggered. Shrapnel ripped into the armors and tumbled, shredding whatever machine or creature was inside. Arghavan and I opened up, our diamondoid-coated rounds punching into the smoking shells.
“Move!”
We ran. Other shells were moving towards the ambush, they didn’t seem able to track us. We took out two more squads the same way. It was an excellent play: the squids didn’t seem able to counter it. I could hear more grenades: the others had figured it out.
There was less and less rifle fire though. If the squids wanted to, they could just throw bodies at the problem till it went away.
The longest three minutes of my life passed.
“Sir, they’re falling back.”
“They are. Any idea who’s left?”
“I saw rail fire on the left flank. Merzad’s people. “
“Best case scenario, the squids are waiting for more heavy support so they can level the village and carry on.”
“That’s best case?”
“Worst case, they’ll figure out how to deal with our ambushes.”
It was the worst case.
Minutes later the shells advanced. They hovered quite low, moving slowly along streets and stopping at homes, entering through doors and courtyards. Screaming would follow, and then the shells would exit and move to the next house.
“Arghavan, stay where you are!”
I could feel the menace through the tinted visor. “We can’t let them do this!”
She was right. But she was wrong.
“They’re trying to flush us out. We need to stay alive and delay them here as long as possible.”
“You stay and delay if you want. I came here to kill aliens,” and she was off.
There was no arguing with strong minded, young women these days. I checked my rounds and followed after her.
In the streets, people were running for their lives. They had either seen or heard what was going on at the village’s outskirts, or they were taking advantage of the lull in fighting to escape.
I saw a young couple hurrying down a street, she carried only a backpack and he carried two small children. They were the smarter ones. Most others on the street were loading up in their cars, filling them with water bottles, pets, and baby pictures. They would get as far as the nearest big intersection and then realize they would have to get out on foot, or wait in a growing traffic snarl to die.
“Sir, incoming.”
Six shells were streaking towards us. They must have fine-tuned their sensors, they knew where we were.
“I see them, get in cover!”
The shells stopped a street away. Screams and panicked weapons fire was their map marker.
“Why aren’t they coming?”
“They want us to come to them. Let’s go!”
Around the corner, six hovering shells were surrounding a woman huddled on the ground holding two two children – the same people we had seen fleeing earlier. One of the squids was carrying the man in its mechanized tentacles – he was motionless, his body bent unnaturally.
It lifted the body up, tore it in half, and dropped it on the huddled survivors.
Rail rounds smacked it across the street and into a tree, it lodged there, tentacles flaring and jerking, flaring and jerking. The rest took cover before Arghavan could re-aim, they opened up with their weapons pods.
Arghavan disappeared in a haze of roaring, light, and dust. My sensors were damaged and I had to scrape pinkish dirt from my caked visor. The first thing I saw were the red, glowing lights of the shells rushing towards me.
One tumbled up to the air, an explosion in its underbelly lobbing it backwards out of the street. A second one exploded the same way, ramming into a storefront in a spray of smashed glass and plasterwork, its carapace burning furiously. The other three swung around to face what was behind them.
I stood up and fired a three round burst into one, switched to the next, three round burst, switched to the last – its rear had already exploded, spraying severed tentacles and lubricant as it crashed.
I opened my visor. The smell of rotting meat and burning metal stung me.
Thunk. A stone bounced off my chest plate. A cloak unfolded out of the nothingness, sniper rifle across its chest.
“Aim for underneath the back panel. It’s a fuel cell.”
“Thanks for the rescue. How many of you are left?”
“Just me. And it’s just you too.”
Screeching rose up from all around us.
“They’re coming, lots of them. Aren’t you going to recloak?”
“My power cell is too low. Let’s make this count.”
We stood back to back.
The shells broke through the heavy fog, twenty pairs of glowing red eyes. Their weapon pods clicked into place.
And froze.
The red lights started flickering off, one then the other, and the shells started to spin in place or falter and tumble. The fog around them began to glitter, and the crashed shells began to glitter and spark, metal cracked and vented gas hissed.
“What’s happening?”
“It’s the fog mines. The nano-machines are finally attacking.”
“But they’re immune.”
“They were immune.”
The enemy code wall had finally gone down.
Havelock V
London. The worst slum ever.
It smelled of old feces, older puddles, and soggy cardboard. Insects swarmed in the air gathering around glaring yellow, sodium lights on rusting pylons. The lights flickered: wires pirated energy from them down to cardboard hovels below.
There were proper streets: wide, uniform stretches of muddy road. They had been set aside by the planning office. Maintenance though was by the Provost’s black suited guards with their mirrored visors and shock-truncheons. The streets gridded London, allowing water trucks and riot tanks easy access. Spinning off were cramped, winding, side alleys, inherent in any city slum. Plastic sheeting stretched between corrugated metal walls. Seniors coughed behind faded curtains, not wanting to be a burden. Small, naked, children chased each other through puddles of trash.
“We never manage to blend in here,” Yuri flexed his gloved fingers. It was not like we were trying: we wore grey greatcoats with tall boots and breather masks. “I never feel like that’s a bad thing.”
“He used to be right there,” I pointed, “but it looks like he moved out and made room for another Virgin Mary shrine.”
“Those things are everywhere. Let’s split up and ask around: this is his community, he wouldn’t have moved far.”
We pulled out pictures of our contact and started asking questions. Most people shook their heads and left us quick as they could, but this I expect from people protecting their own. I like to talk to children instead: children trust everyone.
I found some urchins playing in a communal trash mound. Large, scattered trash heaps were common on the slum ships. Their over-taxed life support systems couldn’t recycle that much waste, so the balance was “reinvested” in the community. The old, the desperate, and children would work the heaps to find treasures. London’s trash problem was acute: it was so poor, it imported trash to sustain itself.
For a bag of sweets I found out what I needed.
“Yuri,” I spoke into my mike, “I found him. He runs the labor permit shop we passed a little earlier. Meet me across the street.”
“Good work.”
It was a brown storefront of faux-stone blocks and dirty windows. A bit too nice: probably from London’s past as an orbital village known for tulips. A peeling sign outside it read OFF-SHIP LABOR PERMITS.
Yuri arrived, glanced at the building and nodded to me. I drew my gun.
“Let’s go.”
I kicked in the door.
Inside were two bald men made of tattoos and muscle. They looked up from their card game as if we were Old Ones come to visit. Behind them was a long counter with a red curtain. The men started to get to their feet.<
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“Not so fast,” Yuri painted the bigger one’s forehead with his laser sight, “you two can sit back down and get back to your game. Where’s the boss?”
One pointed at the curtain with his chin – a very London gesture.
I rounded the counter and thrust aside the curtain.
A hallway opened up. On one side was an office, the door open and light streaming through. On the other were three, heavy doors with one-way glass windows. What sounded like weeping seemed to come from behind one. They were all locked. I walked into the office.
Inside, was a ratty man in an old jacket and an extremely fine hat. He swung his feet off the table and smiled sweetly.
“Agent Rex Havelock! Always a pleasure.”
“Not sure I can say the same. You doing labor permits now?”
“You bet I am. There’s lots of people looking to go off-ship, looking for work. Cleaners, loaders, haulers. There’s good money on some of the alien ships for folks who don’t mind a bit of dirty honest work.”
“Oh yeah? Well how good is the money in human trafficking? I know what you have in those rooms.”
“Now there you go, being all judgmental. Where’s your partner? The nice one?”
“He’s making sure your toughs don’t try cheating at cards. They’re real alert, you always hire the best. Now here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me a great deal, or I’m going to shut you down and put you in a lock-and-forget with a serial killer.”
He made a face and shook his head.
“Well since you put it that way, I’ll waive my usual fee. Now what do you want, Havelock?”
“Antimatter bomb factories. Tell me everything.”
“There’s less to know than you may think,” he poured from a decanter into metal cups. “There’s always loose talk for something this big but it’s a little too smoke and mirrors. Tell me,” he handed me a cup, “you ever been on the Atlantis?”
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