The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “So much for the Society’s part of the harvest,” Emily observed, adjusting the hood of her heavy coat to keep out the wind coming in off the water. “That’s nearly the whole operation – the two sites in the Caucasus, Jakarta, everything we had scattered around Malaysia, and all three Chinese locations. How do you think they discovered the entirety of the operation? Do you think they turned someone? An informant?”

  Alistair shrugged and rubbed the three days worth of stubble on his chin.

  “I’m not certain, but it seems likely. We distributed the harvest knowing full well that it would increase the chances that Central would notice something – but higher visibility seemed like a worthwhile trade-off to limit potential losses should they get wise to a single location. We anticipated losing a facility or two. Not the entire operation in less than twenty-four hours. It’s clear that Xia was involved in this particular raid – and if Xia was here, that means Alice Gallow led this attack personally.”

  “Interesting,” Emily mused, crouching down to examine the half-melted remains of what had been a submachine gun. “And your sources within Central?”

  “Nothing. Yours?”

  “Not a peep. I thought the Auditors were still testing out potential new members.”

  “They are. I’d imagine this was part of the test,” Alistair said, holding out his hand above the ash and closing his eyes. “There are residues from a number of different Etheric Signatures. Not all of them are from the current roster of Auditors.”

  Emily stood up and dusted off her hands.

  “Like who?”

  “Your little friend Alex, for one,” Alistair said, laughing. “And the killer that the Black Sun set to watch over him.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  Alistair glanced over at Emily, her features hidden by the encompassing hood of her woolen coat.

  “Surprised?”

  Emily hesitated momentarily.

  “A little, I suppose. Alex is somewhat...apathetic. I had hoped that he would be more reluctant to become actively involved with the Auditors. It was obvious from the start that they would make a play for his services, even to me, but his disposition seemed to all but disqualify him from combat duty.”

  “Alice Gallow must have found something that Alex can do well enough, because she wouldn’t bring him along out of sympathy. I can sense the residual energies from the damage his Black Protocol caused. Song Li, tell me – what do the dead remember?”

  The dead man closed his clouded eyes, and the corpses half-buried in the sand briefly shuddered in a concert of postmortem sympathy.

  “They saw three of them. I have composed a mental image.”

  Alistair pulled it from the necrotic brain of her unwilling host with all the compassion of a prison dentist extracting a tooth.

  “As I thought. Alex Warner, Katya Zharova…and Kim Min-jun, back from field study.”

  “They engaged with the guards on the beach and killed them, but they were not responsible for the majority of the damage. The guards received reports of attacks at multiple points, all three of the access points.”

  “A distraction,” Alistair agreed. “The main force would have been elsewhere.”

  “The vampires focused their counterattack here, believing this group of attackers to be the most vulnerable. It was almost successful. The Operators were forced to cluster behind a barrier.”

  “Planned from the start, in all probability,” Alistair remarked. “Alice Gallow would not risk her future generation of Auditors so casually.”

  “There was significant confusion.” Song Li’s voice was grotesque, decayed vocal cords humming in a jarring combination of masculine physiology and feminine mannerisms. “It is difficult to determine exactly what happened next. Somehow, the Etheric interference generator failed, allowing apports into the facility. Alice Gallow ported into the heart of the facility...”

  “And I’m sure we can all guess what happened from there,” Alistair cut in, glancing at the slanted, half-collapsed entrance to the facility. “Did they discover the cargo?”

  “Yes,” Song Li responded dully, dark fluid dribbling from the sides of her mouth as she spoke. “And removed it before the facility was destroyed.”

  “I see,” Alistair said, kicking the skull down the beach, fragments flying as it rolled. “Then this portion of the harvest is a total loss. We cannot hope to begin again without attracting Central’s attention – not using the same methods, at least. The Outer Dark will have to make do with what we brought in already.”

  “There is...something else. An oddity,” Song Li reported, a vile gurgling in the back of her throat. “One of the vampires had a clear shot at the back of the Black Sun assassin. His attack landed, but appeared to do very little damage, not even enough to penetrate her armor.”

  “How can that be? A vampire’s strength should be more than sufficient to rend Kevlar. Are the Auditors using some new form of armor?”

  “That’s not it,” Song Li said, shaking her head at a strange angle, due to cracked vertebrae in the neck. “This was something else. An atypical barrier, perhaps? I sense profound confusion on the part of the vampire...”

  “Interesting. Something to consider. Now, Emily, if you would,” Alistair requested, gesturing toward the ruins, “please survey the wreckage. Confirm the absence of the cargo, and assay the damage to the Etheric interference generator. If anything of use can be salvaged, I will have apport technicians remove it to the Ukraine. We could at least recoup some of our investment...”

  Emily nodded, and her form wavered, as if she were surrounded by a heat mirage. Then the appearance of humanity disappeared, leaving nothing behind but water, which drained with unnatural rapidity into the rubble at the entrance of the facility.

  “You fear treachery,” Song Li observed, supporting her lolling head with a hand that was missing several fingers.

  “I do.”

  “From Emily Muir?”

  “No,” Alistair said, shaking his head. “She is manifestly one of us. But something is not right. The Auditors have been unaware of our actions for years, even before I joined the cause. For a short time in the wake of the raid on Central, we continued to operate under their radar. But the last few months have been quite different. They not only shut down our operations, but they do so at exactly the worst possible time, when we have already invested resources in the endeavor, but before we can reap any benefit.”

  “We have absorbed several renegade cartels from Central, not to mention disgruntled operators, recently,” Song Li rasped. “Any of them could potentially be a double-agent.”

  “I am not a fool, Song Li,” Alistair said with a thin smile. “We limit defectors’ access and involvement in operations until they can be telepathically cleared, often until they are fully transmuted Anathema. Harvest operations are extremely sensitive, and knowledge is restricted to a necessary few. Even fewer are privy to the details of multiple operations – we do our best to compartmentalize our endeavors. The list of individuals with access to the information involved is extremely limited. Honestly, I would be the prime suspect, if I were not myself.”

  Water bubbled up through the ash and sand of the beach, rising up in a geyser-like column that gradually took on the features of Emily Muir, wrapped in a winter jacket and tight jeans.

  “Wouldn’t that make you a triple-agent, Alistair?” Emily laughed at her own joke, brushing ash from her shoulders. “It is as Song Li described. The children were removed before the facility’s destruction. The machinery was very neatly sabotaged – they didn’t use anything as crude as explosives. I would guess it was a software attack, a virus that caused critical shorts and overheating in the system.”

  “Odd,” Alistair said, rubbing his chin. “The majority of the facility was kept permanently offline to prevent such a thing.”

  “Must have been locally introduced,” Emily said, shrugging. “No chance of salvage. The central control unit and the system memory appear to have b
een removed. The explosives that brought down the facility’s lower level caused multiple fractures in the foundation, and falling debris damaged much of the remaining machinery.”

  Alistair glanced up at the sky, his expression unreadable, then shook his head.

  “Very well. We have learned all that we can here. Song Li, return to the Outer Dark for new orders.”

  Song Li nodded, then the corpse abruptly toppled back to the earth, like a puppet with the strings cut. Emily wrinkled her nose at the strong smell of decay that filled the air.

  “What about me, Alistair?”

  Alistair smiled and put his arm fondly around Emily.

  “I have a task in mind for you, Miss Muir, for which you are uniquely qualified. Central hurt us with this attack, but we have learned something important – an operation of this scope would be impossible without an inside source within our organization. I need you to go back to Central. Find out what they know, and if possible, how they know it. You still have friends there, correct?”

  “Oh, yes,” Emily assured him, shrugging off his arm. “Good friends.”

  “Prove your worth to the Anathema, then.”

  Emily smiled with obvious satisfaction.

  “It’s about time.”

  ***

  “I am so bored.”

  Mountain Pose. Spreading toes, rooting himself into the mat.

  “Glad to hear you enjoy my company.”

  Forward Fold, struggling to keep his knees straight and his hands on the mat.

  “Not what I meant.”

  Half Lift, creating distance between thighs and navel.

  “Yoga is boring, then? I like it.”

  “Not it either.”

  The second sequence of Sun Salutations, matching breath to movement.

  Or he would be, anyway, if Katya would quit bugging him.

  “Then what? You’ve been moping all week.”

  Arms up and extended, palms inward. Back bend.

  “This place. The Far Shores. There’s fucking nothing to do.”

  Down into the invisible furniture of Chair Pose, arms out in a strange sort of salute.

  “That’s because they are still setting things up. We will have classes starting next week, and we go back to the Academy on Friday. This isn’t exactly a school, you know.”

  Wrapping one arm around the other, elbows at chest level, rooting into his right foot while lifting his left knee to hip level. Eagle Pose.

  “No, I don’t know. I think Vivik mentioned it a couple times, but they sent me here without telling me anything. It’s a research group, right?”

  “Sort of. Let me finish, okay?”

  They followed the routine that Michael had led almost daily at the Academy, the only one Alex knew by heart. Secretly, Alex envied her graceful transitions, but then again, he had never attended any of the optional Yoga classes, only doing the bare minimum required by the Program. He had improved his strength and balance, but the flow that more-practiced students like Katya (or Emily, as his mind insisted on reminding him) achieved eluded him.

  Alex watched sweat drop on the mat below his face, back and legs rigid to achieve Downward-Facing Dog, and tried to remember Eerie’s Wednesday schedule. Homeroom was over, so she was probably in one of her math courses, the classes that even Vivik found demanding. Alex was so bored he even wondered what Vivik was doing – he was that lonely. The Far Shores campus had appeared large when he arrived, but he had spent the last few days sequestered to the hulking Audits building, supposedly while the Far Shores Cartel prepared facilities for their not-wholly-unexpected guests.

  He cheated on Half Pigeon, not even really trying to bring his foot up to touch his elbow, bent over his one leg while the other extended straight out behind him. Katya curled across her leg casually, forehead resting on the mat between her elbows. He couldn’t see a trace of concern on her face.

  Alex dropped out and let her finish the routine without him, but if Katya noticed, then clearly she didn’t care. He stared out the window at the barren hills that surrounded the Far Shores on three sides, a view of dead grass and exposed dirt. Not as if Alex had other options – watching a girl doing yoga felt pervy, even if it was Katya. He waited politely while she ran through the Surrender Series, ending in the sinisterly named Corpse Pose – lying flat on her back, arms and legs extended, palms up, chest rising and falling rhythmically as her breathing slowed, a half-smile on her face. Alex wondered idly why Katya never seemed to have a boyfriend, then realized he was staring and averted his eyes before she opened hers.

  “Okay,” Katya said, sitting up and toweling sweat from her neck and arms. “You wanna know about the Far Shores?”

  “Sure,” Alex said, shrugging. “I have nothing but time till we go back to the Academy.”

  “Poor thing,” Katya said, smirking. “I guess you could call it a research group, though I’d be more inclined to call it a cult. They renounced their allegiance to the Hegemony and conflict with the Black Sun, after all, and got an easement from Central out here on the Fringe, where no one wants to live in the first place, so that they could spend more time staring at the Ether.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. They call themselves scientists, but I’m not sure that tells the whole story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Katya stood and started to roll up her mat.

  “Just what I said. They are clever, but not all of their ideas are particularly scientific. They are more into theory than practical application, for one thing – they mostly study the Ether for its own sake. Vivik claims they’ve done some important research, and he’s a huge nerd, so I believe him – but even he admits that almost everything useful tied to their work has been created by someone else. Vladimir and the Academy’s engineers were responsible for building that power plant they are so proud of, you know, even if the Far Shores did come up with the concept. I’ve heard some weird rumors about some of what they believe – about the nature of the Ether, the creation of Central, all that – and some of it sounds more like a religion than anything else. That’s why they built their place right on the edge of the Ether.”

  “I figured that made sense, since they study it.”

  “It would, assuming they actually did that kind of study. But they don’t do a whole lot of laboratory experimentation or field study. They’ve got a big library, and they spend a lot of time thinking about the Ether,” Katya said, snorting with contempt as she stowed her mat next to her gym bag. “What’s the point, you know? Can’t make anything from it. That leads to the other issue...”

  “There’s more?”

  “Well, like I said, they are mostly concerned with theory. No weapons development, no industry, nothing of direct benefit to Central. Which makes it more than a little suspicious that they get all of their bills paid out of Central’s research budget, no questions asked. Do you know how difficult it is to get allocated anything out of Central’s budget?”

  “Um. Not really.”

  “It’s hard, okay?” Katya grimaced. “Most of the smaller cartels wouldn’t have any presence at all in Central if their headquarters weren’t subsidized. Between that and maintaining the Academy, there isn’t much of a budget left for anything else. But these guys get carte blanche – for thinking real hard about the Ether. Sound likely to you?”

  Alex considered it while Katya took a long drink from her water bottle.

  “I guess not.”

  He stood and rolled his own mat into a loose bundle, following Katya out of the gym and back toward the makeshift dorm that had been established for them in the Audits building.

  “That’s not even factoring in this whole secret facility that the Director built out here for the Auditors. It was apparently vacant, up until we arrived a few weeks ago.”

  “I think it actually was,” Alex said, following Katya down the utterly featureless white hallway. “The dust underneath my bed was pretty thick.”

  “I agree. But that�
�s not my point. I’m trying to point out that Central invested in this place for at least one reason other than their ‘theoretical’ research – this shiny new Audits facility, conveniently vacant and available when the Committee punted the Auditors off the Academy campus.”

  Their footsteps echoed off the linoleum. The hallway was lined with unpainted beech doors, all flanked with a plastic plate that bore a numeral designation, and nothing else to indicate the room’s purpose or function. Without Katya’s help, Alex probably wouldn’t have been able to the find the canteen or the gym.

  “The Director is a precognitive, right? I figured he saw it coming...”

  “Sure. Of course,” Katya agreed dismissively. “Doesn’t change the fact that the Board diverted a huge amount of very limited resources in Central to this particular facility – which, on paper, has no strategic value whatsoever. I mean, why would you want to house the Auditors in the middle of a bunch of weird scientist-philosopher types?”

  Alex considered it on the stairway, which was also white-painted and barren. The gym was on the third floor of the building, while the dormitory was located on the fourth – girls on the west end of the building, boys on the east.

  “Maybe nobody cares if they get killed?”

  Katya paused mid-step, almost sending them both tumbling, then laughed and smacked his shoulder.

  “Not bad, Alex,” she said, grinning. “Might even be true.”

  He basked briefly in the rare praise while they finished the climb to the dormitories.

  “Okay, I get the suspicious part, but I still don’t see what makes them a cult.”

  Katya frowned while she put her palm up to the biometric reader mounted on the door – a security feature that seemed to be universal at the Far Shores.