The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “That’s the hell of it,” Alice said, rolling onto her back and frowning at the ceiling. The tank top she was wearing proved to have an indecipherable logo from one of those awful metal bands she loved. “I have no idea. We raided an Anathema complex in southern China a few days ago. Still cleaning up that whole child-harvest mess, another gift from Gaul’s fountain of stunningly good intel.”

  Rebecca took another pack from a drawer in her bedside table, tore it open, and lit up. She worried about Gaul’s sudden and consistent insight into their normally inscrutable enemy. For years Central hadn’t even been able to locate the Anathema’s current whereabouts; the Outer Dark was considered by many to be a myth. Then, a month and change after the attack on Central, Gaul starting producing detailed intelligence on the Anathema at regular intervals – the kind of material that most intelligence agents would kill for, the kind that only came from an inside source. As far as anyone knew, though, there was no inside source in the Anathema – Rebecca didn’t even have a clue how such a thing could be possible. And it bothered her that Gaul was stubbornly silent as to how he procured the information, along with empathic twinges of guilt she felt from him during unguarded moments.

  It wouldn’t be the first time Gaul had done something terrible, after all.

  “We figured on moderate resistance, but instead we found open doors and empty rooms on the first couple floors. Down deeper, there was abandoned computer equipment and corpses, not one of them Anathema. Some from three cartels who hadn’t even shown up on our radar yet, and some civilian, all relatively local, if you consider within several hundred kilometers to be local. I have Mitzi working another angle, and Xia isn’t much for interrogations, so I figured I would tackle the Jiang Cartel myself.”

  Rebecca smoked and waited for Alice to continue, wondering at her abnormally gloomy state. She thought about tweaking her emotions, cheering her up a little, but decided to wait and see what the cause of her malaise was, first. The Chief Auditor, after all, was due a little self-recrimination by definition.

  “Except they didn’t know anything. I’m almost sure of it,” Alice said, running her fingers through her coal-black hair. “A third of their cartel left in the middle of the night, about half kids. Then most of them – all of the adults – turned up dead in an Anathema base three days later. The rest were just waiting and hoping they’d come back.”

  Rebecca took a moment to think it over, but nothing came of her consideration.

  “Okay, so what did you do to the rest of them?”

  “Who?”

  “The Jiang Cartel.”

  “Oh,” Alice responded hollowly. “Them.”

  “Yeah, them,” Rebecca said sarcastically. “Did you kill all of them?”

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “Ah. Nicely done.”

  “I just broke some antiques, messed up the family altar, and threatened to shoot a bunch of small children,” Alice said, covering her face with her hands. “That seemed to do the trick. But, like I said, they didn’t really know much of anything.”

  “Well, I’d still say that’s pretty good. For you.”

  “Thanks. Hey,” Alice said, sitting up and looking Rebecca in the eyes, abruptly animated. “Do I smoke?”

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “I mean, did I? Before. You know. Ever.”

  Rebecca was thrown off by the abrupt change in the direction of the conversation, and again thought about intervening in Alice’s emotional state, setting her on an even keel long enough to figure out was going on. She decided to hold off, because she was worried about Alice’s concern regarding the past. Alice, despite her handicap, generally wasn’t the kind to indulge in retrospection.

  “No,” Rebecca said firmly. “Not once. At least, not that I ever saw. Why?”

  Alice flopped back down on the bed, deflated.

  “Had a weird experience at the Far Shores. I don’t know. Felt like I almost remembered something.”

  Time for a change in conversation, Rebecca thought, to get her mind off it.

  “They are a weird bunch, aren’t they? The Far Shores crowd. Personally, I was relieved when they left Central. Do you think the kids will be all right down there?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I’m sure I won’t be leaving them alone. If I have to deploy all the active Auditors to the field again, then I’m shipping ’em back to Central.”

  “Wait. Does that mean that you’d consider Xia as a potential babysitter?”

  That finally got a grin out of Alice, which was something of a relief.

  “Why not? He’s great with kids. Really opens up.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rebecca said, reminding herself to do a checkup on Xia’s mental state in the next few months. Just to be certain. “How’s Mitsuru? I haven’t seen her in a while…”

  “I’ve got her working this thing in Georgia. I hope the little bitch appreciates it,” Alice said forlornly. “It’s the kind of thing I’d love to be doing right now.”

  ***

  Green text scrolled across her vision, data provided by the downloaded ballistics protocol informing Mitsuru of what she already knew – all four of the men were armed, the outlines of semiautomatic handguns helpfully tagged beneath the poorly concealed bulges in their suits, hypertext boxes offering educated guesses as to make and model based on dimensions. Of course, she could have determined that just as easily by their habitual adjustment of their coats, or the nervous way that the man near the door would occasionally hand-check something beneath his jacket, a ritual gesture of reassurance. It was to be expected. They all had their roles to play.

  “I am surprised that you brought such a large number of men for a simple transaction.”

  Mitsuru’s role, at the moment, was the representative of a buyer of small arms, mainly for resale to criminal groups in Britain and Republican Separatists in Northern Ireland, where assault rifles sold at a premium. She had spent much of her time over the past several weeks in Tbilisi arranging for the deal, with the help of a downloaded language protocol and a supporting cast provided by the Lionidze Cartel, who had done much of the groundwork for this operation. For a group of people who made a living primarily through the procurement and export of women to the international sex trade, they had proved to be remarkably friendly and helpful.

  “And I, in turn, am surprised that you came alone,” Gotsha responded, his smile revealing two gold teeth of dubious quality. “This is not a safe neighborhood.”

  “Or a safe business,” she responded, with a smile of her own.

  The men she was meeting with were legitimate members of a Caucasian Mafia that specialized in the sale of Russian military equipment to various despotic Middle Eastern countries that, for one reason or another, could not procure such things on the open market. Their role, however, was feigning interest in the deal she had been carefully arranging for a number of anti-tank weapons and sundry explosives, when they actually intended to rob and murder her. But appearances were important to all parties concerned, so they were still playing nice.

  “Very true,” Gotsha said, amused by her words and her apparent ignorance. The Inquisition Protocol she was running concurrently with the ballistics protocol revealed a great deal about what was actually on his mind, and Mitsuru thought that she would particularly enjoy killing him. “I assume that you brought the agreed-upon final payment?”

  The first third had been made by bank transfer, using a Turkish Cypriot bank that was still amiable to such transactions, but the remainder was to be made in cash, upon receipt of the various arms. They had overplayed their hand in their eagerness, however, making it obvious that they did not intend to complete the transaction by never inquiring how she intended to move the materials out of the country. Normally, they would have sought a sizable fee to arrange transit via one of the mafia-controlled border checkpoints – another useful piece of information her human-smuggler hosts had provided.

  “And I, in turn, assume that y
ou have brought the goods.”

  This time they all laughed, and Mitsuru smiled in return, impatient to murder the lot of them and be done with it. Two weeks in the underworld of Tbilisi had left her feeling the need for a hot shower and a handful of benzodiazepines.

  It was the fruit of Gaul’s methodical nature that had brought her here. While Central currently lacked a telepath capable of interrogating the necrotic memories of a corpse, for reasons Mitsuru preferred not to consider, there was no shortage of forensic expertise and technology, all of which the Director had ordered deployed on the bodies of the pawns the Anathema had left behind in their hasty flight from Central. She wasn’t privy to everything that Analytics had prized from the dead, but she knew that her current mission had been devised by tracing the origins of the rifles that a number had carried during the attack.

  The Anathema had relied on the cartels that had turned traitor to provide the bulk of the foot soldiers used in the raid, rather than exposing their own forces, which prevented them from incurring any meaningful losses. The strategy was not without drawbacks, however, among which was the relative lack of combat-grade weaponry that the minor cartels possessed. The Hegemony and the Black Sun retained control of their various subsidiary cartels partially by controlling access to armaments. The smaller cartels had sidearms and light weapons, but not the kind of gear needed to outfit a small army for an attack on Central – meaning that the Anathema had needed to provide it. Apparently the Anathema didn’t have sufficient stock on hand to do so directly, and had therefore contracted a number of criminal groups specializing in such things – in particular, the branch of the Georgian Mafia that Mitsuru had been negotiating with over the past weeks. Many of the AK-47 rifles used in the assault had been traced back to a single Russian armory, and from there, it hadn’t been difficult for Analytics to determine who diverted the guns into Anathema hands.

  Normally, this wouldn’t have been of much interest – after all, Central acquired much of its equipment via similar channels, and putting arms smugglers out of business was hardly among the Auditors’ concerns. This particular branch of the Mafia, however, was long rumored to be under the control of a coven of Witches, and the connection between the Witches and the Anathema was one of the many subjects that the Director was eager to learn more about. Mitsuru had therefore been dispatched to Tbilisi to conduct a transaction similar to the one the Anathema had made, in a successful attempt to draw the same smugglers out from whatever rock they normally hid beneath.

  She wasn’t sure why they didn’t plan on completing the deal. It was possible that they never had, seeing greater short-term profits in simple robbery, or that she had made some small mistake that had raised their suspicions. It made no difference to her, however. Mitsuru had never had any intention of keeping her end of the bargain. All she truly wanted was information, particularly the location of the coven of Witches behind the mafia, so that appropriate questions could be asked.

  The only problem with the situation that Mitsuru saw was that she needed one of the men alive, so telepaths could strip-mine his brain for useful data.

  “Loaded in a truck,” Gotsha lied, gesturing meaninglessly at the street behind the warehouse walls. “Waiting outside. Do you have the specified payment?”

  They were clumsy, playing everything too aggressive. The tension in their stances, in Gotsha’s voice, gave the game away. She would have needed to be twice the fool that they thought in order to believe the deal was still on. The fifth man, the one waiting outside, wasn’t even quiet when he locked the door from the outside.

  “Oh, yes,” Mitsuru said, putting her briefcase on the table in front of her, releasing the latches with a satisfying click. “It’s all right here. Exactly what you deserve.”

  ***

  “Something is wrong.”

  “What? No. Not at all.”

  Eerie frowned.

  “Alex is stupid. Don’t lie.”

  He sighed and looked up at the gently swaying tree branches, the light pleasantly filtered by the green leaves, the grass beneath him still slightly damp from last night’s rain. Eerie sat nearby, pointedly out of reach, and shifted away whenever he tried to get close to her.

  “I have a headache,” he admitted. “I’ve had one since yesterday. Usually, they go away after I sleep, but...well, I had weird dreams all night. When I woke up this morning, instead of feeling better, I felt a little worse.”

  Eerie put a warm hand on his forehead, though given the difference between their natural temperatures, he doubted she could tell anything. The Changeling seemed to have an internal radiator, which made her indifferent to cold weather.

  “Are you sick?”

  Alex shook his head.

  “No. I get these headaches all the time.”

  Eerie pursed her lips and looked concerned.

  “All the time?”

  “A lot. Not really sure when they started. Since the thing with the Anathema, I guess. And...well, that isn’t all.”

  Eerie just waited impassively, her eyes so profoundly dilated in the muted light that he could see his face reflected in them. She had been this way all afternoon – taciturn and distant – and nothing he said or did seemed to make an impact. Alex could tell something was wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what was bothering her. He was tempted to ask, but worried that whatever reasons Eerie had for avoiding him last weekend would turn out to be ongoing.

  He chose his words carefully, which was a chore, because Alex didn’t really understand the things he was trying to explain to her.

  “They’re like dreams, I guess, but different. Almost like memories of things that never happened. You ever wake up feeling sad or nostalgic or happy because of something that happened in a dream, but you can’t remember what the dream was about?”

  Eerie shook her head.

  “I don’t have dreams.”

  Alex shrugged. He couldn’t think of a better way to describe it.

  “I don’t know how else to explain it. I don’t have the words. But it hurts.”

  Eerie put a hand on his chest and kissed his cheek.

  “There aren’t words for some things, Alex. Just because you can’t find a name for something doesn’t make it unreal.”

  Alex was flooded with gratitude to Eerie. He should have known, he thought, should have guessed that she would be the one to understand the things that he couldn’t articulate. Of course she would. The girl who couldn’t explain anything about herself at all, not with the limited vocabulary of human language.

  “Poor Alex.”

  Eerie rested her hand on the back of his neck, and he felt his headache slowly recede, like ice melting, like fog along the coast burning away as the sun rose toward mid-afternoon.

  ***

  The air was heavy with smoke, volatilized lead, and cordite. Her ears rang, made partially deaf by the chaos of a shootout that had lasted only seconds. The gun in her right hand was empty, and she dropped and replaced the clip without paying it much attention, the movements a practiced routine, a vital and lethal dance. There were three shells left in the magazine of the gun in her left hand, which she used to sweep across the bleeding bodies of four men – three dead, and one still very much alive. Bleeding profusely from perforated kneecaps, sheet-white and hyperventilating from shock, but alive.

  The last Mafioso took his time unlocking the door, so Mitsuru had finished reloading by the time he stepped inside. She only needed one of them, and the ballistics protocol assured her that he was not wearing a vest, so she put four hollow-points in his chest. He toppled over into the wall beside the open door. Mitsuru placed her pistols back in the briefcase and took inventory of her injuries.

  One of the gunmen had died before he managed to get his gun out, but the other two had been faster. One of them had done nothing but fire wildly, punching holes in the wall behind her. Gotsha, on the other hand, had been pretty good – good enough that Mitsuru regretted not shooting him first. He must have had a thing
for antique weaponry, too, because the pistol he pulled was a variant on the Tokarev, a Soviet-era vintage handgun famed for armor penetration and deadliness in the hands of a skilled shooter. The gun had lived up to its reputation, and Gotsha had the requisite degree of skill, because Mitsuru was bleeding from a pair of wounds in her midsection above her left hip. The bullets had gone clean through, leaving neat wounds that damaged her intestine and nicked two other internal organs. It wasn’t particularly painful, but probably would have been life-threatening for a normal human.

  Mitsuru removed a first aid kit from the briefcase and applied antiseptic and a gauze pad, then wrapped her midsection in a length of bandage. She had just finished taping herself up, and was about to move on to stabilizing her prisoner, when she noticed one of the gunmen moving. She dropped the first aid kit and scrambled for her firearms, only now realizing that his movements were hardly those of a mortal wounded man.

  He transformed as he lunged, leaping across the table that separated them, claws extruding from his fingers, jaw distorting wildly while silver fur burst from his skin in patches. Mitsuru snatched one of the guns before ducking beneath the table and rolling forward, leaving them on opposite sides of the table. There was no time to turn – his reactions were fast, even for a silver Weir – but the ballistics protocol gave her enough advance warning that she was able to roll with the blow, and his strike merely tore strips of flesh from her back, rather than wounding her fatally.

  The pain lit the circuits in her brain, bringing a sharp awareness of the situation; the smell of gunpowder and shit leaking from a dead man’s intestines, the sensation of blood dripping down her back, hard flat light that illuminated the room from the half-open door. The Weir cried out, still in the midst of transformation, a combination of a scream and a howl, as it charged after her, tossing the table aside with one massive forepaw, giving her no time to collect herself. Mitsuru narrowly evaded the wide arms of the Weir as it rushed her, close enough to see droplets of her blood on the yellowed talons. She opened fire as it passed, firing all seven bullets in the magazine into its back and then tossing the gun aside and grabbing the knife she had strapped to her ankle.