“What?” the ambassador asked in confusion.
“They are now Ru’at,” the clone-Tavin said in a low murmur, but the timbre and solemnity that he managed to give to even these few words made it feel almost reverential.
“What!?” The ambassador scoffed. “That is a load of ridiculous codswallop, as well you know.” She shook her head. “A subjugated people never willingly adopt a new culture.”
“And just what makes you think that they are subjugated, Ambassador?” clone-Tavin kept his voice low amidst the tramp of feet and the rustle of clothing. “Do you hear anyone crying? Wailing? Gnashing their teeth?”
Solomon, as well as the ambassador and anyone else with ears in that room, could not hear sounds of distress at all.
“These people were what we used to call the First Martians, or Chosen of Mars,” clone-Tavin said, and Solomon’s eyes slid to Kol walking a few paces in front of him. Just like you, Kol? He gritted his teeth but said nothing. The technical specialist for Gold Squad had Martian relatives, who had apparently passed on their fanatical belief in an independent and free Red Planet to Kol. When the time had come, and push had turned into shove, the specialist had elected to betray all his squad-mates and leave them to die in the service tunnels under the Martian Armstrong Habitat. He had defected to the seditionists.
“All of these people were already dissatisfied with the Confederacy, and so when another alternative was offered to them—”
“The Ru’at, you mean?” the ambassador said darkly.
“—they volunteered to move and work here,” clone-Tavin said. “They were given hope. A new start. A new life. Which of us doesn’t want those things?”
“I don’t know, do you?” the ambassador returned archly.
“What do you mean? Because I am a clone? Just like the good lieutenant here?” Clone-Tavin spared the ambassador a thin-lipped smile.
“Stop saying that!” Cready hissed at him, and either the hurt and confusion in his voice or the put-down of Tavin made the ambassador stop her taunting of the clone.
“What’s wrong with them all?” the imprimatur whispered to Solomon at her side as they walked sedately in silence. They were heading not for any of the smaller doorways that led to the right or left, but instead, the hostages were being led straight to the far end.
And the spire? Solomon thought grimly. “Wrong?”
“No one’s talking to each other. At all,” Rhossily whispered, and then Solomon realized that was entirely true. He hadn’t registered it at first, given the shock of seeing humanity here in this supposedly alien base.
But there was…nothing. He shuddered as the hairs on the back of his neck started to stand up. No muttered conversations. No exclamations, proclamations. No arguments or lovers’ words. All the ex-Chosen of Mars walked calmly to their respective destinations.
“Are they drugged? Did you drug them?” Solomon hissed angrily at Tavin in front of them.
“Me? I haven’t done anything!” the clone said, apparently finding Solomon’s outrage very amusing. “Here, why don’t you see for yourselves?” Tavin stepped from their course to directly cross paths with another ex-Martian coming the other way. It was a young man with blond hair and an orange shawl.
“Excuse me, citizen. Ru’at hails you,” the clone said.
Solomon watched as the man blinked several times, as if surprised, and then reached up to touch two fingers to his forehead. “Ru’at hails you, brother,” the man responded seriously.
“Tell me, friend. Are you happy today?” Tavin continued.
The colonist stalled in front of him, frowning just slightly.
So, they do feel annoyance, Solomon was kind of grateful to see.
“Of course I am happy, friend,” the colonist responded. “The blessings of Ru’at go with us,” he said with a more perfunctory nod than before and sidled out of Tavin’s path to rejoin his own.
“You see? Perfectly happy!” Tavin stated.
“Perfectly brainwashed, you mean,” the ambassador muttered.
Solomon rather thought that the woman was right. They neared the end of the hallway and swept through a large open arch into a long, curving thoroughfare.
We must be almost under the spire. This appeared to be some kind of canteen space, Solomon thought, as he saw that on the inner wall of the curving room were many, many booth-like cubicles. The citizens of the quiet colony were making their way to various cubicles to wait in line, and through the doors, Solomon saw figures in the darkness—Ru’at!?—handing or offering things to the Martians.
“What’s that? Who’s behind those booths?” the imprimatur asked, clearly completely disturbed by this whole experience.
“Why don’t we go and find out?” Tavin gestured for them to move forward, cutting across the passive crowds of ex-Martians moving back and forth from one booth to another, before moving back into the thoroughfare and off to their own respective, personal missions.
“What do they do here?” Solomon murmured out loud, baffled. “How come the Confederacy doesn’t know about this?”
“Don’t they?” Tavin murmured, but before Solomon or the others could ask the clone to elaborate, he continued. “This is a colony, Lieutenant. Same as any other. The Ru’at citizens here work as every other colonist does, although the Ru’at technology does make a lot of the more menial tasks irrelevant.”
“Making cyborgs,” Solomon guessed, and when he saw Tavin’s jaw twitch, he knew that he had hit the nail on the head. “This is where the Martian separatists are getting their armaments from, isn’t it? The cyborgs? The war robots?”
“Your genetic programming does you a good service, Lieutenant.” Tavin inclined his head, leading the way not to the nearest booth, but cutting across to a line of three that were separated from the rest. Each had a lip built out around the booth, as if those inside would want privacy for whatever business they had to conduct there.
Business…or punishment? Solomon slowed his steps, but before he could signal his intentions to the two women at his side, the silence of the thoroughfare was split by a shrill keening.
Skreeeeeeeee.
“By the stars, what sort of cacophony is that?” The ambassador stumbled, hands sweeping to her ears as the imprimatur did the same.
Solomon, strangely, found that the noise didn’t affect him at all. And neither did it appear to affect Tavin at his side.
But every other human, from the imprimatur and the ambassador to the ex-Martian colonists, appeared to flinch. Almost as one, all the citizens dropped to their knees where they stood. Slowly, with greater resistance, the ambassador and the imprimatur hunkered down too, although Solomon rather thought it was from the pain the high-pitched screeching was causing in them.
In a moment, it was just Tavin, Solomon, and the complement of cyborg guards who stood upright and alone in the thoroughfare.
Tavin half-turned to nod slowly at Solomon. “Believe me now when I tell you that you and I are like brothers?” And then, the clone slowly and gracefully also lowered himself to his knees, gesturing for Solomon to do the same.
The best thief in New Kowloon was very tempted to remain standing, just to spite this strange man. I am NOT a clone! he shouted angrily inside his own head. No matter if he had seen almost two dozen cyborgs wearing his own face, he still couldn’t believe it.
Maybe I am the original, normal human one, he thought angrily as he joined the others on the floor, kneeling with head bowed.
SkreeeeeeEEEEEE! The screeching whine increased in pitch and volume until it appeared that every ‘normal’ human there was in agony. The worst affected, of course, were the ambassador and imprimatur, who cried out in anguish from their huddled falls. But the lieutenant could also see all the other ex-Martians starting to shudder where they knelt, their shoulders and backs shaking and sweat beading on their brows.
And still Solomon and Tavin, as well as the cyborgs, were completely unaffected. Even Kol was kneeling on the floor beside th
e others, gritting his teeth.
“What the hell are you doing to them?” Solomon hissed to Tavin.
“Me? But I am not doing anything at all, Lieutenant. It’s the Ru’at, see?” Tavin murmured, just as a bright purple light burst into the thoroughfare.
The imprimatur gasped out in pain.
The light appeared to have a similar effect on all the natural humans here. Low murmurs rippled across the throng in pained murmurs. It was the first time that Solomon had heard these strange colonists appear to express human needs.
The light grew more and more intense, until it was so bright that Solomon’s eyes, even turned away, burned with psychedelic after-images.
This is the Ru’at? They’re here? His mind was racing, wishing that he had a pistol on him. A weapon. Anything.
The light grew closer. Solomon could tell by the intensity of the glare and the wave of groaning discomfort from the people around him.
But the thoroughfare was too packed with human bodies… Where was the light coming from, Solomon wondered, until he realized that it was floating. The Ru’at, or whatever this thing was, was floating over the humans’ heads. And it was glowing with a brilliance that made Solomon think of neutrino stars and pulsars.
The floating light moved over their kneeling people’s heads, accompanied by that strange, high-pitched whine.
“By the stars, what the…?” he heard Mariad Rhossily whisper beside him. He raised his head to look at her, but the ethereal brilliance turned everything into high contrast. Her skin looked so pale as to be almost translucent, and her eyes were dark.
“What is it? What’s happening?” Solomon hissed at her. The imprimatur had her head not lowered, but raised, and then he saw that everyone else did, too.
“What is going on with them all?” he turned to hiss at Tavin, but then the light hit his eyes, and all thoughts of the Ru’at, the clone-Tavin, and even the Confederacy and Mars itself disappeared from Solomon Cready’s mind…
13
Shadows of the Past
Solomon Cready sat in his tiny box-room hotel apartment, looking at the object on the table. The neon lights of New Kowloon’s never-sleeping business district glared through the blinds. He hadn’t bothered to turn the room’s LED lights on. Really, what was the point when you had a six-meter advertising screen outside your window?
In a short while, everything would change forever for him. Not that the young man knew that at the time. His best friend Matty Sozer would arrive, with the news of his contact in the Neon Lounge who would be able to help him decipher the riddle of the device that sat on the table in front of him.
But maybe the younger Solomon Cready did have some premonition or awareness of what might happen, as his eyes slid away from the strange metal device he had found hidden in this very room.
It was some sort of transmitter, clearly, the man noted. A silver metal tube, thinner and smaller than his little finger, with two wires coming out of the end, with tiny wire pads at the end.
“Someone smuggled this in here to keep tabs on me,” Solomon muttered to himself. But who?
On the other side of the obscure tracking device was a heavy pistol, awaiting its clip of fat nine-millimeter bullets. Solomon had taken the pistol out of its lockbox under the cheap rented bed just a little while ago.
Solomon hated guns. It was generally a sign that everything about the mission that you wanted to go right had failed. Guns were an easy way to solve problems, and always the messiest.
But still, what he was looking at here he knew to be serious business. It was clearly a very sophisticated device, and someone had gone to a lot of effort to hide it in his room.
His room. Solomon Cready’s. It was a sign that ‘they’ were onto him—whoever ‘they’ were…
The Yakuza? Could be. Although this looked far too advanced for their usual methods. If the Yakuza wanted to keep tabs on him, the young thief knew, then all they would have to do was to drive up to his hotel and drag him into one of their Black Maria cars. The largest crime syndicate in New Kowloon had never been shy about getting to the point.
The Triads? Could be…but Solomon knew that they had even less chance of being able to afford some high-tech surveillance equipment like this.
That left only two players. One was the mega-corps that came to the deregulated zone of New Kowloon in order to perform all their most suspicious of trades. They could afford technology like this, but really, Solomon had stolen, swindled, and cheated enough of the world’s biggest companies that it could be ANYONE.
And then, of course, there were the Confederate Enforcers. The stars knew that Solomon had done plenty to annoy the police force of the Earth Confederacy.
Did this mean that they were onto him? And that a raid was imminent?
Whoever it was who was trying to keep tabs on Solomon, one thing was for certain: they had a lot of money, and they could get pretty much anywhere.
KNOCK-KNOCK-tap! The door suddenly shook with two loud knocks, followed by a much lighter finger tap.
‘Thank the stars,’ Solomon breathed as he stood up and moved to open the door. It was the secret knock that he and Matty had shared since they were teenagers, back out West in the American Confederacy.
Now that his best—and only—friend Matthias Sozer was here, everything would be alright. Matty knew people. Matty was smart. Matty had his back…
Many more years back still, Solomon stood in a deserted laboratory, not knowing that his entire life was about to change.
He was barely into his teenage years, and already he had managed to get expelled from the Confederate-state school. Not that he minded. The younger Solomon had hated how slow everything had been in that place—from the lessons to the teachers and other students.
Why couldn’t they see the answers to the problems as he apparently could so easily? Why couldn’t they catch up?
Solomon had been a gangly sort of youth, with sharp features and wide, clear eyes. And he was also very, very smart, which was why he now found himself here, in the heart of AgroMore’s laboratory, not intending to DO anything per se, more just to alleviate his boredom.
Or so he thought.
AgroMore was the biggest corporation in the small Mid-Western town that Solomon had grown up in. This laboratory and twenty or so others just like it were near the top of the company’s giant tower-like harvesters that slowly moved around the endless fields of golden wheat. It had taken Solomon an hour to climb the outer scaffolding, and only a further five minutes to pick the lock that let him in here.
The youth could feel the entire tower moving under his feet, as well as the distant vibration-chug of the hoppers and sorting machines in the levels below.
But up here? This was where the strains of wheat were put together, wasn’t it? Where the crop was analyzed, and the best genes were selected for next year’s growing season.
Around the youth stood rows and rows of metal tables, with long semi-circular hydroponic units on top. Different units were filled with glaring blue-white light, others had a deep red, and still more had a brilliant white. When Solomon edged closer to look inside, he could see the different stages of the young wheat plants—from seeds germinating on a mesh bed to sprouting shoots in thin trays of vermiculite.
But, apart from the wonders of genetic modification, there wasn’t much else for Solomon to see. His curiosity was starting to wane, and that was always bad. It meant that he would get bored, and that he would try to push himself further and do something truly reckless next time.
“Pssst!” A voice disturbed his investigation, and Solomon froze. There was something at the window behind him.
“Hey, you! The guards are coming! Get out of there!” The silhouetted figure was waving at him to come out.
“Guards?” Solomon turned around slowly to see a youth roughly his age—a few years older, perhaps, but not much—with dark hair and dark eyes. He was crouched on the windowsill that Solomon had himself unlocked and opened to the f
resh night air outside.
“Who are you? Why are you helping me?” Solomon didn’t move as he strained his ears. Could he distantly make out something—the sound of a drone copter, perhaps, rhythmically humming in the distance?
“I’m Matthias. Matty. I saw you climb the tower—it was pretty cool—but you were too slow.” The youth shrugged, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to want to climb the harvesting towers in the middle of the night. “You know that the guards patrol every twenty minutes, right?” The kid shook his head.
Solomon paused for a heartbeat before breaking into a grin. “Thanks, Matty. You know the best way down?”
Matthias Sozer nodded. “Of course. Follow me. I got your back.”
And from that day on, Solomon and Matthias Sozer had become friends, and eventually, accomplices.
“What did you do!?” Solomon looked down at the upturned face of his best friend—the man who had been his collaborator on a hundred scams, heists, and missions.
The man who had saved his life more times than Solomon had saved his.
In Solomon’s hand was the same heavy pistol that he had been wary of picking up just a few hours before. But he had picked it up—even though Matty had said his contact would be kosher, that there wasn’t going to be any trouble.
“But there was trouble, wasn’t there, Matty?” Solomon hissed in anger. They stood in the garage basement of one of the many tower block tenements in New Kowloon. The ghettoized district of Hong Kong was now a walled miniature city-state all its own—a deregulated zone that was hard to get into, and much harder to leave.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 84
