by Rick Partlow
Anywhere else, I’d be worried that the cops, if not the military, would be swarming all over the place, but not here. The Cult had been fighting the Skingangers here for years and between the two groups, they’d probably spread enough money around to the authorities to fund the retirement plans for every cop on the planet. It had worked in the Cult’s favor, let them drive most of the organized Skingangers out of Kennedy and in some cases right off the planet. But now it was going to bite them in the ass.
I was rounding the corner of the warehouse when I heard the whine of the hopper flying around overhead and then another explosion somewhere just out of my line of sight as someone launched a grenade out of its open canopy. That would be Bobbi and Sanders, and I hoped they didn’t get themselves shot down before they picked me up. Even as I had the thought, I saw a coruscating flare of lightning bolts ripping apart the sky as one of the Gatling laser emplacements on the wall tried to home in on them, but Sanders took the ducted-fan helicopter down in a steep, banking curve that took it out of the laser’s firing arc.
I cursed under my breath and tried to run faster, but nearly stumbled under the dead weight of the body and had to let go of my carbine again to steady it. It was sweltering hot and the plastic against the side of my face was stifling and I could barely breathe much less run, and I was starting to feel a dull ache in my shoulders and chest from muscle and ligament tears from where I’d busted out of the restraints. I had an idea of where I was in relation to the courtyard but smoke was starting to cloud the walkways and I couldn’t see more than a few meters ahead and I wished to hell my headcomp was back up so it could tell me…
And then I suddenly knew I was exactly ninety-eight meters from the central courtyard and would arrive in forty-five seconds at my current pace. I felt an intense relief at the thought that it was running again, not least because I hadn’t been too keen on the idea of carrying around a useless lump of biomechanical crap in my head for the rest of my life.
“You!” I didn’t need my headcomp to tell me that the man yelling was Calderon; I would have recognized his foghorn bellow anywhere. It did let me know that he was approximately twenty meters behind me, and from echo patterns, there were at least three people between us. “Stop! What are you carrying?”
Now I did run faster, and I juiced myself with more adrenalin to do it, even though I was still coming down from the shot that had let me break the restraints. Pain shot up through my back and into my shoulders and I wanted to fall to my knees and puke but I just kept going, hoping he wouldn’t be sure enough of his target to shoot at me…
I forgot who I was talking about. There was a flash behind me and a scream and I saw people diving for cover as laser pulses struck all around me. I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t go down and look for cover because I honestly didn’t think I could lift the damn thing again if I set it down. I grabbed hold of my pulse carbine one-handed, twisted around in a way that made my back scream with pain, and fired off the whole magazine. I couldn’t tell if I’d hit him or anyone or anything else; between the plastic bag half-covering my face and the smoke obscuring everything, I couldn’t see a damn thing. But once I felt the vibration go up the grip that told me the magazine was empty, I tossed the weapon away and started running again. I didn’t have any reloads and wouldn’t have been able to use them if I did.
I kept expecting a shot in the back to take me down, but there was nothing from behind me but screaming and yelling and people running blindly, just like what was in front of me. Here and there I saw armed Acolytes, but all of them were firing their weapons into the sky, trying to hit the hopper, or squeezing into gaps in the wall and trying to shoot at the truck outside. They didn’t pay a second’s attention to just another Dedicant running, even with something big and bulky and wrapped in grey plastic over my shoulder.
Then I was in the courtyard. It was paved and thirty meters on a side, surrounded by the outer walls of the Church of the Ancients’ main assembly hall and “spiritual education center,” a huge building that took up nearly half an acre on its own and was the only one constructed from modern materials in the whole compound. A bronze replica of the wormhole map from Hermes stretched ten meters long and half that wide on a stylized rock wall to symbolize the Edge Mountains, with the naked, idealized forms of a man on one side and a woman on the other, pointing to the sky.
The building was far enough back from the wall that none of the grenades from the truck had struck it, and the smoke from the fires in the workshops swirled up and away from it. I could see Dedicants running into the broad, open front doors of the assembly hall, under the watchful eyes of armed Acolytes.
“Get down here now!” I yelled at Bobbi, falling to one knee at the center of the courtyard, unable to take another step. My heart was pulsing a kilometer a second and I didn’t dare dose myself again unless I wanted it to explode.
Bobbi didn’t reply, but I saw two grenades punch into the front of the assembly hall and explode in gouts of smoke, clouding the courtyard from their view, and then the hopper was coming in almost on top of me. The fans had slowed to a whisper, letting the vehicle drop like a stone to avoid hanging a target in the air, then suddenly they roared almost in agony to cushion its descent and set it down with a solid thump on the landing struts only two meters from me.
The canopy was already partway open and Bobbi pushed it the rest of the way and jumped out, helping me up with a hand under my arm, her other hand bracing a Gauss rifle against her hip. She and Sanders were in full combat armor with helmets and I felt naked next to her in this stupid robe and sandals.
“Get this damn thing on board!” I yelled hoarsely, pulling at one side of the body bag, feeling weak and useless.
Bobbi grabbed the handle on the other side, and between the two of us, we managed to power the awkward, gawky length of the massive corpse into the rear cargo area of the hopper. I nearly collapsed again, catching myself on the side of the fuselage. I turned just as I heard Sanders yelling inside my head: “Look out!”
Time froze and I could see every single detail like I’d drawn it, pixel by pixel, on a computer modeling simulation. There was Calderon, at the edge of the courtyard, something bulky and cylindrical up on his shoulder, an electronic reticle blocking off the right side of his face, a fierce, satisfied smile spreading across his face. An Acolyte was standing beside him, his hand still slightly extended, like he’d just handed the weapon over to the other man.
I remember the very moment I realized that what he was holding was a plasma projector, and then the world exploded with the fire of a thousand suns and a roaring filled my head and everything was hot, hot pain like I was on fire. I dimly realized that I was moving and that something was dragging at me by the back of my robe and I wanted to fight it but I couldn’t see and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t think…
Then blackness.
Chapter Thirteen
Cesar looked back at me with his big, dark eyes, almost too big for his face. He paused on the trail and pointed upwards.
“What’s that bird, Dad?” His voice was husky for a six-year-old and there was a seriousness to his narrow, strong-jawed face that belied his age. I still felt a warmth in my chest when he called me “Dad.” It wasn’t something I’d ever expected, being a father.
I almost didn’t want to look away from him, but I followed his finger out into the morning sky, away from the red-gold of the rising sun and towards the darker blue of the opposite horizon, where the deep greens of the forest faded into the greys and browns of the mountains. I didn’t see it at first, but then the motion caught my eye, swooping just over the treetops, brown with a flash of white at the head.
“That’s a bald eagle, son,” I told him. I pointed towards a tall pine forward of his flight path. “There’s a nest in there. I’ve seen the chicks when I’ve been out here with your mom.”
“Is that the mom or dad eagle?” He wondered.
“I can’t tell from this far away,” I admitted. “They both bring food
to the nest and look after the chicks though, the same way Mom and I both take care of you.”
“Does the dad go away sometimes, like you do?”
I glanced down at him, thinking there was a child-sized rebuke in there, but the expression seemed more like honest curiosity.
“Yeah, sometimes,” I answered him. “He goes where he needs to go to get food and bring it back.”
“Is that what you do when you go away? Getting food for us?”
I knelt down next to him, looking him in the eye.
“Sort of, son. To get money to buy food and other things. And to keep you and your mom safe.”
“Safe from bad guys?” There was no fear when he said it, just a look I’d come to recognize as wariness and mental preparation for a struggle.
“Yeah,” I pulled him into a hug, closing my eyes. “I try to keep you safe from the bad guys.”
“What happens if you don’t come back?” The words were whispered next to my ear, so soft I almost didn’t hear them, but they twisted like a knife in my heart and I hugged him tighter.
“I will do everything I can to always come back,” I said. “It would take an army of bad guys to keep me from coming home to you and your mom.”
I pulled away from him slightly to give him a reassuring smile. “But even if there is an army and someday I can’t make it back, your mom is one tough lady and she’d never let anything happen to you. She’s tougher and meaner and more ornery than any momma grizzly bear, and you know how tough those can be.”
He laughed at that, like I knew he would. Watching the bear cubs playing in the meadows was one of his favorite things when he went out with Sophia on her population census patrols in the hopper.
“Come on,” I said, patting him on the shoulder and straightening up. “Let’s get back home before your mom starts worrying about us...”
I blinked awake suddenly, confused for just a moment in the transition from dreaming to reality and feeling a surge of claustrophobic panic as I saw the transplas only centimeters from my eyes and sucked in a breath of the stale air. Then the transplas barrier began to slide down past my face with a gentle hum and a cold blast of air from outside it hit me, making me shiver and making me realize I was naked.
I looked around and saw the antiseptic white of the ship’s tiny clinic, the machinery of the auto-doc surrounding me, traces of nanite-filled biotic fluid still gurgling into suction tubes near my feet. On a portable gurney next to the auto-doc was a two-meter-long plastic body bag that I knew held the Predecessor corpse.
Suddenly everything flashed back to me, including things I hadn’t been conscious to experience. I remembered words I hadn’t heard, radio calls that didn’t make sense, the sounds of gunshots and shouting and then the experience of being carried before I’d been stuffed into the auto-doc. There was gravity now, which meant we were either on a planet or in T-space, because the ship’s drive field could only create gravity in Transition Space.
My headcomp let me know that we were, indeed, in T-space, and we’d been traveling through it for over a hundred hours.
Shit. I’d been in the auto-doc for a hundred hours?
Then there was other information in my head, like a memory I didn’t want to recall. I’d been hit by the edge of the plasma projector blast that Calderon had fired. I’d had third-degree burns over half my body and most of my organs had been shutting down before they’d got me into the auto-doc. The only reason I hadn’t been in the thing for twice as long was the nanite suite that Cowboy had given me some years ago repairing some of the damage on its own.
I ran a hand over the skin of my left arm; it felt smooth and normal and I sighed with relief. Then I touched my face and realized that my hair was gone, probably burned off along with my skin. The skin had been replaced in the auto-doc but the hair would have to grow back on its own.
By the time I sat up in the coffin-like tube, I could see Sanders walking up from the ship’s utility bay, carrying a pair of shorts and a T-shirt for me. He walked like a man weighed down with a load, his feet scraping against the deck listlessly, an expression of utter exhaustion on his face.
“Glad you’re awake, Boss,” he said, handing the bundle over to me.
“How the hell did you guys get out of there?” I wondered, taking the clothes from him. “Calderon told me he knew we were on the planet and the ship was being watched.”
“They tried to stop us,” Sanders replied quietly, shrugging. “We may not be welcome on Aphrodite again after this.” He gestured back towards the cockpit. “Kurt kind of fired the proton cannon inside our docking bay.”
“Damn,” I said with a chuckle, swinging my legs slowly out of the pod and pulling on the shorts he’d brought me. “Well, I didn’t much like the place anyway.” I stood up carefully, keeping a hand on the auto-doc to steady myself, but my balance seemed to be okay. I pulled my hand away and slipped into the T-shirt. I felt a bit sticky from the biotic fluid, but I could get a shower in a few minutes. “Are we heading back to 82 Eridani?”
He nodded, like it hurt to talk. I frowned. Something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t me getting hurt.
“What’s wrong, Eli?”
“That plasma shot,” Sanders told me, the words seeming to wrench themselves free while he tried to hold them in. He leaned against the auto-doc, like the act of saying them was draining him and he could barely stand up.
“You got the edge of it.” He choked out the last bit past a sob, barely able to speak. “Bobbi took most of it.”
Then the memory hit me, the words being spoken around my head as I was dragged desperately into the hopper by Sanders. He’d been screaming then, screaming over the ‘link to Victor and Kurt and Vilberg. “She’s dead! Bobbi’s dead!”
I stood there, staring into nothing, not saying a word. I couldn’t speak. It didn’t seem real to me; I was sure that, any second, I’d wake up again and find out that this had just been another part of the dream I’d been having about home. But this was a nightmare I wasn’t going to wake up from.
I heard muffled sobbing and looked up, realizing that, at some point, the others had joined us here in the medical bay. Victor had wrapped Sanders up in a hug, holding the smaller man as he cried unabashedly, his shoulders shaking. Kurt stood beside his brother, a hand on Sander’s arm, tears running down his own face. Vilberg looked sad, scared and a little out of place. He hadn’t known Bobbi as long as the rest of us.
“Kurt,” I said, trying to make my mouth work. “Go get the whiskey.”
He nodded. I didn’t need to clarify; there was only one bottle of whiskey on this ship, and it was Bobbi’s. She left it on board between operations, and only drank from it on the way home. No one spoke while we waited for him, and when he returned, it was with the half-full bottle and five shot glasses we kept in the ship’s small galley. He handed them out, then silently filled each to the rim. Sanders wiped a sleeve across his face as he took his, sniffing one last time.
Kurt filled his own glass last and we stared at the oak-barrel brown of the whiskey, each of us waiting for someone else to speak.
“The first time I met her,” Sanders said, still looking down at his glass, “we were at a group counselling session for Marine vets in Sanctuary.” He grinned through an expression that seemed ready to cry again. “I tried to hit on her, and she threatened to break both my legs if I ever talked to her again.”
“Did she go for guys at all?” Kurt wondered. “I never recall her talking about a man.” He shrugged. “Well, honestly, I don’t recall her talking about a woman either, so…”
“She was married to a guy,” Vilberg said. All of our heads spun around to stare at him, and I wondered if my face looked as shocked as theirs did. The former Fleet Search and Rescue NCO shrank a little at the attention, but pressed on. “She told me once. Like a few months ago, when we were in the galley after an op. It was before the war. She ended the contract when she joined up, because she didn’t think it would be fair to ask hi
m to wait for her.”
“Holy shit,” Victor muttered. I nodded agreement.
“She never got a scratch,” I reflected, my own voice sounding strange in my ears. “All those jobs, all those people shooting at us, all the people we lost…she never got a scratch.”
I held my glass up and slowly, the others did as well.
“To Bobbi,” I said.
“Absent friends,” Vilberg murmured.
The whiskey went down smooth, and I didn’t feel its bite till it was deep into my chest. It spread out like a warmth, moving downward to my stomach.
“This feels like the end,” Sanders said, his voice forlorn and desolate.
“It’s not the end,” I corrected him, turning the shot glass over and over in my fingers, watching the light catch in its facets. “Not until I kill Alberto Calderon.”
***
“This is going to change everything,” General Murdock murmured softly, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to M’Voba, who hung over his shoulder, staring in disbelief at the Predecessor corpse.
It…and we…had only arrived a few minutes ago, but Murdock’s researchers were already swarming around it, setting up the scanning equipment around the gurney with the efficiency of termites building a nest. I don’t know what they’d done to it inside that glass-looking block I’d first found it, but it still showed no signs of decomposition, still looked like the eyes might open any second and it would rise from the table to kill us all with some vague, godlike power.
“The Cult worshipped these things before they ever saw one,” I said, eyes glued to its dark, striated face. “What the hell are they gonna’ do now that they’re…” I struggled for a word. “Growing one?”
I looked over to General Murdock.
“Why would Andre Damiani be loaning technicians out to the Cult to duplicate this thing?”
“That’s rather obvious, Sgt. Munroe,” he said, still not looking away from the corpse. “They’re going to create a living genetic duplicate of the thing, probably give it implanted memories and a convincing story, then pass it off to their followers as being a real, live Predecessor.” Now he looked over at me, cocking an eyebrow. “Better shut your mouth before something flies into it, Sergeant.”
