by Ilsa J. Bick
Body Of Secrets . . .
The first body that turns up in Farway, a secluded town on the planet Denebola, is from out of town. When the Denebola Bureau of Investigation and the legate's office from half a planet away decide to help identify the murder victim, Sheriff Hank Ketchum knows he's in over his head.
Enter the infamous detective Jack Ramsey. With the help of the talented and beautiful local medical examiner, Amanda Slade, Ramsey digs into the case and discovers evidence that puts Farway at the heart of a conspiracy. But who's the greater threat—the Clans, the Word of Blake, or the legate's intelligence operative?
BLOOD AVATAR
Every assassin had a name like Jackal, Scorpion, Midnight Marauder. Even whack-jobs like that one on Towne, the Little Luthien killer, he had a name. So what sounded good? He needed a real kick-ass name because he was going to be famous.
Thinking, he trailed his fingers absently over the contours of a small caliber handgun. A plinker. Do the job, sure, but it wasn't BIG. He wanted BIG. He wanted POWER. He wanted a cannon, something blocky and loud, with a blinding muzzle flash and enough recoil to break his wrist. Something like the Northwind Star 720 tucked in a quick-draw holster on his left hip.
His ears pricked at a far-off rumble, a little like thunder. A car: a ground vehicle, not a hover. He edged his head around. Saw a glint of fading sunlight off chrome, and then heard the crackle, pop, and squeal of rock as the car pulled into the cemetery's gravel drive.
Peeling away from the monument, he knelt before the stone angel. The earth nipped his knees through his trousers. He placed his walking stick within reach of his left hand, shoved the handgun into his left coat pocket, and bowed his head: just an old man praying at the forgotten grave of a fallen comrade. He smelled dust kicked up by the car's tires, and then cool blue-white halogen light from the car's headlamps broke over his back, throwing his shadow into crisp, bold relief. Then he caught the pop of a car door and the crunch of a boot against gravel.
At that moment, for a reason he couldn't explain, his eyes again drifted to the stone angel. The angel's left wing was gone and its face tear-streaked with age. The angel clutched a sword in its left hand and the Scales of Justice in its right.
Then, like a revelation, he knew his name, and soon, very soon, this man would know his wrath: that of the Angel of Death, the Avatar of Judgment. Because he was Gabriel.
BLOOD AVATAR
A BATTLETECH NOVEL
Ilsa J. Bick
ROC
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For Dean, who showed me the way
Acknowledgments
Anyone trolling some of the message boards devoted to Battle Tech and Mech Warrior this past summmer has doubtless heard that this book is a bit of a departure. That’s probably right and I’m as interested as anyone in how this is going to shake out. I’m sure everyone will let me know.
Yet no writer does anything in someone else’s sandbox without the say-so of the people, charged with ensuring the integrity of that sandbox—or universe. In that, I have been blessed with two of the most flexible editors any writer could ask for, both of whom gave me an opportunity to try something just a little different. And so, my profound thanks and gratitude go to:
Sharon Turner Mulvihill, for her patience, enthusiasm, and willingness to stand back a bit and let me push the envelope while making sure I didn’t bust anything. Thanks for thinking of me.
Randall Bills (whose sigh of relief—when he realized that he wouldn’t get nearly as many panicky e-mails this time around—I heard waaayyy over here), for his great good humor and lack of ego; and for being the kind of guy who didn’t get his knickers in a twist even when I interrupted for about the thousandth time. Next time, buddy, I clean up the coffee.
Last, my love goes to my husband, David, and our daughters, Carolyn and Sarah. Thanks, guys, for soldiering on, foraging for nuts and twigs when I forgot about little things like, oh, groceries—and, most especially, for not making good on that threat to eat one of the cats.
The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.
—Franz Kafka
Prologue
New Bonn, Denebola
Prefecture VIII, Republic of the Sphere
9 December 3135
All Jack Ramsey needed was one scream. Then he’d kill the son of a bitch.
What Ramsey got instead was snow hissing over brick and wind roaring through ferrocrete and titanium canyons like a hundred DropShips. He stood at the lip of an alley, pressed against the ice-slicked brick of a condemned tenement. Snow sheeted in frigid gusts, stinging his face and neck, like getting slapped with broken glass.
Ramsey was a big man, with muscular shoulders and forearms, and large, scarred hands. His eyes were a startling blue-green framed by angular cheekbones and a broad forehead. He wore police-issue cold weather gear: thick-soled black boots, a black parka with a gold police insignia, insulated pants, gloves lined with olefin-polyester insulation and gel heat crystals, and a black, militia-stand
ard watch cap.
Where was McFaine? This had to be the place because Ramsey felt the monster like a malevolent force. They had this weird . . . connection. Or maybe Ramsey was just obsessed. Bad enough to be out in a blizzard, tracking a maniac, and probably suicidal to do it with no backup. But McFaine’s message was explicit: Come alone. Tell no one. Or, well, McFaine would kill the five boys, and wouldn’t Ramsey feel terrible about that?
McFaine wasn’t bluffing. Last time, Ramsey went in with a micro-SatNav and a backup team. Oh, he found the killing floor—strewn with body parts, not all from the same child, like McFaine had taken a snip here, a slice there. And scrawled with blood on brick: Naughty boy.
Another gale tore through the alley. Feeling the cold. His face was wet where it wasn’t half-frozen and meltwater trickled down his chin and neck. Even with the gloves, his fingers were numb, and his toes didn’t feel like much of anything. He transferred his personal carry, a blocky Skye Raptor 50-Mag semi-auto, to his left hand and flexed the fingers of his right. Running out of time . . .
“Goddamn it,” he said. He talked to the storm. “Where is he? I’ve done everything he’s wanted. Now where is he?”
Later, Ramsey thought all McFaine wanted was for Ramsey to beg. Because then it came: the thin, quavering wail of a child’s scream.
From the left, left! And there, a sliver of yellow light where there had been nothing an instant before. Basement window. The dark rectangle of an alley door.
Go, go! A swift cop-kick and Ramsey burst through the door, out of the storm and into near-total darkness. He spun a full circle, Raptor at the ready. A sense of a short hallway to his left and ahead, the black-on-black of a stairwell going down. The air smelled of char, old urine, and dead rats. Basement, basement, go! Moving, heavy boots clapping ferrocrete, nothing to be done about the noise, his gun out. At the bottom of the stairs now, where it was no longer dark but grainy with a fan of weak, yellow light coming from Ramsey’s left, and then Ramsey heard a child sob.
No, no, no! He kicked—short, hard. The basement door snapped back, rebounded against its jamb, and Ramsey muscled through—and then he stopped, cold.
The basement reeked of fear, sweat, rotting flesh and wet copper. The cinderblock walls and poured concrete floor were smeary with old blood cracked into a rust-colored jigsaw pattern like a crackle glaze. The blood was old because four of the boys were in pieces, disarticulated limbs heaped like clearance items at a sidewalk sale. A pegged wallboard held McFaine’s toys: pliers, wire cutters. A handsaw clogged with gore. But the reason Ramsey knew that only four boys were dead were the heads floating in specimen jars: eyes open, mouths agape in silent screams.
The last child, the fifth, was still alive. The boy was naked, roped to a chair with barbed wire. Crimson rivulets oozed down the boy’s bare chest and legs, and there were quills of stitches where the boy had lost two fingers at the second joint and the entire length of his right big toe. An odd metallic torque hung around the boy’s neck.
And there, crouched behind the boy, was Quentin McFaine.
“Dad.” The boy’s lips twisted with terror. “Dad?”
“I’m right here, son.” Ramsey fought to stay calm. Just get McFaine to move his head a few centimeters to the right and then . . . “I’ll get you out of here.”
“Oh, Jack, so anxious to leave?” McFaine’s voice was husky, sensual, sibilant as a snake, and just a little pouty. His shoulder-length honey-blond hair was pulled into a ponytail that shone like spun gold. His cobalt blue eyes were fringed by luxuriant lashes and set above an aquiline nose and generous lips sculpted into a perfect cupid’s bow. “God, I thought you’d never get here. I waited as long as I could with the others, but then you didn’t come and what’s a mother to do?”
Ramsey put some steel in his voice. “Step away from the boy, McFaine. Then stand up, slowly, hands behind your head. You don’t do what I say, I will kill you.”
“And blow your boy’s head off? Because you will, either way.”
“What are you talking about?” But Ramsey already knew. That collar . . .
McFaine pointed at a nest of pipes hugging exposed ceiling joists. “A sensor net: programmed to register little things like gunshots or burnt cordite. I knew you’d bring your slugthrower because you hate the smell of burned meat, don’t you, Jack? And I’m not bluffing.” McFaine tapped his wrist, and the room filled with the sound of the raging storm and Ramsey’s voice: Goddamn it. Where is he, where . . . ? McFaine tapped his wrist again, and Ramsey’s voice cut out. “I’m pretty good with sensor webs. Shoot me, and your boy loses his head.”
God, no . . . “What do you want, McFaine?”
McFaine laughed silently, like a dog. “You know,” he drawled, his fingers skimming the boy’s bloody chest, his pointed pink snake’s tongue darting to taste his index finger. “Ah, Jack, you know what I want. I want you, and I won’t make a trade.”
Ramsey was silent.
“Cat got your tongue, Jack? I hope not. I was looking forward to that item myself. Admit it, you want me. You want to get your hands on me, all over me . . .”
“Shut up, McFaine.”
“Because you want me.” McFaine gave a low, throaty laugh. “I’m in your dreams, aren’t I, Jack, your cop wet dreams?”
“Shut up!” Ramsey’s voice was hoarse with rage and desperation. “Just shut the fuck up!”
“Temper, temper, Jack,” McFaine said, and then, suddenly, he stood: a smooth, seamless unfolding of his legs and hips. He wore jeans and a black turtleneck, and now McFaine’s long fingers worked, gathering folds, peeling the sweater from his hairless, sculpted chest and abdomen. “Come on, Jack. Show me what you’ve got.”
Ramsey hesitated, his heart booming in his chest. He sighted down the Raptor’s barrel. Do it, kill him, kill him!
Instead, he broke at the elbow and thumbed on the safety.
“Ah, Jack.” McFaine gave a languid lizard’s grin, his teeth stained orange with blood. “Mano a mano, like gladiators. Skin to skin and winner take all. Now why don’t you get out of those hot things,” McFaine said, as he tugged at his belt, “and down to business?”
1
Farway, Denebola
Prefecture VIII, Republic of the Sphere
Friday, 13 April 3136
Noah Schroeder huddled in an ancient tree house just up the hill from the old, haunted Roman Catholic graveyard and figured that, another couple minutes, these cigarettes were gonna kill him for sure.
And just a couple of hours ago, he’d felt pretty good. Friday, end of another school week, zip homework. He’d biked eight klicks out of town, working up a sweat and going so fast the scenery was a blur of brown and gray, of fields chunky with stubble and stands of craggy, denuded trees. The west wind blowing in from the distant snow-covered peaks of the Kendrakes was cold enough to make his ears hurt, and the tip of his nose felt like a brass button. But the sky was bright turquoise and cloudless, so when Noah looked up, he spied a pair of thin white lines drawn on the dome of the sky. DropShips, freighters probably, outbound from New Bonn spaceport to the system’s jump point five days away. (Not that he’d ever seen a DropShip, or the spaceport, for that matter. New Bonn was seven, eight hours south, but the city might as well be on another planet. Farway was, well, far away.)
Joey handed over the cigarette. Noah said, “Wow, thanks,” wondered what the heck was wrong with him, and sucked. Smoke blasted his mouth, and he felt his head expand to the size of a Mule-class DropShip from the nicotine buzz. He thought he might pass out, or vomit, or just roll over, arms and legs in the air like an Amaris dung beetle and die, or maybe all three.
Instead, he said in a thin, strangled voice, “Yeah, wow, Joey, man, this is great.” Then Noah doubled over and hacked out smoke and what felt like half a lung.
Well, that made Joey Ketchum and Troy Underhill nearly bust a gut. Joey said, “Whoa, whoa, Jesus, don’t drop it!” He grabbed Noah’s arm and tweezed the cigarette free as Noah r
etched. “You know how hard it was to lift that pack?”
“How hard?” Troy asked.
“Hard.” Joey screwed the cigarette into the side of his mouth then swept up a pack of greasy, dog-eared cards and started a Solitaire game of Kerensky’s Run. At thirteen and change, Joey had three months on Noah and seven on Troy. Joey was also a budding sociopath: ironic, considering that Joey’s father was the local sheriff.
“I thought Bert was gonna PPC my ass, he gave me the evil eye,” he said, the cigarette marking time. Joey slapped down a Black Knight Six, squinted through a curl of cigarette smoke, made a horsey sound. “Piece a crap deck,” he said, sweeping the cards up and butting them together. “Can’t win Kerensky’s Run, you don’t got but three Binaries.” Tossing the pack into a corner, Joey knocked a tube of ash from the cigarette, settled his back against a rotting slab of plywood and blew a streamer of gray smoke. “Man, I’m so cold my dick’s gonna fall off.”
“You got to inhale,” Troy Underhill said, with the sage air of experience. Troy’s mom smoked, a lot, and Troy usually reeked like an ashtray. “Smoke’s gotta come out your nose.”
“Yeah? You gonna to show us, big shot?”
“I would, only I can’t,” Troy said, puffing up. He was a scrawny kid with thick glasses, oversized ears and a small pointy chin that made him look like a myopic elf. Troy also had diabetes. At first, Troy’s mom chased after Troy with orange juice and snacks. That stopped when Troy’s dad walked out three years ago, and Troy got an insulin pump. Since then, Troy’s mom just refilled Troy’s prescriptions and worked as a waitress down at Ida’s combo bakery and diner. She also made money another way, but no one liked to talk about that.
Troy said, “Doc Summers says if I smoke, my toes’ll fall off on account of my capillaries getting all constricted.”
