by Rick Partlow
“The Cult?” Victor repeated, shaking his head.
“He means,” Divya supplied, “the Predecessor Cult.” She rolled her eyes at his continued look of incomprehension. She looked a little shaky on her feet herself, but it didn’t seem to be affecting her attitude. “For God’s sake, you backwoods hick, don’t you ever audit the news?”
“Victor,” I intervened, holding up a hand to rein in Divya, “the Predecessor Cult is what most people call the Church of the Ancients. It’s something that’s popped up since the war.” I shrugged. “I mean, there’ve been people who worshipped the Predecessors since we first found out they existed, of course. But since the war, they’ve all come together under one, organized church.”
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger against my temple, fighting to think with a buzzing headache. “I think their main temple is on Hermes, near where they found the jumpgate map in the Edge Mountains, but I know they have a really big following on Aphrodite now, too.” My eyes narrowed and I glanced at Anatoly. “And I know they’ve had a lot of problems with the Skingangers.”
“They consider the human form to be the perfect realization of the Predecessor’s ideals,” Divya chimed in, her tone less scornful this time. “They think we’re the result of the Predecessor’s manipulation and that any attempt to change our form through cybernetics or genetic engineering is blasphemy.”
“I fought them on Aphrodite,” Anatoly said, his voice overriding and retaking control of the conversation as if we hadn’t spoken. “They hate us, and we’ve come to hate them.”
“So why the hell would the Cult be way out here?” I wondered, shaking my head. “And why would they be stealing weapons from the Sung Brothers? Who are they going to use them against?”
“Against us, of course.” Again, Anatoly gave me that look of contempt, like I was asking a stupid question.
I gathered all the patience I had left in one spot and tried to use it as a gag for the smart remark I wanted to make.
“You’re out in the Pirate Worlds,” I reminded him, unable to completely keep the rancor out of my voice, “out in the ass end of nowhere. Why would the Predecessor Cult be stealing weapons way out here, in order to attack you way out here?”
Now the look of contempt turned to one of discomfort, maybe even reticence.
“They came here to buy something from the Sung Brothers.” A thin, barely-discernable smile. “We stole it before they could.”
“Stole something?” Divya repeated, eyes narrowing. “Like a weapon?”
Anatoly’s gaze shifted to Kane for a second, as if he were judging just how far he could trust us. Then he turned and strode quickly out the door. I wondered for just a moment whether he wanted us to follow him, but then Kane walked out behind him and made up my mind for me. We had to jog to keep up with their long, isotope-powered strides, but thankfully, we weren’t going very far.
The chamber was two doors down from the data storage room, but unlike that one, it was sealed with a heavy, BiPhase Carbide door that must have cost a shitload to import out to the Pirate Worlds. Anatoly leaned over the ID plate and plugged his interface jacks into its socket for three or four seconds before the heavy door cracked open with a pneumatic hiss. The Russian pushed it aside and a light flickered on, the glow reflecting off of his cybernetics in a silver, otherworldly gleam.
The room was large and mostly empty. In one corner, a few diagnostic scanners sat forlorn and pushed aside, but all my attention was immediately drawn to the center and to the thing sitting there. It was an orthotope, a three-dimensional rectangular shape, made of some frosty but nearly transparent material that didn’t seem to be transplas or transparent aluminum or anything I’d ever seen before. It glowed from within, though I couldn’t see any light source and the material itself wasn’t luminescent, and there was something about it that drew your gaze almost against your will.
Inside it was a body, suspended in nothing, frozen in ice except the orthotope wasn’t ice. It was over two meters tall, deep-chested and powerfully built, with a musculature that seemed massive even for its size. And it wasn’t human, nor was it Tahni. It was bilaterally symmetrical and bipedal, with stereoscopic vision; it had a mouth where a mouth should be, hands where hands should be, feet where feet should be. Other than that, it was completely alien.
Its face was long and stretched out, marked with deep striations that I wasn’t sure were natural, and the eyes were dark and liquid. A mane of what might have been called hair crowned the elongated skull, but it seemed more like extremely fine, thin feathers than actual hair. The neck was long and sinuous, the shoulders were wide, and the arms were heavily muscled and ended in hands with long, multi-jointed fingers and thick, black nails. The legs were digitigrade, the knees facing backwards, and the feet were long and narrow and four-toed.
I’d never seen anything like it, but it carried with it an unmistakable feeling of familiarity, like it was close to something I knew, or had imagined. I stared at it in frank and unabashed awe, feeling my mouth dropping open and the room spinning around me along with the world that I knew.
“What the fuck is that thing?” Victor demanded, never the most imaginative among us at the best of times.
I knew. I didn’t have scans or radiological dating or spectral analysis or one shred of fucking evidence, but I knew what it was as sure as I knew the face of my son or the touch of my wife. My mouth was dry and I forced moisture into it, feeling a compulsion to answer the question.
“It’s a Predecessor.”
Chapter Nine
“Shit,” Bobbi Taylor hissed, sitting back in the navigator’s couch of the Nomad, her eyes widening. Then she glanced sharply at me. “And you’re sure this is actually a Predecessor, not one of those hive alien things like we fought on Thunderhead?”
Vilberg looked up at that from where he’d been leaning against the wall, eyes flickering between Bobbi and me.
“What?” He blurted. “You fought…what?”
I ignored him and kept scooping the steaming noodles out of the bowl I held in my lap. Vilberg had done a good job getting the intell back to the others, and that had earned him some trust points, but he was still a guy who’d very recently tried to kill us.
“It’s a Predecessor,” I said unequivocally around a mouthful of pad Thai. “And even if it isn’t, the Cult thinks it is.”
“Where the fuck did the Sung Brothers get their hands on it?” Sanders asked.
It was crowded as hell in the cockpit with all nine of us jammed into it and the hatchway, and I wondered if I should have called this meeting in the utility bay. But I liked being able to have everyone gathered close where I could look them all in the eye.
“From what Anatoly and the Skingangers have been able to find out,” I told him, “the Sung Brothers were approached by a man named Marquette. He’s an independent mineral scout and he was surveying an unclaimed system when he stumbled on what he says is a cache of Predecessor artifacts.”
“Jeez,” Waugh hissed, running a hand through hair wild with sleep. She’d been off-shift when Anatoly’s people had dropped the four of us off at the landing site, and she was still wearing the loose-fitting sweats she slept in. It was weird seeing her in anything but combat armor. She looked amazingly normal in civvies, like an office worker. “We’re talking enough money to buy a fucking planet.”
“Or the power to take one over,” Divya corrected her, fingers interlaced in her lap as she sat cross-legged in the copilot’s seat. She looked more herself now that she’d had the chance to shower and change clothes, more in control. “Which is, I think, exactly why the Predecessor Cult wants it.”
“The Sung Brothers are acting as go-betweens for this deal with the Cult,” I went on, tossing aside the empty bowl of noodles and sighing in contentment. I finally felt full, after two sandwiches and two bowls of Pad Thai, and I’d also finally stopped hurting all over.
“The…” I shrugged. “The corpse, or whatever you want to call it, i
s like a proof of concept, to show they can actually deliver the goods.” I snorted a laugh. “Or it would have been if the Skingangers hadn’t sniffed out the landing zone for the cargo shuttle bringing it down from orbit and hijacked the shipment taking it from the boat to the Sung warehouse.”
“But like Waugh said,” Victor interrupted, “we’re talking some serious, government or Corporate-level money here.” He was talking with a little bit of a lisp from his swollen lip; he’d refused the auto-doc, insisting he just needed a day or two to recover. “The Cult might be getting bigger, but there’s no way they can come up with that kind of scratch.”
“The Sungs probably don’t care who winds up buying the stuff,” Bobbi pointed out. “They just want the word to get out that they’re the people to see if you want it.”
I eyed Divya suspiciously, a thought I’d been too hurt and tired and hungry to really consider finally crystallizing in my head.
“They might find out that they’d be better off without that kind of publicity,” I said quietly. “That’s why we’re really here, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” she admitted with a casual shrug. “As I said, neither Mr. West nor Monsieur Damiani share everything with me. But it’s not a huge leap of deduction, is it?”
“Why tell us?” Kurt asked abruptly. I looked over at him, surprised he’d spoken up instead of letting his brother do the talking.
“What do you mean?” Victor asked him. “Kane talked to them, got them to help us.”
“Yeah, Kane got them to help free you guys,” Kurt agreed. “But why would this Anatoly show you the Predecessor artifact? Why would he trust you with it? Aren’t all of us just Norms to him?”
I paused. That was a damned good question. I knew why Damiani would want us here, why he’d want to keep any Predecessor tech off the open market, keep that secret for himself. But why would Anatoly and the Skingangers bring Victor and Divya and me into this?
“He’s scared,” Kane said, his contribution even more unexpected than Kurt’s.
He sat in the pilot’s couch, rod-straight and expressionless, his green eye focused on me.
“He stole the artifact to get even with the Cult for chasing him and his followers off of Aphrodite.”
There was a slight downward curl on the right side of Kane’s lip, the only hint of the stress and even pain that talking cost him. I’d used to think he just didn’t talk much because he was trying to be like the Skingangers, but I’d come to understand that the injuries that had given him his cybernetics in the first place actually made it hurt to talk.
“But then the Sungs brought in the mercs,” he went on. “Anatoly is holding his own, but he’s lost soldiers he can’t afford to lose. He thinks the Cult is stealing these weapons in order to attack him and the other Skingangers in retaliation for stealing the artifact. If they do, he won’t be able to beat them.”
“What the hell does he think we can do about it?” Sanders wondered, throwing up his hands. “There’s only the seven of us…eight if you count Divya.”
“Nine,” Vilberg said softly, hands clasped together in front of him, frowning with decision. “If you’ll have me.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I can work for Calderon anymore.”
“Even so,” Sanders pressed on, “seven, eight, nine, a dozen…what does he think we can do?”
And then I knew. It was obvious.
“He wants us to do the one thing he can’t do,” I answered the question for him as it was answered for me by my intuition. Every eye went to me, and I noticed that Divya’s had a knowing twinkle.
“He wants us to go talk to the Sung Brothers.”
***
“This is the craziest fucking thing we’ve ever done,” Bobbi said, swinging a leg over the back of the grounded mule then strapping herself into the saddle. “And that’s a long and colorful history to choose from, Boss.”
“It’s not that crazy,” I objected half-heartedly, mounting my own ride, then touching the control to bring the vehicle to its feet.
She didn’t say a word, just looked pointedly around at the clearing that connected the dirt road to the trailhead. It was all obscenely brightly lit in the afternoon glare from the system’s primary, the snow nearly melted off the persistent, hardy grass beneath it. Koji’s driver still stood next to the cargo truck he’d used to deliver the mules, looking at us with a mixture of amusement and pity on his scarred, weathered face. Divya watched from the cab, thoughts spinning behind her calculating eyes as usual, while Kane waited for her back at the ship.
Divya had her own part to play: Kane was going to take her out to the nearest system with a jumpgate and use the Instell ComSat there to report Calderon’s activities to the military, and to Cowboy. I figured he would get things done quicker on that front, and maybe we could get the Savage/Slaughter contractors out of our hair without having to kill any more of them.
I wasn’t happy about getting rid of our air cover and losing our only connection to the Skingangers for however many hours in Transition Space it would take them to get there and back, and I also wasn’t entirely comfortable having to ask for help. Generally, we got things done ourselves. But Divya had made a good argument that she was operating on partial, discretionary instructions and needed to get more detailed guidance. She’d seemed almost human about it, which had me worried.
Then there were the seven of us. We were mounted on the half-dozen cybernetic pack-mules that Koji had stuck away somewhere in his warehouse. God knows where he’d got them or what he’d been planning to do with them, but the four-legged all-terrain cargo carriers were the perfect transportation to get us up the mountain to the Sung Brothers’ fortified mansion without being intercepted along the way.
And then they were going to hide out and let me go in alone to try to talk to the Sung Brothers and convince them that their customers, the Predecessor Cultists, were ripping them off and were about to start a full-scale war right here on their planet, in their city. And they were going to listen to me after I’d been seen killing the mercenaries they’d hired and palling around with the Skingangers who they were fighting tooth and nail for control of the city.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I conceded. “This is a pretty sketchy plan.”
Sanders had climbed on behind Bobbi on her mule and she hit the control to raise the machine up into its walking position. The motion sent both of them swaying backwards against their restraints straps, like old-fashioned rodeo bull-riders.
“We’ve been in worse situations,” Sanders commented. He shrugged. “Not on purpose, though.”
“You sure you want to join up with this outfit, Vilberg?” Waugh turned in her seat to ask him. He was back in his Savage/Slaughter armor, but we’d used the portable repair shop on the Nomad to change the color from black to our team camo pattern to avoid shooting him by accident. He was also armed now, which still made me nervous; but if I was going to trust him to come along, it didn’t make any sense not to use him. At least he’d used a Gauss rifle before, even if it hadn’t been his issue weapon either with Fleet Search and Rescue or the contractors.
“Are you kidding?” The former mercenary asked, grabbing his helmet from where it was slung on the cargo netting hanging off the saddle. “I’ve been with Savage/Slaughter for months now and we never do anything this cool.” He settled the helmet on its yoke and sealed it.
“I take it all back,” Bobbi commented dryly, wrestling her own headgear into place. “He’ll fit in fine.”
I took a deep breath of the mountain air; it smelled sweet, like the Rockies back on Earth. Then I sealed my helmet and snapped the latches tight.
“Comms check,” I said into my audio pickup. One of the advantages of being this far outside the city was that we were away from the EM jamming fields and could actually talk to each other like it was the 23rd Century and not the 17th. “Sound off.”
Everyone responded with their name and I nodded inside my helmet, satisfied. I switched to Kane’s ‘link
address.
“Get back quick,” I told him. “If we need the ship, we’re going to need it bad.”
“Thirty-five hours’ turnaround.” It wasn’t actually his voice I was hearing; he had an implant ‘link, like me. His subvocalizations sounded more natural than his physical speech somehow, less strained. “Plus whatever time to negotiate with the ComSat.”
I knew that should be right on time, if we stuck to our schedule and everything went according to plan. Luckily, I had my helmet sealed so no one else could hear my insane laugh at the idea of everything going according to plan.
“Let’s move out. Victor and Kurt, you take the rear. Twenty-meter interval.”
I’d never actually ridden one of these things before and I was having a hard time getting comfortable with it, particularly uphill on the narrow game trail squeezed between rows of evergreens. It was a strange combination of riding a horse and operating a motorcycle and it shifted from side to side with every step, swinging the sides of my legs precariously close to the trunks of the trees lining the path.
The shadowed wood swallowed us up, throwing everything into a twilight gloom, and the dusting of swiftly-melting snow became thicker and deeper the higher we travelled. The slope of the trail wasn’t impossibly steep, but walking it on foot would have at least required snow shoes and taken days. The mules just ate up meter after meter with their long, swaying strides, their wide, spiked footpads sinking through the snow and digging into the ground beneath.
My helmet sensors quickly learned the sounds of the mule footsteps and began to filter them out, concentrating on possible threats. As my mount climbed upward into a small clearing about a kilometer up the trail, I heard a crashing in the brush off to my right and spun around just in time to see the ass-end of a black bear retreating deeper into the trees.
“Why the hell did they introduce bears here?” Bobbi wondered.
“The planet,” I reminded her, “was originally settled by Russians.”
“So?”
