by Rick Partlow
He leaned across the table towards me, his eyes nearly glittering in the soft light, his voice mesmerizing. “Tell me, Mr. Munroe, have you ever felt their presence? Perhaps when you passed through the jumpgates they left for us, or walked on the worlds they prepared for us?” He gestured around grandly. “Even this world, though it is no paradise, has been changed to allow us to live here. Is it not the most humbling of gifts?”
“It is.” And I meant it, though I didn’t know why I was sharing it with this nutburger. There was something about him that made you want to talk to him. “I know someone who feels much as you do about the Predecessors.” I was married to her, in point of fact, but he didn’t need to know that. “But she doesn’t think they would have wanted us to worship them. She thinks they left us all this to make our own way, to be the best humans---or Tahni---we could be, not to try to become like the Predecessors.”
“The Tahni are imperfect,” he scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. “They go into heat like animals, unable to control themselves. They were a clumsy, early attempt before the creators achieved their full magnitude of greatness. They were rushed to sentience. With us, the Ancients took their time and achieved their purpose.”
I sniffed, the hypnotic spell of his voice suddenly broken. That wasn’t a smooth, convincing argument; it was a well-rehearsed sermon.
“Humans don’t seem so perfect to me,” I commented.
“Not morally, I grant you that. But we are only given the opportunity to achieve perfection, not the guarantee. Too many of us obsess over possession, or technology, or power.” I glanced surreptitiously at the Sungs and saw them wince slightly, in chorus as always. Israfil clenched a fist in front of him. “The real power in this universe is to carry on the legacy we were left by the Ancients, to cherish our heritage and safeguard it from corruption.”
“Is that why you stole all those weapons from the Sung Brothers?” I asked him, hiding my grin behind my crystal goblet as I took a sip of fruity wine. “To safeguard our heritage?”
The Sung Brothers glanced at each other, then at Israfil, then at me.
“What the hell are you talking about?” It was the same brother, I was sure of it, the one who’d been doing all the talking before.
“I tried to tell you that the bratva weren’t the ones raiding your off-world weapons storage sites,” I reminded them. “The raiders are working for the Predecessor Cult.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” The speaking half of the Sungs demanded, though both shared the same disbelief and outrage in their expressions.
“If I had to guess,” I responded with a shrug, “it’s because they’re pissed off at you for letting the Skingangers steal their alien corpse and they don’t think your hired guns can get it back. So, they’re going to take your weapons and do it themselves.”
I took another drink, reveling in their discomfort. “And maybe,” I added, “they also intend to force you to tell them where you’re keeping Captain Marquette so they can find this treasure trove of Predecessor artifacts without worrying about the Corporate Council or Space Fleet Intelligence outbidding them.”
Israfil seemed unmoved by the exchange, his face as calm and confident as it had been the entire time.
“Does that sound about right, your holiness?” I asked him, cocking my head to the side questioningly.
“I assume you have some evidence that anything you’re saying is true,” Israfil said, motioning expansively, “and not just the claims of a representative of one of those who would wish to take the inheritance of the Ancients to use as a weapon for themselves or their employer?”
“Boss,” I heard Bobbi’s voice on the mastoid implant hooked to my ‘link. They hadn’t bothered to take the ‘link away…again, sloppy and unprofessional.
“Yes,” I said to her, but made it seem like I was answering Israfil.
“I found him.”
“I have it,” I told her, but looked at the High Priest. “I took it off the computer systems of the raider ship I destroyed on the habitable moon of the inner gas giant in this system just a couple days ago. I’d be happy to provide it to you,” I addressed that to the Sung Brothers.
Then I smiled in a way that I’d learned from Divya over the last year. “I have to wonder, though, if you’ve shared with Israfil here the information that you’re actually holding Captain Marquette prisoner here on the grounds, trying to sweat the location of the Predecessor cache world out of him so you can be the ones to auction all that technology off to the highest bidder.”
That got a reaction from the Cult priest. His eyes narrowed and he looked between the two brothers, his hands flat on the table like he was getting ready to leap up and attack.
“You have the man here?” He demanded. “You told us you were waiting for him to contact you.”
The Sungs stood, both pointing at me.
“He’s trying to turn us against each other,” the talkative one accused, scowling darkly. “It’s nothing but Corporate Council mind-games. They want the technology for themselves, you just said it.”
“Mr. Sung.”
Everyone turned, even me, at the sound of Caesar’s voice. He’d appeared soundlessly in the door to the dining room, and for a gut-twisting moment, I thought he was about to announce that they’d discovered Bobbi and the others. But he didn’t seem alarmed or upset, just perhaps a bit annoyed.
“What?” Sung snapped for both of them.
“Sirs, Captain Calderon and that DSI agent are here. They say they need to talk to you right away.”
Uh-oh. That could complicate matters.
“By all means,” Sung said, still glaring at me. “Why don’t all of us go down and see what they have to say.”
I spoke to Sung, but I meant the words for Bobbi.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
Chapter Eleven
“What in the hell is he doing here?”
I sighed heavily. Apparently, someone had thrown Calderon in the auto-doc and it had repaired his jaw, because he was back to his rugged good looks without the swelling and bruising. He was armored up, but without a helmet, like me. Unlike me, they’d allowed him to keep his sidearm and I saw him reaching for it until Van Stry put a restraining hand on his arm.
“Alberto,” she adjured him quietly. She was dressed in a heavy jacket and I couldn’t tell if she was armed, but she wasn’t looking angry for some reason.
Calderon moved his hand away from his holster and Caesar did as well…he was still standing in the open door, watching the interplay. When he saw Calderon calm down, he pushed the door shut and stepped into the sitting room behind the contractor officer.
“He’s stirring up trouble, mostly,” Sung said, eyeing me balefully as he and his brother came down off the last step of the staircase. “I wasn’t aware you two had met.”
“I tried talking to him before I came to you,” I said, attempting to keep the comment from turning into a snarl. “I thought maybe the way his people were killing innocent civilians was unintentional and we could sort through it in a professional manner. He threw me and my associates in a cell, then drugged us and tried to interrogate us.” I bared my teeth. “It didn’t go so well for him.”
“This piece of shit is in league with the bratva,” Calderon accused, taking a step toward me, shoulders squaring up. Van Stry stepped partially in his way and he scowled at her, but didn’t advance any farther. “They broke him out of our base and killed three of my people doing it! He’s why we’re here, we needed to warn you about him.”
“I listened to what Anatoly had to say,” I spoke to the Sungs, pointedly ignoring Calderon “because he had intelligence I needed. I’m not in league with anyone. I work for Andre Damiani, and his orders were to get the job done, whatever the cost.”
God, I felt dirty saying that. But it was something they’d respect; they sure as hell wouldn’t care about kids living in bombed-out houses.
“You need to lock this man up,” Van Stry urged the Sungs
. “He’s dangerous, and I can guarantee that you’ll have an ample reward from my…” She hesitated. “…my connections if you turn him over to me.”
“We are not getting involved in internecine corporate politics,” Sung insisted, as both of them took up a stubborn stance. “This is between you and your bosses and you can fight it out on your own turf.” His frown deepened. “And you can all get the hell out of here now, as far as I’m concerned. We have business with our clients to attend to.”
He’d nodded towards Israfil, who still seemed distrustful of the two men. He hadn’t said a word since we’d come down the stairs, but I thought I’d seen his lips moving, noticed his eyes flickering side to side, the way someone did when they were using an implant mastoid transmitter.
“The Cult?” Van Stry said, staring at the priest and apparently recognizing his vestments. “What sort of business do you have with the Predecessor Cult?”
“They prefer the title ‘Church of the Ancients,’ Agent Van Stry,” Sung ground out. “And as difficult as this might be for you to understand, our business is none of yours. Calderon, go do your fucking job and get back what those fucking Skingangers stole from us. I don’t want to see your face again until you do.”
“I need some backup if you want me to go into the Skinganger neighborhood,” Calderon insisted plaintively. “I need armored vehicles.”
“They’ll give it back to you,” I said. The Sungs both looked around at that, as did Israfil. “Anatoly told me he’d give you back the Predecessor corpse. You can give it to the priest, do whatever with it. On two conditions.”
“Tell me,” Sung prompted, licking his lips with what seemed like an unconscious tick.
“He and Alexi want to make a deal to share the market.” I shrugged. “They can’t take it back from you, but they can make it unprofitable. They’d rather negotiate something that’ll profit you both.”
“What else?”
“The Predecessor tech. They don’t care if you sell it to the government or to the Corporate Council, but you can’t sell it to them.” I nodded towards Israfil. “Be honest, do you think the Cult could offer you as much as Fleet Intelligence? Or Andre Damiani?” I shot a look at Van Stry, who seemed nonplused by the whole discussion. “Or even my mom, Patrice?”
“Your mom?” Sung repeated, brows knitting in confusion.
“You can end this war,” I offered them. “You can get back to business as usual, get all of us out of your hair and turn a hell of a profit on Marquette’s find. Do you want to make a deal?”
They both looked down, wearing matching expressions of desperate, churning thoughtfulness.
“Mr. Sung…,” Van Stry began, but they each held up a hand to stop her.
“Shut up,” he said. There was a pause for maybe two or three very long and uncomfortable seconds before they looked up and the speaker spoke again. “I want the artifact back, then we can start talking.”
“You are making,” Israfil finally interjected, his tone dark and grim, “an unenlightened decision.”
“You’ll get what you paid for.” Sung waved a hand dismissively, clearly happy to have an excuse to cut ties with the man. “I never promised you anything beyond the one artifact.”
“Sirs,” Caesar stepped up, hand instinctively going to the ear bud for his ‘link, his face showing alarm. “We have incoming bogies…”
There was a change in the air, a shift in the stance of everyone standing there in the entrance hall, and I just knew.
“Bobbi!” I yelled, giving up all pretense. “Get him out of there now!”
I’d barely got the words out of my mouth when something hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer and I was lying on the polished, wooden floor on my back with stars floating in my vision and clouds of pain and confusion swimming inside my head.
At first, I couldn’t hear anything but a dull roar and I was sure my eardrums had been ruptured, but then there was a buzzing in my ear that turned into Bobbi’s voice.
“Munroe! Are you there? We have assault shuttles strafing the compound! You need to get the hell out!”
I raised my head up and saw that the front door had blown inward; glass, cement blocks and burning wood were littered across the entrance hall, along with what was left of the bodies of the guards outside, and a haze of smoke was drifting through the sitting room, lit sporadically by the flickering of smashed light panels in the ceiling. The whine of turbojets penetrated the muffling gauze of trauma and I saw a flash brighter than lightning, heard a crack of thunder that shook the foundations of the mansion as a proton cannon struck a target outside.
I shook my head clear and rolled over onto my side, not feeling anything broken and not seeing any blood. If any shrapnel had hit me, the armor must have stopped it. I got up to my knees and tried to get a look around as best I could through the smoke. I saw Calderon pushing himself to his feet, seemingly uninjured except for a freely-bleeding cut on his scalp, but obviously shaken and staggering, with a dozen scuff-marks on his black armor where fragmented glass or wood or cement had struck him to no effect. Van Stry hadn’t been so lucky: she had a jagged, ten-centimeter-long shard of glass right through her throat. Blood was gushing out around her as she convulsed, trying to draw her last breaths but unable to get them past her torn-out trachea.
Caesar was on the floor, moaning softly, the jacket he wore over his armored vest singed and smoking, and a dozen cuts on his hands, upper arms and face but nothing that looked fatal. His bosses, the Sung Brothers, didn’t look so identical anymore. One of them had a bloody gash across his left cheek and a deep cut in his right side that was turning his expensively tailored tunic from pink to dark red; the other seemed unmarked, though he was flat on his back, eyes closed, moaning softly.
Israfil was nowhere in sight. He’d moved fast, but then, he’d known what was coming. Those were his assault shuttles out there, using the weapons he’d stolen from the Sungs. And he’d be coming for Marquette. I’d barely had the thought when another blast shook the building, farther away, someplace at the other end of the wing.
“Bobbi!” I yelled, staggering over to where Caesar still lay insensate. He had my pistol tucked into the pocket of his jacket and I grabbed and holstered it, then began working loose the sling of his pulse carbine. “It’s the Predecessor Cult! They’re here and they’re trying to get to Marquette! Get him out before they find him!”
Nothing. Not even static. We were being jammed again, by the same people who’d been responsible for the jamming in Shakak. Both sides had assumed it was the other…
I stripped the extra magazines out of Caesar’s chest pouches and shoved them into the pockets built into the armor plates on my legs, then jogged towards the rear exit of the sitting room. I knew approximately where Bobbi had been when she’d called me; my ‘link had displayed it on my contact lens. There was a stairway back here, or an elevator…
I heard footsteps and turned to see Calderon limping to follow me, his pulse pistol in his hand, a look of determination on his face. I tensed and started to raise the pulse carbine I’d appropriated, but he waved at me to keep going.
“I saw him,” he snapped. “That Cult priest…he ran before the explosion.”
I hesitated for just a second, finally deciding that my only choices were to trust him or kill him, and not quite ready to kill him, yet. I headed off and let him either follow or shoot me in the back.
The hallway was dim and filled with smoke, and I nearly collided with a young woman running headlong from one end to the other, fleeing from poorly understood danger to imagined safety. She was dressed formally, in colorful, flowing robes, and I thought she might have been a hired servant. The Sungs were the kind of people who I figured would have servants.
I let her pass by, then headed off to the right, the way she’d come, deeper into the interior of the mansion. The power was off in some rooms, the lights flickering in others and it had gotten colder; the central heating was probably damaged. Here and there
, I could make out shouting and screaming, and twice more there were blasts from what had to be proton cannons hitting the structure.
“This fucking place is going to fall down around our ears!” Calderon exclaimed after the second one, and I glanced back in surprise at how close he was, just a half meter behind me.
“Let’s maintain our interval, Captain,” I bit off dryly and he fell back a step, looking a bit sheepish.
There was the door. It didn’t have a sign, obviously, no holographic designator advertising “secret dungeon this way, watch your step.” But I knew how the building looked from the outside and I knew that there were only certain areas that could support a staircase built out of local materials. It did have a lock, but not an expensive electromagnetic one with biometric sensors; it was just a simple and cheap physical bolt operated by a key card or RFID.
I blasted the locking mechanism with the pulse carbine and it blew apart in a small steam explosion from the moisture in the wooden frame and a splash of molten metal from the bolt. The door swung open with a creak of inadequately lubricated hinges, revealing a deep and unrelieved darkness heading downward. I had enhanced night vision optics in my contact lens, but even that didn’t make the lightless depths below any easier to fathom.
I glanced down at the pulse carbine to determine how to activate its built-in infrared weapons light and nearly died for my trouble. I had no idea where the shots came from, just a corner-of-my-eye realization that something had hit the wall behind me, sending a shower of plaster and wood spraying across the hallway, then training and instinct sent me diving forward through the darkened opening, from known danger to unknown.
The unknown involved stairs…lots of them. I hit them shoulder-first and was automatically trying to roll onto my side when I realized I wasn’t stopping. My armor cushioned the blow somewhat, but I tumbled helplessly head over heels down the concrete stairs, trying to shield my head with my arms. I hit the first landing and finally managed to stop before I slid down the next set of steps. Something was rushing down at me and I scrambled to grab the pulse carbine from where it had fallen next to me, nearly opening fire before I realized it was Calderon.
