by Rick Partlow
“They want him,” I nodded over at where Marquette was slowly sitting up in the cot. “He knows where the rest of it is.”
Anatoly grunted dispassionately. “A few hours ago, I would have tried to kill you all and give him to them to end all this. Now…” He moved his head in what might have been a shrug. “Now, there is nothing left to save, is there? We’ve lost.”
“Everyone lost,” I corrected him. “You, the bratva, the Sung Brothers, us.” I motioned at the kid. “Them. Especially them.”
The boy looked over at me, his face still with that numb, cold expression, like he’d never feel anything again. But he’d cared enough to save us…
“I’m Randall Munroe,” I said, trying to get him to meet my eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Amos.” He looked up. “Amos Dobrev.”
“Thanks for helping us, Amos.”
“He told me to,” the kid said without a hint of shame, pointing at Anatoly.
The cyborg smiled. “I was keeping an eye on the street.” He waved upward. “There are hardwired cameras up there.”
“What do you want?” I asked him bluntly. I didn’t feel the least bit bad about it; he wasn’t going to shelter us out of the goodness of his heart. Whatever else this guy was, he was also an enforcer for a criminal gang.
“A way out.” His answer was just as blunt and plain-spoken, the grin leaving his face. “This place is done, even if and after the Cultists leave. I want a ride somewhere more hospitable. I hear Canaan is a nice place for my people these days.”
“You help us get to the ship,” I agreed, “and you’ve got a deal.”
“Until then,” Anatoly said, “there’s food in the lockers.” He motioned at the polymer storage tubs.
“Protein bars anyway,” Sanders clarified, tossing me a couple of them.
I caught them one-handed and began unwrapping one, then sat down on the cot next to Marquette and offered him the other. He looked better now that he’d been able to rest, and he tore into the ration bar like he hadn’t eaten in days. I eyed him sidelong, chewing my own meal sedately while he sprayed crumbs over his bushy beard.
“What was it like?”
He glanced over sharply at my question, eyes hooded and cautious.
“The place where you found the stuff,” I amended, though I was sure he knew what I meant. “What was it like?”
“It’s all underground,” he said around a mouthful of stale chunks of protein infused with vitamins and minerals. “There’s nothing on the surface, nothing to show what’s down there. It’s not even really habitable anymore, even though it’s got that terraforming fungus. I think it’s really old.”
He paused, swallowing the last of the bar.
“Inside…it’s like there are things you can’t even see.” I squinted at him, uncomprehending and he sighed. “I mean, you see the things, but they’re so strange, so not like anything you’ve ever experienced, that you don’t really see them.”
“So, you couldn’t tell what anything was?” I was almost disappointed. Part of me dreaded what he’d found, knowing how people like my mother and uncle would use it, but another part… Well, these were the Predecessors we were talking about. Legends, myths, bedtime stories people had told their children for over a hundred years.
“Not all of it,” he admitted. “But there were ships. I could tell what those were. Like glowing green tubes, floating over their landing pads. Floating there for hundreds of thousands of years.”
I tried to imagine it, feeling the same sort of tingling go up my spine that I’d experienced when Gramps used to tell me about the Ancients and their secrets. Then I imagined that kind of technology in the hands of the Cult or the cabals and felt a different sort of chill.
“Did you tell them anything?” I needed to know. “Did they get anything out of you?”
“Not what they wanted.”
His beard split in a white grin that wasn’t at all pleasant looking, and I got the sense for the first time that Captain Marquette wasn’t a very nice person. I guess I should have known that; nice people don’t try to sell advanced alien technology to the Pirate World cabals.
“I had counter-conditioning when I was in the military,” he told me, leaning over conspiratorially, “so the drugs the Sung Brothers had lying around didn’t do much. They hadn’t gotten past that stage yet when your girl there,” he nodded at Bobbi, “broke me out.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. Thank God for small favors. I started to stand from the cot, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Don’t you want to know where it is?” His tone was almost playful and he punctuated it with almost manic laugh. “It seems like everyone wants to know that.”
“No,” I said flatly, getting up and stepping away from him. “And I don’t want anyone else to know, either.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Munroe.”
I came awake at the light touch on my arm, before I even heard Bobbi’s voice, and looked around, blinking uncertainly. I was lying in one of the cots in the hide-out, up against the wall, and I didn’t remember going to sleep.
“How long was I out?” I mumbled, rubbing a hand over my face.
“Five hours,” she said, and I sat up straight, eyes flying open.
“Shit.” I swung my legs off the side of the cot, feeling instinctively for my holstered handgun. “You shoulda’ woke me up earlier.”
“You needed the rest,” she told me. I looked at her and saw the dark circles under her eyes.
“And you didn’t?”
“I was going to take the next shift.” She shrugged. “But something’s up. Anatoly wants to talk to you.”
Anatoly, as it turned out, was in another room just down from the main chamber, a much smaller one that was secured behind a very solid-looking metal door. It was ajar and when I pushed it open, I could see the glow of a dozen obsolete, two-dimensional flat-screen monitors mounted on racks set into the stone wall and fed with cables that led upward out of insulated pipes that ran through holes drilled into the ceiling.
I could see the city streets on the screens, and I guessed they were hooked to the wired exterior cameras Anatoly had mentioned. It was sometime past noon outside, and the glare on the lenses made it hard to see details, but I could make out armored Cultists wandering around out there, up to something. Maybe looking for us.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” the big cyborg said, not turning to look at me. “We have a situation outside.”
I glanced at him, then moved closer to the screens. Everything came into focus as the primary went behind a thick, gray cloud. The Cultists weren’t just looking for us, they were pulling civilians out of their homes, and their shops, and their basements. They’d corralled them in the streets up and down the central section of town, the area where I’d been chased around by the drop pod. It was still out there, too, buzzing around just over the rooftops, and I thought I saw the shadow of an assault shuttle pass over up in the clouds.
“What the hell are they doing?” I wondered, shaking my head.
By way of response, he touched a control on the wall and activated the speakers.
“…immediately!” A voice boomed out across the streets as if it came from everywhere. “You have until 1500 hours local time to respond!”
“What’s…” I started to ask, still confused, but Anatoly raised a hand to quiet me.
“It repeats,” he informed me.
“I am Israfil,” the recorded voice began again. “I am a High Priest of the Ancients, and I have come to this world to reclaim that which is rightfully ours. I have nothing against any of the pure humans here, against those who have not given themselves over to the blasphemy of rejecting the perfect forms with which our creators gifted us. I don’t wish to harm any of these innocents.”
I could see their faces now, the people in the streets. There were older men and women, showing their age in a way that seemed unnatural to me, seemed obscene somehow. They
huddled against the cold in misery, buried inside their heavy jackets but still cold. There were children, from toddlers up to teenagers, clutching at their parents’ in fright and uncertainty, their eyes wide and their cheeks red. And then there were the parents, the younger ones, though they looked old before their time as well. They seemed helpless and frustrated and angry and, more than anything else, terrified for their children.
“The fate of these people is in your hands, Randall Munroe.” The words sent a chill down my back as I began to understand what they meant. “I don’t want you, and I don’t want them. I want the one called Marquette, and I know you have him. Deliver him to my forces, alive and in good condition, and I give you my word on the sacred light of the Ancients that I and all my acolytes will leave this place immediately! You have until 1500 hours local time to respond!”
“And so on,” Anatoly commented dryly, switching off the speakers. “That’s another two hours, in case you’d lost track of time.”
I stared at the screens but I wasn’t seeing them. Instead, I was remembering another transmission, one the Tahni had sent the Resistance on Demeter during the war. They’d recorded it in the Amity town square, after we’d launched a successful raid on their headquarters. Their response had been to line up against a wall everyone who had worked in any capacity for the city, planetary or Commonwealth government, and then have them publicly executed. I saw their faces on those screens.
I saw the face of the mother who’d been implanted with a tracker and sent to the Resistance hide-outs with her family. She’d known we couldn’t send her back to the Tahni, and we couldn’t take her back with us, either. She knew what had to be done, but she couldn’t do it herself, so she’d begged me to kill her. And I’d done it, because there were so many other lives on the line, because I’d known it had to be that way.
And now, there was even more at stake. There was the carnage and death and chaos that the Cult would unleash if they were given access to Predecessor weapons, weighed against the lives of a few dozen outlaws living as peons on the Pirate Worlds.
“You’re not actually considering doing this, are you?”
The question came from Calderon, but when I turned back to the doorway, I could see that Bobbi, Victor and Kurt were with him as well…and so was Marquette. None of them looked happy.
“How did they know?” Victor asked me. I frowned in confusion. “How did they know you’d care about the civilians?” He clarified. “Most mercenaries wouldn’t.”
“I think I said something about it when I was talking to the Sung Brothers,” I admitted ruefully. “This Israfil seems pretty quick on the uptake.”
“Oh, Christ Jesus,” Calderon moaned in disgust, shaking his head, “you are going to do it…”
“We can’t let all those innocent people die,” Kurt declared stolidly. “Not after Demeter.”
I looked at him, a bit surprised he’d taken the position that strongly without his older brother occupying it first. He’d changed as much as Sanders, I decided, it was just harder to notice it in the shadow of Victor.
“I won’t let them kill those people,” I insisted. “But I don’t have the right to hand over Captain Marquette to the Cult against his will, either. God only knows what they’d do to him to try to get the location of the Predecessor tech, not even talking about what they’d wind up doing with the technology.”
“We have to hit them, then,” Bobbi judged, not seeming frightened of the thought, nor eager either. In fact, she seemed like she was about to fall asleep on her feet. “If we start sniping them from long range, they’ll have to let the civilians go and head for cover.”
“Until that drop pod zeroes in on your locations,” Calderon pointed out, “and brings whatever building you’re hold up in down around you. Or has the shuttle do it for him.”
“What would you suggest, Captain Calderon?” I asked him, hearing the chill in my voice even though I hadn’t intended it.
“Look at those people, Munroe,” Calderon said, pointing at the images on the monitors. “There are what? Maybe twenty or thirty of them? In one section of a small city on a backwards, outlaw colony out on the fringes? That’s what the whole fucking Commonwealth will look like, if you let the Cultists get Predecessor technology. That’s what Earth will look like.”
He was a stone-cold prick, but he wasn’t wrong. I didn’t say anything, which encouraged him to continue.
“It sucks,” he said, “but your number one priority has to be keeping the Cultists from getting hold of this man.” He looked over at Marquette, regarding him like he might a bug. “Even if you have to kill him to do it.”
“Whoa!” Marquette’s eyes were large, his face pale as he backed up a step from the others. “Let’s not be doing anything we’ll be sorry for later!”
“The merc’s right,” Bobbi admitted, shrugging indifferently. “We can’t turn him over if he’s dead. We show Israfil the body, say Marquette got killed in the gunfire up top earlier, maybe they’ll just leave.”
Honestly, what they were saying made total sense. I’d done worse and for not as good of a reason. Again, the image of that young mother with the implanted Tahni tracker flashed in my head, the red splash as the bullet took her in the back of the head.
“We’re not killing him,” I said flatly, and it almost seemed to me like I was hearing someone else say it, that I had no control over the words. I looked over at the frightened mineral scout captain, who was still backing up, eyeing the hallway back to the stairwell with panic in his expression. “Relax, Marquette,” I told him. “None of us are going to hurt you.”
He didn’t seem totally convinced, but he stopped trying to slink away and leaned cautiously against the wall, still keeping a watch on Bobbi and Calderon.
“We’ll take our chances with an assault,” I decided. “It’s not perfect, but even if some of the civilians get caught in the crossfire, it’s still better than watching them all get executed.” I nodded to Calderon. “Me and mine will take the other exit, out through that bar the kid was talking about and set up to distract them. While we do, you and your two take Marquette and head for the extraction point outside town. Our ship will be landing there in a few hours, so you just have to stay out of sight until then. If everything goes right, we’ll meet you there.”
“And what happens when it doesn’t go right?” The Savage/Slaughter officer wondered. There was no malice in his tone, just a depressed certainty, which made it worse, somehow.
“Anyone who’s not there by the time our ship arrives,” I stated simply, “won’t be coming.”
He shook his head, but didn’t try to argue with me, most likely because he knew he’d be getting out either way. I turned back to Anatoly.
“You’ll go with Calderon,” I said. “Kane’ll take you wherever you want to go, even if I don’t show up.” I looked around, realizing I was forgetting something. “Where’s the kid?”
“He’s not comfortable around so many people,” the Skinganger said. “He’s hiding out farther down the tunnel, under the wrecked bar.”
“Make sure he knows to keep his head down and stay off the street until this is done.” I felt guilty I wouldn’t be able to take him with us, get him somewhere safer.
“You’re really going to risk your lives for those Norms?” He asked me, and I couldn’t tell from his tone if he was impressed or amused. I didn’t bother answering him.
“Bobbi, go brief Sanders and Waugh and let them know we move out in an hour.”
She nodded, and Kurt and Victor followed her back to the main chamber. Marquette stared at me for a long moment before he turned and walked after them without saying another word.
***
“I wonder if Vilberg is okay,” Waugh murmured, checking the charge on her rifle for the tenth time in the last ten minutes.
“He knows the extraction point,” I reminded her, testing the sync between my contact lens and my weapon’s sight and wishing, again, that I had a helmet. “If
he made it through the Cultists, he’s probably hiding out there, waiting for Kane and Divya to get back.”
“He’s not a bad troop,” Sanders allowed with a shrugging tilt of his head, just before he slid his helmet on and began testing the seal. “For a Fleet Security type, anyway,” he continued over his external speaker.
It had been only a half hour since I’d made my decision and everyone was way past ready. There wasn’t much we could do other than stuff down a last ration bar or go to the bathroom one last time before we sealed up our armor. We were antsy and so were Calderon and the others. Even Anatoly seemed to be pacing in the hall out past the chamber, towards the stairwell. I’d never seen a Skinganger pace before.
I was seriously considering just moving up the time of the attack and I was about to suggest it when I noticed that Marquette wasn’t in the room. I frowned, coming to my feet. If he bolted, we wouldn’t be able to protect him.
“Where’s Marquette?” I asked. Everyone looked at me blankly. I stuck my head out the door to the hallway. “Marquette?” I called and heard it echo back at me in hollow emptiness.
“He said he had to go to the bathroom,” Anatoly volunteered, pausing in his restless, metallic shuffle. “There’s one in the security monitoring room.” He paused. “That was a while ago, though…”
I don’t know why I was suddenly nervous; maybe it was instinct, or maybe paranoia. I stepped quickly down to the monitoring room and yanked the door open. Its metal hinges squeaked plaintively and I saw immediately that the room was empty. I ducked inside and went to the small, plastic screen that walled off the chemical toilet and pushed back the curtain, not caring if I walked in on Marquette while he was taking a dump.
Nothing.
“Damn, damn, damn,” I muttered, turning back…and seeing that the monitors were showing an empty street. The Cultists were gone, and so were the civilians. That is, most of the monitors were showing an empty street. One of them was frozen on a video frame of Captain Marquette.
