by Rick Partlow
It was little more than a hole in the wall, sandwiched between a closed-down pleasure doll rental shop and a custom bakery.
The sex doll place is closed, but the fucking bakery is still open? Fontenot thought, chuckling softly in disbelief. These people must really like their cakes.
The sign above the door wasn’t holographic, or even electronic; it was shaped from what looked like tarnished brass and mounted with old-fashioned bolts on a frame attached to the stucco front. “CAP ROCK GRILL.” The words were twenty centimeters tall and tarnished green with neglect that matched with the cracks in the facing and the scratched, clouded transplas of the windows. Fontenot paused on the step up to the front door, about to ask Kan-Ten one more time if he was sure, but he pushed past her and opened the door with a shoulder against its faded brown paint.
A blast of cool air hit Fontenot as she stepped inside behind him, and she felt sweat she hadn’t realized was there drying abruptly, sending a chill down the natural part of her neck. The grill wasn’t terribly crowded for what was, ostensibly, lunchtime, but everyone inside was human and all of them turned to look at Kan-Ten as he and Fontenot moved to the counter.
“So much for this place being a mixed establishment,” she muttered half to herself. Their reports had listed the Cap Rock as a business that catered to both humans and Tahni, but times, she noted, had changed.
She sidled up next to Kan-Ten at the lunch counter, pulling out a stool and more leaning into it than sitting down. There was one woman working behind the counter, haggard and drawn, with the hope drained from her pale, blue eyes. She wiped greasy hands on a greasy apron and regarded Fontenot with an expression too apathetic to be a scowl.
“You know,” she said with a voice like feet shuffling on the pavement, “we don’t serve any of that Tahni food here anymore.” She rubbed at her face with her forearm, scratching at an itch she didn’t want to stain. “You should probably take your friend somewhere else.”
“Well, damn,” Fontenot replied, sniffing a disappointed sigh. “We’d heard good things about this place.”
“There are restaurants for his kind out in the District.” The waitress shook her head, and Fontenot thought she saw a bit of sadness in the woman’s eyes, the first sign of life the walking corpse had shown. “Things haven’t been that good here lately, especially between us and the Tahni. You should go.”
“You are hungry, my friend,” Kan-Ten said to her. “If you wish to eat, I would be happy to wait and drink water.” She wasn’t sure if he was feigning concern, because she honestly didn’t know what a concerned Tahni sounded like.
“You heard Tammy,” a deep, booming male voice came from the kitchen of the grill. “You and that damned freak get the hell out of here.”
The man was tall and skinny, with a stringy brown beard; he was as ragged and greasy as “Tammy,” but not quite as apathetic. There was a fire behind his eyes, the rage of having been wronged, and the satisfaction of finding a target to take it out on. There was what looked like a short-barreled shotgun cradled in his hands, the muzzle pointed low, towards Fontenot’s gut. Her hand went automatically toward her holstered Gauss pistol.
“That gun doesn’t scare me,” he told her, taking a step forward. “You’ll be puking blood before you get the chance to use it.”
“All right,” she said coolly, backing toward the door. That civvie popgun didn’t scare her either, but some things were better left unsaid. “We’re leaving.”
The air seemed heavier when they exited the diner, as if a front was moving in and the storm was about to hit. The sky had clouded over and on the street…she saw the shift in the patterns, the people circling where there had been none before. Some were watching, eyeing the two of them as they walked out of the hotels and restaurants and into close-packed apartments and rowhouses. The minutes dragged with their steps, and as she and Kan-Ten moved deeper into the residential district, the buildings seemed to crumble and degrade with each block; she could see them watching in doorways and open windows and front porches, children and younger teenagers and older people, grandparents, perhaps great-grandparents.
Others were moving, circling, trailing them like a wolfpack tracking prey, looking for weaknesses. The walls seemed too close now, the street too narrow, although it hadn’t shrunk a centimeter. They weren’t locals; she could tell that by the way they carried themselves. They might have lived in this city, but they weren’t from this neighborhood. They were too well-fed, dressed too nicely, far too confident. They stayed thirty or forty meters back, just keeping the two of them in sight but not close enough to give her an excuse to draw her gun, not even close enough that she could have a clear idea of their numbers.
“They are driving us,” Kan-Ten said. She couldn’t see his eyes moving under the ridged brows, but she knew him well enough to know they were scanning from side to side, the same as hers, taking everything in.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“You have been alive a long time, my friend. I am not sure there’s anything you don’t know.”
Fontenot buried the laugh in a snort, trying to keep the smile off her face. It would give the wrong impression at the moment. Then they rounded a corner and even the hint of a smile faded. An old cargo truck was parked sideways, blocking the road, the canvas cover hanging across the metal frame over its cargo bed flapping in the warm wind funneled between the rowhouses. Seven men were arrayed across the breadth of the road in front of the truck, a few with lengths of metal pipe held in rough hands, one with a handgun, and another carrying a short-barreled shotgun.
She slowed her pace, the soles of her combat boots dragging across the pavement, and she drew the Gauss pistol from its holster, holding it at her side. The ones behind them were closing in now, at least ten of them, cutting off their retreat. None of those had guns, but she saw a few knives and clubs.
All of them were men, she noted with amusement, not one over thirty by her best estimate. Were they just hardcore frontier types, she wondered, who thought “womenfolk” were too soft for this sort of dirty-work, or was it just that young men were the only ones stupid enough to get talked into it?
The eternal mysteries of life.
“You can’t get us all with that one handgun,” one of them said from behind her.
She turned and regarded him, keeping her gun at her side. He was tall, fairly good-looking she thought, though too young for her tastes. He was well-built, with biceps and shoulders that strained against the new-looking work shirt he was wearing, and a mop of brown hair that threatened to fall into his eyes. He had a black-bladed dagger grasped in his left hand, held in a knife-fighter’s grip like he’d used it before.
“No,” she agreed, raising the Gauss pistol one handed and lining its muzzle up with his head. “But I can make sure I get you first.”
“So what?” the younger man scoffed, with depressingly convincing bravado. “You think there’s so fucking much to live for here that we care about dying anymore?”
“I think we’re about to find out,” Fontenot muttered, mostly to herself. Then, aside to Kan-Ten: “I’m going to kill the two with guns. Get ready to make a break for it.”
Everything seemed to happen at once. Someone off to the side, maybe one of the crowd encircling them, maybe one of the spectators, threw a rock, a piece of pavement, something---there was less than a second between the time she saw it and the moment it hit, and it connected in just the wrong place. Fontenot felt a spear of pain in her right temple and polychromatic flashes danced across her vision as she staggered backwards, sensing more than hearing the warning from Kan-Ten that the crowd was attacking.
She still had the pistol in her hand, but everything seemed to be floating behind a veil of fog; she could see and hear, but the sights and sounds were disconnected from reality, and her response to them seemed to come minutes after the stimulus. She lashed out with her fists, slowly and clumsily, but there was enough power behind those fists to make even clum
sy blows devastating. One hand missed entirely, but the other connected with a meaty shoulder and she heard the crack of bones breaking and the high-pitched scream of pain, felt whoever she’d struck flying away from her.
Then there were more of them, three, four, half a dozen, clenching at her, trying to pull the gun out of her hand, trying to take her down. Fists struck at her, most bouncing ineffectually off synthskin-covered metal but one connecting with the human side of her jaw and causing another explosion of light in her vision, another jolt of numbing pain. She thrashed wildly, freed from her normal restraint by an incipient concussion that dulled her thoughts.
Bones broke and men fell and the only reason she hadn’t shot anyone was that there were three of them holding desperately onto her right arm, weighing it down, keeping the barrel pointed downward. She pulled the trigger anyway, the tungsten slug discharging into the pavement and sending fragments exploding upward, and someone howled in pain as they were struck in the face by the bits of concrete.
There was the crack of a pistol discharging; it was, she realized dimly, a long-obsolete projectile weapon, not even rocket-assisted or guided, just a propellant and a slug, and the round bounced off the body of the cargo truck with a petulant whine. She snarled at the three men holding her left arm and grabbed one by the ribs through his flesh, feeling the bone crack beneath unyielding metal fingers, then throwing him into another man.
Shouts and screams and pain and blood and she had a dim, distant sense that Kan-Ten was fighting too, and not doing nearly as well. She thought she saw him go down under three of the men, heard a shout of triumph from one of them and she knew she was going to have to start killing people…
Something hit her hard in the right hip, sending her tumbling out of control over the pavement, scattering her attackers with the dull thump of metal on flesh; and, as she hit the street on a metal shoulder, she could see the front end of the cargo truck spinning inward, the left side crumpled from the devastating impact of the transport van that had run into it at top speed. The truck skidded to a stop, bouncing rhythmically on its suspension before settling forlornly into a cockeyed rest, leaning into the ruin where its left wheel had been bent inward.
The van should have been in just as bad of a shape, Fontenot thought, but then she saw the bulldozer blade welded to the front of it like a snowplow, saw the edge of it dig into the street as it jerked violently to a stop. Tall, powerful figures in multi-colored strips of cloth jumped from doors on both sides of the transport, tumbling out recklessly, hands filled with clubs of wood or metal, a couple of them holding oddly-shaped blades. They swarmed over the humans who’d piled on top of Kan-Ten, clubs swinging up and down like the keys of a piano, the notes muffled thumps and cries of pain.
When was the last time I saw a piano? Fontenot wondered irrelevantly, still in a haze. Was it on Earth, two hundred years ago?
They were Tahni, she realized abruptly, some rational part of her brain struggling to seize control once again. The people in the van, the ones attacking their human assailants, they were all Tahni males. They looked like shards cut from the same stone, all of them adults of an age that they could have served in the war, their cues grown long and wrapped around their necks in the style of Tahni warriors.
The shotgun roared; she’d nearly forgotten about it, but the man holding it blasted a round toward the Tahni, ignoring the danger to the men they were fighting, and Fontenot saw a splash of blood from the flechettes striking one of the males in the leg. She rolled over on her side, bringing up the Gauss pistol and aiming carefully, her finger just touching the trigger pad. The electromagnetic slug-shooter bucked and the tungsten projectile smashed into the receiver of the shotgun, slicing through two of the fingers of the man’s right hand and then through his right bicep as well before it died in the rear wheel well of the battered cargo truck.
He was a long-limbed, rangy young man with jet-black hair braided down his back, and those braids thrashed as he screamed and flopped to the ground, clutching at his ruined hand and broken arm, blood seeping through his fingers. The one who’d had the handgun turned towards her, raising it, and she came up to one knee, shooting him through the right ankle to make sure the round dug into the street afterwards instead of heading off into the apartments. The Gauss pistol’s discharge was a hum-snap-crack, its impact a flat, echoing slap interrupted by his cry of pain. He went to the ground and she rose, putting another round into the fallen pistol and watching the cheap, pot metal fly apart.
Behind her, the engine of the van roared with a snarl of alcohol-burning power and it backed down the street, tires screeching. The Tahni had piled into it in the seconds she was turned the other direction, taking with them their wounded man, and Kan-Ten, and leaving scattered, battered humans…and her.
“Goddamnit,” she muttered.
She clambered back to her feet and began to run.
Chapter Three
Images swam across Kan-Ten’s vision, distorted and dreamlike, towering over him like the spires of the Imperial Center, back on a home he’d never see again. He rubbed at his eyes to clear them and the swirling, chaotic shapes turned into faces, Tahni faces, warrior faces, regarding him with what might have been concern or just interest. He felt cold metal against the back of his head, felt the vibrations and occasional bumps of tires on a roadway; he was in a vehicle, though he didn’t remember boarding one. He slowly rolled onto his side and pushed himself up to a seated position, cataloging the aches and pains his body registered as he moved.
“Are you injured, brother?” one of the males standing over him wondered. He held on to a plastic handle affixed to the bare, metal wall of the van and swayed slightly with the bumps in the road. “I am Rhin-Jan,” he added, as custom demanded.
“Not badly.” Unless there was a bleed in his brain from one of the blows he’d taken, but lacking an auto-doc or a fully-equipped medical lab, there was no way to know that. “I thank you for coming to my aid. I am Kan-Ten.”
“Oh, I know of you, brother.”
Kan-Ten thought the remark curious, but the male did not elaborate. He looked around him, trying to get a sense of his surroundings now that his head was clearer. The van’s cargo compartment was large, but it was packed with at least ten Tahni males, crammed in shoulder to shoulder except for one sitting with a leg stretched out across the floor, wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage.
“Will he be all right?” Kan-Ten wondered, gesturing towards the wounded male.
“The bleeding is controlled.” Rhin-Jan made a sign of equivocation. “The Emperor knows the Emperor’s Will.”
Kan-Ten very carefully did not react to that, much as the sentiment angered him. The Emperor’s Will had done, as Fontenot might have put it, fuck-all to save them from human Marines invading their homeworld and destroying their temples.
“We are nearly there,” the male went on. “We have trained medics at our base.”
“Our base,” he’d said, a peculiar choice of words. As if this were a military operation and all of them still warriors. His eyes went to the metal and wood cudgels, some stained with blood, and decided maybe that was the case.
The van’s brakes squealed and the pavement grumbled beneath it, and those standing were jerked against their hand-holds as the vehicle came to a stop. One of the males pushed open the side doors, and hands from outside lifted the wounded man out, supporting him. Kan-Ten pulled himself to his feet, intending to exit behind them, but the rear doors were thrown open from without, and a tall, strong-faced male leaned in, the very image of a Tahni warrior.
“My brother,” Vala-Kel said, holding out a hand. “It is so good to see you once again.”
The building had once been a metal-working shop, deep inside the Tahni district, kilometers outside the main part of the city of Gennich. Like all Tahni workshops, it had apartments above and below it, but the shop itself had been cleared out, its machinery moved elsewhere, leaving only a fine dusting of metal shavings to prove it had ever be
en there. Vala-Kel had led him inside, through the old shop, and he’d noted the small collection of weapons there: guns, not clubs, though few of them. They’d stepped through lines of pallets, simple matts on the floor where males could sleep, and into a small back room that had been turned into an office of sorts.
Offices are such a human thing, he thought silently as Vala-Kel closed the door behind them and secured it. A place where work is done alone, apart from others, as if work is such a dirty thing that no one should see it, or such a private thing that no one should share it.
This one almost seemed a room for humans, with chairs and a table such as they used, and data terminals connected to the planetary nets through antennae he’d seen on the roof. The only Tahni thing in here was an imperial crest engraved into a stone column set upon that table, in the center. He hadn’t seen one since he’d left Tahn-Skyyiah, so many years ago, and certainly never thought to again.
“I am surprised, Vala-Kel,” Kan-Ten said as his old friend turned back from the door.
“Surprised to find me here?” the male finished for him, reaching out a hand to touch the crest. “Surprised that I am not home, under the thumb of our conquerors?”
The male had not changed a bit since the war, not one strand of grey in his hair, not one additional crease or line in that patrician face, not a quaver in that orator’s voice. He could have led an army, if things had gone differently.
“Surprised that you do not still despise me as a blasphemer,” Kan-Ten elaborated softly. “As a heretic, for surrendering to our enemies. For not believing in the Will of the Emperor.”
“Of course not.” His tone was dismissive, as if it were a trivial thing. Kan-Ten might have thought the male was toying with him, but his face was sincere, even enraged perhaps. “You were right, my brother. The mortal being we called an Emperor was nothing but a fraud, a false god. He led us to destruction and disgrace, and here we are wallowing in it, trying to live beside those who despise us.”
