The Long March (The Exiled Fleet Book 2)

by Richard Fox

  “Are you blind!” The Totenkopf kicked the table. “It’s obvious my motion carried, you old—”

  Several of the other pirates suddenly cleared their throats.

  “—and wise, and generous host of hosts.” The Totenkopf punched his fists together. “Perhaps someone else could take count.”

  “Fair enough.” Moineau reached down and tapped Loussan on the shoulder. “Which pile’s larger, my boy?”

  “The arena,” Loussan said.

  “There we are—confirmation.” Moineau rubbed his hands together. “Oh, Commodore Gage, you did say you’d share how to find Daegon infiltrators with all of us before you—or your designated survivor—leaves orbit, yes? Wouldn’t want the Harlequins to forget to share all that with us, what with all the goings-on.”

  “That’s…what I meant to say.” Gage lowered his head slightly.

  “Then we’ve a matter of honor to settle. Loussan and Gage, as your host, I’ll have you both at the Diamond Auditorium here in my coliseum. Duel begins in four hours,” Moineau said.

  “Four hours?” Loussan asked. “Why can’t I just kill him in the hallway right now?”

  “Because I’m going to sell tickets, son,” the old man said with a cackle. “You know what price free men will pay to see a jackboot take a pigsticker to the gut? Or see your pretty head kicked around a stage? A fortune! Gage is still under my protection, and don’t any of you forget it. Now all of you get out of my sight.”

  Chapter 6

  Tolan stepped around a food stand offering boiled grubs on skewers and hopped over a small puddle of blood glistening in the waning sunlight, Wyman following a few steps behind. Both wore different clothes from what they arrived in, and Wyman’s face was darkened with soot smeared across his brow. Tolan kept a hood over his head as he continued down a tenement street.

  “If you ever eat the hawk-fly larva, make sure it’s well done,” Tolan said, wagging a finger at Wyman. “They tend to go dormant when exposed to heat. Sometimes the cook will be in a rush and serve not-quite-dead larva…which then wake up in your digestive tract and they’re more agitated when that happens. But you get them with teriyaki sauce and…” Tolan kissed his fingertips, then stopped on a corner and looked around the ground-level shops selling clothes, firearms, and more than one body shop promising secondhand augmentations.

  “There we are…see that red mountain painted on the stairwell? Faylun’s still in business.” The spy crossed the street and ducked into the stairwell.

  Sitting near the top of the stairs, wrapped in layers of clothing, was a woman, her skin dark with grime.

  “Hey, nana,” Tolan said to her. “You hungry? Bite bite?”

  “Not so empty as to give you the look,” she said, huddling closer to the wall.

  “There still a pubby house two blocks away? Cot and a sponge for some silver?” Tolan wiggled two fingers, then flicked his wrist and a small rectangle of embossed silver appeared between his fingertips.

  “Some pincher out of the Ryukus bought it last month. Price doubled.” She looked at the money and licked her lips.

  Tolan flicked his wrist and offered twice as much. She snatched the money from him and hurried down the steps.

  Wyman put a hand to his nose as she passed. “Why does everything in this city smell so bad?” the pilot asked.

  “This city is all about freedom. No taxes means little in the way of public services, unless you want to pay for it out of your own pocket. The poor may want it, but they won’t get it. And what did I tell you about talking?” Tolan walked up to a white door, the paint peeling away, and held his hands up to his forehead. He pressed his thumbs and forefingers into a triangle and waited.

  And waited.

  “You look ridiculous,” Wyman said.

  “You ever met a Martian, knuckles?” Tolan held the symbol up a little bit higher.

  “A…Martian? I thought they couldn’t survive off Mars. You mean one’s here? In this dump?”

  “Faylun likes the weather,” Tolan said.

  A small panel flipped open on the doorframe and a camera-tipped metal arm slid out and flexed, reaching toward the spy’s face. Tolan kept still as the camera went from eye to eye and around his face. When Tolan opened his mouth, the camera took a good look at his teeth. The arm retracted.

  “New rules,” Tolan said as he dropped his hands. “You can look. You can talk. But do not touch.”

  “You know I’m not an idiot, right?”

  “No touching.”

  “No touching—fine. Just tell me it’ll smell better in there.”

  The door split down the middle and rolled open. Just inside, blue light filled a small compartment with plastic walls just big enough for the two men.

  “Go.” Tolan pushed into the cramped space and got Wyman’s shoulder against his face as the larger man struggled to fit. The door rolled shut and white fog filled the compartment.

  “Hey, what is this?” Wyman asked.

  “Sanitizing,” Tolan said. The entire box filled with the fog that carried a hint of iodine. There was a faint chime, and a fan kicked on. The compartment sides fell down and Tolan wafted away the last of the fog.

  Faylun’s store was several rows of glass cases full of specimen jars, bits of old computer cores, and more than one rack of assault weapons. The far wall was made up of wooden cabinets all labeled in Chinese symbols. A metal bar and stools separated the cabinets from the rest of the store.

  “Ah…” Tolan took a deep sniff. “Hasn’t changed a bit.”

  “How does this work? There’s no one here. You just take stuff, drop money on the counter, and hope he lets you back in later on?” Wyman reached up to a model of a red three-winged airplane.

  Tolan slapped the pilot’s hand.

  “It’s a lot worse than ‘you break it, you bought it’ in here,” Tolan said.

  “It is you…” came from behind the cabinets, the words slow and just above a whisper.

  A hunched figure entered behind the bar, a bright yellow cloth draped over his back and head. He walked slowly, feet stomping into the floor from a brace that circled his waist and extended to his feet. A grill covered Faylun’s mouth and lower jaw, and wisps of vapor escaped with each exhalation. Lenses, embedded in his eye sockets, magnified his irises to almost bug-like proportions. The Martian’s limbs were overlong, as if stretched in some torture device for years on end.

  “May the sun greet you each day and life be pure,” Tolan said and then touched two fingers to a temple, to the side of his neck, then over his heart.

  “Don’t mock my soil, Tolan,” the Martian said. “Had I known you were going after Ja’war, I would have never directed you to that butcher. That the Black One didn’t torture you to death and come for everyone that helped you is a miracle. Imagine my surprise when I heard Ja’war was off the market.”

  “He didn’t go down easy, if that makes you feel any better. And that hack you sent me to get the job done,” Tolan said.

  “Amateur. I can see cracks in your matrix already. What are you using to compensate?”

  “Bliss; keeps the edge off.”

  “I might have something better. Come.” Twig-like fingers motioned the spy closer.

  “That’s not why we’re here.” Tolan opened his coat, withdrew a vacuum-packed item, and gently set it on the bar. “We need you to consult your data core.”

  Faylun snapped his gaze to Tolan, then to Wyman.

  “You know I can’t do that. Exposing that information without Conclave approval will mean a recall to the red. Footy season is about to start, can’t miss that…” The Martian gave a weak chuckle and inched back to the doorway.

  “It will concern Mars eventually. I have a witness.” Tolan stepped aside and pointed to Wyman. “I am the second.”

  Faylun fidgeted for a moment, the rasping through his grill growing faster.

  “I will listen…but promise nothing after that,” the frail man said.

  “Wyman, tell
him what happened to Albion. All of it,” Tolan said.

  Wyman gave a slow, stumbling retelling of his time on the Excelsior just before the first contact with the Daegon through their escape to the Sicani system. Faylun listened quietly, his eyes locked on the pilot.

  “His biometrics read true to all of it…some details omitted about his transit to Siam, but he doesn’t consider that important to these Daegon. And your testimony?” Faylun asked the spy.

  Tolan drew a combat knife off the small of his back and ran the tip down the length of the package. He removed a Daegon armored gauntlet and set it before the Martian, the fingers cracked and broken. The smell of dried blood and burnt meat rose from the blue metal.

  “We know little of our enemy,” Tolan said, “but I suspect you might know more.”

  “Curious…” Faylun poked at the piece of armor, like it was a sleeping animal that might jump up and bite if startled. “The construction is…odd. How much time do you have?”

  “We need answers sooner than later.”

  “I can disassemble it, destroy it in the process…”

  “We have more aboard the Orion.” Tolan crossed his arms over his chest.

  Faylun reached under the bar and took out a shallow metal bowl.

  “I’ll not touch it again…who knows where it’s been?” Faylun wiggled his thin fingers at Tolan. The spy moved the gauntlet into the shallow bowl and stepped back.

  Faylun raised his arms, then snapped his hands to either side of the bowl with a pop of overworked joints. A blue-white field filled the bowl and the gauntlet rose a few inches. Text swarmed across the Martian’s eye lenses.

  “Bio-neural interface…almost familiar,” Faylun said. Metal strips pulled away from the gauntlet and orbited around the armor. “Why didn’t you bring the cortex implant? There’s no other way this system could operate.”

  “Autopsy found slagged devices at the base of the Daegon’s neck, C7 vertebrae. Docs say they self-destructed once their hosts died. None of the boarders survived the attack,” Tolan said.

  “That tells me something.” Faylun’s fingers twitched inhumanly fast and the rest of the armor stripped away, leaving a skeletal frame behind. “DNA shows human…extensive gene modding…were they blue-skinned? Perhaps green?”

  Tolan nodded.

  The armor strips reassembled on the frame, changing their configuration to different styles. Tolan recognized a medieval knight’s gauntlet, a simple exo-suit, then back to the original shape.

  “Almost Genevan,” Faylun said. “The technology shares a lineage. This was bent from the core programming, functions poorly compared to the gestalts. Wearing this would be somewhat painful. Long-term nervous-system damage is certain…but no gestalt needed to function.”

  “The Daegon are Genevans?” Wyman asked. “Like Thorvald and Salis?”

  “The armor bears some similarity,” Faylun said, “like comparing a sword forged by a master blacksmith, then comparing it to the work of a later generation that carried on the master’s technique. And…ah…what’s this? A code fragment in a biometric buffer? Don’t mind if I do.”

  Red lines rose from the gauntlet’s wrist and traced text in front of the Martian’s eyes.

  “Can you read it?” Tolan asked. “If we can learn their coding, we can hack their systems, reverse engineer—”

  “There’s a kernel here,” Faylun said. He leaned closer to the gauntlet and squinted with one eye. “Not in any language I’ve ever encountered, but then there’s this…” He leaned back and an image materialized over the Daegon artifact, a crest spinning slowly in the air. A double-headed eagle behind a shield, the claws grasping a segment of a castle wall and the other had talons embedded into a fish. In the center of the shield, a sun blazed.

  “Why is that in the code?” Tolan asked.

  “It’s the encryption firewall,” Faylun said. “They’re using a 4-D tier to mask the base code, an old technique I’ve only ever seen used in post-Cataclysm information systems. Odd.”

  “Can you crack it?” Wyman asked.

  “My data core might have an old source code…” Faylun pulled his hands away and the gauntlet settled into the bowl.

  “Then what are you waiting for?” Tolan asked. “You’ll have to go back to Mars anyway, show this to the others. The free nations will need Martian help. You all can’t stay under your mountains forever.”

  “We’ve done quite well for ourselves under our mountains, thank you very much.” Faylun raked his fingertips through the air. “We helped Earth reach the stars again after civilization collapsed with the express understanding that the rest of you stunties would leave us the hell alone in return.”

  “I somehow doubt the Daegon are part of the Non-Interference Treaty with Mars.” The left side of Tolan’s face started twitching, and he pressed a hand to his mouth and stomped a foot against the wooden floor.

  “Extraordinary times, extraordinary measures,” Faylun said. “The one you brought, he’s but a child. No idea what a show he’s about to see.” The Martian touched his fingertips to his sternum and bowed his head.

  “Yeah, I’m just chopped liver back here,” Wyman said. “What do you mean, ‘a show’?” he asked Faylun.

  “He won’t answer right now,” Tolan said. “Last time a Martian accessed his data core was over a hundred years ago, sent all the major powers’ intelligence services into a frenzy, trying to figure out what was uncovered. They still teach it at the academy. Assassinations, bombings, sudden slip-engine failure between the stars. There was a shadow war for years.”

  “What’s so special about these data cores?”

  “Sum total of all Martian knowledge stored in a quantum lattice. Pre-Cataclysm information, everything the Martians have worked out since the first colonies back in the twenty-first century. Mars has a few scholars like Faylun spread across unaligned worlds to collect more information, bring it back to the red planet every decade or so. They’re information junkies, in case you haven’t noticed,” Tolan said.

  “If this data core is such a big deal, why hasn’t anyone in this cesspit of a planet ever tried to take it from him?” Wyman asked.

  “That the cores even exist is a state secret, and if a Martian is ever harmed on a planet, that planet tends to suffer cataclysmic events: the computers that maintain infrastructure slag, leaders’ air cars fall out of the sky for no apparent reason. An entire planet’s banking records go up in smoke.”

  “The Martians do that?”

  “No, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.” Tolan rolled his eyes.

  The right half of Faylun’s chest hinged open. The Martian opened the false flesh exterior, revealing a mechanical lung and a glowing cube situated close to the centerline on his chest.

  Wyman tried to back away, but Tolan grabbed him by the elbow and kept him close to the bar.

  Faylun held the cube between his narrow fingertips. Red lines traced down the sides.

  “So much information…” Faylun muttered. The eagle crest appeared on his eye lenses, then vanished in a cloud of static. “Nothing…nothing to decrypt the Daegon code.”

  Tolan bashed a fist against the bar.

  “But there is something…a partial hit on unverified data…” The cube powered down and Faylun returned it to his chest. “Mount Edziza erupted and sent Earth back into the Stone Age in 2109, no forewarning. Billions died in the ensuing ice age, but there were rumors that some on Earth knew the event was coming.”

  Faylun twisted a hand over and a small projector on the back of his wrist lit up. A single image of a massive spacecraft being built on the dark side of the moon, with Earth in the background, appeared. Faylun tapped a finger to his palm and the image zoomed in to the side of the vessel. On the hull, half-obscured by construction scaffolding, was the same crest Faylun found in the Daegon armor.

  “When was this picture taken?” Tolan asked.

  “Eighty-four days before Mount Edziza erupted and choked the sky with ash,”
Faylun said. “This image was taken by a satellite that was hacked and redirected by a team of scientists in the Alamos biodome. After this, all contact between Earth and Mars ended. The official reason was a ‘solar event,’ which never actually occurred.”

  “The ship looks like an early colony ark,” Wyman said, “just like the Britannia that brought the first settlers to Albion…but none of those ships left Earth for centuries after the eruption.”

  “They knew.” Tolan tugged at his bottom lip. “The Daegon knew Earth was about to be wrecked and they kept it secret. Earth had an extensive information-sharing network at the time. Who the hell had that kind of power to keep a ship that size secret?”

  “Who says they did?” Wyman asked. “Maybe that knowledge was lost in the ice age. They’re still digging stuff out of the museums in London and New York City.”

  “Something tells me if every human being knew a ship full of colonists had escaped, it would’ve entered the collective subconscious like the story of Noah’s Ark,” Tolan said. “Mars know of any colony ship like this?” he asked Faylun.

  “No. We were a few hundred strong when Earth fell. None of the Originals ever spoke of a colony ship in their memoirs.” Faylun shrugged.

  “So what are we supposed to tell the Commodore?” Wyman asked.

  “The Daegon have a link to Earth, very powerful people on Earth from before the Fall,” Tolan said. “We have a starting point, which is better than the basically nothing we had before we came in here.”

  “I’ll arrange passage back to Mars.” Faylun gave the bowl with the gauntlet a gentle shake. “If the Daegon are returning to the home world, Mars will be in danger. The Conclave must know of this. Perhaps I’ll learn more there. It’s been decades since my last core sync.”

  “You can keep that,” Tolan said, motioning to the Daegon armor. The spy leaned slightly over the bar. “Don’t suppose you have anything better than Bliss. I get these tremors and maybe some Dizorphomene or Xera’s Kiss…”

  “He’s a drug dealer?” Wyman asked and Tolan’s lips squeezed into a thin line.

  “I prefer ‘apothecary.’” Faylun opened a cabinet and removed a glass jar full of neon-green bark. “Dealing in remedies for all ailments caused by injuries both physical and or mental. Tolan is a bit of both.”