by Alex Kirko
Beware of Light
Part I of Dark Stars
Alex Kirko
Copyright © 2017 by Alexander Kirko
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
To my grandfather
who never stopped becoming better
Contents
1. City of Dusk
2. The Human in Me
3. Wave-rider
4. Life at the Bottom
5. Power Vortex
6. Misfits and Heroes
7. Throne of Lies
8. Art Lovers
9. Enemy Beds
10. Danger of Nostalgia
11. Conflict of Interest
12. Grabbing the Dream
13. Moira’s Interlude
14. Sisters
15. Healing through Fire
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Afterword
1
City of Dusk
The broken towers of Manhattan stretched below him as Blake’s ship headed for the opening in the forcefield. The sky was the color of a dead sunset, and the Moon occupied a quarter of it. He could see its surface covered in termite mounds of man-made structures, safe where no atmosphere could cause corrosion. The last of his people were up there. Blake punched in the coordinates of a major trading hub three hundred light-years away. His fighter passed through a black pinprick in the red sky, and Earth shrunk into a point behind him. Blake took a silver sphere out of his bag and rubbed a speck of blood off the computational module.
The dream ended, and he awoke in the darkness of his mech suit. A cerulean image of his body shone in front of him, and he could see every muscle, bone, and organ. He examined them for signs of anything abnormal.
“Master, you didn’t have cancer last week, and you don’t have it now,” said Aileen through their link. “You should rest more: dreaming of Old Earth will not do you any good—that place is gone.”
She hadn’t turned the cameras on, so it was dark and warm inside the suit. Blake said, “If we had caught it early enough last time, both of us would be resting in peace back home.”
She sighed, and he heard the buzzing of the scanner as it went over his body. It took three minutes before Aileen said, “Full scan complete. Not a single cancer cell, Master. You need to let this go: it’s not like we don’t have enough problems without worrying about your health again.”
The tension ebbed away. Blake knew that the fear of his body turning against him was irrational, especially for a soldier who could be stabbed any day. But he would still have nightmares of hearing the diagnosis and feeling trapped inside his own skin. The doctors had shown him tiny metastases all over his body, twisted beyond the capabilities of conventional treatment because of all the radiation and mutagens that the United States had been exposed to during the Tragedy of Kamarkvat—the war that followed first artificial intelligence experiments.
Aileen said, “We still managed to survive, Master.”
He sometimes forgot she could hear his thoughts.
“Pull up the command structure,” he said. “And give me a body, for God’s sake.”
The body Aileen generated for him was a blue mannequin of light: mech suits’ virtual reality capabilities were geared toward hacking, not realism. The Republic military roster stretched out in the darkness before Blake with him near the bottom of the pyramid and Davis Connelly, Chancellor of the Council, at the top. The chart filled his vision, and it was hard to believe that Terra Nox proclaimed itself to be a peaceful planet. There were five people between him and the top, starting with Akiha Ryuu, the general in charge of all the mechanized troops. He zoomed out and moved to his direct superior, Lieutenant Scott Nicastro.
“This guy is our current problem,” he said. “The invasion starts in eight ours, most of us haven’t worked with him, and he strolls around checking if the weapons ignite. Has he never heard of tactics? Studying the terrain? Drills?”
“Master, Terra Nox hasn’t seen a major military conflict in more than a thousand years. The officers study these things as a curiosity in school, not as something they will need to use.”
“Well, this time it isn’t five kids who got their hands on some knives and a bomb.”
Blake had an advantage over the colonials: he did have experience with fighting against an organized force that had artillery support. The city could use him, and maybe he could get one step closer to getting the military in shape before Terra Nox got attacked.
He said, “Hack into the communication hub. We need to be able to silence our noble leader if things go south.”
There was a momentary pause, and she said, “Done.”
He said, “See you before the battle. Good night, Aileen.”
The nanites ate through the armor from the inside, and the suit peeled apart to let him out. Blake’s position was the nearest to the city, so he didn’t need to pass any of his fellow mech specialists to get to Seind, which was just as well. They always had questions about calibrations, and proper explanations took hours. He did feel compelled to help them though, and getting a new mech to perform at one hundred percent was always fun, so he’d return before the battle.
At first sight, Seind was as always: the golden towers of entertainment buildings, its blocky industrial district, and the fortress of the City Hall. The pavement was cracked gold, advertisements shone on walls, and music began playing whenever he walked too close to a brothel or a gaming center. But the city was in panic. The alleys were deserted as people poured onto the main streets, trying to get out before the siege. A guy galloped by with his knees bending backward followed by a woman with a burning flame tattooed on her left cheek. It writhed and flickered in rhythm with her steps.
Once they saw the black and gold of his anti-terrorism forces uniform, they gave him a wide berth.
Blake shook his head. He thought, is this what freedom looks like? The latest fad was blue translucent skin that showed the muscles, and nearly half the citizens he saw had undergone the procedure. They looked like anatomic theatre displays that had come to life.
He consulted the map, found Tara’s personal beacon, and travelled to where she was: an alley next to this section’s police center. There were no citizens around, and all the peacekeeping forces had left to fake keeping peace. He had no doubt they would declare success when enough people got out of the city by themselves.
Tara stood with her mouth slightly open and brows furrowed in concentration, spray can in hand, and a graffiti on the police center’s wall in front of her. The image resembled an orange policeman with giant legs and barely any head. The caption under it read Demand the police do something and not just look imposing. Next to Tara stood Rose—her self-appointed apprentice, who always did her best to get involved in everything stupid Tara did. She was holding a bundle of spray cans in her arms, her gaze riveted to her idol.
He walked up to them. “Tara. Rose.”
“Blake.” Tara didn’t turn away from the wall. “Rose, weren’t you going to call Selma?”
The younger girl blinked and moved to slap herself on the forehead, fumbled, and barely kept the grip on the cans. “Right, thanks, gotta call mom, you know how she gets. What about you?”
“Nah, my folks are probably at a party, bootlicking some official.”
“Okay. Bye, Blake.”
Blake shook his head as Rose ran away. Tara had an opportunity to do some good here, but instead she t
urned the girl into a sidekick for her pranks.
“Tara, that graffiti is crap. You said your family supported you going into art?”
“Like you could tell a De Volt from Marianni.” She reached forward and added a plume to the head.
“Maybe, but I’m not the one defacing a government building. The government that you, might I add, are also working for. You said you want to sit on the Council one day?” He waved at the wall. “Think they take vandals?”
She turned to look at him then, her black eyes lacking the playful glint they usually had. “The reason we even need to defend a city against an invasion today, Blake, is because everybody just keeps saying ‘Yes, yes, yes, take our money, take our freedoms!’ Well, I’m sick of it.” She smiled, displaying two rows of perfect teeth. “Besides, not like anyone will bother with my little picture when Seind is about to get attacked. Is it time?”
He nodded. “Yes. We have one more artillery battery to check.”
It took them twenty minutes of dodging the fleeing crowds to get to the entertainment tower where the Council forces were installing the artillery platforms. On top, Corporal Fields was out of his suit, buffing the Crest of Donnelly on the left side of his chest with a piece of cloth. When he saw Blake and Tara, he put the fabric into a pocket and extended a meaty hand that enveloped Blake’s in greeting. The man’s eyes drifted to Tara’s bare midriff before they snapped back to Blake.
“Glad to see you here, sir, mam,” he said. “I am the only one here who has experience with picking a position for artillery, and we could use a second opinion.”
His people were out of their mech suits too, and Blake could see all of them stop for a second and stare at Tara. The Ascended combat uniform was little more than a fishnet with shield generators, weapons, and reserve batteries secured to crisscrossing belts, but their reaction still annoyed him. Not like Tara was wearing it to get attention—though she was nuts enough to enjoy it—she needed to be able to touch her enemies with as much skin as possible. And not like she was the only one of her kind in the military.
Fields rounded on his people before their hands stopped moving. “Soldiers,” he said, “We only have a couple hours. Shape up or I’ll send you back into the Cooperation and Control training camp. Have you never seen an Ascended officer? Disgraceful.” He turned to Blake and said. “I hope you’ll forgive them, Sergeant. We have been working around the clock on evacuating the buildings around here and setting up the batteries. With the state Seind is in, there aren’t many opportunities to unwind.”
Blake said, “Lankershire rebelling is a shock for all of us, but it’s no reason to forget about discipline.” He watched them drill another hole they would use to bolt one of the inertia capacitors to the building. He shook his head. “You should set it up five feet closer to the north side. There is a support beam there, so everything won’t fall through the tower if the inertia absorbers fail.”
The soldiers stopped and looked at Fields. The man rolled his shoulders and said, “You heard the man.”
They got back to work. Blake thought the battery was tilted but the equipment they had was probably more accurate than his eye.
The tower was forty floors tall. He asked, “Do you have anything to survive the fall from here?”
Fields shook his head, and his fingers moved to fiddle with the Donnelly Crest. He said, “We’ll be fine if we crash down through the building.”
“And you’ll be trapped under a hundred tons of rubble. Call requisitions. Heavy mech fall dampening mods are still available.” He walked to the edge and looked down at the endless curves and balconies of the pale-pink recreation center. “This tower looks like it will crumble after two hits by a heavy-armored specialist,” Blake said.
The corporal grinned. “And that is why we have the big girl your partner is examining. It’s an XC-98. With the armor-piercing rounds we use, it can shoot through buildings. We’ve adjusted the shields around here to let our volleys through. Nothing will get close.”
Blake said, “I remember working on that baby. We took the XC-96 and made the slug two times bigger—needed a lot of tweaks.” He held his own smile in. “Make sure you keep an eye on the magnetic rail integrity as you fire. A couple of our boys and girls in the thirty-sixth didn’t. One of the rail supports bent and broke. The slug sliced through the chassis and made the damn thing look like a sea sponge tried to vomit itself through its asshole. Shrapnel went everywhere, and the operators’ barrier response time had been turned way up, so they got hit. The fools wanted to improve the precision of weapon calibrations by eliminating shield interference.”
“Sounds painful.”
Blake laughed without mirth. “A kick in the balls is ‘painful’, corporal. A half-pound piece of shrapnel displacing the top half of your skull in an instant isn’t painful. Your brain even gets a free flight on its trip to heaven. So don’t get reckless.”
“Yes, sir.” Fields saluted.
Tara skipped over from where she had been looking the XC-98 over. “Are we done, darling?” she asked. “Today is so boring—just give me a fight already!”
He went down to the street, turned to where the main forces were deploying, and got a move on. Dealing with his partner when she was in a playful mood was something to be avoided if he wanted to stay sane. Tara didn’t do inhibitions or common sense outside of combat.
The little devil stepped into his path and scowled at him.
“Oh, come on, Blake. What are we gonna do there?” she asked. “You’ll marinate in your armor and I’ll tease the new recruits? Let’s do something fun for once. Who knows, maybe you’ll die today, and your last hours will be spent obsessing over your mech suit. I keep telling you, that fixation is unhealthy.”
The thought that she might be the one to get cut down during the fight couldn’t even register inside that pretty head of hers, and Tara was one of the less arrogant Ascended. At least she and Blake had this much in common: he also worried about himself more.
“Too late for that,” he said. “This side of the city is dead.”
“Then I’ll just—”
“We have our orders, Miss Linheld.” He knew her last name was like a nail scratching on glass to her. “Can you at least pretend you have some restraint?”
“You know, if the stick up your ass gets any longer, Drummond, I will use you as a flesh-padded club and not need any weapons at all.” The hunger in her smile made it easy for Blake to resist the girl’s charms. Tara looked twenty, and he wasn’t dumb enough to try to ask an Ascended woman her real age. They would rather discuss children. “Oh, oh! You love barbecue, right?” Tara was pointing at a restaurant—Freddie’s something.
“They are closed.”
“They didn’t barricade the doors. It’s an invitation.” She stepped close enough to him for chills to run down his spine. “Come on, we’ll leave some money on the counter to feed that righteous streak of yours. Do you want to fight on an empty stomach?” She poked him below the navel, and Blake had to hold back the impulse to jump back or punch her. “It’s bad enough you don’t have any muscles. Someone as awesome as me won’t be seen walking around with a stick figure.”
“Why are you even interested in food, anyway?” he asked. “Not like you can eat it.”
She glared at him and said, “Do you have any idea how good my sense of smell is? You need a bath, by the way.”
She walked up to the entrance and drew back her right arm for a palm strike.
The door tore off with the squeal of a baby seal getting bludgeoned to death. It flew into the shop, smashed several tables, and crashed into a wall. A hint of ozone and a warm breeze passed him by, and Blake had to stop his teeth from grinding.
“Tara.”
“I guess the hinges were loose.”
“It’s an automatic door. It doesn’t have hinges.”
“Well, it certainly doesn’t have them now,” she said. “Anyway, we’re in, so let’s have you fed.”
B
lake grumbled about not being a pet before following her inside. He was so hungry he suspected that even had Tara killed a man to get into the restaurant, he’d still rationalize the hell out of it and eat. In any case, it would be almost rude not to take advantage of what this fine barbecue joint had to offer. Especially after they smashed a door, a part of a wall, and three tables.
“It’s a self-serving place,” Tara said, clapping in enthusiasm. “Let me try.”
“No.”
“Come on, I can cook.”
Her performance of an insulted lady would have been more believable had Tara not been pouting while standing in the furrow of broken tables her method of lock picking had created. Blake walked to the grill and fired it up. Dejected at the lack of response, Tara wandered off towards the refrigerators and poked the assorted chilled meats with dainty fingers exposed by the fingerless gloves. Like all Ascended warriors, she didn’t grow nails.
“Artificial. Shame,” she said.
Blake sprayed the grate with some solution that prevented sticking. It was best not to think what the cooks of Terra Nox came up with to mimic the cuisine of Old Earth. Humanity’s crib was a legend to them: distorted customs and paper-thin nostalgia. But Blake wasn’t complaining as long as he could get a passable steak even on a planet where most people ate by plugging a nutrient tube into a port on the left side, under the ribcage.
Tara said, “I’m starving. What’s the point of living on a world full of dangerous wildlife if you can’t get any real meat?”
The steak’s surface had caramelized into a dark-brown crust, and all that remained for Blake was to get it to that perfect medium raw, a sliver between a bag of raw blood and a piece of charcoal. Tara was now lounging at one of the remaining tables.
