Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1)

by Alex Kirko

  “Listen, I got distracted. There is just so much to do—”

  “Why did I make you mayor, Moira?”

  She sighed. “Because I am the sanest of the Sisters, and I can get the job done.”

  “That’s right. Now tell me, how does not calling me back for five hours look? The sun is up, for God’s sake. I’ve been meaning to go to sleep for an hour now, but I thought I’d wait.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but quickly shut it. Kyle didn’t appreciate excuses.

  “Ah, so you do remember your place. Listen, Moira, I love you, but you are my subordinate. I could have been calling about a train with explosives speeding toward your position from the capital and you would have missed it. There could have been an uprising. The Freefolk could have left the Federation.” He chuckled, but there was nothing cheerful about the sound. “A thousand horrible things could have happened, and you didn’t even bother to check your messages. Maybe I should just give the job to Laura.”

  “No!”

  Moira was horrified by the thought. Laura had all the restraint of a five-year-old that had sneaked into a sensory stimulation center.

  “There is . . . my sister Tara is in the city,” she said.

  “Really?” he asked, no hint of compassion in his voice. “We are fighting a war here, and you jeopardize everything with your vendetta. Get your shit together or I’ll put someone else in charge. Someone who will remember to pick up when I call.” Kyle glared at her until she reluctantly nodded. “Good,” he said. “Glad we cleared that up. Give me the damage report.”

  She knew he had all the data. This was about her plans, not the damage. Moira said, “They couldn’t destroy the underground infrastructure. We have electricity in most of the city, running water in more than a half houses, and the warehouses are stocked with enough rations to feed the diminished population for at least two months.”

  “I assume there is also bad news. Go on.”

  “The entertainment production district is largely demolished. I guess they caught on to our plan and figured they would deny us the use of the studios. The crews hid before the fighting started though, so very few died. Still, half the buildings collapsed, and getting equipment out of the debris will be difficult.”

  “I’ll send you two more squads of Crawlers. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but we need them to keep working on those abominable shows and making news reports about how great life under the rule of the Federation is, Moira. And because we can’t censor them, it falls to you to make sure life really is great or at least better than in the Republic.”

  She nodded and said, “We will reach thirty percent of production capacity tonight. In a week, we should recover all that can be recovered. I spoke to some of the people in the industry. They are quite happy about the Federations regulations.”

  Kyle snorted and said, “Of course they are. There are no regulations.”

  “Yes. The Council has been pushing more and more censorship because of attacks getting more frequent.”

  Kyle cocked his head listening to his earpiece before saying, “Listen, Moira, I have to go keep the alliance happy—and good publicity helps. We don’t have a chance in hell of beating the Council without mass uprisings, and I’ve got old man Ukan breathing down my neck saying we should level every town we capture.”

  “The Council has dozens of cities. We control two,” she said, shaking her head. “Not like we can hope they will just turn and run scared after we destroy one of them.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling him, but the old goat is stubborn. Can’t really blame him after what they did to his son, but none of us can afford to let sentimentality get in the way of work. Am I clear?”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir. Won’t happen again.”

  “Good.”

  He cut the line, and Moira sat in the dark room for a while, staring at the far wall with unseeing eyes. Her assistant was polite enough to be silent, although he must have been itching for an “I told you so.”

  “Jim.”

  “Yes, miss?”

  “Next time, if Heatsworth calls and asks me to call him back, please lock me out of the terminal until I do so.”

  “I have updated the system, miss.”

  Days passed with Moira buried in the minutiae of administration. She had to deal with everything, starting with maintenance requirements for the heavily augmented humans and ending with the press hounding her for Federations plans. She tried to tell the vultures she was just the mayor, but Heatsworth was holed up in his castle, and the journalists had no desire to pound at his door. She was the local leader, and this meant that all the problems were hers to deal with.

  When she worked, Moira was fine, but she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a while. Her dreams were plagued with images of her original family.

  She was a girl, playing with her two sisters in the yard of the Linheld house with their old dog Rotor. He led them away into the fields, all the way to the city shields. He ran much faster than her tiny legs could take her. Her sisters fell back as she did her best to chase Rotor, but it wasn’t any use. She managed one last burst of speed and desperately tried to catch up. She didn’t know why, but Moira had to catch their dog. She was ten feet behind him when she slipped on a wet rock.

  When Moira came to, Tara and Shelley were looking down on her. They had child bodies, but their sneering faces were those of adults. Tara stepped sideways, and sun fell on Moira’s face. In her dream, she could smell burning meat. She raised her hand to shield her face. It was her adult hand—massive and pale. It was also reddening, and boils were sprouting all over.

  She moved to grab Tara by her neck and snap it, but her sister danced away with a ringing laugh. The sun flashed bright, and Moira woke up.

  Tired and disturbed by her dreams, she made her way to the balcony. Most of the rubble had been removed, and the city was beginning to look like itself: a sea of towers. The sea was peppered with bald spots though—remnants of the battle.

  They didn’t find Tara, but that wasn’t surprising. The only reason Hale’s people had been able to catch her sister in the first place was because Moira had knocked her out and then sent several patrols in the direction Tara’s broken body flew off to. All the citizen monitoring was done through implants and portable terminals, which meant that if someone used neither, they could be caught only by the surveillance network, which was damaged. Moira had a rapid response team on speed dial, but no luck so far.

  She sighed and swirled the single malt whiskey in the bottle she was holding.

  “Drinking this early?”

  It was Lyndon. He approached the balcony railing beside her and leaned over, watching the city lights with an inscrutable expression. He seemed relaxed. Content.

  She didn’t trust that look.

  She said, “As soon as someone discovers portable shielding that doesn’t turn reflective and doesn’t burn out in ten minutes in the sun, I’ll be the first to drink while watching the sunset. For now, 4 a.m. will do.”

  Moira offered the bottle to her deputy and he took it without a second thought. Not like personal hygiene made any difference when the only foreign bodies in their bodies were nanites that kept them alive.

  “I’m done with Nicastro,” he said, taking a swig.

  “And what did you find out?”

  “Oh, plenty. Did you know that his family made him produce an heir with his cousin before they both Ascended?”

  Moira shivered. That sounded like something Linhelds would do if they cared at all about getting more family members. “Didn’t want to know that.”

  Lyndon chuckled and downed the rest of the bottle. Ascended could get drunk only with ridiculous amounts of alcohol or by tricking the nanites into thinking that spirits weren’t a poison, but it was the effort that counted. Lyndon got another two bottles, and they drank in silence for a while. Moira turned on her shields and toned down her Ascended metabolism to get a buzz.

  “Did he say a
nything useful?” she asked.

  Lyndon flicked a black scale off his right forearm and into the abyss below, and Moira winced at seeing a former human being molting. He said, “I’ve found out why the Council didn’t declare full evacuation before our arrival.” He gulped down more whiskey. “They knew we had a plan and resources to take the city. So the Council decided that in case we succeeded, we would at least succeed in a controlled environment. They planted several operatives here before the attack, and during the capture most records in City Hall were wiped, and the living situation is a mess.”

  Moira said, “I’ve been cleaning it up for four days, and there is no end in sight. Apartments got destroyed all over the city, but more people survived than we expected. I had to coax families into cramming them with others temporarily.”

  “The last war lasted eight years.”

  “I know that, but they don’t,” she said. “I just hope we figure something out while we treat the symptoms. Soldiers are checking the abandoned buildings for traps, and soon everyone should be able to get a place of their own.”

  Lyndon gripped the guard rail and looked over the city. “It’s a ruin. I bet this is what the Council wanted when they blew up civilian blocks. With everyone moving around, nobody will be suspicious as to who their neighbors are, and Nicastro doesn’t have the locations of the operatives. They were distributed among the sergeants. Everyone got one name and one address.”

  “Shit.” Moira took a swig. “Without the servers, there is no ID system. We could have a thousand moles in town.” She rubbed her forehead trying to come up with a solution. “We aren’t equipped to deal with this crap, Lyndon. It’s a hundred needles in a hundred warehouses filled with haystacks.”

  Lyndon motioned for the bottle. “But we also have full control over the city’s information network and all the services: schools, police, augmentations, maintenance. Places where any decent spy would be drawn to.”

  She spent a moment drinking and thinking. Too bad that she was even more resistant to alcohol than most other Ascended. She thought she felt a little lightheaded now, but that might have been self-suggestion. Eventually, she said, “We can catch them there. Or, better yet, feed them whatever info we want the Republic to get.”

  “To disinformation,” he toasted, and they clinked their bottles.

  3

  Wave-rider

  Blake guessed he had been in pain for a while. There was also beeping that made it difficult to focus.

  “—failing—”

  The voice couldn’t pierce the ringing in his ears. If he got some peace, some time to think, then maybe—

  “Life-support failing—”

  That didn’t sound good. Blake couldn’t recall what life-support was, but it had life in it, so it had to be important. Also, what was that feeling in his back? As if a piece of him had been torn out and replaced with something that didn’t belong. He tried to touch it, but couldn’t make his right arm comply. He looked at it. It was bent all wrong.

  “Drummond, wake your Sleeping Beauty ass up! I swear, we didn’t come this far to get eaten by an overgrown rodent!”

  The new voice was familiar and completely clear because it sounded in his head.

  “Aileen? What’s happening?”

  “See for yourself, Master,” she said, putting as much irony into the last word as any machine could.

  A light pierced the darkness when his AI re-established the optical feed. He must have blacked out at some point, and this, of course, had shut down Aileen.

  The world filled with excruciating color, and he could see a two-ton cave sloth. It was difficult to read an animal’s facial expression, but the way it was rubbing its paws ending with six-inch claws pointed to curiosity. As to how Blake tasted, probably. The thing took a step toward him and sniffed the air. While he was sure that it was an herbivore, it was still uncomfortable to be close to something that could crush him using nothing but its weight. And all the animals on Terra Nox dabbled in all kinds of cuisine in addition to their preferred food.

  Blake switched the microphone on. Thankfully, it still worked.

  “Hey, big guy. I’m not a turnip. Go,” he said, but the giant sloth just stared. “I mean it.”

  The animal huffed, turned, and disappeared into a burrow big enough for three adult men to pass into shoulder to shoulder with space to spare. Blake groaned.

  “We must be miles deep in the jungle for cave sloths to be around. Aileen, what the hell happened? And why can’t I move?”

  “We were hit by a new type of Ascended. The inertial dampeners saved you. Then we were thrown into the jungle. Then we got hit by a thousand-ton sequoia tree.”

  Now that the immediate danger had passed, his oldest friend was back to her usual calm self. Still, he knew her well enough to detect irritation in the way she clipped her sentences.

  With an effort, Blake tilted his head up and stared at endless waterfalls of leaves and intertwining branches—the Terra Nox jungle. He was on the ground, squeezed between two-foot-thick roots of an enormous tree that probably blocked out the sun during the day. It was night now, but his sensors could see in the dark well enough.

  Blake could barely make out a translucent web up in the distance, flickering in what little light reached it through the leaves from the two moons of Terra Nox. There was no wind, but the silvery net was still moving, and half his suit was covered in spider silk.

  “How bad is it?” he asked Aileen.

  “The thrusters auto-repaired and came back online moments before we smashed into the tree, and I was able to mitigate some of the damage. The web helped too.” Somebody who didn’t know her wouldn’t have noticed the hesitation in her speech, but Blake had built her. “You have bruising and seventy-two fractures all over your body. Your right arm took most of the impact, so it’s mush inside the suit. You also have a concussion, and your back is broken in three places. Thankfully, only ten percent of your implants have been destroyed, so I rerouted everything as soon as we woke up. Still working on it.”

  Blake blinked, or, rather, the sensors obliged and produced an illusion of blinking.

  “How am I alive?”

  “If you exit the suit, you will die in seconds. I have you pumped full of regenerative compounds and painkillers. Blake, we need to move.”

  He frowned. He couldn’t move. Besides, what would be the point if he could just lie here until he healed up? The branches above him probably housed giant cats that had evolved to electrify prey or something equally terrifying, but it wasn’t like he knew of a safe spot nearby.

  “I’m not an Old Earth medical capsule,” said Aileen, her voice sounding less mechanical. “Your body is all banged up. Everything is out of alignment: nerves, blood vessels, bones, organs . . . It’s healing wrong, Blake.”

  “Don’t cuddle me, Aileen.”

  “If we don’t get you to a doctor in half an hour, you won’t be able to survive without the constant regeneration that the suit provides, and even then, no more than six months—”

  His hands looked fine. Aileen’s voice faded into the background as he examined the black armored glove that now stood between him and the world that would kill him. The jungle seemed to get darker as the sensors focused on the metal in front of them, obeying his commands. A faint crack, somewhat lighter than the ebony of his suit, ran down his middle finger and along the back of his hand. He must have cracked it when he fell, and the nanomachines had fixed it. But nothing ever healed completely. He smelled that trace of chemicals that had permeated the oncologist’s office where he had heard his first diagnosis—

  A white light flashed across his vision.

  “Blake!”

  “Yes, Aileen?”

  “I’ve been calling you for an entire minute.” Her tone turned softer. “It’s not like the last time. If you move, we can still save you.”

  Blake cursed and switched off his sensors. He said, “Back then, you promised I would never be trapped inside my body again
.”

  “I know. This is why you should go.”

  He stopped trying to move his right arm and legs. Nerve damage was worse down his body, and where his right shoulder had been, now there was crushed meat packed inside the suit. He was lucky Aileen had blunted whatever pain sensitivity he still had while inside the mech.

  Blake listened to the soft whirring of the sensors and let it calm him down.

  “Aileen, reroute the still working control implants to my left arm.”

  There was a moment of silence, and she said, “Done.”

  Blake moved his fingers and then the entire arm. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to be enough.

  “Scan for radio-signals. We need to find somewhere civilized and hopefully a hospital.”

  “There appears to be some traffic. If you move around, I’ll be able to triangulate the source’s position.”

  “Sure.”

  “How are you going to move?” she asked.

  “Like this. Just make sure the inertial dampeners are working this time.”

  Blake grabbed a root with his only working hand and pulled with all the juice his suit could give him. As heavy as the assassin mech was, the power of its limbs far exceeded what was necessary to move its mass. With some help from repulsors, he shot out and flew forty feet before slamming into another giant tree. He then cried out in pain as his right shoulder caught on a branch. His back didn’t bother him.

  “Aileen!”

  “Dampeners are at fifteen percent. You might want to give me time to power them up next time you decide to toss your battered body around, Master.”

  Aileen was snarky. She was never snarky unless she was nervous. Blake grit his teeth and pulled at a branch again. It took him another four crash landings, but the AI was finally able to determine that a settlement was only two miles away to the north.

  “What about the Council transmitter?” he asked.

  “Stock Council equipment wasn’t made to withstand such an impact.” He thought he heard a hint of smugness in her voice. “The custom components you have built are of much higher quality, Master.”