Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1)

by Alex Kirko

  “I remember you wearing your hair in that ridiculous knot. As if you were a samurai.”

  “Well, I did have a moral code back then.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think there is still honor left in you.”

  Blake got up and walked to where the rest of the party camped in silence and darkness. The superconductor battery cells in their suits could last years between recharges, and they had spare nutrients and medical supplies strapped to their legs. The only traces they left behind were depressions in the earth, and those didn’t last.

  Nat was the only one awake of the seven. She sat propped against the hawthorn trunk, holding her right knee against her chest with both arms, staring at the stars.

  “What do you want, Drummond?” she said without turning her head.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that we still need to sleep? I mean, we aren’t even conscious, not really,” he said, sitting beside her. “Wonder if the Ascended realize how great they have it with needing almost no rest.”

  When he got into her personal space, she flinched, lowered her head, and looked at him. The v-shaped sensor ridge on her faceplate gleamed with soft pinpricks of reflected stars—even colder and weaker than the real thing. Blake missed the days when people around him didn’t wear blank helmets all the time.

  He said, “I reread our plan for infiltrating Mortenton. It’s beyond reckless.”

  “You have a safer one?”

  “No. I tried to think of something better than hacking their security network and pretending to be Council soldiers, but a frontal assault won’t work. There is no one in the city that the Republic isn’t ready to sacrifice, so no hostages either.” He paused, examining the barren soil under him. “Doesn’t mean it’s a good plan. We’ll probably get killed.”

  “Everyone on this team is prepared to die, Drummond,” she said and looked back to the stars.

  He sighed and joined her. Thousands of years had passed since humanity’s first foray into the void, but the twinkling tapestry looked no less mysterious now than back when their ancestors had first crawled out of their caves. Prehistoric people would crane their necks up and see gods and beasts and men in the scattered pearls of light. The difference was, now humanity knew that the mystery was just a magician’s trick.

  “I understand,” said Blake. “What I don’t get is how you lot got this mission. That breach plan you had before I came along? It relied on security schematics that are thirty years old. If somebody made any changes, every one of you would be dead.”

  She didn’t answer for a minute or two. The forest here was silent, and the dripping of hawthorn venom was the only sound. Thick emerald drops would splat against the ground and seep into it with a soft hiss. The only thing immune to them were the roots of the tree itself. Nothing else grew around it, and the earth was an angry reddish-brown color.

  Nat said, “Hawthorn saplings are fragile. They get uprooted by animals or starve and wilt before they reach ten feet. If an adult tree does manage to grow, however, it clings to the soil for centuries, killing everything around it. Hawthorn was on the sigil of the previous Count of Lankershire.” Her face was turned to the foliage above them as she was telling the tale. “He told me once that he saw himself as this tree. He was obsessed with Old Earth. Thanks to him, the Lankershire collection of pre-1900 books is the largest on Terra Nox, possibly in the galaxy. They were never copied—he didn’t let anyone do it.” She looked over to the six sleeping forms of her soldiers and shook her head. “Did you ever think why Lankershire produces assassin mechs, Drummond? We probably made yours.”

  Blake nodded as Aileen snorted in his mind. This was how he had been able to pass off his mech as a stock model with minor changes: people made assumptions and moved on.

  “You are full of shit, Blake,” said Mei walking into view from behind the tree they were sitting next to. “Your suit only looks like Deep Stealth 90. Most joints bend 180 degrees instead of 170, and your reaction speed is almost one hundred microseconds faster, so both hardware and electronics are different. Never seen anything like it.”

  “I still don’t understand why Sam sent his precious sister with us,” said Nat.

  “Like I gave him a choice,” Mei said, plopping down next to Blake. A drop of poison fell on her left arm and rolled off the fur. “How soon are we moving out?”

  Nat said, “The others should get another half an hour of sleep. We can cover a lot more ground during the night.”

  Mei said, “Yeah, that sunproof exoskeleton Ryan is carrying? It chafes.” She cracked her neck. “So, what were you talking about?”

  Blake said, “Previous Count of Lankershire and why he made assassin mechs.”

  “Oh?” said Mei. “That’s easy. Lankershire produced assassin mechs because it made the Council look the other way whenever rumors of torture reached them. Or whenever bodies turned up.”

  Blake said, “I imagine the Count at least got investigated.”

  Mei snuggled up to his left arm and looked at his helmet, probably trying to guess where the eyes would be. She said, “I sometimes forget you are an outworlder, Blake. The number of rebellions is what the Council cares about. And it was low until fifty years ago when the Count went from eccentric to insane.”

  Nat had been nodding along but now shook her head. “If it was insanity, it was the most gradual psychotic break you’d ever see. More and more people were disappearing and looking for them meant you were next. Sometimes they would come back broken: not able to sleep and twitching at every noise. We would praise the Count’s policies in the streets and complain indoors. That was why I decided to join the troops.”

  Blake had heard this tale both at home and on Terra Nox. People becoming soldiers and military police for a government that had forgotten the value of human life. Some of them joined for money and power, others did it to protect their loved ones.

  “How did that work out for you?” he asked.

  “My family disowned me, but they were removed from the registry. They could walk the streets at night and not get arrested, and they could speak their mind about the government as long as it didn’t end up on the net.” She looked down and sighed. “I can’t complain.”

  Blake nodded. He remembered getting a message at the start of his original career. It had rained that day. “I had a choice like that once,” he said. “I remember raindrops slamming into the window like shotgun slugs when I got the call.”

  Nat stopped staring at the sky and looked at him. She asked, “And how did that work out for you?”

  At least she didn’t call him Drummond. Blake looked away from his companions and put his hand on the hawthorn tree near its roots. He barely felt the bark’s texture through the armor. “I called my superiors. Trusted the system.” He felt Aileen’s comforting presence envelop him as it often did when his mind returned to that day. “They said I was too close to join the rescue mission. I still wonder if it would have made a difference.”

  “What happened?” asked Mei. She squeezed his arm, and with her strength it was almost like there was no armor.

  He shrugged and said, “Fortified terrorists with hostages happened. My mother got shot in the right lung and drowned in her own blood before they could get medical help to her. They brought her back, of course, but too much time had passed before the team medic put her into stasis.” He tapped his right temple. “When her body was healed, the lights upstairs remained out. My father never talked to me after that.”

  Nat rubbed her shoulder in obvious discomfort. She said, “I remember watching my sister’s birthday while being stealthed in a corner in my mech suit. You’ve had it worse.”

  “My family died during the First War,” said Mei. “I’m sorry, Blake.”

  “It’s nothing. Everyone has a sob story. We wouldn’t be on this insane mission otherwise.” He got up and stepped away from the trunk. “Isn’t it time?”

  “Right,” said Nat. “I’ll wake the others and we’ll g
o through the plan again.”

  After making sure everyone knew what to do, the eight of them exited the jungle and started approaching Mortenton from the south. Mei left to do her part.

  “The city itself is in the caldera at the top of that volcano over there.”

  Nat pointed at what looked like the chest of some titan jutting out of the surrounding plains. Lush green woods crawled up its slopes, giving way to specks of shrubs at about three thousand feet, soon to be replaced by volcanic rock. Black, red, and white layers weaved across the mountain face, making it look like a knot of poisonous snakes from this distance.

  “Fuck me sideways,” said Ryan, a tombstone of a man that moved as silent as the spirits of the dead. “We are supposed to convince them we are trying to make it erupt? The volcano must be a hundred miles across.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Blake. “It’s twenty miles. I’ve read that millions of years ago, this was an inner sea, and the volcano was an island jutting out in the middle. Two seismic faults meet here.” He drew a cross in the air with a finger. “Even now, lava still flows under the earth, and Mortenton spends a lot of resources on redirecting it away from the city. They are already afraid, so a little push should be enough.”

  “I don’t see any water,” said Irene, their electronic lock specialist.

  “It’s long gone,” said Blake. “The sea wasn’t deep here, and it dried up as the landmass rose and the climate changed. Rocks eroded. Then the plants moved in.”

  A constant cool breeze was blowing from the east bringing with it the smell of salt. The ground began to rise, the air got warmer, and he realized they were already walking on an active volcano. Obsidian spires of seismic detectors and wave neutralizers were hammered into the ground every five hundred feet. The group crested a small hill and saw their first stop.

  “This is a kind of place a demented rat might live in,” said Blake.

  The disposable pastel town that lay before them looked like it could collapse upon itself at any second. Beige paint peeled off metal walls, revealing gleaming silver spotted with rust—like pockmarks on bone. Buildings quivered with every gust of wind. Everything was nine to twelve stories high, and arcs of yellow lightning would start at the base of structures every few seconds and bounce to the top.

  Blake took Melanie by the elbow and moved her into proper Council squad marching formation. The girl didn’t speak unless nodding didn’t work, but she was the only one who didn’t watch him warily, which he was grateful for.

  “Everyone, remember to go in step,” he said.

  “We know the drill,” said Ryan keeping himself between Blake and his sister Irene. “You are the Council tech expert. Stick to that, turncoat.”

  Nat moved a little closer and tapped on the spear shaft protruding above her right shoulder.

  They started down a half-overgrown road that went through the farming fields spreading in a tapestry of green, gold, and purple. Orchards of trees with bright fruit, patches of meaty vegetables, and waist-high rows of berry bushes all reminded Blake of his childhood.

  He said, “I like it here. None of that nutrition capsule crap.”

  “Drummond. Shut up,” said Nat.

  They entered the tiny town at the foot of the volcano. People here were a weird bunch. None of them stared into space or played games on their personal assistants. Dozens sat inside dull-brown transport mechs and hover trucks, and a few directed them.

  The Mortenton Lower Guard Station towered over the rest of the town from its twenty-floor height. The walls were obsidian-black and a foot thick. Five wings jutted from a central cylinder, like a claw of the Council clutching at the community. Two men in burly assault mechs guarded the entrance: one was a bear-like plum-violet design and the other resembled a black hawk—they were tank and assassin types.

  Sheong’s gait was feminine, and his assassin mech had a layer of veneer. He walked up to the guard and asked, “Hey, man, how is your shift going? Maybe the Ascended decided to do their part for once?”

  The black guard said, “Like always. Those entitled punks get sent on patrol and we end up having to bail them out of a bar before they drink half the Mortenton dry.” He looked the eight of them over. “You lot coming in?”

  “Yeah,” said Sheong. “Just need to get our patrol route. Heard there is a festival up in Mortenton today.”

  The man moved to rub his eyes, and the metal glove made a soft clang against his helmet. He said, “You are early. And there is always a festival in Mortenton. Anyway, show me your ID, and you can go up.”

  Blake barely heard the conversation, because he was too busy connecting a port on his suit to the one on the guard’s while Sheong provided the distraction.

  “Hurry up,” said Nat over the intercom.

  Blake said, “The Council hasn’t changed its encryption algorithms in a hundred years, but we still need a key. I’m going in.”

  Blake stretched an armored hand to the guard to pass him the codes and sent a command to Aileen just when he established a hardware connection with the man’s suit. There was a sense of rushing air, and he couldn’t breathe. Panic hit him for a moment before he remembered that he didn’t need air, and Blake launched his consciousness into cyberspace.

  Aileen stretched above him, a cerulean tree that blocked the sky with her branches. He could make out flickering stars in the distance—the suits of his teammates connected through a private network he had set up.

  He was standing on a root that pulsed softly. Next to Aileen’s colossal form was a red shrub no taller than him—the guard’s AI. Blake knelt and touched the throbbing bark. His hand wasn’t covered in armor here, and it didn’t have hair or nails. Just an idea of a hand, glowing with white light against the dark.

  “None of this is real,” he said and pushed his palm into the root.

  His mind filled with deafening white. The previous two weeks came back to him in minuscule detail, down to the number of strands of hair that were out of place when Mei had woken him in the Freefolk hospital, to the temperature of the earth the night before, and to the pain of his broken spine tearing through the anesthetics when he had woken up in the jungle.

  “Blake, I’m so sorry, I didn’t have time to process it all,” said Aileen.

  He was barely hanging on, keeping the number of moss spores in the Freefolk camp out of his head. There was a moment when it felt like his skull might burst, and then the pressure receded. He probed gently and found that Aileen’s memories were at the level of detail a human could handle.

  “We are running out of time,” she said.

  He said, “Next time, warn me before you try to melt my brain.”

  Now that his head wasn’t bursting, Blake could synchronize his perception with Aileen’s. It was warm here—a summer night. A foot-wide root of hers was reaching toward the flimsy shrub and touching one of its frail roots. A pulse of bright-green travelled down the tree and to the bush, where it flashed crimson and disappeared with a soft clink.

  Blake let his focus shift from his virtual body to the spot where Aileen interfaced with the other AI. There were barriers along the signal’s path: it passed basic Council identification, but they didn’t have the right codes to fake Mortenton guard membership. Blake saw one more packet get blocked with a clang.

  “Two more attempts before defense protocols kick in,” said Aileen.

  Blake brought his mind even closer to the point of contact between the AIs and examined the reaction as Aileen tried to fake the codes another time. It looked like blood-red moonlight reflecting off a lake in a slight breeze. A thousand scarlet fireflies flickered, and he only had time to recognize the general pattern. The barrier rippled from the point of impact, waves rolling to the edge and bouncing back.

  “Hit it with everything we have,” he said.

  A river of light flowed down Aileen’s roots, and Blake prepared the package. A lot of mechs were old, their software held together by band-aids and supported by crutches.
He faked two dozen anomalies in the data, took the sequence of codes he had been given weeks ago for that identification protocol, made an educated guess about what the next one would be, and threw it at the guard’s AI along with a burst of junk data Aileen supplied. The light crept toward its destination, and Blake could see strings of machine code inside the pulse. The barrage of information passed the basic identification and slammed into the firewall in an explosion of blue. The defenses roared before blinking out and letting the data through.

  “Thank you, Aileen,” said Blake and disconnected.

  Reality came to him in a flash of pure white light. He stepped back letting Sheong work his magic.

  “I see you’ve just been transferred from the capital. Your code transmitter is shit,” said the guard. “You should have that looked at, Sergeant Teller.”

  “We will,” said Sheong.

  “Alright. Go right in.”

  The eight of them walked through the twelve-foot obsidian doors that swung open automatically. A forcefield shimmered behind the entrance, framed by the nozzles of plasma dispensers. The barrier blinked out, and Blake forced himself to walk calmly. His skin tingled from anticipating a wall of fire to engulf them at any moment.

  Nat asked, “What the hell was that, Drummond? You said you could fake a Council ID without a problem.”

  “I was a fraction of a second late when I went in. There were only two tries remaining.”

  He heard Nat curse over the intercom, but she didn’t say anything else. He appreciated that. It had been some time since he had done any serious hacking, and he had forgotten just how different the time flow was in cyberspace. Two hackers could have an entire battle there while someone here sneezed.

  They walked into a circular room, which had a sturdy desk in the center and two couches that had been brown during a forgotten epoch. A clerk stood behind the desk. His skin was as grey-brown and creased as the artificial leather of the couches. They crowded next to the table out of necessity: the room was no more than twenty feet across, and the furniture wasn’t by the walls. Sheong coughed, and the clerk looked up from the terminal where some video had been playing a moment before. His jaw would move once, and he would look at one of them, chew once and move to the next one.