by JCH Rigby
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Approaching Arrow
PART I: ORCHARD Chapter One: Machine Voices
Chapter Two: Cyborgs and Trash Like That
Chapter Three: Deep Black from Way Back
Chapter Four: Skipping Stones
Chapter Five: Leaving the Dreamtime
Chapter Six: The Other Bastards are Shooting Back
PART II: STEVE ARDEN Chapter Seven: The Hoplites Arrive
Chapter Eight: Armed, Loose, and Looking Different
Chapter Nine: Horizon Star
Chapter Ten: A Pint at the Bull's Head
Chapter Eleven: A Leap in the Dark
Chapter Twelve: Topping Out the Primes
Chapter Thirteen: Heavy Lifter Deck Cargo
Chapter Fourteen: Hevelious Mass Driver
Chapter Fifteen: Serious Physical Stuff
Chapter Sixteen: Wound Sensation Level
Chapter Seventeen: Silver Lines
Chapter Eighteen: A Tiny Nudge
Chapter Nineteen: The Boundary Layers
PART III: DAVID CHAMBERS Chapter Twenty: A Validation
PART IV: LEON RICHTER Chapter Twenty-One: Ejecta Waste
Chapter Twenty-Two: Like Homesick Angels
Chapter Twenty-Three: No Discernable Signals
Chapter Twenty-Four: Battle Damage
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Psycho Drive
Chapter Twenty-Six: Redacted
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Instincts of Prey
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Wrong Threat
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Like a Hunting Dog
Chapter Thirty: Coffee with the Enemy
PART V: DAVID CHAMBERS Chapter Thirty-One: All the Old Tsars and Princes
Chapter Thirty-Two: Verifiable Other Means
PART VI: STEVE ARDEN Chapter Thirty-Three: A Stradivarius at War
Chapter Thirty-Four: The Fire Brigade
Chapter Thirty-Five: Brown Horse Bloke
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Circus Rolls On
PART VII: ORCHARD Chapter Thirty-Seven: Need to Know
Glossary
About the Author
Connect with JCH Rigby
Cyborg
The Deep Wide Black Book 1
JCH Rigby
Published by Castrum Press, 2017.
Published 2017 by Castrum Press
An imprint of PP Corcoran Ltd.
138 University Street, Belfast, BT7 1HJ
United Kingdom
www.castrumpress.com
Copyright © 2017 JCH Rigby
Cover Art by Duncan Halleck
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
Prologue
The Approaching Arrow
The berries were certainly very tempting. The group had been foraging widely across the area, having killed and eaten several red colobus monkeys on the previous day. They’d eaten well after finding a termite nest, but now they were interested in something different. While meat formed a significant part of their diet fruit and vegetables made up the bulk, and the berries were a delicacy.
The old female initiated the move. She headed away from the stream and clambered onto the lower branches of the nearest tree. The rest of the group waited around the base and watched. She went carefully; big as she might be, leopards were still a threat.
As she reached the most promising-looking branch and stretched out a hand to grab some of the berries a figure sprang down onto the limb and snatched her prize away, leaping back up onto a swaying bough. She pulled her lips back and shrieked with rage, but she kept well clear.
The newcomer ripped at the fruit and chattered back at her. A curious-looking thing. Breath hissing strangely through distorted nostrils. Twisted and folded ears, plugged with mesh, protruded from its shaved head. Eyes hard and lifeless metallic orbs. Silver-flecked skin showed through bald patches in its fur. A leather strap buckled around its neck. The newcomer finished the berries and sat motionless, staring at her.
The female dropped back to the ground and knuckle-walked rapidly away from the unnatural stranger. When it finally moved the creature began swaying back and forth on its perch, moaning and slapping at its head. The group watching from a safe distance.
After a few moments, the old female picked up a small stone and threw it experimentally in the general direction of the newcomer. One by one, the rest of the chimpanzees followed her example and, after suffering several near misses and one painful hit on its leg, the stranger quickly withdrew into the higher branches from which came.
VLADIMIR MASKHADOV WATCHED THE hunter take aim. Pulling the bowstring back to his right ear, Patrice Uche drew the laminated plastic limbs of the bow fully to the rear, waited until the image became stable in his sight, thumbed the targeting button, and paused a further split second for the accept light. Uche released carefully and drew his right hand smoothly away from the bowstring.
The slender arrow swept through the concealing leaves, its fletching warping fractionally to adjust its course as the range to target decreased and the weapon’s rudimentary brain compensated for any sighting misalignment or string snatch. Entering the enhanced chimp’s thoracic cavity to the left of the midsternal line, penetrating the heart at the anterior leaflet of the tricuspid valve and longitudinally rupturing the tricuspid leaflet.
The animal died instantly and dropped, bouncing through branches before hitting the forest floor ten meters away from the startled group of chimpanzees. The arrow point and part of the shaft protruded from its back. The youngest chimps fled, while the adults shrieked their approval and pelted the corpse with stones, sticks, and excrement.
Maskhadov nodded at the hunter. “Nice one, Pat. Good hit, considering that’s 2,000,000 bucks’ worth of improved heart you’ve just ripped apart.”
Uche grunted, only now lowering the bow. He flicked the off-switch on the sighting system and placed the weapon carefully back onto its stand. “You’d prefer I’d used a shotgun to blow its lunatic head off instead, trashing all the gizmos you put in there? Shame you didn’t add an off-switch while you were at it. We might have saved ourselves all this effort when you guys let it go walkabout.”
Maskhadov considered this. True, they’d been a little careless, but at least the animal had been fitted with a tracker. The chimps escape had been a stupid error. A supply vehicle entered the compound at the same moment as a keeper busily exercised the creature. The duty security guard foolishly left both the exterior and interior gates open while checking the driver’s documentation, and the chimp had seen its chance. With a partially accelerated nervous system and uprated heart and lungs, the animal had been unstoppable. The keeper suffering a bad bite to his thigh, while the guard received a stinging slap across his face from the trailing lead and a hard blow to his stomach leaving him momentarily winded able to do little beyond watching the chimp go.
They walked over to the body scattering the watching chimpanzee troop. Maskhadov glanced after them. “They don’t like it much, do they?”
Uche nudged the corpse with his foot. “Well, would you? It can see further than them, and it’s faster, so it’s always going to beat them to any food around. It looks wrong and it smells wrong, and it’s obviously mad. They can’t kill it, of course, they don’t like it.”
Uche rolled the limp body over, giving the arrow’s nocking point a slight twist. Feeling the bodkin head contract Uche put his foot on the animal’s chest and, with a grunt of effort, tugged the arrow free. Su
rprisingly, the shaft wasn’t badly bent. The fletching looked to have survived and, with a little time spent on the straightening gauge, he’d be able to reuse it. All that was left to do was to bring the wagon up here and move this weird chimp back to the compound.
“You guys are going to be putting this stuff into people soon, aren’t you?” Maskhadov stared at him, startled. Uche grinned back at the scientist. “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Who needs super-chimps for anything? This is some kind of trial run.”
Maskhadov bent down and stared at the chimp’s head, stuck for an answer. He couldn’t say, “Actually, we’ve been doing it for a few years. This is an upgrade we’re trying out.” So, he settled for silence and carried on inspecting the animal noticing a tiny movement in the eyes.
Although clearly as dead as a post, the lenses contracted and dilated slightly as they stubbornly processed the ambient light. He wondered if they still held in their memory the image of the approaching arrow.
PART I
ORCHARD 2450
“War does not decide who is right; war decides who is left.” –Bertrand Russell
Chapter One
Machine Voices
SUNDAY, JULY 3RD
This was the week when they were going to start filling the seas, and Chambers had forgotten all about it. It didn’t seem important now. He’d woken around four fifteen, knowing straight away he’d catch no more sleep that night. The room sensed him waking, and softly brightened the corridor lights. On his return last night, he’d tried to rig them so they would chase the shadows away from the bedroom, his efforts only making the corridor seem like a place of safety just out of reach, while the bedroom got darker and the shapes he made from the shadows got scarier. He needed light.
David Chambers painfully pulled himself out of bed, trying to keep the dread at arm’s length, struggling to stop it from filling his head with images of fear and blood and death. A glance at the wall clock told him it was just over four hours since he’d fallen into the once-familiar bed which now seemed so strange. Sore and lost he’d felt dislocated from his once familiar surroundings. The security police either finally believed him or simply gave up caring, dropping him at the train stop by Beaudoin as if they’d been a cab.
He’d had only the clothes he was wearing, the small backpack full of fusty laundry, and his battered slate—not that he trusted it any more. The memory would have been raided, raped, and copied within minutes of him being bundled off the lander and into the police vehicle. However, miracle of miracles, some credit remained on it when he’d boarded the train. Even more remarkable, the apartment remembered him and let him in.
As soon as he’d entered the little vestibule, his fingers opened of their own accord letting the backpack fall to the floor. He’d leaned back against the door and breathed deeply, slowly, gently. His ribs hurt, but that wasn’t why he felt on the brink of tears.
Five years away, then back on the habitat for ten days. It felt both more and less. The interrogators’ probing had been legally short of torture. Pushing everything else aside except for their questions, the doubt and the ridicule, before finally the curious possibility the interrogators might believe him but somehow not care. Why would they do that?
Everything Chambers had been through welled inside him, like bubbles rising to the surface of a simmering pot. This ring-shaped world of Orchard had been his family home for a couple of generations, now it felt like a tiny and very vulnerable irrelevance in a big and scary universe.
Home should have been a shelter where he could hide from what he’d met out there—and what he’d found back here. Yet he’d felt apprehensive about entering the apartment. That made little sense considering he’d been in some pretty scary places recently. This was home. It ought to feel safe.
When he had left Orchard five years before David had known he had been running away from events in his personal life. He had used the excuse that he had been going after fresh stories. He was a journalist after all. Now he was back on Orchard he would have to confront what he’d been running from in the first place.
Entering the kitchen, he found the unit had evidently been talking to the slate and catching up. Trying to meet his presumed changing tastes, the unit experimented with brewing some of the cheff Chambers had in his backpack, rather than the redbush tea he’d been drinking back before he left. Perhaps the slate wasn’t a basket case after all.
Chambers liked cheff, first encountering the drink in the ARTOK company’s research station in the Dead White zone, high above the Parnassus snowline what felt like a life time ago. Chambers cursed silently as he thought of his meeting with Vladimir Filippovich Semyonov, Chairman of the mighty ARTOK. Semyonov requested that the journalist do a piece on the Human Enhancement Program. If Chambers had said no to the smiling Russian, he would never have met Richter and his team. Would never have come within an inch of losing his life. Chambers shrugged his shoulders in resignation. What was done was done and you can’t do anything about it so just get on with it he scolded himself as he returned his attention to the steaming cheff.
It wasn’t tea, it wasn’t coffee, and it tasted as good cold as it did hot. Sipping from the steaming cup, he padded through to the lounge cautiously nudging a low table toward his favorite old armchair facing the picture window. The table paused, briefly resisting him, then got the idea and edged itself into place. Like everything else in Orchard, the apartment was old, creaky, and decrepit.
Her empty chair reproached Chambers from its place against the wall. Reaching out his hand stroking the air, just there. Exactly there. Directly in front of the window where a sound faded down to silence, a stutter-edit hanging in the air as the pixels shrank. The image came here and found him, and he could do nothing to help her. Chambers had watched her die, right here in the lounge.
Hand stroking the place where a lock of her hair faded to transparency. Chambers glanced at his outstretched arm, confused by his own gesture he walked to the window taking in the view.
Once the terminator line passed, he’d be able to see an almost-spectacular view across the roofs and treetops onwards toward the empty seabed. Dad had chosen the location wisely, back when there were no trees, no roofs, and when all you saw was dull grey rock. One day the view would be perfect.
Putting down the cup Chambers sat, feeling his ribs pull and creak where the creature had kicked him. The pain brought memories rushing back, the dizzying horror of blades, claws, and teeth. Chambers’ heart raced. His breathing quickening. Get a hold of yourself. That bit’s over. You’re alive. He admonished himself.
The memories refused to be silenced. The whooping of laser fire and the high-climbing scream of needlers; incongruous amongst the old-fashioned booming of firearms. In the midst of the chaos and terror, curious silence under pressure which he’d come to associate with the Enhanced. The terrible, bubbling screams of a dying man, horrified at what had been done to him. A breathless animal yelping, fading away to whimpers—he’d almost forgotten about what happened to the dog. Somehow, that had been one of the worst sounds of all.
Looking down in horror at the flapping fabric of his own jacket, certain he was going to see his entrails spilling out. The creature had had claws like huge knives, wide-gaping jaws, blades on its feet. He couldn’t breathe. His legs buckled. He was falling, starting to black out, terrified the soldiers would think he’d died and leave him where the nightmare could rip him apart. His vision dimming, narrowing down to a point, head flopping from side to side as he fell to the damp ground.
Lying there, certain he was living his last moments his vision filled with Kirov, face tight with concentration as he fired shot after carefully-aimed shot. A vaguely-remembered image of the ammunition block shrinking in the man’s rifle. Rolling onto his back staring straight up at a fading sky while the creature roared and the weapons crashed. Silence. The soldiers must have abandoned him.
Rough hands grabbing at the straps of his backpack and drag
ging him away. The feeling of relief that they hadn’t left him. He’d seen his blood start to well from the wounds, the sound of his own screams as fractured bones bounced across hard ground. As he felt himself hurled roughly onto the vehicle’s deck he’d known he had a chance to live, and he’d let himself go gratefully into the delicious rest of unconsciousness.
After all that and the incomprehensible journey back aboard the stolen ARTOK ship, dull and dizzy with the drugs that had flooded his system during his immersion in the medical tanks as they worked to repair the injuries which had come close to ending his life, ten days of grief from the security police didn’t seem like such a big deal. All Chambers had to show for it now was the ringing in his left ear where one of the interrogators had smacked him up the side of the head, the bruises around his fingernails, and a twitchy discomfort if he couldn’t see the door. The creature he’d met out there in the deep wide black was a whole lot worse. Behind it, something else again, something even nastier, displaying a frightening interest from a long way off.
He sipped at the cheff. The gingery taste conjuring up images of soldiers brewing up under distant skies, staring thoughtfully into dregs of drinks and wondering what tomorrow would bring, and, now, so was he.
Orchard, Thursday, June 23, 2450
TEN DAYS BEFORE, THE battered lander bounced and slithered about on the ledge of the landing dock as if the guidance software had been as tired as its weary occupants. The ship had been tracked since entering the system, so it came as no surprise to see the dock cleared awaiting their arrival. A sense of relief had washed over the crew. They were finally here, lying back in the crash chairs, listening to the hull pinging and creaking around them and the falling whines of the various auxiliary systems dying down to silence. A machine voice recited numbers, and was ignored. Frigid air wafted from vents. No one moved. As though they’d done enough just reaching here.
