Cyborg (The Deep Wide Black Book 1)

by JCH Rigby

  “I screwed up the job last time, this time though I’ve got you with me. I need you to get the story out, and you need our data, and you need me to explain it.

  “I knew we all had a good chance of disappearing the instant we arrived on Orchard. So, I downloaded myself, and here we are. Now, I’ve lost more friends, and this time I’ve lost me. But I’m not abandoning those people, and I’m not letting anyone bury this story again.

  “So, start thinking about how we can circulate this story to the other worlds, if your local guys aren’t interested. Look, I don’t know how long I can exist like this. This isn’t what I call life, but it’s all I’ve got, and I want to hang onto it.

  “I think that’s enough for now. I don’t want to stay—visible—for too long. I’m going.”

  Chambers remained nonplussed. “What, just like that? You can’t go now—we’ve a lot to talk about. How do I contact you?” Did that make this Richter thing genuine, or was it another level of spook trickery?

  “You don’t. I’ll find you. I know this much: We all leave a data trail, and you’ve left a particularly broad one. So, wherever you pop up, I’ll pop up.”

  The Richter figure flickered and vanished leaving Chambers looking out over a dark sea.

  Chapter Four

  Skipping Stones

  Monday, July 4th

  Chambers slept restlessly until the morning line rolled round again. When he woke, he couldn’t make himself think about Richter’s demand to tell his story yet. The fear too raw, too real.

  Padding naked and barefoot into the lounge, Chambers swerved around that spot in the center of the room, heading for the window. Squinting against the sudden glare. The light from the sun mirrors bouncing off something and blinding him. He didn’t remember this.

  Hold it. It had to be water reflecting the light. Turning, he went back to the bedroom. Pulled on some clothes, grabbing the battered slate, he rummaged around for shoes and headed for the door, hands full and feet still bare. It was time he looked at the sea.

  Hopping on one foot on the doorstep, thumb caught in the heel of a shoe, he wobbled around awkwardly until he dropped the other shoe and the slate barely managing to keep his balance. It would be dumb to fall down the steps and break his neck he chided himself. Calming down for a moment, he straightened up and looked out across the rooftops.

  The view didn’t disappoint. Down the hill, beyond the buildings below, an expanse of 1,000 shades of blue stretched out both directions up the curve, Upspin to the left and Downspin to the right. At its near edge, the water lapped against a shingle beach, which must have been the source of the crunching noise he’d heard the night before. Further out the two lighthouses his father had told him about, a pair of neat little red and white towers facing each other across a couple of hundred meters of sea. And way off in front of him, toward Leftside, the sea ran on and on toward the far wall.

  Chambers knew the distant shore had been planned to be around three kilometers wide, but from here it was only visible as a thick green band below the wooded hills that rolled up to the black. Pretty village, beach, lighthouses, sea view, farmland, forested slopes, the wall, and the smoothly-turning constellations. Above it all, the curve arching upwards and inwards until it disappeared behind the mirrors, more than fifty kilometers overhead, before emerging from the sun glare to arc downwards and around to the village once more. As the curve approached, it grew from a thin scimitar line to a broadening sweep of green and blue. Peace, beauty, grandeur. Nature and majestic construction in graceful harmony. This finally was the perfect view old Pete Chambers had hoped for. The younger Chambers inquisitive journalistic mind would not be sated as he asked himself a few pointed questions. So why now? So many years unfinished, then suddenly this perfect loveliness. How had the squabbling, penny pinching Orchard government found the money to afford this?

  Ignoring the dropped shoe, Chambers leaned against the low balcony wall and let his gaze follow the waterline on around the hill. This was the first time he’d taken a proper look at the neighborhood since he’d come back. Everything looked a lot cleaner, brighter, and better maintained, as if the government finally spent a pile of money on tidying up Orchard’s act. The village roads spotless and litter-free, and all the buildings seemed to be in some sort of use. Now he looked more closely he couldn’t see any graffiti, any dilapidated apartments, any flaking paint or broken windows. Even the gardens and paths seemed neat and well-tended. No discarded junk lying about.

  A clatter and hum from far off to his right, the unmistakable sound of a train pulling into the village. He leaned further out on the balcony wall, twisting around to look away from the sea and back along the side wall of the house and across the street. This would be a local train, like the one he’d caught from Beaudoin the other night, but it sounded a lot less decrepit. No squealing wheels, no clanking couplings. Chambers caught a glimpse of movement through the trees, an impression of white and blue wagons moving briskly. This one wasn’t slowing for the station. What the hell? He followed the movement as far as he could, then quickly crossed to the other end of the balcony to pick it up again as it emerged into view on the far side of the house.

  From this side, he plainly heard the drumming of the wheels on the rails and the humming of the motors, but he still couldn’t make out much through the buildings and trees. He followed the noise until it faded, finally spotting the line of freight cars as they emerged from the wood line and went on up the curve. Not the local passenger service, then, but something new. Large-scale haulage; an expensive thing to start up. What’s going on here? From the distant wood the line ran straight Upspin, and he stood and watched until the details of the twenty or so freight cars were lost to distance. Eventually, all he could make out was the cars’ upper surfaces. Yet, even from this distance the train looked modern, clean, well-maintained. Not the usual Orchard thing at all.

  Chambers turned back looking at the village with fresh, questioning eyes. The last time he’d seen it from up here rubbish had been piled high in the alley below, the empty lots blighted by scattered broken machinery, and the whole place looked neglected. Now, the alley looked like a pleasant place to stroll, the gardens ablaze with color, and the rooftop deck of the apartment below him was bright and clean in the morning light. He heard footsteps and voices, the smell of fresh coffee and baking bread, between the trees he made out people going about their everyday business. Which was, it seemed, shopping for groceries, fiddling around with a few very new small boats and their associated gear, tending to their animals and their smallholdings, taking little kids to and fro, and chasing bigger kids off to the local train for school and college.

  Surely no one was talking about wars and cyborgs, old religions and mass murder, about torture and disembowelment and bloody great lizard-things which ripped people’s limbs off.

  Nothing was real here. How the hell were people going on doing what people do, when all that horror lurked out in the deep wide black? That beautiful velvet vastness would never look the same to him again after the sights he had witnessed on Harmony.

  Okay, let’s think logically said the journalists side of Chambers’ brain. Most people didn’t know about what was going on beyond the peaceful walls of Orchard and the other colonized worlds. But those few who did didn’t seem to care. He would be deep in a world of grief if he tried to do anything about that. Telling Richter’s story wasn’t a decision he couldn’t make lightly.

  Chambers remembered something Pavel Kirov, one of Richter’s disappeared men, once said to him. He and Kirov had been having a casual chat and, as so often with soldiers, it happened over a brew. He’d been trying to get to know this curious man with his metal eyes, his weird senses, his mixed ancestry, and his endless jokes.

  He’d asked a vague question about ambushes, hoping to learn what the Enhanced, as these soldiers with their extraordinary abilities liked to be called considering Cyborg to be some kind of insult, felt. What they though
t when the target walked right into their sights. Kirov took his meaning differently. He’d been ambushed himself, more than once.

  What do you do when it all turns to crap? Listen, David Petrovich, you go forward and fight, or you run like hell to get out of trouble, away from the danger. It’s called breaking contact.

  But then you stand, and you listen, and you look. You look for your friends, and you see if there’s anyone else still alive. Then, you all take off again. Or you’re alone, and you do it all by yourself.

  Once you can stop running you make a list of what you’ve still got, and you carry on with that. You don’t beat yourself up and waste time grieving over what you’ve lost, or wishing for what you’d like, or dreaming about “if only.” You go with what you’ve got.

  Fair enough thought Chambers. I’ve got a beach and a sea. Let’s go and skip some stones.

  WHICH WAS WHAT HE was doing when the Richter avatar came back. Standing up to his knees in the sea, clutching a fistful of pebbles in his left hand and skipping them with his right. Things were looking up: his ribs still tight, but at least he was able to swing his arms. He’d been skipping stones for a little while, and with a bit of luck and concentration he’d found he managed six or seven bounces in succession.

  A group of teenage kids a little distance away, paddling or swimming or just fooling around as the mood took them. Whenever he got a stone to go a decent distance, they’d glare at him. Why weren’t they in school anyway? Chambers wondered. He ignored them, engrossed in his simple game. The last time he’d tried this he had been a kid himself; he’d never really got the hang of it then. Now, it seemed to be coming together.

  His last shot still skipped and splashed across the surface when the Richter avatar returned. This time the thing didn’t scare the crap out of him by materializing directly in front of him. It scared the crap out of him by whispering in his ear:

  “Delightful place you’ve got here, Chambers.”

  He spun around, heart thudding once more. His handful of stones splashed into the water. Would there ever again be a moment when he wasn’t petrified? He couldn’t see the thing. “Where the fuck are you?”

  “Scheisse.” The Richter avatar swore in German. “Keep your voice down and stop freaking out. Here I am, trying to be just a tiny bit covert and you’re acting like a nervous virgin at her first orgy. Stop prancing about and calm down.”

  “What do you expect?” Chambers got a hold of himself a little. “All right, then. Let’s stop playing games. Where are you?”

  “You won’t see me. But I’m here. I’m learning more about this kind of life, and it looks as if I don’t need to be quite as—apparent—as the other night.”

  “I take it you mean my apartment, or was it the village?”

  “What?” Said Richter confused.

  “You said ‘delightful place you’ve got here.’ Which did you mean: my own place or the village? And what have you been doing since you terrified me the other night?” Chambers couldn’t trust the thing, but maybe he might learn from it.

  Richter’s voice originated from nowhere, but it seemed to be outside Chambers’ head, not inside. Not going nuts, then, with any luck. “I meant this cute little habitat you live on. It’s drollig - quaint—isn’t it? No, that’s not it. What’s the right word in English? Twee? Pretty views, nice little lake here, green fields and woods as far as the eye can see. Like the lid on a box of chocolates. A bit lacking in mountains, though, for my taste.”

  Nice little lake? Chambers bit. “Can’t see why that would worry you right now. You’re not going rock climbing any time soon, are you?” Was Richter trying to wind him up? A little petty, perhaps, but two can play at that game.

  The audio quality dropped, and the avatar’s voice became frosty. “No, I’m not. I’m not fooling around when good people are missing, and the biggest threat ever to face our whole species is coming right at us, either. Get your ass into gear, Chambers. You look like shit; you haven’t shaved in ages. You’re wasting time. You’ve got work to do.”

  “I’m not taking a ribbing from thin air, Richter. Shaved? Who gives a shit? And you think I’m lacking perspective, do you? I don’t need to explain myself to something half-way between a video game and a voice mail message, either, but just this once I’m going to.

  “Get a hold of this lot. One: I listened to you when you told me how to behave in a firefight, because that’s what you do. But I’m the journalist here, not you. I’ll decide when I want to do research, and when I want to talk to people, and when I want time to bloody think. Don’t tell me how to work. This is what I do.

  “Two. A lot of strange stuffs happening here on Orchard, above and beyond the story we’ve brought back.”

  “But…” Interrupted Richter only for Chambers to cut him off.

  “No, don’t interrupt me. I haven’t told you this yet, but the police here, and I guess the government, just don’t want to know what we met out there. I know they’re not stupid, so why don’t they care? Someone’s been spending a load of money here, money Orchard didn’t have a few years back. Funny, two odd things in the same place at the same time. Connected? Maybe. Where did all that money come from, and what’s in it for whomever's making it? Journalism 101: Follow the money.”

  If the Richter avatar had been sent by the police, they wouldn’t expect him to lose interest and walk away. If it was real, then perhaps both he and the avatar did want the same thing. However old Richter was, surely he’d never think a threat this big didn’t matter.

  The kids were all standing and staring at him. Chambers realized he’d been shouting, lowering his voice to a near whisper. “Three. Not too many people will want to listen to my stories about foreign wars and alien lizard monsters once they see me up to my knees in the sea talking to myself, and looking like shit, as you put it. I’m heading back to the apartment. If you want to talk rather than have an argument, I’m sure you’ll find a way of joining me. Dress code: visible.”

  Chambers did his best to stomp off through the shallows, soaking his rolled-up trouser legs as he did so. He looked to Upspin. High up in the distance he could still make out the train, a long white and blue shape rolling steadily onwards around the curve.

  CHAMBERS WANTED TO HOLD on to the anger. It felt so much better than the dread and the doubt. Whatever this thing might be it looked and sounded like Richter, and Richter and the others had saved his hide more than once. So maybe he owed it some consideration. Maybe the avatar was genuine; if so maybe it was right, and he should be moving faster with this. No; he knew well enough how to work at a story, and he needed his thinking time or else he’d be chasing after trivial details while the whole direction of his research vanished in a delta of meandering streams of thought. He also knew he was still no surer about the avatar.

  Chambers walked up the new shingle beach and crossed the strip of marram grass running along the shore, studying one of the shiny little motorboats beached near the footpath, before climbing the winding stone steps leading up from the waterfront into the lane below the apartment, he realized he had been so absorbed in every new thing which the village had to show him that his anger simply evaporated. He realized he was ready to start thinking seriously. Chambers didn’t need a thrill of indignation to validate his certainty something was seriously weird in his home. Follow the money, indeed.

  When Chambers entered the apartment, he took that same curious route around the lounge, setting the slate down on the table while telling the kitchen to organize breakfast. By now it should have restocked itself, and the brisk arrival of a plate of scrambled eggs and a pile of toast answered that one. Tea, juice, and he started to feel marginally in control of his life for the first time since they’d smacked back down onto the dock ledge. So long as he didn’t think about the things out in the black.

  And, as if the avatar calmed down as well, it waited until he’d almost finished his meal before quietly announcing itself by sketching its
outline faintly in the air.

  “Hello, Chambers. Shall we try again?” For Richter, the voice was practically apologetic, almost timid.

  Chambers swallowed a mouthful of toast, and nodded. “Yeah, we should. Have a seat…” he trailed off and then laughed. “Screw it. There’s no protocol for this. Do whatever you need to feel comfortable, if anything makes a difference to you. But first things first. How sure are you we’re secure?”

  “Completely. Like I said, I don’t think your local spooks are on to me. I’ve spent the time since we last met learning more about your home, and more about me, so I’m confident enough. I can feel what’s going on around me, just like you can tell when there’s someone standing near you in the dark. And I can deal with it.” The image solidified, showing the Richter-avatar at an angle, as if the man leaned against an invisible wall. Virtual hands tucked into virtual pockets. Non-confrontational body language from a creature without a body. Good trick. But still no eyes.

  “Right, now, there’re three different bugs in your apartment and another one in the right- hand toy lighthouse out there, aimed at your window. That’s what that little boat was up to the other night, by the way. But I’ve dealt with them. The data they’re recording now is harmless. So, let’s talk, shall we?”

  “Okay. We’ll talk.” Chambers stopped himself from looking around for the bugs. If they were there, and working, he was already far beyond the point of no return. “But don’t try trampling over the top of me again. Remember, you came looking for me. We need to do this, whatever the hell it is we are trying to do, so let’s start by agreeing what the hell we’re trying to do, and then we’ll talk about how we do it.”