Donali checked the grid for a place to set down, rotating the three-dimensional gravidar display until it gave him a nice cross-section of the chasm.
That was when he saw it.
Something massive was crashing down above him, taking out streets and air traffic alike, washing them away with bursts of static.
Donali’s mind raced. He could only imagine what it was. He had just a few seconds before the debris reached him. He needed a place to hide! Scanning the buildings, he looked for somewhere safe to land his pod, but the truth was, nowhere would be safe, and there wasn’t enough time.
A distant roar, growing ever closer, reached his ears. Mountains of rubble crashing down. Donali imagined people screaming as they fell.
Then the shields below him flickered out, and he saw nothing but the naked hexagonal outlines of the shield emitter frame. Someone had turned off the shield. Beyond that were layers of traffic and elevated streets. Air cars went screaming by on all sides, fleeing to the lower levels of the city. Suddenly Donali understood the purpose of turning off the shield.
He gunned the pod’s tiny thrusters, following the traffic down. He raced past more levels of streets and traffic. Keeping half an eye on the grid, he watched the wave of static caused by the crashing debris draw near to the lower shield. An instant before the debris reached it, the shield glowed to life. The debris hit with a deafening roar, and Donali’s escape pod rattled with the noise.
Donali didn’t trust that barrier to hold the weight of so much destruction. He flew on for the surface of the city—wherever it might be. After passing just two levels of elevated streets and one level of air traffic, he plunged into a thick, murky gray fog. The stream of traffic fleeing from the upper city raced ahead of him, their tail lights forming crimson halos in the low-lying clouds. Donali assumed those cars knew where they were going, but just to be sure, he ran a quick scan of the fog. Sensors reported the real surface of Avilon rushing up fast.
Donali reversed thrust and pushed the grav lifts up to full power, provoking a high-pitched whine from the generator. He snapped on the pod’s bow lights to cut a swath through the gloom. Gray castcrete appeared at the bottom, cracked and broken and littered with trash. He pulled up to race along that street, chasing after the blurry red glow of the nearest air car. It soon passed out of sight, disappearing in the swirling haze.
The sides of the street were just as crowded with people as the ones he’d passed on his way down. Yet these streets seemed more forbidding. Streetlights were too few, and the ones there were took on an eerie glow because of the mist.
Above, the buildings had seemed to be endless shining walls of light and majesty, but here they were shadowy and gray. The occasional ground car drove by, but for the most part the street was trafficked with people, not cars.
Donali flew by several side streets and cross streets before deciding to take one of them. It turned out to be a deserted alley, but up ahead he saw the red tail lights of an air car, landed and waiting. That encouraged him. If someone else had decided this was a safe hiding place, then maybe he’d gone far enough?
Donali hovered down for a landing. Landing struts touched pavement with a soft clu-clunk, and he eased out of the cramped pilot’s chair, stumbling on wooden legs to the back of the pod. He hesitated with his hand poised over the hatch controls. Now, with the most harrowing part of the journey to the surface behind him, he had enough time to stop and think: what next?
He was a foreigner on a strange world that had been isolated from the rest of humanity for thousands of years. He wasn’t even sure they would speak Versal. Blending in was going to be tougher than he’d thought. He was just about to open the hatch when he noticed his nakedness. Upon waking from stasis aboard the Intrepid, he hadn’t even had time to stop and put on his clothes.
At that point, every second had been vital to his survival. Now that he had a second to breathe, however, he noticed that he was badly chilled and starting to shiver. Whether that was from actual cold or spent adrenaline, he couldn’t be sure, but either way he couldn’t go blundering around Avilon naked.
Donali turned from the hatch controls to look in the locker under one of the pod’s bench seats. There he found a spare vac suit and a pair of self-conforming boots. He pulled on the suit quickly, one leg at a time, and then the boots. He eyed the helmet for just a moment before deciding to leave it in the pod. The air on the surface had to be breathable. Avilonians were no less human than he. Snatching up the utility belt and emergency survival pack that went along with the suit, Donali returned to the hatch controls and opened the pod.
A gust of cold, musty air wafted in, bringing with it the meaty smell of rotting garbage. Donali’s nose wrinkled, and he cast a wistful glance over his shoulder for the helmet he’d left behind. He had to force himself to leave it. He’d attract far too much attention walking around with a bucket on his head.
Donali jumped out of the pod. Debris crunched underfoot. The alley was dark and devoid of humanity. Up ahead, the red tail lights of the air car he’d seen were now gone. Either it had powered down or moved on. Looking up, he saw a scattering of lights from the buildings. At the street level, a few neon signs flickered with alien symbols above rusty doors, but the light wasn’t enough to see by. Donali frowned and unclipped the grav gun from his utility belt. He activated the gun’s under barrel glow lamp and set it to illuminate to a range of 10 meters. It barely illuminated three before being swallowed by the swirling gloom, but it was better than nothing.
Donali glanced back to the relative safety of the escape pod. His stomach growled angrily at him, and he resolved to find a place to rest and eat some of the rations in his survival pack as soon as possible.
Hurrying down the alley, he passed piles of debris and trash shored up against the sides of the buildings. A few rickety stairways zigzagged between glowing, black-barred windows. The welcome glow of light and life mysteriously stopped just a few floors above the street. There were no windows on the first few floors, as if the need for a ladder would be enough to stop a determined thief.
After walking for just a few minutes, Donali began to feel naked again. The alley seemed to go on forever, and he hadn’t passed a single car or pedestrian yet. The bustling night life he’d seen at the bottom of the broader chasm was completely absent here.
Donali swept his glow lamp from side to side, searching the shadows for any sign of life, but all he saw were small, skittering creatures, their eyes bright needlepoints of reflected light.
He walked on for several minutes more, until the murky gloom became lit by a faint, golden glow. Donali headed toward that light, thinking that it must be from streetlights in a more lively part of the city. Before long, the golden glow resolved into flickering tongues of flame. Then he saw human shapes silhouetted against the firelight.
The fog began to clear, and Donali noticed that the alley opened into a large square. His breath began making tiny contributions to the dissipating fog. He stopped and stood at the end of the alley, frowning at the sight before him.
The firelight he’d seen was from a large pile of garbage burning in the center of the square. His eyes teared from the smoke, and he almost gagged from the smell of flaming refuse, but it radiated a welcome warmth. Ramshackle huts, lean-tos, and shanties lay all around the edges of the square. Here and there people stumbled around, or sat in the dust in front of their hovels, watching the fire burn.
Donali turned to look at the nearest man, a skeletal shell of humanity, wearing stained and torn clothing that looked almost as old as he did. As his glow lamp passed over the wretch, the man slowly turned to squint up at him with lifeless black eyes. Long, bedraggled locks of gray hair clung to his head in patches. Donali stared back, waiting for a reaction, but there was none.
Careful to keep his eyes on the wretch, he took a few steps forward and sat down. The wretch watched him for a moment longer before turning back to the bonfire, his brief spark of curiosity spent. A few others noti
ced Donali sitting there in his clean white vac suit, and they stared, too. Yet none of them moved to approach.
Donali realized that this was a place where people went to forget or be forgotten, and that made it the perfect place for him to hide—at least for now.
These people wouldn’t ask any prying questions about where he was from or what he was doing. Donali left the grav gun on his lap just in case, and then he unslung his pack to get at his emergency rations. He opened the case of ration bars and bit off a big chunk of the first one.
Then came a sudden crunch of movement, and he looked up.
There were no less than four people standing before him, having gathered in the few seconds he’d spared to look inside his pack. They were looking at him expectantly. No, not at him, at the ration bars in his lap.
Donali put down the one he’d bitten into and swallowed carefully. He picked up the grav gun and shone the lamp into one man’s eyes after another, forcing them to squint. A few snarled and turned away from the light. Others glared with hunger shining in their eyes, their cracked and scabby lips parted in anticipation of a meal. Donali felt a stab of fear strike him as he assessed those four men. Not all of them were broken wretches. A few were young and fit, wearing better clothing than the others. Those ones were holding makeshift clubs.
One of the club-wielders pointed to the case of ration bars and growled something in a language Donali didn’t understand. Donali stuffed the case back into his pack and slung it over one shoulder as he rose to his feet.
His assailants advanced a step, to which he barked, “Stay back!” Donali aimed his grav gun at the nearest man and fired, lifting him off his feet. The man screamed, flailing his arms and legs. The others turned to look, and Donali dropped him on his face. The man knocked his chin on the ground and cried out in pain.
An adequate warning.
The other three turned back to him with fierce looks. The one who’d spoken earlier shook his club at Donali and growled something else. Suddenly their numbers swelled as more filthy street people melted out of the shadows.
Donali was outnumbered ten or more to one. He backed toward the alley he’d come from, but a pair of ghoulish women appeared on that side, grinning at him with mouths full of missing teeth. They stood blocking the way.
“I’m warning you!” Donali said, shaking his gun at the crowd. But they crept forward, undeterred, as if they knew he’d already used his best trick.
Donali fired again, this time lifting a man more than a dozen feet and dropping him on his fellows’ heads.
A few of them fell to the ground beneath the weight, and the group stopped advancing, as if to reassess the threat that Donali presented.
Then one of them growled something in their language, and they all surged toward him as one.
Donali fired again, but he didn’t have time to do anything else before he was beset by clubs, fists, and clawing hands. The first blow to his head merely dazed him and forced him to his knees.
The second one turned out the lights.
* * *
The air car hovered high above the square, keeping its occupants safe from the Psychos’ desperate, clawing hands. Psychos were at the very bottom of the food chain in the Null Zone, strung out on Bliss, ready and willing to do anything to get another dose that could make them halfway human again. Bliss was a wonder drug when used correctly. It could make you twice as smart, twice as strong, and twice as fast as an ordinary person—a force to be reckoned with, so long as you kept dosing. If not, it would make you twice as crazy. The strength and speed lasted for a while, until the inevitable exhaustion from hunger and lack of sleep took its toll. Then came the chills and night terrors, and a short dive off the deep end into a wellspring of insanity. Once that happened, there was no coming back; you were a goner. These men and women fell into that category—goners.
No doubt they’d once been hardworking citizens, but now they were reduced to sitting in the dust, warming their hands over a pile of burning garbage.
“Biometric scanners aren’t reading anything.”
Bretton frowned and turned to look at his niece, Farah. “Keep scanning, make sure you get a good look at everyone’s faces before we go. We’ve got to tag them all to be sure. If we don’t get a face match, I’ll have to go down there and start asking questions.”
“Why would someone like Tera Halls even bother with Bliss? She was already rich. She had her whole life ahead of her.”
Bretton shook his head. “Bored, maybe.”
Tera Halls was an upper levels brat who’d recently taken to slinking out at night with her friends. Her parents didn’t notice or didn’t care until one morning she hadn’t come back. Last anyone had seen of her had been in a lower levels’ night club. The owner had kicked her and her friends out for badgering him for Bliss, which he swore he didn’t sell. That had led Bretton to search the Psychos’ camps. If you couldn’t find a dealer, the next best thing was a Psycho, an old addict who knew where all the dealers were and could lead you to them. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and the club was just around the corner from this particular stink hole.
“Tagged them all. Still nothing.”
“All right. I’m going in.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Farah turned to him. “You don’t have to. We can take some other case. Something safer.”
Bretton smiled. “Safer?” He shook his head. “Safe doesn’t exist for us.” Being a freelance Enforcer in the Null Zone wasn’t quite the same as being a regular Enforcer, and nothing like being a Peacekeeper. Regular Enforcers rarely ventured below level ten. Peacekeepers would, but only to chase crime on a global scale. Local crimes were Null business, and no one really expected Null Enforcers to police the lowest levels on their meager salary. Everyone was their own deterrent down here, with guns worn brazenly to ward off the Psychos and other lower levels scum. But sometimes even that wasn’t enough, hence the need for freelance Enforcers. They had to go where the official ones feared to tread.
“You could die, you know,” Farah said.
That was the main difference between Peacekeepers and Enforcers—no one brought you back if you died. But what was death, really? Bretton had cheated it too many times already. Come back once, and it’s a miracle. Come back twice and you’re relieved. Come back ten times and it’s a curse. Lifelink implants bleached all the colors out of life and drained death of all its significance. Besides, once you knew the truth—the real truth—you went looking for death any way you could, just to stop knowing it. You can’t unsee something no matter how many times you close your eyes.
“I’m not afraid of death, Farah.”
Farah’s lip twitched and her eyes narrowed. “Maybe you should be.”
Bretton felt the skin around his eyes crinkle with amusement, and he imagined for a moment that he looked as old as he felt. In reality he was a very young-looking fifty-something, whose face bore none of the marks of age that it should have. Even Farah looked like she was still twenty-one. Her real age had to be more than thirty-five by now.
“Why fear death?” he asked. “It’s an end. You know where it goes. Life’s the scary part, because you don’t know where it will end up.”
“Some would say death isn’t the end.”
“It is for us. We already died once at Roka. If some part of us went from there to some other after life, we won’t ever get to see it. This is all we’ve got.”
“All the more reason to cherish it, Uncle Bret. Be careful out there.”
“I will.” He unbuckled his seat restraints. Just as he was about to open the passenger’s side door and jump down, his niece stopped him with a hand on his. “Hold on,” she said.
“What?”
She nodded to the grid. “Someone just walked in on the Psychos.”
“Is it one of our missing partyers?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
A visual feed from the air car’s surveillance suite sprang to life above the pil
ot’s control console.
The newcomer stood at the end of the alley behind them. He was tall with black hair receding at the temples. One eye glowed red, while the other was dark and inscrutable. He wore an unusual jumpsuit—white with blue stripes—and a strange symbol was sewn into his upper sleeve. Upon seeing it, a vague sense of deja vu trickled through Bretton from some other lifetime. Suddenly he knew which lifetime it was coming from, and his eyes flew wide. “It can’t be . . .”
“Can’t be what?” Farah asked, slower to make the connection than he. It had been over ten years, after all.
“Magnify that feed.”
“Okay . . .” Now the symbol on the man’s sleeve was easy to recognize. Six stars surrounding a clenched fist. “Holy frek!” Farah said, swearing in a language that neither of them had used since waking up on Avilon.
“Frek is right,” Bretton said.
“He’s an Imperial!”
“Yes, question is, how did he get here?”
“Well, we won’t know until we ask him.”
They watched him walk into the Psychos’ camp and sit down, oblivious to the danger he was in.
“What’s he doing?” Farah demanded. “Is he stupid, or what?”
“I’d better get down there.”
“After he stirs them all up? You’re as good as dead.”
Bretton frowned. When he’d been about to jump down and go question the Psychos, he’d been meaning to do so quietly, with stealth on his side. For that, he was wearing a suit of cloaking armor. None of the Psychos would have something as sophisticated as a cloak detector. Of course, if he’d found Tera Halls, he had orders to rescue her, so Bretton had also come prepared for a fight.
“I’ll be fine, Fay,” he said, his hand back on the door handle. He flashed her a quick grin before triggering his helmet visor and turning on his cloaking shield. He was using a cut-rate power core, so he’d only have a few minutes of invisibility to play with.
Dark Space: Avilon Page 3
