The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  “Yes, yes, that’s quite enough,” Gerald said, with a faint smile. “You showed excellent restraint, however, and did not. Can you tell the class why?”

  Claire again gave the matter serious thought.

  “You said not to?”

  “Exactly!” Gerald Windsor roared. “Because your teacher told you not to! Is that so much to ask?”

  The students did their best to look chagrinned.

  “Mr. Windsor?” Timothy Vidal-North, his hand raised and his nose running. “What about the burnt-up men?”

  “We’ll leave the janitors a nice note and maybe a tip and let them deal with it, shall we?” Mr. Windsor gave them an evil smile, and then students giggled. “A fitting enough fate, I think, for men foolish enough to be willing to invade the Advanced Studies class over something as petty as a war.” Mr. Windsor sniffed and shook his head. “Now, back to book reports. Who’s next?”

  ***

  Eerie started up from the cell floor like an alarm had gone off, jarring Katya from her reverie. She looked at the Changeling curiously.

  “What is it, Eerie?”

  “Something happened,” Eerie hummed, eyes closed, fingers pressed to her temples. “The Ether has gone wild.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” Eerie said, giving Katya a worried look. “I think we’re stuck.”

  “I know that already, Eerie. We’re locked up.”

  “No, I mean…I don’t think apports work anymore, and I’m not so sure about a bunch of other things...”

  “What? How is that…?”

  “The Ether is all wrong,” Eerie said, curling back up on the floor. “This isn’t how things are supposed to happen. I don’t remember any of this!”

  ***

  Maxim was thrown into the brush by the force of his arrival, a young elm slapping him across the face with green branches as he collided with it and its brethren. Tangled in creepers and pierced by thorns, Maxim was slow getting up, checking himself carefully for broken bones and finding only bruises.

  Maxim gathered his scattered gear, and then went looking for the technician, meaning to give him his opinion of the apport.

  He found the technician laying in saw grass about five meters away, near the edge of the tall brush. Maxim crouched down on a slope covered with high ferns and waited, counting in his head to one hundred, and then repeated the process for good measure.

  The technician remained where he was, laying sideways in the mud, one leg bent painfully beneath him, like the world’s least graceful sleeper. Maxim heard the piping of birds and the rustle of small mammals moving beneath the brush around him, the hum of flying insects, and in the distance, the sound of gunfire. The air stunk of burning, and the no-color sky of Central was stained with yellowish smoke.

  Maxim cracked his knuckles, muttered a quick prayer, and then slunk down toward the body, moving at a snail’s pace. Several times the forest quieted, and Maxim was forced to freeze, crouched in a briar of thorn bushes, until the birds resumed their songs.

  Crouching beside the apport technician, Maxim checked for a pulse out of habit, and then made a cautious survey of his injuries. The technician’s bent leg appeared to be fused with the soil from the ankle down, and it looked like he had torn at it in a desperate attempt to free himself, judging by the furrows dug in the skin along the calf, before three bullets were put through the back of his head.

  Noticing the exit wounds, Maxim scanned his surroundings with narrowed eyes. The brush was noticeably thinner to the west, between the narrow trunks of oak and elm saplings, giving Maxim a moderately unobstructed view of the nearby crest of the hill; exactly the sort of place that a sniper would favor, offering a vantage that took in nearly everything below, excepting only the deeper brambles where the apport had thrown Maxim.

  Their arrival had been anticipated, Maxim realized, and only his misplacement had saved him from a sniper’s bullet.

  He slipped quietly back into the briar, moving deliberately, taking care not to rustle leaves or leave a trail of broken branches. Following the perimeter of the thicket, Maxim made a slow survey of his surroundings, and was perturbed by what he discovered.

  The thicket he occupied was not large, no more than thirty meters across. To the east and north, the slope rose rapidly up to the crest of the hill, the grade too steep for anything less than a mountain goat. At the southern end, however, Maxim was surprised to find himself looking down at the valley floor and listless creek that was their intended arrival site, in the foothills above Central, not far from the road that led to the perpetual lights of the Academy.

  The valley was littered with bodies. Maxim had no need to count, but he did, just to be sure.

  All six of his team, plus the long-range telepath Maxim had borrowed from Moscow for the mission. For unknown reasons, the apport had landed the technician some distance away from his own arrival site, while depositing the rest of his Operators here.

  It was hard to be sure at a distance, as several of his people appeared to have suffered injuries during the apport – Gavin Branch, the team empath, was buried in the ground up to his chest – but the rest had died by the hand of a sniper. The bodies looked fresh, but the encounter must have been over sometime earlier, because one of the Thule snipers stood at one end of the meadow, leaning on his rifle and talking into a radio. Nearby, his spotter smoked a cigarette, while another sniper and spotter pair went through his team’s personal effects. Maxim suspected that there was a third team concealed near the top of the slope, keeping watch, because that’s what he would have done.

  Mouthing prayers for the dead, Maxim retreated into the brush and considered the situation.

  There was no question that their arrival had been anticipated, despite the best efforts of the Black Sun to conceal the insertion. The valley had been a last-minute destination, decided by Maxim on a whim a few minutes before the apport, picked from a dozen different potential sites to reduce the chances of precognitive notice. There was still the chance that the team had been compromised the old-fashioned way, by sloppiness or betrayal, but given Gaul Thule’s prodigious prescience, Maxim was inclined to blame the obvious.

  Fighting the urge to scratch his itching skin as he crouched between bushes, Maxim wondered how many of their moves the Thule Cartel had anticipated, and how many soldiers the Black Sun had lost already. Were all the assault teams met similarly, Maxim wondered, and if so, did they fall accordingly? Was he alone in Central, effectively the last Black Sun agent in a sea of Hegemony?

  Maxim decided he would have to assume as much, and operate accordingly.

  He considering leaving the radio behind. He would have difficulty trusting any transmission he received, in any case. Captured units might be turned, or used as bait. Maxim had seen snipers wound soldiers and leave them alive and screaming on the field of battle, hoping to draw out their compatriots to meet a similar fate, during the long Siberian campaign, and took a lesson from the experience. After a moment of deliberation, he kept the unit.

  The apport technician had protein bars, water, and a first aid kit, which Maxim added to his own supplies. The explosives, tools, camping supplies, and other needed materials were down with the rest of the team, and therefore lost to Maxim, along with the weapons, aside from the MP-443 pistol strapped his belt.

  He would have to make do until he made it to Central, Maxim decided, settling down near the edge of the brush to the south, where he had a carefully obstructed view of the Thule Cartel soldiers below. There was nothing else but to wait until the ambush team left, and then to make his way on foot.

  Maxim still had a mission, after all, and that was something. If that was not enough, then ambition burned hot enough in his chest to keep him warm even as the wind blew off the heights. Still as a spooked deer, Maxim waited beside a dormant blackberry bush, for the coming of the evening, and the soldiers to finish with the remains of his team and move on.

  At the edge of the valley,
not far from where the cooling body of the apport technician was fused with the ground, Ether welled up like steam from a hot spring, thick mist clinging to the grass and oak leaves, spilling slowly into the valley.

  ***

  “I bet you wish you’d taken the deal now,” Lóa observed, in her frantic manner, leaning so close to his face that he could feel her exhale. “You really should have.”

  Renton shook his head to clear it, and then instantly regretted that decision. His cracked skull had begun to knit, thanks to the tireless nanites in his system, but he could feel the fault lines all through the bone, and his eyes ached in their sockets. He wanted to make a response of some kind, to project bravado or nonchalance, but his bruised grey matter refused to do anything but ache and complain, his thought process stagnant as still water.

  A telepath, or probably more than one, had worked Renton over while he was unconscious, and his innate defenses were in ruins, his memory violated and dissected in psychic interrogation.

  His arms were tied over his head, and the balls of his bare feet scraped the floor. Relaxing his shoulders let him rest his feet on the floor more fully, but also threatened to dislocate his shoulders, forcing him to shift constantly from one position to the other. The room was bitterly cold, and Renton shivered steadily in his sweat-soaked clothing, envying the fur-lined coat Lóa wore.

  “We didn’t pick you at random, Renton. None of this is an accident,” Lóa said, taking a pair of scissors from the rolling tray beside her, covered in sterile blue paper and an array of obscure metal tools, not unlike a dentist’s stock. “We offered you a chance to avoid this, Renton Hall. It’s no secret at this point – you’ll never leave this room, so sorry, you big dummy – so I don’t mind telling you. That’s why I approached you, in Scotland. If you had taken my offer, then we would have called off the attack in Harbin, and none of this ugliness would have occurred.”

  Lóa winked at him as she slid the bottom blade of the scissors beneath his shirt, cutting up the front, the buttons bouncing off the tile floor with inset central drain for easy cleanup.

  “Uncle Gaul knew we would have to attack the Black Sun from before he took over the cartel. It was the third thing he told me after father died. Uncle Gaul brought a bunch of classified research performed by the Academy pool with him when he defected. We put our best telepaths and empaths on it for weeks, dredging through the subconscious desires of Anastasia Martynova’s entire staff, her family, everybody. There were all sorts of snakes in the grass, Renton, but you were the one we felt comfortable working with. Your motivations were so…understandable.”

  Lóa removed his shirt slowly, pausing to examine the bruises and lacerations. Renton tried to reach for her mind the instant her fingertips touched his abraded skin, but was rewarded only with a vivid surge of agony that he honestly thought was his brain exploding.

  “Can you imagine? A psychic catalogue of an entire cartel usually reveals dozens of potential inroads. Your little goth crush must work overtime to keep her people on the straight and narrow. But she didn’t pay enough attention to you, right, Renton?”

  She set his shirt aside, and then went to work on his pants with a crooked grin, moving slowly and deliberately, so that he could just manage to track it.

  “You were the closest of all for so long, but what you wanted…” Lóa smiled as she severed his belt, tossing the strap aside. “Well, I know exactly what sort of guy you are, don’t I? Not that I care. You would have fit right in here. We tolerate all sorts of deviancy, even yours. You should’ve taken the deal, Renton. You could have saved yourself, and your Mistress, in one go.”

  Renton trembled, and his skin recoiled from the touch of the scissors as Lóa cut down his pants leg. His head hurt too much to feel more than passing disgust at his own frailty.

  “I wonder how your Mistress failed to see it?” Lóa wondered, crouching down to cut near his ankles. “You hid it well, naturally, but we found it. It took a massive effort, yes, but surely the Martynova family took stringent measures to ensure their own security?”

  Lóa went to work on the other leg, starting from the bottom this time.

  “Or perhaps she did know what you wanted?” Lóa paused and glanced up at him. “That, to my mind, is the more intriguing possibility.”

  She tore away the ragged remainder of his pants. Renton shivered uncontrollably in his boxers, toes and heels dancing across the floor, but never able to put his feet to the ground. Renton appreciated her technique, leaving his underwear intact, as one craftsman to another – after all, a good torturer always left room for things to get worse.

  “Here I am doing all the talking again!” Lóa set the scissors back on the tray. “That’s not very gentlemanly. Then again, we both know you aren’t a gentleman, don’t we? That’s fine with me, though, Renton. I’m not the judgmental type.”

  Lóa picked up a bucket, and dashed him in the chest with cold water. Renton gasped and then whimpered, unable to draw the air to scream. His lungs shriveled in his chest, and his head felt broken and useless.

  “I do want us to be able to talk, though,” Lóa said, with a girlish titter. “I want to understand you, Renton. Oh, and I also want to know about your Mistress’s protocol, so I can make sure to kill her this time. The telepaths assure me that you know that best-kept of secrets, and the analytical pools assure me that her protocol allowed her to survive our last attempt. Do you think that I can persuade you to tell me all about it?”

  She took a set of electrodes from the rolling table, attaching the first two to his nipples with a saucy look.

  “I bet I can! I bet I can make you tell me anything and everything. I don’t mind telling you, Renton – my Uncle’s plan worked perfectly. The World Tree is dead, and the chaos of its death has created a great storm within the Ether. Apports over distances are impossible, and telepathy beyond line of sight is useless. The Black Sun is trapped in the real world, and we are safe in Central, you and I. No one is coming for you, Renton, because even if your Lady Martynova wanted to, she cannot. No one is going anywhere for…ah, well, I don’t know.” She giggled again as she applied a second set of electrodes between his toes, wrapping them with medical tape to secure them. “Uncle Gaul knows, I’m sure. But enough about that!”

  Lóa examined her handiwork, and then checked the connections on the large battery on the rolling tray.

  “You know, Renton, I have to confess,” Lóa said demurely. “I’ve wanted to do this kind of thing with you since the very first moment we met.”

  The activation of the battery was like being woken from a deep sleep by a bright light. The pain was most severe at the fixed points, but the current that wandered between them was like a white-hot wire lancing through his insides. Renton squirmed in helpless agony, his feet scraping the ground, his fractured egg-shell head threatened to burst.

  Then it stopped, and Renton realized that he was screaming.

  “I realize that it seems bad now, but I think a few hours from now, you will look back at this as the highlight of your day. It’s all downhill from here, Renton, until you tell me how to kill the only person you really care about.”

  The battery went on again. Renton’s teeth chattered and the room filled with the smell of his singed flesh.

  “Any thoughts?” Lóa purred. “No need to strain yourself. Take your time.”

  ***

  Nathan Drava hunted amongst the long grass in the very early morning, looking for a rock wide and flat enough to sit upon comfortably. The slope was steep and still muddy from the previous night’s rain, and he was forced to go slow and watch his footing. After a thirty-minute search, wishing he could use his flashlight the entire time he squelched through the mud, Nathan located an appropriate spot, a slab of limestone tucked beneath a small copse of dwarf willows, nearly flat and slightly indented.

  He sat down, and then took a pair of binoculars from his bag, taking several readings with the rangefinder. Apparently satisfied with the results,
he set the lenses aside, and set about camouflaging his position further with gathered brush, leaves, and a drab green tarp that he smeared mud and handfuls of moss across until it matched the ground. It took the better part of an hour to arrange the blind to his satisfaction, and then another fifteen to hike down a short way, to confirm the relative invisibility of what he had built.

  Returning to the blind, Nathan Drava painted his face with dull green and brown smudge paint, and then took a scope from his kit bag and sprayed an extra coat of anti-reflective agent on the lens. Pausing to check the time, Nathan then made himself a cup of coffee on an ingenious self-contained boiler, threw the tarp over his shoulders to ward off the morning chill, and sat back to watch the sun crest the hills and paint the family estate.

  The dogs arrived first, bounding about with relentless enthusiasm, investigating every tree and bush for the foxes that were increasingly difficult to find these days. Nathan was patient, trusting that the dogs were far enough ahead of the hunting party, and that the dogs would be quick to pick up his scent. After a minute or two of barking and running about in excitement, the lead dog, Sentinel, found his concealed place in the hills. Nathan greeted the dog with scratches behind the ear and a drugged biscuit. Two other dogs followed and got the same, while the remainder of the pack paused briefly to examine Nathan’s spoor, and then hurried on with the hunt. Nathan watched the drugged dogs intently as they settled down, snout to tail in a large pile, and then quickly feel asleep and beginning snoring rather loudly. He was a bit apprehensive about the noise, but did not want to risk trekking out of his position to check, not with the hunting party’s arrival imminent. After wrestling with the concern for a moment, Nathan pushed it aside. He was not about to start killing dogs, after all.

  Nathan heard the hunting party long before he saw it, occasional peals of laughter carrying further than the conversation that provoked it. Forcing his hands to move slowly, Nathan slid his rifle out of the bag. The nylon stock of the Remington 700 was done in digital camo, the receiver and barrel treated with anti-reflective gunk that smelled rank and stuck to his fingers. Nathan set the rifle across his legs, and set about mounting the scope and tripod.