The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy)

by Thomas M. McNamara

  She examined the battle rifle in her hands with a practiced eye. “No, our op will look like the desperate play of an outmatched opponent, and he won’t pass up the opportunity to capitalize on something like that.”

  “Aren’t we, though? Aren’t we desperate and outmatched?”

  “I’m confident that our battle plan will prove otherwise. Once his polling goes into free-fall, the opportunity to both take us out and send a maiden voyage through that portal will be too good to pass up."

  Nadira squinted through the rifle’s scope and fiddled with its magnification.. "He may see the risks, but if I know him well enough—and I think I do at this point—he will roll the dice on this one. He’s very protective of his public image, and I’ve done a lot to make him hate the Federation over the decades.”

  “I don’t know, Nadi. We’ve got a batch of fighters and bombers that were stolen by pirates or said to be accidentally destroyed in transit. Then another batch that the Federation built in secret, using stolen blueprints and materials. A couple decommissioned corvettes that had been reported to the empire as scrapped. And then a motley crew of alien ships whose sellers didn’t even know whose money they were collecting. If Sar-Zin sends so much as one battlecruiser, we’re toast.”

  She patted his cheek. “The apparent weakness of our fleet is exactly what I’m counting on, D. They’ll never see us coming.”

  He shook his head. “All right, Cahill, where’s this fancy new toy you’ve been telling me about?”

  Cahill had just finished strapping on her weathered imperial Marine armor. “Over here.” She walked him over to a large rectangular crate on the far side of the armory. It had a sticker with one hand-written word scrawled on it: “Bakari.”

  She nodded toward it. “Well? Aren’t you gonna open it?”

  Darius positioned his right eye in front of the crate’s bioscanner, and its lid unsealed with a hiss.

  “Fresh off the factory floor,” she said.

  They lifted the lid out of the way, and within the crate was a brand-new set of combat armor, but not like any he’d seen before. It had maybe three times as many individual plates, and there was none of the spiderweb pattern of carbon nano-lattice. Instead, it was a dark red matte.

  Both arms had large accessory mounts, plus one on each shoulder.

  “Where the heck did you get this?” he breathed. “And aren’t these supposed to be custom-fitted?”

  “It’s a prototype,” said Cahill. “That’s one of the reasons for all the extra paneling. It can adjust itself to fit a range of users. Saves the empire money and wastage during testing. Then when it comes time to mass-produce, they can just make this one size, and it adapts itself to almost every soldier or Marine, regardless of body type.”

  She touched different points on the armor. “The panels can also slide around as you move in a way that keeps the usual weak points covered. You get the best protection around, without sacrificing range of motion. It’s basically the next generation of combat armor tech, and it may sometimes even rival the current battle armor that regulars use.”

  “Then why am I getting it, and not a combat veteran?” asked Darius.

  Cahill shrugged. “The request came directly from Van Chen herself. She was grateful for the recovery of her special lady friend. Nadira.”

  “Ah. And now we’re heading out again, so I need the best tech to keep our girl safe.”

  “Don’t sell her short, bud. In her time, Nadira’s eliminated more targets than all the ones you fought in your mindworm sims. It just helps to get an edge where you can find one.” Cahill slapped his arm. “Now suit up, and I’ll show you all the shiny accessories you can slap on this baby.”

  Darius reached down and began snapping the armor pieces onto his pressure suit. “Are you sure you want to come along, Cahill? This is probably going to get ridiculously dangerous. Maybe they could use you back here in the fleet.”

  “Son, I was itching for a mission like this before you were old enough to screw. Everything that I’ve done for the Federation has been leading up to this point—to jam our middle finger up Sar-Zin’s ass for all the world to see.”

  “Hmm. All right, I never thought about it that way.” He dug an attachment out of the crate. It looked like it was designed to snap onto his shoulder. “Wow, this one looks nasty.”

  “Oh, you bet it is. Let me pull up the specs in the manual. You’re gonna love it...”

  ✽✽✽

  Figueroa was on the yoke again, but in a different transport this time, the Avalon. The last one was still too hot to re-use so soon. It had been sent to the shop on the Pegasus, where it would get a new paint job and a new set of ID tags. Their pilot was something of an engineer, though, so she was able to transfer most of the armaments to the Avalon in time for dust-off.

  Along for the ride on this mission was the same crew as the Eloris job, plus Nadira.

  This time, Bellamy would be on broadcast cracking duty, while Darius and Cahill would be escorting Nadira into the belly of the beast. Bellamy would hang behind with Figueroa for the second phase of the op, while the other three would go in undercover and secure the evidence.

  Darius supposed that there might have been some better operatives available. More than a few brave and experienced souls certainly offered. That heartened him. But they knew, and he knew, that there was one missing ingredient in every case: the alchemy of people who had worked as a team in the thick of it. His people were the ones who could look each other in the eye when the dust had settled, and they would know without having to say a word.

  It wasn’t long before they were heading through the Dvorak telegate. Darius was back in his old home system now. But from here, it looked like any other. All the planets and moons in the area were just distant points of light for now. You could pull them up on a holo-projector, but even the best ones couldn’t simulate what it was like to be in orbit above the place of your birth.

  Nadira and Darius sat in the back of the transport. He gazed at the stars through a porthole window.

  “Do you think he’s still alive?” Nadira asked him quietly.

  “Who?”

  “Your brother. I mean—your other brother.”

  “I don’t think the odds are in his favor, Nadi. When I shut that telegate down, he was without an exit and surrounded by the imperial navy.”

  “Why do you think he didn’t break off?”

  “If he’s anything like my Rali, he is or was a stubborn son of a bitch. Maybe this one was also willing to go all the way, if that’s what it took to stop me from escaping.”

  Nadira gazed out the porthole on the other side.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your name. Your real name. All this time, I’ve never heard you say it.”

  She looked back at him. “I can count on one hand the number of times those words have passed my lips since Vauxhall Anchorage. Auggie is the only other person alive who knows them. The others are...returned to dust.”

  “I understand. I mean, I don’t claim to understand what it’s been like to—”

  “Isabella. I was Isabella Lucia Pfeiffer.” She looked back at her porthole. “I guess I’m not really Nadira Markosian, either, when it comes down to it. I travel in the space between two lives. Both of them stolen, in their own way.”

  The transport gently tilted beneath their feet as the cargo ship ferrying them set a course for Telamat.

  “Maybe we can get you a new name when this is all over,” said Darius. “And a new face of your own. I think they can do that now. Make brand-new faces for people.”

  She looked over at him and patted his hand. “Still some innocence left in you, I see. Hang onto that. In my experience, we become who we are. Maybe it will be different for you.”

  “ETA to Telamat is 6 hours and 45 minutes,” said Figueroa over the comm speaker.

  Darius reclined his seat and closed his eyes. Sleep d
id not come. His mother’s face came to his mind unbidden. I must go again, he had told her. The Pegasus is not safe, so now you must go too. No, I do not know where. I can’t know. But I will find you.

  He opened his eyes and looked around the cabin. And maybe someday, he thought now, I can tell you everything that won’t scare you.

  There may not be much left to say.

  -15-

  Darius had not imagined that he would ever find himself back in the sewers of New Caledonia. Now he sensed how far away the city was from the violence of the empire. And he keenly felt a desire to stay in this mecca of nothing. To walk the streets of this city and shake all the yelling, angry people. He wanted to tell them how lucky they were. How safe.

  Then again, he was here to split everything apart.

  The sewers remained the best way to get around the city unnoticed. His team entered at the edge of town and walked interminable miles in its dank underbelly. His armored suit filtered out the stench and kept his feet dry this time. It distanced him from his environment to the point where he felt like he was hardly there, like it was a dream. He couldn’t touch the rough surface of the walls. He couldn’t connect himself to this place that had once been home.

  They surfaced a few blocks from his parents’ house on the north side of town. They were dressed as a city maintenance crew. These outfits were baggy enough to cover their armor, and they blended right into the background. The suits wouldn’t cover combat helmets, so they each carried theirs in a tool case. And they each wore a pistol on their hips, disguised as a set of heavy-duty multi-pliers. As for their faces, they had simple wigs and large tinted visors masking their eyes. Sometimes the old tricks were the best.

  An undercover Federation field agent had even dressed up a truck to look like a city-owned vehicle, and they had parked it right in the alley that the trio emerged into. The vehicle could stay there all day, and no one would lift an eyebrow.

  The team could have gone in with stealth fields and a skyhook, with an elite cracker disabling all the security systems in a one-block radius. But the Federation didn’t like flashy approaches. It would have been much faster that way, but it also would have drawn more attention.

  They climbed into the “maintenance” truck and drove a painstakingly low-key three blocks to the target. The traffic AI did most of the work, but Darius still found himself glancing at the speedometer every few seconds. It would be the worst time in the history of the resistance to get pulled over for speeding or for a busted taillight. It occurred to him that they hadn’t actually checked the exterior for things that might have caused them to be pulled over. His left palm grew sweaty at the thought. His right palm, being biomechanical, had no opinion on the matter.

  The van jerked to a stop, and it took him a moment to realize that they had already arrived. This didn’t stop his palm from sweating.

  They were parked next to a weathered fence about two meters tall. He knew without seeing that, when he walked through that gate, there would be a withering vegetable garden on his right and a rusty swing set on his left. The Bakaris had left it up after Darius and Rali grew up and moved out, because the neighborhood kids liked to play back there. It might not have been the only reason. It was the one that they gave. As long as you stayed out of the garden and closed the gate behind you, you were welcome from noon until the sun went down.

  Sometimes mom would bring out a pitcher of lemonade if it was hot that day.

  “Darius? Hey, bud, you there?”

  He snapped out of it. It had been Cahill talking to him. “Yeah, just...thinking. Sorry.”

  “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” she asked.

  “No. No, just...remembering some things. Let’s go.”

  Before I start thinking again, he added to himself.

  Exiting the truck and walking into the backyard required a delicate balance. They couldn’t look like they were rushing to break in, but they also couldn’t dawdle like the city’s maintenance workers usually did. The latter would waste precious time, and it would allow surveillance to get a good a look at them.

  Aside from the high fence, the back entrance was ideal because it also lacked any biometric or even electronic security. In recent years, Dad had prohibited any of that. He had claimed that the usual tech never worked quite right back there. Now Darius knew that it was his father’s work with Nadira that had led to this unmonitored door. Had it been his idea or hers?

  There would probably always be questions. They could wait for later.

  But he did know that Nadira had a key. She pulled it out of a front pocket and stepped over to the door—then thought better of it. She turned and handed the key to him. He took it with a nod. This home did not belong to anyone now, and it probably wouldn’t for a while yet. But in this thin slice of time, he could still pretend, despite everything.

  He unlocked the door and slid it open. The memory of a mother with green and blue skin rushed through him like a ghost. He shook it off. There was no time to linger and contemplate the past.

  “Follow me,” he told them. “I know the way.”

  Once inside, they drew their pistols and scanned the interior with their visors. There were no military spycams that they could see. No soldiers lurking in the shadows and dust.

  The kitchen door was to their left, and Darius could smell the cumin and baharat on his mother’s spice rack.

  Keep moving, he thought. It was hard to stay focused on the mission here. This house didn’t have the usual distractions of the battlefield—the kind that the sims had trained him to filter out. The mindworms knew nothing of his mother’s cooking, or of broken dreams. They had only taught him to kill for the empire.

  He gestured for the others to follow him up the stairs to his father’s study.

  They came to the study door and stacked up against the wall. Their scanners detected no sounds from within, such as breathing or the pulse of blood in the veins. Darius put his hand on the knob and nodded to Cahill. She stood on the opposite side of the door with her pistol ready to blanket the room with gunfire if necessary. She nodded back, and he threw the door open.

  And nothing. It was just a study. Well, it was many things to Darius now. But he was able to cross “a trap” off the list of possibilities now. He and Cahill still entered the room methodically, checking every nook and cranny for optical tripwires and other proximity-based gadgets. Nadira remained in the hallway.

  He turned to her and nodded. It was her turn now.

  She went to his father’s desk and used another key to open one of its drawers. She felt inside the drawer for something. A switch. She flicked it. Something clicked nearby. Nadira turned to the shelf on the wall behind her, and she placed her palm on a set of books. There was the flash of a palm scanner, and a yellow light began blinking on the spine of the right-most book.

  “I am Isabella Lucia Pfeiffer of Vauxhall Anchorage,” she said, “and my voice is my authorization to proceed.”

  The yellow light turned green, and she removed the middle book from the shelf. From within she plucked a data cartridge that hung on a necklace. She handed the cartridge to Darius. “Anyone can access this archive now,” she said to him. “So it’s safer in your hands than it would be in mine.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Because you’re basically wearing a tank right now.”

  “I suppose there is that...”

  His armor did actually have a pocket built into the plate on his left hip. He tapped there with a fingertip, and a sort of holster popped out. There was just enough room for the cartridge.

  Bellamy’s voice crackled in his ear. “Crew 3, this is Central. We’ve got problems in your sector that need immediate attention, over.”

  “This is Crew 3,” said Darius. “Go ahead, Central.”

  “I detect trouble popping up all around your block. You are advised to retreat to a safe position, over.

  “Copy that, Central.”

  He took point. Ca
hill brought up the rear.

  The team hustled its way down the stairs and out the back door, checking every corner as quickly as they could. As they piled back into the maintenance truck, Darius heard a familiar squeal of tires behind him.

  Darius looked back. It was the distinctive six-wheeled brake slamming of an army APC.

  He jammed his foot down on the accelerator just as the APC’s turret blew a hole through the top of the cabin. The sound would have been ear-shattering if the team hadn’t already put their helmets on. As it was, the force of the impact shoved the whole vehicle forward like it had been flicked by a giant finger.

  For the imperial army, that kind of thing was considered a warning shot.

  Darius slammed the accelerator and zig-zagged the truck down the alley. A second turret round went sailing off to their right and destroyed his old neighbor’s backyard. Cahill opened the side window and flicked a grenade behind them. They had maybe 100 meters before they could reach the main road, where they could at least get a lot more lateral movement.

  “Crew 3,” said Figueroa over the radio, “This is Central. I can buy you about 30 seconds of manual override on the street before the city traffic AI takes over.”

  “Copy!” shouted Darius over the din. Cahill’s grenade went off with a boom, and she tossed another one in its wake that she’d dug out of her tool chest. It was her last.

  A turret blast sheared off the left-side door. Its twisted metal skittered down the alley ahead of them, and he had to swerve to avoid a blown tire. The dashboard was a rainbow of dire warnings about battery damage and other malfunctions.

  They were now at the main road. He would have to do a hard 90-degree turn onto the avenue, which would expose their broadside to those ridiculous cannons. But at the same time, Cahill now had a direct shot at their pursuer. She aimed her pistol at the APC, firing her entire magazine at it. But there was no ricochet or sound of shattered glass. Instead, a tar-like substance spread across its windshield. Smart. Just like Cahill to think of ordnance like that.