by Rick Partlow
Shifting his maser rifle to his left hand, he grabbed my wrist with his right and I lifted him clear of the hole, setting him up on his feet. He set down his weapon and pulled off his dark-visored helmet to reveal a mop of unruly blond hair, and a face that was a younger, slightly leaner version of mine.
"You okay, Cal?" Pete Mitchell, my little brother, asked breathlessly, wiping sweat and hair out of his eyes.
"Thanks to you, kid," I grabbed him in a quick hug, pounding him on the back.
"Damn," he pushed me away, holding his nose. "Did you have to go swimming in that toilet?"
"Don't get too sentimental on me, Pete," I laughed. "Where's Jason?"
"Still in the building." He waved at the chopshop down the street. "He's supervising a final search-through, but he sent me down to make sure you were all right."
"Well," I shook my head, "Jase never was one for obeying orders. But then, neither was I."
I was about to try to contact Jason over my neurolink, but he beat me to the punch.
Cal, he called me, do you read?
I'm here, Jason, I replied. Everything secured?
All locked down. We've got a total of twenty enemy casualties, about thirty-five dead Skinners and jackheads.
Holy shit, I shook my head. They put a whole platoon in there. Who the hell would go to that much trouble?
Yeah, well, there's something here you need to see, Cal.
Problem? I frowned.
Maybe.
I'm on my way.
Leaving Pete in charge of directing the incoming ambulances, I brushed aside the medic's attempts to have a look at my leg and headed back up the street. The front of the building was a slaughterhouse, with four of the Skinners sprawled out, gaping holes blown out of them from multiple laser hits. The junctures of their cybernetic and organic parts lay obscenely exposed, charred and bloody muscle and bone melding to splintered ceramic and metal in an inhuman, gut-twisting marriage. Bodies littered the hallways---more Skinners killed defending their turf, some literally torn apart, their Kick high keeping them going through the first few shots. ViR addicts had been shot where they lay, still plugged into their machines, and the smell of burned flesh was thick in the air.
I had a sudden, powerful flashback to the war, to other fortresses on other worlds, littered with the bodies of Tahni soldiers...soldiers I had killed, staring up at me with accusing glares, blood pooled around the ruins of their throats. I had no illusions of what I had been or what I was: a killer, a cold-blooded assassin designed and built to spread terror in the enemy ranks.
There had been a dozen of us at the start, all of us little more than children, none older than twenty-one. The Frankensteins of Fleet Intelligence transformed us through the implants, the training, the psychological programming into the ultimate psychwar weapon---the living manifestation of the Tahni death spirits, their version of the bogeyman.
Clad in faceless, black combat suits, camouflaged by holographic fields, we would appear from thin air in the midst of the enemy camp and assassinate the highest-ranking officers, ripping their throats out with our talons and always, always spreading the fear. Sabotage, intelligence-gathering---those came later, gravy to the real meat of our existence. We were killers, first and last. It had taken a lot of work to pull myself back from that, to become a real person again, and that preprogrammed Killing Machine still lurked somewhere in the darkness of my soul, waiting for me to slip up so it could erupt screaming from my chest. I could hear its breath in my ear as I stepped over the mangled corpses, felt it clawing at the fringes of my psyche.
The Machine is dead, I chanted silently. I am not the Machine.
I nearly slipped in the blood pooled on the floor at the mouth of the rear exit hallway, and had to catch myself against the wall. The bulk of the STAT team was in there, gathered amidst nearly a dozen dead attackers, their corpses exploded from the inside by our maser weapons. Usually the disruptors were set to disable targets selectively by destroying hemoglobin in their blood and rendering them unconscious due to acute cyanosis---preventing enough oxygen from reaching their brains. But these guys were too dangerous to take the chance; for all we knew, they were augmented, with an alternate biomechanical method for delivering oxygen to their organs.
Jase was standing over one of the bodies, his sidearm dangling carelessly at his side. Jason Chen's height marked him as an Offworlder---he was very near two meters, and a bit under one hundred kilos---but he had lived on Canaan since he was ten, and had been my closest friend for that whole stretch of three decades. When we'd both returned after the War, it had seemed a natural thing for him to take the position as my chief deputy. His lean, pale face was twisted into a thoughtful frown as he nudged the fallen pulse carbine next to the corpse. His head turned as he noticed me walking up, and his frown deepened.
"You okay?" He was looking at the wound on my leg.
I shrugged it off. "Just a burn. You wanted to show me something?"
"Most of the Gomers were pretty fucked up by the disruptors," he said, gesturing at the exploded torso of one of the corpses. "This guy I got with a shot from my pulse pistol," he nodded at the one at his feet.
I stepped around him to get a better look at the invader. Someone had stripped his helmet and chest armor off, revealing...motherfuck. Revealing an acolyte of the Predecessor cult. There was no mistaking it. Another, perhaps, might have had a similar swept-back hairstyle, and certainly there were many others with the cloned muscle implants and body restruct job. But the cosmetic holographic inlay of a stylized dual-star system across his chest was the signature of the Cult, a representation of the Alpha Centauri system, where the wormhole map was discovered.
"Goddamn," I said softly.
Jason nodded. "Exactly. We knew they were buying weapons; we just didn't know what for."
"But why now? They have a major deal set up in less than a week---why blow it all on an attack now?"
"Maybe there was someone here they wanted out of the way," Jase suggested. "Did Cutter give you any possible answer before they got him?"
I chewed my lip, thinking that yes, he actually might have given me the very reason.
"When you get through here," I told him, "find me at the station in New Jerusalem. There's someone you need to meet."
Interlude: Damiani
Andre Damiani watched his opponent with predator's eyes. His adversary wasn't too imposing---only a centimeter or two over Damiani's meter-seven---but he was rock-solid beneath his red gi, and the crowd was on his side.
Damiani didn't try to shut out the chanting, screaming throng of working-class Filipinos; instead he visualized their roar as the sound of a huge wave of energy that rolled through him, building up his ki, pushing him forward, urging him to launch an attack on his enemy. But he held back that rush of energy, waiting, looking for the compact, dark-skinned human male facing him to make the first move.
When he did, it was quick---a lightning-fast front snapkick that Damiani barely blocked. Andre tried to counter with a leg sweep, but his opponent hopped over it and scored with a jump sidekick that caught Damiani in the chest and knocked him on his back. Rolling to his feet, Damiani winced from the pain in his chest as the judge called a point for his opponent.
Still, he nodded in satisfaction. The simulator usually made things too easy. This scenario would be a challenge. The ring of onlookers around them grew louder, chanting his opponent's sim-name: "Munos!" they roared. "Munos! Munos!" Manilla was a rough crowd. Kyoto was much more sedate---the Japanese were so well-mannered.
Straightening his gi, Damiani squared off again to face Munos. He knew the Filipino was fast, but still he waited for the simulation to make the first move. Munos edged forward and lunged into a high punch, but this time Andre ducked quickly inside to land a low punch to the man's midsection. Munos stumbled back, grimacing, and the white-clad judge awarded a point to Andre.
Damiani smiled. This simulacrum was fast and strong, but not terribly bright. Prob
ably a "local hero" without much experience. He had Damiani in age and weight, but Damiani was no newcomer to this game.
As they squared off once more, Damiani began receiving input from his neurolink, the tiny transceiver connected to the computer implanted in his skull, capable of squirting data directly into his brain.
Mr. Director, we have the feed from the outpost.
Patch it through my link, he ordered, an unfamiliar thrill of expectation coursing through him.
An image filled his vision, the data registering so fast that the real-time events around him seemed to freeze in space, and a sliver of his splintered consciousness was staring down from low orbit at the brown and blue hemisphere of a planet.
Ship's log of the independent mineral scout, Springbok, Kara Lynn McIntire, Captain.
Suddenly, the shot of the planet was overlaid by the spectral face of a young, dark-haired woman.
"TCC-5607 is a red giant," the woman's voice was even-toned and professional, "with only three remaining planets, of which this is the middle. By all rights, there should be no habitable worlds left after the nova which formed the giant, but this planet, while lacking any higher forms of life, has a breathable atmosphere. My first mate, Evan Martinez, and I responded to a priority call from the Corporate Council mineral resources commission and responded immediately, arriving at this world within a month."
The view of the planet spiraled downward in a dizzying, time-accelerated shot from the starship's nose cameras as it came in for a landing on a narrow plateau, plumes of exhaust and clouds of dust finally obscuring the picture. With an abrupt, choppy transition, the feed shifted from the Springbok's exterior cameras to an unsteady view from a visual pickup mounted to the chest harness of McIntire's first mate---or, at least, he assumed so, since he could see the mineral scout captain standing before him, clad in ship's fatigues, a small respirator hanging around her neck.
"Though the air here is breathable," McIntire said for the benefit of the camera, "thanks mostly to a strange kind of lichen that seems to grow on every surface, it's substantially thinner than Standard and respirators may be necessary." The shot panned downward, revealing the sponge-like growth, a green film that carpeted the sandstone floor of the plateau.
"We're following the source of the transmission on foot into the mountains," McIntire narrated, the shot jiggling and bouncing as they set off up a narrow, rocky trail into the weathered range. Damiani impatiently signaled the program to fast-forward the playback, turning the bone-wearying ten kilometer trek into an absurd roller-coaster-ride vision of blurred sandstone and purple sky. He slowed the progression just in time to witness the two mineral scouts follow the trail to its termination in a boxed-in draw, high in the side of the sandstone mountain...and a cave.
"We're...we're going in there?" Martinez asked, the view from his harness-mounted pickup frozen on the dark opening in the ruddy rockface.
"Cover our backs," McIntire snapped, pulling a flashlight off of her belt and stepping into the cave. Damiani could hear the first mate curse softly as a sidearm appeared in his hand at chest level.
The cavern, Damiani saw, was surprisingly big; its walls were farther away than McIntire's flashlight beam could penetrate. What he could see of the dry, flat rock of the cave floor was smooth and level---almost polished. It looked wrong. No natural phenomena could have carved that cavern out without any evidence of sedimentary formations, calcification or erosion. Something or someone had purposely carved it out, probably with a high-powered energy beam. The conclusion coursed through Damiani like an electric charge---though he had been aware for nearly a year of the details he was seeing, witnessing them first-person allowed him to feel the thrill of discovery once more.
As Martinez moved farther into the rocky amphitheater behind his captain, his camera revealed that the ever-present lichen had invaded the interior of the cave as well, making the footing treacherous---he nearly stumbled several times trying to walk in the wake of Kara's lightbeam. Apparently tired of gingerly shuffling around in the dregs of McIntire's flashlight, Martinez took a moment to pull his own flashlight out of its pouch, his hands blocking the visual pickup for a few seconds as the device snagged on its restraints and he glanced down to free it, still moving forward...
Then suddenly he was falling, engulfed in Stygian darkness. A scream burst free of the man's lips and Damiani caught the glint of his pistol and flashlight flying from his hands. The fall seemed to stretch into infinity, and Damiani was certain that the Martinez would end up crushed on the rock below.
Yet almost magically the flight slowed and finally ceased, and all Andre could hear was the hiss of the first mate's breath in the impenetrable darkness. Then there was a soft, metallic clatter beside him, and the camera panned downward, its infrared optics showing both the pistol and the flashlight resting on the floor beside the man.
"Shit," Martinez hissed, bending to scoop them up, gripping the comforting curve of his pistol's grip in front of him.
The man seemed almost afraid to switch on his light, afraid of what he might see, but he slowly, hesitantly slid his thumb across the activation stud.
"Martinez!" Kara's voice came from somewhere high above him. "Martinez, where the hell are you?"
He didn't answer---Damiani imagined because he couldn't. The first mate's eyes and attention---along with Andre's---were fixed and frozen on the image before him, eerily illumined in the glare of his flashbeam.
"Sweet Jesus," Martinez murmured, using the barrel of his pistol to cross himself.
The man hadn't fallen in a hole---he hadn't fallen at all. He had, as near as Damiani could decipher it from light-years away and days later, stepped into what could only have been some kind of antigravity transport tube which had deposited him deep inside the hollowed-out mountain, in the midst of a massive underground installation. It stretched out before him as far as his lightbeam could reach, an endless landscape of mechanisms that seemed more sculpture than machinery---liquid, flowing curves and vague, hazy edges that almost made Andre wonder if the things were really there.
Tall spires hovered precariously above him, while vaguely rotund mushroom shapes squatted in dark menace. Flickering shadows played teasingly at the edges of the camera's vision, and Damiani had the absurd thought that something more horrifying than he could imagine was about to burst from those tricks of the light and devour Martinez.
Though obviously reluctant to leave the imagined safety of the darkened corner he occupied, Martinez jerkily stepped forward, past the alien shapes and the imagined eldritch horrors they represented, across the smooth, polished floor toward a wall of what looked like glass, lit from within by a faint, white glow. As he moved forward, the shimmering glass seemed to go clear, revealing a hazily-defined image within it.
Martinez stopped in his tracks, frozen, immobile and silent as the image solidified within the clear material, looming a good head over him---it was bipedal and basically humanoid in shape, but definitely not human. A long, angular face, cut with dark striations that Martinez wasn't sure were natural, stared at him with large, liquid eyes. A spiky, swept-back mane of what might have been hair stretched back from the oversized cranium, adding to the creature's already-considerable height.
Then something moved out of the shadows to appear suddenly beside him.
Abruptly free of his hysterical paralysis, Martinez screamed in terror, spinning around, bringing up his pistol...and Kara McIntire caught his arm, stopping his scream with a hand over his mouth.
"Oh, my God...," Martinez panted, hand going to his pounding heart, the pickup view shifting rhythmically with his out-of-control breathing.
"I found the opening," Kara explained, letting him loose and walking over to get a closer look at the creature. Hands on her hips, she scanned top to bottom the glassy wall, trying to peer through the haze at the tantalizingly visible shapes beyond, as if the one impossible being weren't enough for her. "Son of a bitch."
"What...," Martinez stammer
ed. "What the hell is it?"
"I'll tell you what it is." A smile slowly spread across her face. "It's our ticket to the big time, Martinez. You and I are about to become part of history."
End of transmission: 23 February, 2215, Commonwealth Standard Time. The familiar, worry-lined face of Igor Costanza appeared out of the darkness of Andre's thoughts. Sir, this was the original log of the scout team which discovered the outpost---we managed to obtain it from the wreckage of the Springbok after its destruction on Inferno. As you can see, the woman McIntire may know entirely too much about this site. I've talked to your Chief of Security and we both agree on this. I know your plan was to allow the CSF and the Cultists to take care of her, but if she manages to get to the authorities... He trailed off and Damiani paused the transmission.
As part of Damiani's mind pondered the new data, and most of it watched his opponent---finally in apparent motion once again now that the computer linkfeed had ceased---a small fraction reflected that his father had been a very unfortunate man.
Gilbert Damiani had occupied the same position as Chairman of the Corporate Council that his son now did, but his life had been far different. He had spent most of it sequestered in boardrooms, buried in holographic computer readouts. Born too early for the genetic and hormonal treatments that had so extended Andre's life, he had also known nothing of the neurolinks and implant computers which allowed his son to remain active and gregarious, yet still preside over the largest business venture in human history.
The Filipino considered his next move. He thought he had Damiani all figured out as a counterfighter who would wait for him to make the first move.
What about McIntire, sir? Costanza's insistent voice asked him. What should I tell your Security Chief to do about her?
