by Rick Partlow
So caught up was he in his thoughts that the Skinner nearly missed the pumping noises behind him, but he did notice when the biotic fluid in the tank began to rapidly drain. The amorphous figure within it settled slowly against the bottom of the vat, revealing more and more of its form as the fluid retreated. The Skinganger stepped back from the tank, nearly petrified with fear as he caught sight of the thing. All the bionic hardware that had given him such a sense of security suddenly seemed terribly inadequate as a shield against the thing that was rising to its feet in the now-drained vat, its tail twitching horribly.
With a metallic bang, the tank separated longitudinally and fell in two pieces to the floor, effectively blocking the Skinner's way to the ladder that was the chamber's only exit. Flight no longer being an option, fight instincts took over. Gulping down the lump in his throat, the man clawed under his jacket for the compact slug pistol in his belt, knowing instinctively as he did it that the small weapon would be no use against the apparition he faced.
"No need for that, young friend," the thing said in a voice terrifyingly familiar, a voice that froze the Skinner in his tracks. "You've done your job well." It stepped off of the remains of the tank, shaking itself like a dog, spraying the walls with excess biotic fluid. "Now, tell me, who was responsible?"
The Skinner didn't have to ask what he meant; everything was becoming preternaturally clear to him...and, gradually, less and less frightening.
"The Cult," he rasped, trying to work up enough saliva to talk. "It was the Cult."
"Fascinating. Then it appears we have much work to do."
The Skinner nodded eagerly, and two smiles greeted each other in sparkles of sharpened metal teeth.
Chapter Three
"You'll be staying with my wife," I explained to McIntire as we flew away from New Jerusalem, away from the mines and the city. "House is out in the open, with about five hundred meters cleared on each side, and I'll leave Pete there." I nodded at my brother, who was flying the hopper. "Plus a couple other deputies rotating through."
"Is that safe for your family?" she asked, turning in her seat to look at me.
"Should be, for a while---at least until I can check out your story."
"Check it with who?"
"Some friends from the war," I told her. "People I can trust."
"I used to think I knew who to trust," she mused, a touch of bitterness in her voice.
Beneath us, the ugliness of New Jerusalem and Harristown quickly gave way to the tall pines of Dakota Forest, genetically engineered growths designed to thrive in Canaan's harsh environment. A "gift" from the Commonwealth Colonial Authority after the First War with the Tahni, they were beautiful and majestic, but deadly---all the transplanted flora and fauna was squeezing out the local ecology, transforming the planet from Canaan to a cheap, souvenir-shop copy of Earth. Already, more than a thousand local species of animals were extinct outside the zoological preserves.
The forest, vast as it was, passed beneath the hopper in only a few minutes as Pete fed the ducted fans more power from the hydrogen turbines. Beyond the pines was the Old Growth, a jungle of squat, compact local trees, evolved to conserve heat during Canaan's Long Night and radiate it during the Day via an incredible blossom of broad, brightly-colored leaves. It was such a beautiful display that the first settlers had built a festival around it. With the Reflectors in place, though, things had changed. The garish half-day produced grotesque, pitifully-stunted buds which quickly died, and many of the trees didn't bloom at all when the day came. I couldn't help but think that the Corporate presence had produced an analogous effect on our society, stunting its natural growth with their damned interference.
The New Society Church as a social institution was dying. The family farms which had been its demographic base had been pushed out of business by the Corporate Council's orbital food factories---which would probably be obsolete themselves if nanotech replicators can ever be made cheap enough for general release. The new generation was moving to the cities to find work in the mines, adding to the overpopulation and crime, and every day more of the old-timers were giving up and moving offplanet.
God, what a depressing bastard I'd become. Maybe it was time to consider moving on. Find some frontier colony off the main Transition Lines and start over... But, no. I knew Rachel would never go for that; Canaan was her home, plain and simple. Her parents---and mine---had lost their lives defending it, along with thousands of others during the war. She'd die before she gave it up.
Shaking free of my reverie, I noticed that the Old Growth had fallen away and we were cruising over the farmland. These were the old farms, not the new, hydroponic food factories the Corporates had set up. Back before the First Interstellar War in the 2,060's, just after the wormhole jumplinks had been discovered, the original Canaanites had set up the colony as a haven for the fledgling New Society of Friends Church. With a belief fostered in the Sino-Russian War and the near-devastation which followed the nuclear exchange between the two nations, the Friends were pacifists and technological simplists who wished to set up a simple farming community without over-reliance on machinery. Initially, it had been no big problem---there were more habitable planets than there were colonists, and the stress was on getting the excess population off Earth. We'd sat out the first war, too far away from the Tahni Frontier to be affected. Even the postwar Pirate Cabals hadn't bothered us---no high-tech loot, too few people.
But then the development of the Transition drive had provided a way to reach T-Space without having to hunt down one of the rare jumpgates, and systems which used to have no strategic value had found themselves at Transitional "junction points," where the gravito-inertial lines of force from several key systems intersected. One of these systems had been Goshen, which led to Canaan's occupation by the Tahni late in the war as a staging area for a planned, last-ditch attack on Earth.
I'd been deep into some sabotage mission when it happened, and hadn't even found out till months later, when Jason Chen---then a Senior Lieutenant in StarFleet Intelligence---managed to find me and let me know what was going on. Our Fleet strategists, it seemed, were willing to let the Tahni have Canaan in exchange for time to prepare for their attack. But that wasn't good enough for Jason, or for me.
I had stolen a stealthship, loaded it up with weapons and ditched it on the Nightside of Canaan, in order to help organize a resistance with the people that had been my neighbors---the same people that had rejected me when I'd decided to attend the Commonwealth Service Academy and because I was friends with Jason, an Offworlder. Together, we'd taken control of the Orbital Defense Satellite System the StarFleet had put up---against local protests---early in the war, and coordinated a strike from the satellites with an attack from the Fleet, which Jason had arranged with the help of Colonel Murdock, my CO. The Tahni fleet had been destroyed, and the war basically ended except for the invasion of the Tahni homeworld...but at a high price.
My parents and baby sister had died in the initial occupation; and my older brother, Isaac---Isaac, who I'd argued with and fought with, and sometimes hated---had been killed during the attack on the control center, taking a shot meant for me. The Karmic kick in the ass was that I could have probably survived that hit.
So now it was me, and Pete and Rachel...Rachel, whom I'd left a bubbly, vacuous teenager and returned to find a wiser, tougher woman. Hardened by the deaths of her husband and infant daughter, she had become a leader of the resistance on Canaan. We'd filled the voids in each others' souls, and in her arms I'd found my humanity again, found the gentler parts of myself.
Things had looked so much more promising back then... After the War, we'd married and taken over my parent's farm; and, in gratitude for what I'd done (and, I'm fairly certain, because I was too dangerous to be a private citizen), the Church Council voted me Constable for life. It had seemed almost an honorary title at first---Canaan's crime rate was negligible.
Then up popped the Corporates, with a license from the Commo
nwealth Strategic Resources Commission to hunt for iridium, and my job had become much dirtier. Harristown and New Jerusalem had seen an almost overnight influx of Offworlders; within a year, they'd become preform cesspits with built-in corruption. It seemed that the mining corporations brought their own little racket with them, employees earning a little extra money by smuggling drugs and guns onto the planet, and it was all dumped into my lap.
I'd tried to cut off the smugglers at their source, but Wellesley and the Corporates had hamstrung every move I made, refusing to allow local jurisdiction over their employees. The drugs and addictive ViR programs made their workers happy. There was nothing the Church could do about it; the Corporates had Commonwealth backing. I thought a lot about quitting, but it came down to the fact that if I didn't do it, Jase would have to.
Finally, we reached the house. Nothing fancy---actually kind of primitive. Wood and brick construction, mostly by hand; two stories tall above-ground. Things were always pretty dead around the farm at Night; only the autoharvesters were active, making their silent, methodical way through the crop rows. I don't know why we kept the farm up; nobody bought from us anymore. We usually wound up trading with other farmers. But Rachel insisted. It had been our people's way of life for more than a century, and I suspected it was a way for her to keep her family's memory alive.
Pete brought the hopper down in a gentle spiral, its belly fans kicking up a whirling cloud of dust as we settled to the bare ground on the north side of the house. A gentle bump rocked the cabin slightly as the hopper touched down, and Pete cut the engines while we hit the quick-releases for our safety harnesses.
"Here we are," I announced to McIntire, popping the side hatch of the hopper.
She was silent as we stepped out of the craft, her face unreadable. She reminded me of a rabbit cornered by a bobcat: twitchy and nervous, eyes darting quickly around to watch for an attack.
McIntire followed me up the path to the back door of the house, a soft shadow falling across the wall from the slowly-setting Reflectors that couched the door in a pocket of darkness. I guess that's why, when the back door suddenly swung open in front of us, McIntire whipped out her sidearm, nearly putting a round through Rachel's head. I caught the Captain's gun hand halfway up, pulling the laser out of her grasp before she could fire.
"Hi, honey," I muttered, rolling my eyes, "I'm home."
"This must be the guest you told me about on the phone." Rachel arched an inquisitive eyebrow. She was still dressed in her work coveralls, and I guessed she'd just gotten back from the fields.
"Uh, yeah...," I stuttered. "Rachel, this is Captain Kara McIntire. She'll be staying here for a couple days."
"Nice to meet you, Mrs. Mitchell," Kara shook Rachel's hand, seeming a bit embarrassed. "Sorry..."
"That's quite all right, Captain," Rachel insisted, unflappable as always. "Won't you come in?" she waved a hand at the open door.
We followed Kara into the kitchen, Pete bringing up the rear, and I fell, exhausted, into a chair at the table, feeling the hand-carved wood creaking beneath me. The back-to-back combat highs were really beginning to get to me, and the day wasn't over yet.
"Pete," I said, "why don't you take Captain McIntire to the guest room, show her the bathroom, then get yourself set up. I'll send some deputies to spell you once I get back to the station."
"Sure thing, Cal," he said. "This way, Captain." I waited till he and McIntire had left the room before I turned to Rachel.
"You're going back to the station?" she asked me, disappointment obvious in the set of her jaw.
"I have to." I stood with a groan, walking over to her. I took her in my arms, half comforting her, half supporting myself, and hobbled back toward our bedroom. "As soon as I get into some fresh clothes."
"Cal," she said gently, walking with me, "you know I love you...but you look like hell."
"I knew I could count on you for support, hon," I laughed quietly, kissing her on the temple as we angled through the bedroom door. "The worst part is, I feel just like I look."
She pushed away from me in the middle of the darkened room, piercing me with that blue-eyed stare.
"What's going on, Cal?" she asked me straight-up. I sighed, sitting on the bed, stripping off my coveralls.
"It's big," I told her seriously, throwing the sweat-soaked garment aside. I gestured back toward the guest room. "That woman was a Corporate mineral scout. A few months ago, she and her partner found a Predecessor site, with what she thinks was active alien technology, including gravity control devices." I saw Rachel's eyes go wide. "They rushed her and her partner away, told them to be quiet about it. No big deal there." I shrugged, moving over to a closet to pull out a fresh set of duty fatigues. "You wouldn't want somebody else stumbling onto something like that if you had the monopoly. But then some street hoods killed her partner, and when she reported it to the Corporate Security Force, they attacked and destroyed her ship."
"Why kill her?" Rachel asked. "If all they're worried about is keeping the technology secret until they can market it, why not just buy her off?"
"Good question." I sat back down next to her, with the clean clothes across my lap. "The real puzzle is where the Predecessor Cult comes in. I was in a chop-shop in Skintown, talking to a contact, when he introduced me to Kara. Before she could tell me too much, a bunch of cultists with military weapons raided the place, and they must have been looking for her."
"But what would the CSF have to do with them?"
"That's the question. And that's why I've got to get back to the station. Jason's got the High-Priest there, and I'd like to get some answers out of him before Kurisawa and the Patrol figures out we have him."
"Are you in trouble, Cal?" she asked me, her hand resting on the bare skin of my shoulder.
"Maybe." I shrugged. "But it won't be the first time." I turned toward her, leaning over to kiss her on the lips. "I really should get dressed and get going."
"Shouldn't you get a shower first?" She mimed an exaggerated sniff at my left armpit.
I leaned towards her with an exaggerated leer. "Well, I don't know, Mrs. Mitchell. Just what kind of shower do you have in mind?"
She pushed me away, nose wrinkling. "For you, Constable, any kind of shower."
I clutched at a phantom wound in my heart. "Ooh, aren't you the romantic one?"
"We'll be romantic when you come back from the station," she promised, putting a hand on the back of my neck and pulling me into a tender kiss. "Now, go get a shower."
"Yes, dear," I acquiesced with pretended meekness, getting to my feet. "While I'm gone, though, I'd really like it if you stayed around the house. If anyone comes around, let Pete handle them. And I want you to get the rifle out of the closet, keep it handy, okay?"
"All right," she agreed. "You be careful, too, okay?"
"Always." I kissed her again on my way to the bathroom. I paused halfway through the door, turning back to her. "I love you."
"I love you, too." I almost missed her soft whisper as the door swung shut.
* * *
"What have you got?" I asked Jase, as he stepped out of the interrogation room, closing the soundproof door behind him.
"You mean aside from two dozen calls from the Church Council, the Commonwealth ambassador and the Corporate Consulate?" he replied tiredly, running a hand through his matted hair. "Not a hell of a lot. This one's a tough nut." He gestured at the wall viewer that showed Fourcade, still dressed in his priestly robes, strapped to a seat in the interrogation room. The High Priest looked little the worse for wear from the two hours of questioning.
"You've already tried the hypnoprobe?" I assumed.
"Twice." Jason shrugged, getting himself a cup of coffee from the dispenser. "He's got some kind of imprinted protection, plus a headcomp---we just don't have the facilities here to make him talk." He chuckled humorlessly. "Maybe back in the StarFleet Intel holding center, but not here. Drugs don't work either---the damned augmentation again. I'd give
my left nut for a qualified Netdiver right now."
"Take it easy," I laughed, clapping him on the shoulder. "Lisa'd kill me if I messed with the family jewels."
"Oh, God, Lisa!" he smacked himself on the forehead. "I forgot to even call her."
"Go ahead. I'm going to visit our honored guest."
"Good luck," he said, heading out of the anteroom to find a comscreen.
Luck I wouldn't need. There were some things about my implants that I didn't tell anyone, not even Jason. I took a swig of coffee, setting my half-empty cup down on the table before I walked into the interrogation room. Fourcade looked up as I entered, breaking off from some kind of mantra, the calm smile returning to his perfect face.
He shook his head pityingly. "When will you apostates learn that I am the servant of our Fathers? I reveal only what they would have me to."
I ignored his jabbering, walked up behind him and gently moved aside the hair over his right ear until I found the `face socket there. I plugged a jack from my belt comlink into it, even as he began to loose his composure and struggle against his restraints. I instructed my headcomp to tune my neurolink to the frequency of my comunit, then ran the penetration program that I hadn't accessed for over a decade.
Part of my consciousness fragmented and spiraled down the link, through a virtual birth-tunnel of neuronic flashes and onto a backlit, cyan plain that stretched the length and breadth of this reality in agoraphobic expanse. Waiting for me there was Fourcade's analog, a gigantic, looming digital angel of light...a virtual Gabriel, welcoming me into his celestial realm with outspread arms and the eyes of a god. I approached him as a black vacancy in cyberspace, a spectral demon invading Fourcade's twisted Heaven.
"You will not overcome me on this level, Unbeliever." His voice was the rush of the wind and the crash of the ocean, each word highlighted by a crack of lightning that I felt rather than heard. "My power here is Legion."
