Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  The first was as a defense shield, since the field warped all electromagnetic energy, diverting energy beams and radiation away from it to a certain extent. The second was as a source of variable, artificial gravity, though---for reasons my physics teachers could never adequately explain to me---this effect could only be utilized while in T-Space. God knows they've tried to make it work in realspace; antigravity would be such a handy thing to have.

  But it was the third effect that I was interested in at the moment. It seemed that by feeding the warp unit pulsed jolts of energy in a certain wave pattern, you could create a gravimetic wave front that would spit your vessel out like a watermelon seed---kind of a cosmic boat propeller. This made quite a handy tool for larger starships, saving on all the room that used to be taken up by reaction mass, but it wasn't often you saw the capability on a craft as small as a courier.

  The impeller effect did have a couple drawbacks, the first being that you couldn't use it within the gravitational pull of anything larger than a medium-massed asteroid as it would tend to pull you just as far toward the center of mass of any large body as possible. The other little problem was that if there was anything smaller than an asteroid around within, say, a half a klick, the same function of the warp that made it such a great defense shield would push that matter away, and rather violently.

  The long and the short of it was, when I gunned the Hecate out of the docking cylinder, it blew the whole bay to hell.

  Rocketing out into the Big Black, I switched to the rear screens and saw huge gouts of flame and debris shooting out of the end of the cylinder, I guessed from where our drive field had touched one of the shuttles and blown its fuel supply. I felt a cold lump in the pit of my stomach as I realized what would happen if the huge metallic hydrogen stores on one of those big freighters were to ignite...

  Almost as if some ill-tempered god were reading my mind, a blinding, incandescent explosion tore through the heart of the station, consuming the docking cylinder and starting a shock wave that spread up the "spokes" of the habitat wheel, shattering them like glass rods. Air blasted through hull breaches in streams of ice particles and caught fire in other places, expanding from pinpoints of light to glowing jets of flame. The wheel itself didn't come apart---its structure was too sturdy---but the explosion threw it visibly off its equilibrium, its spin sending it wobbling out of its high orbit. If they didn't get an evac crew up there in a few hours, the whole thing was going to hit atmosphere and burn itself up.

  I looked for grief somewhere in my soul, looked for a spark of guilt or regret, but there was none. I was the Killing Machine again, and the Machine felt no guilt or regret. I knew on an intellectual level that there could have been innocent people in that station, but it had no meaning. This was a war, and I was a weapon.

  I glanced aside to McIntire, expecting shock or horror on her face, but she was expressionless. She could have been watching a game of Cyberball for all the emotion she showed. Somehow, I felt that she was even more of a machine than I was.

  I was so engrossed in watching her and the explosion, I didn't notice the incoming assault shuttles coming around Canaan's horizon until the ship's tactical computer gave me a mental nudge.

  "Company," I muttered. "They must have gotten an alert out to the shuttles."

  "We could outrun them on impellers," McIntire suggested.

  "Them, yeah." I nodded readily. "But we're not going to be able to outrun the Patrol cutters they call out while we're buzzing around insystem. In case you haven't noticed, we just destroyed a multimillion credit Corporate Council orbital station and probably killed several hundred people. I'm not up on all the federal ordinances, but I think that might just be against the law."

  "So what's your idea, war hero?" she wanted to know.

  "We need a place to hide," I told her. "For a few hours. While we finish charging the capacitors, and I finish sifting through this thing's navigational computer." I scanned the sensor boards for the location of the assault shuttles, then turned the scanners the opposite direction, nodded in satisfaction. "And I think I know just the place."

  Interlude: Canaan

  Rachel Mitchell flexed the fingers of her right hand tentatively, staring at the limb in unabashed wonder. When she had last seen the arm, in the brief moments before she'd passed out, it had lay meters away from her, blown off by a burst of laserfire.

  But that was long days ago, and the medics at the Mt. Carmel hospital had done a marvelous job assembling her new arm. Assembling was the correct word. Cloned bone tissue, infused with ceramic to make it much harder to ever break again, had been wrapped with cloned muscle and flesh. Superconductive hardwired threads had replaced nerves, attached by an implanted microcomputer and neurolink to her brain. The arm was stronger, its reflexes faster, and its sense of touch a hundred times more sensitive than the original could ever have been, yet it still felt unreal somehow.

  "All right, Mrs. Mitchell." Gregov Bellot, her physical therapist, gently took her new right arm by the wrist. "Let's see how the graft is coming along." She tried to smile politely as he bent and stretched her arm from the shoulder down to the wrist, pushing it just to that shadowy line where discomfort came within a few millimeters of pain. Bellot was a jolly, well-meaning little man who sort of reminded her of one of her uncles, but she wouldn't have been startled to discover that the therapist was some distant relative of the Marquis de Sade.

  "Very good, very good." Bellot nodded, letting loose of the appendage, his pudgy face beaming. "Now we check dexterity," he announced cheerfully, as if they hadn't repeated this same ritual every day she'd been there, led her across the room to a table that held a series of puzzles and reflex tests.

  "Hey, Rachel." She heard a familiar voice and turned to see Pete coming through the therapy room door, looking none the worse for wear from the serious wounds he'd taken at their house. He'd been treated and released over a week ago, but Jason had kept him at the medical center there at Mt. Carmel to take charge of security. He'd taken the job seriously, as evidenced by the sidearm that had become a regular part of his wardrobe since his release. She'd been happy just to get back into her regular clothes and out of a hospital gown.

  "Hi, Pete." She stepped over and gave him a hug, grateful for the interruption in this increasingly boring routine. "Tell me you're here to get me out of this place," she pleaded, only half-joking.

  "I wish I could, sis, but Jase wants to wait till things settle down a bit more."

  "Is he still having trouble with Kurisawa?" she asked, trying hard to ignore Bellot's impatient foot-tapping.

  "Kurisawa, the Corporate Consulate, the Commonwealth Ambassador," Pete snorted. "You name it. He's managed to convince them he doesn't know where Cal and Captain McIntire are, but they're crawling all over our offices, going over the records with an electron microscope. Plus the skingangs are going crazy---they all want revenge for the hit on Cutter's chopshop. There've been at least three street attacks on the Cultists, and we don't have enough people to..." Pete trailed off as he realized that Rachel's attention had drifted away from his words.

  "He'll be okay, Rachel," Pete put a comforting hand on her arm---the new one, and it still felt strange. "Cal can take care of himself---hell, he went on board the CSF station, trashed the damned thing and came out all right. He was the best there was in the war, and he probably knows a thousand hiding places that the Corporates and the feds never heard of." The younger Mitchell smiled with a hint of pride in his eyes. "He's probably leading them on a merry chase right now, trying to draw attention away from us."

  "You're right, Pete," she said, trying to match his confidence. "I just wish I could be with him---we always said we'd never be apart again once the war ended."

  "He'll be back," Pete assured her. "I know he will. And when he does come back," Pete's voice went hard, "there's gonna' be some serious ass-kicking."

  "Is it just me," Bellot stepped over to the window, "or do you hear some kind of chanting?"


  * * *

  "Look, Inspector." Jason Chen tried to keep his voice level, not wanting to yell at a holographic transmission in front of his deputies. "I don't know how many different ways I can put this so that you'll understand. I don't know where Constable Mitchell is, and he has not contacted me since he took off in the Corporate shuttle. Given the situation, I think it's more likely you'll have information on his whereabouts long before I will. However, I would like to know what you and the Commonwealth ambassador are doing to investigate the CSF attack on Constable Mitchell's home, which, not incidentally, seriously injured his wife and brother and prompted his attack on the Corporate station?"

  "We'll take care of that investigation, Deputy Chen," Kurisawa snapped dismissively. "That is not your concern." His expression seemed to soften a bit. "How is Mrs. Mitchell?"

  "She's fine," Jason answered uncertainly, suspicious of the man's motives. "She should be good as new."

  "I assume she's out of the hospital, then?"

  "We want to keep her there for a while just to be safe."

  "Probably a wise idea. At any rate," the Inspector said, his voice becoming business-like once again, "I will notify you if we need to go over your records again or question any of your personnel."

  "That's most gracious of you," Chen replied, without half of the sarcasm he felt, then cut the transmission with an angry flick of his hand. "Goddamned feds," he murmured softly, glancing around the room to make sure none of his people had heard it. Feelings were bad enough without adding to the tension.

  The booking room of the station, visible through the one-way transplas windows of the main offices, was a vision of chaos. Skingangers, brought in for questioning on the numerous attacks on cultists in the wake of the raid on Cutter's shop, crowded the room, cursing and struggling futilely against their restraints. The main database was still offline from the Patrol and Corporate investigators probe, and more than three-quarters of the regular deputies were tied up answering emergency calls.

  This was worse than anything Jason had seen since the war...

  "Sir?" Chen heard the reluctant voice of one of his deputies coming over the intercom.

  "Yeah?" Jason replied, just as reluctantly.

  "There's someone at the front desk to see you."

  Jason sighed, rubbing a hand across his face. He hadn't slept in nearly sixty hours.

  "All right," he muttered, rising from his desk with a twinge of protest from his tired muscles. "I'm coming."

  Jason was loathe to open the door between the offices and the booking room---it was soundproof, and pulling it open was like cracking the gates of Hell. The relative calm and silence of the offices was assaulted by a cacophony of sound and smell---the moans, shouts and snarls of restrained prisoners; the shouted commands and threats of the deputies; the stench of sweat and the pungent stink of urine from skinners who had voided themselves in protest, too strong for the air conditioning to control.

  Chen closed the door behind him, trying to hold his breath as he stepped quickly through the booking area. He kept his eyes straight ahead, ignoring the pleading looks from his subordinates and the curses and challenges of the skingangers alike as he plodded forward. Finally, like Pilgrim emerging from the Slough of Despair, he reached the doorway to the waiting room and pushed through it, shutting it quickly behind him.

  Waiting in the front room were various shopowners, farmers and business persons, come to make complaints about vandalism or petty theft---and a vision straight out of a bad Kickride.

  It...he?...was bipedal, with a basically bilateral symmetry, but beyond that, it was difficult to tell the thing had started life as a human being. Jason didn't believe he'd ever seen a more radical case of street surgery---actually, he didn't think that term was accurate, as no common street surgeon could have achieved this level of sophistication.

  The thing was over two meters tall and...well, Jason had to start at the feet and work his way up. The legs were almost normal, except for the ceramic armor grown into the skin like some kind of scales, but the feet had been expanded, and the toes lengthened---perhaps with cloned tissue---into vicious talons. He had a tail, for God's sake, muscled with bionic servos to make it either a deadly weapon or a platform to allow the use of his feet, and also armored with the ceramic scales.

  The torso had been extended with cloned tissue and artificial ribs and spine to make room for an extra set of arms---also a combination of biological tissue and bionics, each hand of the lesser arms fitted with modular digits to allow for delicate electronic operations. The main arms had been extensively built up through bionic servos and cloned muscle tissue implants, and the hands were huge, four-fingered claws plated with armored scales.

  Then there was the head. It had been expanded to handle extra brain tissue and fitted with superchargers to feed it air, but that was the least of its modifications. Hard, armored ridges lined the cranium, leading up to a pair of wickedly-curved metal horns. The eyes were bionic, and buried beneath heavily-ridged brows, while the nose had been reduced to a pair of slots flush against the face. The jaws were strengthened, and when the too-wide mouth opened, it revealed rows of razor-sharp metal teeth.

  Feeling for his sidearm, Jason didn't approach till his hand rested on it.

  "Are you Deputy Constable Chen?" It spoke. Its voice, ironically enough, was almost pleasant.

  "Yeah," Jason grunted in reply, just staring at the thing unabashedly.

  "I am called Secarius. I must talk to you in private."

  "Of course you must," Jason replied numbly, his brain refusing to accept that a creature from his boyhood nightmares was standing there asking for a private conversation with him. "Right this way."

  Jason tried to ignore the disbelieving looks in the eyes of the watch officers, attempting not to appear overly concerned as he led the creature that called itself Secarius through the door into the booking area. The moment that Secarius stepped into the room, the bedlam faded like a hard vacuum had hit. Every eye, organic or bionic, was glued to the creature, and Jason had an odd feeling that some of the Skinners seemed to recognize it.

  He put that question aside as they passed through the booking area and arrived at the door to the interrogation room. Jason pulled it open, waited for Secarius to enter first. The cyborg had to bend at the waist to make it through the doorway, an unnaturally fluid motion that showed the complexity of its spinal structure. Jason shook his head as he followed it inside, wondering if the pressure had finally driven him over the edge and this was all a paranoid delusion. Closing the door behind them, he turned to face the thing.

  Secarius propped itself up by its tail, crossed both sets of arms and regarded the Deputy Constable evenly---or as evenly as something that looks like a dragon crossed with a scorpion can look.

  "So," Jason prompted, "did you have something important to tell me, or are you just new in the neighborhood and wanted to meet the local law enforcement officers?"

  "It's fascinating how people change, isn't it Constable Chen?" Secarius said in that incongruously smooth voice. "Not too long ago, I would have charged you for the information I'm about to provide gratis. But I'm a different person now, with different goals and a new outlook."

  "How nice for you," Chen commented drily. "I feel the same way after a good weekend off."

  "Your sense of humor reminds me of another policeman I knew once," Secarius observed. "But I'm afraid you don't have much time for small talk. Mrs. Mitchell is at the Mt. Carmel medical center, with her brother-in-law, Peter."

  "How do you..." Jason began.

  "For the moment, forget how I know," the creature interrupted, "and concentrate on the inevitable conclusion that if I know, someone else almost certainly does. Someone who is very interested in keeping the things they imagine Kara McIntire may have told you or them a secret."

  "Who the fuck are you?" Jason demanded, shaking his head. Not even Kurisawa had expressed knowledge of Captain McIntire's involvement in the destruction
of the CSF station.

  "I am Secarius," he replied calmly. "My name and my new purpose---it's a Latin word, Constable, meaning 'slayer.' What I used to be, until sixteen days ago, was an insignificant street surgeon you knew, only by reputation, as Cutter."

  "What in the hell are you talking about?" Chen gaped at him. "Cutter died in the raid on the chopshop."

  "Yes, he did," the thing agreed readily. "And Secarius was born. I admit, I was a bit miffed about dying, though I have no real memory of it, and I've been taking out some of my frustration on those misguided parties responsible."

  "The Cultist killings," Jason muttered in realization.

  The huge shoulders shrugged. "Merely a diversion. My real purpose was to find information about the ones behind the Cultists---the Corporate Council, and their attack dogs in the CSF."

  "The Corporates are behind the Cultists?" Jason repeated, frowning deeply.

  "It would be obvious to a child if he knew where to look." Secarius smiled, baring a nightmarish double set of centimeters-long teeth---Jason shuddered at the unbidden thought of them dripping with blood. "But we have not the time to bandy about the many things you do not know. The Cultists and the CSF are on the move, and you and your friends are the targets."

  Jason shook his head confidently. "There's security all around that hospital. No one will be able to get through it."

  "I personally," Secarius pointed out, "have not known the CSF to attempt something they do not believe themselves capable of."

  Before Jason could fashion a reply, the door to the interrogation room burst open, and Shiella Wolczk, one of the watch officers, exploded through it.

  "Constable Chen!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "We just got a call from Mt. Carmel---it's surrounded by Cultists, hundreds of them!"