by Rick Partlow
“I’m used to dealing with people who’re rough around the edges,” he told her, taking her hand in his. “Trust me, you’re a regular paragon of stability by comparison.” He checked the navigation console. “Time to go,” he said, nudging the controls with his neurolink.
The universe turned inside out and nothingness swallowed them in its dark embrace.
Chapter Nine
Mitchell:
Kara had it right: San Sebastian wasn’t a city. It was barely a town, and a frontier town at that. It had been plain from the air when we’d circled around to the bare-bones spaceport at the edge of the town, but it was even more obvious on the walk from the plateau of the landing field down into the town itself.
The buildings were a mixture of bare buildfoam and local stone and wood, and there were fucking stock pens just beyond the last building. This place was so far off the beaten path that they couldn’t even afford cloning vats for meat products…hell, even Canaan had that kind of tech. The lowing of the cattle and the grunting of the hogs was an antiphonal counterpoint to the growling internal combustion engines of alcohol-fueled trucks that were hauling supplies out of the town to more distant settlements.
It was like something out of a ViRdrama about the early colonists back in the late 21st Century.
“There’s a tech lab in that?” Deke asked from where he walked beside me, disbelief strong in his voice.
“In the Favela District, the message said,” I replied with a shrug.
“There’s districts in that?”
“The Favela District,” Kara said calmly, a hint of a smile at the edge of her mouth, “is that part on the far side of town.” She gestured across the stock pens, across the lines of shops and workshops built from local wood, to a line of buildfoam domes clustered near the center of the town. “It’s where the communal fabricators are kept, along with processing centers for raw materials.”
I glanced at her, a bit bemused. She seemed more…relaxed. And the two of them seemed relaxed around each other. I knew from Deke’s memory dump that they’d been, well…intimate…for a few weeks now, but it seemed like they were actually starting to like each other. Deke always did do everything ass-backward.
I glanced around a bit self-consciously. It was just the three of us on the dirt road into town. There was no one else for nearly a kilometer ahead of us, where a motorized cart was hauling down a load of spare parts from a light freighter. Trint, Rachel and Pete were with the ships---ostensibly because we wanted someone to guard them and haul our asses out of trouble, but honestly because I didn’t want Rachel and Pete exposed to possible danger again so soon after Belial. Mostly Pete: he hadn’t just been in danger, he’d killed a man. I didn’t want to be responsible for putting him a position where he’d have to do it again.
“Someone,” I observed, “really doesn’t want to attract any attention.”
“Well, it obviously didn’t work,” Deke said. “After all, Naga knows they’re here.”
“Unless the whole thing is a setup, like you said,” Kara interjected. “Maybe there’s nothing here at all and it was all a ruse to get the General to Belial.”
“So, worst case scenario,” Deke said, “is we find nothing and have to start back at square one.”
“I thought the worst case scenario was the one where we all get killed,” I commented dryly, noticing peripherally the cloud of dry dust that we were kicking up walking down the trail.
“Second worst case then,” Deke amended with a shrug.
“Cal,” Kara said, the tone of her voice changing slightly, sounding a bit tentative. “Is Rachel…okay with me?”
I figured she’d been thinking about that, but I was surprised to hear her ask.
“Not really,” I answered honestly. “But that’s because of the way you upended our lives last time. I never told her about…you know.”
I felt stupid at my reticence to put it into words. I’d had sex with Kara; the fact I’d thought Rachel was dead when it had begun didn’t obviate that. I still felt guilty. She probably thought I was being stupid and parochial: the more developed parts of the Commonwealth had all sorts of marriage contracts and almost none were for a lifetime bond. A lot of the contracts allowed either or both partners to have casual sex with other people. I’d found that hard to believe when I first left Canaan to head for the Fleet Academy, but my experiences during the war had opened my eyes fairly wide.
“I’m sorry,” Kara said with surprising earnestness. “I didn’t mean…” She trailed off.
“You’re not sorry,” I told her without anger, “and neither am I. That’s why I still feel guilty.”
She nodded, but didn’t look at me.
“So,” Deke said cheerfully, “nice weather here, isn’t it?”
I snorted and Kara chuckled softly.
“All right, let’s focus,” I said, adjusting the fall of my gunbelt over my waist.
It was about then we began to see the first townspeople out in the streets. It was mid-morning and things were bustling---or as bustling as they ever got there, anyway. The people here had the look of frontier colonists everywhere: practical, work-worn clothes fabricated from locally-grown plants, broad-brimmed hats and a perpetual coating of dust. No one looked especially pretty or handsome or striking because genetically selecting your children for looks or other special characteristics was too expensive for most people out in the less-developed colonies.
They went about tasks that would seem familiar, if obsolete, to anyone from Canaan but that would have seemed totally alien to anyone from Earth or Aphrodite or Eden or any of the advanced colonies. Men and women and even children manually loaded finished products from fabrication stations onto wagons and into the backs of trucks, or unloaded ore from the mines and crops from the fields to be processed.
And most alien to any of the more refined citizens of the Commonwealth were the butcher shops where animal corpses were processed into cuts of meat to be sold. The smell wafted off a truck carrying butchered cattle from slaughterhouses outside town and reached me on a dry breeze. I nearly retched.
“We are really out in the sticks this time,” Deke commented, waving the smell away from his nose dramatically.
“Says the man who lived for years in the Pirate Worlds,” Kara pointed out.
“Sure, there was cancer and birth defects,” he admitted with a philosophical shrug, “and contract killings and gang wars and piracy…but at least we have beef cloning vats like civilized people.”
I was about to make a comment on that brilliant piece of ethical gerrymandering when I saw the group of armed men and women approaching us down the center of the town’s main street. I didn’t have to tell Deke and Kara---they stopped in mid-step at the same time I did, then started drifting slowly to either side of me, spreading out into a loose wedge.
There were four of them, three men and a woman, all dressed in the same sort of practical work clothes as everyone else except for armbands they each wore on their left bicep with some sort of logo printed on them. They all carried weapons---rifles or carbines of some type, or maybe flechette guns---and their leader had a holstered pistol. He was an older man with the weathered look of someone born out here. He was tall for the local 1.2 gravities, with the broad build of a man who’d done a lot of physical work in his life, and his brown beard was cut close to his jawline.
He halted the group about ten meters from us, then stepped a bit closer to me, his hand twitching fitfully towards his holstered sidearm, eyes flickering towards Deke and Kara. I stepped up to meet him, trying not to look aggressive.
“Fair morning to you, sir,” he said, his voice and tone pleasant but the set of his eyes clearly worried.
“And to you,” I returned. “Is there some problem?” I nodded toward the other armed citizens grouped with him in the road. Other townspeople had noticed the confrontation and were melting away into businesses and houses, leaving the street nearly empty except for us and a couple of wayward dogs.<
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“I’m hoping not,” the bearded man said. “We’re just a bit sensitive to strangers here lately.”
“We aren’t looking for trouble, Constable…” I trailed off, having guessed at his title.
“Sheriff,” he corrected me. “Johan Iatarola, Sheriff of San Sebastian.”
“Caleb Mitchell,” I returned with a nod. “I’m a Constable myself, where I’m from.”
“What brings you out this way, Mr. Mitchell?” he wanted to know. “People don’t generally happen on El Dorado by chance.”
“We’re here looking for an old friend,” Kara put in from a few meters off to my right. I glanced at her and saw her eyeing the Sheriff, her hand carefully away from her pistol. “We heard he might be in your town.”
“And who might your friend be?” Iatarola asked, gaze swinging back and forth between us.
That was a damn good question. Who the hell would be all the way out here? Who would have a reason to hide here? Who did we know from everything that had gone down four years ago who might have set up a tech shop out here, trying not to attract attention?
“Robert Chang,” I answered and I could see Kara’s eyes fly open wide. “We used to call him Cutter.”
Iatarola shot a glance back at one of his deputies, then turned back to me, relaxing slightly. “He’s been expecting you,” he said, motioning to us. “Come with me.”
The building had the look of recent construction, and from the scorched ground around the perimeter of it, the original structure hadn’t gone down peacefully. However long ago it had burned, there was something else in its place now: something impermanent and unfinished, made mostly of buildfoam and plastic. There were guards outside the place, and they weren’t trying to be subtle about it either. They carried heavier ordinance than the Sheriff and his deputies: high-end, military-class Gauss rifles that could shoot down a flitter. They wore body armor too, though still marked with the same logo as the one on the armbands of the deputies, and they bore more of a look of men and women who carried guns for a living than the farmer-turned-policeman appearance the Sheriff had.
The guards looked us up and down suspiciously, but a whispered word from Iatarola mollified them and we were waved inside. The interior of the place had the same look of impermanence as the outside: every corner was filled with either unopened containers or recently-unpacked equipment. What sort of equipment I wasn’t sure, not being any sort of technician, but it looked expensive and I could tell there was a hell of a lot of holographic computer storage involved.
At the center of the room was a worktable fitted with equipment that was familiar to me…I’d seen similar tech back in Skinganger chopshops in Harristown and New Jerusalem. I was staring at it when a door opened across the room and a man walked in.
His face was unfamiliar and yet somehow I recognized it. It was rounded and soft, with boyish features and deep-set dark eyes that sparkled with intelligence and shone with madness. He smiled at us warmly and spread his arms wide in welcome.
“My friends!” he said genially. “It is so good to see you all once again!”
“Robert?” Kara said, almost a gasp.
“Surely you can’t be too surprised, Kara,” he said. “I survived one death utilizing the genetic duplication technology…you must have suspected I’d have another backup, just in case.”
I’d known Robert Chang as “Cutter,” a street surgeon who installed bionics for the Skingangs of Canaan’s cities. Kara had served with him in the Department of Security and Intelligence during the war, back when he’d been just Robert Chang. We’d both seen him die during an attack on his chopshop in Harristown four years ago and we’d both seen him reborn as the cybernetically enhanced killing machine self-named Secarius. He’d recreated himself using a technique cribbed from top-secret Fleet research during the war. Called genetic reconstruction, it used DNA samples of the donor to construct a full-grown copy, with a blank-slate brain. Install a neurolinked computer into that brain and you could upload memories backed up on holographic computer storage from a neurolink in the original.
“And you’ve been here this whole time?” Kara asked, slowly approaching the man, as if she didn’t believe he was real.
“Not the whole time,” he admitted with a diffident shrug. “I was…revived, I suppose you could say, back in Harristown at my lab. I’d arranged for a backup of my memories via transmission through an Instell Comsat before our departure for the raid on Petra.” He grinned broadly. “I assume it went well, from the news reports and the fact you’re all still alive.”
“You died killing Damiani,” Kara told him. “I don’t know why we didn’t consider that you might come back again.”
“There was a lot going on then,” I pointed out, feeling like I was intruding. “I guess that possibility just…slipped through the cracks.”
“So wait a minute,” Deke finally put in, his face screwed up in confusion. “You’re that big ugly thing with the tail? The one that showed up with Cal’s brother when we were on Inferno?”
“I’m the ‘before’ to his ‘after,’ you might say,” Chang told him. “But come, come…let’s not stand around here staring at each other. Come sit down with me.” He waved us toward the door from which he’d emerged. “We have much to talk about.”
“Robert,” Kara said, “we came here because you’re in danger. Someone is sending out assassins to hunt down everyone involved in what happened four years ago. They’re going to try to kill you.”
“I’m aware of that,” Chang said with a matter-of-fact nod. “You may have noticed that this building is very new.”
“They already tried to kill you?” I asked him, hand going to the butt of my handgun almost of its own accord as I instinctively started to look around for threats.
“No, Constable Mitchell,” he corrected me. “They succeeded.”
My throat burned as the whiskey worked its way down and I struggled not to make a face: it was local rotgut, made by hand not by processor, and it tasted like it. I set the glass back on the table with a solid thud of real glass on real wood.
“So,” I finally said, sparing Kara a glance before fixing my attention back on Robert Chang, “this is incarnation number four then?”
“They sent an assault shuttle,” Chang explained, seemingly serious for once, almost normal. “Took out this building and a couple others.” He shook his head sadly. “Killed seven people who worked for me.” He shrugged, smiling again. “And me, of course.” He sat back in his chair and it creaked slightly while he considered his own drink, held lightly in his left hand. “That was over a week ago. Luckily, I’m paranoid enough that my revival equipment wasn’t stored here.”
“We know the Naga are the ones performing the attacks,” Kara declared. “You’ve heard of them?”
“Of course,” he said, hiding his mouth behind his drink as he took a sip. “I am not without my sources, even out here.”
“Then you know they’re just working for someone else,” I interjected. “Someone who wants us all dead.”
“It’s Gregorian,” Chang told me casually, as if it was of no import.
“Former DSI Director Gregorian?” Deke asked, by way of clarification.
“No,” Chang cracked scornfully, “my old boyfriend Andy Gregorian from Secondary School.” He laughed at his own joke. “Of course it’s fucking Gregorian. He knows who we all are, had files on all of us. He knows where we live and how we’d react.”
“React to what?” I wanted to know.
“The Northwest Passage,” Chang told me, looking as if he thought I should have figured it out already. “Gregorian’s looking for it.” He snorted softly and took a sip of whiskey, probably laughing at the way all our mouths dropped open.
“That is,” he amended off-handedly, “unless he’s found it already.”
Chapter Ten
Trint:
“I am not certain I understand,” Trint admitted, not looking up as he loaded individual hyperexplosive
cartridges into the magazine of the pulse carbine. “What is the Northwest Passage and how does its existence necessitate this operation?” Then he did look up, one of his brow ridge’s twitching in irritation. “Which, by the way, is not tactically advisable under the current circumstances.”
It was Caleb Mitchell who answered. Trint noticed that Cal was always the most ready to talk to him, even more so than Rachel. The others had accepted him, but he wasn’t certain they felt entirely comfortable on an instinctual level with the reality of his existence.
“You know about the Cluster, right?” Cal asked me, pulling the upper section of his byomer suit over his chest and sealing it.
“I’ve heard the term while auditing your news nets,” Trint confirmed. “You use it to refer to the collection of star systems connected by the Transition Lines, do you not?”
“Right,” Cal said with a nod. It had taken Trint a while after his capture to realize that humans used that jerking head motion to mean affirmation. To a Tahni, it was an insulting sexual gesture. “The Cluster is basically a sphere a few hundred light years across, and every star system inside it is connected by gravito-inertial Transition Lines that we can access with the drive.”
“But there’s no way out of it,” Pete Mitchell interjected from the other side of the Ariel’s utility bay. The younger man was strapping himself into conventional body armor and looked eager to get into the fight.
“No one has found a way out yet,” Cal corrected him, frowning as he looked over at him. Trint sensed that the disapproving facial gesture wasn’t for the younger brother’s interruption but rather for the reminder that he was going to be coming along on the raid. “Scientists have been arguing for decades about whether that’s due to some quirk of hyperdimensional physics or if it was locked down that way by the Predecessors when they created the wormhole jumpgates.”
