Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  I reached to the back of my gunbelt with my left hand and pulled a set of neural restraints from a pouch, then tossed them to him. “Put them on,” I instructed him.

  Engineering is secured, I “heard” Deke’s transmission via my neurolink. No prisoners.

  I watched the former DSI operative slip the restraints on across his arms and chest, then I activated them with my neurolink and his whole body went stiff as he lost control of his muscles.

  Engineering is secure, Kara reported. All personnel are down.

  Crew quarters are secured, Trint said. Somehow his neurolinked “voice” sounded different from the others…probably due to the alien design. Light resistance encountered and dealt with. No survivors.

  Bridge is secured, I chimed. And I have one prisoner.

  Roger that, Kara replied. Everyone get to the bridge ASAP. Caleb, go ahead and start the penetration routine.

  I didn’t reply, but started the subroutine in my headcomp to try to penetrate the ship’s computer systems. Having the ship wouldn’t do much good if we couldn’t control her. As I monitored the program’s progress, I watched the prisoner’s eyes---the only parts of his body that he could still control consciously. He was watching me with a kind of numb acceptance, a realization that he was helpless, at my mercy…and wondering whether I would keep my word.

  I thought of the men and women that Cutter had killed back at the Naga base, thought of Rachel, and wondered the same thing myself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nouri:

  Nouri didn’t bother to struggle with the neural restraints. He knew that, given time, his headcomp and neurolink might be able to crack their security code, but why bother? Even if he managed to unlock the restraint web, he’d still be secured in the featureless storage room where they’d stuck him once the automed had done its work. He’d been under for that, but his headcomp told him it had taken nearly seven hours, and the gravity told him they were in Transition Space.

  He sighed and settled back against the wall. So, a calculated risk he’d taken for a chance at insane profits had suddenly turned into an insane risk for little profit.

  Story of my fucking life, he thought with a fatalistic sigh. Wonder if they’re going to bother to feed me…

  The thought had barely fired on his neurons when the door slid aside and Caleb Mitchell and that big Tahni stepped through. He’d seen the Tahni before he went under, and he still could hardly believe it. An Imperial Guard cyborg still alive and hanging out with one of the Glory Boys?

  What the hell kind of shit did I walk in on?

  Mitchell cocked his head to the side the way someone with a neurolink implant often did when they used it to communicate and suddenly the neural restraint web deactivated and he could move again.

  “Come,” Mitchell ordered him, waving a hand impatiently.

  Nouri pulled the device off of him and tossed it aside, his limbs suddenly on fire with the pins-and-needles sensation of feeling returning to them. He ignored that and pushed himself to his feet. He didn’t even seriously consider making a break for the hangar bay: there was literally nowhere to go in Transition Space. Instead, he did as he was told and followed Mitchell, noting the big Tahni walking in step behind him. Neither one was armed…but then, they didn’t have to be, did they?

  The pair escorted him through the cargo bay and up the ladder to the control room. It had been cleaned up since the last time he saw it: there were no bloodstains or loose bits of brain tissue on the deck, anyway. He thought he could still smell the blood in the air, though that might have been his imagination. Oh well, the Captain had been a spineless prick and he hadn’t thought much of the rest of the crew anyway. Just another reason it didn’t pay to make friends in this line of work.

  The ones who’d replaced them as the new owners of this boat were an interesting lot. Besides Mitchell and the Tahni, there were a couple of Normals---well, the woman had some reinforcement in the bones of her arm, but nothing else. The man looked enough like Mitchell to be his brother, and probably was. They were seated off to the side and he thought maybe that indicated their place in the pecking order.

  Then there was another of the Glory Boys, probably Deke Conner from what he’d seen in the Naga files; and another like him, a former DSI cadre who he knew immediately as Kara McIntire---he’d seen her once before he got out, back when Murdock had taken over the Department. Conner was half-sprawled, half-leaning against a control board while McIntire stood, arms crossed and a hard expression on her hard face. Still, she was a looker, in an intimidating sort of way.

  The last of them…he was something else again. He wasn’t carrying any obvious augmentation, nothing that showed up on infrared anyway, but Nouri had the sense that he wasn’t a Normal. Well, he wasn’t normal anyway, that much was obvious by the way his arms swept back and forth as he paced the deck.

  “It’s a shame,” the spastic little man said, “that I couldn’t bring my dear Arachne and her wonderful equipment with me. I’d be curious as to whether it could penetrate the safeguards on a DSI cadre headcomp.”

  “”We were lucky to be able to slip the Ariel on board before we jumped, Robert,” Kara McIntire reminded the little man. “Let’s just be thankful we found the jump coordinates in time to pass them to your ships.”

  So, the little guy was the boss, or at least one of the bosses. That was interesting. Who would these people trust?

  “I’ve seen your face before,” McIntire told him, eyes narrowing as she looked him over, probably calling up a file on her headcomp, he guessed. “On Inferno. You’re Captain Augustus Nouri. You were involuntarily separated from service when General Murdock took over.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted freely. “That’s me.” He grinned crookedly, gesturing at his shredded and bloody Naga uniform. “I found alternate employment.”

  “Why’d you do it, Nouri?” she asked him. He searched her tone and her face for an accusatory tone, but all he saw was curiosity. “Why’d you work for Gregorian after what he’d done?”

  Nouri shrugged and opened his mouth to say something smart-assed, but then stopped as he realized it was a question he’d never actually asked himself. Why had he gone to work for Gregorian?

  “You did the same shit in the war that I did, Major,” he finally answered, shrugging uncomfortably. “It’s not like the regular military, you know? You wind up more loyal to the people you work for, who support you, than you are to some abstract notion of the greater good of humanity.” He paused, a bit surprised at the cynicism that had crept into his voice. He shook himself slightly and continued. “So, when my case officer put me on assignments that seemed like they were more in line with what the Corporate Council wanted than what the Commonwealth government wanted, I didn’t think too much about it, I just did it.”

  He shifted his weight, wishing he had a chair. “And when you guys kicked the Corporate Council’s ass and I wound up on the wrong side of that fight, I followed my bosses to this outfit because I didn’t have too many choices and the pay was good.”

  “Enough,” Mitchell interrupted and Nouri saw McIntire frown at him. Power struggle there, he thought. “Where is Gregorian holding General Murdock? Is he on your flagship?”

  Nouri blinked, staring at the man. “What?” he blurted. “We have General Murdock? The General Murdock? The Bulldog?”

  Mitchell looked as if he were about to snap something, but then he visibly stopped himself and looked at McIntire, confusion in his eyes. Nouri glanced over at her and saw her shaking her head, brows drawn together.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Deke put their thoughts into words, pushing himself up from the control board and pacing into the middle of the room to stand behind Nouri. “First the guys on the moon base and now someone right in the fucking expedition through the Passage and no one knows where Murdock is? How can Gregorian keep something like that quiet?”

  Nouri’s head was spinning. Gregorian had captured the Bulldog? How the hell had he not
heard about that?

  “Is Gregorian on the cruiser?” Kara demanded, her confusion seeming to morph quickly into irritation.

  “As far as I know,” Nouri replied with a nod, grateful to be asked a question he could actually answer. “His courier arrived forty hours ago and the Captain got some sort of message from him. I haven’t seen him in the flesh, but…” He shrugged. “I know he’s supposed to be in the convoy.”

  “Murdock could have been on his courier,” the little man pointed out, hands clasped behind his back as if he needed to find something for them to do. “He might be paranoid about leaks, trying to keep it as quiet as possible.” He suddenly flashed a manic smile at Nouri. “Or this man could be lying his ass off. Perhaps we can rig up something to find out for sure…”

  “No,” Mitchell cut him off flatly, with a tone that would brook no argument. “I told him if he helped us, he wouldn’t be harmed and that includes turning him into a gibbering vegetable.”

  McIntire looked like she wanted to say something, but bit it back. Nouri didn’t blame her. Mitchell scared the shit out of him, too.

  “How did he find out about it?”

  Nouri had to look around to see who had spoken. It was the woman, the one sitting with Mitchell’s brother. She was short and stocky, but still very cute in a kind of I-can-kick-your-ass way, with the classic look of an agro-colonist to her. Broad, open face, long blond hair in a ponytail…way different from the knife-edge sharpness of Major McIntire, but still appealing in its own way.

  “How did who find out about what?” Nouri asked her, grateful to be out from under the hot glare of McIntire and Mitchell.

  “How did Gregorian find out about the Northwest Passage?” she clarified helpfully, not really regarding him but more lost in thought. “We haven’t found the answer to that on this ship or back at the moon base. And where did he get the Predecessor tech he’s been using?”

  Nouri felt himself stumble a bit. He hadn’t eaten in a while and his nano was starting to run out of disposable things to turn into energy. Mitchell must have seen it because he reached back and folded an auxiliary jumpseat out of the wall and motioned for the former DSI cadre-man to sit. Nouri fell into the skeletal seat gratefully, then turned back to the woman.

  “I don’t know that much,” he admitted. “Things are compartmentalized, as you can imagine. But I’ve heard that Gregorian didn’t trust Andre Damiani…”

  “Smart man,” he heard Deke mutter aside.

  “Anyway,” Nouri continued, “from the beginning, once he found out about the Predecessor tech, Gregorian started trying to squirrel away any of it he could get his hands on. Near the end, when everyone was scrambling after Damiani died, he even managed to get one of those ships…”

  “Yes, we saw it,” Kara commented drily.

  “Well, one of the things I hear he got,” Nouri went on, “was a series of magnetic recordings in a crystalline matrix in some really funky looking stones. Damiani’s people had been working on it for a while and hadn’t been able to crack it. Sometime in the last couple years, Gregorian’s researchers must have managed to decode it, because that’s where the coordinates for the Northwest Passage are supposed to have come from.”

  “Where did you hear this?” It was the odd little man that spoke, but his voice was different this time, more concise and less manic. Nouri still tried not to look at him when he answered.

  “Guy on the Science team for this expedition,” he offered, shrugging. “He likes to drink when we play poker. Thinks I’m some kind of bad-ass because of the cadre thing, so he tries to brag.”

  “Do you know what his endgame is?” Kara McIntire asked. “Gregorian, I mean. What does he think he’ll accomplish with all this?”

  “He isn’t my drinking buddy,” Nouri said with a shrug, “so I’m just guessing here…but isn’t it pretty obvious? Anyone who gets hold of Predecessor weapons can tear through the Commonwealth military like it’s not even there. He’s going to take over.” He shook his head. “And if he gets that stuff, no one will be able to stop him.”

  “So one more question then,” Mitchell’s wife surprised Nouri by speaking up again. Her eyes, he thought suddenly, seemed deeper and much more intelligent than a first glance at her would have suggested. “Why did your people try to kill us?”

  He blinked, opened his mouth, then closed it again. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, shaking his head helplessly.

  Mitchell looked at his wife, then back at Nouri, a hint of confusion in his eyes. “You’re saying you aren’t aware that Gregorian sent assassins after me on Canaan? And sent your Predecessor ship to Inferno to try to kill Major McIntire and Captain Conner?”

  “What?” Nouri blurted, sitting forward abruptly in his chair---he barely noticed that the motion made Trint take a cautionary step towards him. “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Because we were the ones who took out his boss, Damiani,” Deke suggested, a perplexed look on his face as well. “He wanted us out of the way.”

  “Because look how well that worked last time,” Nouri shot back with more sarcasm in his voice than he’d intended. “The last thing any of us wanted to do was even let any of you know we existed, much less try to kill you. And send the one fucking Predecessor ship he’d managed to steal to Goddamned Fleet Headquarters? What fucking sense does that make?”

  Nouri felt a bit light-headed and suddenly realized he was standing. He took a deep breath and settled back down on the chair before the Tahni cyborg could come make him sit.

  “Believe me or don’t, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice less strident now, “but as far as I was told---as far as I know---killing any of you was never one of our mission priorities. The only reason we even used the Predecessor tech we had in the Pirate Worlds was because we needed the funding for this expedition. We used the guarantee of our future services to acquire a shitload of loans that we honestly have no intention of ever paying back.”

  He leaned back against the wall, rubbing his head with his hand the way he sometimes did when he was faced with a problem he didn’t understand. “Now, I’m not saying I knew everything that was going on with every decision Mr. Gregorian made…but I’m telling you right now,” he looked Mitchell, McIntire and Conner in the eye, one by one, “I don’t know who was trying to kill you, but it wasn’t us.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  McIntire:

  Kara McIntire slipped out of the bunk as slowly and quietly as she could, not wanting to wake up Deke. The room was dark, but that was irrelevant with the thermal and infrared filters in her eyes. They weren’t cybernetic, entirely…they’d been engineered from cloned tissue and implanted with the required hardware till they were an inseparable combination of biological and artificial.

  Just like me, she thought, surprised at the hint of regret it brought.

  She’d thought she’d made her peace with the implants decades ago, but sometimes, when she least expected it, she’d have a thought like that…

  She shook it off and slipped into a halter top and shorts, then carefully opened the cabin’s manual door, easing it shut behind her. The crew quarters of the lighter were a bit spooky, she thought. They’d disposed of the bodies and had the ship’s cleaning systems take care of the mess, but the whole place still felt a bit haunted. It was one thing to kill someone, it was another to move into their house afterward.

  She padded through the empty hallways, her augmented hearing picking up the faint sounds of snoring from the room where Pete Mitchell slept, the quiet moans and sighs of lovemaking from the cabin Cal shared with Rachel. Trint, she knew, was on the bridge, taking the night watch, and their captive Nouri was locked in the last berth in the row. She didn’t hear anything from his cabin but the regular hiss of breathing and the slow drumbeat of his heart.

  He wasn’t who she was looking for, however. She followed the corridor around to the lighter’s nearly-empty utility bay, what would have been used for smaller car
go had the ship retained its original, commercial configuration. Long before she reached it, she knew who was in the space and what he was doing. The heartbeat was a familiar rhythm, as distinct as a genetic code, and the breathing was controlled but slightly heavier than that of a human at rest. The soft tap of bare feet on the padded floor betrayed the patterns of a movement that she recognized immediately.

  So when she turned the corner and saw Robert Chang moving through the intricate dance of a t’ai chi ch’uan routine on the open floor of the bay, she was unsurprised. The little man was wearing a black singlet that he must have made using the ship’s fabricator---he hadn’t brought much with him when he’d shuttled over to the Ariel from his own cutter---and she could see the play of his toned muscles under his taut skin, reminding her of a time when they’d worked together during the war.

  Robert had been different then, more stable and less…out there. He’d been a good friend, perhaps the brother she’d never had. She saw that in him again as he moved through the intricate dance of the Single Whip form, perspiration beading on his forehead from effort and concentration. She could smell sweat and effort and no attempt made to mask it.

  “What keeps you up in the middle of your sleep cycle, Kara?” he asked her quietly, eyes still staring straight ahead as he continued with the routine. “Does Captain Conner talk in his sleep?”

  “I doubt his headcomp’s security features would allow that,” Kara said, snorting a chuckle. She shook her head. “No, Robert, I’m afraid it’s something a bit more serious on my mind.”

  “There’s much serious to think about,” Chang admitted, still moving through the routine as he spoke. “After all, we’re only days away from coming out of T-space into the Northwest Passage, facing not only Gregorian’s ships but God knows what else.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Robert,” she said, leaning against a wall, her arms crossed. “Nouri said Gregorian wasn’t the one trying to kill us. Do you believe him?”