Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  "I understand," he said. He held his hands up as if pleading. "But it's the only thing that makes it bearable, Illyana. I'm not proud of it---I told you last time that I hadn't even tried it before last month. But I just need something to get me through the next little bit...until I can get used to Raina being gone." He felt a tear trickling down from his eye on cue and on orders. "Can you help me?"

  "Just this one time, Loyce," she said, sounding very reluctant. "And you have to promise me that you won't tell anyone about this."

  "Of course not," he quickly agreed. "I'd be kicked out of the Fleet if anyone knew."

  "Come this way."

  She led him to the end of the hall and into what seemed like the only furnished room on the floor, a large space filled with computer consoles and what looked like some sort of medical equipment. Most of it was concealed beneath sterile white covers, except for a single gurney.

  "What is this place?" It wasn't as hard to put some trepidation into his voice this time.

  "It's going to be a treatment center for Post-Traumatic Stress," she lied easily. "Right now though, it's a convenient place for you to...indulge in your activity."

  "Have you...have you done this before?" Deke asked her hesitantly.

  "I don't like to," she told him with a hint of sadness in her voice. "But there are some brave men and women such as yourself who find themselves with nothing else that will dull the pain, and I can't bring myself to force them to deal with criminals."

  God, she's good, Deke thought. I'd almost believe her if I didn't know better.

  Illyana stepped over to the gurney and lowered the gate along its right side, motioning for him to lie down. He levered himself onto the mobile bed and slowly laid back, swinging his legs onto it before she raised the gate again. His eyes were on her as she walked to one of the covered stations and lifted the white plastic sheeting to retrieve a small module from a locked drawer. It was innocuous looking, the kind of module used to load software into implant headcomps via the interface jacks ubiquitous in and out of the military, but he knew what it held---or, rather, what she wanted him to think it held: illegal ViR streetware, designed to directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain.

  "I'm only going to set this for an hour," she warned him. "Longer than that would be dangerous."

  "Okay," he acquiesced easily. He felt a flutter in his stomach that might have been fear. Not of her, or of what she held, but the addiction it represented. It would be so easy to give into what people had come to call "the dreaming," especially for someone like him. That was the reason he'd never even indulged in legal full-immersion Virtual Reality since he'd received his implants, much less this kind of thing.

  Illyana stepped around behind him and carefully and gently plugged the module into the 'face jack at Deke's temple. He made his face seem eager, not showing the feeling of revulsion the sensation gave him.

  "I'll be here when you come out," Illyana promised, patting his shoulder reassuringly.

  Then she pressed the control on the side of the module to load the software and stepped back, anticipation on her face that she no longer cared if he saw. Deke stiffened suddenly and his eyes went wide as his back arched. His limbs twitched as if he were trying to move but couldn't and his mouth tried to open in a silent scream.

  "It's all right, Loyce," Illyana whispered, looking as if she felt sorry for him, if not for her actions. "In a little while, you won't have to worry about Raina anymore..."

  "Honestly, I was never that worried about her," Deke said, rising up and plucking the module out of his head. Now he did laugh at the look of shock on Illyana's face as she stepped back, banging into a sheet-covered table and barely keeping her balance.

  "How..." Illyana stuttered, using the table behind her for support. "How are you...?"

  "How am I not paralyzed and drooling while your little toy," he gestured with the connection module, "uploads my memories to your holographic computer banks?" Her mouth dropped open and he laughed again. "Because these damn things," which I can't wait to get rid of, he thought as he rubbed at the 'face jack on his temple, "don't connect to anything but a DSI Secure Storage site, and you are fucking under arrest."

  I always wanted to say that.

  "You don't know what you're doing," Illyana said, shaking her head. "If you're DSI, you can't be doing this..."

  "And yet I am," Deke sighed, sliding a small neural restraint out of his pocket. "So, how about we save the histrionics for the holding cell?"

  "They won't let you do this," she warned, sliding away from him as he approached with the restraints.

  Deke knew it was coming. He knew she wouldn't have brought him down here alone without any security, so when the door to the chamber opened and half a dozen of the center's guards crowded through, he wasn't the least bit surprised. He supposed they thought themselves intimidating in their mottled grey body armor and visored helmets, but the nonlethal sonic stunners that filled their hands didn't impress him, and neither did the haphazard way they entered the room.

  Illyana's mouth was opening to give them an order when Deke went into motion, his headcomp dosing him with artificial and natural adrenaline as well as a cocktail of other drugs and hormones that caused everything to slip into slow motion from his perspective. He crossed the room in two long strides and was on the first of them before the last had got through the door.

  Can't kill them, he reminded the Machine that was controlling his motions, a Machine that was a combination of his own instincts, his headcomp's programming and decades of experience. Don't know if they're involved in this or just being duped into thinking they're doing their job.

  He snatched the sonic stunner from the lead man's hands with little effort, breaking a few fingers when they instinctively tried to hold onto the carbine, then slammed his heel into the security guard's plant knee. The guard went down screaming behind his visor and Deke took a fraction of a second to consider his newly acquired weapon. Their helmets were probably shielded against sonics, so he used the heavy carbine as a club instead, swinging it in an arc that took the next security officer in the solar plexus. The armor kept the blow from being fatal, as Deke had known it would, but it threw the guard backwards and took the next two down beneath him.

  That blocked the last two from clearing the door and Deke didn't give them time to figure out their next move; he leaped the pile and came down with a heel kick that broke the collar bone of the woman on the right and drove her to the ground, sending her stunner clattering to the floor. The last man almost had time to fire, but Deke's makeshift club took the gun out of his hands with one swipe, then took out his knees with the backswing.

  The two who'd been knocked down by the second guard were trying to get up, but so slowly and clumsily that Deke felt as if he were ambling towards them rather than running. He kicked their weapons away, then rendered one immobile with a blow to the chest that drove the wind from his lungs before taking the time to bend the other's helmet back for a slap to the carotid that put her out.

  Any time you want to join the party... he broadcast over his neurolink as he walked back across the room to Illyana, who was frozen in shock, looking at him with sheer terror in her eyes.

  She didn't resist this time as he slipped the neural restraints onto her neck; her arms went slack as she lost voluntary muscle control in her upper body.

  What? he "heard" the answer. You think you got all the security guards?

  Kara McIntire walked through the door, not even glancing down as she stepped over the prone guards, looking just as sleek and deadly as the day he'd met her in the back room of a bar on Thunderhead. She was dressed now much as she was then, in a black leather jacket and generic grey utility fatigues tucked into calf-high spacer's boots. No uniform, but then she didn't need one here: she wasn't the one working undercover.

  "Good evening, darlin'," Deke drawled. "Sorry," he corrected himself with feigned contrition, "Major darlin'."

  "It's a good thing I
can't replace you, Conner," she grumbled good-naturedly. She walked over to Illyana and tapped a finger on the woman's cheek. "Director Xiang..."

  "Illyana," Deke corrected sotto voce, earning a glare.

  "Director Xiang," Kara McIntire started again, "we know exactly what you've been doing here, and we know how it started. What we need from you is whose memories you've stolen and how many of them have been replaced with duplicates. You can talk to us here, or I can disappear you to a DSI blacksite and no one will ever see you again."

  Illyana didn't respond. She didn't look sullen or stubborn, Deke thought, more like someone going into shock. As he watched, he could see an involuntary twitching in her cheek, a fluttering of one eye and a peculiar twisting of her mouth.

  "Something's off with her," he commented quietly, stepping away from the woman as if she were a bomb about to detonate.

  "Director Xiang?" Kara said, her face creasing in a frown. "Illyana?"

  The woman collapsed to the ground, seizing violently, foam starting to come from the corner of her mouth.

  "What the fuck?" Deke blurted, checking around for threats instinctively but not seeing anything.

  But Kara was staring intently at the fallen woman. "Look at her eyes, Deke," she said, her voice so cool and even that no one who didn't know her could have told she was scared.

  Deke leaned over cautiously and saw the whites turning red with burst blood vessels.

  "Where have we seen this before?" she asked him.

  "Yeah," Deke realized. "This is what Cutter's penetration program did when he was interrogating that mercenary." The former street surgeon had used a method of his own development to hack into the man's headcomp and access his memories...forcefully. The effects had been drastic, and very much identical to what they were seeing now. "Shouldn't we call the medics?"

  Kara cocked her head to the side in a motion he'd come to learn was indicative of her using her neurolink communicator; then her eyes cleared and widened.

  "We're being jammed," she said tightly, gaze darting around. "Nothing's getting out of the Rec Center, the external network is shut down."

  "Shit," Deke muttered, glancing down at Illyana Xiang, dying from a cerebral hemorrhage on the ground at his feet. "She's connected to a network in here," he announced, receiving the data from his headcomp's analysis. "Not the Rec Center web, this one is internal and local to this room." He ran a test with his neurolink and nodded. "I can piggyback onto the signal; I think I can access whatever it is."

  "Whatever it is," she reminded him sharply, gesturing at Illyana, "is killing her."

  "Relax, love," Deke reassured her. "I'm not here for my looks, you know? My wetware's a bit more advanced than what Cutter was used to dealing with."

  It had been a while since Deke had run a penetration program; his line of work for the last several years hadn't required much in the way of sophisticated software hacks. But it was like riding a bicycle, for his headcomp anyway. He gave it the correct instructions, set the firewalls and then let slip the Dogs of Cyber-war. If he' had the time, he could have monitored the progress of the program, but it would work just as well if he weren't paying attention.

  "All right, I'm running it," he told Kara, his focus turning outward again. "But if someone's locked the comm's down..."

  He didn't have time to finish the sentence.

  When they came, they didn't take the elevator; Deke told himself he should have figured it wasn't the only way down. Instead, a hatch opened in the ceiling at the far side of the room and they dropped in one by one, soles touching the floor with solid thumps, betraying a mass that belied their appearance. There were three of them, two men and a women, dressed in ordinary Fleet blues with enlisted ranks on the collars; they looked unremarkable, with regulation haircuts and the faces of Normals whose parents had lacked the funds to engineer them in the womb.

  It was all a lie. He could tell that just by a thermal scan. Isotope power packs dotted their bodies like stars, a dead giveaway of bionic augmentation; Kara had the same setup from her days as a DSI cadre during the war, but Deke was fairly certain these guys weren't DSI---because he was.

  All three shared a purposeful, machinelike glare fixed on Deke and Kara, and none seemed inclined to talk; they just fanned out across the room, one of the men moving to block the exit. None of them were visibly armed, for the same reason that neither Deke nor Kara carried a gun: the security scanners at the entrances to the facility. They could have gotten away with it due to their position in the Department of Security and Intelligence, but the scanner might have alerted their targets to their presence.

  But not all weapons were visible.

  Deke's implant talons extended with a thought and he was in motion. One of the two males was too far away, blocking the exit, while the female was closer to Kara, so Deke went after the other man with a lunge that crossed the distance between them in a fraction of a second.

  He was nondescript, his head depilated and his face blank and unemotional, a cipher even as he stepped into Deke's attack. Normally, when Deke slipped into combat mode, time seemed to slip into slow motion; but this guy was fast. When Deke went for a quick slash to the throat with his talons, they were immediately locked up with the byomer claws that had extended from the ends of the man's fingers.

  He was strong too---at least as strong as a DSI cadre, Deke realized as he tried to muscle past the block and couldn't. Deke gave himself over to The Machine, the combat program that ran symbiotically between his headcomp and his brain, and the two of them stepped through a brutal dance of move and counter-move that required his total concentration. He barely registered the crackling snap coming from Kara's implant laser and had no idea whether it had struck home or had any effect; and he could barely keep any attention open to watching for the third of the group in case he decided to jump into the fight.

  Blood flew from their frenzied tangle and Deke wasn't certain whose it was. He barely felt if any of the other man's blows had struck him and was only dimly aware which of his own strikes had landed. Everything was a well-rehearsed pattern, devised by the Commonwealth's best artificial intelligences by studying the hand-to-hand combat arts and sciences of centuries of recorded history and then tested via simulation, Virtual Reality and feedback from actual fighting. It wasn't perfect, but it was a damned site better than most had, even those with boosted reflexes.

  Abruptly, without being fully aware of the steps that had taken him there, Deke's right arm shot into an uppercut and his talons pierced through under his opponent's chin and into his brain. The hairless man slumped back, the life going out behind his eyes, and his finger claws slid slowly out of Deke's left shoulder, trailing a trickle of blood. Deke retracted his talons and let the dying man collapse to the floor, finally gaining the space of a heartbeat to glance around.

  He'd barely turned when he sensed rather than saw the third man, the one who'd been blocking the exit, charging at him. Deke's leg came up in a turning back side kick almost of its own accord, and he had a brief flash of his attacker out of the corner of his eye before his heel struck solidly in the man's gut. He was taller, a meter-nine maybe, and built heavier than his now-dead compatriot, but the two were alike in their bland, hairless anonymity and their implant finger claws: spikes of byomer concealed beneath the skin, extruding and hardening when exposed to the proper electromagnetic charge.

  This guy also had a nasty laser wound in his upper torso, thanks to Kara's implant laser Deke was sure, which was probably why he hadn't joined the fight till now.

  Have to thank her for that when I get the chance, he thought.

  His kick threw the taller man back several meters until he fetched up against the cooling tower for a holographic computer and caught his balance. Deke lunged to follow through just as the tall man pushed away from the liquid nitrogen tower and they met in mid-air halfway between. Deke ignored the dizzying collage of the room that spun through his vision as he and the second man collided and tangled in a whir
lwind of flailing hands and feet. He ignored the distant pinpricks of suppressed pain that tried to force their way past his headcomp's barriers; and he ignored the crashing of equipment and the sound of another laser discharge. Instead, he focused all his attention on the open, nasty burn wound in the man's upper chest.

  The wound wasn't fatal, wasn't debilitating, but it was a weakness, as much psychological as physical; while the combat computer was ingenious, it couldn't think exactly like a human and couldn't follow a hunch. The man he was fighting wouldn't necessarily be hurt more by the wound, but lacking an implant computer as sophisticated as the one in Deke's head, he would be conscious of it and wouldn't be able to help over-guarding it...

  And there it was. Just a slip of the guard up toward the chest when it should have gone down. Deke almost winced as he ripped upward with his talons, gutting the man from groin to sternum. He saw the stalwart, emotionless mask slip from the man's face as his mouth dropped open with shock and his face slackened. He was boosted, but there was just so much damage a man could take and keep fighting. His guard dropped and Deke sliced across his throat, nearly severing his head.

  Deke spluttered, shaking his head and spitting out the blood that had splashed across his face, then turned to see Kara standing over the body of the female, shuddering slightly as she caught her balance. Her armored jacket was scored with a dozen parallel scrapes from the dead woman's finger claws that hadn't been able to penetrate, and blood seeped from the side of her neck and her right leg where no armor had stopped them. The dead woman stared at him with sightless brown eyes, her head facing him while her body was turned the opposite way.

  Deke pulled his eyes away from hers and back to Kara's. "We have to go."

  "Is the penetration complete?" she asked with frightening matter-of-factness, given that she was covered with blood.

  "It's downloading now," he told her. "But this won't be it." He gestured at the three dead augments. "This was just the closest they had."