Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  "Not that I am aware of. Most of his contacts were less...respectable."

  "Did he have any place he would do face-to-face business?" Pete asked. "Someplace he felt at home?"

  "I don't know that he felt at home anywhere, Mr. Mitchell," Arjan said, and the imaginary face pouted sadly in Rachel's head. "But as for a place he would do business...I think I remember that he traveled extensively in the Pirate Worlds. The place I heard mentioned more than once was Kanesh. It's out in the Achernar belt, but that's about all I know about it."

  "Why didn't he go back to Tahn-Skyyiah after the war, or one of their colonies?" Rachel wondered. "What do you mean about him not feeling at home anywhere?"

  "As I said," the cyborg's voice held a shrug, "he helped the DSI during one of their missions to end the Tahni occupation. If I know this, you can be sure that other Tahni know this. I did not fight in the war, but from what I know, the Tahni are not a forgiving people."

  "When was the last time you know Kah-Rint was here on Canaan?"

  "That was five years ago now. Just after Cutter left this place with you, Constable Chen. Kah-Rint went into several of Cutter's hidden laboratories and accessed his records, then stripped them of some of the equipment and left the planet on a hired freighter. As far as I know, he has not been back since."

  Rachel felt sour dissatisfaction in her gut and bit back a curse. None of this had been worth the trip to Canaan and it all seemed like a make-work excuse for Cal to keep her and Pete away from Tahn-Skyyiah.

  "What about Cutter?" she asked, grasping for anything that could be useful. "Did he have any contacts in the military?"

  "Of course," Arjan said, his tone sounding as if she'd asked something patently obvious. "He was DSI cadre; someone like that doesn't just cut all ties, even if he wants to."

  Rachel thought about Cal's relationship with General Murdock and had to nod at that.

  "So who did he have the most dealings with?" she wondered. "Was there anyone he talked to on a regular basis?"

  "There was someone," Arjan confirmed, after pausing in thought for the space of a breath. "They spoke frequently, I think...and via video in a private, shielded room, not just text or audio. They seemed close, but Cutter didn't speak about him to any of us."

  "Did you ever hear his name?" Rachel persisted, an itchy feeling at the back of her mind that this was important.

  "He always took the calls in private. The only reason I know they were from someone in the military at all was the location signature I saw when I got curious and dug around in the call logs; they came from Inferno and there's nothing else there but military." She was about to hiss out a disappointed sigh when the voice synthesizer spoke again, as if he'd been waiting for that reaction. "I did once overhear Cutter refer to someone he called 'Red,' to which I could connect no other of his known associates, and in a context that I grew to believe this 'Red' was the person he was contacting on Inferno."

  "Red, huh?" Pete grunted. "Well, that's something. Probably all we're going to get."

  "Thank for your help," she told Arjan, pushing up from her seat. She saw Pete and Jason rising beside her, a look of relief on Jason's face. He didn't like being here at all, she realized suddenly.

  "Tell me something, Mrs. Lowenstein-Mitchell," Arjan said, rising from his support frame with a smooth hum of servos and a creak of weight coming off the metal of the chair. "A bit of quid pro quo if you will. Cutter was as close to family as I have had in well over a decade. I would like to know what happened to him."

  Rachel looked at Pete and he shrugged, a helpless look in his eyes.

  "Cutter..." She trailed off, shook her head and started again. "Cutter left us out there. He decided he couldn't be around Normals anymore, so he took a few of his people and went as far away as he could get."

  It was even the truth. Not the whole truth, of course.

  "I hope he finds the peace he's seeking," Arjan said and she imagined that plastic, genetically engineered face she'd conjured smiling beatifically.

  "Yeah," Rachel agreed, without a trace of irony. "I hope we all do."

  Chapter Eleven

  Reggie Nakamura stood naked in the darkened streets of Tahn-Khandranda and watched Marines in powered armor stomp past him with a sledgehammer beat of tungsten on aggregate street. Tahni corpses littered those streets, their crimson blood turned black in the deep shadows, their bodies torn apart by lasers or fragments from grenades. Living Tahni ran far ahead, trying to outpace the Commonwealth troops; but the skies were filled with drones and assault shuttles, and those they couldn't escape.

  Behind the Marines, cargo trucks converted to prisoner transport vans crawled along, stopping periodically as follow-up squads of Fleet Security arrested those who'd surrendered and stuffed them into locked boxes. The view shifted abruptly, dizzyingly, to a lit doorway; behind a mesh screen door, a young Tahni female stood watching, eyes wide under her barely perceptible brow ridges.

  A light rain started to fall, pattering against corrugated awnings that hung over doorways, but Reggie felt nothing of its warmth. He didn't feel the pavement under his bare feet, nor did he smell the blood and burnt flesh. Instead, he felt the smooth tile of the bedroom floor and the refreshingly cool kiss of air conditioning and he smelled the pungent sweat of the female beside him, her bare shoulder brushing against his.

  "This is from Fleet Intelligence drones," the woman said quietly, tracing a line down Reggie's arm with her fingertips. Her shoulder-length blond hair was twisted into a braid and her skin was pale and freckled, her genetics refreshingly unmodified. "It's from two days after the attacks, when they started enforcing the curfews and running sweeps through the neighborhoods where the terrorists had been recruited. As you can tell, things didn't go easy."

  "How the fuck did the NewsNets get hold of the footage?" he wanted to know. He shook his head, feeling disgust more at the unprofessionalism of the whole thing than the violence. He'd seen a hell of a lot worse.

  "God knows," the woman said with a sigh. She rested her head on his shoulder and he slipped an arm around her waist. "Everyone denies it but the damage is done now. The Senate is throwing a shit-fit, the Alien Relations Institute is filing an injunction with the High Court and the press is running this nonstop. But the worst part is the effect it's having on colonies with Tahni populations. Riots, street fights, vandalism..."

  "Projection off," Reggie waved a hand and the streets of Tahn-Khandranda faded like mist, revealing the comfortable but plain details of his rented suite at the Guest Officer's Quarters by the harsh, too-close light of 82 Eridani that leaked through the blinds.

  He turned to the blond woman, taking her in his arms and staring dark eyed into her wide, cerulean gaze.

  "Billy," he said seriously, "who's running point on this? Who's making the call on the response? Was this," he waved a hand to indicate the footage they'd just experienced, "a knee-jerk, reflexive thing by the CO of the Thaddeus Moore or did it come from higher?"

  Commander Wilhelmina Forrester pushed back slightly from his bare chest, her blue eyes narrowing in suspicion.

  "Why do you need to know," she asked him, "and more importantly, why should I tell you?"

  "I need to know," he told her in an even, reasonable tone, "because my business is executive protection, and I need to be able to predict what sort of threats my people are going to be facing. If we're taking a hard line against the Tahni, we're looking at a spike in terror attacks and assassination attempts and I need to know that in order to prepare."

  Then he smirked slightly, an expression that he knew wasn't his most attractive but he didn't particularly care. "As for why you should tell me...maybe you can consider it an apology for lying to me about the fact that you're still married."

  She winced, the resistance going out of her shoulders. "You knew about that?"

  "Please," he drawled, rolling his eyes. "Remember the crowd I roll with, sweetheart."

  "All right," she sighed. "The response is policy,
as far as I know. It comes directly from Fleet Admiral Sato's office." She shrugged. "If the President feels enough backlash from the Senate, it could change, I guess."

  He nodded slowly, pulling her against him gently, her cheek warm against his. "Thanks. Unfortunately, that meshes pretty well with the less official scuttlebutt I've been hearing from everyone else I talked to since I got here."

  "So that's the real reason you're on Inferno?" she asked, her breath hot against his ear. "Not to see me?"

  He covered her mouth with his, crushing her against him. When he pulled away she gasped breathlessly, face flushed.

  "I am always here to see you, Billy," he assured her. He scooped her easily off her feet and carried her back towards the bed, kissing her again.

  Something tickled at his brain, the familiar notification by his headcomp that he had a message coming through on his implanted neurolink. He followed the signal back to its source, an automatic notification that someone had left a text-only message for him, encoded with a cipher he hadn't used since the war, in the recesses of a personals message board set up as a dead-drop years ago.

  He entered a code he'd created nearly two decades ago, a code that couldn't be automated or used by anyone else, that could only be inputted from his headcomp. He let the request process and let his headcomp decode the message while he devoted his attention to Billy Forrester, both to keep from letting on to her that anything significant was happening and because honestly, he really did like her, even if she had lied to him.

  Anyway, her partner was twenty light years away and she wasn't the jealous type...

  Then he saw the text of the message displayed in his vision and he actually paused in his ministrations.

  Reginald, it read, this is Murdock. Meet me in the munitions bunker at the old training range at Mount Diyu, 1800 hours.

  It was dated today. The General was here? On Inferno?

  "What is it, Reggie?" Billy asked him, sensing that something was wrong.

  He looked down at her, her pale skin beaded with perspiration and flushed red from exertion, and smiled. "Sorry, sweetheart," he said, turning his attention back to her. "Got a message about work. Thankfully," he went on, his lips going to the junction of her neck and shoulder, "it's nothing that can't wait."

  Mount Diyu wasn't much, as mountains went. Weathered and rounded, its slopes were thickly green with the local foliage until about the thousand-meter mark, where they turned brown and bare. Only a couple hundred kilometers from the regimented order of Tartarus, the wilderness tangle around Mount Diyu was a harsh contrast, with fractals of cleared land burned into it from decades earlier, when it had been a live-fire training range for the Fleet Marines...and others.

  Reggie hummed a tune from twenty years ago and watched the trees get closer as he took the hopper down in a gentle spiral over an oval clearing where a fusion-form concrete blockhouse still stood in solitary memorial to the old training grounds.

  "And this is the place..." he sang quietly, replacing the song's original words with ones he'd made up twenty years ago, "...where I kicked Roger West's ass in squad-level tactics..." He raised his voice so he could hear himself over the belly fans as they roared in resistance to gravity. "...so many, many, many years ago..."

  The hopper touched down with a slight lurch as the landing gear settled into the uneven ground, washed out years ago by the annual monsoon rains. Reggie frowned as he hung slightly sideways in his flight harness, but a slide of his finger across a control surface extended the port stern landing gear a few centimeters and the little craft rose to level. The canopy rose and a flux of comfortably warm, comparatively dry air filled the cockpit; it was a welcome relief from the sweltering humidity down at lower elevations.

  The ground was yielding and damp under his utility boots, the scent of the jungle a tangy perfume in his nostrils. He breathed it in deeply, savoring even the hint of death buried under the teeming life.

  "You always did like it out here." The voice didn't startle Reggie because he'd already detected the man's heartbeat and breathing coming up behind him from a sheltered overhang of native flora.

  "Reminds me of home, General," Reggie said casually, arms crossed as he turned towards the older man's approach.

  Antonin Murdock was the very definition of unassuming. Not a tall man, nor powerfully built, nor overly handsome, he was only remarkable in how unremarkable he was. His nose and ears seemed to belong to someone ten centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier, and the only prepossessing feature he had was his eyes: they were large and liquid brown and always seemed on the very edge of tears. He'd earned the nickname of "The Bulldog" not for any physical characteristics but because of his unflinching determination. Wearing rumpled field utility fatigues, he seemed out of place to Reggie, who was used to his old commander always sporting a spotless, neatly pressed dress uniform. The handgun holstered at his waist was a new addition as well; and for some reason he had another holstered sidearm hanging from a pistol belt over his shoulder.

  "You're from Mindanao," Murdock nodded. "New Osaka." He paused, eyes glazing over thoughtfully. "I remember visiting once, when I was a junior officer. The national park at Mt. Pulag is beautiful."

  Reggie frowned. "Is something wrong, sir?" He shrugged. "I mean, aside from the obvious that the Tahni are just about in full revolt and we have duplicates running around somewhere in the Commonwealth military?"

  "Many things are wrong, Reginald," Murdock said, the expression on his face reflecting a sort of manic darkness that Reggie didn't ever remember seeing before. "But the reason I called you out here is that I've deduced you're on Inferno to try to determine if the chain of Cutter's duplicates leads up to Admiral Sato's office."

  "I'm pretty sure it does," Reggie told him, feeling a bit of excitement at the chance to share his discoveries. "Just taking as a given that this whole business with the Tahni is connected to whoever's running the duplicates, I think there must be one of them high up in Fleet command."

  "I need you to drop it," Murdock interrupted. "I need all of you to drop it."

  For a second, Reggie thought he was misunderstanding the man. He opened his mouth, closed it again before he finally responded, heat behind his eyes and behind his words.

  "Why?" he demanded, hands open at this sides. "Isn't that what you brought me into this for?"

  "The situation has evolved." Murdock stepped closer to him, putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing gently. Reggie stared at the hand but said nothing. "You've done a fine job, Reginald, but this phase of the investigation is going to require a different set of tactics." The hand came away and Murdock turned, pacing back a couple steps, his hands interlocking behind his back. "Leave the duplicates to me. I want you all to focus your efforts into the situation with the Tahni insurgency."

  "What the hell can we do about it that the military can't?" Reggie wanted to know.

  "The military is being led around by the nose, used as a tool by whoever is running those imposters," Murdock explained, still facing away from Reggie, staring as the sunset painted the clouds purple. "We can't share information with them because we don't want it getting back to the duplicates. Whoever is controlling them wants us back at war with the Tahni."

  "If the duplicates are in Admiral Sato's office," Reggie objected, "what the hell are you going to be able to do about them? Go to the President?"

  "I doubt she'd be receptive to the idea that high ranking military officers have been replaced by genetic duplicates," Murdock replied with a snort, "particularly since I have very little evidence to back that up yet. And worse, they might get wind of it and go scorched-earth." He turned back to Reggie, shaking his head. "No, better that I handle this discreetly for the time being."

  "You're the boss," Reggie said with a shrug. He looked around curiously. "Why the hell did we have to meet all the way out here anyway? And why meet in person at all? You could have left all this in the dead drop."

  "Two reasons, Reginald," Murdock told
him.

  "Please don't call me that," Reggie muttered under his breath, knowing from the experience of two decades that was a losing battle.

  "First," the older man enumerated as if he hadn't heard the request, "I'm coming to distrust the security of our communications network as of late. Out here, I can have the equipment in my hopper," he waved a hand off towards where Reggie assumed he'd landed the vehicle somewhere off to the east, "scan for drones and jam outgoing transmissions."

  Murdock paused, as if he were listening to something. "Secondly, I was fairly certain you'd be followed, and you have been."

  "Wait, what?" Reggie demanded, tensing as his head whipped around, looking for threats. He saw nothing but the tops of trees swaying gently in the warm breeze.

  Murdock pulled the pistol belt off his shoulder and offered it to him. "I set up an early warning system two hundred meters out. They're just inside the perimeter, to the northeast." He motioned uphill from the clearing. "They probably landed their vehicle farther up the mountain around the other side. The good news is, this close to Tartarus and under the watchful eye of security satellites, they won't be able to use any sort of attack aircraft; and armed drones won't make it past my jammers."

  "What's the bad news?" Reggie wanted to know, belting on the holster then yanking the pulse pistol out to check its load.

  "There'll be no one coming to help us," Murdock warned, drawing his own weapon. Then he smiled, and again there was a touch of mania to it that Reggie didn't recall seeing before. "And I'd like you take one alive."

  "Wonderful." Reggie pointed to the old munitions and control bunker, an aggregate blockhouse half-buried under the dirt. "You should shelter in there and look for targets of opportunity. I'll stay mobile."

  "There are at least ten of them, Reginald," the General said, walking towards the partially-buried doorway. "Be efficient."

  Reggie shook his head and ran toward the oncoming threat.

  "Don't fucking call me Reginald," he said under his breath.