Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  Then he gave himself over to The Machine.

  Reggie Nakamura had talked to the others on the team about what happened to them when they slipped into combat mode. All their stories had been different. Some had complete control and total recall of what they did. Some described being a passenger along for the ride, only realizing what they'd done microseconds after they'd done it. For Reggie, it was more impersonal and withdrawn from reality, as if he were watching it happen to someone else. It was good in some ways: it made the pain further away, made the killing more impersonal. But the lack of control was a bit addictive and it frightened him in ways he would rather not have thought about.

  No choice now. At least I don't have to whine to a military psychotherapist afterward.

  There were twelve of them. He didn't try to separate out the sensory inputs his headcomp used to make that determination, but by the time he saw the first one emerge from the high grass, he knew their general location and which way they were heading. They were moving half their number up the middle into the clearing while the others circled around to envelope the bunker.

  They think we're going to hold up in there and try to call for help, then panic when our transmissions won't penetrate the jamming. They don't know who they're dealing with.

  The thought brought him up short, mentally if not physically; his body continued moving forward, guided by The Machine. They didn't seem to know who they were dealing with, did they?

  He filed that away and settled in for The Show. That's what he'd come to call it during the war, a show put on with his body as the puppet and The Machine as the hand up his ass. The shadowed clearing blurred on either side of him as he sprinted straight for the first attacker doing nearly forty klicks an hour. The man was taller than him, broader and more muscular too, and looked even bigger stuffed into padded black body armor, face concealed beneath a featureless helmet visor.

  He could see Reggie coming, that was pretty clear when he swung around the muzzle of his carbine and opened fire. Laser pulses cut a swathe where Reggie had been a heartbeat earlier, but he had already moved twice since then. He barely felt the packed earth under the soles of his utility boots as he sprinted on his toes alone, almost gliding across the ground with a grace he had prayed for when he'd studied dancing and martial arts as a child.

  I could be on the Commonwealth Ballet now...except they'd disqualify me for the augments. Fucking snobs.

  He was surprised that he hadn't already shot the guy, but then he realized that his headcomp had analyzed the armor and decided a pistol shot wasn't a sure kill at anything but point blank range. Another shot that barely missed, a dazzling blast of energy that ionized the air like a lightning bolt and actually burned away the outer layer of his jacket sleeve as he twisted sideways. Then he was less than a meter away and touching the trigger.

  He didn't look at the severed head that rolled away, or the headless body collapsing to the ground in a tangle of limbs; he just grabbed the pulse carbine, nestled it into the nook of his left shoulder and kept running. He pivoted to the right, cutting straight down the line of their advance and making sure they couldn't shoot him in the back without firing at their own people. He darted back and forth constantly though, because you never knew how highly the enemy valued each others' lives.

  High grass----well, it looked like grass to him, even though it had its own, unique evolutionary track---whipped at his legs and threatened his footing as he skirted the clearing, covering the thirty meters to the next enemy in two seconds. This one was waiting for him, turned his way though still stepping into the combat stance; but he hesitated for just a moment before he fired, worried about hitting his comrades.

  Reggie had no such compunction. His appropriated carbine barked, its anti-tamper safeguards easily defeated by the penetration programs in his headcomp, and two rounds of pressure-pulsed laser fire chopped through the armored man's visor and sent the helmet exploding off his head in an explosion of superheated cerebral fluid. He collapsed but Reggie grabbed his carbine from his nerveless grasp before he could fall, yanking it free of its retractable sling with a sharp jerk. Reggie was past him before the body could vanish into the tall grass, his pistol reholstered and a carbine tucked under each arm.

  They did open fire on him then. They knew he was there and the sensors built into their armor told them where he was---or, more accurately, where he had been a microsecond before. His headcomp sent him into an evasion course meant to defy the expectations of targeting algorithms, cutting sharply at random angles but still riding the edge of the clearing. Blasts of laser fire burned through the grass around him, their plasma sheaths sizzling with ionized energy and setting the whole field aflame with a dozen catch-points.

  Reggie's heart was beating like a trip hammer in his chest, his breath chuffing with the regularity of a piston engine and his feet churning the soft soil in a particulate spray around him. His vision was a kaleidoscope of shifting angles and blurred surroundings punctuated by the painfully bright dazzle of ionized atmosphere; and booming cracks echoed in his head as the lasers created their own artificial thunder to go along with the manufactured lightning.

  Then he was around the other side of the bunker and skidding to a stop. The munitions storage building was buried under a mound of dirt, old enough that grass and bushes were growing thick on it, and rising above him like a natural hill several meters high. He sucked in a deep breath and headed straight up that hill, the toes of his boot digging into the soft dirt to gain purchase. The mound was steep, but he was on top of it in two seconds and then he was across it and leaping from the other side.

  Whatever the hit squad had been expecting, that hadn't been it. They hadn't gone rogue and headed after him willy-nilly; they were arrayed in a skilled and disciplined assault formation and were already spreading out to fill in the gaps created by the two men he'd killed. And from above, they were lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery.

  He chose the center of the group again, firing both carbines simultaneously at two different targets in a way that very few people who could still call themselves human could manage. The two of them---he thought by the height and build that one was a woman---went down with multiple shots through the chest and neck, but the others scattered before he could target them and then he was hitting on the soles of his feet, somersaulting forward to absorb the impact.

  Everything was so eerily silent, he reflected, running back into the high grass. The thunderclaps of the laser blasts still echoed across the clearing, but there were no screams, no shouting, no human sounds at all. The warnings and commands, grunts and exclamations of the enemy were trapped inside soundproofed helmets; as for him, he was trapped inside The Machine and would make no noise.

  He ran to the left this time, hoping he could force them out of their organized formation; and this time it worked. They abandoned their disciplined rank and chased after him; the loss of four of their number in less than a minute had either spooked them or pissed them off. Either one would work. He didn't see it---he was already past the entrance to the bunker---but he heard the discharge of a pulse pistol, different in audio signature from the more powerful carbines, and coming from inside the shelter. General Murdock had taken a shot and Reggie didn't think the man would miss. That left seven.

  He circled back around his hopper, keeping the aircraft between himself and his pursuers and wincing slightly when he heard a stray round slam into the side of it; it was a long walk back to the city. Reggie skidded to a halt and waited for less than a second, for that moment when they realized that someone was firing at them from inside the bunker and let it distract them away from him. Then he charged into them, both carbines firing on full auto, emptying their magazines in one long burst. It was bad for the lasing rods; but what the hell, he wasn't paying for them.

  Incandescent spears of light left afterimages in his vision in the gathering dark, connecting him and three of the hit squad in a web of coruscating plasma for just a microsecond. Their
armor absorbed some of it, but not nearly enough; all three fell heavily with what he was sure were mortal wounds. Reggie dropped the empty carbines and didn't bother pulling his pistol; instead, he extended his talons and plowed directly into the last four standing.

  Laser pulses seared the air around him as they fired wildly in outright panic, and he could feel the intense heat on his exposed skin, could smell his own hair curling away in puffs of smoke as it burned. Then he felt his talons catch in thick armor as they pierced up under an armpit and he pushed away with the sole of his boot into the man's ribs. Blood sprayed in an arc from the severed artery, an arc that followed his spin away from the dying man and ended in the neck of the woman three meters away. He didn't quite take her head off, but he did sever her spine and take out the rest of her throat in front of it.

  The last two probably would have run if he'd let them. He didn't. He stepped inside the guard of the woman closest to him and ripped the carbine out of her hands, feeling the blistering heat of the cooling vanes as he swung it like a club into the side of her right knee. Her legs went out from under her and she slammed to the dirt flat on her back, her right leg bent sideways and flopping nerveless. She thrashed around in pain and panic, clawing at her belt for the pistol holstered there; he broke her right arm with a stamping flash of his heel and reversed the carbine, putting the muzzle against the visor of her helmet. She froze, only shuddering slightly from the pain but not resisting.

  The last one was already prone only meters away, a smoldering hole through his neck. General Murdock stood only two meters from him, the emitter of his pulse pistol glowing white. The look on his face was somehow both impassive and yet almost...giddy somehow. Reggie found it disturbing.

  "Here's your live one, General," he said, nodding towards the last living member of the hit squad. "I'd like to ask her a couple things myself," he mused coldly. "Like who the hell they are and how they knew to follow me."

  "You were asking a lot of the wrong sort of questions, Reginald," Murdock said matter-of-factly, moving over to take the carbine from him and keeping it trained on the prisoner. "It didn't go unnoticed." He cocked an eyebrow at the younger man. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that attractive officer you were visiting passed it along to her superiors. From there, it was only a matter of time until the wrong person heard of it."

  "Billy wouldn't do that to me!" he blurted, flushing.

  "I'm sure her partner thinks the same thing," Murdock replied dryly. "Get going, Reginald." He nodded at the would-be assassin at his feet. "I've got this."

  Reggie looked at him dubiously for a few seconds, then sighed out a deep breath and turned to head back to his hopper.

  "General," he called back as he walked. "I need you to do something for me."

  "What's that?" Murdock asked, not taking his eyes off his prisoner.

  He slapped the palm plate on the side of the hopper and glanced back as he waited for the clamshell cockpit to raise up.

  "Stop fucking calling me Reginald."

  Chapter Twelve

  Kanesh sparkled in the light of Achernar like a faceted jewel, spinning sedately in comfortable solitude at the center of the system's asteroid belt. The light of the blue-white star winked off solar collectors, radiating fins, antennae and docking ports at either pole of the vaguely oval asteroid; and twinkled faintly from the lesser lights of approaching tugs bringing in chunks of water ice mined from elsewhere in the belt.

  "So," Cal muttered, staring at the image in the cockpit viewscreen as the cutter cruised toward the station, "this place is like a sort of cut-rate Belial?"

  Kanesh didn't look like much, by comparison. Belial, out in the Centauri belt, was much larger and more polished and finished in appearance. He'd been there twice: once during their confrontation with the Corporate Council and the DSI and again as Cutter had conned them into helping him beat former DSI chief Gregorian to the Northwest Passage. Though he'd had to fight both times, he'd still been impressed by the corporate-resort atmosphere of the place. Kanesh looked more like what it was: a remote outpost deep in the Pirate Worlds, in an otherwise useless star system.

  "Fuck no," Deke said, a somber warning in his tone that made Cal glance over at him in surprise. "Don't go into this thinking this place is anything like Belial, bud." He shook his head. "Belial is a luxury entertainment resort that people use for making shady deals; Kanesh is a place built for shady deals that just happens to have a few bars and hotels."

  Cal grunted a curt acknowledgement, keeping his face neutral. He almost left it at that, but then thought, I don't have enough friends that I can afford to lose one.

  "You know, that's about as much as you've said to me the last four days," he ventured. "Something bothering you?"

  "You mean something besides nearly getting nuked?" Deke asked, an acerbic bite to his words not allayed at all by any sign of humor in his dark eyes. "Or maybe getting frozen out of half the investigation by the General?"

  Caleb couldn't argue with that. No one had been happy after that report came in from Reggie via a secure node on the system's Instell ComSat. Kara had thrown her office chair right through the door and Holly had been just as angry, particularly when they'd worked out who was going where and she'd wound up stuck on Tahn-Skyyiah with Kara.

  It had all come down to practicalities though. Kara had to stay on Tahn-Skyyiah just to establish the DSI's turf in the investigation; if she left, Fleet Intelligence would step right back in and God knew who they would really be working for. Deke had to go to the Achernar system, to the Kanesh base to check out the leads Rachel and Pete had uncovered back on Canaan. No one else had the contacts in the Pirate Worlds that might---might---allow them to find out what they needed without someone shooting them in the back. He couldn't go alone, but Holly had no experience at all dealing with the criminal underclass, and Cal did. That left Holly to back up Kara, which she wasn't happy about; and it had left one other avenue of investigation open, this one discovered by Kel Savage's netdivers.

  "We managed to data-mine some more intell from the records you brought us," Savage had said in the video file he'd transmitted. He'd been leaning back in his chair casually while Vontez Slaughter stood beside the table with hands clasped behind his back, studiously not staring at the video pickup. "They connect your boy Kah-Rint to a local merchants' association in the Tahni neighborhoods of Toliara out at Anansi in the Eshu system." Anansi was one of the largest of the new settlements, established after the Transition Drive had been discovered and not connected via a wormhole jumpgate like the older colonies of Eden or Aphrodite. It still had a population of well over three million, with about a tenth of those being Tahni.

  "With what went on there at Tahn-Skyyiah," Vontez Slaughter had taken up the report, "we figure he might try to foment some trouble at colonies with a large Tahni minority. If the General wants us to head off a large scale conflict, we think we need to get ahead of this. And we're a lot closer to Anansi than you are."

  "We're going to go in with our cargo ship," Savage had broken in, waving a hand. "Disguise a couple of platoons of our special ops troops as civvie security guards and drop down a couple shuttle's worth of fabricators or some such, try negotiating a deal." He'd shrugged nonchalantly. "Should give us a cover while we check things out."

  Then Rachel had stepped back into the picture. She'd delivered her own report earlier, of course, along with personal greetings, but Cal remembered he had brightened when he saw her again, one positive feeling after the utter disaster in Tahn-Khandranda. That hadn't lasted long.

  "Pete and I are going with them," she'd said without preamble and he'd felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "I audited the Tahni language so I could talk to Trint, and he taught me a lot of the cultural ins and outs." She'd shrugged, the corner of her mouth twitching. "Besides, I'm not sitting around here while you take all the risks, and neither is Pete."

  Savage had smiled thinly at that.

  "We'll leave another message in the drop
as soon as we can."

  And that had been that except for the swearing and kicking furniture. They'd probably left for Anansi before he'd even gotten the message and by the time he heard from them again, they'd be out of there: there was no way to get an Instell message through from a system without a jumpgate except sending it on a ship through to a system that had one.

  He had hoped, for a moment after hearing Rachel's findings from her investigation on Canaan, that Kara might be able to give them some information on Kah-Rint, since she had been Cutter's partner during the war and Cutter had met the Tahni during the battle for Demeter. Unfortunately, Kara had been on another assignment during the Demeter campaign and knew nothing. According to her, Robert Chang had never mentioned the Tahni.

  "Anyway," Deke went on, pushing the reminiscence out of his thoughts, "I'm not entirely sure what sort of reception I'm going to get here. Last time I was in the Worlds, Kara sort of let it slip right out of her big mouth that she was DSI and I was working with her."

  "That's good to know," Cal said with a snort, watching the station grow larger on the screens as the cutter circled around to its polar docking port. "Do you think they'll let us dock or just shoot us down while they have the chance, then?"

  "Our money's as welcome as anyone else's here," Deke assured him, the hint of a grin on his face making him seem more like the old Deke. "They won't kill us till they have it."

  With that cheerful note, Deke guided the cutter past the watchful gaze of floating defense barges, the muzzles of their massive coilguns yawning as they turned on gimbals to follow. Just one slip of a finger, Cal thought, and a tungsten slug a meter long would core their ship like an apple.

  Cal saw Deke seem to visibly relax and a quick systems check with his headcomp showed that the station's docking systems had taken control of the cutter's navigation, putting an interlock on the propulsion controls that wouldn't allow him to activate the main drives without warning them. Theoretically anyway...this was a DSI ship.