Challenge of Steel

by James David Victor

  So, it turned out that the only person on the bridge who was feeling a thrill of anticipation and excitement was, in fact, the commander-general himself.

  Maybe I should get my pineal gland lasered, he thought a little irritably, but of course knew he wouldn’t. A man like Cread lived by his instincts, and the slight nervousness he felt right now was the edge he needed to keep him sharp.

  And to keep him merciless.

  Around Hectamon 7 was a wide variety of freighters and transporters, blocky ships displaying the various colors, flags, and insignia of Golden Throne worlds. But there were stranger ships here too, like the pointed, iridescent ‘butterfly’ ships of the Ilythians, with the solid, sweeping solar sails flaring behind them. As well as the Secari ships like giant doughnuts, encrusted with nodules.

  And last of all came the ships of the Mondrauk people. There were only two, and each one looked as fearsome as the people themselves. Two forward arms swept out around their bulky, box-like center. They always looked as though they were about to charge, the commander-general thought.

  But he and the rest of the Golden Throne fleet would be ready when they did. He smiled slightly.

  “Sir?” The operative beside him made a small bobbing motion with her head. For once, there appeared to be the smallest of frowns on her features.

  “Yes? What is it, my dear?” Cread said. Every time he looked at her, he positively beamed with pride. She had already killed half a dozen or so of the most difficult-to-kill people in all the sentient galaxy for him.

  Anything to expand the Reach of the Throne.

  “There is one other complication,” she said, and for a moment, he saw her hang her head in apparent shame. She looked like a scolded child who had been caught stealing biscuits.

  Didn’t the Architrex say something about this? he thought. That a lab-grown human didn’t evolve the same emotional traits as a socialized one?

  Cread shook his head at his own worries. No matter. She had always performed her job perfectly, and he had no reason to complain to the Gene Seers.

  “Report,” Cread said authoritatively, and at once, the lab-grown assassin snapped straighter. She had been raised to take orders, after all, and Cread could see just how much security that they gave her.

  “I neutralized the spread of the clone bodies,” the woman nodded, “as you know. But it appears that one of the Hectamon 7 MPB officers had already been dispatched to work the Seaview Apartments one.”

  She tapped one of the line of nodes on her arm and drew from it a holo-report, which unfurled into a hazy-neon, almost transparent field of information.

  With a man’s face on it.

  “Lt. Anders V’Mhol’Corsigon, Hecta System MPB. Over fifteen years in the bureau. A widower to a wife and child, killed in a criminal revenge-attack some years ago,” Cread’s spy stated, placing the holo-report in the air before them for the commander-general to look at.

  “My office has already sent the orders for closure on all Hecta unsolved cases.” Cread shrugged. “He should be off catching pickpockets and drunken crab-men by now…”

  “I took the liberty of studying his psychological intelligence file, just to make sure,” the operative continued.

  That’s my girl, Cread thought. Always thorough. If he told her ‘no loose ends,’ then that was precisely what she would do. She probably would have hunted down and killed the three rich dilettantes who found the envoy, if he hadn’t ordered her to return to the Reaver.

  “Will he be a problem?” the commander-general asked.

  “His psychological assessments show a stubbornness trait that is rarely seen in non-Mondrauks,” she indicated. “And he has shown some degree of aptitude in his job…”

  Reaching forward, she tapped a few of the codes inside Anders’s file, and there played out some footage of a chase that Anders Corsigon had gone through during his time.

  The scene saw Anders racing across the rooftops of New Gate City after a burglar. The burglar had jump-assisted braces, allowing him to leap with ease over the span of the buildings. Anders had none. As Commander-General Cread watched, the man took a giant leap from the edge of one of the buildings to land on the roof of a passing shuttle, riding it until he could leap to the next nearest building, and then get a clear shot straight into the legs of the burglar.

  “Impressive.” Cread nodded. “Are you sure this man has no Marine experience?”

  “His files said he signed up—volunteered—for military academy at age sixteen, and his initial selection was for the Marines from age sixteen to nineteen, but then changed his selection to the military police instead,” she said, highlighting a section of the personnel file.

  “Ah, he fell in love.” Cread nodded, although he was the sort of man who had never experienced the emotion himself. “I hear it makes you do crazy things. It suggests that he didn’t want his wife, and later child, I see, to receive his remains one day in a jar.”

  “Sir,” the non-committal response came, as always. She, too, had never had the opportunity to fall in love.

  “A shame, because I can see he would have made a great Marine.” Cread waved at the report and it went zinging back to the node on her suit.

  “And a shame that he won’t be of service to the Golden Throne anymore,” Cread said fatally.

  She straightened at that, seeming all too eager. “Find and eliminate, sir?”

  Commander-General Cread nodded. Now, with that last complication out of the way, he could get on with the next phase of the Eternal Empress’s most perfect plan.

  7

  Gene Seer Facility 793

  Why did a strange Ilythian girl give me a gene key?

  Who is doing all of these killings?

  “And why do half of the bodies look like giant man-babies?!” Anders had more unanswered questions than he liked. He didn’t like feeling out of control. Maybe the bureau psychologists had been right. It had to do with losing his family…

  As Anders sat in the scrubby bushes, in the dark, he remembered what the psychologists had said. That in many cases, a devastating loss like the one he had suffered was enough to break a man.

  But in some cases, it reinforced traits that they already had. There was a dark part of him, Anders had been told, that was now always expecting the worst. But instead of breaking under that pressure, his personality had calcified around one idea: everything would always get worse. Unless he could stop it.

  And so, a man like Lt. Anders liked control. He liked perseverance. There was a hound-dog part of him that wouldn’t tire and wouldn’t stop until he had achieved his aims.

  And his current aim was to break into what was probably one of the most secure facilities on Hectamon 7.

  At least he wasn’t alone.

  “I’ve analyzed the grounds, and unless you have some way of performing an orbital jump, the only way in is through the main gates,” Moriarty informed him.

  The main gates were an arch of white stone, edged with sensors and a glittering blue field. The building itself was made of the same white stone, underlit by floodlights and fashioned into a tall, cucumber-looking tower. Anders had always hated the sight of it, although for many in New Gate City he knew, it was the promise of a new future.

  The Gene Seers themselves were a strange, white-robed bunch who all looked vaguely similar to most humans. They all had that rosy flush of youth that came from their gene-altering therapies, but hardly any of them had gone for the more outlandish hair and eye colors or lurid cheetah, tiger, or zebra skin prints that some did.

  Gene therapy was customary these days. It was, after all, one of the three pillars of the Golden Throne, according to common belief.

  The military, the engineers, and the seers, Anders listed off what he had learned way back in pre-school. All three of which upheld the might of the Golden Throne and made it what it was today: the human empire that stretched across more than half of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  The military academy produced the Marin
es and the police and fought the empress’s wars. The engineering school produced the ansibles, the nodes, and the field-generators that allowed the Reach of the Throne to extend. Last of all, the Gene Seers gave humanity the edge over the other races.

  We can effectively re-program nearly every part of the human animal, Anders thought. He felt a little unsettled by that fact. It was seeing the child that he had frozen with Cassandra years before, he decided. He had watched it swell in her womb, he had been there at the natural birth, and he had watched his little Sibbi grow.

  But she didn’t grow up, did she? And now she never will… The angry thought clutched at his chest.

  “Stop.” The man gritted his teeth and forced the thought down.

  No, the Gene Seers provided their technologies to the people of the Golden Throne for a price. They could eradicate birth defects and most diseases, as well as fix most injuries, but it was only ever a deviation from the standard human norm. They couldn’t make a human into a Secari, for example, but they might be able to make them as tough as one.

  “Main gate then.” Anders looked at the white walls and the archway.

  “Bio-sensors in place. Presumably code-linked to Gene Seer personnel,” Moriarty said.

  “But they have to let civilians in, don’t they?” the lieutenant said. The regular people of New Gate City drove up here all the time, all day every day, in order to get their scheduled treatments.

  Right now, in fact, he could see the bright lights of a bulbous hover-shuttle making its way up the long road that wound around the trees and meadows of the Gene Seer estate. It was full night, but that didn’t stop people from paying for urgent treatment.

  “They must have appointments,” Moriarty suggested.

  “Well then, all I have to do is convince them to swap.” Anders found himself grinning as he loped through the undergrowth toward a bend in the road, secluded by trees.

  “Was that, technically, a legal MPB operation?” Moriarty wondered in the lieutenant’s ear.

  “Commandeering a vehicle in the active pursuit of a criminal,” Anders quoted as he sat behind the wheel of the hover-shuttle. He had been lucky that the craft had only had one person in it, a rather nervy middle-aged man with thinning hair who had apparently wanted a ‘refresher’ before an evening enjoying the delights of the New Gate Southside.

  Anders was glad that he had Moriarty with him so he could scan the shuttle’s registration and owner, before he had jumped out into the middle of the road with his laser pistol drawn.

  “We have yet to ascertain the identity of the criminal,” Moriarty pointed out.

  “One step at a time, Moriarty!” Anders said. The man’s clothes were too long on him, but Anders hoped that would add to the drama as he pulled up to the gate and flashed the lights.

  “Welcome! Scanning vehicle registration. Please present your data-node to the camera,” said a serene voice from the arched gate itself.

  This was the part that Anders was most worried about. He didn’t want to gouge out any implanted chips or nodes from the guy, but he had taken the liberty of relieving him of his data-pad, which would also carry a record of his unique identifier.

  “Here you go.” He presented the pad to the camera, and there was a thin veil of light that swept over it before a dull chime.

  “Authorization granted! Greetings, Denis P’Hal,” the automated voice said as the blue security field clicked off.

  It really is WAY too easy to break into this place, Anders thought as he drove the hover-shuttle inside and across the manicured lawn to settle in the parking bays.

  Gene Seer Facility 793 was busy, Anders was happy to see. Inside the iron-paned glass doors that swept aside for him, he found himself in a large courtyard under a crystal-glass roof. The floor was marble, and in the center was a fountain with a statue of a gender-nonspecific human, reaching out to the sky.

  “They are so arrogant,” Anders groaned to himself as he slid behind the latest crowd of people that waited to be admitted deeper into the building.

  “What are you getting done?” he overheard some of the rich and good of New Gate City saying to each other as they shuffled forward. Drone-waiters buzzed and hummed around them, offering crystal-glasses of perfectly clear water.

  “Oh, just shaving a few years off,” came one reply that Anders overheard, while others said things like, “Oh, fixing a genetic predisposition for diabetes.”

  “A torn hamstring…”

  “Changing up my hair for the weekend…”

  And all manners of other minor and major procedures. Anders smiled and nodded, pretending to be a part of one group or another as he made his way to the back of the room. He wasn’t the sort of man to wait for anything.

  “Most of the patients seem to be admitted directly through the main avenue,” Moriarty said in his ear. The main avenue was straight ahead, a wide concourse with singles or groups of Golden Throne citizens being led by the white-robed Gene Seers.

  They look like a cult, Anders thought. It was something he’d always thought, but now that he saw them up close and personal, it only reinforced his opinion.

  For a moment, the military policeman studied the comings and goings, his highly trained senses picking up on the rhythms of the place. The Gene Seers would arrive via a silver-steel lift, and then they would go to the reception desk to receive their holo-files, before calling out to whichever client was next.

  The lift. Anders slowly made his way across the foyer just as he had before, waiting for the lift to open and disgorge the latest gaggle of white robes.

  Now! And then he made his move, slipping into the empty lift as it closed behind them.

  Bing!

  “Archives, basement floor 7, just above the generator facility,” Moriarty indicated.

  “I can read, you know.” Anders rolled his eyes as he looked at the schematic of the facility on the wall. It showed all the levels stacked on top of each other in blue line diagrams, and a name would light up as Anders ‘flipped’ through them.

  “Down we go then,” Anders said, tapping the archives button. “Moriarty, just out of curiosity… Do you have any hacking abilities?”

  “That would be illegal, sir,” Moriarty replied.

  “Damn.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that I can’t…persuade a computer to allow access,” Moriarty added. It was at times like this that Anders could swear that the simulated intelligence was developing sentience.

  “Do it,” Anders said.

  “I’ll need a hardline interface,” Moriarty said, just as there was another bing from overhead as the lift arrived—

  Revealing a tall, bipedal security drone with a tubular head that was a nest of cameras.

  Drekk!

  8

  The Archives

  The first bolt of red and orange laser fire would have removed Anders’s head from his shoulders were it not for his reflexes.

  Unfortunately, there was nowhere for Anders’s reflexes to take him in the small box of the lift other than out!

  He ducked and threw himself at the bipedal drone blocking the door. The creature was made of steel and white-form plastic. There was no way that even the athletic military policeman could ever match it for strength, but he wasn’t trying to wrestle the thing, just get past it.

  Pain erupted in Anders’s shoulder. It was like trying to tackle an iron girder, but the thing was pushed back, and now he was under its outstretched arm. This standard model of throne security drone had lasers mounted on their forearms, meaning that they could fight and manipulate tools, as well as fire.

  The struggling pair were pushed back a few paces into a wider foyer, before what looked like stacks and stacks of crystal-wire sheets, with solid supports between each one. It was dark and cool down here, the optimum temperature for the crystal-wire’s nano-processors to operate in.

  Suddenly, Anders felt another surge of pain just above his kidneys, and an audible crack as one of his lowest ribs broke, a
s the security drone pounded on him.

  Anders might be a determined wolf of a man, but he was not beyond screaming. “Argggh!”

  “Your data-node has just registered that your eleventh and twelfth floating ribs are fractured, but not separated,” Moriarty informed him.

  I think I get the picture! Anders could have shouted, were not all the air wheezing from his lungs in a painful hiss. He only had a fraction of a second to angle his back and push off from the security drone. The next blow, instead of turning his ribs into pulverized chips, scraped along the inside of his belly, making him feel like he had been kicked by an Arcturian mule-dog.

  “Dammit!” Anders shouted as he stumbled backward, snatching the pistol from his holster and letting off a blast straight into the thing’s white-form chest.

  It rebounded against the wall, smoke piling from the blackened hole, but came back for him.

  “Die, damn you!” This time, Anders shot the thing in the head, causing a small flare of exploding camera parts and wires. That seemed to do the trick, as the thing suddenly grew very weak in the knees and flopped to the floor.

  “What was that about?” Anders collapsed against the opposite side of the wall, one hand holding his side.

  “You know, if you had that medical node implanted like a lot of MPB officers, you would be able to release pain-controlling enzymes,” Moriarty stated.

  “Not helpful,” Anders wheezed and huffed. “Why on earth did that thing try to kill me?”

  “Perhaps because you are an intruder without clearance,” the S.I. suggested.

  “You’re being facetious, Moriarty,” Anders groaned.

  “I am unable to compute that,” Moriarty said in what Anders was sure was a snigger.

  It was the sound of scraping metal that alerted Anders to the second security drone, stalking out of the crystal stacks, head jerking to focus on him as it raised its arm.