Challenge of Steel

by James David Victor

  “Military Police!” Anders shouted, raising his laser pistol. “I am Lieutenant Corsigon, here in the pursuit of a criminal—”

  The thing fired.

  “Drekk!” Anders threw himself to one side, firing as he did so. The first shot was wild, hitting the stacks by the thing’s shoulder. The next struck it on the shoulder, spinning it back into the narrow avenue.

  Urgh. Anders hit the other side of the metal foyer and tried to cushion his side with his elbow as much as he could, but it still sent daggers of pain through his fractured ribs.

  The drone was already raising to fire on him again, then falling down as it attempted to push itself up from an arm that now hung limp at its side.

  “I said Military Police! Stay down. That’s an order!” Anders was having similar difficulties as he tried to slide up the wall while his side felt like it was on fire.

  But the drone wouldn’t. It opted to raise its singular useable arm once again, the lasers popping from its forearm with smooth efficiency.

  Suddenly, there was an explosion of metal parts as the thing’s head erupted into flame.

  “Huh?” For a moment, Anders looked at his own pistol, whose muzzle was still glowing with the heat transfer of the previous shot, but it wasn’t wisping with burnt particles and ozone. I didn’t fire that, he thought, a little stunned.

  “It was me, human,” said a voice that at once reminded Anders of sighing mountain winds and the fierce shriek of wild hawks. The lieutenant looked up to see that walking toward him down the avenue of crystal stacks was a woman. No, the woman.

  She was dressed in dark umbral clothing—tanned russets, deep ochres, and earthy oranges. The perfect camouflage gear, Anders thought. He knew from his time at the military academy that a lot of people thought that black was the perfect subterfuge fashion. It really wasn’t, he knew. Black was a total absence of color, and most places where you needed to sneak around were low-lit areas with colors. Black stood out in the night. It didn’t blend in.

  As well as being perfectly dressed for the occasion in form-fitting, multiple-section gear, the woman also stood out by having the lightest tawny skin. Long white hair was secured tight in braids to her head. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes were large, and her ears were pointed.

  She was an Ilythian, and Ander would bet his life savings—which weren’t a lot, to be fair—on the fact that she was his Ilythian.

  “Are you the one who gave me the code?” Anders said as she stalked toward him. She held one of the Ilythian versions of a laser pistol—a small, swept-back device that looked almost like a cross between a frozen insect and a conch shell. It was clearly what she had used to destroy the security drone in front of him.

  “What do you think?” The Ilythian released one hand from her weapon, instead drawing out a small bone-yellow tube. “Here.” She threw it to him, where he managed to catch it.

  “What is it?” Anders said. He saw that it was a vial with a tiny cork stopper on the end and delicate whorls inscribed around it.

  “For the pain. It works on humans,” the Ilythian muttered, turning to take up a practiced stance as she aimed her weapon around them.

  “Moriarty?” Anders whispered.

  Without asking, his simulated intelligence knew just what to do. “Conducting chemical analysis…” the virtual identity said. “Complete. Amino acids, complex-chain enzymes, unique proteins.”

  “But will it kill me?” Anders whispered, earning a snort of disgust from the Ilythian woman above him.

  “Nothing I can detect indicates an adverse effect, sir,” Moriarty said.

  Well, in that case—

  Anders unstopped the vial and threw back the contents, which tasted slightly like fruit juice. The effect took a moment to kick in, but he gradually felt an uncomfortable warmth spreading along his side and stomach, slowly replacing the sharp daggers of pain. It was still odd—like sitting a little too close to a heater for too long—but it wasn’t agony, and Anders realized he could move.

  “You’re not healed, human,” the Ilythian woman muttered in her breathy voice. “So, don’t act like you are.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that.” Anders coughed as he straightened up. “The gene key. What is it? What do you know of these murders? Why did the security drone open fire?”

  Anders knew that as soon as he had revealed himself, the drones, and all citizens and guests of the Golden Throne, would have to obey by golden laws. Or should have done.

  “And why,” the lieutenant continued, “if you are able to break into here, did you give me the key?”

  “Come with me,” the Ilythian woman said in her maddeningly Ilythian, ‘mysterious’ way.

  This is just like them, Anders thought. Ever since the throne made first contact with them by entering the distant Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way, they had remained aloof.

  Anders had seen the archival footage of the encounter of course, every Golden Throne kid had. The Throne FTL scout had appeared in the opposite end of the galaxy, and almost instantly had been met by a wall of their fabulously iridescent ‘butterfly’ ships. What had followed was a tense standoff and a cold sort of peace for the next hundred years between their two species.

  Strangely, the Ilythians had never showed any particular designs to expand their empire or kingdom or whatever it was they had on their distant home world of Ilya. But even as the Golden Throne had pushed further and further across the Milky Way, there were occasions that if they ventured too far into the Centaurus Arm, they would be met by the same wall of hundreds of Butterfly ships.

  The peace held, but it was clear that the Ilythians would not become another client-territory like the Secari. There was trade and even selected movement of humans and Ilythians from one territory to another, but there was never a general sign of friendliness between them.

  So what is this one doing here, helping me out? Anders thought as he followed her through the stacks.

  The alien woman was, like all of her kind, striking and beautiful in a statuesque kind of way. There was something almost cat-like in the way that she moved—careful, graceful, and exact. Her sculpted boots seemed to make no sound compared to Ander’s more hulking, metal-shod service boots.

  Anders looked at the stacks of the crystal-wire glass around them. It looked like lots and lots of panes of almost-transparent material, threaded with silvery-blue and gold wires. Each panel was separated from the one above and below it by aluminum rods, and connector cables daisy-chained up and down their edges.

  This was the heart of Golden Throne technology. Anders remembered the three pillars. He didn’t know when it had been invented, but it was a new way to ‘grow’ nano-architecture at an almost atomic level. It allowed for the vast increase in processing power and complex computations that led to the development of cybernetic node interfaces, FTL drives, particle fields…and gene manipulation.

  For a moment of almost-horror, Anders wondered if this Ilythian was here to steal throne secrets, which meant his duty would be to plant a laser shot right in her back, right now.

  But she just saved my life, Anders thought. And she gave me the gene key. She had wanted him to be here, with her.

  “Here.” The Ilythian paused at one of the stacks that was seemingly exactly the same as any other. When Anders looked, he saw that the very edges of the plates held serial numbers. This one read 430101.

  “Okaaay…” Anders looked from it to her, still a little wary.

  “We Ilythians do not have the interface to read what is on this,” the woman said, sounding for all the world as if she had a right to know what was on it. She was looking at the small buds of Anders’s metal nodes that he had transferred to his stolen suit.

  “And you think I’m going to give it to you?” Anders shook his head in wonder. “You do realize that I am an officer of the Golden Throne, don’t you?”

  “Which is why you are the perfect person to get this information out,” the woman countered. “The m
urders that you are investigating are not just a Golden Throne matter. They are of importance to the entire fate of the galaxy.”

  “So you say,” Anders started to argue with her, just as the lights flushed orange and klaxons went off.

  “Full lockdown in process, sir,” Moriarty said. “The facility’s security computer is in red-alert.”

  “Lady, whoever you are, I cannot give you this information. This is a throne matter…” Anders was starting to sweat. What had they taught him about diplomatic incidents? “If you come with me, I’ll be able to offer you diplomatic immunity until we can sort this out.”

  “Fool!” the Ilythian hissed angrily. “It is a wonder that you humans ever managed to get off your world at all! The security drones paid no attention to your rank or status. The throne will stop at nothing to halt this information getting out!”

  That at least made sense to the lieutenant. All unsolved cases closed, he remembered. Even Captain B’Halam had thought that there was something fishy going on, which was why he had given him the order-not-order to look into it.

  “The Ilythian Council received a coded transmission,” the Ilythian woman said tersely. It clearly cost her a lot to even reveal this much.

  “From a traitor?” Anders said flatly as the klaxons roared around them.

  “Sir? The security computer has dispatched two more teams of drones to this location,” Moriarty pinged him. They didn’t have time for this.

  “We believe it to be a throne whistleblower,” the Ilythian said instead. “The transmission came to us through the most shielded channel on the ansible, reserved only for the most extreme of messages. It said that it was of utmost importance that we be at a certain set of coordinates at a certain time, and that the fate of the entire galaxy depended on it. They were the exact coordinates for Room 14 of Seaview Apartments, Hectamon 7, Hecta System. I was sent to investigate, and look…” She pulled off her long-fingered ochre gloves and slapped one of her hands to clasp the side of Anders’s face, and the man felt a shock of cold wash over him. And then—

  It was like he was looking through her eyes, and an Ilythian’s eyes were strange. She padded down the street, with every detail picked out in incredible, high-definition clarity. The metals and the standing plants—even the sky and the ocean seen through the gaps between the buildings—had their normal colors but were overlaid by more.

  The Ilythians can see into the ultra and infra spectrums! Anders realized as he saw the pulsing glows emanating from people’s nodes as she passed. The Ilythians could see at least some forms of field energy that human eyes were unable to.

  He followed her as she ghosted into Seaview Apartments, managing to stay hidden within the confines of a heavy storm coat as she padded up the service stairs.

  She arrived at the same floor that Anders remembered, just in time to hear a door bang, and for a large shape to emerge from the victim’s pod-room.

  The Ilythian had pulled back, wary and cautious.

  It was a human, a very large, heavyset human with a deep cloak. His size made him almost monstrous, with head of brown hair peppered with shots of white, and a beard to match on a square face.

  “Oh crap,” Anders whispered in this strange memory-state. He recognized the man in the moment before he pulled his hood down over his features. Almost anyone in New Gate City would recognize the human face that was a mass of ugly white scars, with the one cybernetic patch over his left eye.

  It was one of the Red Judges, a man named Uskol Hecatia, who was destined to take part in this year’s Challenge.

  “It is done,” the Red Judge muttered into the node on his wrist, seconds before he tapped it again for a field to wash over his face. He now didn’t look like Uskol Hecatia anymore, he looked like a regular, beardless human with fleshy features. A businessman down on his luck, perhaps.

  The memory vanished just as soon as it had appeared, leaving Anders reeling and gasping like a fish. He didn’t know that the Ilythians could transfer memories.

  “Now you understand,” the Ilythian woman said. “I cannot go after this man, but you can. We need to know why he killed that person, and what information that person had.”

  “And what kind of person it was…” Anders muttered.

  The klaxons were still blaring all around them, and Anders was certain that he heard the hum of elevator doors somewhere—

  “Okay.” Anders tapped on his communication node for it to petal open like a tiny flower, and he jammed the connector cable from plate 430101 into it.

  “Accessing data…” Moriarty informed him.

  There was a distant sound of clanking, getting louder.

  “Quickly!” Anders hissed as the Ilythian took a few steps to cover him, taking aim.

  “Download successful,” the simulated intelligence chimed, just as the first security drones appeared at the end of the aisle.

  “That way!” The Ilythian gestured with one hand at the far end of the aisle as she fired her weapon with the other. The bolt of purple and green energy hit the first drone in the chest, sending it crashing into the one behind. “Go!” She was already half-turning to run as she fired behind them.

  Anders and the alien dodged through the stacks as crystal-wire plates were shot apart behind them. The drones weren’t giving up, and there appeared to be at least four uninjured ones chasing them.

  “How are we going to get out?” Anders growled. He had a hover-shuttle, but it was parked smack in the middle of the parking bay at the front entrance. The Gene Seers would probably have already surrounded it.

  “Leave that to me,” the Ilythian said as they ducked down one aisle, and she threw a handful of pine cone-looking discs behind her. There was an almighty flash and the sound of breaking crystal, followed by sparks fizzing. With a slow and ordered pattern, each of the stacks nearby started to click off, losing power.

  “Electromagnetic disruptors,” the alien said proudly. It was almost totally dark, but Anders felt a long-fingered, soft, cool hand seize his as the unnaturally-sighted Ilythian led him to a wall, where a cover was already free from a vent.

  “The cooling systems,” Anders recognized as he heaved himself in, the Ilythian following.

  “I have a cloaked shuttle on the grounds,” the woman said behind him.

  All we need to do now is to read what was on that key, Anders thought, still a little dazed at everything that was happening to him. And survive, he added.

  The military policeman wondered if what he had just done was treason.

  9

  Facility 793 Control Room

  “They got away,” said the Gene Seer facility manager to the woman beside him, who was making him nervous.

  “They did,” said the black-garbed woman with the red hair, who had arrived during the security alert, her security ID bypassing all of the facility’s most comprehensive measures.

  Standing side by side, the two humans couldn’t look more different. She wore a tight-fitting encounter suit and he wore the long white robes of the Gene Seers, although his had more gold embroidery at the edges, lapels, and around the hood than the other seers. The manager also had the same perfect skin and bone structure as all of his kind, and flaxen hair of a man in the first flush of his thirties. His nodes were directly implanted into the backs of his hands, which he tapped now as he checked the security footage.

  “What branch of the throne did you say you worked for again?” the Gene Seer said.

  “I didn’t,” said the woman in black, not looking at him at all, but instead at the footage that the facility’s cameras had caught.

  There were two feeds. One was the complete capture of every bit of footage showing Lieutenant Corsigon, while the other was of the small bits of interaction between him and the other intruder.

  “An Ilythian,” she said, sounding just a little bit interested. Perplexed, even. Cread will want to know of that, she mused to herself.

  The Gene Seer manager was used to being regarded as the biggest
fish in the pond that was his facility. Here on Hectamon 7, at least. The other throne citizens here regarded him almost as a spiritual figure, able to wield the powers of life and death, health and recovery for any and all.

  But the manager knew only too well precisely what his real position was, which was as a very small cog in a very, very powerful machine.

  But he had met the Architrex himself, and in person too. Didn’t that count for something?

  “Can I… Can I ask who you report to?” asked the manager.

  “You can ask.” The operative frowned, for once turning to regard him with her shockingly green eyes.

  “True cyan 1, no sub-type,” the manager murmured to himself. It was a rare color. What most people didn’t know was that eyes were one of the most difficult bits to keep to their programming.

  The woman blinked slowly.

  Oh. The shock of realization spread through the facility manager. It was clear in every part of the woman that he was talking to. From her bone structure to her skin complexion—the part that wasn’t blotchy with some sort of irritant, that was. All of it spoke of some very expensive gene therapy.

  In fact… As the facility manager looked at her, he realized that he wasn’t just looking at someone who had been through many courses of gene therapy, or someone wealthy enough to make changes to their base physiognomy.

  You could never deviate far from the human norm—that was the fundamental constant of the Gene Seers’ work. You could add, subtract, alter, and enhance, but the base genetic code of any person always had a shape all its own. That shape would always result in effects later down the line. A well-built person could become thinner, but they would always a have a certain stockiness to their frame. An aging person could always reduce their years, but their treatment would have to be repeated every so often, and with more frequency to stop the body’s attempts to revert back to its natural age.

  But what I am looking at here is someone with NO base physiognomy!