Sig lowered his eyes in defeat. There was no reasoning with Vladric. And ultimately, he was right: Sig had sworn a vow to the Ceti Brotherhood, as all initiates did. It didn’t matter that it had happened decades ago. The oath was timeless, and it had been witnessed by dozens, many of whom today held positions of great power in return for their loyalty.
‘I vowed,’ he admitted.
‘You did,’ Vladric said, his eyes betraying a hint of anger. ‘But I won’t hold your life to it. You’re a friend. The best man I’ve ever known. The only one I trust to attack the Archangel or kidnap a prince.’
Sig noticed a Ceti gunship approaching the Aria Black. It stopped about two hundred metres off the bow, its blue navigation lights casting a steady pulse into the bridge.
‘You’re in over your head,’ Sig muttered. ‘Again.’
Vladric’s bottom lip broadened into a smile.
‘Always.’
‘Fine,’ Sig said, accepting his fate. ‘How did you learn where the twins will be?’
‘Will the answer really help make up your mind?’ Vladric asked.
‘To commit an act of war against a sovereign state, I consider that information operationally vital.’
‘Alright. It was House Alyxander.’
‘Wonderful,’ Sig muttered. ‘In exchange for—?’
‘A significant financial incentive to do something useful with that information.’
Sig shook his head.
‘Are you saying Lance Alyxander put a bounty on the Obyeran twins?’
‘Does that change your moral calculus?’
Sig ignored the jab.
‘You’d let me take the Black to do this?’
‘The Black is the only ship that can do this,’ Vladric said. ‘My crew and boarding party are already in cryo. You should do the same. To reach the intercept in time, you’re facing a hard burn for two weeks. The autopilot will place the ship in an ice field and then shut down. Life support will wake you up, but you have to maintain emission discipline.’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘One disabled Obyeran Lightspear. You should end up within ten thousand kilometres, but you can’t use active sensors to find her. Passive tracking only. She’ll be powering up slowly, if at all. If she does detect you, odds are she won’t be able to fight. But that isn’t assured.’
‘It never is,’ Sig muttered. ‘What then? Breach and raid?’
Vladric nodded.
‘Your target will be alone, but – Must. Be. Taken. Alive. The marauders know this and have the kit they need to do it quickly. You shouldn’t have to leave the Black. You won’t even have to leave your seat, not unless things go badly. But when the VIP is secure, burn the hell out. The autopilot knows where to go. You’ll find out where when you need to.’
‘What about Obyeran patrols, guardians, sensor buoys …’
‘You should get there before they do.’
‘And if you’re wrong?’
‘Stay hidden. Stay alive. And then re-evaluate.’
Sig looked at the canteen in his hand. He drained the last few drops, then cast it away. It floated to the front of the spherical cabin, partially blocking the view of Bertha.
‘If I do this …’
‘Then you can claim Alyxander’s bounty,’ Vladric said. ‘Or I can release you from your oath, and I’ll never ask anything of you again.’
Sig considered the possibility that he had seen Lethe for the last time. Ceti had other ships that could outrun a Lightspear. But no matter who manned the helm, the Aria Black was always Vladric’s, as was her crew. For now, Sig was her captain so long as an Obyeran twin was within reach. But any deviation from the kidnapping plan would lead to the airlock, one way or the other.
Vladric spoke into his corelink.
‘Victor, go ahead.’
The gunship hovering off the bow began moving closer, passing over the Black’s bow. Sig heard the metallic sound of the mating locks engage.
‘Do you want to hear the attack plans for the Archangel?’ Vladric asked. ‘Or have you made a decision?’
‘Obyeran,’ Sig answered.
‘Then get moving,’ Vladric said, unstrapping his harness and floating out of the seat. He crossed his chest with an arm. ‘Good luck.’
Sig returned the salute as Vladric left the bridge, heading aft towards the dorsal airlock. The Aria Black was his. There had been a time when he would have been thrilled to be seated here, craving the opportunity to hunt people. He used to love holding that power over his victims.
No longer. Sig felt nothing but dread as Vladric’s gunship coasted away, leaving him with a band of frozen murderers and a ship that he sensed didn’t want him aboard.
He brought up the navigation plot. The final destination was more than a billion kilometres away: an ice belt trapped between the orbits of Zeus and Heracles, part of a treacherous and vast expanse that separated the House Worlds from the Inner Rim.
They called that void the Hades Terminus.
14
JAKE
I’m in a bed, naked and spent, after one of the craziest trips of my life.
Winding tendrils of greenish smoke are streaming from my nose, merging with the thick haze of sweat and smacker-stench air overhead. Lying beside me is Lira, a prolific madam with as much wealth as a highborn. She has to be a mutant, or maybe a cyborg, optimised for giving mind-blowing pleasure to anyone, anytime; in essence, a built-to-order, state-of-the-art sexual machine. As far as Jack Tatum is concerned, her legendary reputation as the best lay in Orionis is still intact. When I glance towards her, she still has this devilish, hungry look in her eyes that makes me stir.
Myabe it’s the drugs amping up the wonder factor but there’s no doubt I just took part in a unique experience, and not just because we fucked each other like our lives depended on it. Visually, it was just insane, the way the patterns beneath her skin undulated like waves in a pool, or danced like the flames in a blaze, or roiled and churned like the cloud bands of Zeus.
Lira is on her side, her long, wild red hair splayed all over the pillows like a burst artery, patterns of blue and black slithering out from her sex, winding up her abdomen and curling around her huge breasts like serpents closing in for the kill. I still don’t know how much of the living artwork is real, and how much is just the smacker messing with my head. I think I can watch it for hours, but then my post-coital period of bliss shatters and my mind plummets into the same cesspit I can never escape from.
Because Lira is just a perk, a reward of flesh from Ceti for revealing two undercover Navy agents in the cartel.
The weeks ever since have been hell, a searing, suffocating misery that I had to keep a hard face throughout. Jack has been the recipient of congratulatory back-slapping, drugs, toasts, drugs, bad jokes, liquor, ass-kissing, more drugs, and above all else, acting like he was proud of what he’d done. Jack Tatum is one of Vladric’s stars now, a VIP with real power in the organisation, someone everyone looked up to with envy.
But when I was alone, away from the facade, and sober long enough to analyse my actions, I had to keep telling myself that I had made the right choice. The undercover operators that Jack had exposed were despicable men, playing both sides against each other in a bid to create an empire of their own. Ceti officers run their own business lines on behalf of the cartel, and each has an earnings quota to meet. These double agents were withholding line earnings from Ceti and using Navy field op money to pay down their quota. Then they hired privateers to hit convoys from both institutions, splitting the loot and selling their share wherever they could, sometimes even back to the same people they stole it from.
At first, I didn’t know they were cops. I only suspected they were stealing from Ceti because my own clients fell victim to their scheme. Instead of confronting them directly, I turned Dusty loose on them. Asked him to dig around quietly, work his magic with data forensics and electronic surveillance. He traced their tainted quota money back to the Ori
onis government and proposed the sting which led us to their gunship as it rendezvoused with a Navy frigate.
It was the best gift Vladric Mors ever received. Jack Tatum had served up a pair of trophies which he could use to make an example of what happens to thieves, and to send a very serious fuck you to Orionis. I was already a big producer in the organisation. Now everyone knew who I was: a rising star in the Ceti cartel that the Big Man himself had taken notice of. No other cop, living or dead, had ever infiltrated so deep before.
I want to believe those turncoats were justified casualties, expendable foot soldiers who died on a covert battlefield. They rolled the dice and lost. My role in their demise is morally indistinguishable from a general who butchers soldiers to win a war.
But it wasn’t enough to just give up their names and all the evidence Dusty found.
Something fragile is blocking the memory of what else I did. The drugs are keeping it that way. And that’s how it needs to stay, because the sacrifice of their lives, will have been for nothing unless I can pass on what I’ve learned since then: that the cartel is just months from launching what Vladric described as the killing blow to the Navy and the beginning of a Ceti renaissance. They’re going after the Archangel while she’s still in dry dock, and, having seen their plans, I know they have a chance, albeit a costly one. That information was critically time-sensitive, but I had no way of delivering it: the bounty on my head made Outer Rim travel prohibitive. For our own safety, Ceti Watch had put me and Dusty up at The Helodon the last two weeks.
To help pass the time, they offered the erotic freak show that is Lira Vicerip. One look at her and already I’m starting to hate myself again.
‘I hope you’re not leaving,’ she says.
My clothes are on the floor. I sit up and swing my legs over the side. Then I reach for another hit of smacker, taking a deep, dangerous puff. The drug is a potent entactogenic that’s supposed to produce a relaxing, intimate tingle. Instead, it feels like my brain was just lit on fire. “I’ve taken far too much.
‘Lucky me,’ I mutter, wincing at the torment.
‘Hero sex is so urgent,’ she muses. ‘You know that’s what they’re calling you, right? A hero?’
Her finger starts swirling around my back. It sends revulsive chills down my spine, and I flinch away.
Which just encourages her to be more aggressive about touching me.
‘Aw, what’s wrong?’ she asks, as I feel both of her hands grab my shoulders in some faux massage. ‘You’re not scared, are you?’
‘You figured me out,’ I grumble, standing abruptly. As I bend to reach my trousers, a cold set of fingers grabs my testicles. I practically levitate off the floor.
‘Jesus Christ!’
Lira laughs hoarsely. Her neck and cheeks are a psychedelic kaleidoscope.
‘You’re so interesting,’ she purrs, emerald-green eyes staring inquisitively at me. ‘C’mon, cheer up. There’s something I’ve been dying to ask you …’
‘What?’ I mumble, stepping into my trousers.
‘Is it true you put a blowtorch to the balls of those cops?’ she asks.
I freeze.
Then I inhale more smacker, just to take the edge off an urge to do something violent.
‘It is true, isn’t it?’ She laughs. ‘What was it like?’
I turn around. She’s leaning back on her elbows, her ridiculous breasts erupting in some collage of blue and green that swirls down to her pale, curvy hips.
‘You should keep thoughts like that to yourself,’ I manage. My head feels like it’s going to explode.
‘Everyone is talking about it,’ she insists, knees wagging back and forth. ‘You and Vladric Mors, roasting nuts at a campfire. That’s … fascinating.’
In a single puff, I take the smacker blunt down to the hilt while stepping into my greaves. I need to leave.
‘Don’t you give me the silent treatment!’ she coos. ‘Why can’t you answer the question?’
I’m halfway to the door when he shows up.
‘Answer the lady,’ the Minotaur says. I turn around, and there the man-beast is, circling the bed. ‘No need to be rude.’
Lira laughs.
‘That’s right!’ she agreed. ‘C’mon, Jack, I want to know!’
My head is rocked by a twitch, and a shiver makes its way from the base of my spine all the way to my shoulders.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ Lira asks, pouty face and all.
The Minotaur smiles as he sits next to her and puts his dark red hand onto her thigh.
‘Get out of my head,’ I whisper.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘I like being in there.’
‘The smell was intoxicating,’ the Minotaur says, gaping nostrils flaring as he strokes her up and down. ‘The screams…like music.…’
I mouth the words, but can’t hear myself say them.
‘… I’ve never felt closer to God in my whole life.’
Lira is staring at me, mouth half open, eyes narrowed. I can’t tell if she’s horrified or turned on. All I know is that I feel very, very sick, and she sees it.
‘Do I see remorse in those eyes?’ she asks.
The Minotaur is playing with her hair when my corelink rings. It’s Dusty, my last connection to sanity.
‘Jack, they just gave us clearance to leave,’ he says. ‘I’m already on board.’
The bile is creeping up, but I force it back down.
‘Remorse? Oh yes,’ I say, as the man-beast runs a black tongue along the side of her face. ‘I regret I didn’t make them suffer longer.’
Lira says something, but the Minotaur is laughing so loudly I don’t hear what it was.
And then, apparently, I left.
I don’t remember boarding the Breakaway.
But when I woke up, Dusty was navigating the ship into the axis hub hangar of Brotherhood – at least a ten-hour burn from Helodon. At just under 80 metres in length, the Breakaway met the size restrictions for the ‘sheltered’ hangar; anything over a hundred metres was relegated to the dockyards several kilometres away. The hangar rotated with the hub; any ship entering had to initiate a roll to match the station’s angular momentum. It extended through all three tori, providing access points to the spokes connecting to the main station.
Dusty requested a slip nearest to Camden Yards, the epicentre of Brotherhood’s infamous black market. It was crammed into a populous district of the station, where a good portion of Ceti’s working class lived. The Navy ranked this metropolis among the most dangerous places to live in all Orionis, right up there with Zeus mining trawlers. But for Jack Tatum, this hellhole was home.
I watch as Dusty masterfully pilots the ship into latch position, something most would-be captains rely on autopilot for. No one but him touches the Breakaway, the love of his life.
As I pull on my greaves, he speaks up in his timid, nasally voice.
‘Jack?’ he says, as an airlock boom reaches for the port midline hatch.
‘Yeah?’
He looks uncomfortable, and I’m already annoyed. I remember I have urgent business in Camden and just want to get on with it.
‘We have to talk about your … habit,’ he says.
‘Oh yeah?’ I ask, stomping out into the main corridor.
‘You’re not right, man,’ Dusty calls out behind me. ‘You need help.’
I reach the hatch and catch my reflection in the portal. Staring back at me are bloodshot, sunken eyes resting on dark blue bags and a gaunt face overgrown with veins and stubble. Just the way a dead man is supposed to look.
‘Do you see my mother around here?’ I ask, throwing the hatch open. ‘Me neither.’
I storm into the airlock and he follows, pulling along the satchel of crap he always brings to test merchandise for defects or bugs.
‘You don’t remember how you got here, do you?’ he says.
‘I just stepped off the Breakaway, so there’s a hint,’ I grumble, marching past the secu
rity checkpoint. But all the junk in Dusty’s bag sets off the alarms, waking the guard and forcing an inspection. Ceti looks the other way for almost everything that comes through here except explosives and firearms. Not that anything handheld could penetrate the station bulkheads, but they like to ensure their own security personnel are the only ones carrying them.
By the time Dusty is finished gathering all his stuff, the crowd in front of us has already boarded the spoke tram.
I try to change the topic as another tram pulls up.
‘What do you need from here again?’ I ask, rubbing my head. It feels like something is trying to hatch from it.
‘Gyroscopes for the gun turrets and a few other things,’ he says, rummaging through his satchel like a woman with her purse. ‘For the record, you walked right past the Helodon governor, blew him off when he tried to shake your hand, and started mumbling something about a Minotaur,’ he added. ‘Then you puked in front of Vladric’s officers at the hangar and passed out. I brought you aboard myself, injected you with detox plus a little something to make sure you didn’t wake ’til we got here.’
‘I don’t see how sleep would be an issue—’
‘I did it to keep you from hurting yourself or the Breakaway during the trip,’ he tells me. ‘You’ve been acting really crazy lately.’
‘Nice going … Mom,’ I say, rolling my eyes. The tram begins moving, inserting itself into the spokes of Brotherhood’s Bravo torus.
‘You just haven’t been the same since—’
‘Dusty, shut the fuck up,’ I growl. He’s right, of course. Unfortunately there’s nothing anyone can do to help me. I feel bad intimidating him, but I’m too tired to put up with this right now.
‘You need help, Jack,’ he repeats.
‘Do I?’
‘All I’m saying is don’t make them regret promoting you.’
Who, the Navy or Ceti? I ask myself with a grin. Dusty looks horrified at my expression, which makes me smile a little wider.
When the tram doors open, the rank filth of Camden Yards assaults me. Deafening noise greets my ears as countless vendors haggle with customers and as bidders shout over one another at auctions. Some desperate types accost us as we exit the tram; one sickly vagrant is holding up mouldy fruit, another is a mutant offering used microfusion packs. I shoulder past them and a trio of prostitutes showing me their goods. Personalised advertisements violate my reality, asking if I’d like to get high or browse a selection of cybernetic limbs. I consider visiting the merchants who paid for these ads to break their skulls with a hammer.
The Tabit Genesis Page 14
