Horror ballooned until he could not breathe. He thrashed awake, bruised muscles screaming outrage. He rolled over and sat up shaking, chest heaving as though he’d run the entire night through. He shook his head, tried to work moisture into a sand-filled mouth.
This was a new dream. Something different. Unlike the old nightmares of youth, or the new nightmares of his own impending doom, this left an echo of others. Of events all around him. More importantly, as his breathing slowed and the adrenaline finally stopped pumping, allowing his pulse to return to normal, it stayed with him. Except for the single waking dream, the immediacy of all his nightmares passed quickly, leaving only a fragmented memory dropping away like a forgotten promise.
But this. This was different. A clarity sang within him. A clarity akin to the ambush on the river. A knowledge that seethed with assurance. With pure understanding. Not with an understanding of what it meant or what it might become. But with the knowledge that it did mean something. Something important.
Once more in a daze, as though following an endless, circular set of footsteps, he struggled to his feet in the predawn chill and made his way quickly towards Hisa’s tent. He stopped abruptly, the hurtful words of last night piercing the growing elation. An elation that perhaps he might have found something.
She will forgive. She will! He staggered on, desperate to speak of his vision. To share it before it might evaporate and turn into a lifetime of rationalizations. He was so tired of it all. So desperate to have what every other mystic seemed to have.
Faith.
Without thought he crossed the threshold, slapping the tent flap aside. “Hisa!” He tripped over something on the floor, falling headlong towards the ground, hitting his head against something hard and angular. Stars burst bright and flashing, setting a bell ringing like a ’Mech fist to an armored chest, vibrating through him until he felt his teeth might shatter. Rolling into a sitting position, he felt something lumpy beneath him. A disquiet awoke.
“Hisa.” The timorous voice sickened, but he could find no strength, as another knowing inundated his senses until the room seemed as ethereal as the felines from his dream. Eyes adjusting to the darkness, a slight shifting of light through the partially ajar flap showed a face he did not recognize, and the disquiet wormed into alarm and déjà vu slid across his skin like oily mucus.
“Hisa.” Desperation sent hands scrabbling in the darkness, when a sudden stickiness slicked his hands, eliciting a scream of anguish. After an instant’s hesitation, he continued, until his fingers found recognizable contours and lips already cooling, flaccid and never again to bless him with a smile.
Annihilating anguish overcame him and pushed him into an oblivion he welcomed with open arms.
25
The Café, Sapporo
Kushiro, Ozawa
Prefecture III, The Republic of the Sphere
15 November 3136
And the café bustled around him. Waiters weaving around each other, in and out of tables and patrons, in perfect, choreographed steps, as though in a ballet. They delivered food, picked up empty dinnerware, took orders, filled glasses—the dance always moving.
The patrons ate at a snail’s pace. After all, this was the best café on-planet (according to some, on any number of planets), requiring weeks if not months to secure a reservation. Sometimes even nobility could not use their influence to sway The List. A list the maître d’ would likely keep in a secret pocket in a shirt in which he slept. And he likely would sleep in a separate bed, so he wouldn’t talk in his sleep and let The List slip to his wife. She’d tell someone, after all. He would know that.
And the food? Exquisite. Absolutely fantastic. To die for. Chefs rivaling any within two jumps of Ozawa. Chefs chained to stoves, performing culinary masterpieces night after night. Best of all, you could not slot the food (no, too mundane a word—cuisine, yes, that was the only word that came close) into a single category. It was not ethnic, nor world- or even House-based. Instead, the café presented a unique melding of every type of culinary treat you might find on a half hundred different worlds blended into a matchless dining experience.
And the ambience? Par excellence. The neo–art deco surroundings combined with a strange, almost primal mosaic of multicolored, glazed flagstones, all set off by basalt tables. The visual feast served eyes as starving for high culture as the stomach for cuisine. All taking place on a large patio ten stories above the crowded, obnoxious streets below, providing for an extraordinary outdoor dining experience under the stars.
And rain? Oh, never fear. Only the best for this café. A state-of-the-art ferroglass retractable cover, with a hydrophilic coating that reduced surface tension to smooth the raindrops into a tumultuous fall of liquid, creating a look as though eating underneath a waterfall, complete with sensory and auditory stimulus to accompany the experience.
And so people took their time eating, savoring each morsel as though it were their last. Knowing too many plain, boring dinners would fill the space until their next visit.
And it never hurt to have the patronage of some of the brightest stars on-planet, and one or two of the most powerful nobles (didn’t seem to matter that it was owned by those same individuals). Thus it was not simply the fantastic food (it was), or the stunning ambiance and location (because none rivaled it), but the driving need to be seen at the café . . . that was what made it all work.
And work well.
Tuli smiled, the fork presenting the flash-grilled pink Angol fisherpike to his mouth like a sacred offering. The smile only grew wider as the juicy morsel exploded with a wild assortment of flavors, flashing sparks of hot and even cold along the tongue and quickly bringing a light sheen of delicious sweat to the brow.
But the food, the friendly bustle, the whole experience, was not what brought a satisfied smile to his face. Instead, the holoreader on the table, generating a discreet window for his solitary perusal, brought an almost real joy.
Though half a dozen such devices were scattered across basalt tables throughout the patio, allowing other solo diners to review work proposals, read the latest bestseller, do homework, or whatever else the mundane might fill their days with, he was well aware his work fell outside the norm.
Well outside.
He smiled wider, knowing the next forkful of delicate fish flesh would assuage any concern over a solo diner smiling widely. The beauty of such readers was that the projection required a person to not only be viewing it at a perfectly perpendicular ninety degrees to the reader, but the viewer had to be within a half meter. If either criteria was not met, then it simply appeared as a ghostly white outline, an ethereal frame for whatever the eye might see beyond.
And he was careful. Always careful.
And so, even if someone did happen to catch a glimpse (those too-efficient waiters), all they’d get was an eyeful of a few paragraphs of a novel. Not a bad little bit of trashy romance mixed with Solaris VII intrigue. Never mind the writer had obviously never even set foot on Solaris, much less dodged gangs, police, and the underworld—not to mention that damn Toorima monstrosity that “escaped” into Kobe’s sewer system a few decades back—in Solaris City’s nightlife. And never mind the writer made the bad assumption so many of his kind made day in and day out. After all, assassins (at least the good ones) didn’t hide out in slums, or live out of trashed flophouses, with drug addicts and whores for company. Could that be more obvious?! If one went looking for a rat and found one in a rat hole, bingo. Deader than a yak getting his hands on someone after they insulted his oyuban. But if the rat hid in plain sight? Better yet, if the rat hid amongst the gentry, with their preening and their foppish ways and their beliefs that anyone with the money and the looks and the panache to join their crowd couldn’t possibly be anything but what he seemed to be? Well, then, one would be hard-pressed to find the rat, wouldn’t they?
The smile tweaked a hair higher as he deciphered the code imprinted into the off-the-shelf e-novel, while secretly mocking everyo
ne within eyeshot.
Geisha’s gossamer wings.
The lead-crystal glass from New Rhodes III refracted the candlelight and discreetly placed lamps around the perimeter in an otherworldly mesh of unimagined colors as he raised the chardonnay to his lips. The horrifyingly expensive Harrow’s Sun Winter Harvest 3130 dusted his tongue with a wonderful blend he failed to experience fully as he churned over the unusual nature of the activation phrase.
Not the Geisha, but her wings? For several long minutes, not a facial tic or change of emotion marred Tuli’s composure as he casually reread several pages, as though the experience of the dinner had actually drawn his attention away from the novel, something he knew had happened to four people that evening alone. The waiter came and went, the last of his meal was consumed, and the dessert menu discreetly placed, while he verified what the targets would be. Not the geisha. But those she sought to solicit for aid.
He clucked his tongue lightly, remonstrations against his presuppositions of what the boss wanted. Many man hours lost. Time equaled money in his line of work and wasting time was a graver sin than any he could think of.
He slowly stood to instantly find a waiter at his elbow, obsequious in his desire to make sure Tuli enjoyed his dinner (of course, yes, wonderful as usual, thank you, of course I will come again, my compliments, yada, yada), before leading the way out, as though he might have forgotten the way over the fabulous cuisine. No vulgarity of public payments here—if you were on The List, of course, you usually paid in advance with a carte blanche.
Stepping lightly into the elevator, his mind accompanied the descent in a dive down another vertical shaft, into a lifetime of training and technique, as he began preparations to visit several people who needed special attention. The elevator gave a microbounce as it settled, the doors whisking open, and he moved past a phalanx of security guards and cameras into the dank, musty night that enveloped him in dark arms that welcomed him home.
He consoled himself that his hours of preparation to aid the geisha out of this life could lie fallow for any amount of time before he picked them up again . . . if needed.
26
Fists of Truth, Broadsword-class DropShip
Orbital Insertion, Athenry
Prefecture II, The Republic of the Sphere
25 November 3136
“Where am I?” he managed to get out. Urgency echoed latent in words, budded behind every confused muscle spasm.
“You are on the Fists of Truth, Mystic,” a voice said.
Fists of Truth? His brain felt trapped in a pool of cooling molasses—the congealing mess making it difficult, if not impossible, to think at all, much less in straight lines. The world shook.
DropShip. The world slowly filtered up through the morass, splitting open like a rotted fruit, splattering juices across his perceptions. He shivered as a kaleidoscope of memories and images rocked through him with more force than the vibrating DropShip making interface with the upper atmosphere. And through it all, urgency flowed like quicksilver.
“Mystic, do you need more medication?”
The words hesitantly seeped into off-kilter perceptions. A weighted something pushed against the sticky morass of consciousness, bursting memory bubbles in strobes of pyrotechnic brain activity. Calloused fingers gripped a brow furrowed with deep lines of hurt, confusion, and urgency until the sensations passed. He centered even more, coming up for a breath of fresh air as though he had lain drowning for long days, long weeks.
“No.” He tried shaking his head to emphasize the point, but found it too much effort. “How long?” he croaked, then glanced up and saw a water bulb cinched to the bunk rail. He squirted the cool water—elixir to parched life—down a gullet that seemed to suck the moisture directly into cellular walls before it ever reached the stomach.
“Mystic?”
Perturbed, Kisho blinked rapidly, bringing the small berth into partial focus: white bed, rainy sea gray bulkheads, small medical computer bolted to the side of the bed, several wires and an IV running into different parts of his body. A diminutive medico with black, curly hair, swarthy face, bright, quizzical smile. His tongue scraped across salt-encrusted lips, tingling, and his throat worked convulsively, demanding more liquid. Despite the show of weakness, he shook the bulb and the medico immediately bent to a compartment underneath where he sat, cycled open a small compartment, extracted a new water bulb, and exchanged it for Kisho’s. He downed another magnificent draught of fluid before continuing. “How long have I been out?”
“This time, you mean?”
For a moment the answer confused him, until a rapid series of bursting bubbles buried deep rose to the surface with flashes of the recent past: confusing bouts of desperate mania, interspersed with long periods of comatose inactivity. Demands for immediate transport back to Athenry. Demands carried out by Nova Cat personnel stunned over the death of a mystic and the apparent psychotic episode of another. And behind all of that, visions and memories of visions to send a man stark raving mad. An endless chiaroscuro of the mind, threatening to thrust up from its mundane flatness and flare to a three-dimensional reality that would tear free of its origins, becoming an all-consuming entity, first devouring its creator, then exploding in an orgy of rapid, grotesque growth to devour everything . . . everyone.
Trembling like a leaf in a brisk winter wind of need, waiting for the sudden snap and jerk dislodging him from the reality of the tree branch and sending him to a fluttering, aimless death, as the red leaf at his meeting with Kev Rosse, he spoke in an effort to secure his world. “What is the date?”
“The twenty-fifth.”
Words trembled on lips, afraid for utterance, but knowing no choice. “Of November?”
“Of course, Mystic.”
Kisho need not see the medico’s face to hear the confusion. Despite the show of weakness, a sigh shuddered from lips almost numb with confusion, exasperation, but behind it, still a desperate exigency. How has it come to this? Can I lose myself so completely?
“What did I order?”
“Mystic? Just now?”
“No!” he said, blazing eyes raised to pin the medico to the bulkhead. The other man flinched back as though struck. “On Styx,” Kisho spit out. “What did I order?”
“That you be transported back to Athenry as soon as possible.”
“And?”
“And that if we made contact with any Spirit Cats, to treat them as hostiles.”
The words triggered a sensory overload, sweeping him momentarily from the present to the past and back. Then he slowly leaned back into the angled bunk with a sigh.
I remember now.
Kisho leaned against the bulkhead after the short trek from the medical berth, cool metal a firm reality against uncompromising, betraying flesh. I am not physically wounded and yet I move like a babe! Words from the old man seemed to waft through a seething mental landscape: “Mental wounds can be more debilitating than any physical infirmity, while an alert, perceptive, and willful mind can overcome any bodily ailment.”
Left palm against a metal stanchion, the rumbling of the ramp finishing deployment vibrated through his boot soles, tingling, while the boom of the locking mechanism echoed through the small ’Mech bay on the Broadsword-class DropShip. Kisho’s hand traced the formal uniform of a mystic, stopping to feel the ivory stav of his rank and the small bas-relief of a young life—a life that felt as aged as a continental shelf. The minute images gave way to a mostly barren, smooth plane of off-white.
Potential. The word vibrated with power, yet pierced with pain. Will a bas-relief soon mark that surface showing the death of two mystics? The death of two mystics and once more the failure of the third? Another cross for the road behind.
Hisa!
Despair and loathing warred in equal measure, pulling relentlessly at self. Only a burning need for revenge kept him sane and rooted. Only an understanding of who killed Hisa and Tanaka. Of who likely tried to kill him, but Hisa proved more than the h
ired assassin bargained for. You were always more than anyone bargained for, least of all me.
The pain of loss brimmed until the desire to kill swam through his reddened vision. The only person to understand me. Gone.
A new sound intruded as the hot, sticky, despised air of Athenry reached through the widening bay door to welcome everyone with a moist slap and a sulfuric bouquet. Not now. Grief will come. Not now. With an effort, he straightened, drawing strength from that thought, and from the Mystic clothing not worn in so long.
He began walking down the ramp, and found Tivia already waiting. As expected. But he refused to cave under her shocked, questioning look. Eyes all too perceptive and piercing. Despite questions still brimming, the urgency of vengeance covered any doubts in a mountain of immediacy. Until blood washed his hands, any self-doubt would go unanswered.
He stopped at the end of the ramp, a step above Tivia, and met her stare for stare. The movement of other Nova Cats down and up the ramp made no impression as the two towering wills sought dominance. Finally, too many years of indoctrination forced Tivia to give, bowing and raising a hand to form the circular motion of respect. “Mystic. You have returned from your journey.”
“Aff. And now I require leave and a small force to pursue my vision.”
Eyebrows climbed until they seemed to disappear into her hairline, while doubts lay bare across her face and body posture. “You wish to take a force and depart Athenry? While we have yet to pacify this world? Quineg.”
“Aff, Star Colonel. Aff.” He poured every ounce of will learned across a brutal, inhuman upbringing; his voice was strident and looming with mystic authority. “I know who has slaughtered the mystics and he must pay.”
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