by M. R. Forbes
She did a query on his name against the private Syncsys messaging service the terminal was connected to. Nothing came back. Frag. She held her face with her hand. She was sure he was in the system but under another name. Someone else then. Who? She would have to connect the dots. She considered the crew of the Nova. Best to start near the top.
She entered the ship’s CO, Kyle Ng.
Nothing.
She took out his first name.
A raft of results appeared. She opened the first one, a short message from Gloritant Thraven to Honorant Ng.
She felt a sudden chill. The Commander of the Nova was working for the Nephilim. How many Republic starships did Thraven have under his control?
“Shit.”
She updated her query, adding an Earth Standard timestamp range for the days before and after her arrest. Only four messages. She opened the first of them:
Drop complete. Package confirmed. Prepped for delivery.
That was it. The entire message, sent to Evolent Ruche.
Evolent?
She checked the other messages. All of them were to Ruche. She backed out and updated her search, setting a timestamp for after her arrest.
Ruche had been busy. A few hundred messages appeared. She started at the top, pausing when she got to the one that revealed his identity:
Meeting with Cage as expected. Recommend conversion.
Ruche was Davis, that fragger. She clenched her fist, feeling the Gift respond. She took a few breaths. She had to stay calm. Gant was right. It was coming more easily. Almost too easily.
She scanned the other messages until she found what she was looking for:
Transfer complete. Package en route to Earth for processing.
Earth?
She slumped back. There was no way they could go to Earth.
Then again, maybe they wouldn’t have to.
12
“Queenie,” Benhil said as Abbey emerged from the offices and onto the factory floor. “You have to see this.”
Abbey nodded, glancing at Jequn. The Ophanim was looking at her curiously. It was clear from her expression that she was wondering what Abbey had been doing.
“You’ll forgive me once you do,” Benhil continued.
They made their way across the factory, past a row of bots working at the end of a long conveyor belt, past a huge sorting machine and an equally large smelter. The warehouse was at the far end, hidden beneath a pair of large blast doors that were hanging open enough for any individual smaller than a Trover to squeeze through. They went through, entering the large, open floor of the storage area, where a few smaller hoppers sat, half-loaded with goods to carry up the ravine to incoming merchant ships when they arrived. Most of it was blocks of melted down metal and boxes of parts stripped from the salvage.
“I’m not impressed,” Abbey said, looking over the stash.
Benhil laughed. “I knew you were going to say that. Forget this section. This way.”
He led them deeper into the building. The smell was stronger here. What the hell was it?
He stopped halfway across the floor. “Wait here,” he said. Then he ran to a small terminal base jutting out from the floor near the south end.
“Jequn?” Abbey said.
“I told him to leave it open, but he wanted to surprise you.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not going to ruin his surprise.”
Abbey heard motion above them. She looked up. There was a magnetic rig attached to beams that crossed the warehouse in a grid. The large, round magnet was lowering directly in front of them.
“He wouldn’t have found it without me,” Jequn said. “The smell. I knew I recognized it.”
The magnet continued dropping until it hit the stone floor.
“Back up a few steps,” Benhil shouted.
They did.
The magnet started to rise again. Abbey was surprised to see a large square of the floor rising with it. The awful smell nearly became unbearable as it did.
“What the frag?” Abbey said. “I’m not going to thank you for this.”
She slowed her breathing, the stench making her nauseous.
“It isn’t that bad,” Benhil said, running back to them once the slab was over their heads. “Look.”
Abbey did. There was a ramp leading down beneath the factory.
“Did you go down?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
He started down the ramp. Ambient lighting appeared along the sides of it as he moved, revealing that it continued beyond the edge of the slab.
“Gant, wait here. Holler if anyone shows up.”
“Aye, Queenie.”
Abbey and Jequn followed Benhil down the ramp. The smell only got worse, and she had to cover her nose with her arm to adjust to it.
“What the frag is with the sewer?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” Benhil said.
The ramp sank another twenty meters underground, dropping them out into a second warehouse. A secret warehouse. Everything in it was covered in a layer of dust and soot, except where Benhil and Jequn had already been, their footprints visible in the dirt. They had walked the perimeter of the space, around the many boxes and crates, around the large shapes hidden by larger tarps. A couple of the boxes had been pulled open. One of them had a rifle resting on top, suggesting it was a sample of the contents.
“The smell is coming from back here, Queenie,” Benhil said.
Abbey followed him, towards a darker corner of the room. Jequn produced a light from her suit and turned it on, shining it at the corner.
Abbey’s heart began to pound. “What the frag is that?”
“We called it an Extinctor,” Jequn said. “It’s a Nephilim derivation from a seed of the One.”
Abbey stared at the thing in front of them. It had been dead for a long time, but that didn’t make it less frightening. Eight meters in height, humanoid in shape. Most of the flesh was decomposed, but she could see from the skeleton that its arms and legs were covered in bony spikes. The neck was thick, the skull thicker. Its teeth were long and vicious looking. A gun nearly as large as she was sat on the floor beside it.
“You can see how difficult it would be to kill with a Uin. The bones are dense, making them hard to get through to reach anything vital.”
“What the hell is it doing here?” Abbey said softly, still trying to recover from the sight of it.
“I’m not sure,” Jequn said. “If I had to guess, I would say a prospector found it somewhere in the mines, down where the climate would preserve it, and Sam brought it here to hide it.”
“And killed the prospector for the trouble, I’m sure. You’ve fought these before?”
“Not personally, but they are part of our histories of the Nephilim. I told you, Queenie. There are other monsters under the Gloritant’s control beyond the Goreshin. The seeds Lucifer took, he modified them to make weapons to kill the One and his followers.”
Abbey stared at the massive humanoid. She could see the vague similarities between it and the Trover, both in size and the general shape. “And they have more of these things?”
“I’m certain they do, though I would doubt Thraven would use them against you. They’re strong, but they also wouldn’t fare well against a high powered railgun or a higher level explosive.”
“Score one for our violent nature,” Benhil said.
“That isn’t the true prize,” Jequn said. “These crates are.”
“Weapons?” Abbey said.
Benhil nodded. “Lots of them. That shithead Sam was stockpiling them here, preparing for the war, I guess. There’s even a squadron of Devils over there.”
“How suitable and relatively useless,” Abbey replied. Starfighters from three generations past. They couldn’t outmaneuver Shrikes, and they would look stupid in a dogfight with an Apocalypse fighter.
“I showed them to Gant. He said he might be able to dress them up a little bit, make them a little more effecti
ve with some modification.”
“Do they fly?”
“We’d need Lucif… Imp down here to make that call.”
“What about the other boxes?”
“Take your pick of munitions, Queenie. There’s enough here to outfit a few platoons.”
“Suits?”
“Older models. This cache has been dormant here as long if not longer than Bunyon over there has been rotting the night away.”
“Bunyon?”
“Old Earth legend. Paul Bunyon?”
“I don’t know it.”
“Doesn’t matter. This is a serious haul, and just what we were looking for. And we get to keep our disterium.” He smiled. “So, do you forgive me?”
Abbey smiled back. “Not yet, but you’re off to a good start.”
13
Olus didn’t slow the car until he had reached Bethesda fifteen minutes later. He had managed to somehow keep ahead of Thraven’s forces after exiting the secret evacuation tunnel on the north side of D.C., lifting the vehicle skyward and hitting the same VIP lane he had been riding in before, using its light traffic to take a straight line to the smaller city. He had stopped the ride near a food center, quickly grabbing Omsala’s communicator from the seat beside him and retrieving a multi-tool from a pocket. He turned the device over, using a laser to carefully burn through the joints before adjusting the tool to a small screwdriver, which he used to pull the two screws holding it together. From there, it took only an instant for him to pull the main battery and the smaller emergency battery that would disable the beacon.
When that was done, he exited the car, scanning the air for inbound units. He caught sight of a dark craft in the distance, headed his way. He shook his head, tucking the pieces of the communicator in his pocket and abandoning the car, walking briskly toward the food center.
He had barely made it to the front door when the craft arrived, dropping down beside his stolen car almost at the same time two more units showed up, taking a ground route into the area. Four soldiers emerged from each vehicle, wearing blacksuits and carrying rifles. They went to the car first, sweeping it before turning their attention to the building.
Olus ducked inside.
The center was a standard grocery distribution point, a fully automated system that took orders from the net and assembled them for pickup. A single human worked in the large facility, a greeter for the shoppers who came to retrieve their groceries.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Do you have a car?” he replied.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Do you have a car,” he repeated, looking back out of the building. The soldiers were coming their way.
“Yeah, why?”
“Do you see those assholes out there?”
She looked outside. Her expression turned fearful.
“They’ll say they’re with the FBI or something. They aren’t. They’re hunting me, and I’m not really in the mood to die today, so if you want to stay alive too, I recommend we go to your car and get the frag out of here.”
“What? I don’t even know you.”
“Olus Mann,” he said. “Director of the OSI. Or at least I was up until fifteen minutes ago. You’re wasting time.”
The soldiers were almost to the door. Damn it, he should have just threatened her. He was getting soft in his old age.
“Really, you ought to at least get behind something,” he said, turning to face them. He found his pocket knife. It was all he had left.
They raised their weapons toward him. Their faces were barely visible behind their helmets, but he could almost sense their intentions. He shifted his balance, and then threw himself at the closed door.
It slid open as he approached it, and he dropped and rolled toward the soldiers, drawing fire that was off the mark. He came up between the first two, stabbing one in the hand with the knife, turning and grabbing the gun of the other, pushing it downward as the soldier fired again, the bullets striking the cement at their feet. He used his momentum to carry him into that soldier, rolling across his side with the knife still in hand. He wrapped an arm around his neck and his foot around his leg, dragging him back and down, letting the soldier land on top of him. He ran his arm sideways across his neck, using the knife to cut it, taking hold of the rifle and firing into the second soldier before he could recover.
He threw the soldier off him, bouncing to his feet and closing on the other soldiers, keeping them too close for them to risk shooting. He slammed one in the head with the rifle, a fist from another landing on his gut. He ignored it, stabbing the outstretched hand before bringing his weapon up and firing point-blank into his attacker’s chest.
He kept moving, not letting himself lose the kinetic energy, floating toward another soldier. He waved the knife ahead of him, batting his opponent’s hands aside when they reached out, leaning in and shoving their arm aside, pushing past their guard and shooting the man in the gut. He bounced sideways from that tango, feeling a bullet come way too close as he tossed the rifle at the soldier in front of him. The distraction worked, and he pushed his way into the soldier, shoving his head up and back and creating a space between lightsuit and helmet and stabbing the knife into it. The soldier fell back and he rolled over the top of him, picking up the rifle on his way back to his feet, diving to his right and coming up ahead of the next, shooting him in the helmet, grabbing him and turning him, putting a finger on the trigger of the soldier’s gun and shooting the target approaching him from the rear. He skipped toward the remaining pair, slapping the gun away from one with his, letting it fall as he smacked at his opponent, quick, precise blows that put him off-balance despite his armor. Olus pulled a sidearm from the man’s belt, shoving it in the side of his neck and firing. He turned back toward the remaining soldier, facing off as they both prepared to shoot.
The weapons fired at the same time.
The soldier missed.
Olus didn’t.
He scanned the area. Twelve soldiers in black lay around him, bleeding from the various holes in their bodies. He doubled over, breathing hard, using his knees to balance while he sucked in extra air. He hadn’t needed to work so intensely in a long time. Hell, even Hell had been a lighter workout. Bureaucracy had made him soft, but in a way, it was good to be back in action.
Once a killer, always a killer. That was what the Republic had trained him to be.
He didn’t have time to waste. He leaned down over the nearest soldier, grabbing another sidearm and quickly rifling through tightpacks until he found some ID. He synced it to his card, and then ran back to the center, pushing through the doors.
The woman was still there, having ducked behind her desk when the shooting started. He leaned over it, looking down at her.
“Car?” he said.
She reached into her purse and pulled out the key card. “It’s out back,” she said, tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, taking it. “If anyone comes to question you, tell them they should have taken care of me when they had the chance.”
14
Olus didn’t keep the woman’s car for long, taking it north to Baltimore and dumping it there. It was further away from OSI HQ than he had wanted to go, but the response from Thraven’s units had forced him to seek a more dense environment to hide in, and the city fit the bill.
He had read once that ancient Baltimore had been a nice but troubled place, the diversity of its populations both in racial and social standing causing tension across the board. That had started to change with the discovery of disterium and the invention of the first FTL drives, when settlers from the planet began making their way off-world to seek something else somewhere else. Thanks to its closeness to D.C., the city had become an extension of the nation’s capital, and now it was a valuable right hand, built up and proud as a city of tall glass buildings and a number of businesses that operated locally and across the Republic. Its spaceport was one of the largest and busiest in the world
, behind only Beijing and Mumbai, and it was a popular starting point for travelers from around the galaxy on their way to more famous destinations like New York City and Seattle, as well as points across the globe.
For Olus, it was a place to disappear, to finish killing the beacon on Omsala’s comm and try to get what data he could from it. A place to settle in and begin the second phase of his primary mission to identify and protect the remaining Council members from Thraven’s plot to unseat them.
He went on foot from the random garage where he left the car, using untraceable payment transfers to pay for a loop ride downtown, and then locating a cheap hotel to hole up in. He kept his head down, his face hidden, staying unimpressive and unnoticeable, a regular, ordinary individual all the way until he reached his room on the fourth floor. He slipped inside, maintaining his calm as the door closed and he removed Omsala’s communicator. He placed it on a nearby desk, went to the bathroom to relieve himself, and then took off his jacket, noticing a scuff on the sleeve from a bullet that had grazed his elbow. That would have hurt.
He tossed the jacket aside, sitting at the desk and leaning over the communicator. He removed the toolkit from his inside pocket and laid the tools out on the table, working quickly to detach the circuit board, locate the emergency beacon, and leverage it off the device. He placed it aside before putting the whole thing back together, leaving the battery for last.
He was about to insert the battery when the communicator tucked beneath his shirt collar intoned an incoming ping. His eyebrow went up, and he tapped the collar to activate it.
“Ruby,” he said. “This channel isn’t secure. Be quick.”
“Sir,” Ruby said. “The Queen requires a Knight for a quest. The lost treasure is in your kingdom.”
“Priority?”
“Critical.”
“Timeline?”
“Immediate.”
Olus cursed under his breath. He had other work to do.
“Transfer?”
