by Rick Partlow
I had a sudden, powerful flashback to the war, to other fortresses on other worlds, littered with the bodies of Tahni soldiers...soldiers I had killed, staring up at me with accusing glares, blood pooled around the ruins of their throats. I had no illusions of what I had been or what I was: a killer, a cold-blooded assassin designed and built to spread terror in the enemy ranks.
There had been a dozen of us at the start, all of us little more than children, none older than twenty-one. The Frankensteins of Fleet Intelligence transformed us through the implants, the training, the psychological programming into the ultimate psychwar weapon---the living manifestation of the Tahni death spirits, their version of the bogeyman.
Clad in faceless, black combat suits, camouflaged by holographic fields, we would appear from thin air in the midst of the enemy camp and assassinate the highest-ranking officers, ripping their throats out with our talons and always, always spreading the fear. Sabotage, intelligence-gathering---those came later, gravy to the real meat of our existence. We were killers, first and last. It had taken a lot of work to pull myself back from that, to become a real person again, and that preprogrammed Killing Machine still lurked somewhere in the darkness of my soul, waiting for me to slip up so it could erupt screaming from my chest. I could hear its breath in my ear as I stepped over the mangled corpses, felt it clawing at the fringes of my psyche.
The Machine is dead, I chanted silently. I am not the Machine.
I nearly slipped in the blood pooled on the floor at the mouth of the rear exit hallway, and had to catch myself against the wall. The bulk of the STAT team was in there, gathered amidst nearly a dozen dead attackers, their corpses exploded from the inside by our maser weapons. Usually the disruptors were set to disable targets selectively by destroying hemoglobin in their blood and rendering them unconscious due to acute cyanosis---preventing enough oxygen from reaching their brains. But these guys were too dangerous to take the chance; for all we knew, they were augmented, with an alternate biomechanical method for delivering oxygen to their organs.
Jase was standing over one of the bodies, his sidearm dangling carelessly at his side. Jason Chen's height marked him as an Offworlder---he was very near two meters, and a bit under one hundred kilos---but he had lived on Canaan since he was ten, and had been my closest friend for that whole stretch of three decades. When we'd both returned after the War, it had seemed a natural thing for him to take the position as my chief deputy. His lean, pale face was twisted into a thoughtful frown as he nudged the fallen pulse carbine next to the corpse. His head turned as he noticed me walking up, and his frown deepened.
"You okay?" He was looking at the wound on my leg.
I shrugged it off. "Just a burn. You wanted to show me something?"
"Most of the Gomers were pretty fucked up by the disruptors," he said, gesturing at the exploded torso of one of the corpses. "This guy I got with a shot from my pulse pistol," he nodded at the one at his feet.
I stepped around him to get a better look at the invader. Someone had stripped his helmet and chest armor off, revealing...motherfuck. Revealing an acolyte of the Predecessor cult. There was no mistaking it. Another, perhaps, might have had a similar swept-back hairstyle, and certainly there were many others with the cloned muscle implants and body restruct job. But the cosmetic holographic inlay of a stylized dual-star system across his chest was the signature of the Cult, a representation of the Alpha Centauri system, where the wormhole map was discovered.
"Goddamn," I said softly.
Jason nodded. "Exactly. We knew they were buying weapons; we just didn't know what for."
"But why now? They have a major deal set up in less than a week---why blow it all on an attack now?"
"Maybe there was someone here they wanted out of the way," Jase suggested. "Did Cutter give you any possible answer before they got him?"
I chewed my lip, thinking that yes, he actually might have given me the very reason.
"When you get through here," I told him, "find me at the station in New Jerusalem. There's someone you need to meet."
Birthright
Birthright Book Two: Northwest Passage
And
Birthright Book Three: Enemy of My Enemy
are all available now on Amazon for Kindle.
Visit my author blog at: https://rickpartlow.wordpress.com/
And my Amazon author page at: http://www.amazon.com/Rick-Partlow/e/B00B1GNL4E/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
