“Are you two ladies lost?” he asked in a very masculine voice.
“No, we’re fine, thank you,” she said quickly.
“You should be leaving then.” The man turned to the side, opening the way for them but staying in the inner door frame so they would have to pass him at an uncomfortably close distance.
Cygni looked at Pawqlan. She seemed to have recovered somewhat, but she still looked flustered. Clearly, dealing with armed officials was not her forte.
“Let’s go, Pawqlan.” Cygni led the way into the sitting chamber. Once past the man, she let Pawqlan continue on into the corridor and turned back towards him. “Hi, I’m Cygni Aragón.” She offered her hand.
“I know.”
“Are you a fan?” She saw his eyes twitch, and smiled. It hadn’t taken very long to get under his skin. So he probably hadn’t been in the intelligence division of Star Corps, either that, or he really disliked her.
“No.”
“You have me at a disadvantage then.”
“I do.”
She smiled and cocked her head. She wasn’t sure, but maybe if she pressed the right button she could get him to reveal why the CSA was in Baroness Altair’s suite.
“I’m Baron Revenant’s press secretary.”
“You’re going to miss the shuttle if you keep trying to chat me up.” He crossed his arms before the bulge of his chest.
This close to him, she could see the tell-tale signs of that too-perfect, athletic body beneath his suit that indicated he was bio-enhanced. “If I miss it, I miss it. I’m sure Baron Revenant will send another for me.”
“You are sure, are you?”
She nodded.
His nostrils flared.
“Cygni!” Pawqlan nearly hissed at her from the corridor.
Fine. “A pleasure to meet you, Mister Tough-Guy,” she said and backed up towards her colleague. She’d find out who he was later, she was sure, and what that odd pin meant.
He gave her a last look over and headed deeper into the suite.
So he wasn’t here for us, she noted.
“Come on!” Pawqlan tapped her on the shoulder.
“Okay, okay, let’s go.” She followed Pawqlan to the lifts. The doors slid smoothly shut and the floor pressed into her feet as the lift started moving upward towards the spindle section of the ship.
“I need a minute.”
“What?”
Ignoring Pawqlan’s question, she set her implant to hold her body upright and shifted her perception inward. Her consciousness became surrounded by darkness as her brain stopped listening to her biological senses and started perceiving information from her cerebral implant instead. Her flesh turned silver as she took on her digital persona, and before her materialized a neon-blue menu hovering in space.
She accessed the data from the grains. Here in the digital world, every ten seconds that passed were the equivalent of one in the realm beyond her skin. She’d be able to extract, edit, and review the grain data before they reached the shuttle bay—or so she hoped. She could always continue the review on the trip down to Kosfanter, but she figured that time would be absorbed in conversation with her editor, who was no doubt going crazy with the changes imposed on him.
She told her computer to scan the data for times when the grains detected significant movement, and show only those time frames in the four pop-up windows that materialized around her the moment she gave the command. She settled in to wait, and was considering writing Shkur a message about her change in work assignments when a beeping sound echoed in the space around her.
Already? She thought. Something must have happened shortly after she left the suite. She looked at the windows and watched as the picture showed her rising from behind the divans looking very puzzled. Using multiple grains had given her a three dimensional reconstruction of the room as the data was compared from their microsensors. Though she could view either room she’d put the grains in from any angle, the default was one at about her head-height right between where she’d planted the grains—just in front of the fireplace.
Ignore this part, something whispered in her mind. A pressure built up behind her eyes like a sinus headache, but the more she watched the more her feeling of dread built in opposition to the will of that voice in her head. She watched herself shrug and start to walk out of the room. As her body receded into the background, more of the living area was revealed. She was about to jump ahead in the recording when something caught her eye that caused the growing anxiety in her digital gut to erupt like an exploding volcano. She would’ve gasped if she’d been in the physical world.
She watched herself walk right past a rail-thin humanoid being with gray skin, a bulbous, teardrop-shaped head with large, black eyes whose irises were marked by rings of blue sparks. The sight of him made her dizzy, and when it passed the pressure in her head went with it.
His legs were the same ones she’d thought she’d seen from under the divan, but she gained no pleasure from finding out she’d been right all along. He simply hadn’t been there when she rose from behind the divan—and yet there he was on the recording, watching her walk right past him. It would’ve made sense if he was using some kind of optic stealth technology, but that would’ve distorted the sensors in the grains. She was baffled at how she didn’t see this man-creature—and then the memory of what her olfactory senses had told her came to mind.
That man-thing was a VoQuana—a VoQuana outside of the quarantine instituted and enforced by the Abyssians after the Quae-Sol war ended sixty-years ago. Cygni would have said it was impossible but for the evidence of her own eyes. Her mind leapt forward, connecting the dots. VoQuana were said to be telepathic, or at least to have technology that could read biological minds, which was why the Confederation had turned over its defense to the super-AI, Daedalus and its Abyssians. It had been the only way to win against a species that knew your every move as you thought it. They had lost the war in the end, been quarantined to their planets and to one consulate structure in the Diplomatic District in Ikuzlu. It was illegal for them to leave these areas and they were supposed to be under guard. It was supposed to be impossible for them to slip out—
She stopped herself. Deal with what is, not with what should be.
Here was a VoQuana, outside of quarantine and clearly having something to do with Baroness Altair. She had to know more.
She sped the record forward, watching the VoQuana retreat into a room she didn’t have a grain in, and then seeing Baroness Altair enter. He came out, they talked—and then Baron Keltan stumbled into the waiting area. They spoke some more, apparently unaware of his presence until the VoQuana pointed, Baroness Altair opened the inner doors, and then—
Cygni’s eyes widened.
I’m in deep shit.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lokhari Forest, Elmorus
41:2:7 CST (J2400:3130)
For several seconds, all Nero could hear was the crackling of fires in the rain and the wheeze of Sorina’s breath. He chanced a look at her, and her amber, cat like eyes met his filled with pained determination. He gave her a reassuring nod, then looked back at the deep shadows of the forest.
The sound came again. It was something like a rustle of leaves, but muted. The odd tone could have something to do with the nature of this planet’s flora, he reasoned. He wished Prospero were still online to tell him and chuckled at himself. He wanted Prospero to shut up almost since the first day he could remember the SCC’s voice in his head, and now that it had, he wanted him to start chattering again.
The rustle was followed by the familiar hiss of hydraulics. Qismat shouldn’t be making that noise, if it was like other artificials its system was not one of tubes and wires but of silicon based cells and fibers. On the other hand, it certainly had systems he didn’t know about and it could be damaged or malfunctioning from the fall.
He prepared himself for combat. His ears told him where to look as it emerged from the forest into the flickering light
of the clearing.
Brown-and-tan, fur-covered, densely-packed muscles on a nearly two meter long frame emerged from the underbrush. It was over a meter tall at the shoulder, with carnivorous teeth on a thick muzzle, and a set of piercing brown eyes framed by streaks of gray in its fur. Its large nose pulsed as it sniffed at the air, and then the beast let out a single, sharp bark and started trotting towards where he and Sorina lay.
“Cerberai. Shit.” The strength was already leaving him, pushed out by his despair. A cerberai, in his present state, as might as well have been Qismat. They had no chance against its genetically engineered strength, speed, and intelligence.
The beast stopped at his feet. It eyed the blade humming in his hand, then leaned its muzzle down and gave the tip of his boot a tentative lick. It raised its tail and moved it slowly back and forth in the air, as though the beast were waving a signal flag.
His brow furrowed. Cerberai were intelligent, but he didn’t know them to be deceptive. He switched off his blade and lowered his arm. “Do I know you?”
The cerberai barked, waving its tail more vigorously and straddled his lap. Before he knew it, the more intact side of his face was under assault from its wide, wet tongue. The beast’s fur was becoming covered in the gore from his wounds, but it didn’t seem to care.
Sorina coughed. “Get a room,” she said, but her voice was pleasant, relieved.
Then the first of the ‘bots stepped out from among the trees.
Two-and-a-half-meters tall, the thing was armor, pistons, and poly-steel cables woven into a human form. Its head was fashioned like a Solan skull with two glowing blue eyes beneath a broad helmet that fanned out in the back half-way down its neck. In its hand was a rail gun, nearly as long as the ‘bot was tall, and at its side was a two meter long, curving high-frequency sword. Inscribed on its shoulder plates and chest were three, circumscribed white lines. The left most of them was crooked at an angle.
“Mitsugawa?” Sorina said, giving voice to Nero’s thoughts.
The cerberai barked excitedly, then bounded off back into the woods right between the ‘bot’s legs. Almost at the point where the cerberai disappeared into the gloom, a second Mitsugawa ‘bot emerged, looked around, and moved to stand beside the first. Both held their oversized rifles in a ready position, but thankfully were not aimed at him or Sorina.
He felt Sorina’s fingers at his elbow. “Why are they here?”
He looked at her and winced. A sticky, wet sheen covered her face and neck, and he didn’t think it was from the rain. She was paler than a few moments ago. His own wounds were itching and burning worse than before, but it all went out of his consciousness at the sight of her.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly, “hang in there. I’ll get you help.”
“My limbs are getting cold. I’m going into nholelhon. I’ll be alright, but I won’t be conscious much longer,” she said.
“What?”
“Nholelhon is a Relaen hibernation trance my ancestors engineered into our genome when we took to the stars. When we are badly injured or suffocating, we descend into a deep coma like sleep. It cuts down on our need for oxygen and restricts blood flow. It’s meant to give us an extra chance to survive, or be rescued, or some such. I guess it’s our version of what Solans call shock, maybe. I’m not a doctor,” she said.
He frowned. “How do I get you out of it once we’re safe.”
“I’ll wake up once my body has healed enough.”
“I’ll see that you do.” He looked over at the two ‘bots. They remained as they were before, metallic statues watching them with electric eyes.
The cerberai came bounding out of the darkness again. He watched it run up and sit beside him and Sorina. The beast glanced at both of them then returned his eyes to the forest, tail wagging. Nero followed its gaze and spied something that made his heart skip a beat and all his muscles freeze as though petrified.
In the darkness, a pair of glowing, unearthly green eyes appeared. They bobbed as their owner picked her way through the forest and emerged into the flickering light of the clearing. He knew who she was even before the rest of her came into the light.
She was much taller than when he’d last seen her. Then, on the Zeus’ Thunder, she’d been a girl of nine; now she was a young woman. She was wearing a black jumper with short sleeves and a pair of sturdy, new looking hiking boots. Everywhere her pale flesh was exposed, save her face, he could see black line and circle tattoos of the kind the VoQuana had. She still had the rail-thin frame and tangled raven hair, though now it reached nearly to her ankles. Age had stretched her already long features, and her face was narrow with a pointy chin and a high forehead leading to a widow’s peak. Her frame had only a hint of a woman’s hips, and her breasts were small and sat high on her chest. Her eyes were the same, ectoplasmic green that he remembered from Savorcha.
“Kiertah,” he said.
She moved gracefully through the detritus, her tangled, ankle-length hair billowing out behind her like a cape with each step. When she was beside the cerberai she gave him a good rubbing on the ridge of his skull and nodded at Nero. She looked over him and Sorina, then raised her almost skeletal hand into the air and gestured at the ‘bots.
“Try to relax,” she said with an accent that he didn’t recognize—though that didn’t mean much out on the frontier. “You are both safe now.”
The bots moved over, slung their rifles over their shoulders, and knelt down. They scooped both Nero and Sorina up in their large metal arms.
The ride to the Mitsugawa camp was a comfortable one considering the conditions, though Nero did heave up the contents of his stomach two more times on account of the burning pain on the left side of his face. It was far worse now that the immediate danger had passed. The rain all but vanished once they were under the canopy of the black leafed trees, though the damp chill remained in the air.
It took them an hour to reach the camp. It emerged from the near pith-blackness as an oasis bathing in ghostly light cast by hovering spheres in the forest. He noted that whomever was in command had tried to make sure their profile was as low as possible. No trees were felled, and every tent and piece of equipment was carefully placed so that the canopy above provided maximum cover from prying eyes in the sky. He estimated there were at least a hundred sentient beings and four more Mitsugawa warrior robots about. It wasn’t by any means a reliable figure. Not only was he distracted by the pain in his face, which had scaled up to the point where it was difficult to think, but the thick trees and lack of light didn’t help matters either. He caught a glimpse of insignias on some of the crates and equipment strewn about, and noted that not all of them bore the three stripes. The rest, he assumed, belonged to mercenaries like the ones they’d encountered in town.
The ‘bots put them down near the center of the camp. He was grateful that they were so gentle about it. Sorina was unconscious now, her body corpse-pale and limp. Once the ‘bots moved away, a set of medics in cloud-gray armor with crimson crosses on their shoulders approached.
“She’s in some kind of hibernation,” he said, surprised at how weak his voice was.
“We know.” One of the medics, an Achinoi with its Mohawk of head-quills clipped so that they would fit comfortably inside a standard helmet, knelt beside him and fed a dose of nanomachines into his system. The other did the same with Sorina.
“This is the best we can do for you out here,” the medic continued, regarding Nero with brown eyes set in a bronze-scaled face. “We’re here with stripped down equipment and few provisions. Our employer wanted us as light as possible.”
“Baron Mitsugawa’s employing you, I assume? Who’s your commander here?” He felt, much to his pleasure, at home here in a military camp. He’d known more than his fair share of them on Savorcha, and there was something good about being in one again.
“Our commander is a Solan named Valhalla Armstrong. She’s with our employer in the big tent over there,” the medic explained.
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He looked over at the tent. The pain in his face was already starting to fade thanks to the nanomachines’ work. “Did you say your employer is here?”
“He wants to see you immediately,” the medic said.
Nero licked his cracked lips. “Baron Mitsugawa is here? He’s supposed to be off burying his father.”
“Not for me to say, Praetor.” The medic gave him another injection. “That’s the best I can do for you. Go see the baron.”
“What about Agent Khepria?” The pain faded fast from the point of injection. He didn’t know numb could feel so good.
“We’ll make sure she’s alright. Nholelhon can last up to twenty hours after the body’s repair. We have a tent she can complete her hibernation in.”
“Thank you.”
He waited thirty seconds before attempting to rise to his feet. It went better than he was expecting, though he felt woozy and had some trouble catching his balance. He walked quickly over to Sorina’s prone form and knelt beside her. She looked a little better already. The medic had straightened out her legs and set them with splints to ensure the nanomachines patched them right. He gave the Solan man a nod and headed for the big tent.
A tarp covered the ground inside. A two-meter wide holographic-projector table, several folding chairs with arms but no backs, and a food hydrator in one corner occupied much of the available space. Two glowing spheres hung from the two tent-peaks, providing an illumination that was close to daylight filtered through clouds. The projector displayed the Elmorus system complete with orbital paths marked with smooth, glowing lines and the positions of several FTL ships marked by yellow triangles with their names hovering in small print below. There was also a set of red deltas at the opposite edge of the system from the yellow ones.
A Solan woman with a shaved head, smooth round cheeks and a small, upturned nose stood beside the projector. Her eyes were two different colors, brown and blue, and but for the look of steel in them and the shaved head she might have been at home in some ‘web drama or holographic movie. The armor she wore was the same gray of those outside, but had three red hatch marks on its pauldrons. On the upper left part of its breastplate a sword and crossed axes, all dripping blood, were inscribed.
Blood Siren (Chronicles of the Orion Spur Book 1) Page 38
