“Are you suggesting . . . they’ve slipped something into the fine print?”
“Yes,” said Oliphant.
“Shit, I was joking.”
“No joke. We welcome peace, but the nuance of the Ushun terms may encode something unacceptable, something that will defeat the Sodality more completely than open military action.”
“So, you want to look at the document?”
“We do. It is confidential. We will pay highly for the privilege.”
“Where is it?” asked Dwire.
“The only copy is sequestered in a hypersecure data storage clave, watched over by an independent custodian. We have learned the location.”
“Who’s this custodian?’ asked Dwire. He suddenly had a sense of foreboding.
“Deryl Durant,” said Oliphant. “The data baron.”
“The Frost Giant,” said Dwire.
“Yes.”
“The treaty . . . it’s stored on Nox, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Mr. Dwire.”
“Now I understand why you’re talking to me.”
* * * *
It had not been a clean landing. Dwire had broken some ribs and at least two fingers. The gestalter engine had saved-and-switched him into the third CLoan about thirty seconds after it had made planetfall on Nox.
He got up, unsteady.
Steal a peace treaty from the most secure vault in the Sodality, he thought. Stop a peace. Start a war. Not exactly the heroic destiny Dwire had hoped for himself, but Oliphant had been convincing. There were nobility and duty in it. If Oliphant and his fellow clients were right, and Dwire was successful, it would lead to a war that would cost billions of lives.
And that would be preferable. A win.
High cliffs of black rock and blue ice towered over him. He was standing on the lip of one of the thermal canyons. He could see the monumental white phantom shapes of the cryo-vanes. Data was hot. The amount of data stored and protected by the Frost Giant generated enough heat-bleed to stoke a sun. That’s why he required specialist holding claves like Nox, sculpted for maximum heat dispersal, cryo-cooled to nigh on absolute zee. The Giant’s specialization in ultra-cold storage had earned him his nickname.
Nox was cold as hell and loaded to the brim. Not to mention out of the way, discreet, hard to find or reach, and defended up the ying-yang.
Dwire was the best security architect in the Sodality. He was not a field agent, but he knew Nox like no one else. And he had made it to the surface wearing a synthetically reinforced tacbody that was hardwired with the instincts and reactions of a special forces operative.
Three of four. His margin of error was narrowing; his window was closing.
He set off at a jog. The canyon lip would take him to the base of Vane Seven, and from there he could gain access to the local service shafts. As he ran, he un-sacked his sidearm from the pouch on the front of his suit. Clutching it made him feel more comfortable.
The skeletal service walkways were fitted for heat, motion and vibration. Frost clogged the handrails and the spacer grilles. Dwire wondered if anyone had walked on them since the day he’d finished his work and taken one last look around.
Dwire kept to the rock, though it was sheeted with ice and treacherous. Thermal pads in the soles of his boots thawed each step he took and increased his purchase.
His ribs hurt. The tacbody must have hit the ground damn hard.
There was a supply port in the silo above the service shafts. That was Dwire’s entry point of choice. He knew for a fact that there were six autosentry modules in the area. He jogged a route that expertly snaked him between all of their perceptor cones.
He had gotten within sixty meters of the port when the slayborg arrived. The first he saw of it was a howling maw full of stainless steel teeth coming at him like a runaway train.
Dwire had placed slayborgs in the lower levels in his original design, mostly for mechanized patrol and perimeter checks. He hadn’t put any on the surface. Was this evolution, or was this the Frost Giant tinkering with the design?
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that there was one in his face. What also mattered was that the slayborgs he’d installed down below had been security-grade units, the basic, highly efficient “Supertrooper” model built by Teksimiles out of Lares Hub. He’d bulk-bought ten thousand of them.
This wasn’t a Supertrooper with a bland, goofy face and khaki plating. This was battlefield grade: a Coyne Munitions “Berserker” model, huge and feral.
It lunged at him. Its reach was six times his, and its talons were like sabers.
He let the CLoan body’s instincts take over, and evaded hard, puffing up a spray of ice crystals. A nice dodge, but the Berserker was fast. It wheeled and ripped at him. It was trailing loose cables and rubber pipework from its snout, so it looked shaggy, like some emaciated, dreadlocked bear. No eyes. The perceptors were down in its armored chest.
It lashed out. He tucked and rolled. The slayborg’s knife-fingers gouged out pack ice and rock like a backhoe. Dwire rolled again, the opposite way. Rime covered his faceplate. His ret-feed was flashing him hazards that he either didn’t need to know or were spectacularly obvious. Blades came down at him like icepicks and broke the ground like glass.
He aimed his sidearm. It was a steel frame tactical assault pistol, firing jacketed photonics. A 760 White Liger, manufactured by Coyne Munitions—just like the slayborg. There was some pleasing irony in that. Three rapid shots smacked the charging slayborg onto its ass, as though it had run into a clothesline.
It got up, leaking syrupy fluid from its blast-distorted jawline and cranium. Dwire’s ret-feed tight-targeted the rumpled plating above the Berserker’s perceptor array, and he put two more rounds into the hole. The slayborg blew out. The power cells in its armored thorax lit off, and its abdomen vanished in a fireball blossom.
The hazards kept flashing. Rising, Dwire saw two more Berserkers bounding over the ice toward him like galloping simians. He stood his ground and put four shots into the nearest one, dropping it in a fountain of fluid while it was still ten meters away. He switched to the second. Three shots didn’t stop it. The fourth round dropped it, but it got up again. The fifth and sixth went down its slavering mouth and exploded its spine.
The slayborg Dwire hadn’t seen ran him down from behind. He thought he’d been swiped by a truck. A blade finger stabbed into his back. He felt every centimeter of it go in, felt it slice his liver and shred his intestines. It picked him up like a fish on a skewer and shook him.
Dwire screamed. His faceplate was full of blood. He fired wildly.
The thing dropped him. Dwire flopped over, leaking steam and blood. Trauma was overloading the tacbody’s systems. Stim supplies emptied into his bloodstream. The slayborg was on him. It crunched off his left hand and spat it out. Dwire fired point-blank. The pain intensified. It was eating him alive.
Save and switch.
He loaded into the fourth tacbody, bringing the ghost of atrocious pain along with him, a shock so hard, the CLoan staggered and the stims kicked in again. Dwire could barely think. The successive traumas were going to drive him insane.
He’d placed the fourth tacbody last in the running order where he thought he’d need it most. It was a tank form, engineered for frontline duty, the only heavy-grade CLoan in the batch the clients had sourced. It was built like a nose tackle on steroids. Its brute solidity and trauma compensation package soothed him to a whimper and regulated his vitals.
He was standing on the ridge above the supplying port, tears streaming down his face. He had a composite armor exo-suit with a reflective bronze finish, a Bakshine Hypernetic carbine, and an unused fusion mine.
Below him, the crippled slayborg was dismembering his still-screaming former self. Dwire shouldered the carbine, took aim, and put a hyperkinetic round through the head of his previous body. In the pink mist, the slayborg glanced around and saw him.
“And fuck you, too,” said Dwire. He fired again an
d turned the slayborg into a cloud of meat.
Waste of a round, but the satisfaction was worth it.
He started to run, enjoying the increased speed and ground coverage of the new tac. He checked the datarray. One hour left on the range window, and he was down to his last deployable tacbody. That was disappointing. He’d burned through time and resources more quickly than he had anticipated.
The autosentries were whirring around. Screw them. Like they didn’t know there was an uninvited guest. He lobbed the mine.
It landed smack on the supply port. This tank CLoan had a good arm. The blast took out the armored shutter of the port in a blizzard of metal shards and wrecked the support gantry. It slumped, groaning and creaking.
The autosentries began to fire. Ice flaked and spat at his heels.
Dwire leapt headlong into the flames.
* * * *
He fell down the service shaft that the blast had uncapped. The walls rushed past. It was a two-mile drop. The tacbody knew how to control itself in freefall. It had made HALO jumps before. The base of the shaft was rushing up at him. He triggered the grav-pod strapped to the small of his back, and floated down the last twenty meters like a feather.
Service hatch. He ripped the plating off with his fingers and stabbed in a datahack. The tool buzzed as it bit into the instructor systems.
Identify: hatch operation functions.
Hatch operation: seal hatch in event of attack.
Reverse instruction.
Confirm instruction.
Verify situation: attack underway.
Initiate function.
The hatch opened. Dwire stepped through. Trick of the trade. He wondered if he would ever have been hired if people realized how simple a walkaround could be. Security architecture was pretty much impossible to break or override. But if you got in underneath, at the instruction level, and simply reversed the instruction order, the system thought it was doing what it was supposed to do and didn’t argue back.
The halls were lofty and dim. Frost coated every surface. His footsteps sounded dull and flat. Infilling at Vane Seven put him close to Stack Sixty, so the recovery room there was the nearest.
Hazard flash. Dwire swung up and picked a Supertrooper off one of the overhead walkways before it could tag him. Two more appeared, drawing aim. Scary-fast, he tracked the carbine and punched off their heads, one after the other.
He started active hunting via the carbine’s scope as he advanced. Three more slayborgs came into range. He felled them with a burst of rapid, and they sprayed metal and plastic fragments as they shredded. He plugged another through the throat with a single round, and it collapsed, head bowed as if in prayer.
The massive iris hatch of the recovery room was wide open.
The room was vast and domed. Thirty ornate seats were arranged in a circle, like a clock face around a central datarray system. Only one of the positions was active. Data shimmered in the cold, misty air above the station.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
The tacbody was standing near the operational station. It was a heavy-grade CLoan like the one he was wearing, but it was brand-new, and the motile skin armor encasing it was polished chrome, fancy and expensive—this year’s model. It made his army surplus cast-off feel shabby and soiled.
“Mr. Durant,” said Dwire. “I didn’t think you’d be here in person.”
“Of course,” said the Frost Giant through the tacbody’s mouth. “With something this important, I like to mind it myself. My whole business and reputation are based upon my level of service, and this is a very special case.”
The tacbody took a step forward.
“Speaking of reputations,” it said, “I’m very disappointed in you, Mr. Dwire.”
“You know it’s me?”
“Of course. Who else could get this far? I recognized you by your approach. And your poor mind’s been flying around a lot today from body to body. That’s given me plenty of time to process and match your brain patterns.
“I pity you, by the way,” the Frost Giant added. “You must be feeling wretched. All that trauma. I doubt you’ll ever be quite the same again.”
“I’ll survive,” said Dwire.
“No, you won’t, not in any way. I’ve known you were coming here for weeks. Information, my friend. It’s what I do. It’s the most powerful commodity there is. I’ve known about your mission since you were hired. I know who your clients are. I know what their concerns are: the framing of the treaty.”
“If,” Dwire began, “you knew I was coming, why—”
“It was a wonderful opportunity to run an active test of my security architecture. I’ve already devised a number of new countermeasures and system evolutions that will make sure this never happens again. So, thank you for that. Good of you to provide aftercare service.”
Dwire shrugged. He went to the circle, chose a seat at random, and sat down.
“What happens now?” he asked.
Behind its gleaming visor, the Frost Giant smiled with the face it was using.
“Well,” it said, “you’ve got six minutes before the packet ship moves out of range. After that, it’ll be too far away for you to save back to the gestalter engine. Your body will be out there, on a mail boat, and your mind will be stuck here. It will die along with that CLoan you’re loaded into.”
“Six minutes,” said Dwire. “A lot can happen in six minutes.”
He snatched up the carbine and fired. The Frost Giant was already moving, a blur. The hyper round clipped it and spanked away into the far wall, but even the glancing impact was enough to spin the hurtling tacbody clean off its feet. It smashed into the station, crumpling a console and wrecking one of the chairs.
Dwire was on his feet. The Frost Giant, a gruesome blister of blackened metal and cooked meat marring the sleek chrome lines of its shoulder armor, tackled him hard. They crashed over together. Another ornate seat was demolished. Dwire punched the Giant in the side of the head and cracked its visor. The Frost Giant rolled clear and delivered a spin kick that carried Dwire clear across the reading station. He bounced off the edge and hit the floor. The Frost Giant kicked the fallen carbine away across the frosty deck, picked up Dwire and slammed him into the chamber wall.
Dwire mashed his elbow into the Giant’s face, then punched it in the sternum. He heard bone shear. The Giant fell back. Released, Dwire dropped to the deck. He kicked the Giant off its knees and stood over it.
The Frost Giant looked up at Dwire. Through its broken, blood-flecked faceplate, it smiled.
“Your time is up,” it said.
“I know,” said Dwire.
“The packet ship has moved out of range.”
“I know.”
Dwire looked around. The room was slowly and quietly filling with Supertroopers. Their weapons were leveled at him.
“So . . . are they wrong?” Dwire asked. “Oliphant and the others? Are they wrong about the treaty?”
“No,” Durant replied. It wrenched off its helmet and spat blood. “The treaty is brilliantly engineered. The Ushuns are very methodical. The peace agreement requires full alliance with the Ushuns, and Ushun participation in the administration of government. If you think they were a military menace, just wait to see how they exert influence and power from within the Sodality legislature. David has killed Goliath. A long and bloody war would have cost the Sodality less.”
“You knew this . . . all this, and you protected the information?”
“That’s what I do, Mr. Dwire. My reputation depends on it.”
“They paid you?”
The Frost Giant shook its head.
“Only in information. In exchange for my services, I become designated custodian of the entire Ushun cultural archive. Sole custodian. My claves become true treasure houses. I will possess a data resource unparalleled in human or Ushun space.”
“Not just the richest being in the Spiral Arm. The most powerful.”
Durant heav
ed his tacbody to its feet.
“A giant, truly,” it smiled.
Dwire shrugged.
“Information is precious,” he said. “Durant, what’s the active save-and-restore range of a gestalter engine?”
“You know that well enough, Dwire. It is a range your mail boat has long since exceeded.”
“But say I ejected an active gestalt base-unit from the packet when I launched my CLoans, it would still be in range, wouldn’t it? Easily. And still in range of the ship, too. For another eighteen minutes.”
Durant’s reply was incoherent. The slayborgs began firing and didn’t stop until Dwire’s fourth tacbody was a liquefied sludge coating the recovery room’s wall.
* * * *
Dwire opened his eyes. Ret-feed told him he had been down for sixteen hours, and in that time, his heart had stopped on nine separate occasions. The packet ship’s medborgs were bending over him.
He’d be sick from the stims for years. The multiple save traumas would probably never leave him. He got up, in his own flesh. The medborgs tried to persuade him to lie back, but he waved them off.
He opened a fast-link messenger blank. It would take two days to reach its destination. It would still arrive before the packet ship.
He selected “Oliphant” from his recipient list with a haptic flick. Then, in the open pane, his fingers touching nothing but light, he began to compose a message telling his client that he’d stopped a peace and started a war, and was now leaving Nox at seventy-three times the speed of light.
Somehow, that didn’t feel fast enough.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAN ABNETT is a seven-time New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written over fifty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies, volumes of the million-selling Horus Heresy series, The Silent Stars Go By (Doctor Who), Rocket Raccoon and Groot: Steal the Galaxy, The Avengers: Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero, and Embedded, and with Nik Vincent, Tomb Raider: The Ten Thousand Immortals and Fiefdom. In comics, he is known for his work for Marvel, DC, Boom!, Dark Horse and 2000AD. His 2008 run on The Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel formed the inspiration for the blockbuster movie. He has also written extensively for the games industry, including Shadow of Mordor and Alien: Isolation. Dan lives and works in the UK with his wife, Nik Vincent-Abnett, an editor and writer of fiction. Follow him on Twitter @VincentAbnett.
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