by M. S. Farzan
I wandered from the little infirmary towards the center of the arena, smelling food. The others had ransacked the casino’s non-perishable supplies, preparing a substantial meal of canned goods and flash-frozen food. The Scribe stood behind a portable induction stove, stirring a pot with one hand while using his finger to scribble on his digitab. The rest of the group sat in the grass oval, eating.
Alina looked up as we approached, Buster running over to put his face in a bowl of scraps. The Pitcher handed me a plate filled with food, and made room next to her for me to sit down.
“Thanks,” I said gratefully, gently lowering myself to the floor. I put my hand on her arm as she passed me the food.
“And thanks,” I added. She caught my eye and my meaning, smiling slightly.
“Don’t mention it.”
I set to inhale my food, taking large bites and washing it down with a cup of water. It was tepid, but felt soothing on my parched throat.
I noticed something missing. “Where’s the Sigil?” I asked around a mouthful of beans.
The Scribe piped up, not looking way from his stirring or digitab. “Even His Grace tires of company,” he said meaningfully.
We finished our meals in silence, and a bit more quickly, thinking that we had already overstayed our welcome. I stretched a little, feeling strength slowly returning to my body.
“So,” I said at last, “what happened after I went out?”
“She happened,” Alina said, pointing at Doubleshot with a piece of bread. “Demon with legs, that one.”
If Vasshka was impressed or embarrassed by the compliment, she didn’t show it. “They kept coming, but we held them off. We pulled you guys into the sanctuary and Alina looked after your wounds.”
“The assassin?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Had half of his face almost cave in, courtesy of our Pitcher here,” Gloric said proudly, his tiny hands resting comfortably on his belly. “Cast a spell and disappeared. The rest of the rabble routed after him.”
“Wait, how do you know?” I objected, confused. “Weren’t you dead?”
“I have cameras throughout this city, and others, Eskander Aradowsi,” the Sigil buzzed, rolling into view from a nearby pathway between the machines. “My captain now has access to most of them.”
I stuck out a lip, impressed. Setting down my plate, I cleared my throat, asking the question on everyone’s mind.
“What about Tribe?”
Only Doubleshot would meet my gaze. “They got him,” she said.
I had suspected as much, but my heart sank nonetheless. I knew what they would do, and it would break him.
“We have to move,” I declared, starting to get up. “If we leave now, we can be back in the city by nightfall-”
“To do what?” Alina interrupted me, looking up at me defiantly.
“Get back to the NIGHT headquarters,” I sputtered defensively. “They’ll have taken Tribe to the VPen, so we can grab him and then the data drive-”
“And how do you propose we do that?” she said, rising to her feet. “You’re injured, we’re all exhausted, and Glory’s out of commission.”
“Well, I-” the gnome began to protest.
“Even if we were at our full strength,” Alina raged, “I don’t see how we’d manage to break into a fortified island of government superagents, fight our way to the VPen, locate the data drive, and escape with our lives.”
“I have a friend on the inside,” I said, “she could help us to-”
“You don’t get it, Nightpath! Some of us gave up fighting because we stopped believing in what we were fighting for. You’ve dragged us into your mess, and want us to help you clean it up.”
I opened my mouth to respond, and shut it. I didn’t have much to say to that. I looked to the others for support, but didn’t receive any.
“Listen,” I said placatingly, “I realize that I’ve made a lot of assumptions, starting with coming to you for help. And I understand that because of your involvement with me, you’re now all targets - with the exception of Doubleshot, who was already a wanted fugitive.”
Vasshka tipped her hat in acknowledgement.
“But there’s only one way out of this, and it’s through the top,” I continued. “If we want to save Tribe from certain torture, clear our names, and avoid a war, we have to get into Alcatraz.”
“The world doesn’t need a savior, Nightpath,” Alina said quietly, relenting a little.
“I’m not looking to be one.”
“Can I say something here?” Gloric chimed in. Seeing no protests, he continued. “Getting into the NIGHT base won’t be that much trouble. I can access most of the security protocols fairly easily, if the Nightpath’s associate can do the rest. We’d only need a distraction to draw the NIGHTs’ attention from our entry.”
“That may not be necessary, Gloric Vunderfel,” the Sigil said. “Your team’s actions have spurred the Inquisitor General and auric king to action, earlier than planned. Their machinations are already coming to fruition.”
That gave us pause. If Karthax and Thog’run had set their plans into motion, the city could be under siege, even overrun, within a matter of days. The NIGHTs were formidable, and could enlist the aid of the military and local enforcement if necessary, but the Inquisitor General hadn’t gotten to his position of power without making certain connections along the way. If he wanted the city to be turned over to the underraces under the pretense of battle, it would happen.
“How long do we have?” I asked the Sigil.
“My eyes show revolutionary movement underground, and increased NIGHT activity,” the vacuum beeped. “Estimated time before impact is three hours.”
I quickly initiated my lens display and pulled out my digitab to sync it with the network, trusting in Gloric’s protective subnetwork and knowing the assassin knew where to find me, in any case. Several messages from Madge and Striker popped up, along with quite a few other alerts. I ignored them and pulled up a display, looking at the news.
A number of articles appeared, detailing the dispensary bombing, the loss of a NIGHT operative to revolutionaries who sacrificed their own in the blast, and the brief ensuing military preparations. Karthax was depicted making an onscreen speech to Congress, alongside a picture of me in uniform and another of the auric king looking menacing. They had made a martyr out of me, and had been well-primed for war after decades of human-underrace tension. My reported death was the camel’s straw.
I put away the digitab and addressed the group. “We have to stop it,” I said, putting confidence in my voice. “Not because we’re the best equipped, and not because it’s our responsibility.”
I paused, letting them digest my words. “But because no one else will.
“I may have gotten you all into this,” I continued, “but it’s bigger than me, and I need your help to fix it. I can get to Tribe and the data drive, but I’ll need you to cover me. If not for me, do it for your friend. And if not him, do it for the city.”
I looked around at my companions, trying to make eye contact with each of them. “Will you help me?”
Doubleshot was the first to respond, chuckling. “You had me at ‘leave now.’”
I grinned, then looked at Gloric. The gnome cocked his head to the side. “I wouldn’t be much of a captain if I didn’t!” he said. I liked his attitude. “I may not be much help at the moment, but I’m in.”
I turned towards the Pitcher, knowing that I needed her, more than the rest. “Alina?”
Her face was placid, but I could see emotions warring behind her blue eyes. Her freckles were pretty in the sunlight.
“OK,” she said at last, giving in. I flashed her a smile, which she returned with a little reluctance.
I looked from Buster, who had fallen asleep, to the Sigil. “Thank you, Your Grace, for your help and protection.”
“You are welcome, Eskander Aradowsi,” the machine said. “Fare well, and expect communication from my Scribe.”<
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We said our goodbyes, making our way back through the arena and casino to our parked vehicles, which had thankfully been left alone by the assassins. Vasshka and Alina plotted a course back to San Francisco, and we headed through the mountains towards the setting sun.
Our little caravan slowed as we reached Mystic, Doubleshot noticing something in the roadway. My stomach turned as I saw what it was. The dwarven patrol lay in heaps across the freeway along with three times their number in the entromancer’s assassins. Alina and Vasshka set about the gruesome task of searching for life, finding none. It was no stretch of the imagination to determine who was responsible.
We helped Vasshka build a cairn with the nearby rocks, burying the dwarves beneath with their weapons. She stood stolidly for a few minutes as we prepared to leave.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I walked up behind her.
“He was my brother,” she said stoically. I assumed she meant Rodder.
“I’m...really sorry,” I repeated dumbly, tentatively putting my hand on her shoulder. She accepted it gratefully, reaching out to gently touch the cairn.
We gathered ourselves and drove away, leaving the assassins in the road behind us.
The drive was quiet, more so without Tribe’s music or chattering. When we had made our way around Truckee, we began assembling our plan for assaulting the NIGHT headquarters, speaking to Vasshka through the SUV’s audio system and trying to put the gruesome sight of the dwarves out of our minds.
By all accounts, San Francisco would be a warzone by the time we returned. The auric king’s army would have made their way under the city, drawing on its revolutionary safe houses to capture strategic and vulnerable locations. The Coast Guard and SFPD would put up a fight, and the NIGHTs would be called in almost immediately, but Karthax would have already prepared a tactical retreat, falling back to headquarters. There would be a brief window of time when most of the operatives would be in the field, and I had no idea what they planned to do with Alcatraz when Thog’run had his run of the city.
It seemed hard to believe that the Inquisitor General, a man who had worked all his life in the service of humans, would be willing to give even an inch to the opposing side, even if that served a greater purpose. I suppose you just don’t know people.
My own emotions were a whirl. Like most halfies, fourthies, eighthies, and so on, I wasn’t used to self-identifying as either human or auric, having spent so much time in the company of both, and rarely being accepted by either. The pluralist allure of Aurichome had never held much sway for me, as it appeared from the outside to be too absolute of a dictatorship for my liking. Yet, I was slowly become acquainted with the appeal of picking a side and sticking with it, if only to put to rest the constant, if not always perceptible, feeling of alienation. I couldn’t deny the simple sense of belonging that being a NIGHT had afforded me, but it was no real community. I wasn’t sure what I would do or where I would go if we were indeed able to secure the data drive and clear my name, but I hadn’t been able to think past that point just yet.
The plan, if it could be called that, would be to utilize the revolutionary assault as a distraction to gain access to the NIGHT headquarters. For the short period of time before the retreat, Alcatraz would be operated by a skeleton crew, allowing us to gain access to the perimeter fairly easily, with the help of Gloric’s technomancy. Vasshka and the gnome would provide cover support for me and the Pitcher, giving the two of us time to break into the facility, if Gloric’s keycodes worked properly. We’d still need Madge’s help for some of the security systems, but I was sure she’d come to our aid. We had been through almost everything together, and I trusted her with my life.
Having gained entrance to Alcatraz, Alina and I would head to the VPen and then the mainframe, which was my best guess for where the secured data drive was stored. I hoped that hitting the VPen first would allow us to free other prisoners of war and create a secondary distraction. I had no idea what we would do if the data drive wasn’t where I thought it was, but put that thought out of my mind. It had to be there, and we would use it to prove our innocence, along with the falsehood of Karthax’s war.
I chuckled ruefully at the irony of breaking into the island fortress, which had years before been a federal penitentiary, and still housed a number of VPens. Most people had spent their time trying to get out of the place.
I didn’t want to put Alina in the line of fire, but she was the only one that could heal Tribe’s wounds, or anyone else in the VPen. Vasshka and Gloric would have to fend for themselves, but I had every confidence in the dwarf’s ability to keep them both safe.
I shuddered to think of what they were putting Tribe through. Originally created as a band-aid solution for the limited space in local jails and federal prisons, the government had leveraged entertainment-based virtual reality technology to create VPens. Tiny chips that, with the appropriate audiovisual hardware and security systems to keep the subject in place, could create a virtual penitentiary anywhere, programmed with the requisite punishment. Lawbreakers could be locked up in smaller spaces, with minimal supervision, forced to re-experience whatever virtual judgment was decreed necessary.
Punishments were regulated by the judicial system, but in the wrong hands, the chip could be used to do a lot worse. The VPen was intended to give a shoplifter the repeated virtual experience of being apprehended while in the act of stealing, with the stomach-churning feeling of being thrown behind bars, again and again. It was supremely effective, allowing judges to give lighter sentences and penitentiaries to house more people for a shorter amount of time. Over time, however, applications began to be developed that would go beyond the original scope of implementation, particularly under the auspices of internal defense.
The NIGHTs would describe it as interrogative questioning; the revolutionaries called it torture. The public, tired after generations of such discussions, didn’t care.
With an unrestricted VPen, they could get Tribe to say anything they wanted him to. They would put a visor and headphones on him and let him sit in his own filth while they played scenario after virtual scenario through his chip. They would burn him, they would break him, they would humiliate him. And when they were done, he would swear on his life that he was a revolutionary, if his captors chose it.
I hoped against hope that we would get to him before that happened. We had to.
We made it back to the Bay Area around midnight, our stop in Mystic having pushed back our intended travel time. By the time the Bay Bridge came into view, we already had some idea of what we were up against.
At first glance, it appeared as though the city was on fire. Orange flames could be spotted, engulfing several of the smaller downtown buildings visible from our vantage. Upon closer examination, it looked like there were as yet only minor pockets of fighting that had broken out, which were corroborated by reports that Gloric was receiving on his digitab. Red and blue lights flashed on the bridge, local police and NIGHT vehicles blocking the roadway. Alcatraz stood solemnly in the middle of the inky Bay to our right, its ivory towers bathed in emergency red lights.
“Bridge is blocked,” I stated the obvious.
“Which way do you want me to go?” Doubleshot’s voice came through the truck’s speakers.
“There’s a harbor in the city of Berkeley, on this side of the Bay,” I said, thinking out loud. “We can commandeer some water cruisers from the docks, but there will be security.”
“On it,” Gloric said from the back seat, tugging his massive backpack out from underneath Buster. He pulled out a portable keyboard and strapped it around his body, beginning to type.
Alina swung off of the 80 towards Berkeley, following Vasshka onto a frontage road towards the marina. I made a quick call to Madge, needing her help with what we were about to do.
Her voice reverberated in my ear almost immediately.
“Eskander?” she sounded worried.
“Madge, can’t talk, being tracked. Need you to
let me into HQ when I give you the signal.”
“Eskander, I-”
“No time!” I barked. “Wait for my signal.”
I hung up, hoping that Gloric’s security measures held, and that our brief call wasn’t long enough to be traced.
I hesitated, unsure of what I was about to do, but put my trust in my instincts and sent off another message.
We made it to the harbor in no time, several NIGHT cruisers and police cars racing past us in the opposite direction. I turned in my seat to give Gloric a look.
“That you?” I asked.
The gnome nodded happily. “They seem to think there’s been an incursion on our side of the Bay.”
I snickered, glad he was on our side.
The harbor was mostly deserted, with only a few parked cars and very few personnel at this time of night. Tall oak trees swayed in a fresh night breeze, silent sentinels in the otherwise quiet marina. We stashed the SUV and Vasshka’s motorcycle a few blocks away from the docks, walking the rest of the way.
I had thought that we would need to move a little slowly for Gloric’s sake, but the little auric proved to be made of sturdier stock, and kept pace with the rest of us. I injected myself with some Oxadrenalthaline to mask my own injuries for a few hours. Hopefully we wouldn’t need more than that.
There were only a handful of police officers and two NIGHT heavy cruisers still stationed at the docks. The two factions sat as far away from each other as possible in the large parking lot in front of the shipyard, visibly wanting nothing to do with one another. I employed a shadowspell to send the police officers chasing a fleeing silhouette, and Gloric used his keyboard to override one of the cruisers’ remote driving systems. The gnome guided the vehicle away from the harbor and into the city proper, leaving the other cruiser to drive after it in pursuit.
I was starting to think that this was going to be easy, and did not like that feeling.
The docks were divided into several different sections, from a larger, metal-wrought wharf that housed large transportation ships to more moderate, wooden piers where privately owned yachts and houseboats bobbed. We easily located a vacant water cruiser, using Gloric’s skills to disable the digital security and power it up. It was a medium-sized vehicle, modeled like a speedboat crossed with a waverunner, with a ceridium engine that could do a hundred knots in open water.
