by Isaac Hooke
The children had reported that there was a shield around the entire estate, an invisible dome that reached all the way to the outer walls. It was generated by One's avatar apparently, so the children couldn't inject anything inside the shield, nor move anyone covered by it, until Tanner clamped the trackable bronze bitch onto One's neck and cut off its powers.
Tanner steered the spyglass to the upper rooms of the mansion. The window to Jeremy's bedchamber was draped in blackness, so Tanner slid the spyglass rightward. He paused at another window nearby, this one uncurtained and offering a view into the hallway just outside Jeremy's room.
A new Direwalker appeared in the corridor every few seconds, walking away from the bedchamber.
"As I suspected," Tanner said. "The Direwalkers are coming from Jeremy's bedchamber in the upper east."
One had to be in there, too.
Tanner let Cap and Al try the spyglass.
"This is a good lookout," Cap said. "We'll place a scout at this window when the tunnel is ready."
Tanner didn't disagree. He led the others back to the first floor, and then down a second flight to the unfinished basement, which was made of bare limestone walls, all hard angles.
"I'm not surprised you never finished your basement," Tanner told Briar. "After all the money you threw away on the rest of the house."
Briar shrugged. "Insult me all you wish."
"Wasn't meant as an insult. Just a statement of the facts."
Briar sniffed. "Your barbs are like tickling feathers against the impenetrable hide of my self-confidence. And if you must know, I bought the house for the prestige of having parties on Highbrow Row. No one ever goes to a party in the basement."
"Well, here we are, about to attend the biggest party of them all." Tanner set a tracker on the limestone floor and activated it. A flashing blue light appeared at the core of the metallic sphere. The children would use the signal to tunnel a path to another tracker in the sewers nearby, connecting Briar's house to the underground staging area.
Jacob had wanted to use the preexisting manholes along the streets of Highbrow as the staging area, arguing that there was a tunnel close enough to Jeremy's mansion from the sewers already, and that setting up a new one was an unnecessary risk. But Tanner had overruled him, explaining that a bottleneck like a manhole was no place to launch a sally. The children could've just enlarged it moments before the attack, of course, but Tanner was careful not to point that out. He wanted a safe place to scout and observe before the final attack. And that place was here—you couldn't observe properly from a manhole.
"Time to go," Tanner said. The children wouldn't take long to form the tunnel once they received the signal, but Tanner and the others still had to leave the house through the front door so as not to arouse suspicion.
Tanner was the first to reach the main floor.
A Direwalker was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.
107
Tanner rested his hand firmly on the hilt of his fire sword.
"You there," the Direwalker said with disdain. "What are you doing?"
Tanner made a point of baring his canine teeth. "We're searching for krub hold-outs of course."
The Direwalker eyed him sceptically. "This house was searched hours ago." The Direwalker gazed past Tanner, and raised an eyebrow when it saw the others on the stairway. "You're all unit leaders?"
Tanner let vitra fill him from the sword, and as the power flowed through him he felt invincible. A surge of recklessness gripped his heart, and it took all his restraint not to draw the sword and cut down the Direwalker right there.
"I'm the only unit leader here," Tanner said.
The Direwalker spat some strange, guttural words. It was testing him by speaking a tongue known only to gols, or Direwalkers.
Some of his restraint left him, and Tanner drew his sword and touched it to the Direwalker's neck. He was careful not to let the vitra ignite it—he wanted the sword to seem ordinary for now. "Enough posturing, unit," Tanner said. "We're doing our jobs. You do yours."
Tanner sensed movement at the edge of his vision, and he glanced down the hall to see another Direwalker make a hasty retreat through the front door. The second Direwalker had obviously seen the whole incident, and Tanner was glad now that he hadn't killed this one. That action could've brought the whole army down on the house.
Tanner pulled back the blade, scowled at the Direwalker, and sheathed his weapon.
"You will answer to my unit leader for that," the Direwalker snarled.
Tanner shrugged. He glanced over his shoulder at the others. "With me, units!"
The Direwalker smirked. "You're trying too hard."
Tanner ignored the comment and led the others into the living room, where he sat himself down on one of the sealskin couches and did his best to make himself look comfortable. Cap, Al, and Briar spread out on the remaining couches and chairs. There was a long coffee table in front of Al and Briar, with an intricately detailed silver octopus as its centerpiece. A scalloped-edged area rug covered the floor in front of the table.
The Direwalker had followed them. It leaned against the doorway, crossed its arms, placed one foot over the other, and waited.
A cadre of seven Direwalkers soon came into the room, taking up positions along the walls. They regarded Tanner and his companions with sneers.
One of them, a Direwalker bigger than the others, moved with an air of command. The unit leader, then. Rectangular-faced, pug-nosed, close-cropped hair, taut features. It carried a large sword strapped to its waist.
"These are the units that threatened you?" the unit leader said to the Direwalker leaning in the doorway.
The other nodded.
The unit leader barked strange guttural words at Tanner and the others, and waited for an answer.
Tanner blinked calmly. He couldn't even begin to understand those throaty words, let alone voice them. "We will talk in the krub tongue."
The unit leader strode to where Tanner reclined on the couch, and bent over. Its face was only a fingerbreadth from Tanner's. It leered. "Why? What are you hiding?" Its breath stank of rotten flesh.
Tanner's fingers twitched toward his sword hilt. If he killed these Direwalkers he'd compromise this location and ruin his carefully laid plans. He had to use wits rather than violence to get out of this.
The Direwalker straightened, backing off to observe Tanner's companions scornfully. "You're an entire company of unit leaders? Tell me, where are your units? And why are you in this house?"
Tanner steepled his fingers, trying to puzzle out why the Direwalkers thought his companions were unit leaders as well. This Direwalker dressed the same as the other units as far as he could tell. Two of the other Direwalkers even had blades, though the remainder were swordless. The children must have missed some setting in the avatars of Cap, Al and Briar.
"We answer only to One," Tanner said.
The unit leader smirked. "I doubt the likes of you would ever get close to the Great One."
Great One. So that's what the Direwalkers called it. Tanner would have to remember that for future encounters.
The unit leader glanced at Briar with disdain. "You. You're not even a proper unit. What are you doing here dressed like that? Speak up, gol."
Briar swallowed nervously, and glanced at Tanner.
"Don't answer him," Tanner said. He remembered what Jacob had told him about the Direwalkers. They treat normal gols the same as humans. There would be no quarter granted if Briar pretended he was an ordinary gol.
The Direwalker took a step toward Briar, who was visibly trembling now. "Answer me, gol! With flesh oozing off your body in rolls like that, you have no right to that uniform." The Direwalker drew its sword and leaned over the coffee table, touching the blade to Briar's belly. "Answer."
108
Tanner shifted his fingers closer to his sword hilt.
Briar abruptly stopped trembling. To Tanner's eye, it looked like something had clicked in
side Briar's mind, something triggered by the sword pressed against his belly.
Briar slowly gazed up at the Direwalker, and then his features slackened. His tongue slumped from his lips and he drooled. He made a low moaning sound and rolled his eyes, putting on his best impression of a gol infected with the mind disease.
The unit leader lowered its sword uncertainly. "What's this?"
Nicely done, Briar.
Moaning and slobbering, Briar stood up. He stepped around the table, toward the unit leader, swinging his arms from left to right.
Unsure of what to make of this latest development, Tanner glanced at Cap and Al, but the two shrugged, just as confused over Briar's actions as he was.
The unit leader retreated, and flashed a three-fingered hand signal at the others. Three Direwalkers came to its side. "Somehow you've fooled our awareness receptors. You're not even gols, are you?" It glanced at its brethren and snarled. "Kill the krubs!"
Briar spun toward the coffee table and smashed his hand into the silver centerpiece. One of the octopus' silver tentacles folded open, and the area rug beneath the unit leader and the three Direwalkers fell in, swallowing all four of them.
Four down.
Four to go.
Tanner sprung into motion. He launched himself at the nearest Direwalker, drawing his sword and cutting down so hard that the blade sliced through the collar bone all the way to the hip.
He slid the blade out and cut off the thing's head, then spun toward the others.
Cap and Al had already taken out the second and third Direwalkers via similar beheadings. The fourth dashed out into the hallway.
Tanner pursued. He released a concentrated ball of flame from the sword, and it struck the Direwalker in the back. The thing was sent sprawling to the floor.
Tanner closed the distance as the Direwalker scrambled to its feet, and he severed its head. Blood squirted all over Tanner and the walls as the Direwalker toppled. He and the others had purposely taken the heads of their targets—they didn't want the things getting up again.
Tanner left the ghoulish scene and, covered in blood, he returned to the living room, feeling for all the world like a ghoul himself.
Briar was staring into the pit where the rug used to be. "Well! I thought they'd never stand in the right place!"
Tanner peered down. Four Direwalkers lay contorted in death, their bodies impaled by a grid of razor-sharp spikes tall as a man. The unit leader was perforated by two spikes—the first pierced its bowels, the second poked through the back of its head so that the bloody tip erupted from its mouth.
Tanner turned away, wrinkling his nose at the fecal stench.
So much for using his wits to get out of this. So much for preserving his carefully laid plans.
"Now I know why they call you Briar," Tanner said in a frigid tone.
"Indeed!" The fat merchant smiled heartily, just as if Tanner had complemented him. "Now you understand why the debt collectors never came to my house!" He glanced down into the pit. "Briar, Direwalker slayer. Has a nice ring to it wouldn't you say?"
"How many more traps do you have in this house of yours?"
"That was the last." Briar sighed. "To my great regret."
Like Tanner, Cap wasn't too amused. "What are we going to do now? We can't use this place for tonight's attack anymore, that's obvious. Others will come looking for these ones. They'll find our little get-up downstairs."
"Follow me." Tanner left the living room and returned to the unfinished basement. The children had already done their magic here—a tunnel was carved into the floor beside the tracker. Wide marble steps led down to the sewers.
Three New User scouts were just coming up those stairs, fire swords courtesy of the children in hand. They seemed surprised to find Tanner and the others still here.
Helen, the leader of the scouts, stepped forward.
"Problems?" the old woman said.
"More than you know." Tanner approached the opening. "With us, Helen. Bring your scouts. This house is compromised."
He drew his fire sword for light, and started down the perfectly-hewn stairs into the darkness. Al started to pick-up the tracker on the floor beside the staircase, but Tanner made him leave it.
The stairs ended in a wide, rectangular corridor built entirely of marble from floor to ceiling. Nicely done, children. Streaks of black swirled within the white. It was definitely an improvement over the mudbrick tunnels floored by frozen shit, though this corridor would lead to those sections of the sewer soon enough.
Tanner pulled up the city map in his head. He walked along the marble passageway, watching as his position changed on the map, and he halted when he stood beneath the location he sought.
Tanner got Al to give him a boost, and he secured a second tracker to the ceiling.
"We'll have the children seal up the other exit," Tanner said. "And make a new one here. Right under the neighbor's house."
Cap nodded. "Clever boy. But what happens when the Direwalkers decide to search that house too?"
Tanner smiled politely. "We wait until tonight before making the new tunnel, roughly an hour before the attack. Just giving us enough time to set up and scout."
Cap seemed about to contest him, but then shrugged. "Suppose that'll work."
"It will." Tanner confirmed that Helen and her scouts were wearing trackers, and then he instructed her to wait here and guard the tunnel until the children sealed up the other exit. The ambient light from that other exit could be seen from here, forming a dim square in the distance.
Leaving Helen and her scouts behind, Tanner hurried deeper into the sewers with Cap, Al and Briar.
He needed to get those updated orders to the children, and set his plan in motion.
109
Graol floated among ten of his brethren. His race was called the Satori, a species of waterborne telepaths that achieved spaceflight while humankind was still in its Late Middle Ages. The best description of a typical Satori, one that a human being might understand, would be to imagine the body of a jellyfish with an overlarge starfish glued underneath, the tentacles of the upper body spilling over the lower appendages like kelp. Visible within the translucent epidermis were the four radial brains, each of which might seem large at first glance, but when measured using the encephalization quotient to compensate for body size, each brain was around the same size as a human's. Four brains, yet only one consciousness.
The coralline cave around Graol was murky, lit only by the glow of the other entities. Tiny particles floated by, waste products from the thousands in hibernation outside the cave.
The ten other Satori present were linked in a circle of tentacles, a formality, because thoughts could be exchanged without contact. Fhavolin, leader of the shipboard Council, addressed the entities, and her words sounded like a rapid series of moans and clicks in Graol's head.
"Graol has returned because the mission is nearly accomplished," Fhavolin projected. "Our victory is nigh. The virus is working its way through the neural net of the alien ship. Javiol, the Twentieth Surrogate, has succeeded. Scans indicate that the aliens are waking up and dying ship-wide. The destruction of the last vestiges of Species-87A is all but assured. I have called this Council to inform its members of the good news, and to choose a reward for the Twentieth Surrogate when he returns."
Graol felt his gastric cavity nauseate at the mention of Javiol, the Twentieth Surrogate—also known as Jeremy in the human simulation.
"A bit premature, isn't it?" Thason said. He was the Chief Biomimetics Officer. Thason was the one who'd created the human surrogates in the first place. Still smarting after all these years because Fhavolin had been chosen leader of the Council and not him, Thason usually took a position counter to hers. "Because a reward assumes that Javiol will actually return. Our victory is nigh, you transmit? How many times have we heard such a thing before? We've been on the verge of victory for the past two hundred years, according to you. Until we've actually won, and Javiol si
ts here among our ranks, any talk of reward is useless, if not downright disingenuous. To be frank, even if the aliens are destroyed and we finally win, the Twentieth Surrogate has so entwined himself in their false reality that I doubt his mind can handle the return. It almost broke Graol, if you recall."
All minds glanced Graol's way. He kept his thoughts blank.
"Remotely injecting your consciousness into an alien body for a short stint of existential fun and pleasure is one thing," Thason continued. "But injecting it into a newborn alien, a baby immersed in a virtual reality formed by the A.I.s of an alien starship, and then leaving it to live out its life in that reality? I'm not surprised most of the other surrogates have gone insane."
Fhavolin's algal glow became a deep red. "It was necessary."
Two hundred years ago the hunt had begun. This ship, the Vargos, had spent the first six years hounding the human vessel across their home system. The two ships had weaved back and forth, using the gravity wells to slingshot between planets and launch attacks. Finally the human vessel miscalculated and allowed the Vargos too close. The Satori launched all three fission payloads against the human ship, but the human defenses destroyed the first two. The last payload struck, and caused the vessel to crash into a moon of the largest gas giant in the system. The Vargos took up a position in orbit around that moon, and began energy bombardments against the downed vessel.
The decades passed. The Council had meant to keep the Vargos in orbit for a millennium if necessary. Time wasn't thought to be an issue. The Council simply hibernated like the rest of the passengers while the ship's A.I. handled the attack. They checked in on the progress every few years, tweaked some variables, then went back under.
But things weren't so simple. Eventually it was discovered that the energy bombardments were draining the Vargos to the core, and the ship was running low on power. The self-repairing hull of the human vessel was proving to be a problem. So the Council had come up with the virus idea.
