The Zygan Emprise: Renegade Paladins and Abyssal Redemption

by YS Pascal

  “Because it’s from an old radioxi show, ‘The Shadow’,” he did the voice again, “‘The Shadow knows …’

  “Ah,” I said and forced a chuckle.

  “But little do they know,” Carl nodded at the other holos, then pointed to Sutherland. “Good job, buddy. On both ends.”

  I was ready to blurt out that Sutherland’s escape wasn’t my fault when I remembered I was Ward Burton. I said carefully, “Thanks …” What did I—Wart—do that was ‘a good job’?

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Carl whispered to me in a conspiratorial tone, as he motioned for his neighbor to cover his station.

  I nodded, swallowing hard to clear the knot in my chest. Was he inviting Ward Burton, or had he sussed out it was me?

  * * *

  “We’re shielded here,” Platt assured me as we eased into the comfortable couches in the lounge. “Great work.”

  I nodded again. “Means a lot,” I punted.

  “Benedict’s very happy,” Carl added with a broad smile.

  “Great,” I answered instinctively, before it hit me. Oh, my God! They’re inside! Benedict’s Andarts are inside Zygint! My hand quietly inched towards my Ergal. And Wart, our Wart, was one of them!

  “The one hundred mil in Deltan credits we promised are in the Krøneckðr account,”xii Platt continued smoothly. “But—”

  I tensed. “But?”

  Carlton spread his hands open. “Look, you’re still uncontaminated. Why don’t you wait until Sutherland cleans up in Phoenecia and then mute away. Until he’s done, we might still need you.”

  “Is that a request …?” I said quietly.

  Carl’s tone got cold. “Benedict always asks.”

  I smiled, and waved a hand in the best Wartian style. “Well, then, what do you think? Of course.”

  Carl’s features relaxed. He leaned over and slapped me on the back. “That’s my buddy. How ‘bout we go get some lunch?”

  * * *

  I managed to get away from Carlton over the salad, feigning an upset stomach. But exiting Central would be almost as dicey as getting in. I was shaken to the bone to discover that our Wart was a traitor, and worried that my anger and disappointment at his betrayal would be picked up by the NDNA scan on my way out. As the scanner light washed over me, I tried visualizing Wart’s delightful sense of humor and remembered his friendly welcome and support when Spud and I were starting as green catascopes at Earth Core. The technique fortunately worked, and I was able to hold back my tears until I’d made it through the lobby of the tall spire and out into the comforting blanket of clouds once again.

  As soon as the mist had enveloped me, I Ergaled back to Matshi’s kalyvi. Grateful to be muted back into Shiloh, I sat quietly in my chair, shaking my head. Spud was as shocked as I’d been. Not only had Benedict’s men infiltrated Zygint, but, incomprehensibly, our colleague Ward Burton, too, was a Benedict mole!

  “That certainly explains how Sutherland escaped,” Spud said bitterly, adding for the others’ benefit, “Ward Burton filed our nav plan and prepared our transport cell.”

  “There was never an E-shield …,” I muttered.

  “I doubt it, too,” Spud said. “He left the cage door open, and Sutherland was free as a bird.” Frowning, he added, “Assuming he was even in the cell at all.”

  “You mean a holo? No wonder he wasn’t talking, or even moving much.”

  Spud nodded. “As regards to shields, Carlton told you that Sutherland was cleaning up back in Sidon. If Central had put a temporal vector shield around Sidon—as Gary had said—how could Sutherland get past it to go back there?”

  The thought alarmed me. “Maybe everybody at Core’s dirty …,” I whispered, unconsciously shifting away from Spud. Was there anyone I could trust?

  Spud caught my move, and looked genuinely hurt. “Not everyone,” he added quietly.

  Oops. I winced. “I’m sorry … I didn’t mean …”

  Matshi stepped in. “It is a good question, Escott. How did Sutherland get through the temporal vector shield back to Sidon?”

  “I am only theorizing here,” Spud said, “but after we brought Sutherland to Core and sent him to the holding suite, Wart could’ve hacked through the shield and shot Sutherland back to Sidon to finish his mission. Nobody else at Core would have those skills. Our whole transport could’ve been staged with an avatar to fool us, Gary, the Drexels, and anyone else who is dirt-free.” He stressed the last two words with an edge in his voice.

  Regretful, I tried to pat his arm, but he pulled away.

  Ulenem laughed heartily at our gullibility. “You Terrans are so naive.”

  Eikhus looked at us and asked, “Let’s just assume Spud’s right. What do we do next?”

  I shrugged, adding through clenched teeth. “Obviously, we have to go back to Sidon and catch Sutherland once more.” The thought suddenly struck me: how had Sutherland caught on to us so quickly as impostors in Sidon, unless he’d been warned by someone? Wart, again?

  Apparently, Spud was thinking on the same track. “Our covers have been blown. Either we go back with our DNA muted, or someone else can.” He looked around the table. “In any case, if it is we, we cannot let Core know we have resumed our quest.”

  I agreed. “Wart probably has put a DNA tracer alert in the vector shield to notify him and track us if we show up.”

  Matshi raised two hands. “Then, we’ll go. Ulenem and I can do it.”

  Sneering, Ulenem pulled out his athame and ran a finger across its blade.

  “You sure?” I asked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ll be expecting a rescue.”

  Matshi looked at his friend. “We’re up for it.”

  Ulenem twirled his serrated blade once again and nodded with a broad smirk. Friends since childhood, Matshi and Ulenem had been inseparable during their first months of training at Mingferplatoi. When Matshi’d had his crisis of conscience and decided to drop out of the Academy, Ulenem had reluctantly given up his own ambitions of serving as a Zygan combat hero and followed his lifelong comrade into a relatively obscure career as mercenaries, soldiers-for-hire. The last two years had seen them waste their talents as partners-for-hire on several trivial missions for planetary security and police departments, or as Ulenem had complained dourly, “plucking Felisilsxiii out of trees.” They were both, obviously, itching to get back into big-league action.

  “Thank you,” I said, my voice cracking. “We owe you.”

  Spud glared at them both and said firmly, “Alive. We need Sutherland alive.”

  Chapter 5

  Tyre

  Phoenecia—two thousand years ago

  Getting Matshi and Ulenem through the temporal vector shield had been easier than we expected. Wart must’ve sneaked in a few loopholes, Spud surmised. He estimated we’d have a good chance to break through the vector shield and find our targets by using a Trojan horse. In our case, our Trojan horse was, literally, a Trojan horse. Ostentatious in the imperial Roman sculpture tradition, the colossal marble statue of Homer’s equine was M-fanned by my Eikhus-modified Ergal onto the grounds of a Tiberian governor’s expansive estate on the outskirts of Tyre. As soon as nightfall hit, our friends opened the portal in the horse’s belly, and crept outside. Why reinvent the wheel?

  I’d let the pair borrow my Ergal to deploy during their mission, hoping that we could rescue Yeshua--and our assignment--before anyone at Central found out. Matshi, anamorphed into human form, still looked, frankly, scary. With his seven-foot height, he towered over most of the villagers on the road to Tyre, and his broad thorax, its exoskeleton covered by Ergaled human skin, gave him the muscular appearance of a heavyweight fighter. Ulenem, whose normal height was less than two feet, had, in his human disguise, mega’d himself to look only slightly shorter and less bulked up than Matshi. And, he was equally intimidating, even with his athame and other weapons hidden in the folds of his robes.

  Raised in warm environments, both men were much
more comfortable in the hot, dry desert than Spud and I had been. With Ergals translating, their Phoenecian and Latin were passable, though Matshi did have a tendency to over-roll his R’s.

  Once inside the city limits, they quickly set up a skinos (a large tent made of gamil leather) on a deserted rocky ridge dotted with chaparral, from which they had a good view of the part of town favored by immigrant laborers, many from Judea. It was likely that Yeshua could be found among them. If Matshi and Ulenem succeeded in getting to Yeshua before Sutherland did, they could hopefully prevent the youth’s murder, preserve Earth’s timeline, and recapture Sutherland for us once again.

  At sunrise, Matshi stuck a head out of the skinos and shivered. He said to Ulenem, “It’s only 321 degrees Kelvin, bundle up.”

  The Assassin snorted. “Earth’s always in an Ice Age.” He draped his body and his weapons with several layers of robes, and quickly joined his partner on the trek to the workers’ camps in the valley below.

  Zygint’s monitoring of Sutherland had included contact metrics for his location, most valuably date and time. We’d figured we’d give our team a head start to reach Bar Maryam first and, using the data from the Zygint holo, sent them back in a few days earlier than Sutherland was due to arrive. Unfortunately, none of us had contact metrics on Yeshua. Matshi and Ulenem had to find him the old-fashioned way, pounding the pavement.

  The young warriors took that instruction somewhat to heart, and didn’t waste time with the niceties Spud and I had favored. Going from tent to tent in the immigrants’ settlements, they impressed the migrant workers with forceful questions on the whereabouts of a Yeshua or a Saul. Matshi’s report is a little sketchy on the details of their interrogations at this point, but he does note that the results of their efforts led them on several wild goose chases—Matshi uses a more colorful idiom—based on inaccurate answers from what I suspect were terrified and desperate browbeaten victims.

  Finally, after a couple of days of unsuccessful pursuits, Matshi opted to try a different tactical approach. Several of the “interviewed” workers had identified a gathering place about three kilometers on the other side of town that was used as a temple by some of the more devout immigrants. Matshi urged his partner to join him at the site.

  “It is too late,” Ulenem averred, twirling his athame. “We must first go ambush Sutherland. Then we have all the time in the world to find the boy.”

  “The Zygint holo showed that Sutherland should be arriving at the road to Tyre in four and a half hours,” Matshi advised, checking the contact metrics on his Ergal. “We still have time to make the ambuscade if Yeshua turns out not to be at this temple.”

  Ulenem wasn’t easily convinced, but in the end he reluctantly agreed to accompany his friend. Leaving the warmth and goodwill of the camp residents behind them, or not, Matshi and Ulenem set off for the Temple on the Hill.

  The Temple was a stone building of two storeys with wooden doors surrounded by shady cedar trees. Shivering, Matshi pulled his robes tighter and waved for his partner to follow him inside.

  The temple’s ground storey was divided into two discrete areas, empty except for lonely rough benches of pine, and dimly lit by a few weak rays of sunshine that peeked through fissures in the stone wall. At the opposite end of the room, was a charred, stained stone structure. Across it, a man in colorful robes, his back to Matshi and Ulenem, was bent over a table poring over an unrolled scroll. The temple’s priest, no doubt, Matchi estimated.

  The odor of incense pervaded throughout the chamber, and Matshi coughed to clear his throat. As the men entered, the robed man turned to reveal an exceedingly long black beard hanging almost to his waist. He walked up and greeted his visitors with more than a hint of suspicion.

  “You are the strangers,” he said warily in Aramaic.

  Matshi didn’t mince Ergaled words. “Clearly.” He took a step closer, towering over the cleric. “Where is Yeshua? Is he here?”

  The priest calmly responded, “Who?”

  “Yeshua Bar Maryam,” Matshi announced, scanning the room as Ulenem drew his athame and started slowly running his fingers across the shiny flat surface.

  The cleric calmly studied the visitors for a long moment, finally saying in Hebrew, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” After a pause, he added, this time in Aramaic, “They are here.”

  Matshi looked at Ulenem, frowning. They?

  “Well, then,” the Chidurian ordered the Temple host, “take us.”

  The priest hesitated at first, but relented after Ulenem placed the tip of his athame gently against the cleric’s ribs. He led them carefully up a narrow flight of wooden stairs at the rear of the building to a stuffy attic. From the doorjamb, the Zygans could see the attic was filled with rows of pine tables and benches, at which bearded old men sat reading scrolls of parchment and papyrus under the anemic rays of sunlight trickling through the gaps in the walls of oak and stone. In a distant corner, sat our targets, Yeshua and Saul, their heads together, studying a scroll.

  “So much for Zygint contact metrics,” Matshi muttered.

  Ulenem pulled his partner back towards the steps. “Saul has not killed him yet,” Ulenem whispered in Zygan. “That is good—and stupid.”

  “There are rules even for Benedict’s team, I expect.” Matshi returned. “A public execution could be more damaging to the timeline than Benedict intends.” He nodded at Ulenem. “Why don’t we go say ‘hello’.”

  With a lightness of step born of their training as hunters, Matshi and Ulenem each crept to one side of the ostensibly studious pair. Matshi observed a Zygan stun gun with the knife point that, concealed from the others, was aimed at Yeshua’s abdomen. Giving a visual signal to Matshi, Ulenem lunged towards Sutherland’s arm and knocked the gun out of his hand. Before Sutherland could spin around and fight back, Ulenem had grabbed the Andart by the shoulders, pulled his arms behind him, and snapped them briskly into the firm Zygan handcuffs called cherukles. Meanwhile, Matshi had pulled Yeshua up and back out of his chair, a harder task than he had expected. So slight in appearance, Yeshua was actually quite muscular and very strong. Matshi thought it’d be best to cheruklize his captive, too, just in case. Having to stun Yeshua in front of the now wide-eyed scholars to carry him out of the loft would raise even more questions than a fancy pair of handcuffs.

  All eyes in the attic were now focused upon the Zygans and their prisoners. Ulenem once again had drawn his athame, and rested it gently against Sutherland’s throat to discourage any thoughts of intervention by his fellow scholars.

  “Return to your studies,” Ulenem barked at them. Most did so obediently, to his visible disgust.

  Backs to the wall, the Zygans pushed their prisoners towards the door, out of the attic library, and marched them down the stairs; the Assassin and Saul in the lead, Matshi and Yeshua following behind.

  Midway down, Sutherland’s sandal caught on the uneven wood and he stumbled forward. Ulenem reacted quickly, but not quickly enough. As he fell, Sutherland ejected a microstunner from his sandal with his toes. The Assassin jumped to the side and reached in his robes to pull out his knife, but the tiny missile caught half of its prey; Ulenem’s arm remained hanging and frozen, useless, along with the right side of his body. The Assassin quickly lost his balance and started tumbling down the stairs. Sutherland had already rolled down to the landing, and with an impressive gymnastic contortion, slipped his cuffed hands out from under his legs to the front. Leaping to the bottom of the stairwell, Sutherland whipped out a second stun gun from his robes. He sprayed a dispersed laser blast at the adjacent floors, ceilings, and walls, which, made of an extremely dry wood, ignited fiercely and sent waves of dense smoke and flame up the passageway towards the second floor.

  Matshi had been able to hold his breath, along with his captive, for the first few minutes, but Ulenem, without full control of his torso, had tumbled helplessly down directly into a wall of flame. Matshi’s choice was clear. Re
leasing Yeshua, he raced down the stairs and leaped onto his partner, rolling him out of the ring of fire onto a cooler area of ash and stone. Alarmed, Matshi noted that the fire had already melted some layers of Ulenem’s Ergaled cover, and his underlying green skin, some of which was now charred to a dull gray, peeked through. Though clearly in pain, Ulenem gazed up gratefully at his friend. Uttering a curse in Izmal, the language of the Madai assassins, he croaked, “Took them long enough to warm the place up.”

  Matshi rubbed his partner’s hair and eyed the rivers of flame creeping towards them, “Just let me catch the bastard!”

  “Already out the front door,” Ulenem said ruefully. “Where’s the kid?”

  It was Matshi’s turn to curse. He had left Yeshua on the stairs, which had just collapsed into a flaming pyre. Screams from the attic had grown louder, as the fire had spread to and ignited the dry leaves and branches of the overhanging cedar trees which had then set fire to the shake roof. The attic above had become an inferno, showering torrents of ash and flesh, and chips of wood and bone onto the first floor.

  “He’s … gone,” Matshi said slowly, staring with fury at the blaze. A burning wood beam crashed just inches from their heads. “And we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Ergal!” cried Ulenem.

  “Right here,” Matshi shuffled through his robes. “Hold on to me.”

  They X-fanned just as the entire second storey of the temple collapsed on the floor where they had lain moments before.

  * * *

  The Chidurian Enclave, Zyga—present day

  Back in the kalyvi, we’d lost track of Matshi and Ulenem after they’d Ergaled back in time. Getting the Trojan horse through Wart’s loophole had been a stroke of good fortune. But, there was a very good chance we’d be expected, and they would be monitoring for our Ergals and DNA. Matshi knew to use my Ergal only for emergencies so it couldn’t be picked up and tracked easily, ruling out his sending us a continuous live feed. Even occasional routine communications would be pushing our luck.