Born in Darkness

by Thomas Farmer

  “What is it?” Myrto asked.

  Victoria held up her hand in a gesture she picked up from watching the soldiers. She assumed the raised hand with her palm outward meant “stop talking,” anyway. That was the usual reaction from the others when Pallasophia or Photeos made the gesture.

  Apparently, it worked, and Myrto said nothing else. She also drew herself up a little straighter and raised her own weapon.

  The noise came again, closer this time. Repetition and proximity allowed Victoria to identify the source of the sound. Approaching them were two mastigas, small ones, probably more mikros. They moved slowly, carefully, obviously aware that the humans were holed up in a room with nowhere to go.

  She relayed that information to Myrto as soon as she was sure it was accurate.

  “I'm going to wake the others.”

  “Don't.”

  “If I don't, gunfire is going to be their alarm, and we don't need that kind of stress after that thing killed Isodorus.”

  Victoria considered that, then nodded. “Be quick.”

  The two mastigas came into view a few minutes later. Victoria heard motion behind her, but never broke her concentration on the hallway. The sounds behind her were not mastigas; the Technocrats did not move like the green-eyes. She had nothing to fear from those noises, and so she ignored them.

  Finally, she had something to pay attention to. Stavros joined her at the door, carrying a weapon similar to the one she took from him, but different in form. The instructional voice in her head told her his rifle was heavier than hers—his old one—and fired more slowly, but fired much larger rounds.

  Victoria nodded. It would do.

  “Location?” he whispered.

  She closed her eyes, listening to the sound of footsteps. Something else was there, just loud enough to be heard, but too quiet for her to discern amid the sounds of the Technocrat camp rousing itself to wakefulness. Instead, she focused on the footsteps of the mikros.

  “They're close. Around that corner,” she finally replied, gesturing with one hand at a bend in the hallway about ten meters from their position. “Follow me.”

  She spared a momentary glance at Stavros to make sure he followed, then moved to the corner in a fast, low crouch. She pressed her back against the wall just short of the corner.

  “On three,” she said, then counted. When she hit three, she dropped to the floor, shoulder first. She hit the ground, rolled, and came up with her rifle at her shoulder in the same moment that Stavros rounded the corner, standing upright.

  One of the mikros screamed, a high, shrill noise that sounded more like an alarm than anything else. She flashed back to some of her first memories—at least the earliest memories that actually belonged to her body and brain, anyway. Gigas or worse came running in answer to that call then.

  All of those thoughts passed in less than a second. The mikros was not even done sounding its alarm call when she gently squeezed the trigger of her short rifle. Training printed into her brain held the weapon still with the same precision of the trained soldier beside her.

  The bullets slammed into the mikros's torso, staggering it off of its feet. A single cough of fire from Stavros's gun took it square in the head and it crumpled instantly.

  The other mikros turned and sprang away, moving on hideously long legs. Victoria fired again, as did Stavros. Most of the bullets hit the walls, but a splash of vibrant red on the back wall indicated that at least one of the rounds hit home, probably in the fleeing mastigas's leg.

  Stavros surged forward. “After it!”

  Victoria rose. A movement driven more by instinct than conscious thought extended her hand and she snatched at the back of his jacket. She grabbed more roughly than she meant to and threw him backwards. He stumbled and fell.

  “What the hell?”

  For a moment, anger flashed through Victoria's mind. His tone brought out a desire for violence in her, but she choked it down. When she spoke, however, she channeled that feeling of violence into her words. “Chasing after it like that is a good way to get yourself killed!”

  “That 'thing' is a scout!” he retorted. “It's going to tell the others that we're here.”

  “You think I don't know that?” she growled. “How many of them do you think I fought down here? How many did I kill? Did you not hear it yelling?”

  Stavros nodded reluctantly.

  “They already know we're here. All chasing after that mikros is going to do is lead us into any trap they have for us.”

  “They're not smart enough to lay a trap!”

  Victoria's eyes narrowed in automatic disbelief. She knew he could not see the gesture, but it had been an unconscious reaction. “Wolves can set traps, can't they? Herd prey into the jaws of the other wolves? Mastigas are at least as smart as that. If there are others out there, and you chase after that mikros, you'll be running right into their arms.”

  She had only the faintest idea of what a wolf actually was, but the words and the analogy came to her nonetheless.

  Victoria had no chance to voice anything else as a shout of alarm from their safe room brought her and Stavros back in a run.

  Victoria momentarily unshouldered her rifle, using the stock to bounce against the doorframe as she careened into the room. She had never heard a shout of alarm from another human being before, but the sound sent shivers down her spine and her heart thundered in her ears as a single overriding instinct projected itself onto her brain.

  PROTECT.

  She cursed at the sight. Three fonias stood on their feet, menacing the Technocrat soldiers with their knives. At such a close range, and with so many of their own people around, their guns suddenly became useless. At those ranges, the little knife-armed monsters were many times more deadly than they would have been if the soldiers had a clear shot.

  To one side, Photeos rolled along the ground, grappling with a fourth fonias. The small mastigas were phenomenally strong, but Photeos seemed to be holding his own. In the half-second that Victoria watched him, he reversed an attempted pin and rapidly gained the upper hand.

  She ignored Photeos, turning her attention to the others. Eleni blocked a slash from one of the fonias with her rifle, but the thing kicked her in the stomach a moment later and she crumpled. Pallasophia and Myrto stood back to back, facing off against the remaining fonias as the knife-wielders circled them.

  “Stavros!” she snapped. “Help them!”

  He nodded, dropping the rifle and drawing a dagger of his own from his boot.

  Victoria put him out of her mind as well, returning her attention to Eleni. The fonias had her pinned with one hand on her throat. The other held one of their signature knives raised high, ready to plunge into whatever soft target presented itself first.

  She did not give it time to choose a target. Dropping her rifle to the floor, Victoria snatched the weapon she was most familiar with from her belt. The baton settled into her hand nicely as she crossed the room in bounding steps, the last of which gave her the momentum to smash the fonias's skull into a mess of blood and brains. Her stroke knocked it away from Eleni as well, allowing her to come to her feet again.

  A shout from behind interrupted Victoria's second swing, aimed again at the fonias's skull to make absolutely sure it was dead. The overriding instinct in her brain to protect those around her stopped her hand and turned her feet almost before Victoria was aware of the thought forcing her way through her skull.

  Victoria pivoted on her heels, taking in the scene as she dashed toward it.

  Photeos kicked the fonias away from him, and the lithe creature rolled backward and to its feet. It jumped away from Photeos and tackling Stavros instead. Fortunately, it lost its daggers when Photeos dropped it, but that only made the mastigas marginally less deadly than it had been before. It, and Stavros, rolled away as the mastigas savagely clawed at his chest.

  Pallasophia kicked the fonias away from her, turned, and dove onto the mastigas tearing its way through Stavros's bloody
clothing. The two of them rolled away as Pallasophia's limbs wrapped around the mastigas, pinning it with her legs before Victoria could get close enough to help. By the time Victoria passed, Pallasophia already slit the monster's throat.

  Photeos and Victoria collided with the third fonias at nearly the same moment. Reflexively, she drove the handle of her baton into its face, kicked it—and by extension Photeos—away, and slammed the baton into its skull. Knife in hand, Photeos grappled the fonias, pulling it the rest of the way to the ground amid a flurry of blood and steel.

  She turned toward the last one. Myrto bled from several wounds on her forearms as the fonias slashed wildly with both knives it carried. Without thinking, Victoria threw one of her own knives across the short distance, embedding it in the mastigas's chest. It screamed and lunged forward, blindly attacking the closest target.

  It and Myrto fell to the floor as Victoria and Pallasophia covered the few meters between them. Out of the corner of her eye, Victoria saw Eleni kneeling over Stavros, fiddling with something in her hand that she assumed was quick heal.

  Pallasophia reached the fonias first, delivering a brutal kick using her own running momentum. It flew a meter into the air where Victoria caught it, pivoted, and slammed it bodily onto the floor. One arm ended up under the mastigas, but the other remained free to rain down blows until it stopped moving.

  Victoria stood, looking around the room for more enemies to fight. When her eyes fell on Pallasophia, however, that instinct changed. Pallasophia knelt over Myrto, muttering something under her breath. Something inside her softened, and Victoria knelt in time to hear the last few words.

  “...not very religious, Second Lord, but...”

  A wet cough answered her.

  “May Selene's light shine on you forever.” She looked up and, despite the masks between them, Victoria knew their eyes met. “She's dead.”

  Chapter 13

  The view from any given balcony on the exterior of Odyssey's dome was a swirl of color to the human eye. Odyssey itself was fully enclosed, even the balconies and windows on the outside were fairly small compared to the vast bulk of the former starship. The closest thing the city had to a truly open area, at least completely open to the elements, was the landing pad that occupied the very top of the dome. Even that could be covered by meticulously maintained doors if the need arose.

  The surrounding areas, however, told another story. Much of that space was open to the sky, built to be a deliberate contrast to the vast bulk of the capital city proper. Those outlying towns, themselves cities in their own right, stretched off in every direction around Odyssey in a mixture of architectural styles spanning a thousand years. Most of them had, at one point or another, been fairly far away from Odyssey, but as their footprint grew, separation shrank.

  Now, many of the surrounding cities were literally attached to Odyssey itself. Bridges and causeways spanned gaps between buildings built on Prosgeiosi and the outer shell of the ship that brought them to that planet in the first place. Those bridges connected to what were at one point in the distant past docking bays or large personnel hatches. Now, those vast doors stood permanently open, admitting a constant flow of foot and vehicle traffic in every direction.

  In and among the colors of the building and landscape themselves moved people and vehicles in a vibrant profusion of color as well. By far, blue and green were the dominant colors worn by those moving around, the robes of thousands of Second and Third Lords creating a visual sea of blue-green. Here and there yellow robed Fourth Lords congregated and groups of orange-clad Fifth Lords and even red Sixth Lords moved through the crowd.

  From Odyssey's upper balconies, however, the effect was muted. The smear of color as people moved around the streets far below was much less interesting than the vista of the cities themselves or the landscape beyond. Odyssey and its child cities sat in the middle of a vast open plain, the one of the largest in Prosgeiosi's temperate zone, chosen over a thousand years ago as humanity's new home.

  Unlike most, Second Lord Panatakis was actually more interested in the people moving down below than the mountains in the distance. Without serious focus, he could not really hear things at that distance, anyway. Certain sounds echoed, but most of those heralded some sort of violence: gunfire, explosions, and the like. Odyssey was thankfully free of that type of noise. The general press of humanity produced more than enough noise to echo off those mountains, but the image that came to his brain was unclear, muddy. He tended to ignore sound like that.

  If Panatakis really wanted to see the mountains that badly, all he had to do was reconfigure his implants so that they processed visual data the same way everyone else did. He rarely did that and much preferred to live in the world as he saw it now. Sounds produced splashes of color whose brightness and shade corresponded to loudness and pitch. He could do the opposite with light, but for the moment his focus was on sound, and he allowed no optical data into his brain.

  Standing on his balcony, he could “see” everything that made a noise loud enough to hear. Picking individual things out of the cacophony was not easy. Especially with an entire city's worth of noise, the exercise was much like a normally-sighted person trying to solve a hidden image puzzle.

  Complicating the difficulty was that none of the people below him stayed in the same place. He would begin to pick one out of the crowd, then they would vanish into a loud conversation or enter a vehicle or building. Sometimes, Panatakis could listen to the noises they made long enough to start to get a picture of what a person looked like. Truly identifying people, even those he knew, from this distance was impossible, but that did not mean he never tried. Everyone moved a little differently and even from a long distance some of those patterns were identifiable.

  Today, however, the press of people was too thick for that sort of detail. He could follow them here and there, but only for a few seconds. Rather than distinct splashes of color, the best he could manage was to pick out a slightly brighter swirl here and there. Vehicular traffic was also unusually high, drowning out all but the loudest sounds of people moving around.

  Those, at least, he could follow easily enough. Before Project Titan, he could not have identified more than a handful of the most popular vehicle brands across the entire binary. Since then, not only had he learned to understand the different sounds, but Panatakis could also diagnose a great many problems with their engines from up close. He could not hear that kind of detail even in the largest vehicles outside, but identifying them by make and model was easy enough.

  The clock had not even struck noon yet, but the majority of the traffic below was luxury models. Ironically, those were the hardest to identify by sound because they often came with an entire suite of noise canceling devices. When they made noise, it was a low, red rumble, dim and hard to make out past the louder colors of higher-altitude freight haulers.

  It made sense, he rationalized, watching the river of luxury cars fly by below in a streak of dim red so dark it was almost brown. Not only would people be coming to Odyssey to watch the Council session, but the day after that was the formal dinner and ball for the Titans. Unlike the Council meeting, those events were technically private, but a great number of tickets had been sold to those with the means to afford them.

  The following weeks marked the end of Project Titan, officially, and would be dominated by the ceremony where the six of them were “officially” introduced to the populace. Since the installation of his implants, Panatakis found he enjoyed pomp and ceremony much more than he used to. The plethora of information available to him, even with his senses no more sensitive than a human's, was fascinating. If he enhanced one or more of them at a gathering like that, he often learned all manner of interesting information.

  He also kept most of that from his Hexarch, informing her only of the implants' success at first restoring his sight and then later allowing him to adjust his senses so that the information from one could be routed to any of the others. He obviously trusted Fi
rst Lord Eurybia with his life, otherwise he never would have allowed her scientists to operate on his nervous system, but Panatakis had no real desire to play the secret-finding game that the Hexarchs prided themselves on.

  He set aside an hour for the perception exercise, and that time was nearly up. Now, as the last few minutes ticked by, he turned his attention to the landscape at large. People, vehicles, and all motions down at the street level faded into a seething sea of colors. Sparks of light popped in places as loud noises cut through, but nothing down there caught his attention anymore. Instead, he tried to picture the landscape itself as it spread out below him.

  This exercise required some actual visual data, which Panatakis slowly added to the stream of aural information running through his optic nerves. His goal was to try and create a complete picture of the area around him using nothing but sound, then compare it to how things actually looked. This exercise, like most of his others, was one Panatakis himself invented. No one else understood exactly how he perceived the world, and he quickly surpassed Eurybia's scientists in his understanding of his implants. Panatakis reasoned that if he could assemble a portrait of something the size of Odyssey's suburbs, then imaging a single room or building would be easy.

  In a way, it required even more concentration than trying to pick out a single sound-color. That was difficult enough, but once he acquired a “lock” on something, it was easy enough to trace out the path of color as it moved. Capturing an entire area in his mind required him to focus on things in every direction and keep track of a multitude of tiny sounds and colors as the world moved.

  Fortunately, Panatakis had years of practice at this point.

  His implants afforded him a great deal of control over his bodily functions and in moments, he stilled his pulse to the point that even its noise would be a quiet murmur in the background. For obvious reasons, he could not keep it up for very long, and so his goal became to piece together as much information in as short a time as possible. As his heart slowed, Panatakis pushed awareness of his body out of his mind. Bones, muscles, the sound of cloth against his skin, all of that was happening to someone else for the next few moments.