The Gate of the Feral Gods

by Matt Dinniman

  4. Donut – Cat – Former Child Actor – Level 39 – 300,000 (x2)

  5. Dmitri and Maxim Popov – Nodling – Illusionist and Bogatyr – Level 43 – 200,000 (x2)

  6. Miriam Dom – Vampire – Shepherd – Level 52 – 100,000 (x2)

  7. Elle McGib – Frost Maiden – Blizzardmancer – Level 47 – 100,000

  8. Bogdon Ro – Human – Legatus – Level 44 – 100,000

  9. Eva Sigrid – Half Nagini, Half-Orc – Level 40 – Nimblefoot Enforcer – 100,000

  10. Quan Ch – Half Elf – Imperial Security Trooper – Level 48 – 100,000 (x2)

  I was now the number one crawler in the dungeon.

  I patted Donut on the head. “Once the sixth floor opens, we’ll all be locked in together. They’ll be just as trapped as we are.” I tossed the ring in the air, and I caught it. I looked up into the sky, ending all pretense that I was actually saying this to just Donut.

  “You guys see this thing? I’ll tell you what. If you want it, it’s yours. It’s right here. Come and get it, motherfuckers. Actually, you know what? I have a better idea. No need to come to me because I’ll be coming to you. That’s my pledge to you and to everyone else watching this. By the time the sixth floor collapses, every single hunter who dares to set foot on the same floor as us will be dead." Donut, Mongo, and I moved into the stairwell. "This I swear on my life. One by one, I will break you. I will break you all.”

  Epilogue

  “How much money, exactly, have we spent so far?” the woman asked. “The man is insane. Did you hear that? He’s absolutely insane.”

  “It’s best if you don’t know,” Dr. Hu replied.

  “It’s best if people don’t question how a small NFC can afford this. It’s best if they don’t ask why.”

  “We’re well past that,” Dr. Hu said. “We’re going all in on him.”

  “He’s unstable. He’s going to die at any moment. And even if he doesn’t, the AI is going primal and is liable to kill the entire planet before they even hit the ninth floor. The Valtay are sticking their nose into everything, and the Kua-Tin underground are going to start a bloody civil war any day now. King Rust’s children are all trying to murder each other, and Princess D’Nadia is probably going to do something stupid, too. Plus this human is not nearly as clever as you think he is. You should have included instructions with the yam. They wasted half of it on saving that other crawler.”

  “He knows what it’s really for.”

  “Does he? I’m not so sure.”

  “My dear, he’s already shaken everything up. Even if he fails, it’s already a success. Every time he goes on that Odette woman’s show, more people sign up for the cause.”

  “They sign up for his cause. Not ours.”

  “It’s the same cause.”

  “He’s going to die, Porthus. He’s never going to make it past the sixth floor.”

  “That’s what you said about the fifth floor,” Dr. Hu said.

  “We all want happy endings,” Sadir said to the creature in the cage. It looked back at him sullenly. He knew the animal couldn’t understand him. “But sometimes, my little friend, we don’t get what we want. Sometimes our mutual desires are incompatible with one another. For example, I wish to be warm and dry right now. You want freedom. I fear neither of us are getting what we want this evening.”

  Freezing rain pelted down on them. It was just past ab-solar, what the locals called “midnight.” Heavy clouds covered the sky, making it especially dark out here. He couldn’t even see the lights of the thousands of ships and probes in low atmosphere. For a moment, it felt like the three of them were the only living things on this world. Him, his partner, and their quarry.

  He stuck a long, gray finger into the cage. The fuzzy monster hissed and scratched at him, lightning quick. The tiny, sharp claws caught on his flesh, tearing at his skin before he could pull away.

  “Fuck. By his left tit, that hurt!”

  The beast—a “cat”—issued a low, deep growl. Its ears were pinned to the back of its head.

  Sadir pulled his finger to his mouth and sucked at it while Gennrik chuckled. Gooey, blue-tinged blood oozed out of the wound and into his mouth. He pulled up his self-diagnostics to see if he needed an antibiotic, and then he cursed again after he remembered his implants were offline. The planet was off-limits to non-natives, and they had to shut their systems down to avoid detection.

  “It’s not him,” Gennrik said after a moment. The tentacle-faced saccathian put the hand computer down and stowed it on his belt.

  Sadir growled with frustration. This was the sixth cat they’d found in the area. He cursed the Syndicate rule that all non-crawler survivors have their implants scrambled. This would be so much easier if that weren’t the case. But then again, he thought. They wouldn’t need us if it were that simple. This is what we do.

  Sadir pulled the hotsheet from his belt and looked at it and back to the cat.

  “Are you certain?” he asked. “It looks like him.”

  “Yes. The markings are similar, but not exact. This one contains a human microchip, and the database pegs its owner as a man who was in the initial collection. Plus, this is a female. Her name is Contessa Purrington. Let her go.”

  “I’m going to shoot her,” Sadir said. “She attacked me. She drew blood.”

  Contessa Purrington hissed louder and batted furiously at the electric walls of the bounty cube. Sadir took a step back.

  “You are not. She scratched you because you stuck your hand where it shouldn’t be.”

  Gennrik reached up and pressed a finger against the top of the cube. The device disappeared, turning into a metal square. The cat bolted, vanishing into the darkness.

  Sadir pulled his bio-scan unit and wiped the rain off the screen. He grumbled, once again cursing the Syndicate’s stupid rules. He pulled the camo netting over his head and turned the scanner on, making sure to keep the device close to the ground so its presence was even further shielded from the scanners. He already had two strikes against him. If he was caught trespassing again, his warrant would be lowered to three figures. He’d be snatched right up for sure this time, especially with war brewing. Multiple wars brewing.

  As a Null, he already had a hard enough time making a living. Whole systems refused entry to his kind, despite the practice being illegal. The Syndicate didn’t care. They turned their backs on the rights of the non-council member races. Especially the null. They only cared about corporations, the rich and royal families, and the gilded homeworlds of the free citizens.

  So when the season’s Walk-On List was released, he marched himself right to the closest port, found a bounty crew who hired null, and he signed right on. This was the sort of crew where his two strikes were an asset, not a hindrance.

  The Syndicate knew about the Walk-On List. Of course they knew. There was even a holo drama about it a few seasons back. Rights organizations crowed about it. They wrote bills in subcommittees demanding the practice be officially condemned. Nothing ever happened. Syndicate security still patrolled the planets. They still hunted down and captured, and sometimes killed, trespassers.

  But the corporations, who were the real culprits? There was no accountability. None.

  Bastards, all of them, Sadir thought bitterly. Some of these worlds had guaranteed income just for being lucky enough to be born on the planet. And here he was, literally risking his life and freedom to make a living.

  Risking his life to track down a godsdamned cat named Gravy Boat.

  “There’s only one other cat on the scan, but it’s in the camp,” Sadir said.

  “Tits,” Gennrik replied. He thought for a moment. “Switch the scan to human. How many are there?”

  “Too many,” Sadir said a moment later. “There are 74 humans in the camp. Only six are juveniles. One of which is a sub-yearling.”

  Gennrik let out an annoyed trumpet noise. “Fuck it. Let’s go for it. If we find the thing, it’ll be the first A-tier target captu
red, and we’ll get the bonus.”

  Sadir hesitated, but only for a moment. The Walk-on list was shorter than usual this year, meaning the competition was fierce. Bringing human attention to themselves would be a big risk, but if this was their target, the potential rewards were astronomical.

  Sadir’s team wasn’t even bothering with the woman in the tropical zone, despite the unusually high value placed on her capture. It was a lost cause. The area had been flattened with a tsunami after Borant parked their executive headquarters not too far from there. The entire area had been washed clean. Nobody was alive.

  Still, dozens of hunters who’d infiltrated the planet were in the tropical zone searching for the prize. An equal number were in the southern hemisphere seeking that little girl’s father. That prize was lower, but he was much more likely to be found. Nobody had found shit yet. They were all likely dead, Sadir knew. They had to be, or they would’ve been found by now. That happened. Sometimes a season’s Walk-on list would have 5,000 names, and only one or two would be found.

  And this time it was even harder than usual. Normally they had access to the planet’s snapshot as captured during the exact moment of the collection. But Borant had pulled their underhanded orcshit by starting the crawl early. Sadir was sick of the extra protections given to these governments. A person couldn’t stave off a collection action because they had some project brewing. How was it fair? And because Borant started early, throwing everything into disarray, the probes had last done a backup two days earlier, meaning all the records, including the location data and the native internet backup, were stale by the time everything went offline.

  But they weren’t without hope. When a planetwide collection occurred, all citizens and sustainable fauna were placed into three categories: Collected, Crawlers, and Natives. The Collected were, of course, those unlucky enough to get caught up in the collapse of the societal infrastructure. In most cases, and especially in this one, this group comprised of the largest percentage of people. The Crawlers were those who chose to enter the game. The Natives were everybody else.

  As the game progressed and certain crawlers rocketed to the forefront, the season’s producers oftentimes pulled from their library of collected citizens to add drama. Who could forget that Valtay season when Crawler Hoon piloted his mech to the elevator leading to the 12th floor, only to find his own children—repurposed as sentinel hunter killers—guarding the exit? All five of them, even the yearling. Hoon had chosen to eat his own gun. It was one of the few times the cruelty of the game had been too much, even for the free citizens. Sadir felt a shiver come over him, remembering that moment. They’d banned the use of collected children after that. Pregnant women, too.

  Fucking Valtay, Sadir thought. They were the cruelest of them all.

  But what happened when the producers wanted to use a specific native, and that person couldn’t be found? If they weren’t collected, and they weren’t a crawler, that meant they’d survived the initial collapse and they chose not to enter the dungeon. Most of those people were dead. The attrition rate of natives oftentimes mirrored that of the crawl, though on a slower scale.

  The producers wanted to find and utilize the missing Natives. They wanted to bring certain individuals into the dungeon. But there was a problem. The rules were clear. They were untouchable.

  And then came the Walk-On list.

  The practice of hiring trackers to sneak onto the planet and hunt down and kidnap desired survivors was not even remotely legal. It wasn’t something any corporation could justify in court. But they were never called out on it. Very few people outside a few fringe groups cared. If the viewers could justify the subjugation of an entire planet, an extra crime or two was hardly worth a second thought. The practice was as old as the crawl itself.

  Finding someone should be easy. Even on the frontier planets with trash-tier sniffer zones, tracking individual natives was as easy as initiating a handshake with the planet’s AI controller. Earth had a perfectly fine controller system, better than most planets. Thanks to the Indigenous Species Protection Act, however, once the crawl started, all natives had their implants scrambled, despite being born with the damn things. They were “free.” Once the crawl was done, and this entire circus moved on to another system, the planet would be locked down for multiple generations. Sadir couldn’t remember exactly how long, but it was a while.

  “This is a waste of time,” he muttered as they trudged toward the settlement. It was located on a flat area a kilometer from the last known location of the cat. He glanced up at his partner as thick, almost-frozen rain dripped off his camo netting. “We should be searching for that man in the southern hemisphere. Or that other creature. The goat.”

  “If we don’t find the mark,” Gennrik replied, “we will move on. The captain is going to send us to the jungle on the planet’s other side. To find that dead crawler’s twin.” He held up a hand as the shuttle flashed by in the dark sky. They both relaxed. It was not Syndicate security.

  Sadir grunted. “As long as the weather is more suitable.”

  “I like the weather here,” Gennrik said. They crouched and ran along the cracked rock of a human street. This was a wide road, made of black rocks, rough to the touch. Occasionally, rectangle-shaped holes in the roadway appeared, indicating places where the human vehicles had been pulled down during the collapse.

  Sadir gave Gennrik a withering look. It was supposedly the last weeks of winter in this hemisphere. This was not pleasant weather, no matter what world you came from. This metropolis, once called “Seattle,” supposedly had a dense population. He had trouble believing it. Even humans weren’t stupid enough to subject themselves to this climate when this planet’s equatorial region was a paradise.

  The glow of multiple fires appeared in the distance. They’d positioned the camp against the side of what had once been a bridge over a roadway, placing tents where the freezing winds off the salt-water sound couldn’t reach them as easily. Fires burned in controlled circles, despite the driving rain. There were over thirty tents. The bones of wood-built structures rose nearby. It appeared as if they’d just started rebuilding.

  Remnants of the society they’d lost dotted the encampment. Sadir noted multiple gasoline-powered machines, mostly two and four-wheeled, open-top, single passenger vehicles. An electric light shone over one large tent, and music played from another. There was movement about. Despite the late hour, the camp was not asleep.

  “Check your weapon,” Gennrik said.

  Sadir examined his air-powered, flechette gun on his hip. He’d had it set to knock out a cat. He ticked up the dosage by three, which would render most humans unconscious in moments. He much preferred the reliability and simplicity of a regular stun pistol, but the signature of the weapon would alert every security probe in the solar system.

  The two hunters lowered to the ground and pulled the camouflage netting over themselves. They settled in to observe. Sadir pulled out his scanner and zoomed in on the cat’s location. Now that they were closer, he could see the exact tent the cat was in. It was the third tent, pushed back against the side of the hill. He cycled through the scan, looking for other life forms. There were also two humans in the shelter. He set in, mapping out the location of all the life forms in the camp. He pulled a sheet of ready paper and started drawing out a diagram.

  He had a thought, and he recalibrated the scanner. The Syndicate generally didn’t place security in native camps, but he did a sweep of all known syndicate security protocols. He really should’ve done this first. He caught something odd at the top of the hill overlooking the camp, but it disappeared a moment later. He zoomed in with his scope. There was nothing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Syndicate security. They didn’t do subtle. He risked a deep scan of the area, and the anomaly was gone.

  “Tell me something,” Gennrik said as Sadir worked. “Why do you do this? I heard you the other day, talking via tunnel to your mate. You lied and claimed you were working on an elemental bar
ge. I heard what you said. How much you hate Borant. How much you hate the crawl. Yet here you are, risking your life to make the production more entertaining.”

  Sadir bristled. Both at the invasion of privacy and the fact the sac had called him out on his own hypocrisy.

  “I have multiple children,” Sadir said after a moment. The very first tent had four dogs inside of it, but it appeared they were very small. Not dangerous. Just loud. He wrote that down. “They live in the null commune in the Filt system. The orcs have raised resident alien tax rates once again. If they want to stay, I need to earn a wage. I suppose I am just like the crawlers you see on the show. They are hurting others for their own survival.”

  “But there have got to be less dangerous ways to make money,” Gennrik said. “My family does this because we like doing it. And to earn money for the Prism’s buy-in bid. You don’t need this risk, not if you dislike it. It’s a big galaxy. You can do anything.”

  Sadir grunted. “That’s easy for a sac to say. The null have never had it easy. Even these humans knew what we looked like. They sold novelties with our likeness on them. That is how deep the hatred of my kind is rooted.”

  Gennrik made a honking noise. “They knew your likeness because your people were illegally poking around the system before the crawl. Besides, in the inner system, all are free. It doesn’t matter what you are.”

  Sadir didn’t even bother answering. They had a job to do. “We can pass behind the first two tents and breach along the fabric wall of the third here,” he said, pointing his long finger onto the sheet of ready paper, tracing their route. “The humans are asleep in the first two tents. One is awake in our target tent. We must be as quiet as possible as the dogs in the first tent might sense our presence. Luckily we have the loudness of the rain.”

  Gennrik nodded his assent to the plan. They didn’t waste any more time. Both pulled their weapons free and rushed up the hill toward the camp, sticking to the pools of darkness.