by Dan Schiro
“Cities built upon cities,” he said with a glance at Aurelia.
She offered a smug nod. “The foundations of Konnexus are truly ancient.”
They passed through an unmanned, trash-strewn access station on the other side of the causeway, paid an automated landing fee and climbed a few cracked steps to the surface of a narrow street. The higher platforms and mountain-like superstructures crowding the sky gleamed a baleful red-orange as the last few spears of sunlight penetrated the jagged vertical sprawl. Floating glowglobes threw flickering yellow illumination on the dark-windowed structures lining the lane, and a barely lit sign arching above them read “Welcome to Tatumu District, Where Industry & Dreams Thrive.” A bald, cat-sized rat gnawed at a suspiciously long bone in the streetlight ahead of them, until a pair of half-naked poxgane children ran out of the shadows, swinging iron rods to scare it off the grisly find and take it for themselves.
Bully growled at the children running off with the slick bone, and Kangor sniffed the air with a wrinkle of his wolfish face. “Be wary, little friend,” said the vycart. “There’s fresh blood in this polluted air. Pulse-scorched metal, too.”
Orion nodded and led them down the deserted street, opening Memory’s Prism to see the path to the business that was supposedly “Govan’s Resale Warehouse.” Within a few hundred feet, a trio of armed men emerged from the shadows. The two bearded poxgane wore black clothes with sheets of rough-cut metal strapped over their torsos. In their many hands, they carried spiked bats, rusty cleavers and homemade shanks. Their temba nubu companion was nearly bald with mange, wearing scavenged body armor and carrying a formidable pulse rifle over his shoulder. All three of them wore white headbands knotted behind their heads, a black hammer icon in the middle of each.
“Welcome to Tatumu,” said the temba nubu with an addled lilt to his voice. “Where dreams and industry thrive.”
Orion signaled subtly with his left hand to tell Aurelia, Kangor and Bully to hold. “I’ve been wondering about that,” he said with a friendly smile. “Whose dreams, and what industry?”
The temba nubu grinned, his cat-like ears flattening on his head. “Our dreams, and the only industry this world gives us.”
“You want to walk the streets of Tatumu after dark?” asked one of the poxganes as he waved a sharpened fan blade. “You pay the Black Hammers for that privilege.”
Orion rolled his eyes. “I was getting that, but thanks for spelling it out.” He sighed, feeling a tickle of animal violence from the spellblade in his arm. “Look, I’m going to be honest with you guys. I really don’t need any more red in my ledger right now. Plus, I’d feel bad about killing you, since you’re a product of your environment and all.”
The poxganes glanced at each other nervously, and Orion thought he saw their mangy leader chewing the inside of his cheek, perhaps reconsidering the mugging altogether. Then Dalaxa Croy shoved past Orion with her pulse pistol drawn.
“Stand aside, you wastes of bio-matter,” she yelled, her finger on the trigger. “You have no idea how important—”
She didn’t get to finish her threats before a fourth, this one a durok female, stepped out of the shadowy doorway to their left. She put the barrel of her modified pulse pistol against the back of Orion’s head where no lightshield would stop it. “Put the gun down, you skinny s’zone bitch,” she growled, adding, “I’ll burn a hole in his head, I swear.”
Dalaxa hesitated, the pulse pistol suddenly trembling in her hand. “I…”
With intuited timing built on years of teamwork, Orion’s crew flew into motion as one. Beneath his cloak, Orion conjured a short gladiator sword in his gauntlet hand and spun with blurring speed. His backhand stroke sliced through the pulse pistol and the fingers holding it in one fluid movement. As the durok woman screamed and clutched her hand, one of the poxgane threw himself at Aurelia. The Lady of the Jade Way lifted an open palm to his brawny chest, muttered a quick phrase in the Green’s rolling language and blasted emerald energy through his back. Kangor took a pulse bolt to his chest as he closed in on the patch-pelted leader, and the temba nubu’s terrified yelp ended with a sickening crunch. While the durok woman ran off whimpering, Bully’s jaws clamped down on a leg of the other poxgane to immobilize him. Orion moved in quickly, his gladiator sword transforming into a thin knife, and a single precise thrust was all it took to end the fight. When he pulled the squelching dagger out of the poxgane’s eye, he saw that Dalaxa Croy stood trembling in the middle of it all, her gun still raised.
“You… you… killed them,” she said softly.
“I sure hope so,” said Aurelia, standing over the four-armed corpse with the sizzling hole in its chest.
Dalaxa shook her head, found Orion’s eyes and slowly lowered the gun. “That happened so… fast.”
Orion glowered at her as he checked Bully’s black body for wounds. “This is what we do,” Orion said, trying not to soften his anger as Bully licked his blood-spattered face. “This is what we’re good at.” Satisfied that his dog was unhurt, Orion vanished his dagger back into a silver gauntlet that ran red with bright veins. “This is why I didn’t want you along.”
Kangor walked back from the twisted body of the temba nubu and loomed over Dalaxa. The undifferentiated cell clusters rushing to the vycart’s chest bubbled with throbbing tissue that would become a rock-hard scar in a matter of minutes. “I should not have given that to you,” he said as he opened his clawed mitt in front of her.
She handed over the gun without craning her delicate neck to meet his chastising red-orange eyes. “Good,” Orion said as he whirled back toward their destination. “Now let’s go.” At the snap of his fingers, Bully came to his side.
After a few more blocks past boarded-up windows and burned-out ground cars, they came upon a firefight. Six navy-clad SpaceCorps soldiers huddled behind a barricade of crates and rusted vehicles, one of the Union’s elite Legionnaires among them. As the lanky mystskyn Legionnaire shouted orders to the soldiers, they popped up to fire pulse bolts from their long rifles, targeting a plasticrete skywalk running over the street between buildings. The enemy returned fire from the square windows in the skywalk, peppering the makeshift barricade with blazing bolts. Heedless of the incoming fire, the Legionnaire darted out and fired a barrage of explosive rounds from his cannon-like multi-fire assault rifle.
“Stay low,” Orion yelled to his crew after the sharp explosions echoed over them. “When we get to cover, I’ll talk to the Legionnaire.”
They hustled down the side of the avenue, Orion hoping the overhangs and angles of the tight-packed buildings would give them some cover. As they made their last dash to the barricade, a few pulse bolts sizzled and died on their fresh lightshields. One of the corpsmen quickly noticed them.
“Incoming, incoming,” hollered the young, brown-haired great ape as he turned and leveled his rifle at them.
“No, no,” barked the mystskyn Legionnaire as he clamped a hand on the top of the soldier’s long barrel and gave the gun a rough shove. “Idiot boy, they’re not gangbangers.”
Orion and his crew scuttled to the barricade, and Orion leaned close to the mystskyn in the blue-accented white assault armor. “Sir, I’m Orion Grimslade III, agent under orders from Member of Parliament Zovaco Ralli.”
“Legionnaire Jabari Trax,” shouted the mystskyn over the pulse bolts hissing back and forth. “And I know who you are, Mr. Grimslade. I pointed a gun at you once. About a year ago, when you appeared out of thin air in the Grand Chambers?”
“No kidding?” Orion chuckled as a hail of debris rained down on them. Jabari had scales so dark green they looked almost black in the flickering light of the pulse fire. The outline of circuits pulsing with a gentle white glow beneath his scales suggested a high-quality bio-modification system that made the Legionnaire a stronger, faster instrument of violence. “You were there? Look, Legionnaire, we need to get through to
Third Ward—”
Jabari popped up again, his massive multi-fire rifle exhaling a dragon-like plume of flame at the structure. “Seems we’re on the same end of the gun this time, Mr. Grimslade,” he said when he crouched back down. “That’s the only way through to Third Ward.”
“What are you doing here?” Orion shouted.
“I’ve been sent to clear out these gangbangers.” He sprang up, fired his explosive rounds again, and crouched back down. “I just wish SpaceCorps wouldn’t have saddled me with troops so green they haven’t shed a scale yet,” he yelled over a refrain of loud bangs.
Orion glanced down the line at the panicked SpaceCorps officers and nodded. “What’s the situation, Legionnaire?”
“We’ve got a bunch of Plastic Sky ‘bangers holed up.” He shot a nod at the gray skywalk beyond the barricade. “They’ve only got basic pulse weapons and homemade explosives as far as I can tell, but they’ve got position for the time being.”
Orion nodded, wincing as a near pulse bolt sent a shower of sparks over the trashed car. “There must be a way around this. Our objective is only a few blocks past.”
Jabari Trax shook his head, his forest-green coxcomb wagging. “Sent a scout to check. That way and that way,” he said as he gestured to both sides of the street with his huge gun, “we found sections of platform ripped out, and it’s a long fall to the slums below. They must have torn it up to force this chokepoint.”
“How can we help?” Orion hollered.
“Hunker down for now,” said Jabari, slapping Orion’s shoulder. “When their pulse cartridges start to run low, they’ll come out to engage us, or they’ll run.” He shrugged and gestured at his troops as they returned fire over the barricade. “These ‘bangers are nothing but kids. We’ll tear them up as soon as they lose position.”
“We’ll… be ready.” Orion flashed him a joyless thumbs-up. “But maybe if we can…” He trailed off as he heard a faint hum behind them.
Orion looked back into the flickering yellow light of the glowglobes and saw four hover cars race into view and turn sharply, drifting to a sideways stop perhaps a hundred feet from them. Young men and women dressed in motley armor piled out of the cars, each of them wearing a streaming white headband with a bold black hammer icon. They moved quickly, arranging themselves behind the resting vehicles and readying their pulse weapons. When they started blasting, Orion, his crew, and the SpaceCorps soldiers found themselves caught in a crossfire between the Plastic Sky and the Black Hammers. Lightshields buzzed all around Orion, absorbing what bolts they could before they burned out. The off-balance SpaceCorps troops turned and fired back at the new enemy, but as they did, their first dance partners fired over the barricade to drain their lightshields further still.
“Aurelia, throw it up,” Orion shouted as he reached into his smartcloak.
The Lady of the Jade Way stood tall amid the chaos and lifted her arms. She cried out with an alien incantation, and a swirling sphere of green light expanded from her body. The SpaceCorps troops looked up in awe as muffled pulse bolts from both sides rippled harmlessly against Aurelia’s force field.
“Stop staring, assholes,” Jabari shouted at his young squad. “Snap in some fresh cartridges, switch out your lightshields, hurry,” he bellowed. “Miracles don’t last forever!”
Assorted aliens wearing pink-painted plastic masks flooded out of the buildings connected to the skywalk, and Orion thought the hardened gangland soldiers looked far from the wannabes Jabari Trax had supposed. They fired pulse pistols and hurled incendiaries, and Orion saw the strain on Aurelia’s face grow with each hit.
“Can’t hold this forever,” she grunted, glancing in Orion’s direction. “You got something?”
The Legionnaire shouted more orders at the corpsmen, and Kangor and Bully came to Orion’s side, both bristling for battle. Orion simply held up the brass-plated datacube he had pulled from his smartcloak when they first got caught in the crossfire. “Already sent the signal.”
“To whom?” cried Dalaxa Croy as she checked her depleted lightshield. “Are you friendly with god?!”
Tucking away the datacube, Orion put his left hand on her shoulder and conjured a round shield from the liquid metal armoring his right hand. “Help is on the way,” he told her as their eyes locked. “Stay close to me, and be ready to move.” He looked up. “Aurelia, hold the field!”
Aurelia cursed, a filthy stream of obscenities accumulated over centuries. The Lady of the Jade Way trembled with strain, yet her eggshell of green light remained. When it seemed she might fall to her knees, Orion heard the roar of an ion engine as if underwater. He looked up to see the blurry image of a Briarhearts squadron saucer. The round dropship descended over the narrow streets of Tatumu, its dark circle dotted by an array of white-hot landing thrusters.
The barrage of pulse bolts and homemade explosives relented as the gangsters turned their eyes to the new bird of prey in the sky. Long lines of black rope unspooled from hatches on the underside of the ship, and armor-clad figures came slinging down all around them. Big Zagzebski landed first, hefting high-yield pulse rifles in each arm, narrowly beating Adler, who came down chucking her specialty grenades. Seals shimmied down while drilling headshots with his tactical pulse rifle, and a dozen new Briarhearts Orion didn’t recognize followed. Pulse bolts erupted anew from all sides, and at that moment, Aurelia’s force field faded. The exiled Lady of the Jade Way dropped to her knees.
While Kangor, Jabari Trax and the SpaceCorps troops joined the Briarhearts in their brazen firefight against the two street gangs, Orion unclipped his lightshield and fastened it around his dog’s thick neck. “Bully, protect Aurelia,” he said to the pale-eyed dog as he pointed. He gave the dog a slap on his rump and grabbed Dalaxa Croy by her slender arm. “Come with me, no questions!”
Orion pulled her through the fray, swinging his mirror-like shield instinctively to deflect stray pulse bolts. They ran down a side street, and soon they came to a sprawling hole melted all the way through the thick industrial platform. On the other side of the hole, air traffic lanes crisscrossed like streams of fireflies in the darkness, and open fires burned atop the shadowy structures thousands of feet below the Tatumu District platform.
“Impassable,” Dalaxa said as she eyed the distance across the sinkhole in the narrow intersection. “We’ll have to turn back.”
Orion slipped his left arm around her tapered waist. “Trust me. Or better yet, just go with it.” He ran and jumped, taking them both over the edge.
Chapter 9
Dalaxa gave a short, sharp shout as they plunged into the abyss, but Orion held her tight and lashed out with the living metal of his spellblade. The silver hook caught on a tremendous severed tube that ran back into the old planetary platform, stopping their fall and Dalaxa’s cry abruptly. With a grunt like he was contracting one of his own muscles, Orion hauled them up the silver lash and hurled Dalaxa into the large tube.
“See?” he said with a smirk as he climbed up behind her. “Trust me.”
Dalaxa got to her feet shakily inside the dark pipe, flung the muck from her hands, and turned to Orion with a white-hot glare. “You’re… enjoying this?”
“Well, yeah,” Orion said. “Do you think I would do this job if I didn’t love it?”
Dalaxa tipped her slick head, her large pink eyes peering at him in the near-dark. “You’re… mad. Absolutely mad. I can’t believe I didn’t see that before.”
Orion rolled his eyes and started past her into the darkness. “Hey, you’re the one who twisted my tit until I said you could come along.” He tossed his datacube in the air. “Illuminate.”
“Where are you going?” Dalaxa sloshed after him as the datacube’s clean white light revealed the sludge-caked interior of the defunct waste pipe. Beetle-like bugs crawled along the soft walls, and another bald, cat-sized rat hissed at them and retreated into the sha
dows. “What about your friends, your dog?”
“They’ll be fine, they’re pros,” Orion said, reassuring himself as much as her. “But we need to get on with this. Every second we waste is a second the Maker Rings could be burning.”
“But… but…” She stopped in her tracks with a splash. “Do you even have a plan?”
Sighing, Orion stopped and turned to face her. “This,” he said gesturing at the ort-plastered walls of the tube, “is the plan. Or at least an approximation of it.” The datacube automatically floated back to hang between them, illuminating both of their faces. “We weren’t just going to walk up to the resale warehouse and knock on the door. ‘Hi, we’re on a secret mission for Union Parliament. We were hoping we could look around to see if you’re amassing weapons of planetary destruction.’” He raised an eyebrow at her. “But you should know that — you actually read my mission briefing.”
Dalaxa shook her head as if still trying to dispel lingering terror from their leap over the edge. “Well…”
“We were headed for a maintenance hatch on the other side of the gangbangers’ chokepoint.” He turned and started walking again. “It would have led us into the substructure of the platform. Which is where we are now.”
“Wait!” Dalaxa slipped slightly as she hustled to catch him in the dark tube. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “You had a planned access point and a route in your brief. How the hell do you know where you’re going from over here?”
“I memorized the layout of the platform substructure.” He shrugged as he trudged on. “At least a few levels of it beneath the blocks surrounding the warehouse.”
