Message in a Bullet

 

PROLOGUE: RAFAEL BRAVO TWO

 

Harmony City, Schedar

Word of Blake Protectorate

3 August 3072

 

“Ever been to New Avalon?”

“Yeah, once. While back.”

“What did you think?”

 

Avalon City, New Avalon

16 April 3067 (Five years earlier)

 

“Go, go, go!”

“Covering fire.”

Machine gun on his right arm yammering. Somewhere, the crack-smash of a rail gun. The thud of autocannon. An armored figure dashing across the road until it is caught in a blast, lifted off its feet and thrown onto its back.

“Shit.”

“Parker!”

“Medic! MEDIC!”

“Put some fire on that building.”

Shifting his aim, yellow tracers hosing into the buildings on the far side of the intersection, blowing out walls and windows. Parker howling in agony. The ground trembling

“MEDIIIIIIC!”

“Oh shit. Ohshitohshitohshit.”

“Some fracking rescue op this is.”

“Bravo-Mike, heavyweight, ten o’clock.”

“Get down, get down.”

The air pulsing as a particle bolt screams overhead, detonating into a 10-story office building. Glass falling like frozen rain.

“Rescue? We’re the ones that need a fracking rescue!”

“Michelangelo Home, this is Rafael Bravo Actual. Fire mission, grid tango one-niner. Target is one Bravo-Mike. ComGuards Helios, six-zero tonnage.”

“Solid copy Bravo Actual. Alpha-Sierras inbound. Zero two mikes.”

“Two minutes? Shit. That thing is going to pulp Parker in about 10 seconds.”

“LT, we’ve gotta move!”

“Which building is the target in?”

“That one.”

“What?”

“THAT—”

The zip of a laser, a blinding flash, his visor darkening to compensate. The man beside him vanishing in an explosion of blood, brain and bone.

“LT? LT?”

“Unity.” Looking down, his armor splattered in red. “Unity.”

 

3 August 3072

 

“Little noisy for my taste.”

“You went downtown?”

“Mmhmm. Saw some of the old business district, before it was demolished.”

 

16 April 3067

 

Firing jump jets, gravity like a giant hand pressing down on his whole body. Landing on the roof, teeth-rattling impact. Then sprinting, heading for the next building, 20 meter gap. Quick glance at the display, metal monster in the road below pausing, turning to track him. Away from Parker.

Leaping, kicked forward by the suit’s thrusters, just as a score of missiles slam into the top of the building. Roof he was on obliterated, just vanishing, slabs of ferrocrete hurtling through the air like meteorites. Roof on the other side coming up fast. Off-balance, the blast wave smacking into his back. Landing hard, forward shoulder roll, then up and running again. The ’Mech lumbering, tracking him, turning in a tight circle.

Flashes of laser fire from the squad’s position. Pinpricks, scratching the thing’s armor. The pilot hesitating, swinging back towards the squad. Laser and particle cannon fire from the thing’s arms lighting up their position. Screech of static over the taccom. Hope they’re okay.

Now.

Jets fire, he is airborne. Coming down. Right on top of the thing’s head. Scrabbling for a handhold, stop himself from falling off. Machinegun pointing down, blazing away at the ferroglass canopy. The thing twisting left and right, trying to shake him. Its own shoulder-mounted missile pod getting in the way of the hand trying to swat him.

Keep firing. Ammo counter in the bottom left of his HUD dropping, down into double digits. There, a sensor cluster. Switching his aim, blasting free a fist-sized lump of electronics. The Mech jarring, bumping now, running. Towards the nearest building. Crashing straight into the façade.

“Shiiii—” And he is airborne again.

 

3 August 3072

 

“Business or pleasure?”

“Business. Had to see a guy about a girl.”

 

16 April 3067

 

Groggily opening his eyes. Lying on his back in the middle of the road. The ’Mech pulling itself out of the ruined building, triggering small landslides of rubble. Walking back towards him, ground thumping with each step. Raising one foot over his head.

Can’t even think of anything clever to say. “Frack you,” he tells the foot. It doesn’t seem impressed.

The rolling boom of fighter engines. The air screaming as pulses of energy hammer into the Helios, staggering it. The foot crashing down, inches from his head. A dark blur as the fighter passes overhead, the boom peaking then dropping into a fading Doppler-roar. The ‘Mech turning, just as the scream of the second fighter becomes audible, laser blasts punching into the rear of the Helios, transfixing it, crucifying it. The head engulfed in flames, blowing open, pilot rocketing up, still flaming, then coming down again like a human star shell. The machine sinking first to its knees, then keeling slowly over to one side.

Back on his feet now, the way forward clear, sprinting, past the screaming still-burning MechWarrior, jumping, through the windows on the 20^th story, glass giving way, showering across the floor. Office floor, rows of desks, chairs, terminals, all shoved away from the windows. Comes down next to a soldier with a gyrojet rifle, uniform so dirty and torn no insignia is visible, just standing, looking puzzled.

Opening his mouth: “Whose side are you—”

The suit’s punch shattering the man’s ribcage, flinging him through the air, impacting against the far wall hard enough to go straight through, leaving vaguely man-sized hole rimmed in red.

Other soldiers on the floor reacting, bullets pinging off his armor like hailstones. Picking up one of the desks and hurling it, sideways, plowing into two men, knocking them through the windows, screaming as they fall. Machinegun on his right arm hammering now, bullet comet trails piercing armor, flesh and bone.

Running again, straight through the wall, plaster bursting apart all around him. Big room, office, everything in dark wood and leather. Empty. Hearing the thwoop-thwoop of approaching VTOLs. The roof. Firing the jump jets straight up, straight through the ceiling, through the next, the next, the next.

Punching straight through the floor of the rooftop helipad, vague impression someone being blown off their feet and over the edge by the force of his mini-eruption. A VTOL circling the tower. Another one just touching down on the roof, man and a woman ducking, man with one hand around the woman’s arm, both shielding their eyes from the downdraft. Woman turning, the look on her face, not terrified, not hopeful, but resigned. The man looking back now too, looking frightened, then calming himself, assured.

Holding a gun to the woman’s head, pulling the trigger.

Back of her head blown out. Body falling. Man throwing away the gun, raising his hands. Smiling.

“I surr—”

No thought. Machinegun firing, punching fist-sized holes in him, decapitating him, blowing the body apart.

Looking down at the woman’s body.

“Rafael Bravo, this is Bravo Two, target is down … Repeat target is down, need a medic ASAP … Rafael Bravo respond … Rafael Bravo come in … Rafael Bravo, this is Bravo Two, respond please …”

A burr of sound as one of the VTOLs fires. His arm.

His arm.

 

7 August 3072

 

“Sounds memorable.”

“Absolutely.” Looking down at his left arm. Smartalloy material, synthskin over metal and myomer. “It’ll always be a part of me.”

 

 

1. FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE

 

Harmony City, Schedar

Word of Blake Protectorate

9 August 3072

 

The message cylinder gleamed like a brass bullet casing.

He held it between thumb and forefinger, twisting it so that it caught the artificial light in the concourse outside the HPG station. He’d seen a lot of brass casings on a lot of worlds, over the years, and thought perhaps he was done with them. Evidently not.

The concourse was one of the few above-ground structures in the claustrophobic, subterranean city, its high ceiling giving it a rare sense of space. The floor was tiled, each tile etched with a sunburst symbol, though the Word of Blake had a gang of blue-coveralled prisoners ripping them up in one corner, replacing them with coarse, plain black ones. A row of green down the middle of the concourse separated the flow of people moving in each direction, lined with artificial bushes and trees. There hadn’t been enough sunlight for plants to grow in over a century. Behind the man, a short flight of broad steps led up to the gilded doors of the HPG station, guarded by militia in dark red fatigues. Directly in front of him there was a fountain, delicate arches carved from crystal. Water was too precious to waste on such displays.

Outside, a ribbon of the planet’s ultradense smog smeared itself against the concourse windows in an oily rainbow.

Doorways at either end of the concourse irised open and closed like artificial aorta, pumping crowds of people around him. Most with their heads down, trying to avoid catching the eyes of the Word of Blake militia who stood in restless clumps across the concourse.

Retro-future Japonisme seemed to be the fashion, the men smooth-shaven with neon-dyed rooster hairstyles, the women in little-girl dresses and ribbons on everything. Not that he followed fashion. He just knew it was different from the faux-3D tattoos of last year, the ones that looked like they were moving when you looked at them from different angles. He supposed people liked to change the little things when they felt the big things were beyond their control. He had tattoos, too, across his chest, on his shoulders and down his back, though his were done with a needle and pen-ink and very definitely did not change with the angle.

He was a tall man, powerfully built, with very short blond hair and a neatly-trimmed beard, dressed in the latest iteration of the ancient M1 bomber jacket over a black-and-white T-Shirt. Everything about his stance and dress spoke of calm competence and precision. The impression was only spoiled by the left hand, the one that held the message cylinder, whose skin was clearly a different color than the rest of him.

He tossed the cylinder loosely in his palm, feeling the weight, or more precisely, the lack of it. Such a little thing. And yet, the wonder of the modern age. Hyperpulse Generators—HPG—squirt bursts of pure data through hyperspace, tunneling through tiny wormholes in the fabric of the universe to leap between planets in an instant. The message on the roll of paper inside had outrun light itself, zipping through a dimension beyond human conception or understanding. A marvel, a majestic middle finger to Einsteinian physics.

Energy is mass times the speed of light squared, Einstein said, and while the cylinder weighed less than 20 grams, how much energy did it contain after travelling millions of times faster than light, crossing 50 light years in seconds? And what would happen, he wondered, when that energy was released?

Someone jostled his arm and stumbled back a half-step. Eyes blinking in surprise at the polymer hardness beneath the jacket. A half-mumbled apology, followed by a hasty retreat.

He stuffed the cylinder into a jacket pocket. Read it later.

“Is there a problem, citizen?”

One of the Word of Blake guards from the HPG station entrance. He’d been standing too long.

Turned slowly, blinked a few times. Maybe that was overdoing it. Ah well. The guard seemed nervous, sweaty. Blunderbuss-like needler rifle gripped in both hands.

It was an ugly thing, despite the name functionally more like a shotgun or flamethrower than a rifle, only instead of buckshot it filled the air with a hornet swarm of angry, razor-sharp flechettes. It was to marksmanship what a spray gun was to calligraphy, brutal and amateurish, a gun for half-trained troops facing unarmored opponents. An odd weapon for crowd control, unless your idea of crowd control was running people through a paper shredder, though knowing the Word, that probably was their idea of crowd control.

Behind the guard, at the doors to the station, a new figure stood. The light that glinting from his mirrored, prosthetic eyes was cold and hard.

He tilted his head towards the figure “That one of, you know, them?”

The guard twitched, then ignored the question. His voice went up a little, squeaky with nerves. “I said, is there a problem?”

Shook his head, nice and slow. Smiled easily. “Nope.”

“HPG station is a restricted area,” said the guard, waving him away. “No loitering. Bad for your health, citizen.”

“Keep that in mind.” The man nodded his head at the tentacle of smog-slick spreading greasily across the windows. “You have a nice day now.”

2. OBJECTS IN MIRROR

 

The Demi-Precentor watches him go. The Demi-Precentor’s eyes are smooth, featureless, mirror-bright, and each can look into a world invisible to ordinary eyes. He clenches the muscles about his eyes slightly, switching from visible light to thermal vision, and sees the roiling body heat rising from the hurried crowd, the cool greens and blues of the floor tiles, the dark purple of the guards’ boron-carbide body armor. In this view, the man’s prosthetic myomer left arm leaps out, a well of black against the mountains of red around it.

The Demi-Precentor purses his lips, thoughtful, as the man walks away. He is here to hunt, and the man with the prosthetic arm is not his prey, but he has not survived this long by ignoring details. He mentally files the image away.

“Is something wrong, Demi-Precentor Yeager?” An Adept beside him shifts slightly from foot to foot. In thermal vision, the man’s face is so red it is almost pink. The man named Yeager looks at the Adept silently, knowing the Adept will see himself reflected there, knowing how uncomfortable that will make him.

This is an easy game for him to play, now. Almost too easy. “I don’t know. Is there, Adept?” Making people wriggle on your hook, with that stunned mullet look.

“N-no, sir.”

“No?” He turns fully to face the Adept. “Then you have found this woman? She has not evaded your security? She is now in your custody? There is no danger she will escape? I have wasted my time coming here?”

“Yes, I mean, no sir,” hands clasped behind his back now, doubtless to stop them from trembling. “We caught the smuggler who brought her here, sir.”

“And where is he now?”

Oh dear, the man really was pink now. The Demi-Precentor wonders if he is about to have a heart attack. Annoying. If he dies, Yeager will have to start over again with the man’s replacement.

“D-didn’t survive the interrogation, sir.”

A long-suffering sigh. “Is there anything about this operation you fools have managed not to completely bungle?”

“No sir, I mean yes sir. We’ll find her sir. It’s just a matter of time. Sir.”

“That is the one thing we do not have, Adept.” Yeager shakes his head. “They will be planning her escape, even now. Every day we flounder is another day they have to plan and prepare.” He rubs his chin absently in thought. “They cannot get her off-planet without outside help. You will begin by extracting a record of every message received during the last five days. No exceptions.”

The Adept salutes, pivots and not-quite runs back into the station. Yeager remains outside the station, statue-still. Sometimes, the hunt is as much about the wait as it is about the chase.

Such contradictions amuse Yeager, whose sense of these things has been honed by his time among the Word of Blake. The organization is itself a contradiction. A religious order that abjures the numinous and divine, and instead worships technology. Filled with technologically illiterate recruits from backwards, barbaric backwater planets for whom the lightbulb is a kind of magic. An order devoted to the unification of mankind, knee-deep in the bloodiest holy war the galaxy has ever seen. Up to its eyeballs in it, he chuckles to himself. United in devotion to the teachings of the Blessed Jerome Blake and his successor, Conrad Toyama, but utterly divided on what those teachings actually were.

And so he stands here, at the edge of the Word of Blake Protectorate, an angry tumor of over 100 worlds wrapped around the heart of human-colonized space, knowing these contradictions mean the organization will never achieve its vision, that it will never unite mankind, knowing that in so doing, it may achieve a still greater purpose. This too, is a contradiction, one that makes him smile again.

The Adept returns with a data crystal held in outstretched, shaking hands. “As you ordered, sir.”

Yeager takes it without comment. Holds it up to the light, in conscious mimicry of that earlier figure he’d watched, the man with the prosthetic arm. What had he seen?

And that is when the bomb goes off, rips through the HPG station with a ravenous, demonic roar, the sound hitting them just as the blast wave slams them down with titanic force, filling the air with boiling grey smoke and a murderous storm of ferrocrete and glass. The green, plastic plants are flattened or picked up and flung through the air before impacting against the far wall of the concourse. The crystal fountain shatters in tiny rainbow detonations.

There is a moment of silence after the blast, like the eye of a hurricane, broken only by the crunch of crystal as it falls to the floor. Then people begin to scream.

The Demi-Precentor staggers back to his feet. He ignores the frenzied crowd in the concourse, some rushing to escape, others running forward, calling names, searching among the smoking wreckage. He looks down at his own shredded clothes, turning his hands and arms this way and that, marking the cuts and burns with clinical dispassion.

He had been burned and broken once, five years ago, but the Word of Blake found him, remade him, gave him these eyes, lungs that didn’t choke, skin that didn’t burn.

He is not like these frail people.

The mirror eyes watch the body of the Adept cool, from red to yellow, then blue.

 

 

3. AN ENDLESS LOOP

 

Leftenant Theresa Sortek, heiress to the Barony of Thinveil, formerly of the Fourth Deneb Light Cavalry, more recently one of the most wanted fugitives in the Protectorate, sat on the narrow bed, rested her chin on her knees and looked out over the city. Not Harmony City, of course. There were no windows, not 30 stories underground. You could get feeds from surface cameras, but visibility most days was less than 30 meters so usually all you could see was a brownish-orange haze. No, the holoscreen that covered one wall in the apartment could be set to shown any one of a score of Word-approved cities on Terra: Rome, Jerusalem, Amritsar, Mecca, Varanasi, Lhasa, San Antonio, Riga, Waco, Jonestown. It wasn’t a live feed. You watched long enough, like she was doing now, you’d see the traffic and pedestrians repeat, stuck in an endless loop.

There wasn’t much else to do in the small apartment. That was okay without being especially okay. Just, she was getting used to small spaces.

A week ago, she’d crawled out of the shipping container they’d smuggled her in, and he’d been there. The big, quiet one, false arm and the real one crossed across his chest. The prosthetic was like something trying to crawl up the sides of the uncanny valley. You didn’t notice it at first glance, but the skin, the covering, whatever you called it, was a slightly different color than the rest of him, and completely hairless.

Her knees had been weak and shaky after two weeks spent mostly in a box barely big enough to lie down in. She could hardly stand. He’d frowned at her. “You okay there?”

“Yeah.” On cue, both knees had folded and she’d landed hard on the ground. “Just peachy.”

A slight twitch at the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile. “Sure.” Offered a hand to help her stand. His real one.

He’d lead her from the warehouse through darkened, disused maintenance corridors, talking over his shoulder as she stumbled in his wake. “My place, for a day or two. Until she can get you set up on your own,” he’d ducked under a pipe. “Euphoria.”

Euphoria? She’d wondered if she’d misheard, or was still suffering from Transit Disorientation Syndrome—TDS. “Joy,” she’d agreed.

He’d laughed softly. “Nah, not that. Euphoria Everclear.”

Definitely TDS. “Neat?”

The first two nights on Schedar, she’d stayed at his apartment. She’d been woken from a dark, turgid tar-dream by strange sucking sounds. A narrow strip of yellow light visible beneath the bathroom door. She’d crept over and pushed it open. Seen his broad back, covered in black and purple designs. A statuesque woman holding a bow in the center. Over one shoulder a castle with a woman standing on its highest tower, over the other, a snow-capped mountain. Surrounded by skulls: some human, some animal. The sucking sound had been him taking off the prosthesis, nerve connectors tearing free with plastic pops, causing the false fingers to twitch. He’d turned and looked at her then, not surprised. She guessed he’d heard her, knew she was watching, and the look was just to let her know he knew.

It had been a relief when they’d moved her into her own place, a safehouse on the lower levels of the Amity Undertower, sort of an upside-down apartment complex buried underground.

‘Euphoria Everclear’ turned out to be a tall, wiry woman who came to take her from the apartment to the safehouse. Eurasian features, a sharp chin, dark red hair cut boyishly short and eyes that could cut through steel. Theresa had to repress the urge to stand at attention whenever she came into the room.

“Euphoria Everclear,” the woman had saluted, noting Theresa’s frown. “Parents were Tri-Millennial Alcohol Adventists,” Euphoria rolled her eyes. “Salvation through inebriation. Hate the name. Call me EE.”

“Leftenant Theresa Sortek,” Theresa had returned the salute. “He mentioned your name.”

“Who, Nix?” a small shake of the head. “He talks too much.”

“Mm,” Theresa had said. “Very chatty.”

“Let’s get you some less conspicuous clothes and,” a glance around the man’s apartment, nose slightly wrinkled, “a more comfortable place.”

Comfort turned out to be relative. The new place was bigger, with the cityscape holoscreen, but otherwise much the same. A UV strip over the bed to stop you from getting Vitamin D deficiency. Small stand-up shower with a trickle of multiply-recycled water that Euphoria had advised against drinking.

Same feeling. Like she’d never quite gotten out of that smuggler’s storage box.

“Stay inside, sit tight and lay low, Baroness,” Euphoria had said. “We’ll get you out of here.”

Like she was one of those people in the holoscreen, still stuck in an endless loop.

 

 

4. CORROSIVE ATMOSPHERE

 

The man Euphoria called Nix strolled back from the HPG station along the underground corridor. Half the lights were either missing or dead, drenching the crowd beneath in shadows. The shelves in the stores that lined the corridor were mostly bare, trade now restricted to war-essential supplies and a faint trickle of food, water and other necessities from other worlds in the Protectorate. Air filters, dust-clogged from neglect, wheezed overhead. A disaster waiting to happen, right there. With a city of several million all breathing the same recycled air, all it would take to wipe them out would be one bad case of Fomalhaut Flu. He tucked his neck turtle-like into the collar of his jacket and hurried on. Tried to avoid standing under the filters for too long.

The atmosphere of Schedar had always been thick, hugged tight to the surface in the planet’s high gravity, allowing the byproducts and emissions from centuries of industrial mining to slowly congeal in the air, forming a thick, permanent, mildly acidic blanket across the planet. You couldn’t go outside without a mask, and unprotected skin would blister in an hour. Three or four hours would almost certainly be fatal.

So people lived like moles, abandoning the surface cities, turning their backs on the problem and tunneling underground. The result was Harmony City, and dozens more like it; clumps of surface buildings linked together by a labyrinth of enclosed tunnels, above a network of upside-down skyscrapers burrowing over a kilometer down into the ground.

Nix descended the steps into Friendship Square maglev station.

It was often said—by those who had no experience of it—that the one good thing about oppressive rule was that it got the trains to run on time. Evidently, the Word of Blake had never heard of this saying, for during the three years of their occupation the Harmony Hyperline had gone from unreliable to erratic to positively senile.

People adapted. Mainly by getting better at waiting in lines. At getting by with less. At squeezing onto maglev cars. Nix didn’t mind crowds. His size, the way he held himself, usually ensured he got a little extra space. He swiped his new Word-issued ‘Freedom Card’—an ID card that doubled as a credit chip, and incidentally allowed the planet’s central computer to monitor everything you did—across the reader at the station gate. The display showed his name, Nicholas Rei, his photo and his remaining credit balance.

Nix shuffled with the crowd inside, under the watchful eyes of the militia, perched on little platforms so they could see over everyone’s heads. Each team with a bristleback held gingerly on a leash—a non-native species a bit like lean, long-legged, porcupine-quilled hounds.

Nix waited on the platform, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, looking up at the announcement board. Newsflashes of Word of Blake victories on Benjamin and Arc-Royal. Recruitment videos. Wanted ads—Clark Fenlon, Victor Bradford, Theresa Sortek. The number of minutes the train was delayed steadily increased.

Line maintenance, the board claimed. Probably the tunnel wall had cracked, Schedar’s corrosive atmosphere not so much leaking as oozing into the tunnel. Might be hours, depending on how long it took to find the leak.

Angry shouting. The low hum of the crowd fell silent, tense. The Wobbies waded into the crowd, stunsticks crackling. Bristlebacks keening eagerly. The militiamen zeroed in on a man holding a sign over his head, photos of a boy and girl, under the caption, ‘Justice for the children.’ Everyone carefully not looking at the man or the sign. The shouts cut short as the sticks lashed out, and the jerking, unconscious body was dragged away. After a few seconds silence, the murmur of the crowd resumed, but now with an edge to it. Like a guitar string wound too tight.

When the train finally did arrive, the doors hissed open and a kind of tug-of-war began, the crowd eddying back and forth as those on tried to push their way off, and those off, on. Nix shouldered his way into a corner at the back of the car and closed his eyes. The press of the people kept him upright.

Stations passed. Friendship Valley, site of the city’s largest detention and re-education center. Three Sisters. Concordia. Amity Palace, where the megaservers of the planetary computer network were stored. The Hollow. Union Valley. Harmony Spaceport.

It was another struggle to get off at his station, but a thumb applied to the back at just the right location got the orneriest passenger rethinking their policy of standing in his way. He sighed with relief when he pushed free of the car and stood on the platform, an hour since he’d been at the HPG station. There was a tremor in the train as he stepped off, the massive magnets keeping it floating above the track flickering, letting the cars dip a little before restoring them to the proper position.

Behind him, there was a ripple of despair as the conductor announced another delay.

 

 

5. CIGARETTES WILL KILL YOU

 

Nix worked at the spaceport, loading and unloading cargo from the DropShips, once their landing pad had been lowered from the surface on colossal telescoping pedestals, and the worst of the planet’s pollution had been pumped out again. It wasn’t hard work, the industrial exoskeleton did most of the heavy lifting. Kept him busy.

Since the occupation, it could be dangerous, too. Schedar couldn’t feed itself, the algae and fungi they could grow underground would barely have been enough for population half the current size, so most of the food came through the port. Hunger and poverty were common enough to tempt people to try stealing. One night a kid had broken into a warehouse, twitching on something industrially psychoactive. Holding a vibroknife that sliced through a warehouse door, a shipping container, and very nearly Nix’s neck.

Kid had taken a swing at Nix when he saw him coming. Nix caught the wrist, pulled the kid towards him, off-balance. Kid’s neck snapped forward, bringing his jaw smacking into Nix’s prosthetic fist coming the other way. Nix followed up with an elbow to the solar plexus, dropping the kid to the floor, then stamped down hard on his neck. Blade when skittering across the floor and cut straight through a pallet loaded with cases of some orange kids’ drink. Bright, sticky orange spilling everywhere. Broken switch. The weapon couldn’t be turned off.

Best thing about the job was, it gave him an excuse to meet Jonas and Creed. Ex-military, both of them. Jonas Klimt was a Schedar native, short, pale and built like a bulldozer. Had spent time in the Light Guards. Creed was taller, vaguely afro-hispanic, something you couldn’t quite pin down. Never gave a first name or a unit, which probably meant he was ex-Clan. Big but not Elemental-big. A freebirth maybe. Nix didn’t push it.

Both were part of the cell.

Nix walked through the employees’ security checkpoint 30 minutes before his shift, waved to the woman behind the bulletproof glass.

“Hey Rei,” she said. “Bomb in Friendship Square.” She nodded at the holoscreen mounted behind the her. ‘Terrorist strike kills innocents.’ ‘Demi-Precentor Yeager calls for vigilance.’ ‘Harmony City united in defiance.’ “Crazy, huh?”

“What is the world coming to,” he murmured.

“Unity, Rei, that’s cold.”

A small shrug. “I’ve seen worse.” Done worse, he thought.

Creed was watching Sortek at the safehouse. Jonas was in the back, feet up on the long, narrow break table in the center of the room, his back to a row of employee lockers, watching something on a handheld compad. Cigarette held loosely in the other hand. His face lit up with oranges and reds by the screen. Probably watching an illegal feed of the bombing, Nix figured.

Nix threw the message cylinder onto the table. Landed with a clink. Jonas glanced up, switching off the compad.

“Nix,” he rumbled.

“Jonas,” Nix cracked open his locker, fished out his work gloves and hardhat. Pointed at the glowing stub in Jonas’s hand. “Cigarettes will kill you, my friend.”

Jonas shrugged, a muscular micro-earthquake beneath his work overalls. “If cancer wants to kill me, it can get in line.” He crushed the cigarette in an ashtray, then picked up the cylinder, toothpick-small in his hand. “This it? That was quick.”

Nix thought about sharing his musings on Einstein, mass and energy. Nah. One of those things that sounded better in your own head than out loud. “The wonder of the modern age,” he said instead.

Jonas snorted. “Used to talk about the same petty, pointless bull people have been writing about since forever. ‘We are pleased to announce’. ‘We regret to inform you’.”

“’Please blow up this building.’”

“Indeed,” the big man waved at the compad. “Bit of a commotion at our local intergalactic phone booth, quite soon after you left.”

“Don’t look at me, I only said the place could do with some redecorating,” Nix replied. “Although I did see one of their custom jobbies at the station. He might have been the target.” Manei Domini, they were called, ‘the hands of the Master.’ Cybernetically augmented soldiers, assassins and spies, the elite of the Word of Blake military and intelligence agencies. Bad news. “Glass-eyed bugger, shit-eating grin.”

“Might be eating dust now. Think he’s here for her?”

“No Jonas, I’m sure him showing up just after she arrived is all a massive, crazy coincidence.”

“I’ll bet,” Jonas tapped the cylinder. “Read it?”

“Not yet.” Checked his timepiece. “We’re on in ten.”

Jonas pulled out the long, thin scroll of paper stored within the cylinder, smoothed it out on the table. He scanned it slowly, carefully. Satisfied, he crumpled the paper into a ball, held a lighter under it, watched it burn until the flames nearly reached his fingers. Threw the blackened corner into an ashtray.

“A touch melodramatic,” remarked Nix, pulling on his gloves. “Garbage disposal is over there.” Tucked his hardhat under one arm. “And?”

“JumpShip in ten days.”

Nix nodded. “I’ll tell EE tomorrow. Zero Squared.”

 

 

6. ASKING FOR IT

 

10 August 3072

 

“Lean forward,” said Euphoria, holding something that looked like a staple gun in her hand.

Theresa obligingly tilted her head down, felt the cool metal of the whatever-it-was press against the base of her neck. Then a quick jab, making her wince. “What is it?”

“Subdermal chip,” Euphoria patted Theresa’s neck, an artist admiring her handiwork. “Tracker. Make sure we don’t lose you.”

Her neck stung a little, a dull throb, like after you got a vaccine injection. “That seems unlikely. I never go anywhere, and you’ve got someone here twenty-four seven.” The dour one called Creed was parked on the sofa in the living room now, watching the news. She didn’t watch much, herself. Got tired, and not a little paranoid, seeing her own wanted bulletin every 30 minutes. She’d stick to the cityscape holos.

Euphoria grunted, putting the thing that wasn’t a staple gun into a shoulder pouch. “Something like 80 percent of the city is covered by video cameras, and all that data gets stored in one place. If you, or even someone who looks a bit like you, shows up in that data, the Wobbies will know in a microsecond.” She took apart the phone, places a tiny audio receiver inside, then undid a panel at the side of the holoscreen and repeated the process.

So much for privacy. Theresa watched Euphoria work absently, then turned back to the holoscreen. She’d set it to Ise, Japan. The elegantly curved wooden roofs of the shrine complex barely visible among a towering forest of cedars. She knew the Wobbies had chosen the cities deliberately, to create the impression of the Word as the defenders of the cradle of humanity, of its holiest sites.

There was a kind of commonality to religious architecture, she’d found after days of flipping through the simulated cityscapes. Spires, towers, minarets. Patterns that repeated, over and over, in civilizations across the world, across the ages. Faced with the unknowable, the incomprehensible, people kept building the same kinds of structures, as though instinctively reaching for the heavens, straining for the stars.

There were churches and temples on New Avalon, too. Done in plasteel and ferrocrete, old forms in new materials. Humanity had reached the stars, but still kept looking up, still kept looking for answers to the same old questions. Kept repeating the same old mistakes.

Neo-feudalism was part of that. The title she was heir to, the title that had swaddled and cradled her throughout her youth, the title that had made her a fugitive, had already been old two millennia ago. People trying to mimic what they saw as the natural order—on earth as it is in heaven, she thought. Who gets to lead? Who has to follow? Same old questions, same old answers. Same old mistakes, repeated cyclically, over and over.

Her only problem was she’d been born at the wrong point in the cycle. A century ago, she would have cashed in on the family name, enjoyed a cushy posting in some rear-area unit like the Guards Brigade, had a handsome, well-connected husband and the expected number of children, lived her life in comfort. Now? History had a way of balancing its accounts, and the bill for her family’s decades of power and position had come due. Fanatics baying for the blood of any aristocrat they could find.

For a moment she could picture it in her eye, a cosmic set of scales, her own life weighed in the balance against hundreds of years of privilege. But the idea was too big, too big to matter on the scale of the merely human. In the end, she was just the wrong person at the wrong time. It wasn’t fair.

“Not fair,” she mumbled, mostly to herself.

Euphoria tutted. “Lot of lives depending on this,” she said. “You know our faces. You get taken, we all die.”

The cedars in Ise nodded in agreement.

“I didn’t ask for this.” Theresa heard the petulance in her voice, hating it but unable to stop it. Looked up at Euphoria, whose mouth was set in a thin line, biting back a reply.

Instead, Euphoria let her breath go, and just shrugged. “Who does?”

 

7. FULL STERILIZATION

 

Demi-Precentor Yeager sits in the security control room, in front of a wall of video monitors. The Adepts and Acolytes of the ROM section crowd behind him, standing. ROM is the Word of Blake’s security and intelligence branch, though the meaning of the acronym ‘ROM’ has long been forgotten. Yeager finds this forgetfulness entirely in keeping with his evaluation of the branch as a whole.

The bombing has been a disaster. The HPG itself is badly damaged, and there is no way to signal for replacement parts. A ship will have to be sent, taking a round trip of two weeks. Ground to space communications have also been wrecked. Oh, and a few dozen are dead. All because of one man.

Yeager watches the man in the video push a hover sled laden with four round, grey, black-lidded plastic tubs. Two HPG station guards halt him, examine a digital invoice presented on a noteputer. A bristleback watches the man with unblinking, alien eyes. The first guard jerks a thumb at the tubs while the other holds the bristleback’s leash and shifts his needler rifle. The man obligingly opens the tubs, then steps back when waved away by the needler. One guard peers in all four tubs, waving an electronic sniffer over the surface of each, checking the reading. Satisfied, the guard places a thumb-print on the invoice, then waves the man away.

The feed switches as the tubs are pushed into the kitchen beside the mess hall, where they sit unattended for twenty minutes, before erupting into a massive fireball that washes out the feed. It ends in static.

There are more feeds, of the man boarding a train, exiting, riding various elevators as he descends further into the bowels of the city, but Yeager is already bored. No challenge here. Schedar is almost uniquely built to be the perfect police state—its inhabitants trapped together in an enclosed, controllable environment, their every movement watched and recorded. No challenge, and no sign of his prey. A distraction, one he wishes to remove immediately.

“Adept,” Yeager beckons. A man leans forward over his shoulder.

“Yes, Demi-Precentor?”

“You have identified the man?”

“Yes sir. He is—”

“I don’t care who he is. You have his location, those of his family, his associates?”

A brief rustle as the man refers to a noteputer. “He and his family live in the Concordia Cordial Cooperative—”

“Is there any evidence he is linked to Theresa Sortek?”

“Not at the moment sir. But—”

“Lock down the Cooperative. Full sterilization. Agent CT in the ventilation system. Liquidate any survivors.”

The Adept swallows audibly. “I, uh, I mean, doesn’t that seem a little …”

Yeager twists his head to regard the man with both metal eyes, dropping his voice a register. “Is there some reason you are not immediately carrying out my orders, Adept?” The man shakes his head, mutely.

One of the other Adepts speaks up. A red-haired woman, Yeager can’t be bothered remembering their names. “Perhaps it would be wiser to keep him under surveillance, sir, until we can determine—”

“Fagh,” Yeager waves away her objections. “This attack was as amateurish as it was stupid. He would never have been a threat to any semi-competent security force. Further observation will tell us nothing new.” He sighs heavily.

“Never mind, I’ll take care of it myself. What else? Oh yes; If the two men on duty survived, I want them arrested for incompetence and shot,” Yeager rolls on. “If their commanding officer is alive, I want him arrested for treason and shot. If anybody refuses to shoot them, I want them shot. If you find any of this objectionable, please save both of us some time and just shoot yourself.” He rises from the chair and turns to face the assembled men and women. “Are there any further questions or comments?” An Acolyte’s mouth opens. “Think carefully.” He closes it. “That is all.”

Yeager sweeps past the security team, knowing they are looking at him, at each other, eyes round in mute astonishment. The fools. It is so hard to find good help, he thinks theatrically.

Although, on that front, he has an idea.

 

 

8. A DREAM OF TWO FACES

 

Every night, Adept Salome dreams of two faces.

Both faces are from Tortuga, the planet she was born on, so far from the core that ‘civilization’ was a thing you heard about rather than experienced. Where she’d been sold, at the age of six, into servitude at the local bandit lord’s household. Where she’d been tattooed on each temple, a wheel to symbolize servitude, a star to symbolize the lord’s wealth. Where she’d been beaten, starved, treated like an animal.

It is his face she sees first, his face as he beats her, first with hands and feet, with a belt or cane later. He smiled, when he hit. It is his face she sees, when at age 12 she climbs the compound wall and flees into the night, knowing there were worse things than beatings to come.

The second face she sees is that of the Adept who found her, shivering, starving, on the shadow of the HPG station. The woman who took her in, fed her, clothed her, gave her a name. In the lord’s house she never had one, unless it was salope, but the Adept told her this was an insult, and she would never, ever be salope again. Salome, the Adept had said, and she’d smiled. Her name would be Salome.

It meant ‘peace.’

When Salome is roused awake she is thinking of those two faces, those two smiles, the kind one and the cruel.

The lights are on in the barracks, and her squad is being assembled. Some shuffle out of bed slowly, as though dragged down by the planet’s gravity, but she springs readily to her feet. She stands at attention at the foot of her bed, the rest of the squad lined up down the room.

The Demi-Precentor strides into the barracks, and he gives them their orders. He smiles.

 

Later, when the doors to the Cooperative are opened again and Salome and her men are sent in to search, she will find the body of a girl, perhaps 12 years old, huddled alone in a closet. She will remember the Demi-Precentor’s smile, then.

And she will think: she has seen that smile before.

 

 

9. TIME TO GET BIBLICAL

 

Zero Squared was not so much a dive as a belly flop. A dark smear of dirty plasteel and concrete reached down a flight of sticky, unsavory steps, under a faintly glowing sign. A squared-off zero with an upside-down ‘2’ in superscript. It was a black joke for a diseased world: meant the opposite of oxygen, O₂.

The owner was a dreadlocked Lyran from Tamar who went by ‘Noah.’ Nonspecifically criminal, nothing sexy like the yaks or triads, but connected: he hinted at access to drugs, alcohol, black market electronics. Nix didn’t know how Noah managed it; Nix had never managed to catch anything funny happening down at the port. In any event, Noah was young, fashion-model handsome, and completely mute, communicating by lip-reading, written notes or sign language. They weren’t sure if this was by genetics, by accident or by choice. Euphoria liked to call him her ‘Megaserver’, when she wasn’t making flood jokes.

The theme of the bar was Ecstatic Nihilism, the atmosphere a party at the end of the universe, for people whose idea of a good time was to have the worst time practicable. The music helped on that score. It just sounded loud, screeching and repetitive to Nix, but he understood that in some way the awfulness was the point. It was something to be enjoyed ironically or not at all. He plumped for ‘Not’.

There were just six tables, thin metal rusted things like disused office furniture from a previous millennium, two dozen chairs, no two exactly alike (because, like, furniture, what’s the point?), a small bar with a smaller holoscreen perched above it (because, like, entertainment, what’s the point?), in the corner of the ceiling. The walls were covered with nihilist slogans scrawled in neon glitter: ‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ ‘The point is there ain’t no point.’ It was a blind spot in the planet’s surveillance blanket, there were almost never any other customers and Euphoria had swept the place for listening devices. It came up clean. It was about as safe as you got, on an unsafe world.

Nix and Creed ducked in. Jonas was back at the house. Euphoria was already at a table in the far corner, three fingers around the long neck of Amity Amber Ale. “Boys,” she nodded, and held up three fingers for Noah. “Keep the liquids coming, boat boy. Let’s get Biblical in here.”

Noah popped the tops of the bottles off on the edge of the metal table before setting them down in the center.

They clinked the sweaty bottles together and drank in silence for a minute until Noah had retreated back behind the bar. Finally, Euphoria set her beer down. “We get word?”

Nix nodded. “There will be a merchant ship in ten days. Captain is one of ours. Officially headed for Mirach, but it will actually jump to Logandale, in the Federated Suns.”

“Alright,” Euphoria nodded. “Guess it’s up to figure a way to get the Jackpot on it.” Jackpot was her nickname for Sortek; the Leftenant had won the jackpot just by being born.

“Bomb’s going to make that tough,” said Nix. “One of ours?”

Euphoria hesitated, then shook her head. “Locals, maybe.”

“Sure about that?” Nix gave her a long look. She met it evenly for a moment, before looking away.

“Well, upside is communication with anything at the system jump points or other planets just got slowed right down to zero,” Nix continued. “Might make getting her to the JumpShip easier. Downside is planetside security will be dialed up to 11.”

“This guy can get booze and drugs in,” Creed suggested, looking in Noah’s direction. “Why not see if he can get the Jackpot out?”

“And have him sell her straight to the Wobbies?” Euphoria asked dryly. “Let’s think of a plan that doesn’t rely on a criminal’s ability to resist temptation.” She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “Besides, we smuggled her in, they’ll be looking for us to try to smuggle her out. We could put her on a DropShip as passenger or crew, but that data is digitally analyzed by algorithms looking for anyone on the Word’s blacklist. Not just names, but biometrics, height, weight, previous travel history, everything. Anything anomalous is going to get red-flagged faster than Katherine Steiner-Davion’s psyche evaluation.”

“Any way we can hack into the database?” Nix asked, though they knew by ‘we’ he meant ‘Euphoria.’ They didn’t know where she worked; just that it was something to do with the megaservers of the planet’s central computer network.

Euphoria looked thoughtful. “Could be tough. Security on the servers is serious. Like, Atlas serious.”

“But is it possible?”

She took a long pull of beer. “Possible? Maybe yeah, possible. Risky, but possible.”

Creed was shaking his head. “Why even bother? Who is the Jackpot?”

“Grand-niece of Ardan Sortek, the former Prince’s Champion.” Euphoria recited, sing-song. “Second cousin to Bishop Sortek, legendary commander of the Guards Brigade. Scion of one of the greatest, most glorious families in the entire Federated Suns.”

“I did not ask who she is related to,” Creed swished his beer around his mouth before swallowing, as though to get rid of a bad taste. “Has the woman herself accomplished anything? Is she a great warrior? A noted strategist?”

“The Wobbies want her, that’s reason enough not to let them have her,” Nix cut in. “Our job is to make life here as uncomfortable for them as possible. Keeping her out of their hands qualifies.”

Creed’s mouth turned down a little at the corners, as though to express sad disappointment in a galaxy where one’s birth mattered more than one’s achievements. “Making my life uncomfortable,” he muttered.

“Hold up guys,” said Euphoria. Pointed at the holoscreen. “Turn it up, Noah.”

A head-and-shoulders shot of a hooded figure with glassy eyes filled the screen, labeled ‘Demi-Precentor Allan Yeager.’

“That’s him,” said Nix. “Guy from the station the other day.”

The man was speaking.

“—found to have been knowingly sheltered by residents of the Concordia Cordial Cooperative. We have had no choice but to institute an immediate and total quarantine of the area. To ensure the safety and security of innocent civilians, we have employed a tranquilizing agent before our brave men and women proceed to search—”

“Tranquilizing agent my ass,” Euphoria spat. “Frackers gassed the whole neighborhood.”

“You sure?” asked Nix.

“Count on it,” she replied. “Word doesn’t have any ‘tranquilizing agent.’ Only gas they have on-planet is CT. Nerve agent. Puts you out, alright. Just, you never wake up again.”

Nix watched the face on the screen. A faint smile as the man condemned thousands to death. Cold bastard.

They watched to the end of the broadcast in silence. Noah turned off the screen.

Euphoria was right, Nix figured. Maybe it was time to get Biblical

 

 

10. DEAL

 

11 August 3072

 

Theresa watched the news, and tried to figure out how she felt about it.

“Not your fault,” Euphoria said, standing behind her, as the newscaster spoke in oblique, censor-approved phrases of the deaths of 3,000 men, women and children in the Concordia Cordial Cooperative.

Part of it was relief, at knowing it wasn’t her fault, part of it was guilt, at feeling relieved when innocent people were dead. Part of it was revulsion, anger, and more than a little dread, seeing what the Wobbies were prepared to do, indeed did not hesitate at all to do.

“They weren’t after you.”

That part heard what Euphoria said and added, ‘this time’ on the end. Yes, dread was a big part of it. But maybe the biggest part of it was shame, shame that she was sitting here in this apartment, guarded around the clock, doing nothing at all to stop what was happening.

“No? The bomb in the HPG Station that sparked this, that have anything to do with me being here?”

“Look, Theresa, a lot of people are going to do things, on their side and ours, because of whose daughter you are or what your name is. There might be a lot of cargo that comes with that, but feeling good or bad about it won’t change anything. It’s just the way people work, the way the galaxy is.”

The next item was a report on the militia pulling down a statue of Hanse and Melissa Davion. The new ticker at the bottom said ‘cheering crowd’ but the sound was out of sync with the desultory clapping.

Theresa killed the screen. Sat back on the sofa, with her guilt, her dread and her shame. Shivered a little, and hugged herself. “What next?”

“We’re working on it.”

Theresa thought about that, and how that fit with what she’d just heard. “If I get out of here, they’re going to want a scapegoat. More people are going to die, aren’t they?”

“That’s on them,” Euphoria said quickly, not bothering to contradict her. “Don’t even think it. Nobody forcing them to kill anyone.”

Theresa knew that, and knew it didn’t make it feel any better. “Promise me something?”

“Shoot.”

“I want in,” she said. “Whatever you’re planning, I need to be a part of that. If people are dying because of me, then let it be because of the choices I made.”

Euphoria came around the sofa, looked down at her. Something new in her eyes, maybe something like respect. “Deal,” she said.

 

 

11. PRECENTOR I

 

The planetary Precentor sits at his desk and rubs his temples. The hair that grows there was black until recently, now turned quite grey. There is a bottle of bourbon on his desk, a quarter empty. His job as planetary governor is to keep this corner of the Protectorate quiet, so that attention can be focused elsewhere. It should be a simple assignment, perhaps even a lucrative one, trading favors to merchants and businessmen in return for ‘gifts’ of appreciation.

How did it come to this? The HPG facility is a smoking wreck, the planet cut off from the rest of the Protectorate or even from other ships in the system. A noted fugitive smuggled onto the planet, probably fomenting unrest. Which naturally, naturally, means it’s time for the new Manei Domini agent to start massacring civilians and otherwise doing everything he can to provoke a revolt.

And now the man claims to have some clever scheme to recruit local agents to help track down the fugitive. The Precentor shakes his head and wishes he had jurisdiction over the man, but the Master has been quite clear: they’re the apple of his eye, and allowed free reign. It would take something truly drastic to dislodge this one from his position.

The Precentor sighs and takes another sip of bourbon. Something drastic? He should be so lucky, he thinks mournfully.

 

 

12. WRESTLERS IN QUICKSAND

 

11 August 3072

 

Abandoning the surface cities hadn’t happened overnight. At first, there was just garden-variety industrial smog, dangerous to the elderly and young, but nothing you couldn’t endure without a basic mask on. All the same, people started to move out of the valleys, where it was worst, up into the hills. Then the air up there started to turn brown, too, and people started digging. Basements, sub-basements. Some people moved into the planet’s natural cave systems, setting up air locks at each exit.

When even the young, the healthy and rich started to die, the planetary government finally moved, working to link the ad-hoc collection of private underground dwellings, expanding on them, digging deeper and further.

Some of the hill-top refuges remained, unconnected to the ant-tunnels that made up the planet’s cities. In one of these abandoned basements, on a hill overlooking the flat domes of Harmony City, stood a suit of battle armor. It was an Achileus, a stealth model, looking like a gorilla dressed to play American football, with dark grey armor, jump jets housed in its bulbous shoulders and weapons pods jutting from either forearm.

A trapdoor in the ceiling banged open, providing entrance to a swirling dervish of dust and the mummified figure of Nix, goggled, masked and wrapped against the caustic air. He wrenched the door shut against a howling wind outside, then crouched at the top of the stairs, scanning the room, compact pulse laser pistol held easily in his hand. Satisfied, he tucked the pistol into the back of his waistband, and came down the stairs, peeling off his goggles and pulling down the mask from his face.

His team had three suits, their aces in the hole for the day something big needed to happen. Jonas and Creed had their own battle armor too, stored somewhere, he didn’t want to know where. Better that way.

He left the dust-clogged clothes in a pile, stripped to a black body suit, and cracked open the back of the Achileus. Holding on to the back plate he swung himself feet-first into the legs of the suit, then fit his arms and head inside. The backplate closed behind him automatically. Sensors came online, illuminating his face.

“Voice authentication required,” the system said.

He cleared his throat. “Cutesy authentication phrases are for self-satisfied idiots who like nothing better than to hear themselves talk.”

A beat. “Voice authentication confirmed. Welcome back, Nix.”

“Combat simulation, Word of Blake augmented infantry company,” he told it.

The system began to paint a virtual city-scape populated with the sensor-illusions of foot soldiers all around him, registering ‘hits’ and ‘damage’ as they fired. He ducked, rolled and twisted the suit around the empty basement, ‘firing’ virtual weapons back to blow the enemies away in multicolored fountains of pixels.

He didn’t hate the Wobbies, not the rank and file anyway. They came in two flavors, he noticed. One was the Believer, usually some kid from a backwater planet or the Periphery, for whom Blake mean security, science and civilization. Who followed orders unquestioningly, no matter how brutal, secure in the knowledge that it was all in the cause of building the brighter future Blake had long ago foreseen.

He spotted a squad setting up a field cannon behind him, rolled forward on one shoulder, came up firing the arm-mounted laser. The screen showed a hit, the squad derezzing as their bodies hit the ground.

The other flavor was the Opportunist. Often from war-wracked border worlds, who felt betrayed by a social and political system that guaranteed the privileges of the nobility while ensuring five centuries of nearly uninterrupted bloodshed across the galaxy. Who—oof, that bastard with the sniper laser had tagged him good—had watched friends, neighbors, family die, from war, disease or malnutrition while others lived in comfort. Who felt angry, powerless and ignored, who wanted nothing more than the chance to strike back at a galaxy they felt had abandoned them.

Thing was, the way Nix saw it, the Opportunist had a point.

He twisted, letting a virtual missile fly past him, then swung back and blasted the gunner. He was getting rusty. Time was, he’d have seen the man before he could fire.

After four Succession Wars, countless brush conflicts and an invasion of genetically engineered super-soldiers, the prince and princesses and dukes and warlords and whatever else were still at it, like wrestlers in quicksand, still trying to throttle one another even as they sank, suffocating, into the ground, dragging everyone else with them. The whole top-heavy edifice was crushing itself under its own weight.

Peace? Peace was impossible when they only saw it as an opening for a fresh round of killer king-of-the-hill. Case in point: the victory over the Clans had been immediately followed by a five-year civil war between two leaders on the winning side.

He’d been part of that, but hadn’t understood it. Fighting people he’d called friend or brother, for ground neither wanted, on the word of some entitled aristocrat neither had even met. It was sick. A million deaths was these people’s idea of a family squabble. They would launch wars on a whim, then call it off when the right or wrong person was killed or captured or just dropped dead, rendering the struggle, valor, cowardice, sacrifice, blood of those who fought under them grotesquely superfluous.

After New Avalon, they’d given him a shiny silver medal and a new arm and he’d given them his resignation, vowed never to be the tool of power-hungry madmen ever again.

Climax of the simulation now. Six Purifier Adaptive battle suits, all charging him at once. Memetic armor made them hard to see, nearly invisible, only a slight blurring when they moved. Had to fight smart.

The Wobbies wanted to overthrow the ruling noble houses? More power to them. If they’d stopped there, he might have walked away, washed his hands of the whole thing. Given them the benefit of the doubt; maybe they were what they claimed to be, the cure for the cancer that had ravaged the Inner Sphere for all these centuries.

In the sim, his laser sliced a leg from one of the Purifiers. Bet that would have hurt.

But they hadn’t stopped there, of course, because there were Believers, Believers who saw no problem with gassing an entire city block, Believers who felt justified in dropping nuclear bombs, in poisoning whole worlds. They weren’t the cure, just another, more virulent and aggressive strain of cancer, just another group of power-hungry madmen.

The system blinked red, shutting down movement and weapons to simulate a killing hit. Still, he’d gotten five of the six. Just have to do better next time.

 

 

13. SUNSET ITCH

 

12 August 3072

 

Nix pictured his mind as having two modes, a bit like a light switch, On and Off. On, it was focused; Off, it wandered. Today, focus was proving elusive. He pushed the sofa into a corner and did one-arm push-ups in the center of the living room in the safehouse. Tried to concentrate on the mathematics of it, of the addition of muscle to will, the multiplication of effort, the division of time into repetitive motions.

And yet. His mind wandered.

He’d had a dream. In the dream, he was standing on top of an office tower—since New Avalon, all his dreams involved a tower—in the middle of a helipad, great orange ‘H’ stretched beneath his feet, wind whipping his clothes about him. On the pad was a tilt-rotor aircraft, though polished to a silvery shine that hurt his eyes so bad he had to squint. Standing on the ramp was Theresa Sortek, hair blown about her face like a dark halo. She waved to him and he waved back, with both arms, with two flesh and blood arms, and that was when he realized he was dreaming. She turned and boarded the VTOL, alone, and he could see her face at one of the windows.

She had looked so lonely.

He waved and waved as the aircraft took off, lifting gently and noiselessly into the air, up and up and up into an overcast sky, until he couldn’t see even a speck. He kept waving.

‘Who are you waving to?’ a voice had asked.

He’d looked down and found Theresa standing next to him on the helipad, looking puzzled.

He’d lain in bed a long time after that, just looking at nothing, until the chime of his timepiece had reminded him it was time to go.

In the safehouse, he shook his head. Got to focus.

Theresa lay half on the bed, one leg dangling over the edge. The air conditioning in the undertower was malfunctioning again, the room a toasty 30 degrees Celsius that made it too hot to do anything but lie still. On the screen by the bed, it was dusk in Rome, the domes and columns burnished to gold in the last rays of the sun. Earlier it had been Mecca, the great glass-and-steel towers overlooking the Kaaba, but Nix had taken one look and asked her to change it. She could hear Nix in the living room, hear his rhythmic huffing as he worked through his exercise regimen.

If she’d thought about espionage before, she would have pictured stylish secret agents trading barbed wit with smirking villains in dimly-lit casinos. She would not have pictured quite so much waiting. Euphoria said she was working on a plan, so in the meantime there was nothing to do but wait.

She thought of the blue skies of her home, New Avalon, tried to picture her parents there. She’d heard memories last a lifetime, but they didn’t. Not even close. What ones she could recall seemed vague and fuzzy, as though abraded by the passage of time. A few images came to her at random, mostly of water. Diving into the cool azure pool at the summer estate. Sheltering under a store roof when caught in a sudden summer squall. Sharing a shower with that cadet, the Duke of Galax’s second son, the one with the long fingers.

What she’d give for a decent bath. Or a man with long fingers.

“Nix,” she called. “Hey, Nix.”

The huffing stopped, and his head appeared around the doorway. “Get you something?”

“You married, Nix? Got a girlfriend?”

He frowned a little. “You’ve been to my place. I look like I’m married?” The frown deepened. “Why you asking?”

“I, just. I, ah, never mind.”

Shaking his head, Nix went back to the living room. He could guess what she had meant. It was something he’d thought about too, though he tried hard not to. Not that he had any right to be choosy at this point in his life. But they were at opposite ends of the social pyramid, her at the apex, him a nothing nobody from nowhere. It was just this animal itch, coupled with boredom and proximity.

There had been a series of women, when he was younger. Or putting it more accurately, there had been a younger him for a series of women. He’d been fit, athletic, outdoorsy, okay-looking, in a military full of smart, ambitious women who knew what they wanted and didn’t feel like waiting for it. That had been taken from him, along with half of his left arm, in one instant on New Avalon. It reminded the women too much of how close they lived to the edge, he guessed.

There were those who were into myomer arms and that kind of thing, he’d heard, but the prospect was too depressing to contemplate.

Got to focus.

Theresa had been thinking of sex, too, despite or maybe because of it all. There was little for her to do but sit and think, and one of the thoughts was that if she was going to die she’d like to be held again, one last time. Creed seemed angry and resentful of her, so that was a non-starter. Jonas was kind, body a little more V-shaped that she liked, but he had a nice smile, and when you were locked in an apartment for a week a nice smile went a long way. Nix was easy on the eyes until he took his shirt off, and then those tattoos were the absolute, total, polar opposite of easy.

It had been a stupid thought, best forgotten.

Nix stuck his head back around the corner. “Have you ever seen a Schedar sunset?

She rolled to face the doorway and propped her head up on one hand. “A what?”

“Like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

Two hours later, she was seated at the top of a low, isolated hill of fractured volcanic rock, swaddled from head to toe in a dust suit, her knees drawn up in front of her, looking up into the swirling, ochre sky. Nix sat beside her, his figure similarly blurred in layers of wrappings, face hidden behind a mask and goggles. The wind was quieter here, allowing her to hear the hiss of air as her mask labored to filter the air. It still smelled like burnt rubber.

When the silence got too loud, she asked, “Can I ask a question?”

He sighed. “The arm or the tattoos?”

“What?” A startled laugh. “No, neither. I was wondering: What brought this on?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“Promise not to.”

“A dream.”

She laughed.

“Liar,” he accused, without any heat.

“Sorry. You have this way of catching me off-guard every time you open your mouth,” she confessed. “But that has to be the strangest thing I’ve heard since I came here.”

“Reminded me of. Ah, this one time. Nothing. Anyway, made me realize how hard this must be for you.”

“Thanks for the very clear explanation,” she replied, mildly sarcastic. “That dream must’ve been a good one. All I get is weird shit, like King Kong carrying me up a skyscraper, only it’s like this hollow tube and we’re on the inside, and there’s this other giant ape chasing after us.”

He tapped the side of his head. “Oh yeah, that’s totally nuts.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m kidding. Pretty straightforward, given the situation. Pursuit, monsters, enclosed spaces.” He held up a hand. “Okay now, I think it’s starting.”

He was right. It was like nothing she’d ever seen.

There were pretty sunsets on New Avalon or Deneb Kaitos, dusting the horizon in orange and magenta, and she’d imagined it would be the same here. It wasn’t, not at all. They sunsets she knew were static, slow-moving things. Sunsets on Schedar were alive. It started slow, bright flickers she caught out of the corner of her eye, gone like will-o-the-wisps when she turned her head. Then they came faster, longer, gradually coalescing into great comet trails of cherry and violet fire that fanned and spread across the sky. The trails shimmered and merged and grew, until the air over her head seemed to be burning, close enough for her to touch. She unconsciously reached up a gloved hand, fingers trailing through the air, as though to feel the heat.

“It’s like alchemy,” said Nix, his face titled upwards too. “Lead into gold. Pollution into poetry. All this junk in the air blocks the light, depending on which way the wind is blowing and what’s up there in the stratosphere, and this is the result.”

She nodded, absently. “That sounds rehearsed. You bring all your fugitives up here?”

His goggles glinted as he glanced at her. “Only the Baronesses.”

“Get a lot of those, do you?”

“One so far, but who’s counting?”

There was a chance, here, for something to take shape between them. But then she was who she was, he was who he was. Where they were. Everything. Their chance would be like a sunset—pretty but quickly over, followed by darkness. Unconsciously, she spread her fingers, as though letting something go.

After a quarter of an hour the light began to fade, darkness gathering at the edges of the sky. She saw a thick, writhing knot of blackness begin to slither across the horizon.

“What’s that?” she pointed.

“Squid-storm,” he said. “Hydrocarbons precipitating out of the atmosphere as it cools. Bit like an airborne oil spill. We’d better head back.”

 

 

14. PEOPLE AS SYMBOLS

 

13 August 3072

 

Euphoria was livid.

They were all seated or standing around the safehouse’s kitchen table: Euphoria, Theresa, Jonas, Creed and Nix. Euphoria was winding up a 30-minute tirade in which she reminded Nix of the danger of Theresa going outside and being caught on surveillance video, of the even greater danger of going out into a skin-eating dust storm, and of the many intellectual failings required to ignore both of those two factors in favor of a pretty lightshow.

“Theresa’s not a piece of hardware, EE, she’s a human being,” protested Nix. “Can’t lock someone up for weeks like that without them going a little crazy.”

“We talking about her or you, Nix?” Euphoria asked.

“It was my decision, my responsibility,” Theresa interrupted. “I could have said ‘No.’ I didn’t. If that put you in jeopardy, then I am sorry. I promise I’ll keep a low profile from now on.”

“The best solution would be to get her off-world as soon as possible,” said Creed. “Do we have a plan?”

Euphoria continued to look at Nix for a moment, then sighed and looked back to Creed. “We do.”

There were three layers of security at the spaceport. First, an initial ID check outside the gates, where everyone had to swipe their Freedom Card. Next, the crew and passenger registry, documentation and baggage check, including chemical sniffers, X-ray scans as well as a physical pat-down. Then the final boarding inspection, again using the Freedom Card and travel documentation.

“I nearly hit on it the other night at Zero Squared. We can’t put her on a DopShip crew. But we can put me on.” Euphoria pointed to Nix and Jonas. “Get her a ground crew uniform. You guys take her through the maintenance tunnel to the cargo area, the same one we used when we brought her in. She blends in with the work crew, you guys run interference if anyone tries to ask her questions. I enter by the normal route, then slip her my ID before the final security checkpoint.”

Jonas snapped his fingers. “I get it. Switch you two at the last minute?”

“But we look nothing alike,” Theresa protested, pointing to her own dark mass of hair.

“Cut your hair, dye it, you’ll be surprised. It won’t have to hold up to close scrutiny. Just get you onto that ship. Communications array is still offline, so even if they figure out what we did a day or two later, it’ll be too late.” Euphoria looked at Creed. “Might help if we staged a diversionary attack on the detention facility or server farm, draw their attention there.”

“They’ll go back and check the records,” said Theresa. “They’ll see it was you, EE. This means blowing your cover, maybe everyone’s.”

Creed was shaking his head. “It is not going to work, EE.”

Euphoria crossed her arms. “Look, Creed, I know it’s a risk but—”

“I have a life here, one I am fighting to keep,” Creed cut her off. He waved a hand at Theresa, lip curling. “I will not throw it away for this … byproduct of incestuous inbreeding.”

“What?!” Theresa, pale, indignant.

Nix put a hand on Creed’s shoulder. His left one. “Creed—”

Creed tried to shrug the hand off, unsuccessfully. “Take your hand off. Before, I have respected you. But clearly you are not thinking with your brain here.”

Nix smiled, tightly. Very tightly. Let go the shoulder and took a step closer to Creed. “Creed, I’ll ignore that, out of respect for what you’ve done for us. But let’s be clear: I wouldn’t care if she was Stefan Amaris’s daughter—nobody, nobody deserves to be hunted just for whose name they carry. So we’re going to fight for her. If that frightens you, then maybe we can find something a little less scary for you to do.”

“This isn’t cowardice,” Creed shot back. “I would have fought for you, or for Jonas. Fought and died, if need be. But not for this. Not for her. You cannot ask this of me.”

“Resistance isn’t a democracy, Creed,” warned Euphoria, eyes narrowing. “I need to know we can trust you. Can we trust you?”

Creed took a deep breath, tore his eyes from Nix to look at Euphoria. “I will guard the house. No more. Whatever else you do is your affair.”

Euphoria glanced to Theresa, who was carefully studying her feet. Then back to Creed. “Alright, Creed. You sit this one out. Not like we have much choice. Jonas, maybe you can handle the strike?”

“Hey, you all know I’m a better fighter than Creed anyway,” Jonas grinned and cracked his knuckles. “Be glad to.”

 

 

15. LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACES

 

14 August 3072

 

Nix dreamed of falling. Falling from the sky, without a suit or parachute, plunging helplessly straight down, and as the ground rushed up he saw he saw he was falling towards an office tower (of course, there would be a tower), falling straight towards the helipad on its top, falling straight towards a man and a woman standing there. He tucked in his legs and hugged them to his chest. The roof came rising to meet him in a rush, the there was a smash as he impacted, then went through the roof. On the other side was air. He was falling, still falling straight towards a familiar office tower helipad, two people standing there, hurtling up towards him. Impact, resistance, weightlessness. And the falling, falling towards an office tower helipad…

He was pulled from the dream by the sound of someone hammering on the door. Rhythmic cracks, slamming heavily into the plasteel. Not a social call then. He had been half-expecting this for three years now, ever since the invasion. He got out of bed, went to the kitchen, opened the small silver fridge, and pulled out a beer. Tortured, tearing sounds as the door began to tear free of the brackets holding it to the wall. Nix sat down on one of his two plain, plastic chairs, and positioned it so he could see the front door from where he sat. He twisted off the cap with his prosthetic hand, and took a long drink.

The door flew off its hinges, revealing a squad of Word of Blake militiamen holding a pneumatic battering ram. They dropped the ram and came storming into the apartment, guns ready. Several people were shouting at him variously to freeze, to get on the ground, to raise his hands and to stay where he was.

He liked that advice the best, so he followed it. “Door was open,” he said, mildly.

Two remained in the kitchen, their guns leveled at his chest, while he heard the other four banging doors and shouting orders to his empty bedroom and bathroom. He took another drink. The four returned, empty-handed, squeezed into the far end of the room, out of arm’s reach.

“At ease,” said a new voice, one Nix had heard before, quite recently. The militiamen lowered their needlers. A hooded figure entered the apartment, and threw back its cowl as it stepped into the kitchen. A face with flat, silver eyes and a tight, cold smile. A gloved hand reached over and took the top of the other chair, dragged it protesting squeakily across the floor until it faced Nix.

“Make yourself at home,” Nix said into his beer as the other sat down stiffly on the chair.

“Forgive their over-enthusiasm. You can’t be too careful these days. But there I go, nattering on about things you already know very well,” the man continued, pulling off his gloves and folding them neatly in his lap. “You’re something of an expert in caution, aren’t you Mister … Rei?”

“You have me at a disadvantage,” his eyes flicked to the militiamen. “And at gunpoint.”

“That’s the funny thing: I’m not sure I do.” The other man smiled. “You know, the Word of Blake has captured a number of Federated Suns databases over the years, yet until our occupation I can’t find a single record of a man named Nicholas Rei.” The head tilted slightly to one side. “Why would that be, do you think?”

Nix shrugged. “Looking in the wrong places, I guess.” He set down the beer. “Look, it’s Yeager, isn’t it? Yeager, old buddy, I hate to be rude to a guest, but does this visit have a point?”

“Of course, you’re a busy man, aren’t you? All those days lifting potatoes or whatever it is.” Yeager’s smiled disappeared. “Tell me, where did a dock worker lose an arm, Mister Rei?”

“Odd choice of words.”

“Which?”

“’Lost’,” he said. “Like it’s just going to turn up one day at the bottom of a box of MechWarrior trading cards and old porn holos.” He looked down at the unnaturally smooth surface of the arm. The skin tone didn’t match any more, not after years of living underground on Schedar. “New Avalon, ’67, the year I quit the AFFC. Not sure what it was, to be honest. Gauss slug or autocannon, maybe.”

“Another thing we have in common, Mister Rei. I have my own … memories of New Avalon. Although, I confess to being a little disappointed. How far the mighty have fallen,” Yeager shook his head. “Dock worker? You could do so much better.”

Nix arched an eyebrow. “For instance?”

Yeager leaned forward. “A man of your talents, not to mention enhancements, would always have a place with us.”

Nix threw back his head and laughed. “You’re offering me a job?”

“That was not a joke. Here, with that arm, you’ll always be a cripple, an outcast, a freak. Among the Word of Blake, you would be an equal, a comrade, perhaps one day a leader. We know that cybernetics are, if not the future, then certainly a future. The least you could do is consider what I’m saying seriously.”

Nix nodded absently a moment, as though in thought. “Tell you what,” he said at last. “You get one of those fine folks from the Cordial Cooperative down here and ask me nice, and maybe I’ll think about it.”

Yeager sat back in his chair, which creaked uneasily. “Gentlemen,” he said loudly, to the militiamen. “If I might have a word with Mister Rei in private.” The men glanced at each other, then retreated into the hallway outside the door. Satisfied, Yeager turned back to Nix. “They are dead. On my orders. As you—and any semi-intelligent citizen—are perfectly aware.”

“That sounds an awful lot like an admission of a war crime, Yeager old chum.”

“You wonder about our methods? The purpose of our terror?”

“Yeah, sure. In a what-the-hell kind of way.”

“Bombing, gassing, massacring people so they will unite behind us. Ludicrous, isn’t it?”

Nix waved his hand in a well-you-know kind of way. “One way of putting it.”

“Any reasonable person would put it that way. Luckily, our followers, even our leaders, have bid a fond farewell to reason in favor of fanaticism.” Yeager flicked a speck of dust from his robe, as though to brush his compatriots from his clothes like dirt. “Let me be clear: They are fools, all of them.”

That caught Nix’s attention, as the man had probably known it would. “Then why?”

“Because the Inner Sphere is a jail,” Yeager held up his hands and made two fists, wrists together like a prisoner. “Keeping us locked together, fighting with the same weapons, over the same scarred ground, until we wipe ourselves out. There will never be peace in the Inner Sphere. Too much time has passed, too much blood has been spilled. As long as we stay, we will never evolve as a race, never move forward. A dead end, destined for extinction.”

“’Destroy the village in order to save it’, that’s your answer?”

“Yes! Yes, exactly! Cut away the cancer to save the body,” Yeager beamed, sweeping his hands apart, as though breaking invisible chains. “What is the purpose of terror? The purpose of terror is terror, because only terror can set people free. Like birds that have lived too long in cages, they will never voluntarily leave the prison of the Inner Sphere. So we must make them abandon their homes, their cities, their worlds, and flee for their lives. Many will die, yes, so the rest may live. Sacrifice billions, hundreds of billions, so that millions may live. We must scatter humanity to the far reaches of space. Only then will we adapt, evolve, find new ways of being, move forward. Cybernetics, selective breeding, genetic engineering, hive minds, cloning, every path must be explored, because a species with only one path is on a path to extinction. Only destruction provides a path to the future”

Nix looked down at his prosthetic arm, feeling the fingers as they flexed. It didn’t feel much like the future. “You know, I bet the fella who took my arm off felt exactly the same way,” he paused, mouth half-open, aware that whatever he said next might be the last words he ever did. What the hell. “He thought he was cutting the cancer away, saving people from themselves, just like you. He was okay with a few people dying, if that’s what it took, just like you. Only, I’ve noticed, when people like you and him say ‘people will die,’ what you mean is ‘people who aren’t me.’ Funny how the people talking always figure they’re the ones who are going to be part of the righteous or the genetic elite or the cybernetic pioneers Which got me thinking. Maybe. Maybe people who say ‘cut away the cancer’ are the cancer. Maybe what’s holding us back, if there is anything, is the folks who think they’ve got it figured, and what they’ve figured is that all they need to do is kill enough of the rest of us and it will all work out.”

Yeager was silent, his mouth pressed into a thin line. Finally: “Well, I hope that’s not your final answer.”

Nix snorted. “If that makes you feel better. Now, maybe you can take your pals here back to the station and let me get some sleep. Unless this was one of those ‘join us or die’ deals, in which case you’ll be taking them to the morgue.”

Yeager seemed to consider that. “There are six of them, you know. Hardly seems like a fair fight.”

“Feel free to call for reinforcements.”

That produced a chuckle. “Now, now, Mister Rei. There’s confidence, then there’s arrogance.” Yeager stood, pulling his gloves back on. “Think about it, Mister Rei. This isn’t about which lord gets to park his posterior on some imaginary throne for a season or two before the next one knocks him off. This is about the future of the human race.” Yeager walked back to the doorway, looked down at the shattered remains of the door on the floor. “Pity about the door. Consider it a gentle reminder. We’ll be in touch.”

The militiamen fell into step behind him, footsteps echoing into silence as they marched away.

A delicate rain of plaster fell from the shattered door lintel.

“Asshole,” Nix told the empty kitchen.

 

 

16. FOR THERESA

 

Demi-Precentor Yeager sits in his office and plays the piano. Beethoven, Bagatelle No. 25 in A Minor, popularly known as ‘Für Elise.’ Although the woman Beethoven wrote it for was probably not named Elise, but Theresa. A woman hidden behind another’s name. Yeager likes that, almost as much as he likes the quick, sharp movements the piece requires.

The floor is polished onyx and the piano brilliant white. Around the walls are floor-to-ceiling views of Schedar in infrared, low-light imaging, sonar, and monochrome. It is another of those contradictions that he loves, that those entering the office of the most feared (he likes to think) men on the planet, to find him sitting here, playing this gentle melody now twelve hundred years old.

Tonight’s conversation has left him disappointed, and uncharacteristically reflective. He tries to excise the poison through his fingertips, through the music, but calm is elusive. The mention of New Avalon has stirred his own memories, the chaos of battle, not really knowing who one was fighting, or why. The tangled lines of blood and fealty had wrapped around his unit and dragged them into the inferno. And then the literal blaze as his ’Mech caught fire, cooking him alive, and a short, desperate flight that left him blind, blistered, half-dead.

Losing his physical eyes had, he chuckles to himself, been an eye-opening experience. Only then had he seen how insatiably ravenous they were, these princes, chancellors, coordinators and archons, how their power was sustained like the ancient Aztec gods with the blood of regular human sacrifice. He had thought the Precentor Martial, Victor Steiner-Davion, had been different. He’d been a fool. Who was Victor? Heir to two of the most powerful families in the galaxy. Who were his generals? The sons of Dukes, the cousin of an Archon. It was Victor’s vanity that had cost Yeager his eyes, and would cost the species so much more.

The Master was a fool, too, the Sixth of June plotters all fools. The rebirth of the Star League would merely be an extension of the cycle, a step backwards for every human. Yeager had seen then that the old order must fall, and that humanity had to be set free lest it trap itself in the same patterns. He had hoped Rei would see that. Rei might be made to see yet, or there were other ways to deal with him.

There is a buzz of an incoming call. Yeager’s fingers slip on the piano keys and he halts. He pushes a button on an intercom mounted on top of the piano. “Yes?”

“Sorry for the interruption Demi-Precentor b—”

“You have a good reason, I trust?”

“A call sir, anonymous. Claims to have information on Theresa Sortek.”

“Put it through.”

He almost hopes it will be Rei, but is not entirely surprised when another’s voice fills the speaker.

 

 

17. SEEING STARS

 

15 August 3072

 

Theresa awoke to find her hands had been tied together in front of her. Thin black loops around either wrist, felt like rubber, but strong as steel. A dark figure stood beside the bed, what looked like a squat flare gun held in one hand, pointed at her.

“Up,” it said.

“Creed?” she asked, trying to sink back into the mattress. Her head pounded like it had been caught in a vise. He must have used a stunner or drug on her while she slept, so she wouldn’t wake up when he fitted the restraints.

Creed reached down at the cord between her wrists, and jerked her to her feet. Her knees immediately folded, and she sat down heavily. Creed huffed in annoyance. “Do not make this harder than it has to be.”

“For who?” she asked bitterly, as he hauled the strap up again. It felt like he could rip her arms from their sockets. She stood.

Creed waved the gun under her nose. “This is a sonic stunner. If you try anything foolish, I will knock you out, then carry you. It will be easy for me, but unpleasant for you.”

“More unpleasant than being executed?” she sneered. “Unity, Creed, you know what’ll happen if you turn me in.”

Creed shrugged, took out what looked like a dog leash, clipped one end to the wire between her wrists, fastened the other around his own left wrist. Waved the stunner at the door. “Move.” Shoved her in the back.

She stumbled forward. “It’s the Word, Creed. You’re Clan. The Word fracking hates the Clans.”

“I’m a freebirth, you over-privileged idiot,” he grunted. “They hate the Clans? So do I. Trueborns, nobles, you are all the same. Parasites getting everything handed to you because of your name.” He shoved her again, hard, like being kicked in the back. “Now shut up and walk.”

He marched her down the dim corridor, past the doors of the other units on the level. She hoped, prayed, to see another face, but knew it was unlikely. They’d picked this place precisely because it was a neighborhood where it didn’t pay to be too nosy.

They reached the elevators and Creed stabbed the button repeatedly, impatient.

Doors chimed for their level and slid open. Jonas stepped out.

He blinked when he saw them, started to smile. “Hey Creed, just forgot my ciga—” Registered the ties around her wrists, the leash, the gun. “—the fu—”

Creed was bringing up the stunner and Theresa threw herself backwards against him, hard as she could. It was like bouncing off a brick wall. She staggered back, then folded when Creed buried a fist in her stomach. She collapsed, wheezing in agony, to the floor.

Creed was firing the stunner, faint keening barely audible at the top of her hearing, but she’d distracted him a little, his aim was off, and Jonas didn’t go down. He reeled, woozily, like a man drunk, but didn’t go down. He was fumbling at his back, bringing out a thin, compact pistol. Eyes unfocused, Jonas fired anyway, a thin red beam lancing over their heads and burning a trail across the ceiling.

Cursing, Creed dropped the stunner and the leash, leapt at Jonas, arms wide, tackling him to the ground. There was a flurry of punches and kicks, too fast for her to follow, the men snarling like jungle cats wrestling.

Theresa tried to stand but her legs weren’t listening, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but retch and heave. The stunner lay on the ground, where Creed had dropped it. She focused on it, tried to focus on reaching it. She could hear Creed and Jonas, yelling, cursing, and the crash of plaster as they threw one another against the walls.

A door opened a crack in the corridor and Theresa looked up, pleading, but it immediately slammed shut.

Finally, she got her knees under her, pushed herself across the corridor, her bound hands reaching for the stunner. Closed around the grip. Behind her, a laser shot. Two, three.

Bringing the stunner up.

To be kicked away, by what felt like a hammer, sending the stunner flying. Smashed against the wall, pieces bouncing off the floor and spiraling away. She felt the small, round muzzle of a pistol, pressed against the top of her head. Glanced up. Creed was standing over her, breathing hard, face bloody, going purple in places. Behind him, slumped against the wall, Jonas’s sightless, staring body, neat round holes burned above one eye, in the throat, in the chest.

She’d liked Jonas. The only one of the three who actually seemed to be happy to be helping her. A little star-struck, just to meet a Sortek. A little kid in a wrestler’s body. Dead now, because of her.

Creed dragged her to her feet and she didn’t have the strength, or maybe the will, to resist. She didn’t feel anything, except perhaps a sense of unreality, her brain refusing to process what was happening. She allowed Creed to march her into the elevator, then up and out the residential complex, in a kind of anesthetic daze.

The corridors on the top level were dark and empty. The few people they saw quickly turned and started walking the other way, or stood to the side, eyes firmly locked on the ground.

A few blocks away they were met by a squad of men in bulky armor, holding squat, ugly rifles. They kept them ready as Creed and Theresa approached. A tiny part of her brain still engaged with reality noticed the tallest soldier was actually a woman, biceps maybe as big as Creed’s, with tattoos on her face the way they still did, out in the Periphery.

A hooded man stepped forward. A hard-faced man with mirror eyes.

“Theresa Sortek,” he said. “So nice to finally meet you.”

 

 

18. WOMEN AND WAYS OF BEING

 

Nix collapsed onto his unmade bed. Work at the spaceport was tiring but mindless. Gave him plenty of time to think about what Yeager had said. Nix’s still felt any dream built on so much death could never lead to anything but still more death, but then, couldn’t the same already be said for the Inner Sphere? Help overthrow a system at the cost of billions of lives, or help perpetuate a system that had already cost billions of lives. Sit back and watch billions die anyway. He concluded the human brain was not built for billions; he would help save one life. What more could he do?

By agreement with Euphoria, Nix hadn’t been back to the safehouse since the conversation. He was almost certainly being monitored now, so he was living as dull and ordinarily life as he could. He glanced at his timepiece. Jonas would just be getting off. Creed’s turn at the safehouse. Closed his eyes and dreamed of a tower.

A buzzing in his left arm. His eyes snapped open. Reached over with his right and dug a finger into the synthskin on the inside of his elbow, flipping out a small patch and sliding out a thin wafer that vibrated rhythmically. A microcommunicator, designed to clip directly to his ear. Euphoria had given it to him, three years ago, with strict instructions to never, ever use it. Any signal can be tapped, hacked and traced, she’d said.

One-time use, power cell designed to fuse and melt the electronics after one call. Strictly for emergencies only.

He fit it to his ear. “EE?”

“They got the Jackpot.” Fuzzy voice, low-bandwidth, lot of interference underground. Still, the word were like an electrical charge jolting him awake.

“You sure?”

“Chipped her. Yes, I’m sure,” the edge of her voice cutting through the static. “Bugged the place, too. Nix, listen. Creed is a traitor. I think Jonas is dead, too.”

“Dead?” That was a lot of process at once, so he didn’t. Nix’s mind had two modes, on and off. Off, he daydreamed too much, thought about towers and hyperspace, women and ways of being. On, he didn’t think about anything. Just moved. He’d been off for far, far too long. Creed’s betrayal, Jonas’s death might hurt, later. Right then, it was just more information. He was moving, off the bed, out of his work clothes, pulling on his black bodysuit. “Where’s she headed?”

“Friendship Square detention center.”

“Going to have to get her out of there.” He opened his closet, scooped up his sand goggles and breather mask from the bottom.

“Is that even possible?” Incredulous. “Place is a fortress.”

“Yeah, sure it’s possible,” he said, already out the door, pounding down the corridor at a dead run. Neighbors suddenly pressed themselves against the wall as he went barreling past. “Crazy, but possible.”

“You serious?”

“Serious as an Atlas.”

“What can I do?”

“Arrange extraction. Something fast. Have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

“See what I can do. Luck.”

Nix grunted and took the communicator from his ear, flinging it into a public garbage receptacle, noting its self-destructive firefly flare as he did. Five minutes later he was through an airlock, into the orange haze outside, a shadowy figure headed straight into in the storm.

 

 

19. THAT DELICIOUS TASTE FOR REVENGE

 

The ceiling, walls and floor were polished, reflective black. A severe, white metal table stood in the center, with plain white chairs on either side. There was only one door. The smoked glass of surveillance camera domes dotted the ceiling. On the wall opposite the door hung two gigantic portraits, of bearded Jerome Blake and a smiling Conrad Toyama.

Theresa Sortek sat in the chair facing the door, with her back towards the portraits. Armed guards stood at stiff attention on either side of the door. Demi-Percentor Yeager sat across from her, his hands clasped on the table. Creed prowled the room, radiating nervous energy, and ice pack clasped to his face.

Yeager was looking at Creed. “The others?”

“Three others. Jonas is dead. Nix—Nicholas Rei—will either be home or at the port. No idea about the woman.”

Yeager looked delighted. “Nicholas Rei? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. We’ll send teams to both places, but I suggest you get ready.”

Creed halted his pacing, lowering the ice pack and looking puzzled. “For what?”

“For Mister Rei.” It sounded like this was the fulfillment of a long-cherished hope. “He is almost undoubtedly on his way here.”

Creed’s face looked briefly troubled. “If he is, I’ll kill him, too.”

“You can certainly try. Take one of our Purifier suits, the weapons master can arrange it.”

The door closed behind Creed and Yeager returned to his seat in front of Theresa. She stiffened under his basilisk gaze.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she asked, voice quavering.

“What do you think?”

Her shoulders sagged, her body bowed forward. “Make it quick,” she whispered.

Yeager sighed. “I can think of few prospects that appeal to me less than listening to the screams of some idiot woman. Torturing you would be as boring as it would be pointless. Creed seems to know everything you do, if not more, and he’ll tell us all of it with considerably less moaning about it. Let us be frank, Miss Sortek: As a symbol, you mean everything, as a person, nothing. There will be a public trial, you will be found guilty of murdering the poor, innocent people of the Concordia Cordial Cooperative, and you will be executed. People will see us tearing apart the old, oppressive order, and at the same time we’ll satisfy that delicious taste for revenge.”

She sniffed, once, deeply. Her head, almost parallel above the table, just nodded.

“Unless,” he said. She sat very still.

“Unless,” Yeager went on, “unless you can help me deal with Mister Rei. For reasons I will not bore you with, I’ve grown rather fond of the man, but I fear when he arrives he won’t be in a talkative mood. We will confront him together, and you will help him listen to reason. Do that, and we can spare the trial and execution. Oh, you’ll spend the rest of your life on a penal colony or planetoid in some nameless system, but then, there will be rather more of the rest of your life than there will be otherwise.”

Yeager stared at the top of her bowed head while she seemed to think it over. Finally, without raising her head, she said, “I don’t think he works like that.”

Yeager nodded, absently. “Still seeing yourself as the princess here?” he sneered. “There’s no white knight coming you save you, you know.”

She looked up at that, her body still bent at the waist. “Why do you hate us so much?”

“I told you, you tedious bore: I don’t hate you, per se. I don’t hate the nobility, really, though I’ve plenty of reason to. It’s just that you represent the past, the shackles that must be broken if the human race is to escape.” He indicated the door Creed had gone through with a thumb. “As you see, I don’t even hate the Clans, either. I mean, their plan to re-establish the Star League is depressingly backward-looking, and their limitation of selective breeding to the warrior class represents a colossal failure of imagination, but hate? No. You are all tools, to be used or discarded, as the situation demands.”

Yeager stood and nodded to the two guards. “Take Miss Sortek to a maximum security cell on the lowest level. She may yet be a useful tool, if only as bait.”

 

 

20. SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY

 

She was awoken by an earthquake. Disoriented. The bed was shaking, and she blearily clung to the frame to stop from falling. Another tremor, this time joined by thunder. Louder, somewhere above. A third, and now there was a massive crashing, tearing noise. Shouting outside, then the high-pitched scream of a laser and the shouting cut short.

Footsteps, thunderous as those of a titan. They halted outside her cell.

“Theresa?” A voice, distorted through speakers and the cell’s doors, but recognizably Nix’s. “Theresa, get under the bed. I’m blowing the door in three.” Theresa rolled off the bed, then crabbed sideways underneath it. “Three, two…” The door came flying into the room in a blur of ferrocrete dust, bounced off the opposite wall, before smacking to the ground. There was a bowl-shaped dent in it, almost dead center.

Theresa hauled herself out from under the bed and looked out the doorway, cratered where the door had been hinged, small landslides of dust trickling to the floor. Beyond, a hulking dark grey monster, with megalithic shoulders, a narrow blue visor, the hungry maw of a laser cannon under one arm, a short-barreled submachinegun under the other. An Achileus battle armor suit.

“Nix?” She tottered unsteadily forward, brushing the dust from her clothes and hair. Took a deep breath. “Jonas is dead, Creed’s a traitor, get me the hell out of here.”

“Figured.” The suit waved for her to come out of the cell. “My thoughts exactly on the second part. Let’s go.”

There was a hole in the ceiling of the corridor outside, a cone of rubble beneath it, and what looked like two smoldering, shattered skeletons.

“Back this way,” said Nix, pointed toward the hole.

Two small, black pineapples came tumbling from the hole, bouncing off the rubble to land spinning on the ground.

“Down,” yelled Nix, his suit crouching over her, tree-trunk arms making a circle over her head. She clapped her hands over her ears and opened her mouth. There air pulsed as the grenades detonated, shrapnel pinging off the suit’s armor.

The Achileus straightened, just as two thin nylon cords snaked from the whole, a red-clad man at the end of each. Even as they touched the ground the Achileus’s left arm was up, the submachinegun stuttering, orange-yellow flame belching from its barrel. The two men jerked like marionettes at the end of their cords, blood and viscera spraying out across the corridor before they fell slackly to the ground.

“Okay, maybe not that way,” said Nix, turning, setting off in a ground-shaking run down the corridor. “Follow me.”

He didn’t slow down when he reached the door at the end, just raised an arm and plowed into it, through it, ripping it from its hinges and flinging it aside without effort. Two more guards stood, open-mouthed, in the corridor beyond and then the suit’s laser fired. Their upper bodies dissolved in the consuming torrent of fire, which blasted through them, through the door behind them, and left a gaping hole in a wall 90 meters down the corridor.

They rounded a corner, coming out into the detention center’s entrance hall. White security desks, the black arches of metal scanners, a long entrance hall lined with thick grey columns. Reinforced steel double doors at the far end. And in front of them, two dozen red-and-white uniformed guards, laser rifles, automatic grenade launchers and two tripod-mounted machineguns pointed in their direction.

“Back,” he shouted, an arm sweeping out to throw her back around the corner. She landed with a thud, rolled and curled into a ball. From around the corner came an earl-splitting metallic wail like a buzzsaw. Stray bullets stitched into the wall by the corner, throwing up puffs of paint and ferrocrete. Someone seemed to be setting off a holiday’s worth of fireworks, too, filling the dusty air and illuminating the walls with searing flashes of white, yellow and reddish light. Lightning-storm bursts of it, blinding even when seen in reflection. Then hammering detonations followed by blast waves that made the floor jump. Hot fragments of metal ricocheting off the wall and around the corner.

The noise stopped, the sudden silence roaring in her ears like the ocean.

She waited, unmoving. It wouldn’t be long now. Silent tears trickling down her cheeks. They’d come so close.

“Clear,” Nix called.

Theresa wobbled to disbelieving feet. Slowly inched out around the corner.

The hall had been repainted in thick, lumpy red that dripped from the walls and ceiling. The desks and scanners were gone, leaving only smoking, flaming stumps on the floor as proof they’d ever been there. The columns looked like they’d been turned into cheese graters, pitted from floor to ceiling. The steel doors had vanished, too, as had a sizable portion of the far wall, replaced with a sagging, ragged arch of glowing metal.

In the middle, Nix’s Achileus stood watching the burning archway, its grey surface soot-stained and scratched, but otherwise intact. Smoke curled from the muzzle of the submachinegun on the left arm. The blunt, visored head turned in her direction.

“Sorry about the mess.”

Theresa was a MechWarrior, and she’d been in battle before. In a BattleMech. Cocooned from the combat by 80 tons of crystalline armor, myomer and titanium. Dealing death from ten meters up, like a valkyrie, riding high over the battle. This was. This was something else. Entirely.

Like, she and the other MechWarriors were playing a game. Nix played it for real.

Her foot slipped on something wet and yielding, and she very much did not want to look down and see what it was.

The corridor outside ended in a bank of four elevator doors. Nix’s Achileus wedged its fingers into the crack between one set of doors, and forced them open with a nail-on-blackboard screech. The elevator shaft was crisscrossed around the edges with latticework of rails and guides, the outer walls veined with cables and wiring, plunging down into darkness far below. The far wall of the column was broken up every twenty meters by the smooth rectangles of doors on the opposite side. The elevator car was barely visible, halted at the top of the shaft far above their heads.

“Close your eyes,” Nix advised, bringing up his right-arm laser. Theresa squeezed them shut and averted her face for good measure. There was a distant boom and clang of metal that echoed and re-echoed in the shaft, followed by a blast of hot air. When she turned back, she saw a pair of doors on the opposite side of the shaft about 40 meters up were gone, leaving only a smoking hole.

 “Need you in front,” Nix’s voice crackled. “Arms around my neck. Legs around the waist, if you can manage.”

Theresa looked up at the hole, down the echoing shaft, then back at Nix. “But what if you—”

“I won’t.”

Thing was, she couldn’t see any alternative. She stepped in front of the Achileus, and had to jump up so her arms would reach around the suit’s head. His left arm caught her waist, stopped her from slipping down. “Ready?”

“Frack no.”

He jumped.

Jets built into the suit’s shoulder and back roared to life, catapulting them through the air. With her face pressed against the Achileus’s chest, all Theresa could see were the shaft’s walls passing in a scribbled blur, all she could feel was the sudden, frenzied gale tearing at her face and back. Until the shuddering jar of impact. She waited for him to topple, to fall. Instead his knees flexed, suit cushioning the impact, and then his hand let go her waist and she slid limply to the ground, muscles turned to jelly.

“There,” Nix said. “That wasn’t so bad.”

A bolt of nova-bright red light slammed into the back of the Achileus. The suit toppled forward, straight towards Theresa. She scrabbled backwards frantically, trying to keep from being crushed underneath. Nix managed to get one hand up, brace it against the wall, so that the suit fell sideways, twisted onto its back, crashing down just short of Theresa’s feet.

“That,” gasped Nix, “was bad.”

“What was that?”

“Anti-armor laser,” he hissed. “Another suit, back down there. Must have been a Purifier, why I didn’t spot it behind us.” The legs of the Achileus twitched slightly. “Damn, motive systems are shot. This thing’s not going anywhere.”

“Nix?” a loudspeaker voice called from down the shaft.

“Creed,” he said to Theresa. “Probably going to offer me some bullshit way of dying ‘honorably’.”

“Nix? Giving you one chance to come out and fight like a true warrior.”

“Bingo.” The right arm of the Achileus moved, laboriously slow, half-dragged across the floor of the corridor until it was pointing back out the shaft, at a nexus of wiring and cables on the far wall. “Fracking Clanner.”

“What’s he waiting for?” Theresa whispered.

“Either trying to decide if I’m dead or not, or else waiting for a backup team to cut off our escape.”

“Alright Nix,” called Creed. “If that is the way you want it.”

“Anything you can do?” she asked.

“Maybe yes,” Nix sighed. “But probably no. Ah, here we go.”

She heard the boom of jump jets. The laser on the arm of the Achileus spat a beam of brilliant light, blowing apart the cluster of wiring on the far wall. A split second later, the blurred shape of a Purifier battle armor appeared in front of the hole to the elevator shaft, just cutting its jets to bring itself arcing down—

Nix missed, she thought, despairing.

—And then the elevator, brakes released when Nix destroyed the wiring in the shaft control system, came plunging down, smashing into the Purifier like a freight train. One second, the suit was there, the next there was a blur of grey metal, and both were gone.

She listened for the impact, with growing horror as she ticked off the seconds. When it came, it was like distant thunder.

“That had to hurt,” Nix said dryly, as the back plate of the Achileus slowly hinged open. “So, for that matter, does this.” He hauled himself out of the suit, teeth gritted. Theresa saw he was dressed only in a black, one-piece bodyglove that ended above the knees and elbow. Blood ran down one leg.

He reached back into the suit and pulled out a pistol, then tossed her something, a square plastic-wrapped package the size of a small briefcase. “Dust suit,” he said, and started limping up the tunnel, pistol held in both hands. “Put it on as we go, you’ll need it.”

Theresa tore through the plastic as they walked, hauled the drawstringed-trousers over her legs one at a time, hopping as she went, then pulling the hooded jacket down over her head. Breather went around her neck, goggles sat on her forehead. “Where’s yours?”

Nix jerked a thumb back at the Achileus. “That was mine.”

“You going to be okay?”

“Sure, fine, no problem,” he said. “Got somewhere we can hide. Just have to walk for a couple of hours.”

 

 

21. ECHOES

 

Salome splits her squad up into pairs to search the tunnels more efficiently.

The radio is silent now. Earlier, there had been shouting, an excited Adept reporting he’d found them, and then the signal had been washed out by an ear-splitting screech of noise the taccom had automatically muted to a whisper. She half crouches as she pads down the tunnels, and grips her rifle in both hands.

The tunnels here are close to the surface, where heated air cools, releasing its tiny cargo of water vapor. It drips in tiny stalactites from the walls, and the plinking sound of the drops falling is the only thing she hears. She presses her throat mike, and whispers “Laskey, Kimura, status.” There is only static, like cosmic radiation, then a burst of what sounds like Spanish speedmetal that threatens to burst her eardrums. She clicks off, disgusted. Comms have been sporadic ever since the alarm sounded.

It is just her and her backup, a fellow Tortugan named Oliver, so new he barely knows which end of the needler to hold. She keeps him with her so he won’t slow the other teams down, but is beginning to regret her selflessness. He splashes through every puddle like a kid in a playground.

So it is that she nearly misses the shuffling sound up ahead. She holds her arm up, fist clenched, as a signal to stop, but it takes a second before Oliver notices and halts. Salome flicks him an adamantine look over his shoulder that promises many things, all of them unpleasant, when they return to barracks. He swallows, hard. She signals again: Wait.

Years of servitude in the master’s household taught her to move quietly, lest she draw his attention, and she glides forward now, needler held ready. The shuffling is louder. She slides up to a junction in the tunnel. The sound is very near.

And then she moves, spinning around the corner, needler held ready against her shoulder, her cheek against the stock—

—and finds herself looking down the bore of a laser pistol aimed at her head.

The man holding it is the man from the apartment, the one the smiling Demi-Precentor wanted to talk to. As soon as she sees the barrel of the pistol she knows that she is dead, that he is dead too, for even in dying she can fire, and at this range, in this enclosed space nothing will live that stands in front of her gun.

She does not fire.

Salome dreams of two faces each night, but there is a third face in the story that she never sees, for that face is her own. She sees it now, sees a memory of that 12-year-old Salome cold, wet, filthy, hungry and alone, in the face of the woman standing behind the man with the gun.

And slowly, she lowers her needler. The man watches her, and she knows he is ready, she still might die if she so much as opens her mouth. She flicks her eyes in the direction of the other tunnel, away from where Oliver crouches, and she sees the man’s head move fractionally.

They edge slowly away from her, down the other tunnel, never turning their backs on her. Salome stands, rifle held loosely in her hands, and watches them go. The man is tattooed, she notes, just as she is, and she knows she has done the right thing. He is owned by the past, as surely as she is, and when the line of sight breaks as he rounds a corner, she feels that a cord has been cut. Now, she is free.

She walks back to Oliver, shrugging at his quizzical look.

“Just an echo,” she says, and leads him in the opposite direction.

 

 

22. BUTTERFLY PEOPLE

 

Theresa expected the dust to sting. She didn’t expect it to feel quite so personal. Like the wind was deliberately trying to find a gap between her mask and her face, or between her gloves and jacket. The wind whipped and howled and beat at her in impotent rage. Gritty dirt flew into her face with a force that felt like spite.

If she was having a hard time, Nix was suffering. Dressed only in his short body suit, with his chin tucked down and the neck stretched up to cover his mouth, his skin looked raw and red. Every few minutes he had to stop, wracked by another coughing fit. He waved her away, each time a little more feebly than the last.

Nix concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. The wind felt like sandpaper on a sunburn. The air like trying to breathe in a burning building. His eyes were blurry with tears.

Shapes loomed like mirages in the sandstorm. Pillars of rock, like office towers. So, it came back to this. Always back to towers. Some nights he stood on the top, some nights he fell through the sky towards it, but it was always the tower, always he returned to the tower.

What was a tower? A hierarchy given physical form, penthouse suites and executive offices at the top, garbage in the basement. Everything was about vertical relationships in a tower, the top and the bottom, one floor above the next. Each person’s struggle to the figurative top turned into a literal ascent, people stratified like layers of sediment along the way, deposited where the tides of life had carried them.

Nonsense, he was rambling. It was just a building. Just a way of stacking people together.

Where were they going? Oh right, the basement where he’d stored the suit. Pity he’d lost the Achileus. Would’ve made things much easier. Quite careless, that. Must get Theresa there.

He felt like he was being slowly skinned alive by the wind. Maybe the outer layers would peel away and the new him would emerge, butterfly-like, from the cocoon of his old self. Rambling again. Bullshit. People weren’t butterflies. Over the course of a lifetime they could barely change. Over the course of a civilization? Not at all.

“People aren’t butterflies,” he told the wind. The wind screamed back.

It all came back to towers.

People were always building towers. They were majestic, imposing, comfortable. No. They were top-heavy, unstable things, that kept crashing down. Crash, just like that poor woman’s head. And people would pick up the pieces, vowing they had learned their lesson, and go right back to building another one. Oh, but that poor woman’s head, those were pieces you couldn’t pick up. But what did it matter? Noah’s nihilist scribbles were right. People would go on being people, go on building towers, go on knocking them down. Nothing he could do would change that.

“Rafael Bravo Two,” he told the wind.

“Nix, you’re hallucinating,” the wind said. Nice of it to be concerned.

He sank to his knees in the dust. Something that sounded like his name was being shouted in his ear. What did it matter? It was just someone asking him to climb another tower. Didn’t they know he was tired of climbing?

A face pressed against his. A woman’s face. No, no, he remembered a woman’s face. Not angry or frightened, but sad, alone, resigned. No, he didn’t want to see her face again. Let her stay dead, on top of that tower, and let a part of him stay with her. But the intrusion was insistent, now something plastic was being pressed against his nose and mouth, rubber edges sticking to his skin. “Breathe,” the dead woman said. He breathed.

He opened his eyes a crack. Theresa was kneeling in front of him, her own mask pressed against his face. “Breathe,” she shouted, and he took another deep breath.

That was the thing about towers. Manmade, but too large to be human scale. Dwarfing their creators. You couldn’t think about the tower, your mind couldn’t hold it, it was too big, it would crush you under its inevitable weight. There was only the person that was in front of you. You couldn’t stop the tower from falling, but maybe, you could pull free one survivor.

He reached up and gently, firmly, pushed her hand and the mask away. Leaned forward, his mouth next to where her ear would be under her hood, shouting. “Keep walking the same direction. Look for the rock shaped like a ship prow. There’s a cave at the base. Go.”

She was shaking her head, mouth moving, words lost in the wind.

He tried to push her away, made feeble by another coughing fit. “Go, go.”

Theresa stood, hesitating. Then a sound, a deep, steady hum. Growing louder. A shadow approaching. He fumbled for his gun, barely able to see. Theresa moved, crouched behind him. The hum cut off, a figure separating itself from the shadow then the slam of a door. The figure drew nearer. Nix waited, resigned.

“Malbenita, you look like merda.”

The voice sounded almost cheerful.

 

 

23. ESPERANTO

 

Noah was at the wheel of the ATV. That wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was, he could talk. And what came tumbling from his angelic, cover-ready face, was a non-stop stream of multilingual profanity, a kind of unprintable Esperanto composed primarily of curse words, which was matched for careless exuberance only by his driving.

“Fouille-merde Everclear, she bangs on my door in the middle of the night, says you need help,” he was saying, one hand on the wheel while he turned and talked with them as the jounced in the back. “Begs me to get my pequena vagon. Chinga tu madre, I tell her, but loco onna doesn’t get the meaning of ‘No’ and chikusho-o-o—” The buggy bounced heavily, sending Theresa and Nix briefly airborne before they slammed back into the molded plastic seats. “—Farsela addosso, that what a good one, eh?”

Visibility at this speed was about three seconds, Nix figured, which in the event of a collision would give him just enough time for the life flashing before his eyes to get as far as his first kiss (Naomi, grade six, wasn’t that good) before he was catapulted straight out the front glass. The bouncing made every inch of his blistered skin scream. He began to wonder if sudden death might not be preferable. Unconsciousness, when it came, was a relief.

“Can they track this?” Theresa asked as she clutched the seat in front of her.

“Mutterfickers couldn’t find their own ketsu with both hands, vaquiero,” Noah replied cheerfully, swerving the ATV around a sudden outcropping of rock. “This bambino is all-electric, no emissions. Body’s made out of the same kaka as stealth armor.”

It grew noticeably darker in the cabin as Theresa saw they drove between the walls of a slot canyon, barely wider than the ATV. The wind dropped from a roar to a whistle, like air rushing through a train tunnel. Where the other rocks she’d seen had been jagged, shattered shards, here the stone flowed in ripples like chocolate silk. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch them.

The walls were getting higher as they drove, the sky reduced to a sketchy caramel ribbon far overhead. Noah fell silent, grimly focused on the narrow, winding path ahead. He turned on the headlights, illuminating the walls and throwing back spastic, trembling shadows.

In the brittle light, Theresa saw they were heading straight for a sheer rock face. Noah gripped the wheel, oblivious. The rock wall was growing closer. “Uh, …” she began and then her stomach lurched as the ATV plunged down a sudden incline, passing inches below what she’d taken to be the bottom of the rock face.

The tunnel on the other side was smooth, regular, and lit at regular intervals by standing lamps casting halos of sodium light. The buggy slowed to a halt in a large cavern, similarly illuminated and strewn with boxes, tables, chairs, pallets, rolls of plastic, and large, heavy-looking blue tarps hanging over a number shapes whose function could only be guessed at.

There were also about two dozen men and women, no two dressed alike, but all the sort of people her parents would have advised her against making eye contact with. It was strange to think that Nix might well have been the least heavily-tattooed one among them. She glanced over at Nix. His eyes were closed, his body slumped back in its seat. She reached for a pulse at his neck, and was relieved to feel his skin flutter under her fingertips.

Noah hopped from the ATV as soon as it stopped, signaling to several of the others too fast for Theresa to follow: Fist pump—card shuffle—the number four—finger pistols—excitable duck. Four men came and lifted Nix gingerly from the ATV, and carried him to a corner of the room where there was a bed surrounded by a makeshift curtain and stacks of boxes with red or white crosses stenciled on them.

A man was waiting, snapping on latex gloves as the men lay Nix on the bed. “I’m the medic. What happened?” the man asked, eyeing Nix’s skin critically.

“Went for a walk outside without a suit.”

The doctor nodded unhappily. “Not the smartest move. Suit’s contaminated now, we’ll have to get him out of it,” he tapped the bodyglove. “Help me turn him over.” That done, the doctor picked up a scalpel from one of the boxes and sliced through Nix’s bodysuit, revealing the inkwork beneath. He whistled appreciatively. “Damn.” He glanced at her. “Know what these are?”

“Well, yeah. Tattoos.”

“Mementoes,” he corrected. “Your friend here is either a yakuza, a Draconis commando, maybe one of the Rabid Foxes that worked with them.”

“You recognize them? Who’s the woman?”

“Not who but where.” The doctor dragged over a stand with a bag of clear IV fluid. He probed the inside of Nix’s elbow with a finger, before slowly inserting the needle into his arm. “The woman is Huntress, one of the Clan homeworlds. The castle will be New Avalon, which means he’s probably one of the Foxes. Not sure about the mountain …Kathil maybe?” The doctor retrieved a tray stacked with shiny, silver pouches. He broke one open, extracting a white rectangular sheet that he applied to Nix’s skin. He tossed two to Theresa. “Put these wherever the skin is red or blistered. Where was I? Right. The V’s on each shoulder are rank markers, the two-headed eagle on his chest for a scout or recon specialty. The skulls are kills, obviously, animals for Clanners, human skulls for the others. The woman on top of the castle, though, that’s a new one on me. Have to ask him about that one yourself. He never told you?”

“Must have forgotten to mention it.” She traced the outline of the figure, a lone woman standing on top of the highest battlement, with the tip of one finger.

The doctor gave her a long look, then went back to applying the patches to Nix’s skin. “Friend of yours?” he asked, too casually.

“Yeah. No. Hard to say,” she looked down, forgotten pouch in her hand. Seemed to see it for the first time, tore it open and placed a pad gently on Nix’s bare leg. It was hard for her to say. Owing someone her life, that was a feeling she didn’t have the vocabulary to express. Like she’d have to invent a new language for it.

 

 

24. OLD-FASHIONED GOODNESS

 

Euphoria watched the doctor and Theresa standing over Nix’s bed. There was something between those two, she knew, perhaps just shared danger, like the insanity and exhilaration of two people base-jumping off a building together. Still, a possible complication.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Noah wander over. He’d shucked his dust suit in favor of mafioso chic: black shirt, black waistcoat dark purple tie. For a moment they stood in silence, watching the doctor and Theresa work.

“Pinche cabron is tough,” Noah murmured, approving. “You should have come to me sooner though, EE. I’m hurt.”

“Didn’t know if I could trust you.”

“Oh lihele no, you can’t, no doubt about that. See that over there,” Noah pointed at a palette stacked with grey plastic boxes. “Lethe, street name ‘Wipe’ or ‘Bleach.’ Makes you forget everything and feel all Zen, keep using it and you get amnesia, eventually permanent memory loss. Great drug for budalast people who don’t want to face reality, too bad if they wake up not knowing who their own family is. That’s the business I’m in, and in this business, you look after numero uno or you die,” The pointing finger curled into a fist. “On this though, helping you helps me. I’ll do anything, if it hurts the Blakists.”

“Really? Not that I’m not grateful Noah.” She turned to face him. “Just a little curious. Why?”

His face tightened. “Hundan nuked Tamar, EE. Just because the Clans were there. They dropped the verdoemde bomb on my home. My home.” His face relaxed, as though with effort. He smiled thinly. “Plus I could never say ‘No’ to a pretty face.”

“You could never say anything to anyone, you faker.”

“Meh. People talk more freely around you when they think you can’t talk yourself.”

“We owe you.”

“Too kirottu right, you do. And I plan to collect on every kroner. The first thing you can do to pay me back, though, is to get that woman off my planet.” He jabbed his chin in Theresa’s direction. “Mujer is bad for business.”

“Would that it was so easy. Have to assume our initial plan is shot to hell. Though you seem to have no problems getting things through security.”

“Oh, you’re wondering about that, are you? Think I’ve maybe got some stealth tech, or a highly skilled hacker, or maybe a hidden tunnel?” His grin flashed white in the dim cavern. “You’re underestimating the ability of people to be people. Ever hear of a guy named Oskar Schindler? No? Helped Jewish people escape another dictatorship, a millennia ago. He could do it because he was rich, tall and handsome, and when you’re rich, tall and handsome, people will let you do anything. And EE, I am fracking gorgeous.” He struck a fashion-model pose, thumb and index finger against his chin. Euphoria had to admit, the man looked good enough to eat.

“Just like Schindler, we’re dealing with a dictatorship here,” Noah went on. “And the whole point of dictatorship is to eliminate dissent, right? No more of that messy supervision or questioning orders. Pretty much tailor-made for corruption.” Noah took his hand from his chin, rubbing his thumb against two fingers. “Write someone marching orders like that and they’re lining their pockets before the ink can dry.”

Euphoria chewed her bottom lip a moment. “Bribes, huh. Anyone we can bribe to get Theresa onto a DropShip?”

Noah shook his head. “Get you a fake ID maybe, DropShip crew uniform, stuff like that, but all bets are off if anyone finds out who she is. Price on her head is too high. I can’t match economic firepower like that.”

Euphoria’s shoulders sagged a little. “Maybe a good, old-fashioned hijacking?”

“Sometimes, violence really is the answer.”

“Pity we don’t have any literal firepower, either.”

“Well now, EE,” Noah smiled slyly. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

 

 

25. RECOVERY

 

16 August 3072

 

He opened his eyes a crack.

The first thing he saw was Theresa, head nodding down on her chest, as she sat in a folding metal chair by the side of the bed. Her head came up as he tried to push himself up, blinking at him owlishly. “Hey.” She stifled a yawn and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You okay there?”

“Sure,” he grunted, propping himself up on his elbows with effort. “Just peachy.”

She smiled from within a sleep-tussled tangle of black hair, and Nix felt as though someone had stabbed his chest with a pin. He looked away, quickly. Took in the lime green curtain around the bed, IV stand by the bed, plain white sheets. He lifted up the sheets. “I appear to be naked.” Theresa smiled innocently. “I trust you didn’t take advantage of me?” Theresa batted her eyes in an I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about sort of fashion. “Details?”

“We’re in your buddy Noah’s smuggling hideout,” Theresa gestured around. “All very romantic, couldn’t help but tear your clothes off.” She laughed at his expression. “Nah, not really. Noah’s doctor—male doctor—said your bodyglove was contaminated and best thing to do was cut you out of it. EE and Noah have been thick as thieves, so I’ve been stuck minding you.”

A break appeared in the curtains and Euphoria’s head appeared. “Thought I heard some candy-assed SpecFor moaning, and I knew you had to be up.” She eyed him critically. “Looking better. When you’ve finishing being a typical crybaby sixer, come say hi. Noah has some new toys for you to play with.” She disappeared back behind the curtain.

After a minute, Theresa cocked an eyebrow. “A sixer?”

“MI6.”

“That answers that. Doctor said you were probably some kind of scout or recon guy.”

“He’s probably right.”

“So…” she ran a finger lightly along his arm, thinking of their earlier conversation, before the sunset. They still were who they were, and then again, they weren’t. They’d both come so close to death, all of it seemed to matter a lot less now. Her rank, her position, his arm, his history. Everything. It didn’t matter, only this, here, this heartbeat in her fingertips, this skin beneath her touch. “Recon means you’re good at moving quietly?”

Watching her finger move. Nodded, wordlessly.

“How quietly?”

A modest shrug.

“Mmm, that is very quiet.” A mischievous smile. “You know, I’ve seen you naked now. Seems a little unfair, doesn’t it? Wonder if there’s some way we can even things out.”

“I might have an idea or two.” He reached over, clasped her hand in his. Gave her a wink. “Some time I don’t feel like a potato that’s been peeled and boiled.”

She retrieved her hand. “Well then,” leaned close, and brushed her lips across his. “Get well soon.”

 

17 August 3072

 

“The megaservers.”

Euphoria spread out several architectural blueprints across a metal table. Theresa and Noah stood, Nix sat. “The drawback to having all your data stored in one place is vulnerability,” she continued. “That, and heat.” She tapped a series of large circles on the ‘surface level’ floorplan. “All that digital thinking creates a lot of heat, so there are dozens of these big-ass fans to cool the place down. Follow the air tunnel down, you can get right into any one of the server farms, either take out the processors themselves or blow the power supply.”

“And when the power is off?” asked Theresa.

“We’ll target the spaceport security servers: Cameras, body scanners, ID card readers, communications, everything goes offline. Backups will kick in after five to 10 minutes, so we have to act fast.”

“And do what?” asked Nix.

“Get Theresa and I through the security checkpoints and put her onto a DropShip.”

Nix scratched his head. “That was a whole lot of ‘What?’ for one sentence, EE. Why do both of you have to go? And won’t they just lock the place down when the lights go out?”

“The two questions are connected,” Euphoria said. “Theresa and I go through security, her with a fake ID supplied by the loquacious Mister Noah here, me with my regular ID. Cameras and scanners will pick up on her, algorithms will do their algorithming, red flags will start to appear in the system. But before the alert is sounded, which will likely be just after the second security checkpoint, we cut the power. When everything blacks out, the first thing the guards are going to do is look for an officer to tell them what to do. That’ll be me.”

“You?”

“Never told you about my day job, did I Nix?” Euphoria gave a mock bow. “Adept three-rho Emilia Clearing, at your service. The ‘rho’ is the branch designation: ROM.”

Nix blinked in surprise. “A double agent?” Euphoria nodded. “Damn, explains a lot. So wait, did you know silver-eyes was going to break down my door the other night?”

“Yep, and recorded every minute of it,” an unapologetic shrug. “Yeager said some very interesting things to you, Nix. So interesting, in fact, I sent a copy to the planetary Precentor.”

“Fair enough.” Nix found he was running his hand through his hair again. “Might keep him busy for a bit. So, the servers shut down, alarms go off, Adept on the scene starts shouting orders. One of the orders is to get the crew, including Theresa, onto the DropShip. Communications are out, so there’s no way to verify the order. Then you order the ship to make an emergency launch?”

“Best way to avoid a suspected terrorist attack.”

“Okay. So how do I take out the megaserver?”

“Allow me to answer that, bratr,” Noah walked to a corner of the cavern, where a blue tarp was draped over what looked like a large manikin, vaguely human-shaped but larger and bulkier. Noah gripped the bottom edge of the tarp, turned and gave them a wink. “Ein, dos … ”

He whisked the tarp away with a flourish. Underneath stood a suit of battle armor. It was smooth and muscular where the Achileus had been hulking and distorted, with two separate eye lenses rather than a single visor and shiny, serpentine coils leading to each arm from its backpack unit.

“I present the Purifier Adaptive battle suit, the absolute latest in go-anywhere, do-anything, kill-anyone technology. Memetic chameleon-camouflage armor, five centimeter extended range laser, 90 meter jump capability,” Noah patted the massive shoulder affectionately. “Fell off the back of a truck. Fella whose truck it fell from took an overdose of Bleach, doesn’t remember a thing about it. Or about anything, really. Very sad that.”

It looked a bit like a gargoyle wearing a gas mask, Nix though, levering himself to his feet and limping over to the suit. He completed a circuit of the armor, whistling in approval. “Invisible armor, eh?”

“Don’t get too carried away,” Noah cautioned. “You’re still physically there, so you still cast a shadow, still leave footprints, still create a negative space in smoke or rain.”

Nix grinned as he looked at the suit. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”

 

 

26. PRECENTOR II

 

The planetary Precentor pats the back of his head. Feeling a little thin back there. Probes his scalp some more. Definitely thin. Is he going bald? Not surprising, really.

On the desk is a noteputer, and on the screen is a report of the detention facility attack. A total of 30 casualties, with massive sections of the facility now totally unusable, owing to the sudden absence of doors, walls, and in several notable instances, floors. There is a bottle of bourbon next to the noteputer, and it is a third empty.

The Precentor hunts for a glass, the one he keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk.

Instead he finds a small, white packet. It is addressed to him. He lifts it from the drawer, gingerly. Feels the shape of it. A cube, perhaps a few centimeters per side. The packet is not sealed, and the Precentor slides the contents out onto his desk. A clear data crystal comes tumbling out, bouncing to a halt in front of him.

The Precentor reaches for it, hesitantly, before placing it into the reader slot of his noteputer. Automatically, a file begins to play. There is no video, but on the audio, he can quite clearly make out Demi-Precentor Yeager’s voice.

“Luckily, our followers, even our leaders, have bid a fond farewell to reason in favor of fanaticism … ”

 

 

27. LIVE WITH IT

 

18 August 3027

 

He walked back to his bed in the cavern and found Theresa sitting on the edge. Most of the lights in the cavern were out, a single lamp by his bed caught her half in the light, half in shadow. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps.

“You’re feeling better, I take it?”

“Like a whole new man,” he grinned. Looked down at his skin, covered in a veneer of sweat but no longer red and peeling. “Which on a certain level I kind of am, I guess.”

“EE’s given you a workout.”

“The new suit is something else. Amazing what technology can do,” he said, sitting down beside her on the bed. “EE’s got me doing flips, bouncing off the walls, all kinds of acrobatic stuff I could never do in the old suit. Time comes I won’t even need to shoot, I’ll do a ballet routine and the Wobbies will just drop their guns in awe.”

“Well, I’m glad you sound confident,” she smiled back. “EE is quite something, isn’t she?”

“Keeping us alive through the last three years took quite a bit of something-ing,” Nix agreed. “Glad she’s on our side.”

“This plan of hers, though …”

“She’ll come through this fine, you’ll see,” he reassured her. “Take more than a Wobbie to stop her.”

Theresa smiled again, then grew serious. “Make sure you come through this fine, too. This Yeager guy … He treats people like bacteria in a petri dish. Sociopath doesn’t even begin to cover it—he doesn’t care if 99% die as long as there’s 1% left.”

“Monsters don’t scare me,” he said. “You can kill monsters. It’s the people that listen to Yeager and do what he says that terrify me, because they’re just ordinary people. That means the ordinary person, when given a choice, will follow a monster like Yeager. And I don’t know how you kill that.”

Theresa put her hand over his, patted it. “If you’re trying to reassure me, you’re doing a terrible job here, Nix.”

“Okay then, try this: I’ll be fine.”

“Fine?” Skeptical.

“Great, once I know you’re safe. Well, great and not-so-great, when you’re gone.”

“You sound like you don’t like that. I like that you don’t like that.”

“You do seem to be an expert on causing me pain.”

“Your own stupid fault.”

“Theresa …You know I … I mean we …”

“EE was right,” she leaned forward and kissed him. “You talk too damn much.” And pushed him, unresisting, down on to the bed.

Awareness returned slowly, as he lay on the bed, Theresa cradled beside him. He felt foolish for having worried, about her, about himself, about everything. You couldn’t change everything, and it was inhuman to try. Civilization would go on, or it would falter, with or without him. For now, there was only the tickle of her hair on his chest, the feeling of her breath across his skin, the warmth of her body.

He closed his eyes and slept, and for the first time in many years, did not dream of the tower.

 

 

28. A HISTORY BOOK THAT WOULD NEVER BE WRITTEN

 

19 August 3072

 

“You awake?”

“No. You?”

“Me neither.”

“Talk to me then. Tell me a secret.”

“You first.”

“Okay. Let’s see: I’m not really a Sortek.”

A long pause. “You probably could have saved a lot of people a lot of bother by mentioning that sooner.”

“I mean technically. Grandma Felsa was the last Sortek, before she married and took Grandpa’s name. You know Hanse Davion was my father’s godfather? Not sure if that makes him my grand-godfather or god-grandfather. Anyway, papa switched the name back from Green to Sortek when I was two years old. He thought it would help the family get ahead.” Dry, bitter laughter. “Your turn.”

“Dunno. What you do want to know?”

“The woman on the castle.”

“Jealous?”

“Maybe.” Coy. “I’ll let you know after I hear the story.”

“I’ve never told anyone before. But here goes: She was a countess, I think. Or was it a marquess?”

“Ouch. Outranked.”

“Pro-Victor. Her younger brother was pro-Katherine. He kidnapped her during the civil war, took over the family business and estates. I think he would have kept her alive, if things had gone otherwise. If I hadn’t arrived.”

“Damsels in distress are your specialty, are they?”

He looked down at his arm. “No, not really.” She followed his gaze, and understood.

“Well, practice makes perfect. I hope.”

That didn’t hurt, not nearly as much as it used to. He was, he decided, developing perspective. It would always hurt, just a little, but the memories didn’t have to define him. You had to take the good with the bad, and make the most of each moment as it came. “C’mere.”

“Again?” A giggle.

Enjoy it while it lasts. “Practice makes perfect.”

 

Nix sat on the edge of the bed, Theresa lying behind him. Her bare feet rested against his back. He wasn’t sure what it was—love, lust, infatuation—he didn’t know what you could call it with two people who were so obviously destined to be footnotes in one another’s histories. He just liked the feel of her feet on his skin, not because it was all that erotic, but because it spoke of intimacy and casual familiarity. A peak at a page in a history book that would never be written.

He reached around and ran his hand up her leg. Why do people torture themselves so? “It’s time.”

She sat up, ran a hand through the black mass of her hair. “Think EE would be mad if we cancelled the whole thing?” Only half-joking.

“Delighted, I’m sure.” Deadpan.

“What would we do, if we stayed here?”

A wicked smile. “I’m sure we could think of something to fill the time.”

“Don’t tempt me.” She rolled out of bed, and began pulling on the grey DropShip crew uniform Noah had ‘found’ for them. “EE would kill us, wouldn’t she?”

“Us? Nah, no away. Absolutely not,” he reassured her. “Only me.”

“She is blowing her cover for this, for me. However many years she’s been working undercover, gone.” Her face was thoughtful, her eyes far away.

“Well,” he wasn’t sure what to say. “Guess she feels you’re worth it. I know I do.”

Theresa blinked, her eyes refocused. She put her hands on either side of Nix’s face and kissed him, long and hard. Drew away slowly, reluctantly.

“Just have to make sure it is worth it then,” she said.

 

 

29. QUIET RIOT

 

Euphoria tapped a small communicator around her wrist. “Nix, you in?”

“Oh yeah. I’m in. Textbook landing.”

They approached the door labeled ‘EMPLOYEES,’ Theresa in front, Euphoria following a distance behind. Theresa hitched her shoulder bag up a little, took a deep breath, and marched forward. She felt a trickle of sweat running down her back, making the grey DropShip crew overalls itch fiercely.

The doors slid open, revealing a desk faced in bullet-proof glass, behind which a patently bored guard sat, leading back in her chair, arms crossed across her chest. On either side of the desk were the chest-high pedestals of ID card readers, and behind them the blocky inverted U’s of body scanners. Beside them, trundling black conveyor belts whisked baggage into the dark caves of X-ray machines.

“DropShip crew?” the guard asked, not even looking at her. Theresa nodded. “Baggage through the machine. Swipe your card.”

Theresa placed bag on the conveyer through the scanner, then slapped her ID on the reader.

A light flashed red. It beeped rudely.

Theresa froze, staring at the machine. Pressed her card again. The light remained obstinately red. The guard frowned, stood up, walked around the end of the desk and over to the reader. A stunner rode on one hip, a snub-nosed autopistol on the other. “Problem?” Reached over to take Theresa’s card. “Not like that,” she said, flipping the card over and pressing it against the scanner again. “Other side.” The card reader chimed and lit up in green. On the screen, her face and the name ‘Anna Chapman’ appeared.

Theresa mumbled her thanks, tried to walk casually through the body scanner on the other side of the card reader. The guard glanced at the screen, then waved her on. “Next.”

Behind her, the beep as Euphoria placed her own ID on the reader. “Good morning, Adept, sir. No need to put your bag through the scanner, sir. Have a good day, sir.”

In the depths of the megaserver stacks of Amity Palace, Anna Chapman’s entry was registered and cross-referenced with the Word of Blake’s dossiers on each citizen. Height and weight data from the body scanner matched. Cross-referencing her name against criminal records and lists of suspected dissidents was immediately flagged—but given the Word’s paranoia, there was nothing unusual in that.

Red flags only started to appear when video data was analyzed. Here was Anna Chapman, only a few minutes ago, in a completely different part of the city. Background data was brought up. Red flags multiplied exponentially. The woman was a chemical engineer—nothing remotely close to what was required for a DropShip crew. The assignment had been sudden, with no record of contact between the ship owner and Chapman.

New directives went out: ‘Anna Chapman’ was to be detained and questioned.

The waiting area in the spaceport was only half-full. With the advent of the Protectorate, most of the people in the departure concourse were DropShip crewmembers rather than passengers, seated or standing in clumps around scuffed plastic tables and benches. A few vendors sat idly behind neon-lit counters and holographic advertisements, their fermented algae drinks and mushroom salads largely ignored by the crews. Here and there were the new elite, Protectorate bureaucrats and overseers who had replaced the nobility, but wearing much the same clothes, and much the same expressions of disdain.

The two women walked through the concourse, the DropShip crew and the Word of Blake Adept, approaching the security checkpoint at the embarkation point. A pair of guards stood listlessly, pulse laser rifles slung across their chests and a bristleback at their feet, while a clerk sat at a counter, tapping through the data on each passenger or crew.

The lights in the spaceport appeared to be in no special hurry to turn off.

“Nix?” Euphoria brought up her wrist and hissed into her communicator, keeping her walking pace slow and measured.

“Wait one.” A metallic squeal. A muted blast. “Kind of busy here.”

A board listing departure and arrival times flickered and dissolved into a storm of static. The baggage scanner at one of the entry checkpoints ground to a halt, red lights flashing.

At the checkpoint in front of them, the clerk continued to click away, uninterrupted, on her noteputer.

Euphoria reached out and tugged Theresa’s sleeve, slowing her walk.

“Nix, we need the power off now.”

The guards looked at them curiously. One shifted his grip on his laser rifle, and began to walk towards them.

“The what? Oh, right, sure,” Nix sounded tired. “No problem. Nothing easier.”

The lights went out. Somebody screamed. Voices raised in confusion.

They were on again. Alarms started to ring, high and shrill. Metal shutters clacked down across the concourse exits. People scrambled out of the way to avoid being caught underneath. The guard in front of Euphoria and Theresa stabbed at his ear, muttering something over and over, then shook his head in disgust. He looked over to another guard, who gave a helpless shrug.

Euphoria strode towards the checkpoint. “Adept three-rho Emilia Clearing. Sitrep?” she barked at the guard.

The guard tore out his earpiece and held the offending item towards Euphoria. “Comms are out, systems are down. I’ve got no fracking idea what’s going on, Adept. Is it another terrorist attack?”

“Calm down,” she snapped. “If it is an attack, the first thing is to get this DropShip away. I want all the crew boarded, ASA-bloody-P. You two, get down to the tower and clear it for launch. And get people away from the doors, or we’re going to have a riot on our hands.”

The guards saluted. “Sir, yessir.” They scrambled off.

Euphoria glanced at Theresa, gave her a surreptitious thumbs up. She nodded at the tunnel beyond the checkpoint. “Straight down there, don’t stop no matter what. I’ll head to the control tower.”

The alarms fell abruptly silent. A voice boomed from the speaker of every PA system. “Citizens, please remain calm. You are being sedated for your safety. Please remain calm.”

Someone in the crowd pointed up. Shouts of fear, disbelief.

“You are being sedated for your safety.”

A grinding sound echoed above their heads. They looked up, to see the slats across the air vents along the ceiling had all opened as wide as they could. People weren’t fools; they knew what had happened in Concordia. The crowd started to panic, surging towards the exits. Guards looked at one another in bewilderment, a few half-heartedly pointing their guns at the mob, others dropping theirs, joining the flight. Hands began to batter uselessly against the metal shutters across the exits.

“Please remain calm.”

Theresa looked at Euphoria, read the fear there. Euphoria met her eyes, and just shook her head. She reached for Theresa’s hand and gripped it tight.

“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “So sorry.” Tears in the woman’s eyes.

Theresa understood. Accepted it. So many people seemed to want her dead so badly, it seemed almost inevitable. She’d been foolish to think it would end any other way. She squeezed Euphoria’s hand back, drew the other woman close, hugged her fiercely. “It’s okay.” It wasn’t evil, it was just people being people. Doing what they always did. “It’s okay.”

“You are being sedated for your safety.”

Overhead, the whirr of air blowers ramping up to full speed.

 

 

30. SHADOW AND LIGHT

 

The exhaust tunnels were massive, perhaps two dozen meters in diameter. A metal grill stretched across the surface of each one to keep people and animals out. The upward draft caused the planet’s orange dust to dance in twisting cyclones above each tunnel.

Nix stood at the edge, gripped the bars of the grill directly in front of him, and then and fired three short, controlled blasts from the arm-mounted laser, cutting free a roughly circular slice of metal. He tossed it away into the sand, looking down at the drop beneath his feet. The massive carbon-fiber blades of a double fan spun at the bottom of the shaft, 80 meters below, creating an intricate play of shadow and light. The suit’s sensors registered a strong updraft.

He watched a countdown in the corner of his HUD tick down to zero, and stepped off the edge into space.

The Purifier suit plunged down the shaft, buffeted by the rising currents. Nix flared the jets, keeping the battle armor vertical, feet down. He sighted at the conical hub at the center of the whirling fan blades and fired. Suit and hub were joined by a line of red fire, then the hub’s casing blew outwards in superheated shards.

The blades, now rushing up towards Nix’s feet with alarming speed, kept spinning.

“Shiiii—” Nix pumped the suit’s jump jets to slow his fall, aimed and fired again. The fan motor detonated like a grenade, fragments thrown clear by centrifugal force to ricochet like ball bearings off the walls of the tunnel. The blades started to slow. Not slow enough.

Time for one last shot, carving through the fan blades, snapping them free from the hub, creating a brief gap—and he was through, landing with a crash on the floor beneath the fan. The tunnel formed an L-bend, curving sharply, causing Nix to slip and skid, tumbling down the tunnel with a banshee screech until he made his left hand into a claw and dug it into the tunnel floor, slowing himself to a stop.

His taccom beeped for attention. He chinned the mike. Heard Euphoria’s voice. “Nix, you in?”

Nix looked up at the crippled fan, still slowing, half its teeth missing. Small debris tumbled down like intermittent rain. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “I’m in. Textbook landing.” Euphoria snorted skeptically, and clicked off.

Nix glanced at the HUD timer, and set off at a jog down the tunnel, footsteps echoing.

The server farm was cold, a few degrees above freezing. Four-meter high pillars of stacked black computer units marched in regularly-spaced rows down the length of the room like the columns of a Roman temple, ice-blue LED lights winking in thought, ropy tentacles of insulated wiring coiling down their length to disappear into the floor. 

Nix advanced cautiously down the center aisle between two columns. Cold mist swirled about the room, curling into random, chaotic shapes.

And some not so random.

There, an unnaturally straight line, as though the mist was flowing along the lines of a—

Nix ducked just as a red beam lanced out from the shadows. He snapped a quick blast in the direction of the beam, and then dropped, rolling along the ground. Two more lasers, eye-blinks of brilliant light, cut into the floor where he’d stood, each coming from a different direction.

Surrounded. At least three, then. They were aiming at the energy flare of his gun, Nix realized. He feinted left, triggered a blast from his laser, then rolled right, coming to his feet. Four lasers fired back, probing the darkness for him, slagging the floor and blasting into a stack of processors, setting them ablaze. Okay, more than three of them.

A smoke alarm began to honk. A shadow flickered in the light of the blazing computer stacks. He fired, rolled, fired again. A blurry outline seemed to rock back, then slid down, growing more substantial as it fell, chameleon disguise derezzing in shimmering hexagonal patterns as the suit’s power failed, until its solid black carapace lay face-down on the floor, head smoking and shattered.

Answering laser fire stabbed through the air. Nix was on his feet, ducking around the back of the closest stack. He watched the mist for signs of movement. There. He dashed behind the next stack, putting himself behind them. Then spun around the opposite side of the stack, firing. Three blinding flashes of red light, right into the center of the moving mist. Another suit stuttered into view, its back arched, poised for a moment before it toppled over backwards.

Nix ducked back behind the pillar as return fire blazed, the whole stack of processors shuddering and swaying under the impact. He braced his legs against the wall, put his back to the nearest stack, and heaved. The pillar swayed, groaning, then toppled directly into its neighbor, setting off a cascade as the columns smashed together like monolithic dominos, blocky processors spilling from the racks in a slate-tip avalanche.

A humanoid figure was briefly visible, memetic coating scrambled as it tried to keep up with the shower of plastic and metal parts falling about it. Nix hit the figure once, twice in the center, watched it go down.

“Nix,” an urgent voice on his taccom.

“Wait one.” He rolled across the gap between two pillars, found his feet and dashed back across to the other side of the room, laser blasts now nipping at his heels as they learned to look for movement. He threw the suit into a forward roll as a blue particle bolt screamed inches behind him and impacted into the wall in a burst of lightning.

“Kind of busy here.”

He crouched, fired, ducked down again.

Some instinct, something seen out of the corner of his eye made him duck just as a fist smashed into the server he’d been crouching behind, scattering a jagged rain of plastic shards and wiring. He jumped over the next blow, hit a micro-burst of his jump jets, spinning the suit into a backflip, blinding the other with his exhaust. Nix landed facing the suit, brought up his right arm and pressed it against something solid. Fired. The blast punched straight through the abdomen of the other Purifier, folding it in half as it was thrown back off its feet, landing with a crash.

Nix’s shoulder was rammed back against the wall in a searing burst of light. Red lights winked in his HUD as he gasped in pain. He twisted away as two more shots slammed into the wall. Then he was up and sprinting, straight for the source of the closest beam, by the near wall. Lashed out blindly with his left arm, head-height, felt it connect. Nix’s suit shuddered from a glancing blow to the shoulder as the other flailed back. Nix grabbed for the head, brought it smashing into ferrocrete wall, creating a fist-sized crater. The other suit lashed out again, a lucky blow that caught Nix under the armpit, throwing him to the ground.

He aimed a kick where the thought the other thing’s leg was, cracking his foot into leg armor just as it fired, laser bolt going wide, the server stack behind him exploding in a shower of sparks. Laser bolts blazed out of the darkness, the other Purifier homing in on the shot, not realizing it was their own squad mate. Nix had the brief impression of a silhouette looming over him, caught like the after-image of a strobe light, its arms thrown up in agony.

There was a howl of anger, then a rush of footsteps, the last suit charging straight towards him, puffs of frost thrown up from where its feet pounded the floor. Nix bounced up, fired a burst of his jump jets to launch himself forward into a flying tackle. His injured shoulder slammed into armor, and pain exploded in nova-white light behind his eyes.

Both Purifier suits crashed to the ground. Nix rolled, heard a foot come down where his head had been. Kicked back, a glancing blow, metal squealing on metal. On his feet. A punch caught the side of his helmet. He reeled back. Another punch to the suit’s abdomen left him winded, breathless. Nix felt his suit crash against the wall. A kick landed on his knee and he fell sideways, landing heavily on one hip.

The enemy suit’s camouflage faded, deliberately switched off. It brought its gun up, pointing down at Nix, paused deliberately, then fired.

Nix twisted on the ground, brought his left arm up to shield his head. The beam sliced through armor, the prosthetic arm within, spending its fury on myomer muscle and titanium bone. Leaving Nix alive.

“My turn,” he growled, raising his own laser and firing.

A brilliant flare of light illuminated the room, blinding, searing. The other suit looked down, its left hand felt blindly at its chest, and found the smoking hole there. Then it fell to its knees, tried to lift its right arm. The head drooped and it toppled forward, sprawled across Nix’s legs.

Nix pushed himself up, panting heavily. He looked down at the stump of his left arm, the ragged hole of white-hot armor and melted polymer muscles. “Oh frack,” he muttered. “Not again.”

Euphoria again, voice that could cut glass: “Nix, we need the power off now.”

“The what? Oh, right, sure.” On the far wall was the power junction box. “No problem.” He leveled his laser without looking, still examining the smoking ruin of his left arm, and blasted the box to pieces. He let his laser fall. “Nothing easier.”

He struggled to his feet, and began to limp back towards the exhaust tunnel.

Now, it was up to them.

 

 

31. ANTICIPATION OF LIFE’S FINER PLEASURES

 

“Reports of an attack in Amity Palace sir, at the central computer megaservers. A level one of battle armor is engaging.”

“A level one?”

“Yessir.”

“Oh dear, is that all?” He should be angry, but he can’t help but smile. He does so enjoy the anticipation of life’s finer pleasures. He pulls his red robe up over his head, revealing the hard grey plates over the skin of his chest. If you wanted something done right, he thinks. “You’d better get my ’Mech prepped.”

“Your ’Mech?” A note of puzzlement. “Yes sir, of course sir.”

He touches a panel on the wall and a small storage space rolls out. He pulls out a MechWarrior’s cooling vest and helmet. Sets the helmet on top of the piano. A thought occurs. “Which servers were attacked, Adept?”

A short pause. “Uh, spaceport security and traffic control, sir. We’ve already switched to backups though, sir. Minimal downtime.”

He pulls on the vest, fastening the clasps methodically, from top to bottom. “Are any DropShips scheduled to land or take off in the next few hours?”

A longer pause. “Yes sir. The DropShip Mileage May Vary is scheduled to take off in less than an hour. It delivered foodstuffs, and is returning with electrical parts, bound for Mirach.”

Yeager nods to himself. “Adept, I want the spaceport locked down. Full quarantine.” He picks up the helmet, starts for the door. “Agent CT in the ventilation system.”

“CT in the … But, our own men sir?”

“Full quarantine.” Yeager pauses with the door open. “See to it personally, Adept.”

Closes the door behind him with finality.

 

On the way to the ’Mech hangar, his way is blocked by two militiamen. He waves for them to stand aside. They do not. They look intensely uncomfortable, but they do not stand aside. Yeager reads their body language—they are ready for a fight.

He halts in front of them. “You have three second before I—”

They interrupt him. Him! They dare to interrupt him. “Sir,” says one. “Could you please follow us sir?” The second one chimes in “Orders from the Precentor himself.”

Yeager grinds his teeth. “We are under attack you idiots. This is hardly the time—”

“Sir,” apologetic, but not backing down. Interrupting him again! Some people really do have a death wish, Yeager thinks. “The Precentor insisted you come with us, now sir.” Yeager sees their hands now rest on the butts of their pistols.

“And if I refuse?” he asks, already knowing the answer. “You are authorized to use force?”

“Sir, we would like to avoid a scene, sir, but you are being placed under arrest.”

“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to use force.”

The two men look at each other. This gives Yeager plenty of time to grab the first by his throat, lift him from the floor and throw him head-first against the corridor wall. The second draws his pistol, but too slow, these frail people are much too slow. Yeager’s hand clamps around the wrist, squeezing until bones snap. The militiaman sinks to his knees in agony, while Yeager calmly plucks the autopistol from nerveless fingers, turns it around, and shoots the man in the head.

The first guard is back on his feet, head bleeding from a gash down the side, and he fires at Yeager. At point blank range, there is no way he can miss. The bullet impacts against the dermal plating around Yeager’s chest and shatters. Bullet fragments scatter chaotically. One shard buries itself in the militiaman’s left eye. He falls back, hands clutched to his face, blood streaming from between his fingers.

Yeager looks down, aims the pistol at the man’s head, then reconsiders. He turns and walks away, towards the hangar, leaving the man on the floor. If he survives, perhaps he too will be blessed with new eyes, Yeager thinks, advancing humanity an inch closer to its destiny.

There is still the Precentor to worry about, but he will deal with that later. For now, there is the hunt.

 

 

32. SMALL MERCIES

 

Adept Salome went back to Tortuga once after becoming an Adept, to lead a raid on a local strongman’s compound. A girl named ‘peace’ had come home, bringing war. She’d found him hiding under the bed, greyed, melted with age, barely recognizable beneath the years. She’d hoped for something, what she didn’t know, fear, anger, recognition. But it had been too long, he’d had too many slaves to remember one escaped girl.

There weren’t any final words, any devastating exchanges where she revealed to him who had wrought his downfall, because her name wouldn’t mean anything to him. She just stood him up in front of the wall and shot him. There was no transition, the eye processed too slow: he just went from man to nothing in an instant.

She hasn’t killed a man since, but thinks she is about to, now.

“What’s this?” Salome asks, both knowing and dreading the answer.

Her squad has been posted at the entrance to the Harmony City Municipal Air Filtration Plant. There are a dozen men standing in the hallway outside who want entry, dressed in militia uniforms and pushing two carts laden with a dozen tall, grey cylinders. The cylinders are stenciled with “CT,” a serial number and a series of icons threatening dire things for should their handlers commit any one of a variety of idiocies.

“Sleeping gas,” the Adept says, straight-faced. “Now stand aside. Demi-Precentor Yeager’s orders.”

She closes her eyes for an instant, remembering the girl she’d found in the closet. So. It has been a hard, miserable life, worth little, meaning less. She feels no bitterness though. She is simply glad she has been granted this chance to at least do no further wrong, maybe to find just a little grace. It started in the tunnels, it ends here. Her eyes open. “This is unauthorized,” she replies, not moving. “Who is your commanding officer?”

The men standing behind the officer mutter to each other. Who does this Adept think she is? The officer grows angry, jaw clenched, his head bobbing forward with the force of emotion as he spits out his words. “Are you deaf or stupid? This is authorized by Demi-Precentor Yeager himself. Now you either move aside, Adept, or my men and I will make you move.”

Her hand rests on the butt of her needler rifle. “I’ll need to see some authorization.”

“I’ll show you my authorization bit—” He reaches for a pistol in a hip holster.

It is precisely the wrong word to use for the woman known as salope as a child. “Traitors!” She yells as loud as she can. This is very loud. She doesn’t know if her squad will hear or understand, but maybe the confusion will give her a few more seconds. She fires the needler from the hip.

Since she is aiming slightly upwards, the flechettes tear straight through the chest of the officer, then into the face of the man standing directly behind him. Even as they fall she is pivoting, firing, filling the hallway outside the plant with a hail of needles, scything through the men like grass. Even wearing armor, their faces, arms and legs are exposed, and the needles find these weak points with murderous efficiency. The ones closest are all down, dead or maimed, those further away, shielded by the cylinders and their companions, are reaching for their own rifles, trying to wrestle them around to face her.

She drops her needler, empty now, and draws her autopistol, held with both hands, already bucking as she brings it up. She leans into the recoil, her face set, like a house-servant sweeping out a room. A man is hit in the throat, crumples, mouth moving soundlessly. Another is hit in the thigh, just below the edge of his armor, exposed as he shifts his stance to raise his weapon. The femoral artery pumping black blood as he falls, screaming.

There is a blow to her back, like a mule’s kick, and she falls to her knees. Two more, shoulder-height, spinning her around as she falls to the floor beside one of the carts. One of her own. Pale little Oliver, fellow Tortugan, his own pistol drawn on her. The cylinders partially shield her here, prone on the floor, and she is thankful for this small mercy.

It gives her time for one last act.

She places the barrel of the pistol against the skin of one of the cylinders, almost like a caress, and fires.

Her hand goes slack and her head flops back to the ground. Her last though is of the smiling face, the kind one that found her. She hopes the other would approve.

She doesn’t hear the hiss of escaping gas, she is beyond all hearing. Soon, the others are too.

 

 

33. LEAVING GROUND

 

In the spaceport, two women closed their eyes, hugged each other, and waited for death.

The first downdraft from the ventilators touched their skin. It felt cool. It continued to feel cool. It went on being inoffensively, mildly cool. Euphoria and Theresa opened their eyes, and looked at one another. Theresa reached down and pinched Euphoria’s skin.

“Ouch. What was that?”

“Just checking,” Theresa said, dazed. “We don’t appear to be dead.”

Around them, the tone of the crowd was shifting, terrified screams replaced by confusion, tinged with anger. Clots of guards were deep in argument with one another, gesturing at the ventilation system. One turned their laser rifle on the metal shutters and began carving a hole, until another grabbed the barrel, wrestling the gun downwards. Militiamen pointed weapons at other militiamen.

“Damn, this could end badly.”

“We need to talk them down.”

“No time, got to get to the ship.”

“No, one of us has to stay. If any shooting starts, it’s going to be a massacre in here.”

“You go, I’ll stay.”

“Hey, I can do this. I have to do this. I won’t have more blood on my hands.”

“Are you crazy?”

“You’re too valuable to stay.”

“I can’t go. Not like this.”

“Yes, you can. This was always going to be the end, one way or the other. If you stay, you’ll die. Go, and live.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“I can’t go.”

“You can.”

The ROM Adept strides among the militiamen, barking orders, defusing the tension. Militiamen are happy to have an officer to follow. The system has obviously malfunctioned, the Adept explains, organizing the men into squads to cut open the exits, allowing the people inside to file out, weary and fearful, but thankful to be alive. The Mileage May Vary is given immediate clearance to launch.

The DropShip crew member walks down the tunnel connecting to the ship. She glances back, just before she enters, thinks she can just make out the Adept, hands on hips, the picture of command. She smiles to herself and boards the ship, introducing herself to her new crewmates as they strap themselves into acceleration couches. The DropShip’s engines roar to life and she feels herself pressed down even as she is lifted high, high above the world.

The Adept watched the flame of the DropShip engines flickering, dwindling to a vanishing point high above the dusty air, and nods to herself.

 

 

34. NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

 

Nix fired the Purifier’s jump jets from the bottom of the exhaust tunnel, rocketing the suit up past the broken fan blades, through the hole in the covering grill, and out onto Schedar’s surface. Looking up, through the haze of dust he could make out the fading contrails where a DropShip had taken off, a looping half-parabola that tapered into nothing as it reached the heavens. Darkness was falling, the sky illuminated in its shimmering dance of red, orange and pink. He breathed a sigh of relief. She was gone. She was safe. He remembered his dream, of him standing on the rooftop of the office tower. Mentally he waved goodbye.

The ground shook beneath him.

A colossus strode from the swirling dust. A Helios BattleMech, weapons bristling from its arms and shoulders. A shape from his nightmares of New Avalon. Proof, he decided, that if there was a god, or fate or destiny, it had a wicked sense of humor. “You have got to be kidding.”

“Well, Mister Rei, I see it’s been a bit of a rough day for both of us,” Yeager’s voice boomed on external loudspeakers. “I seem to have lost my prisoner and my position, and you seem to have lost your left arm. Again. Becoming something of a habit, isn’t it?”

“Very funny, Yeager old buddy. I would clap, but …”

“Entertaining as ever, Mister Rei. I only wished I’d recorded your witticisms so I could play them back when you’re dead. Speaking of which, I think we both know how this goes,” Yeager said to Nix as the machine’s right arm aimed a tank-killing particle cannon at him. “I could say something like: ‘Surrender or die,’ but then it wouldn’t matter what you say because I’m going to kill you anyway.”

“Lacks originality.”

“Well, that’s life for you, Mister Rei,” Yeager said. “Nothing new under the sun. It’s big old hamster wheel for a few decades then kaput. So on that note: Surrender or …”

Nix triggered his jump jets just as the cannon spat a cobalt ball of fire, blasting a crater and melting the sand into glass where he’d stood. Nix sprinted, zig-zagging, then hit his jets again as soon as they recharged, bounding across the dunes. Memetic armor was useless in the thick dust, he knew. His life would depend on speed, and he had precious little of that.

Behind, the Helios turned and broke into a lumbering, earth-shaking run, firing brilliant streaks of green light that flash-burned the sand on either side of him. Another jump, over the top of a dune, then Nix cut right, sprinting again.

The Helios crested the dune, smoke belching from a shoulder-mounted missile launcher. Warheads arced down, scattering explosions like a string of firecrackers. A near-miss picked Nix’s suit up and hurled him sideways through the air, rolling and bouncing down the far side of another dune.

He shook his head, groggily, aware of the thunder of the Helios’s approaching footsteps. He got to his hands and knees, then paused. Oozing from the ground, all around him, rising into the air like ethereal snakes, were thin tendrils of blackness. Squid-storm. Nix found his feet and ran, deeper into the storm.

Yeager followed.

In his cockpit, Yeager watching the black smoke leaking out of the air, amorphous smudges of it seeming to multiply exponentially like a virus. Yeager swatted at it, experimentally, and saw it roil and twist in the air currents, some of it sticking to the surface of his armor like a limpet. He checked the HUD, but the system registered no damage, no heat buildup, no decrease in mobility. The only issue would be visibility: the stuff was opaque to normal sensors and thermal imaging. A man with superhuman sight, forced to fight blind. He smiled at the thought. All the better. It would make for a more interesting chase.

Nix dodged, left, right, but kept heading in the same direction. Towards the slot canyon near Noah’s hideout. If he could lure Yeager into the canyon, trap him there, then ignite the storm. He put his head down and ran.

Yeager followed the swirling wake Nix’s suit left in the squid-storm, black clouds flowing back around his passage.

Through the clinging, black fog Nix though he could see the narrow slash of the canyon. The external mics boomed with the sound of the BattleMech’s footfalls. The thing must be almost on top of him. He risked a glance over his shoulder, saw the thing barely a dozen meters behind. The left arm was raised aloft, then came whistling down. Nix risked firing his jump jets, leaping back, towards the Helios, as the arm buried itself in the ground where he’d stood. He angled for the thing’s head. Just like New Avalon.

The Helios twisted sideways, bringing the right arm arcing around, the PPC barrel smacking into the legs of the Purifier, sending Nix tumbling, crashing to the ground. The suit bounced once, rolled and was still. He looked up to see the BattleMech towering over him. “This seems familiar,” he muttered. He wondered if anyone was going to feel like strafing the Helios today. He doubted it.

“A fine chase,” Yeager’s voice boomed. “Sorry to see you go, Mister Rei, but it’s for the good of the species.”

“You’re a myopic, cross-eyed, evil windbag, you know that Yeager?”

“Evil? Look around you, Nicholas,” the gargantuan arm swept through the squid-storm, tentacles of the stuff coiling about it, plastering it with black goo. “Whose work is this? Who poisoned this world? Not the Word of Blake. This is what we will set people free from: the evil tyranny of the short-sighted, greedy, self-serving elite that allowed this to happen. This is what we’re going to burn out of the galaxy.”

“You’re talking about people, Yeager. My death won’t help that one way or the other.”

“No, perhaps not. You’re just a little flame in a universe full of stars. But then, it takes a spark to start an inferno.”

He fired his lasers.

There was a brief, blinding flash of light around the barrels.

The air exploded.

Yeager barely had time to open his mouth before a rushing wave of fire swatted the Helios like a doll, blasting the 60-ton ’Mech off its feet and pitching it onto its back. Missile ammunition roasted in the coronal heat and detonated, its tiny roar lost in the thunderous clap of the burning sky.

Yeager’s armored skin, enhanced lungs and kidneys, his metal eyes withstood the inferno for a microsecond, before giving way and being burned to ash, blown before the howling wind.

Nix, prone on the ground, was caught by the edge of the blast, thrown like a tumbleweed, bouncing and spinning across the sandy plain, straight towards the slot canyon. Each time he plowed into the ground a new red light joined a growing host of others crowding together across his HUD. He almost didn’t see the lip of the canyon until it was too late, making a wild grab for the edge, digging the barrel of his laser cannon into the ground like a makeshift oar, finding purchase, gritting his teeth as his body swung down like a pendulum to crash against the canyon wall. Then the cannon snapped and tore free and he was falling. It was a long way to the bottom of the canyon floor.

Fire flowed overhead like a molten river.

Its energy expended, the firestorm abated, turning into a fine rain of black soot and firefly-glowing embers. They swirled down around Nix as he lay. He envied their bright mayfly lives. From Huntress to New Avalon to Schedar, he’d fought his way from one side of human space to the other. Here, at the end, all he wanted was a little peace.

He thought of a woman’s face, that lost one, dead these many years, but found the memory had faded. That seemed right. There was another, but she too was gone, beyond the reach of hurt, safe in the halls of his memory. He smiled. Finally, he could put them to rest. Finally, he could rest, too.

The embers winked out and he followed them into darkness.

 

 

35. PRECENTOR III

 

20 August 3072

 

The planetary Precentor of Schedar holds his head in his hands. The noteputer on his desk displays the most recent in a string of headache-inducing reports. Half the militia in a state of near-mutiny. Two dozen men killed by their own nerve gas. A population on the brink of revolt. A riot only narrowly averted by a quick-thinking Adept, herself now among the missing. A wanted fugitive slipping their grasp. And one of the Manei Domini, caught on audio tape preaching heresy, now found dead.

There is a bottle of bourbon on the desk, and the bottle is half-empty. Beside it stands a glass. The glass is half-full.

The Precentor lifts the glass to take another drink, and notices the symmetry. He puts the glass down, and calls for his secretary instead. Things seen from another perspective.

He dictates a memo, of a heretical Demi-Precentor in league with the Federated Suns, who aided one of their people to escape by staging attacks on the civilian population of Schedar. He asks the secretary to read it back to him when he is done, nodding to himself. The HPG is still down, so he orders the message dispatched on the first available courier.

When the secretary has gone, the Precentor picks up the last of the bourbon again, and tosses it back.

 

 

36. STORYBOOK ENDING

 

Noah’s men brought the battered Purifier suit into the cavern on the flatbed of a trailer hitched to the back of Noah’s ATV. It took six men to lower the suit from the trailer to the ground. The metal plates were dented and warped, forcing them to carefully, gingerly, cut away the armor a piece at a time.

From within the metal cocoon, the form of a man took shape slowly emerged as the carapace was peeled away. Like a butterfly. He only had one arm. The other ended in a half-melted mess of plastic and metal. His skin was a mosaic of tattoos, which traced a history for those who could read. His face was peaceful.

“Nix? Nix?” the woman kneeled over the prone body.

Something might have flickered behind the man’s closed eyes.

“C’mon Nix, give me a sign here.”

Nix’s eyes opened. It took a second for things to focus. There was an irregular, rocky ceiling, half-lost in shadow. And leaning over him, a face. A familiar face, and he felt a surge of affection, reached up with one hand to cup that face gently, watching her smile, feeling the tears wet his hand. “But you’re gone,” he whispered.

Theresa Sortek held his hand against his cheek. “Change of plans, Nix,” she said. “EE was on that DropShip.”

His eyes focused. “It is you,” he said. He stared up at her. “Why?”

“Because,” she sniffed, trying very hard not to feel sorry for herself. “The Federated Suns needs an intelligence officer with inside knowledge of the Word of Blake.” Deep breath. “More than they need a green MechWarrior leftenant fresh out of the academy.”

He closed his eyes, lying there on the floor. He let go her face, letting his arm flop down across his eyes, as if to banish the sight of her. For all his size, he looked quite small. “I suppose,” he said slowly. “You feel very noble, now.”

His anger made it easier. Let her outrage crawl on top of her self-pity. “I feel like, for once in my life, I’ve made the right choice, hell, that I’ve made any choice at all.” She straightened up, looking down at him. “Sorry to ruin your storybook ending, Prince Charming. But I’m not a princess, and I’m not yours, not anyone’s to rescue.”

Nix shifted his arm and looked up at her. A faint smile. “That sounds rehearsed. You tell all your men that?”

“Only the candy-assed sixers.”

“Get a lot of those?”

“One, but who’s counting?” She held out her hand.

He looked at it at moment, then clasped it with his right. Let her pull him to his feet.