But something deep in the marrow of his bones told Rigar that he wasn’t. That whatever this disturbance was, it did not bode well for either the Red Judges or the throne. Or anyone else.
It looked like a perfect black sphere was pushing through the center of the imperial position. So deep black that it emitted no light or field energy or plasma of its own, but its surface caught and reflected a thousand flaring lights of the imperial ships’ engines as they fought to get away.
Suddenly, Rigar knew that if he was feeling fear, down here a few thousand leagues away on the surface of Aries, just at the sight of that strange thing, then the throne pilots and staffers up there must be feeling mortal terror…
There was the first flares of fire and plasma as the first collision amongst the Throne Marine ships happened, followed by another. The vast majority of the throne fleet had managed to scatter, but those nearest the arrival of the alien orb had apparently been too surprised or too terrified to move quick enough…
“B-Boss...What is that thing!?” Carly asked, now near Rigar’s shoulder and looking at the vast alien orb that had now exited the imperial cloud and was continuing out of the Aries System.
“I don’t know…” Rigar whispered, almost unable to take his eyes from that thing—whatever it was. Group-Captain Rigar was not a man to ever study xeno-mythology. He had no idea what a Black Sun or an Archon was, so he had no name for the thing he was looking at as it exited his home system, but Rigar knew one thing, at least...
Any Throne Marine discomfort was their gain.
“Attack!” Rigar suddenly gripped the railing once again as the top rung bent in his grasp. “Send everything! Attack!”
18
The Gene Seer Forest
Sector 0, Sol
Suddenly, the cart was charging into the greens and golds of forest and sunlight, and Anders realized that they had fought—and ran—through the night and into the next day.
And still, Cread has Jake…and was probably already at the Gene Temple, where Anders was horrified at the prospect of what could be happening to him there.
The cart burst through the woods, inside its own culvert-like ditch with stubborn moss and leaf litter exploding from the heavy metal rails that were staked to the ground. Above them, the tops of the culvert held trees that reached down, almost toward the burnt and dented walls of the damaged cart, which was wobbling and bouncing on its rails with alarming recklessness.
“Woah!” Anders was thrown against one of the walls and had to grab the railings as he was sure one entire set of metal wheels lifted from the track before hitting the ground again with a heavy thump!
“Patch!” he yelled, but it was Jin who got to the pilot’s seat first, pulling on the brake lever for there to sound a protesting screech and a spray of sparks as they started to slow down.
“Anders!” the Ilythian behind him hissed, and he turned quickly at the alarm in her voice, seeing the Ilythian half-risen from her crouch and looking back the way they had come. They couldn’t see the tunnel that had spat them out, and Anders realized that even in those few moments, their speed had thrown them deep into the forest.
“What is it? Throne Marines?” Anders asked, moving hand-over-hand down the railings to join the Ilythian.
“No… Perhaps,” the long-limbed, large-eyed alien replied as she scrutinized the tops of the embankment behind them. “I thought I saw something back there… Movement…”
Anders growled, raising his heavy rifle. “Moriarty? Bio-signature scan,” he said tersely, and, as Moriarty complied and the green swathes of light washed over his visor, he murmured to Dalia under his breath. “Well, they can’t be Throne Marines, as they’d be shooting at us by now if they were.”
The creatures following them didn’t shoot at them, because these beings didn’t even have guns.
“Sir, multiple movement signatures on either side, but I can’t read their biology,” Moriarty was saying, just as there was a flash of movement almost overhead, between the trees.
“What is it!?” Anders was sure he saw something tawny like fur. A suggestion of limbs…
There was another flash of movement, this time almost abreast of the cart. Anders saw something that was extending its legs the way human runners did, before it veered off and vanished behind the tree line. But there was something about the movement that struck Anders’s eye strangely. The runner had an odd, loping sort of a gait...
If they are running after us, they can move fast! he thought, realizing that their cart, even though it was slowing, was moving many, many times faster than even the fastest human sprinter.
The fastest natural human sprinter, Anders realized, just as there was a grunt and something burst from the tree line above them, scissoring and kicking its legs as it leapt.
This was the forest of the Gene Seers, wasn’t it? They didn’t have to obey the laws of natural human capabilities at all, did they?
The first hit the nose one of their cart with a snarl, its black-taloned hands scratching and catching on the plates of metal for a second before it looked up—straight at the terrified Jin and Patch—and howled.
It was human, sort of. Or somewhere near human, anyway. The creature was human in general body type, but their muscles and form were easily almost a foot or so larger than the civilian average, with thick slabs of muscle and corded tendons similar to many of the enhancements that a wealthy Throne Marine might buy from the Gene Seers.
But that was where the similarity with its parent genetic family ended. Its body was covered with a dark, short fur that was black and brindle, and its legs appeared to have an extra segment—until Anders realized that it was actually a long, backward-jointed foot, like a kangaroo or a dog.
The creature’s hands were heavy with claws, and their arms were strong, attached to wide shoulders mounded with a mane of longer, dark hair, and its head…
“Dear stars!” Patch stumbled back involuntarily, because the creature’s head was like a cross between a dog and a human. It had an almost-muzzle filled with crooked fangs, but it had light golden eyes that were shaped like a human’s.
“Ghraar!” With one pull of its arms, the creature vaulted toward them, up over the nosecone of the cart.
Phzzt! Dalia shot it, the purple-white bolt from her heavy rifle hitting the thing squarely in the chest before it could get a chance to land and sending it flying away from the cart.
“Nice shooting!” Anders breathed.
There were more snarls from the tops of the embankments as more of the gene-altered humans leapt, kicking their legs and reaching with their talons toward them.
“Fire at will!” Anders bellowed.
One of the creatures had seized the nearest metal rail by Anders and took a swipe at him.
Tzt! A flash of blue field light from the shield that Moriarty had thrown up from Anders’s data-node rebuffed the attack. There was the smell of burning hair, and Anders swept the butt of his rifle across…
…only to miss the wolf-like human as it ducked. They were quick. Augmented reflexes, Anders realized as he reversed the weapon.
“Oof!” The creature had already thrown itself bodily at him, flinging both of them backward in a tangle of metal-clad limbs and furred ones. Moriarty’s weak blue shield flared once again, but the creature appeared too incensed to notice. The shield broke, and the creature seized Anders’s suit plates and began to pull.
Warning! Suit Impact! Front Plate -15%…
It was strong, too. While Anders was sure that it wouldn’t be able to tear and scratch its way through the suit plates, it had already levered claws over the front breastplate and was pulling hard, and there was the sound of a creak and the pop of wires…
It doesn’t have to punch through the battle-plate! Anders saw. All it had to do was to break enough of the seals that the plate would become useless, and any moment now—amid the wrestling, scratching and snarling limbs—the creature would find one of the rubber seals and pull it apart to revea
l the soft under-mesh suit that Anders wore underneath the armor…
Warning! Suit Impact! Front Plate Compromised…
Anders struggled, seizing the creature’s wrists and attempting to break the thing’s grip, but it was too strong. Stronger even than him with the mechanical augments that the suit gave him.
“Moriarty!” Anders hissed in a moment of panic.
“I have an idea, sir,” his simulated intelligence said, always in the same steady tones. The program’s suave attitude did not fill Anders with confidence, however, as he would have preferred at least for someone to recognize the horror he was in. The creature’s face was inches away from the faceplate of his visor, spittle and hot breath hitting the crystal-plate.
>>Outcast Power Suit Override/Moriarty.exe...
>>>Suit Reserve Battery Maximum Charge/Power Vent…
TZRK! There was a sudden flare of static electricity as Anders’s suit crackled with lightning, and Moriarty forced one of the suit’s batteries to overload.
A pained, snarling whimper came from Anders’s assailant.
Warning! Outcast Power Suit Compromised...
The digital HUD display flashed a warning orange.
>>Life Support Systems Compromised…
>>Filtration System Compromised…
>>General Power at 40%…
Anders growled with worry, but at least this time, his suit had not turned into a heavy, solid shell of metal as it had at the transmitter station on Neptune, like the last time the ex-detective had allowed Moriarty to do this trick.
But the mutant creature had been flung back as Anders was pushing himself to the side, his suit feeling heavier now without half of its servo-motors firing.
“Gragh!” The creature snarled at one end of the cart interior, its entire front blackened and smoking, but it was already pushing itself to pounce at Anders once again.
My rifle! Anders found the stock and swept it up as the creature lurched, its clawed hands outstretched.
PHZT! He fired a point-blank shot that was enough to still the beast at last, and Anders toppled under the weight of his compromised suit against the railings as he looked to see how the others were faring.
Dalia was still standing, swinging around from side to side with her two thin blades flashing through the air. She had clearly abandoned the use of her own heavy rifle, now laying at her feet, and was instead cutting a bloody swathe through the attacking creatures clambering around and toward her.
Patch!? Anders could see the Void engineer with his back to the pilot’s chair, firing his rifle at the creatures as they attempted to climb up the nosecone toward them.
“Where’s Jin?” he thought, realizing that the New Eden scout had completely disappeared—until he saw a patch of red and a scrap of what looked very much like the human’s patched and re-patched service jacket, torn and frayed, from one of the sides of the cart. Gone, Anders thought grimly as he raised his rifle to fire in tandem with Patch, clearing the nosecone of the beasts just as Dalia finished her assailants with a kick, sending the last flinging backward.
For a moment, they were clear of any of the mutant wolf-creatures, and Anders was panting heavily with the effort it took to move his heavy suit.
“Sir, I am working on restarting your reserve battery,” Moriarty informed him.
“Do it quick,” Anders growled. He nodded to Patch and Dalia. They were still alive, albeit with many more scratches and dents to their power suits—hardly worthy of the name.
“They got Jin,” Patch breathed in horror. “What were they?”
The cart was still careening through the forest, with the howls of pursuit getting smaller and smaller behind them. Anders wondered if they had passed through the territory of these creatures, or whether the wolf-things had finally started to exhaust themselves. Ahead of them, the forest looked deeper and darker. Gloomier.
“We’re in the playpen of the Gene Seers,” Anders growled. “Who knows what they’ve concocted out here, without anyone knowing, or telling them they shouldn’t…”
19
One Life
“This is as far as we go,” Patch murmured as the cart slid to a shuddering halt, hitting and bouncing a little against a large set of metal brackets that ended their line, half-covered with a thick bank of ivy and briars.
The sounds of the pursuing…whatever they were had vanished, leaving nothing but the ticking sounds of the cart engine and the rising wind in the trees above.
“Sir, I’m registering heavy electromagnetic frequencies north-northwest of your location,” Moriarty informed Anders, supplying a neon-green vector image of his scan, showing a series of small buildings among their own clearings, circling a much larger, almost star-shaped structure.
The Gene Temple, Anders realized. The heart of the group known as the Gene Seers that held all the secrets of the human genome.
“Everyone, make sure your rifles are powered, with reserve battery packs where you can,” Anders growled as he vaulted over the edge of the cart and hit the gravel and moss floor on the other side. “We only get one shot at this.”
The forest around them was heavy and brooding as the trio crept toward their goal. Beside the giant trunks of ancient deciduous trees, Anders occasionally saw the humps and wreckages of much older infrastructure. Bits of concrete blocks—still with steel support wiring poking out—emerged from under blankets of bracken and ivy.
“There’s no birds,” Anders heard Dalia whisper, seemingly in horror. The Ilythian was a little ahead of him on the route they had taken—there was no path, so they had to carefully pick their way forward over cracked masonry and tree roots, scanning every step of the way for trap drones or signs of surveillance technology.
“Huh?” Anders blinked and looked up for a moment before he realized that the Ilythian was right. In fact, he couldn’t quite remember the last time he had heard or even seen birds in this forest, either. The revelation made him feel uneasy, as if even the natural life of the Earth shunned what the Gene Seers were doing.
“Boss…” It was Patch, gesturing with his rifle to something that glinted through the trees. There was metal and glass up ahead.
“Moriarty?” Anders breathed.
“Scans indicate a small structure, residual field energy. No shielding,” the cultured voice of the simulated intelligence said.
“Hm…” Anders glowered ahead, then he nodded to Dalia. “On my left.” He made a circling motion with his hand, and immediately the long-limbed Ilythian started picking her way through the forest in an arc as he had described. “Patch? Stay behind me.” The ex-detective brought up his rifle and started to step forward, sighting down the barrel and swinging to every movement that caught on his scanners.
But apart from the play of the wind in the branches and the soft scurries of smaller forest rodents, nothing drew Anders’s attention until he had reached the tree line and saw the shape of the first Gene Seer building.
It was a small dome, made of something like steel, with panes of crystal-glass. A series of bulkhead doors sat around its circumference, but it was what was in front of it that turned Anders’s stomach.
Pens.
There was a series of metal crates with open bars, each one over seven feet tall at least… Big enough for people. Anders grimaced. They stood clustered around the dome like innocent bystanders. Anders remembered what the New Eden scouts had said. That terrible things happened here. That people were killed. That experiments were run to see what killed people.
And everyone thinks the Gene Seers are all about life. Anders curled his lip in disgust. Little did the rest of humanity know.
“Bio-readings?” Anders asked the intelligence.
“Negative, sir. Only some residual field energetics, which I take to be the general mainframe of the Gene Temple,” Moriarty said.
“Okay…” Anders breathed out slowly and took a step out into the clearing. He paused, rifle raised, but there was no klaxon of alarm or sudden emergence of a
ny drone attack. He saw Dalia emerge on the other side of the clearing, pausing and looking in his direction. Anders nodded, and the pair started to converge quickly on the domed building.
“Patch, stay out of sight. If something comes our way, I want your eyes on it first,” Anders said
“You got it, boss.”
“What illness is this?” There was a hiss of breath as the Ilythian beside him saw the pens, and Anders shook his head silently. He turned instead to the crystal-glass, peering in to see inside some kind of control room.
“Moriarty? Can you hack the door controls?” Anders asked.
“Already working on it, sir,” the intelligence said. A line of orange code slid down the side of Anders’s view before suddenly turning a flashing green. There was an answering flare of light from the nearest archway, and the metal slats started folding themselves up into the frame for Anders and Dalia to step down into the interior control room.
It was round, with control desks on every side underneath the windows. Clearly so that the Gene Seers can view what is going on out there. Anders raised his head before one desk, getting a clear view of the pens.
“There’s still power…” Dalia breathed, waving a hand over one of the matte-black desks for a series of holo-controls and lights to emerge under her fingertips. Words and file names started to float into the air before her.
>>Observation Reports 1012...
>>Delivery and Impact Reports...
>>Subject Diagnosis…
Anders felt his stomach suddenly turn over.
“We haven’t got time for this!” Dalia suddenly whispered, already turning toward the door. It was clear that she didn’t want to know what horrors had been committed here.
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