Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4)

by G. S. Jennsen

  Harris responded quickly. I’m on the second floor already. I’ll get on it.

  Thanks. Adlai, status report?

  Justice reinforcements are in place around the perimeter. The first, second and third floors are confirmed free of hostiles, and no new incursions have been reported. We’ve got a sea of inert dynes littering the premises.

  The shooting might be over, but the crisis was not. “We’ve confirmed the lower floors are clear of intruders. Let’s move everyone to 2-A, where we can triage injuries while the rest of the scene is secured. Spencer, why don’t you and Geoff go ahead and get Maris there, so she can get those wounds checked out. Maggie and I can get everyone else out.”

  Spencer stood and, despite his own considerable injuries, gathered Maris up in his arms and started carrying her down the hallway toward the lift.

  Geoff looked at Nika in question, and she shrugged. “Go with them anyway. Spencer’s apt to collapse any second.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She turned back to where Maggie was helping more people extract themselves and joined her on the floor. “Thank you for the help. Are you hanging in there okay?”

  “Body works like the new it is.”

  That wasn’t exactly what she’d asked, but someone else struggled to crawl through the opening, and she let it go.

  Five minutes later, a face stared at her through the opening. A Commerce Advisor, Edgar B’laughn. “Five people are unconscious in here, and—” he indicated his left hand, which dangled at an unnatural angle at his side “—I can’t drag them out.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll come in after you and bring them out.”

  He clambered out with their help. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Head to Conference Room 2-A and get yourself patched up.”

  Once she was sure B’laughn was moving under his own power, she shifted back to Maggie with a sigh. “In we go.”

  The room’s interior hardly looked better than the exterior did. Several large pieces of ceiling had fallen free, and the bloodstains on the floor nearby suggested this was the cause of most of the injuries. That along with the disintegrated right wall, which now formed part of the debris field blocking the hallway.

  Five bodies lay in the far-right corner. She recognized Basquan by his rich golden skin, though a layer of dust had turned his cardinal hair to clay, and Forchelle by his lengthy beard. One of the others worked for Basquan and had been a constant helpful presence at the Pavilion. Sandie? The other two were Katherine’s subordinates in Admin, but she’d never caught their names.

  She knelt beside Basquan and did a surface level scan. Heartbeat, weak but steady. No major leaking wounds. Great.

  Forchelle wasn’t so lucky. No heartbeat, no electrical activity. She rolled him onto his side and discovered why. The back of his skull had been crushed.

  She dragged her hands down her face. She’d bet a reasonable sum of money he didn’t have a psyche backup stored in any official repository. But any First Genner who had made it this long by definition possessed a fierce survival instinct; he must have backups stored somewhere. Maybe they’d even be able to find them.

  Until then, she only hoped they’d learned all they needed from him. It was a harsh assessment, but desperation had chased her into a corner.

  “This woman’s got a bad bleed in her neck, but someone’s bandaged it up. The other two are gone.”

  Nika looked up at Maggie. “Her name’s Sandie. Let’s try to gently move her and Mr. Basquan into the hallway. I bet response teams are on-site by now, and they can bring gurneys up here. I’ll take facial scans of the victims, so if the building collapses before someone comes to move the bodies, we’ll be able to identify them.”

  A shout from the other side of the hole echoed through the destroyed room. “Hello? Are there injured up here?”

  “Sounds like a response team is already here.”

  “Oh, thank gods.” Maggie slouched against the wall. “You know, waking up out of the blue and being told you’d died weeks earlier, your home’s been destroyed, the government’s been overthrown and a foul alien species is on their way here to make your death permanent? It’s not as easy to recover from as it sounds.”

  She reached out and hugged the woman. “I know it’s not. But we are going to survive this. I promise you.”

  Nika stopped by 2-A to see for herself that triage and repair were in full swing and to check on Maris, who remained groggy but was being tended to by two med techs.

  The adrenaline refused to dissipate quite yet, so after pinging Dashiel to make sure he and Joaquim were safe, she left the wounded with those better equipped to help them and went up to the data vault on the top floor.

  An impressive wreckage of Justice dynes and drones, machine limbs and torn metal lay strewn across the entrance and decorated the front third of the room.

  Inside, Ryan knelt beside the mangled but somewhat intact frame of IkeBot.

  She crouched by the opposite side of the frame from him. “Ryan….”

  He glanced up at her distractedly. Blood trickled out of a slice across the bridge of his nose, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. “It’s okay. The damage isn’t total. I’ll be able to rebuild him.”

  “I’ve no doubt.” She gave him an encouraging smile and squeezed his shoulder on her way to see Parc, who busily checked over a variety of server inputs and display outputs.

  He looked as if he’d just come from a spa day. He didn’t have so much as a speck of dust on him.

  “Parc, did you let Ryan do all the defending while you hid behind the servers?”

  “Hey, I was protecting the motherfucking data, thank you very much.” He frowned and motioned her closer, then leaned in and dropped his voice. “IkeBot got smashed protecting me—and the data, but I suspect mostly me.”

  “Well, that’s its job—protecting us.”

  “I know. But…” he rubbed at his jaw “…I’m thinking I’m going to have to make it up to Ryan somehow.”

  “Probably a good idea. So, the servers are functional?”

  “A couple of surface scratches from flying debris, but they’re intact and didn’t suffer any power surges or structural damage.”

  “Excellent. They may be the only thing in the building that didn’t. I passed Selene on the way in, and a Justice squad is coming up to stand guard. When they get here, you guys come down to Conference Room 2-D. We’ll bring in some food, steal some bandages from the triage room and figure out where to go from here.”

  35

  * * *

  MIRAI ONE PAVILION

  “It could have been much, much worse.”

  Nika nodded in vague agreement, though whoever had said it stood behind her and wasn’t talking to her. For one, the data they’d accumulated on the Rasu, from hard facts to wild speculation, could have been destroyed. The leaders of the interim government they’d cobbled together could have been wiped out in one fell swoop, leaving the future of the Dominion to people like Blake Satair.

  It was still bad. Nine people not counting the attackers had suffered total body loss, including Julien Grayson and Magnus Forchelle. Dozens more were seriously injured, including Maris—who Nika suspected had never experienced a firefight in her exceptionally long life, not even during the SAI Rebellion—though she was going to be okay after a short stay in a tank. The building had suffered widespread, significant damage, and the cost of repairs would reach into the millions.

  But it could have been much, much worse.

  Joaquim and Dashiel returned to the conference room carrying one and a half handfuls of coffee, since Joaquim’s right arm remained in a makeshift sling.

  Dashiel handed her a cup with a concerned look. “You’re exhausted, aren’t you?”

  She dropped her forehead onto his chest. “I’m walking around, and I’m not even bleeding. I got off easy.”

  “We both did.” He kissed the top of her head. “Katherine just walked in, and judging by the
smoke coming out of her ears, she’s itching to pick a fight. Let me go run interference and give everyone else some peace.”

  “You are a saint, Dashiel Ridani.”

  “I really am.” He rolled his eyes as he stepped away.

  Joaquim was leaning against a nearby table watching the room quietly, and she studied him over the rim of her coffee. “You seem…much better. In the head, I mean—you still look like shit. Are you back, or was this merely a drive-by heroic rescue?”

  “I’m…hells, if I know. It appears you guys were lost without me, so…I guess I’m back?”

  “And better.”

  He chuckled. “And better, too.”

  “Have you seen Perrin yet?”

  “Nah. She’s going to kick my ass, and, frankly, my ass has already been kicked more than enough for one day.”

  “I suspect she’ll mostly be glad to see you. Can I ask, what did you do while you were gone? What brought about the reformation—or if not reformation, at least better mood?”

  “You can ask, but I’ll never tell.”

  “Get a little up-gen?”

  He arched an eyebrow.

  “Get fucked within a centimeter of your life by a beautiful woman?”

  Nothing.

  “Two beautiful women? Two beautiful men?”

  Joaquim drew two fingers across his lips wearing a smirk. “Never telling.”

  “Ugh. Fine. Keep your damn secrets.” She carefully draped an arm around his good shoulder. “Welcome back.”

  In her peripheral vision, she saw Perrin rush in then stop short when she spotted Joaquim. Nika dropped her arm and nudged him around to face the doorway.

  Perrin glared at him for a solid five seconds before the hard edges of her expression melted away into a full-body sigh. She jogged over to him and wrapped him up in a hug. “You’re an asshole. You know that, don’t you?”

  He returned the hug as best he could. “Yeah, I know that.”

  “Good.” She stepped away and scrutinized him intently. “I’m happy you’re here—tonight, specifically. And…I’m happy you’re here.”

  “Me, too.” He stared at the ceiling; took a sip of his coffee. “Your guy did all right tonight.”

  “Did he now?” Perrin acted as though she was going to hit him in his wounded shoulder but pulled her punch with a giggle.

  Parc and Ryan arrived then, and Nika left Perrin and Joaquim to their awkward making up.

  Ryan carried WheatleyBot under one arm. The drone seemed to be in better shape than IkeBot, though it was currently shut down.

  Parc shook his head as she approached them. “Gods, this place is a wreck. Not this room necessarily, but the whole damn building. It looks like a cyclone tore through it, then an earthquake, then another cyclone.”

  “It does indeed. But it’s also beginning to look like we came out okay, all things considered.”

  “Have you determined what the hells happened?”

  “Someone, probably the officers who broke Satair out, had pulled three squads of Justice dynes out of rotation before they got reprogrammed and stashed them in a warehouse. As we’d suspected, Satair had inserted programming of his own that let him control them, and he used them to attack the Pavilion. As for the abrupt shut-down, a wide-field kill-code was issued that turned off all Justice equipment in the immediate area. The code was buried deep in their firmware, and none of the Justice Advisors knew about it, which we think means it came from Luciene. We figure Satair used it when he saw his dynes were losing the fight. Luckily, we were there waiting on him.”

  Joaquim appeared at her side. Coincidentally, Nika noticed that Adlai had returned and he and Perrin were talking in hushed whispers near the door.

  He nodded at Parc and Ryan. “Thanks for answering the call tonight. Hey, Parc, if you’ve got a minute, I want to run an idea by you.”

  “Sure. Let’s go find something alcoholic to spike this coffee with. We’ll bring it in here, then Ryan can try to fix your blade mechanism, because….” Parc pointed at the sock covering Joaquim’s exposed wrist blade and laughed.

  “You know, I didn’t come back and save all your asses to take this kind of abuse.”

  “Of course you did.” Parc clapped him on the back and urged him toward the door. “But don’t worry. Drinks will make it all better.”

  MIRAI

  The news reports told the tale of the attack on the Mirai One Pavilion with breathless shock and dramatic turns of phrase, but Luciene controlled enough listeners embedded in the nex web to have learned the sordid details hours earlier.

  Advisor Satair would not be returning to the safehouse tonight. Indeed, the man was out of commission until such time as those in power decided to regen him; the same fate appeared likely for the Advisor’s lieutenants. The dynes under their control were shut down and headed off for reprogramming, if not scrapping.

  Luciene’s most substantial resources—funds, software, hard assets—had been seized by the Justice Division or his access revoked. He still enjoyed contacts, however—people beyond Satair who would do anything for him. People who remained afraid enough of him to do anything he asked of them.

  But what would he ask of them?

  It wasn’t merely that Satair had failed, nor that with the man’s failure Luciene’s best chance to re-seize control of the framework of government had vanished. No, it wasn’t the failure which triggered the descent of a miasma of despair more suffocating than any he recalled suffering in times past.

  It was that the rebels and terrorists had succeeded. Succeeded in defeating Satair, succeeded in living to solidify their control over his government in the morning light. Succeeded in amplifying this strange, incomprehensible shame he could feel seeping into his bones.

  He gazed out the window. There were no riots in the streets; not tonight or the night before or the night before that. Isolated pockets of unrest in the initial few days following the destruction of the Platform had been pacified with a restrained, gentle touch on the part of Justice and faded away.

  Instead of rioting, looting and rending asunder the hallmarks of civilization, the people had peacefully risen up and come together in common cause.

  The rebels and terrorists had somehow managed to catch themselves a Rasu. Then, they’d somehow managed to extract useful information from their prisoner. The details of their methods and the information which resulted remained hidden from him, but excited rumblings were spreading across the nex web, rumblings infused with an emotion he’d never imagined possible: hope.

  They were still all going to die, of course, for this inevitability had been written into the stars eight years ago. Due to the traitorous actions of the rebels and terrorists, they might all die a bit sooner than they would have otherwise. But now? They were going to die with their heads held high, fighting for their lives with a fierceness of spirit he’d forgotten Asterions could possess.

  Because he, Luciene Toskav, Asterion Dominion Guide of Synra for two hundred forty thousand years, had been…wrong. Wrong about nearly everything. When he gazed out the window, he felt the shame spread from his bones into his veins to infect his processes. The actions of his people brought honor upon themselves and shame upon him, and they knew nothing of the misery they inflicted on him by those actions.

  He stood here and watched, but they didn’t see him. They didn’t think of him. He had fallen into irrelevance as the people took control of their own lives and their own future, short though it may be.

  A bitter, frigid acceptance, comforting in its desolation, seized hold of him, and he sent a message to one of those people who would do anything he asked of them.

  MULTITHREADING

  DAYS UNTIL RASU DEADLINE: 12

  36

  * * *

  NIKA’S FLAT

  “You’ve got the new barriers I developed in place, right? I want you to feel safe.”

  Safe. The word held no subjective meaning for Nika. She’d never sought its peaceful embrace, and it had
certainly never sought hers.

  She recognized that Parc was going out of his way to assuage her concerns, but it wasn’t working. What she felt was on edge. Frayed, as if too much power flowed through her veins. For the last five years, her mind had been sacrosanct. Fractured and lacking crucial pieces as it might be, it was the only thing she could cling to in order to prove she was. She existed as an independent, living soul.

  She’d connected with other people on a superficial level multiple times. Dashiel, of course; Perrin and a few others. But in those instances, the rules and barriers were clear, defined and thoroughly tested. This, though? This was all new, and the only rules for it were the ones they made.

  But if she was going to recommend to the other Advisors that they encourage the creation of these psyche collectives—or that they not—she owed it to everyone, but most of all herself, to understand precisely what she was recommending.

  “I’m ready.”

  Parc grinned. “Then activate the new ocular setting and see the world change.”

  He was enjoying this way too much. She steeled herself, tensing her muscles like they were going to help protect her, and did as instructed.

  Tendrils of spectral luminescence danced in the air around her, as if a full-dimensional overlay had been dropped atop the world. She reached out to grasp one of the strings, but her fingers slipped through the apparition. They had no tactility, no physical presence. The tendrils nevertheless seemed…alive. She laughed in delight.

  “Hells of a sight, isn’t it?”

  “It’s incredible. What do I do now?”

  “Do you see the string leading to me?”

  He sat across from her on a couch in her flat, and though a straight-line path existed from her to his location, the string in question undulated around its axis on its way to him. “I do.”