by M. G. Herron
I was glad I did. About two hours before dawn, an Escalade with dark tinted windows pulled into the driveway and parked at an outward-facing angle that would be conducive to a quick getaway.
“Anna, wake up.”
She sat up and blinked the sleep out of her eyes. “What happened?”
With adrenaline pumping through my veins, quickening my mind and waking me the rest of the way, I nodded down toward the Escalade.
Four of the Gatekeeper’s bodyguards got out, each of their three individual canine heads gazing warily in every direction. I pressed myself low to the ground and averted the binocular lenses so that they didn’t reflect an errant glare and risk giving away our location.
Once they determined the area was free of threats, Ezembaster unfolded from the car, all dark fur and scars, with blazing blue eyes. He wore the same clothes he’d been wearing the night the Jel’ka were set loose, but his body bore new lacerations and cuts to accompany his dozens of scars.
The Gatekeeper moved into the center of his squad of beefy bodyguards, and together, they made their way into the spacious back yard, looking carefully around them.
When they stopped on the groomed green lawn, the back door of the brick house slid open and out walked a platoon of aliens I didn’t know, mostly Lodian.
However, scattered throughout the group were a few I did recognize.
There was Hix, the Torlik head of security, his alien handgun visible on his hip.
There was the Daacro, Samael, tied and gagged and being carried between two tough-looking, gray-skinned Lodians.
The last one out of the house gave us both a shock—he was an old Lodian with wrinkled skin and a burn scar on his neck.
Anna and I exchanged a stunned glance. “Was he—”
“Tanamir,” I whispered. “The old Lodian from the racetrack. Hix must have sat him next to me on purpose. Sneaky son of a bitch.”
Suddenly, my innocuous conversation with the aged offworlder took on a new significance.
“Powerful offworlders like the Gatekeeper are bound to make enemies,” he had said to me. “Seems to me that the Gatekeeper finally has some real competition.”
Hix positioned himself between the two parties who were separated on the lawn by about fifty feet of grass.
After some discussion we were too distant to hear clearly, Samael the Daacro was led forward and dropped unceremoniously at Hix’s feet.
The Gatekeeper did not seem pleased with this. He appeared to be demanding more of something. I couldn’t tell what. Drugs? Money? What did he want?
The fire in his eyes grew hot and bright, and a great bellow erupted from the Gatekeeper’s—or more accurately, Ezembaster’s—throat, echoing like a banshee’s screech out across the river.
Guns were drawn. Threats were made. Anxious shouts echoed over the hillside.
When Tanamir did not give in, the Gatekeeper began to use Ezembaster as a punching bag, slamming the Pangozil’s face down onto his own furry fists over and over and over again until crimson blood gushed down his chin and chest, glistening in the starlight.
Tanamir just watched, perfectly calm and unemotional.
The Gatekeeper reached out one hand, and began snapping the Pangozil’s finger bones, one at a time with precision. I felt Anna press the length of her body into me as she cringed at the display of brutality.
When the Gatekeeper grabbed a pistol out of the jacket of one of his bodyguards, racked the slide with an experience draw, and blew one of Ezembaster’s kneecaps to smithereens, Tanamir finally shouted, “Enough!”
Tanamir then gestured and six more Daacros, these in a column of connected ankle shackles like a chain gang, shuffled out of the house. Some kind of bracelets locked over the base of their wings prevented them from flying away, even if the chains didn’t.
With one of the three-headed guards at his side, the Gatekeeper, in Ezembaster’s bloody and injured body, limped forward, dragging one leg. Suddenly, the blue light went out of his eyes and Ezembaster’s body collapsed to the ground in a limp pile, as if his muscles had all suddenly ceased to function at once.
The blue spirit of the Gatekeeper circled into the air, did a lap around the bound Daacro as if checking on them, then slammed himself into the mouth of the central head of the nearest canine bodyguard. The eyes of that head suddenly lit up with blue fire.
“Untie them,” the Gatekeeper demanded.
When the chains were unlocked, two of the Gatekeeper’s henchdogs carried Samael back to the Escalade out front. The rest of the Daacros took flight and veered off into the night.
Meanwhile, Tanamir’s people picked up Ezembaster, disappearing with him into the house.
A few more words were exchanged between the Gatekeeper—now in the henchdog’s body—and Tanamir. And then, to my complete and utter lack of surprise, Tanamir and the Gatekeeper shook hands.
“Why do I feel like Faust just made a deal with the devil?” Anna whispered.
I grunted. “The question is, which one is which?”
We waited until the Gatekeeper’s people had departed, and Tanamir and his creepers had all gone back inside. After the tense negotiation, it was almost anticlimactic.
My body tensed, waiting for the second shoe to drop.
It never did.
Being out there all night had chilled my stiff muscles, and the wan sunlight peeking over the horizon didn’t do much to warm us.
Back in the truck, I rubbed at my arms as the engine warmed up. Anna held her hands in front of the air vents. It was definitely approaching fall now.
A light in the cupholder caught my eye—a blinking red that seemed to be coming from the bag of trail mix.
I lifted the trail mix and found the light’s source.
“Huh,” I said.
“What is it?” Anna asked.
“Someone left us a message.”
24
Wait,” Detective Gonzalez said, “So you’re saying this Tanamir dude was who the Gatekeeper wanted you to find?”
Anna, Vinny, Alek, Gonzalez, and I sat in my cramped office. Since we were back in the city, Vinny had resumed his convincing human disguise, as well as his flour-dusted chef’s clothes, which he hadn’t bothered changing out of before coming over. Gonzalez wore a somber charcoal suit and pale blue blouse that fit her current skepticism. Anna looked as tired as I felt. Neither of us had slept since hearing the message from Dyna. The only one who looked well-rested was Alek, lounging against the wall and chewing on the cold end of a cigar. I made him put it out before he came inside, lest we all inhale his smoke.
I was beyond exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep until they’d all heard it. With Vinny trying to catch up at the restaurant, and Gonzalez buried under paperwork, it had taken most of the day to get them to join us, but it was important to me that they were all here.
I rubbed my face in my hands, the thickening stubble of new beard growth scraping my left palm. The burning sensation in the irritated skin of my cybernetic hand had calmed somewhat, but no feeling had returned to the parts where there was metal grafted to the skin, or where my bones has been replaced with machinery. Minor details like nerve endings hadn’t been a priority in the surgery, it seemed, and it continued to ache with a ghostly pain I couldn’t pin down.
“He didn’t know it at the time,” I said. “But yes.”
“I don’t follow,” Gonzalez said.
The detective looked far more comfortable wearing the suit than she had been in her blue police uniform. She also seemed tired, which was no surprise as she’d been up most of the night arresting and booking Spider. Aside from the Ora, they had apparently discovered eight kilos of cocaine and a stash of unregistered firearms in his house. The success of the bust had been enough to get Gonzalez out of the station and reinstated as a detective. That, at least, I could be happy about.
“Once the Gatekeeper had Ezembaster, he must have been able to figure out that Tanamir was behind the mystery Ora supply. Tanamir got Yarn
ow and Hix to import Ora in the bellies of the Jel’ka, so that the Gatekeeper wouldn’t notice.
“Tanamir then used the Ora to compete with the Gatekeeeper directly. Who knows how long that’s been going on, but by the time he’d approached me, the Gatekeeper was thoroughly irritated. You see, since the Gatekeeper controls all offworld imports and exports in the city, it’s enabled him to corner the drug market. And he’s kept the Federation off his back by being equally strict about who the drug is allowed to be sold to.
“Tanamir did two things to undermine the Gatekeeper—not only selling the drugs, but selling them to humans. Most offworlders didn’t know the Gatekeeper was the main supplier of Ora. He kept it quiet, which is why it was so hard to suss out his motivations for wanting my help in the first place.”
“How is the attack on this… what did you call it, Harbor?” Alek asked.
I nodded.
“How is that related?”
“When competing with him didn’t get the Gatekeeper to come to the table, Tanamir upped the stakes and began kidnapping Daacros, whom I assume were the main dealers of the Ora for the Gatekeeper—taking a sideline during Samael’s kidnapping to beat the stuffing out of me and warn me off. And then when that didn’t work, he attacked Harbor, the Gatekeeper’s nightclub.”
Gonzalez shook her head. “He attacked Harbor… you make it sound like the idea that it was an attack is a foregone conclusion. I checked, by the way. There are no records to show this so-called Harbor place beneath the Museum of the Weird even existed, Gunn.”
“It does,” Vinny said.
“Or, it did, anyway,” I said. “I’ve been there twice.”
Gonzalez said, “I talked to the ATF guys who were assigned to investigate the explosion. They told me it was a broken gas main.”
“Then it was obviously tampered with.”
“Or someone paid off the detectives,” Anna pitched in. “Wouldn’t be the first time a cop took a bribe.”
Gonzalez scoffed. Vinny snorted. I winced.
That was hard for the detective to accept. In her view of things, there was no excuse for that kind of behavior. She was having a hard enough time believing our outrageous story about alien drugs and Tetrad insurgents. If she didn’t know Vinny was an offworlder, if she hadn’t seen the Peacekeepers and helped me fight off an alien fugitive once already, she would have laughed us out of the room.
“Okay, say I believe you. You think that now, Tanamir and the Gatekeeper have made a deal of some kind?”
I nodded. “We saw them shake hands.”
“What are the terms?”
I held up my hands. “That’s what I don’t know. We weren’t close enough to hear them talk details. All I know is that the Gatekeeper has maintained control of offworlder activity on Earth by being friendly with the Federation. And he just made a deal with someone who seems to work for their greatest enemy.”
“The Tetrad,” Gonzalez said.
I nodded once.
“That’s crazy,” she said, pacing back and forth across the small office.
Seeing that she finally understood the context as well as the rest of us did, I pulled the digital recorder out of the top drawer of my desk and set it on the desktop.
Vinny leaned forward and interlaced his fingers. Gonzalez stopped pacing and narrowed her eyes. Alek took the cigar butt out of his mouth and spit bits of tobacco into the trash can.
Anna took a deep breath to steel herself. She’d already listened to it several times.
I depressed the play button and Dyna’s melodic voice came singing out of the speaker.
In the background echoed the ominous drumbeat of shells, gunfire, and boots on the ground.
“Gunn, I have just received your message. It would not surprise me if the Tetrad was involved. By the time we returned to Lodi, war had broken out on the Pangozil homeworld.”
With his eyes transfixed on the recorder, Vinny’s nostrils widened.
“The Tetrad have spent decades sowing the seeds of dissent. Now, it seems, they have decided it is time to mobilize. The Peacekeepers are spread as thin as we’ve ever been. The Federation has committed the full resources of its navy, but their forces are being split, pulled in different directions across the galaxy with vicious effectiveness.
“It would be no great surprise to me if what we managed to accomplish on Earth was only a temporary stopgap. It is, after all, why I tried so hard to recruit you.
“Unfortunately, the mission I am on will yet take me some time to complete. You will have to go on without my help for now. I hope that this message reaches you in time.
“I do not know when next you will hear from me, but heed these words…”
There was a momentary absence of Dyna’s voice. The explosions in the background were like concussions in the silent room, interrupted only by our breathing. I met the eyes of each of my companions in turn.
“Prepare yourself. War with the Tetrad is here. I fear that nowhere in the galaxy—not even Earth—is safe.”
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
CULTURE SHOCK
You just read: OVERDOSE
Up next: QUANTUM FLARE
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ABOUT M.G. HERRON
M.G. HERRON is the bestselling author of The Translocator Trilogy, The Gunn Files and other science fiction novels. When he’s not building new worlds, Matt works as a content strategist in Austin, TX, where he lives with his wife, Shelly, and their dog, Elsa.
www.mgherron.com