by Richard Fox
A young Royal woman was there, a tired look to her. From several feet away in the hallway, a ceraton—a dog-sized working animal with short bony frill that ran down its snout to a sharp beak—growled as a chubby Blooded security guard pulled back on the leash, giving Daniel an apologetic look.
“Greetings, I am Shadow Sazon and I…am wasting my time here,” she said with a sigh.
“Can I help you?” Daniel asked.
“We’re looking for a group of fugitives. I received a report pertaining to this hotel, but you are obviously—” she canted her head back to the guard and his ceraton, which was hissing in anger, “obviously not who we’re looking for. Don’t suppose you’ve seen a family of Linkers? Parents and teenage son?”
“Have I been mistaken for a Linker?” Daniel raised an eyebrow.
“Evidently. You have my apologies.” Sazon held out a hand.
“Think nothing of it.” He went to shake her hand, but she shifted forward and gripped his wrist. Her thumb pressed against the small bone just forward of the ulna, the pisiform, and her eyes went wide as she felt the bone that Tyr lacked.
Daniel grabbed her by the arm and yanked her into his room, flinging her against the floor with strength beyond any Tyr his size, sending the shadow rolling into the legs of the table with all the newspapers. The wood snapped as Sazon barreled through them, and the table crashed down upon her.
“Move, move!” Daniel barged into the hallway and kicked the security guard in the sternum. He bounced off the wall and landed hard. His ceraton cringed back, snapping at the air. Daniel snarled at it and it ran off, its lizard-like tail between its legs.
Sarah and Michael rushed out of the room, each with a single bag in hand.
“We get to the car and then we—”
There was a clack as rounds were loaded into the chamber of a weapon behind him. He turned and found himself staring into the barrels of a half-dozen assault rifles, each wielded by a Blooded in full tactical gear.
Red laser lights flashed across his eyes. Another pair of Blooded were at the windows, hanging from ropes and harnesses.
“You sound familiar.” General Fastal stepped around the corner, his revolver held near his face, the muzzle pointed at the ceiling. “There’s a reason for that, yeah? Why don’t we talk?”
“Dad…what do we do?” Michael asked.
As Daniel raised his hands slowly, he heard the bags thump against the ground behind him. This wasn’t how he planned on making contact again with the kingdom’s leaders…but here they were.
Sazon stumbled out of the room, bits of newspaper and splinters caught in her hair. “That was amazing.” She glanced back and forth between the Clays and the assault squad, then slapped her back against the wall to get out of the line of fire.
“Cuffs.” Fastal tapped the shoulder of the soldier in front of him and the man moved toward Daniel at a crouch, pulling a set of handcuffs from his tactical vest.
A few minutes later, the Clays were all sitting on the bed in their hotel room, wrists and ankles in restraints.
Sazon bent forward and looked Daniel straight in the eye, then held up a penlight and passed it over the many small irises.
“This isn’t the place,” he said, looking over Sazon’s shoulder to the Blooded in the room with them and Fastal.
Sazon poked at his face, then pinched his nose and waggled it back and forth. “It seems so…natural,” she said. “Forgive me, but I have a theory.” She removed a small bottle with a stopper and unscrewed the top.
“Don’t you dare insult one of the King’s kin,” said a Blooded lieutenant, pointing at her.
“They don’t know,” Daniel said flatly. “Not a smart move.”
“I am of his kin. Know your place,” Sazon said over her shoulder, then put a drop of the bitter-smelling oil down the bridge of Daniel’s nose. He felt a prickle through the synth layer.
“We’re not Hidden.” Sarah shook her head. “Our markings won’t wash away with chadice tincture.”
“How do you know about that…” Sazon put the bottle away.
“Look at this.” A Blooded had one of the suitcases open and was using a thin metal rod to lift up a shirt, exposing Daniel’s Corp-tech laser pistol in a leather holster. “That molded grip looks custom.”
He reached for the weapon.
“Don’t!” Daniel snapped. “Don’t touch it.”
The Blooded huffed and grabbed it by the handle. The pistol flashed and the Blooded cried out in pain. The pistol hit the floor and disintegrated into grey smoke. The Blooded’s glove was on fire and he slapped it against his thigh to put out the flames.
“Get him to a doctor,” Daniel said. “He’ll need a skin graft—and have his hearing checked while you’re at it. There’s another weapon in the other bag. Please don’t touch that either, as it’s the last one.”
Fastal grabbed the injured Blooded by the shoulder and pushed him out of the hotel room. “What by the dark of the moon are you?” the general demanded.
“We’re here to help you.” Sarah pulled her hands apart and snapped the chain on her cuffs. “That you’ve tracked us down means you’ve put together most of the picture.”
Fastal tensed as Sarah freed herself of the restraints, but he didn’t aim his revolver at her.
“They got the warheads, didn’t they?” Daniel asked.
“Show me.” Sazon’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Show me what you really are.”
Daniel traded a glance with Sarah, then broke his own restraints. He pinched his left earlobe and his synth layer went slack, his Tyr face drooping like melting wax. He grabbed a handful of loose synth at his forehead and pulled down, revealing his true self.
Fastal’s jaw quivered, his whole body taut like he was caught between fight or flight. Sazon covered her mouth, eyes wide with excitement.
Daniel lifted his jaw and peeled down to the base of his neck, letting the synth layer hang like a bib over his shirt.
“You’re in danger,” he said. “Not just the kingdom, the entire planet. My people—we call ourselves human—will take over and kill every last Tyr unless you listen to me.”
“Demons!” a Blooded shouted from the doorway and snapped his machine gun up.
Fastal slapped the barrel aside and a line of bullets shredded the edge of the bed where Daniel sat. Fastal slammed the butt of his pistol into the soldier’s face and he fell back, then the general ripped the machine gun away and pushed the Blooded into the hallway, shouting orders. Daniel heard the shuffle of boots as the assault team retreated.
The machine gun had fallen at Daniel’s feet. He remained still as bits of down floated through the air.
Sazon snatched up the weapon, then removed the magazine.
“You understand why we prefer to have the masks on,” Daniel said.
“What is a ‘human’?” Sazon squinted at him.
“Were you sent by the gods or not?” Fastal asked. “The King must know this.”
“You have…no idea what’s out there.” Sarah shook her head. “But we are not of the gods.”
“No one move,” Fastal said. “Not an inch.” A Blooded showed up at the door with thicker chains. “You’re going to put these on. You try to break out and I will end you. Is that clear? Sazon, you take the female and the child back to King’s Rest. The male’s coming with me.”
“Now wait just a minute.” Daniel stood up slowly but froze when Fastal aimed his revolver right between his eyes.
“Put…your face back on, thing,” Fastal said. “And do not say another word.”
Chapter 31
Rain lashed at Yenin as she struggled through a patch of ferns. Vines gripped her ankles and each step became a chore as she slogged forward.
“I hate this place already.” She wiped her face and touched her mostly intact helmet. Without the faceplate, it wasn’t providing much in the way of protection, but she still heard sound through the earpieces. There were moments she could have sworn she h
eard radio chatter, but no one ever answered her broadcasts.
Thunder rumbled overhead and there was a squeak in her earpieces as lightning cut through the low storm clouds.
“The company sold condos on this planet, of course they sold condos on this planet…” She had no idea where she was going or even if she’d been walking circles in the jungle since she made it off the beach. “Couple video clips of actual weather will get the rubes living in some deep hive so excited for a colony world. Until they actually get here and water’s running down the crack of their ass and pooling in their boots and everything smells like a wet dog covered in cat piss and…ugh.”
She stopped against a tree, feeling tears come from her eyes that meant nothing in the rain.
“Training…what’s my training…re-contact with what we’ve got in orbit. Request pickup. Avoid indigs. Too easy. Way too easy.” She spied a clearing amidst a flash of lightning and made for it.
Yenin tapped her faceplate against her thigh to knock away water and walked out into the open space. She was dimly aware of the danger, as her flight suit would likely prove to be a decent lightning rod, but some chance of rescue was better than no chance of rescue.
Bending over the broken visor, she got a small part to function as a screen. She rested it on one knee and entered commands on a forearm screen.
“Come on, come on.” She skipped across lower-band radio frequencies, hearing indig channels and music. She switched her receivers to the telemetry channels used by the survey drones they’d dropped over this part of the planet, and her heart skipped a beat when she synched into one.
“Yes!” Weather data scrolled over her visor. Her fingers trembled as she accessed the re-transmission functions and opened the drone’s communications up even further.
A map of the local area appeared, along with two pulsating dots. One was hers, the other belonged to Cisneros. He was a few hundred yards away, just down a hill and in a riverbed.
“Greg? Greg, can you read me?” Yenin started toward him. His beacon wasn’t moving, but she saw hers shift on the display.
She ran into the jungle, her eyes locked on the screen. She was so focused on getting closer to Cisneros that she didn’t notice when the contour lines on the map adjusted closer to each other. She did notice the hillside suddenly becoming very steep and wet when her feet went out from under her, sending her sliding down a muddy slope.
Yenin’s limbs splayed out as she tried to stop her rapid descent. She hit a bump and went flying, pinwheeling through the air before landing hard on a shed made of tin. There were squeals and an incredibly earthy odor as mud flowed down the sheet metal and around her shoulders.
A porcine nose sniffed at her face as she stared dumbfounded up at the sky. Yenin slapped the nose away and sat up. A small herd of fat lizards with sky-blue scales had congregated in the corner of the pen. Double sets of eyes and a red line of hair down their spines stopped her from drawing further comparisons to pigs, but they were pretty close.
She looked down at one hand and saw it was full of a gooey brown mass; the other still held the broken visor.
“Ah…ah…that hurt.” She sat up, and then, with one hand on her thigh, limped over to a rain-soaked wooden fence. “That smell…I know what that smell is.” She hiked a leg over the fence and found herself in a small farm. Lights were on in a dilapidated home, but she didn’t see any movement.
“Riding the storm out with vids and booze?” She limped forward, regaining some grace as the knot in her hip worked itself out. She hesitated to go up to the window. An alien covered in sort-of-pig shit knocking on the glass in the middle of a hurricane was not part of the survival module the company had her complete.
“Greg?” She looked at the visor and gasped as his beacon moved ever so slightly farther up the riverbed. She stepped around the farmhouse and found a gravel road winding up past more farmhouses and small plots of land. Lights from a village glowed in the rain and low clouds.
The eye of the hurricane had passed, and the winds and rain eased away.
She was weighing the idea of moving back into the jungle to hide her movement, when a cheer carried through the waning storm from the village. She double-checked Cisneros’ beacon…he was in the village.
Yenin broke into a run. Cisneros was the only friend she was going to find on this planet, and stealth became less and less of a concern as the cheer rose into a chant.
She ran past a pen of saurian creatures bigger than cows and with curved, forward-pointing horns, and stopped against a wall with peeling white paint. Rainwater sloughed off the corrugated metal roof and hit her shoulders. She leaned back, the lines of water striking her chest and the tips of her toes. The chanting was louder and had gotten a touch faster.
“Who the hell is this?” came through her earpiece. She recognized the voice—the cruel Myrmidon woman from the alien capture mission. Solanus.
Yenin crossed herself and said a quick prayer of thanks.
“Matsui? Matsui, this is Yenin, Tanya. Employee number X-ray one nine—”
“You were on the survey mission that’s overdue. Did you all decide to land and collect souvenirs?” Solanus asked.
“No, no, Matsui, we crashed and I made it ashore to…to…just look at my beacon. I need recovery, ASAP. Me and Greg Cisneros. He’s alive, but I haven’t reached him yet.”
“Boss, I found that data leak from the survey drones,” Solanus said over the channel, obviously not to Yenin. “No, the cargo scrub…right in the middle of the shit storm, yeah…really? You think they’ll chop off on that?”
“I can hear you, but you haven’t told me where to make rescue,” Yenin said.
“Stand by, we need authorization from the Leopold.”
“Authorization? Why the hell do you need autho—hello?” Yenin tapped the side of her incomplete helmet, the channel dead. She cursed and crept around the side of the building. The village appeared to be deserted, but there were cars and trucks at each house.
She moved toward the chanting, where there was a glow of light. Checking her visor again, she saw Cisneros’ beacon at the center of the village.
“Maybe…maybe he’s being worshipped as a god. I can be his goddess. He’s ugly, but I can play the part for a bit.” She slipped the broken visor into a pouch on her chest and picked up a wooden board from a pile of scraps.
She ducked and ran to a truck parked outside what looked like a circular park. In the center was a crude dolmen of large standing stones, each the size of the cars and trucks arrayed around the park.
The space was full of Tyr, all with their backs to her, many holding torches in their hands. Smoke reeking of petrochemicals wafted over her. Some of the aliens thrust rifles into the air, calling out slogans that were repeated by one of the armed Tyr at all times.
“Shag og noth!” over and over again.
“That’s friendly, right?” She hid close to the truck’s cab, exposing as little of her face as possible.
The crowd began stomping their feet against the wet ground in a slow rhythm.
Ropes flew over the standing stones, then went taut. A wooden beam lifted up, and Yenin gasped.
Cisneros was lashed to the beam, his helmet gone, his head lolling from side to side as the beam sank into a post hole. Yenin almost cried out to him, but more and more rifles were brandished to the sky.
“Matsui, Matsui, come in. We need immediate assistance,” she said into the microphone built into her helmet.
Nothing but static back.
Dark liquid splashed over Cisneros, and he groaned. Raising his head, he let out a pitiful cry.
The Tyr pulled back slightly, but then a single Tyr with a face full of black splotches against white and a necklace of bones and bits of silver held up a torch, shouting words Yenin didn’t understand.
“Please, we need help,” she pleaded.
“Pickup’s not authorized,” Solanus said. “Good luck. Oh, I’ve got to play something for you…one sec.”
<
br /> “What? What? No, you can’t just—”
“Attention, this is a prerecorded message from Bahadur-Getty Incorporated.” The voice was male and read like a sales pitch. “Following automated review—or executive-level judgment—your employment contract has been terminated as you are no longer economically viable to the general mission of the company.”
The Tyr with the torch thrust it into Cisneros’ stomach and he burst into flames.
He screamed, but not for long.
Yenin turned and ran.
“We thank you for your service, and due to the sudden nature of your termination, we will include a two-percent bonus toward any unpaid wages. Please return all issued equipment within twenty-four hours from receipt of this message, or the fair-market value will be deducted from your final pay due. A negative balance will be reported to credit agencies.”
Yenin ripped off her helmet and threw it into a ditch. She turned down a paved road leading out of the village and didn’t look back.
Chapter 32
Daniel sat inside a Tyr helicopter, the thinly padded seat growing uncomfortable against his hip, but the thicker double chains of his restraints meant he couldn’t even stand up if he wanted to.
The helicopter had landed in a freshly harvested ambary field, the pungent odor of the resin heavy in the air. He watched the sunset through the open ramp, alone in a space large enough to sit a dozen Tyr Blooded.
Fastal came up the ramp, his sleeves rolled up, hands dirty with oil and a scowl on his face.
“Where are we going?” Daniel asked. His face was that of his normal Linker. The sight of a non-Royal in chains seemed to be much easier for Fastal’s men to accept.
“What did I tell you about talking?” The general rubbed a cloth against his hands. “The security detail’s edgy enough as it is after an emergency landing.”
“You’re not taking me to the same place as my wife and son,” Daniel said. “There were two helicopters at the lodge. I went to this one, they went to the other. If we were going the same place, you’d have just tossed me in the back of the other one when this one had to land.”