For several minutes, she let the birds consume the priest’s allies. Then she turned her gaze northward, where war raged and an assassin had been sent to kill the one true hope for the rebels, Telthen’s brother. She tasted the breezes flowing from the north. There was smoke, blood…and death.
She remembered something an old ally, lover, and now nemesis had said of the Lords of Calos, the aggressors in the North War: “They truck with otherworldly creatures. They will do more harm to the people of Farik than Osuran ever would, I assure you. Osuran plays both sides of the war, ensuring it never reaches Farik’s gates. He is evil, but if you kill him, they lose that buffer and will most definitely suffer. It’s best to keep the Balance,” he said.
She pictured Thoroc’s face, revisiting the day he’d tried to kill her as she lay next to him. He had failed because he had hesitated, giving her time to realize something was amiss. He wanted to kill her for the sake of the Balance he believed in.
She let out a deep breath. She hadn’t chosen this life—or unlife. The Twelve had thrust it upon her when they created her. That didn’t matter to Thoroc; according to him, she needed to die to ensure his precious Balance.
“Betrayer,” she spat to the wind. “I’ll decide what’s Balanced. Neither you nor the Twelve will manipulate or destroy me,” she said aloud. “I’ll protect Farik from anything Osuran’s death will visit on them.”
She winged herself skyward, leaving the noblemen behind. She glanced down at the zeringes: “Come. We have Lords to slay.”
The thousands of zeringes behind her formed into their double-V flight pattern, their wings working hard to carry their full stomachs. “Happy to kill Lords with the Marathuk,” they projected back.
The Rydr Express
Tobias Buckell
You’ve made your way through the corridors of the train and found your room, up on the third deck. Tea has arrived, delivered by a vaguely humanoid robot that balances its torso on a pair of continuously spinning gyroscopes.
Sitting down at the small table, you let yourself relax just a touch and stir in milk and sugar as the train continues to speed up. Two hundred miles per hour, two-fifty. It has just emerged from a wormhole that led downstream towards even more wormholes that eventually bifurcate. At that junction there are trains to the worlds of Fairwater and Fairhaven.
Outside your window, the purple forestry of Rydr’s World whips past. The occasional city slowly accretes around the windows, then fades back away.
Now that the Rydr Express has slipped out of the wormhole at the Western edge of its lone continental landmass it is headed East toward the other wormhole on the far coast. When it hits that wormhole and passes through, it’ll start jumping its way toward the Dawn Pillars junction. From there it’ll head upstream through hundreds of wormholes, until it ends up in League territory when it exits a final wormhole and arrives on the world of Bifrost.
The Rydr Express is a spur that juts off in that uncertain territory of unaligned planets that all exist in between the Forty Eight worlds. They are all connected by thousands of wormholes, and it’s only been in the last decade that the wormholes have been moved out of space, onto land, and hooked up by rail.
You have nine hundred miles to go before you hit the Eastern coast. Nine hundred miles of tension.
The door to your room slides open.
You drop the spoon to the table. A startling sound: metal on wood. The clattering reveals that you are surprised. It also reveals that you are a bit stunned, and overly nervous.
The tall man you’re looking at is wearing a black oilskin coat, and he walks with a slight limp as he slides the door closed behind him.
Inside the small sleeper berth, he dominates the room. His steel-gray eyes flicker, scanning everything, then finish up by pinning you in place. His shoulder-length dreadlocks are graying, slightly, and with the weathered lines of his face, he looks like he’s in his forties.
A far cry from the centuries that you know him to be.
You’re holding your breath, and the trigger of the gun in your left hip-pocket, where it’s been all along.
It’s a trigger’s-width away from releasing hell as the man sits down across from you on the other side of the table. From the creak of the floor underneath, you can tell he weighs double, maybe triple what a man should.
You can’t say you weren’t expecting this. He’s that good. That’s what everyone says. But this is your world, your game, and your territory. To have been flushed out before you’d even really sat down is a gut punch.
“This is a private room,” you say, mustering indignant outrage. You’re still trying to keep up your usual traveling businessman camouflage.
The man leans in, his elbows resting on the table and making it creak from the strain. “I’m Pepper,” he says, as he holds out a hand and his locks fall forward.
You maintain the fiction for another split second, then lean back and retrieve your tea. You’re impressed at your steady hand. “Most of my friends,” you mutter over a sip, “call me Vee.”
“Are you going to pull that trigger, Vee?” Pepper asks, very seriously, your eyes meeting over the lip of the cup.
“I haven’t decided yet,” you reply, setting the tea down.
*
Eighteen hours earlier the militia summons jacked you up out of bed with a ringing headache, leaving you stumbling around shaking your head as your partner grumbled and pulled the covers up and fell back asleep.
The klaxon sound, rigged to a bone-induction military earpiece quantumly entangled to HQ, continued on until you patched in and reported that you were on your way, goddamnit, and they could quit paging you.
But there was no trip to HQ. Head of operations was standing outside your very door with three other rail agents when you got uniformed up and burst out the door.
“We have a situation,” she said.
They all forced their way into your tiny apartment.
“I have someone here,” you stammered.
Operations looked over at the door to the bedroom. “Tell them to leave,” she said. Then she paused slightly. “How serious is this?”
“What?” You were a bit lost for words. What the hell was going on?
“Your file shows few social attachments. Is this someone we need to take into our protection during this mission? There’s a high risk component. An attachment could be a liability.”
“Protection,” you said, eyes wide. Even if it was only a fling, you hadn’t wanted someone’s life at risk due to their having the bad luck to stumble into you for a few great encounters.
Operations sighed and pointed at the bedroom door and snapped her fingers. “Make it happen.”
One of the agents walked to the door.
Moments later the apartment had been vacated, and the confusion and shouting abated. Everyone’d had a deep breath, and Operations sat in your armchair as if she’d owned it her whole life.
“We have a situation,” she said.
“You mentioned.”
“Pepper’s here on Rydr’s World.”
“Oh.”
“We’re constitutionally a neutral zone, Vee. Our economic ties are to the Xenowealth, but we still have two League-loyal worlds downstream of us, and they have peace-brokered rights of transport through us on upstream all the way back to core League territory. We can’t have the Xenowealth’s top troublemaker running loose. Fairhaven and Fairwater, those worlds are far more militarized than we are.”
“What do you want me to do?” You’d been unsure of what all this meant.
Operations clarified that, leaning forward. “Intelligence says he’s been around shipping and loading centers. We think he’s planning to get weapons aboard a train. Why? We’re not sure. But it can’t be anything good. We need you to shadow him until he gets out of our territory. Once out, he’s not our problem. But whatever he’s involved in, we can’t have it jeopardizing our neutrality.”
You’d licked your lips. “And if he starts causing trouble, wh
at am I supposed to do?”
“Stop him.”
“Stop him? This is Pepper. The man is more alien machinery than human. He’s more legend than real. I’m probably not going to be able to stop him, Ops, you know that.”
She looked at you, and then nodded. “I know that,” she’d said. “But we need you to at least try, to demonstrate our seriousness.”
And you’d swallowed. Because you realized then that’s why they chose you. No family, no attachments.
You’re damn good at being a rail agent, there’s that too.
But most of all: you’re kinda expendable.
And Operations was watching. She’d at least done you the favor of explaining things. They’re always honest. It’s a volunteer job. Always was.
You could have refused.
But you’d slowly nodded.
Because in the end, how many people ever get a chance to meet a living human legend?
*
Pepper grins at you, now, as you let go of the gun in the hip holster and put both your hands on the table. “I’ve haven’t really done anything yet, and you’re the fair sort,” he says. “I like your decision-making process.”
“What are you up to here?” you ask.
Pepper leans forward. “How much weaponry do you have access to aboard the train?”
Enough, you hope.
“This is neutral country,” you remind him.
He slings an arm over the ledge on the back of the built in seat. “Neutral? The line’s swimming with League agents.”
“And with Xenowealth agents,” you tell him.
He waves a hand, unimpressed. “We just follow the activity.”
“Treaties were brokered. Rydr’s World seceded from the League ten years ago. But we are also not allied with the Xenowealth. We host trade to both.”
“And you let the League run up and down the train lines as they see fit,” Pepper says. “That breeds trouble.”
“It was a condition of our independence.”
“The League knew it couldn’t hold onto you, so it grabbed that best possible concessions. You bent over backwards.”
You bite your lip. “I’m not here to argue history.”
“And yet, it always walks back up the line to bite us all in the ass,” Pepper says.
“What are you planning?” You ask him, outright.
“It’s not what I’m planning you need to be worried about,” he says, and raises a finger.
You both hear the dull thud down the corridor. Your ears were cored out and replaced with synthetics when you agreed to join the rail’s security. Yes, you volunteered to defend your planet. Yes you do as part of a self-assembling militia. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t teched out with the latest and greatest. Quick nerves, reinforced skeleton, subprocessors in the nape of your neck.
A body hits the carpet. A hand smacks the wall. You half stand, but Pepper, expecting something of this sort, shakes his head.
Wait.
The door is kicked open, and Pepper reaches out and grabs the man standing there.
He’s a bit stunned. He’s holding a large, silenced pistol, but Pepper’s grabbed and broken his hand before he’s even had time to frown. You notice, in the split second as his entire body is violently yanked from the doorway and over your cup of tea, nudging it slightly with the tip of his boot, that there’s blood splattered on the assassin’s gloves.
By the time Pepper slams him into the side wall, just under the window, his neck is broken.
Yet, for good measure, Pepper takes the man’s own silenced gun, puts the silencer to the dying man’s mouth, and pulls the trigger.
Blood and brain tissue spray the window.
Pepper sits back down and delicately pushes your teacup back to its original location on the table. “You were saying something about neutrality, I think,” he says.
*
The dead man will be tied into a battle-net of some sort. You’re not wasting time. You’re kicking out the paneling underneath your bench seat and reaching under to retrieve a large black case.
Inside, nestled in foam: extra handguns, a tactical assault rifle, ammo, a belt of flash bangs.
“Who are they after?” you ask. “Me or you?”
“They’re killing passengers,” Pepper says.
You pause. “I can’t believe that.”
Pepper still has the gun he took off the dead man. He glances around the door. “Follow me and see for yourself.”
Outside, in the hallway, blinking at the bright lights, polished brass, steel inserts and other neo-modernist stylings you see the first body. It’s an alien: Nesaru. Its quill-like feathers droop from its skin in death. Clear fluids are dripping, splashed against the hallway wall, and soaking into the carpet.
The slender, ostrich-like alien’s neck is bent in an impossible angle.
“There’s more,” Pepper whispers.
Each room is a display of death. Different colored fluids. Different bodies. But all punctured, broken, run down. Still. Unmoving. Statues in their nooks, holding gory, distorted death poses for you.
But some of the rooms are empty.
That leaves you puzzled. You’re mulling it over, but even as you do that, you enable contact with HQ.
It’s quantum entanglement communications. Which means it’s expensive. Someone has to create the two paired pieces of quantum bits and separate them. You get one bit, HQ gets the other. And once one gets used, and the information passed through, its state reverts to unpaired. It’s the universe’s most expensive form of limited bandwidth email.
So you telegraph HQ a summary: LEAGUE KILLING PSSNGRS. TRAIN HIJACK IMMNT? ADVISE.
Pepper looks inside another empty room, then back at you.
He’s expecting you to notice something, but the reply flashes back, painted over your eyesight thanks to a chip in your visual cortex. WCH PSSNGRS?
Which passengers?
And the empty rooms are a puzzle that finally snaps into its proper shape.
You’re only seeing dead aliens. There are no humans in here.
NON-HUMAN, you reply.
Pepper’s watching your air-typing fingers.
OBSRV & RPRT, you’re ordered.
“What do your masters order?” he asks, forcing another door open.
You don’t answer. You don’t need to. The troubled look on your face tells him everything.
*
“So what’s your plan, here?” you ask. You’re keyed up. Sickened. Shaken. Trying to figure out what all this means and what it means to you. You’re also relieved no one has ordered you to detain or try to stop this man.
“Plan?” Pepper looks down the corridor. “To stop it.”
“Why?” You do hate yourself for asking, somewhere deep inside. But there is genuine curiosity. What’s in it for this man? What is making him tick. “This isn’t your fight. This isn’t a world that asked you here.”
“It’s infectious,” Pepper says as he points at one of the bodies.
You recoil for a split second, then realize stepping back won’t make a difference to survival one way or another. “Biological warfare?”
“No, the violence,” he says. He’s looking back at you. “It starts here, but then it spreads. Consumes everything around it. Like a fire, it tries to pull in everything within reach. Borders might be decent barriers, but it tries to leap around, continue. So I come out here, to fight it before it has fuel. Before it spreads to the worlds I hold dear.”
There’s a darting movement, a shadow against the far door leading to the next car. Pepper launches himself forward, boots digging into the carpet hard enough to rip it and make the metal beneath his feet groan as he springs away.
You follow, a breath behind. Fast to the unaided eye, but molasses compared to the snap-speed of Pepper, who hits the steel door and rips it out of its hinges.
He pivots, keeping it to his right side as a shield that smacks into someone you can’t see, just as another man bursts
down the corridor. This man is dressed in dull gray armor. It’s a flowing, shifting exoskeleton He looks like a knight with submachine guns in either hand. Pepper drops the door and closes with him.
When he and Pepper hit, it sounds like a padded gong has been struck. Metal colliding with flesh with metal underneath.
Pepper grapples with whining exoskeletal arms, and both men twirl and spin around the corridor, each one looking for a weakness as they grunt, shift, and struggle in their rapid tango.
Still locked together they smash through the door of a cabin.
*
As the sounds of destruction and splintering walls fill the corridor the ripped off door shifts. A man crawls out into the corridor on his hands and knees.
He leaves a trail of blood behind from his ruined face, where the door struck him as Pepper passed. He has a large gun in one hand, which he awkwardly holds as he pulls himself along.
A new sound creeps out into the train car. Something like the scream of a can being slowly ripped apart, and then a fleshy, wet, thump.
Pepper steps out of the room holding a helmeted head in one hand, torn completely free of a body.
“Pepper!” You shout the name in warning, without thinking about it, and the crawling man raises his gun.
But before he completes the motion Pepper throws the decapitated helmeted head at the gun. The shot destroys the dead skull, creating a cloud burst of blood mist that Pepper cuts through to kill the crawling League agent with heel stomp to the back of the neck.
The two of you are alone again.
“I was hoping he’d still be unconscious,” Pepper says, looking down at the corpse. “I wanted to talk with him. Find out where the human passengers are being herded to. How many League agents there were.”
“And what they were up to?” you suggest.
Pepper shrugs. “That’ll emerge.” Then he looks up and down the car. “What do you think, up to the front, or back?”
“I can’t help you,” you remind him.
He looks past you, back down the train. “Are you physically prevented from helping me in any capacity, right this second? Is something literally holding you back? Neural taps?”
You shake your head.
“Then you’re full of shit. You’re making a philosophical choice. To follow an order. You are choosing to stand by.”
The New Hero Volume 2 Page 27