Marque of Caine

by Charles E Gannon

  Hsontlosh lowered his eyes as he spoke. “I have been asked to stay with this human, whom I have the honor of introducing to you as—”

  “I know the human’s name, and I know yours, Hsontlosh of Ullshyand’s Fourth Ring. I also know your reputation for obsequious politesse and spineless catering to every opinion that is at odds with your own. Assuming you have any. You are of no interest to me and you are not welcome here. Leave. I will not speak with Caine Riordan nor oversee his immersion into Virtua until you are gone.”

  Hsontlosh’s tattoos had darkened profoundly. He glanced at Riordan. “I am duty-bound to stay with you, but…”

  Riordan nodded, imagined Elena’s sleeping face, somewhere in the vast complex around them. “If you don’t go, I can’t accomplish what I came for.”

  “A human more perspicacious than a loji,” the node mistress observed. “Already, this promises to be memorable entertainment.” Her mouth twisted as Hsontlosh turned, face pale, tattoos almost black, and exited. Two of the robots followed him.

  Riordan nodded at the Dornaani. “Since you already know who I am, and why I am here…”

  “You wish to learn something of me. But that is neither necessary nor desirable. It is enough that I consented to receive you. You may call me by a name from one of your own languages: Kutkh.”

  Riordan hoped that one day he’d find it easier to control his temper when confronted with Dornaani disdain. “Then I shall be blunt. You wouldn’t have allowed me to come here unless you wanted something. What is it?”

  “A question worthy of an answer,” pronounced Kutkh. “I want you to try to kill me.”

  Riordan had several simultaneous reactions: that he could not have heard correctly; that Kutkh couldn’t be serious; that he wished he was armed; and that the two floating robots suddenly looked extremely dangerous. But all he said was, “Please repeat that.”

  “I see your perspicacity has profound limits, human. To clarify, you will attempt to kill me while we are both in Virtua.”

  Which is still damned risky. For both of us, exit codes notwithstanding. “But why would you wish to—?”

  “I seek insights. You need know nothing more. Do you accept?”

  But if she controls the model…“I assume you can’t keep track of my actions if you’re in Virtua, also. Otherwise, there would be no point to this exercise.”

  “Perhaps your perspicacity is not so stunted after all. While immersed in the model, my perception and knowledge are limited to that of the persona I have adopted.”

  “But if my attack takes you by surprise, if you don’t have time to use your exit code—”

  “Human, I cannot discern if you are indirectly attempting to gather additional information or express a quaint but ludicrous concern for my well-being. Either way, your inquiry is unnecessary and unwanted. Perhaps it would be wiser to worry about your own safety, instead.”

  “You’re not going to provide me with an exit code?”

  Kutkh’s mouth twisted slightly; it was a malicious, not amused, smile. “You shall have an exit code. But if you use it, your quest is over. Permanently.”

  Jesus Christ, Kutkh is making this a game? For Elena’s life? Before Riordan could stop himself, the words blurted out, “So this is just another stupid test.”

  The twist of Kutkh’s mouth became more pronounced. “As is everything.”

  “That stupendously specious evasion still doesn’t explain or justify threatening my life—and ultimately, my mate’s—just to gain a few new ‘insights.’”

  Kutkh’s eyes opened slightly wider. “You may prove a worthy opponent, after all. However, debate and discussion are pointless. I have something you need. You are either willing to pay my price, or you are not.

  “I shall explicate the dangers once, human. Virtual trauma can trigger a fatal seizure or arrest. But it is far more likely to cause memory loss. The same is true if your stay in Virtua exceeds one real-time month. The longer the immersion, the more extensive the loss and the more likely it will affect long-term memories.” Kutkh gestured toward the cocoon bed. “Do you have further questions?”

  Riordan thought. “I need to know your identity in the simulation.”

  “When you awake, your pants pocket will contain a note revealing my persona.”

  Riordan nodded, laid down on the platform. The surface on either side of his head rose toward his temples.

  “Are you sure you haven’t forgotten anything, human?” Kutkh’s voice was a broad taunt.

  “Such as?”

  “Your own exit code.”

  Riordan paused. What if he used it by reflex, before he could stop himself? “No. Don’t need it. Let’s go.”

  The last thing Caine heard was the burbled huffing of Dornaani laughter.

  Chapter Fifty

  JULY 2124

  LELTLOSU-SHAI (VIRTUA), BD+75 403A

  Riordan awoke to the sound of feet thumping overhead.

  He opened his eyes to a wood plank ceiling. Sitting up, he swayed, momentarily unsteady. A side effect of immersion into Virtua, maybe?

  But no, the swaying was not in his head but in his surroundings. Which, given the brackish sulfur stink, meant he was on a boat. Then other sensory impressions arrived in one great rush.

  Small compartment, below decks. A narrow passageway to his right, flanked by two fuel bunkers of charred briquets the size of his fist. An odor of burned wood coming from a large companionway to his left. Faint shouting. A distant gong. Intermittent gunshots—hoarse blasts, not the sharp reports of modern firearms.

  Riordan rose, headed left toward the sound and the smell of smoke, felt something on his head. He swept off a brimmed cap, tucked it in his back pocket, noticed the coarseness of his pants the same moment he felt his calves start to itch. Woolens. A sturdy vest, practical coat, and worn linen shirt completed his attire. He checked his pants pockets. His probing fingertips grazed a folded piece of paper. Kutkh’s message…

  A scream from beyond the companionway, followed by the shrill, truculent voice of a young girl. Regretting the dull clomping of his worn brogans, Riordan climbed up into the light.

  The top of the companionway was framed by boat hooks racked to either side and led out to an afterdeck four meters across. Pushed back against the stern was a cluster of shoddily clothed people, crouching away from two menacing men. Both were dressed in rough but newer clothes, and kept the group corralled against the transom, their swords—swords?—raised. But not against the crowd. Their intended target was a young girl who was scrambling out of a toppled barrel, midway between the swordsmen and those cowering before them. However, instead of dodging away, her eyes widened as, between the legs of the men threatening her, she saw Caine emerging from the hold.

  Time slowed long enough for Riordan to see how the next few seconds would unfold. In a moment, the people behind the girl would also see him. A sliver of a second after that, the two sword-bearing bravos would notice that too many pairs of eyes were now focused behind them, and they’d turn. From that point, it was a toss-up whether they’d bother to demand that Caine surrender, or simply skewer him on the spot. But if by some miracle they didn’t notice him, they certainly meant to cut down the girl.

  So Riordan seized the only advantage fate had given him: surprise.

  Caine grabbed one of the boat hooks, and with a long leap, brought it down into a two-handed thrust. It punched against the spine of the closer swordsman. He sprawled forward. Directly into the desperate crowd.

  Without stopping to reassess, Riordan leaped back as hard as he had jumped forward. A thin, fast current of air cooled the tip of his nose as the second swordsman’s blade swept past. Riordan shifted his grip on the boat hook, holding it like a staff as he circled away. The bravo followed cautiously, sizing up the unexpected enemy.

  But only for a moment. The large man leaped forward with a yell, sword coming over his shoulder.

  There was no time or space to do anything but block. Riordan, han
ds wide upon the boat hook, realized he couldn’t trust the wood to stop the blow, Caine twisted the pole to the right as he stepped out to the left.

  The sword sliced into the shaft at an angle, splitting it along the grain. But Caine’s twisting parry diverted the force so that the edge of the cutlass jammed between the splintered halves of the handle. The rapid change in momentum tore the weapons out of their wielders’ hand, sent them clattering down the companionway.

  Again, the men circled each other warily. Riordan kept his face expressionless, assessing. He’s bigger and more experienced. I’m probably smarter and better trained. So…

  Riordan sidestepped away, right foot cheating back slightly.

  The bravo interpreted the move as indecision. Right fist cocking back like a meaty hammer, he charged and let fly a roundhouse punch.

  Riordan leaned forward as he slammed an outside block sideways against the inrushing forearm, felt bone bruising bone. Only partially deflected, the blow tore skin off Caine’s left ear as he countered with a right punch of his own. His opponent raised his right hand to block…

  Caine checked his punch, rocked back on his right heel, brought up his left leg and kicked forward into the man’s right knee.

  Caine did not hear the sharp, decisive snap he had hoped for, but the effect was similar. His opponent fell with a groan, sweeping a broad paw at Riordan as he dodged past, grabbed the second boat hook, spun back around…and stopped. And smiled.

  Unable to stand, the bravo stopped cursing long enough to see that Caine was not smiling at him, but at something over his shoulder. He turned. The crowd at the stern was inching forward, a heavily built woman holding the bloodied sword of his fallen friend.

  Caine leaped in, swinging the boat hook in a wide, smooth arc. Years of baseball made it second nature to power the bat all the way through the ball. Or in this case, the head. The force of the blow splintered the wood against his opponent’s temple. He fell forward like a sack of potatoes.

  Holding the shattered handle in his right hand, Riordan raised the other in both greeting and caution…and realized with a start that the crowd at the stern was speaking English. But in an accent and idiom that was almost indecipherable:

  “Step to that painter and cast off! We’d best give it the buttock downriver while we can.”

  “Hang on, these two aren’t flannel-jackets. They’re naught but common carvers. Crew could still be aboard, hey?”

  “Yeh, an’ ’oo’s the well-fed bloke in the brogans?”

  “Never mind that. Gwynnie: use that great chiv! Snuff that red-eyed bastard’s candle, just like t’other!”

  Riordan dropped the remains of the boat hook to raise both hands: an appeal to pause, to stay the blow. But, in that critical moment, when calming words should have been coming out of his mouth, Caine glimpsed what lay beyond the stern…and was struck dumb.

  Beyond large docks and ramshackle wharfs, a great dome rose above a disorderly stew of buildings, few of which reached as high as three stories. Which was why the unmistakable edifice that was St. Paul’s Cathedral loomed even more majestic here than it did in modern day London. In the near distance, the Southwark and Blackfriars bridges drew his eye up the Thames, to where its southward bend obscured Westminster Palace. From that same direction, a boat chugged toward them, white smoke belching out of its funnel. Although it was still too far off to make out many details, the figures clustered at the bow were carrying what appeared to be long, thin, sticks: shoulder arms of some type.

  A nearby blur of motion and a meaty thump pulled Caine’s attention back to the afterdeck. The woman with the sword was straightening up from the inert thug. There was a smile on her face and fresh blood on the blade.

  “No!” Caine shouted, realizing that his long second of amazement had been the last second to save the man. “You didn’t need to—”

  Just as the woman’s expression of puzzlement began to become irritation, her eyes snapped away from Riordan’s, looked past his shoulder…

  A roar deafened his right ear the same instant an ugly red crater appeared just below the woman’s collarbone. She slumped sideways, sword falling from nerveless fingers.

  Riordan instinctively spun away from the blast, glimpsed a cluster of short barrels just before they swung into his cheek like a hammer.

  The blow muddled what was left of Caine’s hearing, left behind a muffled roar. He was falling but couldn’t stop it. His skull was heavy with pain, seemed separate from his body. He didn’t feel himself hit the deck, was unaware of the position of his arms and legs—

  Then, the sense of being in his own body was back. He was slumped sideways on the deck, his left cheekbone a blinding ache. A large man stepped past him, working the heavy cylinder of a pepperbox revolver. He wore a black armband, had a long scabbarded dagger on his belt. The crowd retreated from him until their rumps pressed against the boat’s transom.

  “Anyone else want a go?” he shouted. “No?” He cocked the pistol’s hammer. “I’ve as many barrels as you ’ave bodies. I figure ’at’s fair odds for traitors what will slice open the ’eads of senseless men.” He gestured at the two dead bravos, then returned his attention to the crowd. They leaned away as the weapon’s six muzzles swept across them, the little girl with her hands in her pockets.

  The man stepped toward her. “An’ what about you, y’ little mudlark? Somethin’ t’ hide? Let’s see your dabbles, then.” When she shook her head and pushed her hands deeper into her frayed pockets, he grabbed her elbow roughly, hauled savagely at it. She screamed.

  Caine tried to raise up on one elbow; the world tilted sharply. His face smacked down on the deck again. A lightning bolt of agony shot from his left cheekbone to his left temple, then arced across to the right. He thought he might vomit.

  The man’s strength finally prevailed; the girl’s hand popped out of her pocket. The narrow, balled fingers were stained gray, cuticles and nailbeds almost black. The ogreish man grinned horribly, pistol coming up. “Not a mudlark, but a cinderscamp! Filchin’ coal from the king ’Imself!”

  She yanked her hand away. “Can’t steal from a man ’oos already been robbed of ever’thing!”

  He grabbed her by the shoulder. “Shut yer sauce hole! I’ve a mind to—”

  She swung at him. He saw it coming, grabbed her fist as it flashed toward him. “Eh, but ye’re a bricky one, ahn’tcha?” Now holding her wrist, he pulled upward. Her feet left the deck. She screamed, this time in agony.

  Riordan rolled on his back. “Let her go.”

  The man looked around. “Wot? You still breathin’? I can fix that.”

  Seeing that the man had momentarily forgotten the girl, Riordan did his best to spit. “I’ll bet you can.”

  Suddenly florid, the patch-haired ogre took a step toward Caine, then halted. The color bled back out of his jowls. He smiled. “Nice try, climber. Keep yer place and you might even dodge the noose. But this little cinderscamp, she’ll be learning ’er lessons at the end of a rope.”

  The dangling girl shrilled at him. “Lessons? From you? Ye’ve bollocks for brains, y’ pillock!”

  “Oh, but I’ve wits enough to understand the new catechism.” He laid the barrels of the pepperbox against her forehead with a gentleness and a grin that made Caine shiver. “No good tryin’ to fill yer pockets with a little coal…because Coal has already pocketed every little thing. Including you.”

  She spat at him. “Piss off!”

  The man rubbed away the slimy gobbet that had landed in his left eye, using the back of his pistol hand. “Right, then. Time to shorten the gallows’ queue.” He hauled her up higher, until her head was level with his own.

  Caine pushed himself up through vertigo and nausea, swaying on his elbows. “Bastard! Coward!”

  The big man sighed, shook his head, dropped the girl. She fell flailing to the deck as he turned toward Riordan. “Now, see: I try to be a reasonable man. To scare rather than kill. But there’s them as just won’t let t
hat be. Like you, f’rinstance.” He paced toward Caine. “An enemy of the state.”

  “And how did I harm the state?”

  The ogre grinned. “Why, by rubbin’ me fur the wrong way, ye sorry bastard.” He raised the pistol.

  And in that instant, Riordan realized what he’d actually done. He’d saved a girl that didn’t exist, had brought on a virtual death that might actually kill him, and had ruined his chances of saving Elena. All because Virtua felt so utterly real that he’d become lost in it, had believed what his senses told him…

  His self-recriminations were obliterated by the sound of the expected gunshot. But at the very moment he expected the scene would fade to gray, the pistol-wielding brute fell his length on the deck, the left side of his head a ruin of bone and blood.

  “Becca!” a new voice shouted from above and behind.

  “Uncle Pip!” the girl shrieked back.

  Riordan turned his head carefully.

  A rangy man hopped down from a scaffolded stone piling alongside which the boat was moored. He landed on the small top-deck behind the smokestack, raced toward the stern. Caine didn’t know what surprised him more, his unlooked-for rescue, or that he had never noticed that the boat was mostly sheltered under of the arches of a long, low bridge.

  The man slid down the ladder to the afterdeck, one hand on the railing, the other holding what looked like a short musket. Becca ran to him, the rest of the crowd coming away from the taffrail far enough to bend over the sword-wielding woman whom the ogre had shot.

  Niece on his hip, “Uncle Pip” crossed to Riordan. “I’m in your debt, sir.” He extended his hand, the angle of which suggested it was both a gesture of introduction and a practical offer of help up from the deck. Riordan took it, accomplishing both. The man smiled. “I’m Steven Robinson. Pip, to my friends.” He waited. “And you’d be called—?”

  “I’m Cai—”

  Riordan caught himself in the middle of his reflexive reply. Careful! Keep your distance. Keep reminding yourself this isn’t real. Don’t even use your own name. Use your grandfather’s.