Enter the Shroud: In the Pursuit of Knowledge (The Shroud Discord Book 0)

by Bran Nicholls

  “So many.”

  “Earth had a problem, the corporations found a solution. This,” he said, with a wave of his hand, “is the result. You’ll find a restaurant like this in each of the diamonds, with a cluster in the Martian diamond, of course.”

  “Tell me about Mars,” I said. “The things they don’t broadcast on the infochannel.”

  LeRoy thanked the waitress when she brought two slim glasses of beer as tall my forearm, and set them on the table. He lifted his glass, tapped the rim against mine and took a long draught. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  I took a sip of beer, caught the fire and dust of Mars in the back of my throat, and coughed. The Martians sitting around us smiled, some laughed, all raised their glasses and toasted my first taste of Martian beer. It was like drinking sand, and I imagined the fine dust of the red planet seeping into everything. Why wouldn’t they incorporate it into their beer? The taste of home.

  I wiped imaginary dust from my lips, and said, “What do they want?”

  “Justice, I think. It’s hard to tell, Joe. I think they thought they were given a raw deal, although no-one said it was going to be easy – colonising Mars – but the corporations threw a lot of money at the informercials. It looked like it was going to bankrupt some of the more aggressive colonisation companies, until they discovered Mars’ best raw material, and how to exploit it.”

  “Minerals?”

  “Children. The first borns, and the generations that came after them.” LeRoy took another sip of beer. “There has always been money in war, Joe.”

  “I never heard about it.”

  “That’s because you don’t come out of your apartment. Just like every other citizen of the citysphere – there’s no need, no drive, no reason.” LeRoy tilted his glass and gestured at the Martian customers. “You won’t find any screens or glasses here. The Martians are the only ones who know how to live.”

  I looked around the room, noticed the subtleties of expression, gesture, touch that defined and set each blaze-black figure apart from his or her neighbour, friend… lover?

  “Do they couple?” I said, my voice a whisper.

  “Yes,” LeRoy said. “That’s the one law Martians are exempt from, tragic as it is.”

  “Tragic?”

  LeRoy waited for the waitress to set our food on the table, and then said, “Martian babies don’t survive more than a few days on Earth.”

  “It’s too damp. Their skin rots,” said the waitress. “I’ll bring more beer.”

  “I haven’t finished the first one,” I said.

  LeRoy said nothing, content to watch as I forked a mouthful of gritty white vegetables stained with a paprika red sauce into my mouth. My tongue went numb at the very first taste. I put down the fork and reached for my beer, amazed at how the sandy liquid coaxed the Martian curry into a fiery lather as I swallowed. It was till gritty, but raw and powerful at the same time. I took another forkful, another mouthful of beer, working my way through the dish and the beverage, imagining my body channel the rich Martian food directly to my muscles.

  LeRoy took small spoonfuls of his light dessert, it was pale in comparison, nor did he drink quite as much beer as I did. When the waitress returned, he slid his second beer across the table to me. I nodded my thanks and shovelled another forkful of spiced vegetables into my mouth, as LeRoy started to talk.

  “The first generation of Martians born on the planet was quick to adapt to the environment. Those that didn’t died within the first year. When the colonists realised that their children’s skin needed no protection from the sun, they developed respirators to add oxygen to the air. You noticed the diamond shapes around their noses and mouths?”

  “Yes.”

  “Respirators,” he said. “The lighter circles around their eyes are from the goggles.”

  “And the hardpoints?”

  “Came later,” LeRoy said, “once the demand for Martian fighters was realised. It takes a lot of firepower to bring down a spear of Martians. Their skin is like wood, fibrous – you can sand it, drill into it, and attach things to it like armour plates or weapon mounts. It’s really quite incredible.”

  I finished my beer, pushed the empty plate towards the centre of the table, and worked hard not to belch.

  “Let it out,” LeRoy said, “they’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”

  I belched like I was a teenager, and the teens around me applauded. I waved and reached for my glass.

  “No more. Synthea can’t train you if you are intoxicated. I’ll order coffee.”

  LeRoy said nothing more until our plates had been taken and two syrup-thick bowls of red coffee were brought to our table. I turned the bowl on its saucer, sniffing at the spices spiralling up from the surface.

  “What you don’t hear about on the infochannel, what you will never hear spoken of here,” he said, with a wave of his hand, “is the Martian Storm.”

  “Atmospheric?”

  “Political. The Martians are sceptical of corporations; they don’t let them rule on Mars. Instead, they have a political system, not unlike Earth’s before the creation of the cityspheres.”

  “And the storm?”

  “Is brewing. There is talk of a fleet of Martian ships, built in secret, crewed with a host of Martian children – off quota, hidden from the books. If you believe the rumours, the Martians have populated the southern reaches, where the actual storms make it impossible to penetrate with satellites, or any other form of communication and surveillance. If that’s true,” LeRoy said, “then there is a chance that Mars will sever the ties with Earth for good.” He gestured at my coffee. “You’ve sampled the cuisine, you’ve seen the culture – seen how they talk to one another, touch one another, have the kind of contact only your parent’s generation can recall. Why would they wish to remain subservient to Earth, forced to pay in the currency of children for services rendered?”

  I caught the flicker of light in LeRoy’s eyes, smiled, and said, “I think you are a secret Martian, LeRoy H4RBINGER.”

  “Do you?” He laughed. “It’s the beer.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said.

  “I’m in this purely for the money, Joe. The highest bidder is my employer.”

  “TK Inc.”

  “That’s right,” he said, but the sudden stillness, even the slow flicker of light in his eyes, suggested something more.

  “What about the Shroud? How do the Martians…”

  LeRoy shook his head. “Not here, Joe. Later.”

  “All right,” I said. I finished my coffee, savoured the bittersweet tang, licked the Martian film of grit from my teeth. “What’s next?”

  My body was restless. No matter how much time I felt I needed to process the events of the day, Synthea, the Martians, the Shroud, my body needed to move, and I could feel my muscles twitch as they detoxed. I would be shaking soon, and I needed Synthea to help get over the shakes. But then, I also just needed Synthea.

  “There’s a training pit beneath the restaurant, somewhere you can use Synthea. I’ll settle the bill and we’ll start there.”

  “Is she going to link the memory with my muscles?”

  “Yes, and much more.”

  “She’s going to train me to fight?”

  “She’s going to train you not to get killed; I have hired a Martian to train you to fight. No,” LeRoy said, as I looked around the restaurant, “they’re too old.” LeRoy stood up and coughed to get the attention of the Martians. “At midnight you’re going to fight a child, in the arena.”

  The looks I caught were intense, weighted with anticipation and disbelief. The waitress looked up from the couple she was serving and shook her head when LeRoy attempted to pay for our meal.

  “No,” she said, and looked at me, “dead men don’t pay.”

  LeRoy whispered something in return and the waitress gestured for us to follow her. The spices sizzling in the kitchen brought tears to my eyes, and I stifled the urge to quaff a mou
thful of beer from the jugs the cooks had beside the hotplates and baked stone grills. But as the waitress opened the door into the corridor leading below the restaurant, I would have traded all the Martian beer on Earth for a bottle of cold water. My tears turned to sweat, and my shirt was soaked before we reached the floor of red sand at the bottom of the stairs.

  LeRoy’s Strident suit compensated for the heat. He thanked the waitress, kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks. LeRoy walked barefoot to the centre of a circle of red sand beneath a low black ceiling. It was domed and pricked with tiny lights.

  “Take off your clothes, Joe,” he said.

  I stripped, tossed my damp shirt, shorts and underwear to one side, and then reached for the disc on my arm.

  “Wait,” LeRoy said. He gestured at the disc. “You’ve probably felt it already, your connection.”

  “Yes.”

  “That shouldn’t hold you back.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You might think that Synthea is your friend, a soul mate, the closest thing to a lover you have ever had.” He nodded as I felt my cheeks blush. “But Synthea is just a tool; you must try not to get attached.”

  “She’s stuck in my arm, LeRoy. You put her there.”

  “I’m just saying that Synthea is just a projection of you, albeit with a latent set of skills to impart.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope so, Joe, I really do, because the minute you engage Synthea, she is going to try her best to kill you.”

  PART 6

  Synthea shed her clothes with a slip of electrons, and I stared at my own projection of what I believed was the image of perfection, soft brown eyes, a defiant lift of the jaw, long black curls pulled into a tight ponytail behind her head, strands of loose hair tickling her cheeks, that full mouth, the dimples like curved bows at each corner, slender shoulders leading to breasts that…

  Synthea’s first kick shocked me out of my rapture and onto the smuggled Martian dirt. When I looked up, the flicker of the sensual hologram was gone, to be replaced by the familiar blaze-black teak skin, complete with hardpoints drilled into her chest. She slapped my body with paddle-hard palms, chopped with the baton-straight edges of her hands, and kicked me in the chest with what felt like the end of a pole, a bat, something hard and inhuman. Synthea was all business, and she was determined, all of a sudden, to end our relationship, to drive me into the Martian sand, and split my new skin, to draw blood. The sand arced as I plumed into it, and I cast a bloody glance at LeRoy.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said, “she’s your projection.” He waved at the restaurant’s patrons as they lined the walls in a dense ring of black, the brown skin around their eyes, nose and mouth, gave them a triangular concentration as they followed the fight. I heard the suck of air through the spectators’ teeth as Synthea drove the flat of her foot into my stomach, felt my muscles cramp for just a second, and then, as a sense of pride mixed with disgust at my sadomasochistic folly, I picked myself up, caught the next kick against a stomach of diamond-hard flesh, and slammed my fist into Synthea’s stomach, and, when she buckled, the point of my elbow into her back, just below the neck. The holographic bitch went down.

  I smeared dust into my busted lip as I gauged the reaction of the spectators. They seemed less convinced, and I realised why when Synthea dealt a concussive blow to the side of my head.

  Had I been the seventy-three-year-old curator I was before midday, I would have died from that self-inflicted blow. As the augmented, eel-skinned septuagenarian of Jamaican descent, I concluded I was not dead, not yet. I rolled onto my feet, glared at Synthea through the dust, and prowled the outer rim of the Martian ring.

  My muscles had stopped twitching. In fact, it seemed that Synthea was having the desired effect, pile-driving memory into my muscles with each blow. In the reprieve, at the edge of the ring, I succumbed to a moment of over confidence. LeRoy saw it, and I caught the shake of his head, as he realised I had changed-up and learned the nature of the game. For it was a game. Synthea only hit as hard as she knew I could stand. There were limits. In theory, I could walk into her attack, brushing off each blow with a thought, a registration of the fact that she couldn’t hurt me. That I couldn’t hurt me. I took a step towards the centre, and, as Synthea spinned up her attack, I walked into the blows, throwing up my arms to block, my thighs to deflect, and my elbows to counter, all while spoon-feeding my body with the thought that this was all part of the plan, that I had planned this. The blows rolled off my body, and I moved tight into Synthea’s sphere of attack, slamming the base of my fist into her nose, grabbing her hair, and tugging it back as I…

  She wasn’t supposed to have hair.

  I glanced at the Martians – bald, all of them. I looked at Synthea; saw those soft innocent eyes, the blood on her cheek, dribbling from her mouth, spotting her chest. She panted within my grip and I felt my fingers relax, her hair tickle the palm of my hand as she slipped out of my reach, wound her fist back, and slammed me into the sand, into the black, beyond the reach of the stars.

  LeRoy said I was out for five minutes.

  I felt his cool hands on my shoulder as he turned me onto my back. His face wore that what-did-I-tell-you expression, and I let him pull me to my feet. Two Martians stood by his side, one of them fiddled with Synthea’s disc as the other bound my waist with a leather cloth and belt, scored with creases of grit.

  Synthea shimmered a few metres in front of me, kicking at the sand with her toes, unable to meet my eye. Or was it me that felt shamed? What had I done? Was she hurt?

  “Stop that,” LeRoy said.

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re syncing. It’s dangerous. You have to stay detached. Synthea is an algorithm. She’s not real.”

  “I know that.”

  “Those are just words, Joe.” LeRoy sighed. “It’s my fault. You’re too old. I should never have augmented you.”

  “But you did,” I said. “I made the assurances.”

  “Yeah, you did, and I’m sorry about that. You made those assurances with my employer, the same as I did.”

  “So we’re both indebted to TK Inc.”

  LeRoy said nothing, did nothing, and I was too tired to interpret his silence. Synthea lifted her head, caught my eye, and looked away.

  “Anyway,” LeRoy said, and slapped my arm. “We’ve come too far to stop. These two are going to help you,” he said, and gestured at the two Martians. “If you clear your head, and let Synthea do her job, she’ll mimic their fighting routine, and we’ll have you shadow-link the moves into memory. All set?”

  “I don’t know?”

  “Hey.” LeRoy slapped my cheek. “Stop looking at her. It’s disgusting. Self love. Get over it.” He slapped me again. “Understand?”

  “LeRoy?”

  “There’s no time, Joe. An hour from now you might be dead, and then what have I got? Eh?” He clapped his hands, moved to the edge of the ring, and said, “Let’s go.”

  The leather cloth wrapped around my waist and between my legs was as restrictive as it was protective. It chafed as Synthea pulled my limbs and twisted my body with hammer blows and blocks, kicks and retreats, chops, thrusts, punches, and even butts with the head, jabs with elbows, and gouges with thumbs. Without my thoughts to shape her, she bruised, bled, and reeled across the Martian ring as we learned the moves of a culture bred to fight if only to survive.

  A moment of reprieve gave me pause for reflection as I studied the Martians, and wondered at LeRoy’s tell. He was still every time we talked of his employer, a pause here, a hesitation there. I looked at him, slick and white among the burned-black warriors, and I wondered if I had been hired to save a corporation or to start a revolution? I wasn’t sure that it even mattered. In the ring, as the sand clung to my body in streaks and swathes of sweat stained red, nothing mattered, nothing else existed, only people.

  Perhaps it was my advanced years, or the sudden and life-changing shocks to my
system, to my understanding of the world and my place in it, but I was no longer the same Joe, member of the fifth wave of asylum seekers. I was eel-born, Martian bred. All that remained was to determine how I should die, because in that moment, when I stepped onto the red dust of the Martian arena, I was sure I was going to die.

  “I paid for a ten-year-old,” LeRoy said, his voice struggling to breach the tiny gap between him and the manager of the arena in the darkest corner of the Martian diamond. The Martians in the crowd were the silent ones, it was the so-called elite, the top echelon of Earth’s corporations that jeered and cursed from the seats ringing the dirt. They lifted their masks to drink filtered Martian beer from elegant glasses, as the peaked ceiling dragged their voices into an echo cloud twisting in the very apex of the roof.

  “Eight-year-olds are cheaper,” the manager said.

  “They are killers. I want a ten-year-old.”

  “Then you must pay more.”

  LeRoy swore, and then pulled a slim card from his pocket. I looked up as he pressed the card into the manager’s hand, and said, “Talk to this man. You’ll get your money.”

  The manager slipped the card into his pocket and waved at a figure shrouded in darkness on the opposite side of the ring. There was a subtle shift of shadows, and then a child stepped into the light, the soft brown diamond of skin on her face and around her eyes suggested she was female – a female Martian child, ten years old, and at least two metres tall.

  “She’s a child?”

  I watched as the girl knelt in the ring to dust sand across her palms.

  “With a few years of maturity. This crowd,” he said, with a sneer at the masked spectators, “pay only for blood. They want the children to fight. I had to pay more to keep you alive.”

  “What about the Martians? What are they here for?”

  “Pride and duty. Their siblings and their offspring will fight, and they will manage their winnings, their careers, or arrange their funerals. Without a war, there is no alternative source of income. Another reason for the Martian politicians to call for independence.”