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

by Bran Nicholls

  “And why am I here?”

  LeRoy put his hand on my shoulder and pointed at the girl. “Her name is KIDTEN-0. She’s the highest ranking ten-year-old on Earth. If you can survive three bouts in the arena with her, I’ll know you’re ready to enter the Shroud, and so will my investors.”

  “Your investors?”

  “The quiet ones, in the middle row of seats. They’re the only ones not drinking.” LeRoy squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Don’t look. It’s best if you don’t.”

  I glanced at the kid, turned to LeRoy, and said, “You’re not employed by The Knowledge, are you?”

  “No, Joe, I’m not.” He sighed and beckoned for me to lean close so that he could whisper in my ear. LeRoy’s breath was cool, like his skin. “I’ll come clean, I represent the Valhalla Group.”

  “The underworld?”

  “Part of it, that’s right. They’re just another organisation, Joe. They can feel a change coming, everyone outside of the lower and rougher diamonds can. When they discovered the splinter in the Shroud, they decided to go for it, after they butchered the entire crew and wiped the logs of the deep space prowler that discovered it.”

  Two soft beats of a skin drum drew us apart.

  “Three bouts, remember. You have to survive. If you don’t, they will have to act.”

  “They? LeRoy?”

  He said nothing, turned and walked to the edge of the ring, his shoes and suit expelling sand and dust with soft antistatic charges that rippled through the stitches and seams.

  I remember the charge, and remember being surprised at the speed of the Martian child as she ran towards me. I caught the first blow across my chest, felt my collarbone crack, and my heart stop, if only for a moment, just long enough for the kid to break my right femur.

  I buckled into the sand, too overwhelmed to scream.

  If I had understood correctly, then an eight-year-old would have finished me then, perhaps with a chop to the back of my neck, or a twist of my head, but the kid just prowled in an arc before me. The drums might have sounded for the end of the bout, I don’t remember, but when I forced myself to my feet, the kid leaped into the air and drove the back of her foot into my arm, shattering Synthea’s disc, and piercing my soul with such a sense of loss, grief, and sadness, that I crumpled to the sand and decided to lie there until I died.

  When I woke in the sweat and blood-stoked hospital wing of the arena, LeRoy suggested it might have been better if I had.

  “We have to go,” he said. “As soon as you are fixed, we have to run.”

  PART 7

  The ten-year-old Martian warrior was in the room, watching as the arena’s medical team stuffed the tip of my broken femur back inside my thigh. It should have hurt more than it did, and I heard the doctor say something about slippery skin and steroids, but all I could think about was Synthea.

  LeRoy stood to one side as the doctor clicked the last of the plastic bolts into the regenerating tube buzzing around my wound. She had repaired my collarbone with a quick concentrated blast of a trauma laser, and my heart, obviously, had started beating of its own accord, but the femur was another matter.

  “You’re the one that augmented him?” the doctor asked LeRoy.

  “Yes.”

  “You should know better than to hang Martian muscles on a geriatric Earth frame.” She looked at me, and said, “This is going to cause you all kinds of problems.”

  I stared back at her as I searched for the missing part of my soul, wondering if it was love or delusion, wondering too if synchronisation was legal, and understanding if it wasn’t. It was LeRoy’s fidgeting by the door, the rapid glances he shot at the corridor, and the way he tapped his thighs with the tips of his fingers that drew me out of my grief, if only out of curiosity.

  He caught my eye, and said, “Whenever you are ready, Joe.”

  “This man is going nowhere for at least forty minutes,” the doctor said.

  “Joe.”

  I nodded and slipped my leg over the side of the blood-grained bench.

  “If you leave, you risk irreparable damage.”

  “And if he stays,” said LeRoy, “he’ll die.”

  “What about her?” I said, and pointed at the Martian girl.

  “I don’t know what she’s doing here,” LeRoy said. “We’ll find out.”

  I started to hobble towards the door, only to have the girl slip a black arm around my waist, and my arm around her shoulder. I let her take up my weight, and we followed LeRoy out of the hospital and beyond the doctor’s curses. LeRoy picked up the pace, pulling a slim triangular disc out of his pocket, he pasted it to the skin behind his ear.

  “We’re on our way,” he said, paused, and then, “Two passengers, I think.” LeRoy glanced at the girl and she nodded. “Two, confirmed.”

  LeRoy held up his hand when we reached the door at the end of the corridor. He waited for the girl to nod, and then opened it with his palm pressed against the pad in the centre of the door. It shushed open and the smells and sounds of the street bustled in.

  “People here notice things,” LeRoy said. “We’re going to get some weird looks, attract all kinds of attention, but we don’t care, we just keep moving. Understood?”

  The girl nodded and I followed her lead, too sad to object, only the pain in my thigh felt real, and I focused on it. The pain increased as LeRoy picked up the pace; pushing his way through people wearing suits similar in style and fashion to his own, but less bloody. I realised he must have helped carry me out of the ring.

  LeRoy stopped at the corner, letting the evening traffic flow around us as he pretended to buy a coffee at a Martian stand. The owner nodded at the girl, and ignored us as LeRoy looked through the dry-spice vegetable snacks hanging from the eaves of the stand, and studied the flow of pedestrians behind us.

  “There are two,” he said, more to the girl than to me. “Can you get rid of them?”

  She nodded, and I felt the shift of her body as she let go of me and slipped into the crowd.

  The girl moved like a shark, twisting through the tide of smartly-dressed elite, the top of her bald burned-black head rippling the surface as she homed in on the first of the two men LeRoy had singled out. I lost sight of her, realised she must have dived, and then heard LeRoy’s intake of breath as one of the marks disappeared from view. The effect rippled through the crowd like rings, a wave of shock, and then the girl was moving again, and the last of the two men started to run.

  “He’ll try and get some height,” LeRoy said, and pointed. “There. The statue of the sphere.”

  I grasped the side of the stall, followed his finger and saw a man climb the statue, reach inside his jacket, and draw a slim-barrelled gun. The barrel was almost clear of the jacket when the girl leaped out of the crowd, slapped the weapon from the man’s hand, gripped his head, and slammed it against the sphere. We heard the crack of his head and the gasp of the crowd, watched as the girl let the man’s body slip to the ground, and then we turned and ran.

  LeRoy ran, I hobbled, until I felt the wet sheen of the girl’s skin around my waist, and she carried me, through the crowd, and into the cab LeRoy hailed on the main street. I grimaced as the girl pressed me onto the back seat and sealed the door. LeRoy gave the driver directions, pressed the triangular disc behind his ear, and gave a time of arrival, ten minutes from now. He sealed the cab from the passenger area with the press of a button, leaned his head against the seat, nodded at the girl and looked at me.

  “How are you doing?”

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  “And your leg? You need to focus, Joe.”

  “My leg is all right.” I glanced at the girl and held out my hand. “Joe A5YLUM.”

  “KIDTEN-0,” she said.

  “You’re not a kid.”

  “I’m ten. Rank zero.” She looked at LeRoy, and said, “I’m also a spy.”

  “I know,” he said. “How far will you go?”

  “To the Shroud.”

/>   “Those are your orders?”

  “I am to wait there.”

  “Fair enough.” LeRoy sighed.

  “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “A moment ago, you were talking to someone.” I tapped the side of my neck. “Another one of your discs.”

  LeRoy peeled the disc from his skin and pressed it into my hand. It was heavier than it looked, the edges rougher than I imagined.

  “Black market,” he said, “like all my stuff. It works, but it doesn’t look pretty.” He wiped at the blood staining the trousers of his suit. “These are knock-off too. I should tell you, Joe, I’m a fake. I belong to bad news, and I just pissed them off.”

  “The Valhalla Group?”

  “And then some.” He looked at the girl, and said, “Your job is to get him there, I don’t care what you do once you arrive, just get him to the splinter. Will you do that?”

  “That is my assignment.”

  “Good.”

  The pain distanced me from thoughts of Synthea, gave me the space to think, and I realised that I was at the bottom of the list of people who knew about me, and what I was doing. I said as much. It made LeRoy laugh.

  “This didn’t happen overnight,” he said. “They found the Shroud last year, and, after they cleaned up, I was contacted by the Valhalla Group. I owed them plenty, and, once they got my assurances,” he paused to show me the palm of his hand, the debt worms had begun to crawl leaving raised traces of black beneath his skin, “they tasked me with finding someone who could read. I found you.” LeRoy traced the lines of the worms with his thumb.

  “How long have you got?”

  “Until I collapse and wake up on the butcher’s block? Long enough to get you to the H3RMES. That’s your ship. That’s where we are headed.”

  I was going off-world. After seventy-three years in the sphere, I honestly didn’t know how I felt about that. Everything LeRoy had said and done to me had been in preparation for this moment, and now it had arrived, I didn’t know how to feel. She might have known. It helped not to say her name.

  Synthea.

  Clearly, I was not done torturing myself.

  The cab slowed as the driver waited to shunt into the lift that would take us below street level, another first for me, although the commuter pipes were something I had heard about on the infochannel. I wasn’t a complete ignoramus. The cab windows fluoresced as we slotted into the lift and disappeared below the street. We picked up speed. LeRoy closed his fist, and nodded that we should get ready. He stood up the moment the cab started to slow.

  “This is it,” he said, and pulled one more object from his pocket. “This is the real deal, Joe. It’s a holocom. Take it.” He pressed the puck into my hand.

  “You’re not coming with us?”

  He flashed his palm, and said, “Track and trace. I’ll lead them away from you.” I looked at my own palm, and LeRoy shook his head. “Placebo worms. I didn’t need any assurances; I knew you would accept the job.”

  “How could you?”

  “I did my homework, Joe. You’re not hard to read, and you read. It was a slam-dunk, if you know what I mean?”

  “Not really?”

  The cab stopped as the driver waited for his slot to drop us off.

  “The fifth wave of asylum seekers was the hardest hit by the flood. Your family waited until the last minute. Hope was their ultimate undoing. I can see it in your eyes, too. Hope. You think there is something out there that can make a difference. You’ve been content with your lot in life while waiting on hope. All I had to do was offer you the slightest inkling that it was real and you took it, gave me your assurances, and blindly did everything I asked of you. Hope is your Achilles heel, Joe.” He nodded at the girl. “The same as hers’.” LeRoy reached out and took my hand as the cab doors opened. “It’s been a pleasure.” He nodded at the puck in my palm. “I’ll call you, if I can.”

  “I’d like that.” The girl helped me to my feet, and I raised my hand for her to wait a second. “The herbergers provided more than lodgings, you know,” I said, and LeRoy listened. “They went ahead of the army, to find the lodgings, and in doing so they brought news. They became known as heralds.” LeRoy smiled and I continued. “Are you seeking lodgings for an army, LeRoy? Is that what this is about?”

  “I’m just trying to connect a reader with a tonne of books, that’s all.” LeRoy nodded at the girl and waved for us to get out of the cab. “The H3RMES,” he said, “it’s about as ugly as a ship gets, but the paintjob is nice. Look after yourself, Joe.”

  He grinned and closed the door. I watched the cab slip away and the next take its slot, and then the girl tugged me to the door of the sphere’s spaceport, and into a huge grey bay, the walls streaked with dirt, smoke, and grease, the floor lit with a web of glowing lines, like the sliver worms in LeRoy’s palm, but with actual destinations, not death at the end of them. The girl slapped her barefoot on a worn marker, swiping away the destinations with her toes. She stabbed the category with names of ships, selected the alphabetical register, and tapped my arm as a purple stripe pulsed at her feet.

  “We follow that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The hangar was not as crowded as the street. Pedestrian traffic was light. The few passengers I noticed could easily have been pilots, navigators, engineers and cooks. The woman waiting at the foot of the ramp beneath a massive twin-nacelled ship was a combination of all four. She had to be, she said, as she introduced herself. She was the only member of crew.

  “That’s if you don’t count H3RMES,” she said, as she took my hand. I struggled to look her in the eye. She had Synthea’s eyes. She had the same hair, the soft cut of her jaw and that same defiant chin I noticed as she stood before me in her greasy overalls, and slipsole boots.

  “I’m Joe, and this is KIDTEN-0.”

  “Walburga,” she said, as she let go of my hand. “Don’t ask, because I don’t know. Although,” she said with a glance up the ramp, “H3RMES might have a few ideas about that. Let’s get you introduced and out of sight. We’re third in line to leave Earth, and I don’t intend to miss our spot.”

  PART 8

  She even walked like Synthea. Walburga stopped at the top of the loading ramp and slapped her palm on the button to raise it. The ramp whined as the girl helped me navigate the metal grilles and gantries as we followed Walburga across an open bay at least as deep as the ramp was long. Chains and cranes ran along girders above us, and the smell of fatty lubricants and fuel clogged my nose. I stopped to sneeze, cursing as the pain shuddered through my thigh. Walburga waited, her hands on the guardrails running each side of the gantry, and her hair blowing in the breeze of a fan hidden from view.

  “It’s better once we get past the hold,” she said, as we joined her. “All kinds of things have been spilt down there. It’s on the list of things to do before I die.” The left side of her mouth twisted up, and she said, “It’s a long list.”

  Her smile at least was different from Synthea’s – not so coy. I began to pull back on my first impression, pleased that thoughts of Synthea were slipping, fading into memory, like the actions that had been absorbed into my muscles.

  Walburga reached behind her head and twisted her hair into a knot, studying the girl as she teased errant hairs, curling them behind her ears. “Who are you, again?”

  “I’m a spy,” said the girl.

  “Right.”

  “She probably is,” I said. “And a warrior.”

  “Now warriors I can use,” Walburga said, as she turned to walk the rest of the gantry and up a short flight of metal-grille steps to an open hatch leading up into the ship. “There haven’t been actual warriors on this ship since they phased out the H3RMES-Class around the time of the second generation of Mars colonists. The idea was to have about twenty spears – that’s one thousand infantry, plus all the dropships, command shuttles, pods and gear needed to support them.” She waited by the hatch a
nd pointed down into the massive space we had just walked across. “Two dropships down there, shuttles hanging above them. The hull opens just about everywhere there’s a flat space,” she said. “That’s probably why they started work on the smaller H4RMES and now the series eights. Smaller, faster. Only one door. Which is a good thing, considering how twitchy these old buckets are.”

  Walburga winked at the girl and glanced up at a series of pipes running along the bulkhead on both sides of the hatch. A yellow pipe burst with a plume of steam, only to stop a second later.

  “Joe, Kid,” Walburga said, “meet H3RMES.”

  The pipes rattled and burst in three places before self-sealing clamps detached from the joins and shunted into place sealing the leaks. Walburga reached up and tapped the closest clamp with a greasy finger.

  “Once H3RMES and I started communicating, I had these installed all over the ship. Unless our discussions get real heated and he gets all rowdy, then we can talk all over the ship. Of course,” she said, and stepped through the hatch, “there are some parts of the ship where the pipes are really just one long clamp. I call them the quiet places.”

  Walburga led us through one of four canteens, and the adjoining recreation room, fitness room, command room, and the room for charts. She stopped beside a small metal table with a holographic emitter running through the centre.

  “This is the spot they reserved for the actual traders. You know, the ones the troops were supporting? The H3RMES missions were a joke – not the ship,” she added, palms raised. When the rattle of pipes faded she continued. “I mean, here we are in 2194, and we’re still convinced there is life out there in the universe. Somewhere.”

  “There are people on Mars,” said the girl.

  “Because we put you there,” Walburga said, and laughed. “Sorry, kid, but you only grew up alien. You’re as human as Joe and me.”

  The girl’s arm was cool around my waist when she helped me through the bunk room, but the tight draw of her lips suggested she was thinking, or brooding. When Walburga said we could have our pick of beds, the girl helped me into a chair around a small table in the square space between two rows of bunks, and slipped away to a bunk farthest from the hatch.