“Apparently,” he said, as he fought to control his breathing, “the rings don’t work.” He looked at me, and said, “So, I’m kind of hoping that you got my message, Joe. That you have the coordinates.”
“I don’t,” I said, and LeRoy screamed. He pitched onto his side, and I gasped at the stump where his left foot was only moments earlier. Like the severed hand, it dissolved from view.
“Do me a favour, Joe,” LeRoy said, as he rolled onto his side, “at least try to string them along for a bit.”
“I’m not very good at this,” I said.
Walburga suppressed a smile, and then walked forwards to study LeRoy’s hologram.
“I’m glad someone thinks this is funny,” LeRoy said, as he shifted position on his knees. He opened his mouth to speak, pausing as Walburga shouted to H3RMES to block the signal. LeRoy dissolved as Walburga ran to the nearest console.
“What did you do?”
She held up her hand for me to wait.
“They’re going to kill him,” I said.
“No they’re not. Did you see the necklace?”
“What about it?”
Walburga turned away from the console, slid her finger across her throat, and said, “There was a port for an agar plate. They not going to kill him, Joe, but they might remove his head.”
“And we’re going to let them?”
“No, we’re going to do our best to run away.” She swore and slapped the side of the console. “Too late.”
“What’s going on?”
“They must have started tracking us as soon as we established a link.”
KIDTEN-0 looked up as H3RMES piped a proximity alarm through the speakers. She nodded at Walburga and ran for the ladder. She dropped down to the corridor below and out of sight. Walburga clicked her fingers and pointed at the grainy feed on a bank of viewscreens.
“She’s going for the hold.”
“Why? What’s coming?”
Walburga adjusted the gain controls on the screens, and then opened a locker in the bulkhead dividing the bridge from the captain’s quarters. She tugged a short Warhammer rifle out of the locker, clicked the front grip into place, checked the magazine, and pressed the charge button above the grip. She slung the rifle and tapped a screen with an external view of the H3RMES.
“The Valhalla Group,” she said. “The green dots in the background. They have found us. They will board us.”
“So what do we do?”
“You wondered why LeRoy gave you combat augments?” Walburga shrugged, and said, “Now you know.”
“But my thigh,” I said, and tapped the screen of the regeneration ring.
“Is probably healed already. Take it off, and get ready to fight.”
“I shouldn’t get the coordinates first? So that we have something to bargain with?”
“Did we see the same hologram?” Walburga slung the rifle across her chest. “Agents of Valhalla don’t bargain. We’ll be lucky to get through this.” She checked the safety setting on the Warhammer, and then looked up at the pipes above her head. “What about you? You ready?”
Two of the pipes burst with a plume of steam. I watched as the clamps slid across the ruptures, sealing them with a hiss of air and four beats of metal as the clamp set its feet into the pipe. Once it was sealed, the clamp split into three, with two parts ready to slide in each direction.
“H3RMES will protect the bridge and the corridors,” Walburga said. “The kid has the cargo area, and I’ll take the canteen and crew quarters.” She pointed through the hatch at the library below. “That’s yours. Don’t let them get in.”
I watched as she slid down the ladder. Once she was gone, I reached down to unclip the regeneration clamp, and tossed it to one side. My skin was scarred but whole. What pain remained was bearable, and likely nothing compared to what I was about to experience once the Valhalla Group breached the H3RMES. It was time to put my training into practice. I wished H3RMES good luck, walked to the ladder and climbed down to the library.
PART 10
The hull of the H3RMES creaked as the Valhalla agents leached their craft onto the exterior plating, and cut their way through. H3RMES provided the first line of resistance, burning the agents that dropped through the plates with blasts of steam, or rods of dry ice for the agents that gained entry from beneath the cargo bay. KIDTEN-0 was waiting in the cargo bay, and I followed her progress via the screams of the men and women who she crippled with blinding chops of her hands, pile driver punches, and rapid kicks to the head for those that dared try to stand.
I almost felt sorry for them.
Walburga met the agents that dropped directly into the canteen and sleeping quarters. The Warhammer rifle was aptly named, delivering massive rounds at a low rate of fire. I heard the bullets from her gun thwack and thud against the bulkheads, together with the occasional sound like ripe melons impaled with thick blunt knives.
In truth, I should have paid less attention, because some of the first agents to breach into the bridge – the ones that escaped H3RMES’ blasts of steam and ice – were the first to slip down the ladder and storm the library.
I caught a blow to my chest, and staggered back half a metre before I realised that it barely hurt. Once you have been hit in the solar plexus by a Martian child, anything but a bullet to the chest pales by comparison. I squirmed my foot against the bottom of the closest shelf, wound my fist back to my hip, blocked a second blow from the same man, and then curled my fist into the man’s chin. I heard a snap, and then the weight of his limp body as he collapsed onto mine.
The second agent, a woman, preferred to keep a metre or so between us.
She was smart.
Infuriating.
We danced in and out of the library hatch until I ripped the wooden ladder from the shelf and charged, forcing the woman into the bulkhead at the end of the corridor. I caught a glimpse of Walburga changing magazines as the bottom rung of the ladder snapped against the agent’s throat. She gasped and I pushed, driving the second and third rungs into her face, and splintering the sides of the ladder into the bulkhead. I realised later that the strange sound I heard wailing around the enclosed space was me. The cry of the septuagenarian warrior, beefed up and buffed with augments and memories. I slammed into the bulkhead when the woman blacked-out and slid to the floor.
“Down,” Walburga shouted, as she ducked through the hatch and blasted two more agents dropping down from the bridge. The report of the Warhammer drew blood from my ears, and the ringing didn’t stop before the agents were down and KIDTEN-0 appeared at the hatch, her blaze-black skin slick with blood. There was blood on her respirator and goggles, and I wondered if she had been outside the ship, and to what end?
“They’re gone,” she said, as she pulled the mask from her face.
“How many?” Walburga asked.
“Three. H3RMES sealed the breaches; I crawled inside each ship, killed the pilot and released the docking clamps.”
“You, kid,” Walburga said, and smiled, “can eat all the chicken you want.”
KIDTEN-0 grinned and dipped her head for a moment. She acknowledged me with a lingering inspection of my body, and, satisfied I was not broken, she retreated to the canteen.
“You did okay, too.” Walburga slung the rifle over her shoulder and inspected the dead agent at my feet, and the agent moaning inside the hatch to the library. Walburga reached down to pull a bone shank from the sheath behind his back, and stuck it into the base of his skull. She twisted the blade as the man twitched.
That was when I threw up.
I had been all too keen to accept LeRoy’s augmentations, even the eel, but nothing of what he gave me had prepared me for the act of killing, and the sights, sounds, and smells of death.
“It’ll pass,” Walburga said, as she let go of the shank and dragged the body into the corridor. I’ll clean this up. Why don’t you sit with the kid in the canteen?”
I wiped my mouth and nodded, retreating from
the corridor and into the canteen as Walburga checked-in with H3RMES. I might have smiled at the creaks and hisses the ship shot back at the captain, but I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. The smell of roast chicken did not help, and I waved at KIDTEN-0 before retreating to a bunk. I drew the thick curtains and let myself slip into the darkness. It had been a long day.
I had my first augmented dream in that bunk, as Synthea took my hand and led me on a path through the stars. She stopped to dig her toes into the black of space, lifted my hand and extended my finger. Synthea tugged my finger through the stars trailing dust and light in straight lines as she traced the letters and numbers of H3RMES. Hermes was the Greek God of boundaries and travel, communication and trade. I shook my head between the stars. Synthea’s skin shimmered and the electron light in her eyes sparkled as she smiled. She spun her fingers, wanting more, and I remembered that Hermes was also the God of language and writing.
Books.
I woke then, realising I was travelling through the stars with the God of books.
The curtains were dense, trapping light and sound in the tight weave of the fibres. The darkness amplified my thoughts, made me think of LeRoy’s last words – something about a puzzle. I didn’t like puzzles, had never been good at them. But I knew words, and names, and the meanings of each.
Shroud.
Shroud comes from the Old English of scrūd, similar to scrēade – a shred. The Shroud would need a lifeboat if it was in tatters and shreds, if a splinter had opened in its shield. But that would just make it all the more difficult to find.
I pulled back the curtains and slipped out of the bunk. The floor was cold to the touch. Sweat cooled on my brow, and I started to shiver.
“You’ve been out for a while,” Walburga said, as I walked through the canteen.
I shook my head, made a vague pointing gesture with my hand, and ducked through the hatch and into the corridor. I stopped outside the library, leaned through the hatch and palmed the light to a higher intensity. I scanned the library from the door before stepping inside and working through the books on the shelves, tugging each into my hands, and then returning them to open the next one. Walburga and the girl watched me from the corridor.
“You don’t look well, Joe,” Walburga said. “Maybe you should put on some clothes?”
I held up my hand, shushed her with a brief shake of my head, and then, finally, I pulled a book off the shelf that felt and looked right. It even smelled right, but not of old ink or paper bleach. It smelled of desert and spice, as if it had been carried in a saddlebag, read around a campfire, many times. I opened the first few pages. The text meant nothing to me, but the pages were interesting, torn in places, slit in others. I pressed my fingers to the first whole page. It was thicker than the tattered pages that came before it. The pages after had been slit with a sonic knife to create envelopes ready to be sealed, once the contents had been inserted.
I carried the book to the desk, smoothed the tips of my fingers around the edge of the page, ignoring the shreds before it and the envelopes after. Walburga and the girl stepped into the library and approached the desk, just as I held the top of the page between my fingers and thumbs and proceeded to tear it, to remove a strip, until I had a shred of paper in one hand, and the key to the location of the Shroud in the other.
I parted the envelope page and tugged an ultra slim disc into the light of the library.
“The Shroud is hidden in the shredded book,” I said, and handed the disc to Walburga.
She smiled as she took it. “It’s almost cheating,” she said, “I thought you were going to have to read all these books.”
“I thought so too, but LeRoy likes puzzles, and I like etymology of words, puzzling out where they originated from. LeRoy is the harbinger, you are the ruler of the fortress, and,” I said, with a look at KIDTEN-0, you must have another name, not a rank or a classification.”
“I’m a spy,” she said.
“Gacheru,” I said. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
The girl smiled. “I am Gacheru.”
“A man’s name.”
“Named after my father’s father, from Earth Africa.”
“Well, Gacheru, Joe,” Walburga said, “why don’t we continue this conversation on the bridge, while I figure out how to push this disc into something H3RMES can read.” She carried the disc out of the library and up the ladder to the bridge.
Gacheru’s smile did not fade, and it brought a light to her face that danced in her eyes. She took my hand and pressed it to her chest as I followed Walburga.
“Thank you, Joe,” she said. “I’m pleased to be called by my name, pleased you discovered it.”
“Thank LeRoy,” I said, and smiled at the thought of the breadcrumbs he had sprinkled on the route to the Shroud.
Gacheru let go of my hand and I stepped into the corridor to climb the ladder. As I climbed onto the bridge, it occurred to me that LeRoy was very particular in his choice of people, and not least what they were called. I moved to one side as Gacheru entered the bridge, toying with the meaning of her name as Walburga argued with H3RMES and then pressed the disc against a flat view screen. She let go of the disc as the screen turned black and a system of stars shone on the surface. A star in the centre of the screen pulsed and Walburga tapped it to release a pulse of light that narrowed into a line leading from one star to the next. Coordinates flickered above and below the line, and Walburga tapped the screen twice to load a keypad. She typed in the coordinates, installing each string of data into H3RMES’ navigational matrix. I took a step closer to the view port as the ship rumbled and the nacelles shimmered before spinning up to maximum velocity. We jumped a second later.
“The jumping into hyper drive is the easy part,” Walburga said, as she took my arm and guided me to one of the chairs on the bridge. “Jumping out can push your guts into your toes. So, buckle up, baby.” She winked as she clicked and snapped the restraints in place, kissed me on the forehead, and clicked her fingers at Gacheru. “You too,” she said.
The jump out of hyper drive occurred only moments before Walburga strapped herself into the pilot’s chair. I heard the soft click of her waist buckle, and then the H3RMES crashed into uncharted space. The proximity alarms blared just a few seconds later.
“What the hell?” Walburga said, as she turned in her chair to study the screen built into the armrest, her face glowed green with data. “Three ships. Massive. Maybe four times the size of H3RMES.”
I twisted to look at Gacheru.
She shrugged, and said, “I’m a spy.”
“It’s the Martian fleet,” I said, and unbuckled my restraints. I walked to the view port, pressed my forehead against the cool surface, and traced the stars as Synthea had done in my dream. There, in the black space ahead of us, a splinter phased in and out of focus, and I knew we had found the entrance to the Shroud – the gateway to an ancient society in shreds and tatters. LeRoy had sent them a lifeboat and a fleet of frustrated Martian warriors. I was lost, puzzled out. Whatever the next move was, I was going to need help to decipher it.
The Martians were less introspective. They opened fire on the splinter with a hail of rockets.
PART 11
H3RMES burst a series of pipes as Walburga plotted a course correction away from the Martian hail of fire. I grabbed the rail beneath the view port and held on. Gacheru pulled a knife from her belt and used the back of the blade to unscrew one of the hardpoints in her chest. I watched as she pulled out a coil of metal and glass the length of my thumb. She wiped away the bloody matter with her fingers and held it up.
“A Martian beacon,” she said. “LeRoy said I had to wear it.”
“Why would he say that?” Walburga took the beacon from Gacheru’s hand, turning it in the soft bridge light.
“Why did he do any of the things he has done?” I said, and looked out of the view port. The wings of the splinter glittered with explosions and tendrils of light webbing out in brief pulse
s across the shield. “Maybe it’s a signal? For the people on the inside. As soon as they see the shield light up, they know it is time.”
“Time for what?” Walburga asked.
“I don’t know.”
Walburga pressed the beacon into Gacheru’s hand and then walked across the bridge to the view port. We both looked up as Gacheru crushed the beacon beneath her foot.
She shrugged, and said, “He said I should do that, too.”
Walburga nodded and then tapped the surface of the view port with a greasy nail.
“He did say something about a vault.”
“What kind of vault?”
“I have no idea, but small enough to get through the splinter. Unless,” she said, and clicked her fingers at Gacheru. “How powerful is the Martian fleet? What kind of atomics do they have?”
Gacheru joined them at the view port, traced a rocket with the tip of her finger, and said, “One of those can destroy a citysphere.” She traced a smaller plume of gas. “That one can destroy H3RMES.” She turned her head at a sudden piff of steam above the view port. “Sorry,” she said.
“So the Martian fleet is powerful enough to destroy Earth’s cityspheres,” Walburga said. “So why don’t they?”
“There are lots of Martians on Earth,” Gacheru said.
“But Earth would be defenceless – the spears are all but outdated, and they have nothing to match the firepower of that fleet. The Martians could revolt.”
“No,” she said, “they are not free. They are hostages, they are controlled. It was agreed.”
“The Martian Shield,” Walburga said, as she watched a second salvo of sphere-busting rockets slam into the side of the splinter.
“So,” I said, “LeRoy sends the fleet here to get something from a vault? But to what purpose?”
“Leverage,” Walburga said. “Earth’s corporations need new ideas if they are to maintain their foothold, and keep the population cowed. This vault must contain the secrets of the Shroud, a vault of knowledge. If the Martians have that, they can pay off the corporations and bring their people home.” Walburga tapped the view port. “That’s why we’re here.”
Enter the Shroud: In the Pursuit of Knowledge (The Shroud Discord Book 0) Page 7