by Rick Partlow
“No.” I didn’t bother to pretend I didn’t know who she meant. “She was incapacitated and I had other problems.”
“She’s going to be trouble, you know.”
“She’s already been trouble.” I rubbed at my left shoulder; I was pretty sure I’d separated it breaking free of the restraints. “Does anyone know where we’re going?”
Before either of them could answer, the brakes of the big trucks grabbed at the packed soil of the road and began to slow with a grinding, scraping sound and the squeak of metal on metal.
“No,” Victor said, “but I think we’re there.”
We came to stop with a violent jolt and I banged my shoulder against the corner of the cargo box before I lurched back the other way and banged the opposite shoulder against the unyielding metal of a bionic arm. I glanced into the glowing, red eyes of the Skinganger I’d collided with and murmured, “Sorry.”
He didn’t respond, but I hadn’t expected him to.
The Skingangers nearest the rear doors pushed them open and dropped down to the ground. Light was leaking in from outside now, competing with the chemical strip-lighting on the inside of the cargo compartment walls, and it wasn’t the neon glare of street lights or signs. Dawn was breaking, finally, bleak and grey but a relief from the oppressive darkness.
I let Victor and Divya go ahead of me, trying to work up enough energy to move. I couldn’t find it, but I had to move anyway. I nearly fell out of the back of the bed and Victor had to grab my arm and steady me before I regained my balance. As I straightened up, I began to notice our surroundings.
We were somewhere in the city, surrounded by generically industrial buildings and warehouses, the truck pulled just under the overhang of an enclosed garage. The dull, grey metal door was cranking down as I watched, blocking out the grey dawn in favor of the dim interior lights. Four other trucks were parked inside the garage, along with a makeshift armored vehicle built out of a rover. A wide ramp led up to a double-doored cargo entrance on the next level, with a narrower staircase running parallel to it and terminating in a side entrance sized for people instead of freight. Four Skingangers were posted in the garage as guards, as motionless as statues at their posts, each carrying a heavy, backpack-fed assault gun.
Kane was waiting for us not at the foot of the stairs or the ramp, but at another, smaller door tucked into the side of the concrete support column upon which the ramp was built. It was an elevator, and the only way it could go was down.
“Want to fill me in?” I said quietly to Kane as he led us into the lift car. It was just the four of us; none of the Skingangers came along. “What the hell happened anyway?”
“Vilberg,” Kane said, pushing a button on the wall, the last one in a row of four. “Told us about the fight with the mercs and the Skingangers.” His natural eyebrow moved slightly, as close as he would come to a shrug. “Wanted to talk to them.”
There was a lurch and a fatigued, overtaxed electric motor hummed to life, lowering us down under the warehouse.
“How did you know I’d be in trouble?” I prodded.
“They have sources,” he said simply, gesturing upward.
That wasn’t surprising. I bet they had autonomous insect drones with on-board memory that smuggled out intelligence physically to get around the EM jamming. The Skingangers loved all those little tech gadgets.
“Are the others here?” I wondered.
“No.” He might have left it at that with anyone else, but with me, he knew he had to be more precise, even at the expense of wasteful and inefficient oral communication. “Back on the ship. They wouldn’t be welcome.”
“But we are?” Victor cracked. Kane didn’t respond to that, but then he didn’t feel like he had to talk to Victor.
“I’m fairly certain,” Divya commented unexpectedly, “that they brought us here as more of a ‘fuck-you’ to the Sung Brothers than as any bonhomie they might suddenly feel for Norms.”
“We’re heading to meet someone, aren’t we?” I asked Kane, feeling a sudden stab of concern. “Not just trading one cell for another?”
There was that slight movement of the eyebrow again, this time a signal of disdain.
“Anatoly,” Kane told me. “The boss.” He turned back over his shoulder to Victor. “Don’t talk.”
Victor grunted in amusement at that, but didn’t say anything.
The car ground to a halt, nearly throwing me forward as the door opened. Wherever we were, it had an air of primitive permanence to it; the walls were carved out of bedrock, unlined and unadorned but for adhesive strips of chemical ghostlights and looking like they could have been dug out tens of thousands of years ago by the Predecessors.
A single cyborg Skinganger waited for us; and from the looks of this one, she might have started out as a female, though it didn’t make much difference at this point because most of her torso was metal. She had a rocket carbine held at high port, and she followed us closely as we headed down the stone corridor to an open, doorless chamber. It was full of holographic computers, enough storage to rival the Fleet Personnel Center on Inferno. Data input consoles ringed the rounded walls, each equipped with cords that could be hooked up to interface jacks.
There wasn’t a chair in sight, unfortunately, and I really needed to sit down.
A hulking figure waited there, the light of a data display behind him throwing an ominous shadow across the room. He was big enough that he made Kane look puny by comparison, and he had enough biological material left that I could tell he came by the size naturally, not from the replacements. His face was all biological except for the eyes, both of which were glowing red orbs that didn’t even try to mimic flesh, and the squared-off jaw and high cheekbones spoke of a visceral, natural power and commanding presence.
The red eyes bored into me with a perpetual glare of disapproval, and he spoke.
“You are Munroe.” The voice was deep and pleasant, like something you might have heard synthesized for a NewsNet update.
“I am,” I confirmed. “You are Anatoly, brother of Alexi Putschin, boss of the Novya Moscva bratva.”
“My brother skulks while I fight his battles.” There was something different about this one, I thought. He didn’t seem a slave to the abbreviated idiom and absurdly efficient movements as the others were, even Kane. “I am my own man and the leader of my own force.”
“You’ve been fighting the Sung Brothers for a while now,” I said, seizing on his loquacious mood to ask the questions we needed answered. “You’ve attacked them many times. But you claim neither you nor your brother are responsible for the assaults on the Sung Brothers’ off-world weapons caches.”
“Because we are not,” he said with no doubt in that well-modulated voice. “We lack the space assets to do it ourselves or the funding to hire others. If we had that kind of money, we wouldn’t be forced to fight to the death for our share of the arms market, would we?”
I felt unsteady on my feet and I wanted to ask him if he had a protein bar in his vest, but I forced myself to relevance.
“Do you know who is responsible then?”
“Of course I do.” He regarded me with an almost contemptuous smile. “It’s the Cult.”
“The Cult?” Victor repeated, shaking his head.
“He means,” Divya supplied, “the Predecessor Cult.” She rolled her eyes at his continued look of incomprehension. She looked a little shaky on her feet herself, but it didn’t seem to be affecting her attitude. “For God’s sake, you backwoods hick, don’t you ever audit the news?”
“Victor,” I intervened, holding up a hand to rein in Divya, “the Predecessor Cult is what most people call the Church of the Ancients. It’s something that’s popped up since the war.” I shrugged. “I mean, there’ve been people who worshipped the Predecessors since we first found out they existed, of course. But since the war, they’ve all come together under one, organized church.”
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger against my temple, fighti
ng to think with a buzzing headache. “I think their main temple is on Hermes, near where they found the jumpgate map in the Edge Mountains, but I know they have a really big following on Aphrodite now, too.” My eyes narrowed and I glanced at Anatoly. “And I know they’ve had a lot of problems with the Skingangers.”
“They consider the human form to be the perfect realization of the Predecessor’s ideals,” Divya chimed in, her tone less scornful this time. “They think we’re the result of the Predecessor’s manipulation and that any attempt to change our form through cybernetics or genetic engineering is blasphemy.”
“I fought them on Aphrodite,” Anatoly said, his voice overriding and retaking control of the conversation as if we hadn’t spoken. “They hate us, and we’ve come to hate them.”
“So why the hell would the Cult be way out here?” I wondered, shaking my head. “And why would they be stealing weapons from the Sung Brothers? Who are they going to use them against?”
“Against us, of course.” Again, Anatoly gave me that look of contempt, like I was asking a stupid question.
I gathered all the patience I had left in one spot and tried to use it as a gag for the smart remark I wanted to make.
“You’re out in the Pirate Worlds,” I reminded him, unable to completely keep the rancor out of my voice, “out in the ass end of nowhere. Why would the Predecessor Cult be stealing weapons way out here, in order to attack you way out here?”
Now the look of contempt turned to one of discomfort, maybe even reticence.
“They came here to buy something from the Sung Brothers.” A thin, barely-discernable smile. “We stole it before they could.”
“Stole something?” Divya repeated, eyes narrowing. “Like a weapon?”
Anatoly’s gaze shifted to Kane for a second, as if he were judging just how far he could trust us. Then he turned and strode quickly out the door. I wondered for just a moment whether he wanted us to follow him, but then Kane walked out behind him and made up my mind for me. We had to jog to keep up with their long, isotope-powered strides, but thankfully, we weren’t going very far.
The chamber was two doors down from the data storage room, but unlike that one, it was sealed with a heavy, BiPhase Carbide door that must have cost a shitload to import out to the Pirate Worlds. Anatoly leaned over the ID plate and plugged his interface jacks into its socket for three or four seconds before the heavy door cracked open with a pneumatic hiss. The Russian pushed it aside and a light flickered on, the glow reflecting off of his cybernetics in a silver, otherworldly gleam.
The room was large and mostly empty. In one corner, a few diagnostic scanners sat forlorn and pushed aside, but all my attention was immediately drawn to the center and to the thing sitting there. It was an orthotope, a three-dimensional rectangular shape, made of some frosty but nearly transparent material that didn’t seem to be transplas or transparent aluminum or anything I’d ever seen before. It glowed from within, though I couldn’t see any light source and the material itself wasn’t luminescent, and there was something about it that drew your gaze almost against your will.
Inside it was a body, suspended in nothing, frozen in ice except the orthotope wasn’t ice. It was over two meters tall, deep-chested and powerfully built, with a musculature that seemed massive even for its size. And it wasn’t human, nor was it Tahni. It was bilaterally symmetrical and bipedal, with stereoscopic vision; it had a mouth where a mouth should be, hands where hands should be, feet where feet should be. Other than that, it was completely alien.
Its face was long and stretched out, marked with deep striations that I wasn’t sure were natural, and the eyes were dark and liquid. A mane of what might have been called hair crowned the elongated skull, but it seemed more like extremely fine, thin feathers than actual hair. The neck was long and sinuous, the shoulders were wide, and the arms were heavily muscled and ended in hands with long, multi-jointed fingers and thick, black nails. The legs were digitigrade, the knees facing backwards, and the feet were long and narrow and four-toed.
I’d never seen anything like it, but it carried with it an unmistakable feeling of familiarity, like it was close to something I knew, or had imagined. I stared at it in frank and unabashed awe, feeling my mouth dropping open and the room spinning around me along with the world that I knew.
“What the fuck is that thing?” Victor demanded, never the most imaginative among us at the best of times.
I knew. I didn’t have scans or radiological dating or spectral analysis or one shred of fucking evidence, but I knew what it was as sure as I knew the face of my son or the touch of my wife. My mouth was dry and I forced moisture into it, feeling a compulsion to answer the question.
“It’s a Predecessor.”
Chapter Nine
“Shit,” Bobbi Taylor hissed, sitting back in the navigator’s couch of the Nomad, her eyes widening. Then she glanced sharply at me. “And you’re sure this is actually a Predecessor, not one of those hive alien things like we fought on Thunderhead?”
Vilberg looked up at that from where he’d been leaning against the wall, eyes flickering between Bobbi and me.
“What?” He blurted. “You fought…what?”
I ignored him and kept scooping the steaming noodles out of the bowl I held in my lap. Vilberg had done a good job getting the intell back to the others, and that had earned him some trust points, but he was still a guy who’d very recently tried to kill us.
“It’s a Predecessor,” I said unequivocally around a mouthful of pad Thai. “And even if it isn’t, the Cult thinks it is.”
“Where the fuck did the Sung Brothers get their hands on it?” Sanders asked.
It was crowded as hell in the cockpit with all nine of us jammed into it and the hatchway, and I wondered if I should have called this meeting in the utility bay. But I liked being able to have everyone gathered close where I could look them all in the eye.
“From what Anatoly and the Skingangers have been able to find out,” I told him, “the Sung Brothers were approached by a man named Marquette. He’s an independent mineral scout and he was surveying an unclaimed system when he stumbled on what he says is a cache of Predecessor artifacts.”
“Jeez,” Waugh hissed, running a hand through hair wild with sleep. She’d been off-shift when Anatoly’s people had dropped the four of us off at the landing site, and she was still wearing the loose-fitting sweats she slept in. It was weird seeing her in anything but combat armor. She looked amazingly normal in civvies, like an office worker. “We’re talking enough money to buy a fucking planet.”
“Or the power to take one over,” Divya corrected her, fingers interlaced in her lap as she sat cross-legged in the copilot’s seat. She looked more herself now that she’d had the chance to shower and change clothes, more in control. “Which is, I think, exactly why the Predecessor Cult wants it.”
“The Sung Brothers are acting as go-betweens for this deal with the Cult,” I went on, tossing aside the empty bowl of noodles and sighing in contentment. I finally felt full, after two sandwiches and two bowls of Pad Thai, and I’d also finally stopped hurting all over.
“The…” I shrugged. “The corpse, or whatever you want to call it, is like a proof of concept, to show they can actually deliver the goods.” I snorted a laugh. “Or it would have been if the Skingangers hadn’t sniffed out the landing zone for the cargo shuttle bringing it down from orbit and hijacked the shipment taking it from the boat to the Sung warehouse.”
“But like Waugh said,” Victor interrupted, “we’re talking some serious, government or Corporate-level money here.” He was talking with a little bit of a lisp from his swollen lip; he’d refused the auto-doc, insisting he just needed a day or two to recover. “The Cult might be getting bigger, but there’s no way they can come up with that kind of scratch.”
“The Sungs probably don’t care who winds up buying the stuff,” Bobbi pointed out. “They just want the word to get out that they’re the people to see if you want
it.”
I eyed Divya suspiciously, a thought I’d been too hurt and tired and hungry to really consider finally crystallizing in my head.
“They might find out that they’d be better off without that kind of publicity,” I said quietly. “That’s why we’re really here, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” she admitted with a casual shrug. “As I said, neither Mr. West nor Monsieur Damiani share everything with me. But it’s not a huge leap of deduction, is it?”
“Why tell us?” Kurt asked abruptly. I looked over at him, surprised he’d spoken up instead of letting his brother do the talking.
“What do you mean?” Victor asked him. “Kane talked to them, got them to help us.”
“Yeah, Kane got them to help free you guys,” Kurt agreed. “But why would this Anatoly show you the Predecessor artifact? Why would he trust you with it? Aren’t all of us just Norms to him?”
I paused. That was a damned good question. I knew why Damiani would want us here, why he’d want to keep any Predecessor tech off the open market, keep that secret for himself. But why would Anatoly and the Skingangers bring Victor and Divya and me into this?
“He’s scared,” Kane said, his contribution even more unexpected than Kurt’s.
He sat in the pilot’s couch, rod-straight and expressionless, his green eye focused on me.
“He stole the artifact to get even with the Cult for chasing him and his followers off of Aphrodite.”
There was a slight downward curl on the right side of Kane’s lip, the only hint of the stress and even pain that talking cost him. I’d used to think he just didn’t talk much because he was trying to be like the Skingangers, but I’d come to understand that the injuries that had given him his cybernetics in the first place actually made it hurt to talk.
“But then the Sungs brought in the mercs,” he went on. “Anatoly is holding his own, but he’s lost soldiers he can’t afford to lose. He thinks the Cult is stealing these weapons in order to attack him and the other Skingangers in retaliation for stealing the artifact. If they do, he won’t be able to beat them.”