by M. R. Forbes
It felt like an eternity. Every second did when the pain was that great. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. She opened her eyes, flares of light still crossing over them as she looked out into the now open corridor.
She was free.
She collapsed across the threshold, coming down on her hands and knees past the wall, her body succumbing to the sudden exhaustion. Had she opened it or had something else? The Shard?
That was impossible. Her fatigue was getting the best of her. There had to be food in this place. If there was food, she could wake the naniates. If she woke the naniates, she would heal.
She heard a soft click, and then something cold was pressed against the side of her neck.
“Don’t move.”
Abbey turned her head slowly until she could see the individual holding the rifle against her. A human in blacksuit, wearing a tactical helmet. One of Thraven’s. She could see his lips moving behind the ballistic shield, telling his commander he had found something.
She didn’t know what the soldier’s CO said to him. She saw his expression change, his eyes become fearful. She felt the muzzle of the rifle dig a little deeper into her skin.
She was tired, but not too tired to let herself be killed.
She dropped flat onto her stomach as the weapon fired, the shot striking the floor centimeters away. She didn’t try to do anything fancy, instead rolling herself into the soldier’s ankles as hard as she could, getting enough force behind it to trip him over her.
He caught himself before he hit the ground, but he was way too late. Finding strength from somewhere, she jumped up and onto his back, wrapping an arm around his neck. She held on as he stood again, reaching back for her and then slamming back into the walls. She hit hard, grunting but not letting go, adding more pressure to choke him.
It wasn’t enough. He bounced Abbey from side to side, bashing her so hard into the walls that she could feel her bones cracking. She howled in anger and pain and desperation. She could hear motion above them, the other units responding to this asshole’s report.
There was no more time for this bullshit.
She drew back and punched him in the kidneys with her free hand. Once. Twice. A third time. She couldn’t get through a lightsuit like that. It was a useless effort.
Or was it?
She hit him again and again. He dropped her into the wall again. She couldn’t believe how much she hurt. She kept punching anyway, striking the same spot. Her vision started to blur.
She didn’t feel the Gift. She didn’t notice the change. Not until she felt the warmth in her hand. Not until she smelled the blood.
The soldier grunted in pain, still trying to swing her off. She looked down, finding her free hand. Her fingers were claws, and they had penetrated the suit and the flesh and were covered in blood.
She held on, bringing her hand up to her mouth, licking the blood from it. She didn’t want to do it, but she was going to die if she didn’t. She could taste the iron sweetness of it, and it only made her want more. She dug her hand into the same spot, pulling it out and sucking the red liquid away. Her body reacted, a sudden warmth growing from her stomach. She could feel the slightest tingle of the Gift returning to her.
She let go of the soldier, falling to her feet behind him. He pushed himself away, turning around and raising his rifle. She grabbed it, pulling it down, reaching up with her clawed hand and stabbing him in the neck, finding the opening between armor and helmet. He screamed as she pushed him, back away from the wall and into the hidden room. She pulled him to the ground, dragging her claws out and stabbing him again.
He stopped moving. She turned around, finding the seam of the false wall on the ceiling above. She reached out to it with the Gift, bringing it down enough that she could grab it, and then lowering it the rest of the way to the floor.
She sat with her back against it, listening as the soldiers reached the area. She could hear their comments as they noticed the blood. Then they moved ahead, searching for her.
There was barely any light in the space. She didn’t need it. She could smell the soldier’s blood.
She crawled over to the soldier and put her hand on his wrist. He was dead. She was lucky he wasn’t a Convert.
“Forgive me for what I’m about to do,” she said softly, not sure who she was asking for forgiveness. Hayley? Gant? The Shard? God? It didn’t matter.
She sank over the soldier, putting her lips to the wound on his neck. One time, and never again. Only to survive.
She fought back the disgust and nausea and started to drink.
The other soldiers would come back, once they couldn’t locate this one. They would see the small crack beneath the wall. They would find the room.
She would be ready.
5
She thought the blood would make her vomit. She couldn’t believe how much she drank. How much time passed? It couldn’t have been much. Her throat and mouth worked almost of their own volition, pulling in, swallowing, absorbing. She could feel the Nephilim’s Gift responding to the fuel, coming alive again. The feeling of motion beneath her skin returned, more constant than before, as though the Gift was working harder within her.
Replicating? Or altering her?
She hoped for the former as she reached around to feel the small protrusion on her back, making sure it wasn’t growing. So far so good. It could still pass as a normal albeit slightly enlarged tailbone.
She took the soldier’s weapon and two extra magazines, putting them into tightpacks on her demonsuit. She made the mistake of looking at his face as she did. It was pale. Too pale. Now that she was feeling better, could she live with what she had done?
She had to. Too many people were counting on her.
She returned to the wall to listen. She could hear the movement in the corridors outside, and the movement above. It didn’t sound like the whole force in the crater was coming her way, but it did sound as though there had been ships on the ground, and now they were leaving. Had Thraven told them to make sure she couldn’t get off the planet?
If Bastion and Jequn made it out, they would be back. Jequn would tell him what she had done, and they would be looking for her. She had to make sure they didn’t get blasted out of the sky when they did return, which meant she had some serious work to do upstairs.
First, she had to get upstairs.
She thought about waiting for the soldiers to come back. They would figure out the wall was false sooner or later, and she could ambush them when they came through. Frag that. Right now she felt like she had just spent a week on the beaches of Nazzra, sipping alien alcoholic drinks and sleeping late. She didn’t want to waste the energy, but she was eager to get out.
She reached out with the Gift, barely having to move her fingers for it to power the wall open once more. All of the time she had spent digging and the only thing she had needed was a little blood. She could see how the Nephilim had become addicted to it and dependent on it.
The area was clear, but she could hear movement further down. She went that way, taking the Uin from her demonsuit. She stalked ahead, a predator on the prowl. She wasn’t having any trouble drawing on anger and hate and rage. All she had to do was picture Thraven’s face as he cast the wall of fire toward her and Charmeine. All she had to do was remember herself being pushed into the teleporter, and the ancient Seraph dying because of it.
This subterranean complex had to be almost as old as Charmeine. The walls were hewn directly into the stone that sat beneath the surface of the crater, the marks on the sides suggesting it might have been dug out by Plixians. It couldn’t be that old unless the insect race had been working with the Seraphim long before humans had found their homeworld. Could that be possible?
Every few meters, she came to either an intersection or a room, usually hidden behind a stone door mounted on a sliding mechanism that made it open silently with the lightest touch, even after all of the centuries. Everything was coated in some amount of dust
and debris, the action above only accelerating the rate of dispersal below. It made it harder to guess the last time anyone had lived down here. Months? Years? Centuries? Millenia? She wouldn’t have been surprised.
The rooms she passed were mainly living quarters. Some were as small as fifty square meters. Others were composed of multiple rooms. She didn’t enter and explore them, not when there were soldiers up ahead, but she peered inside, took note, and kept going. As she drew closer to the enemy, she raised her cowl, fitting it over her head and eyes and adding infrared and other enhancements to her sight and senses.
She heard their voices then, coming toward her. She jumped lightly forward using the power of the demonsuit, landing beside one of the rooms and pushing the door aside, slipping in. She was sure the soldiers had checked the same rooms already. They wouldn’t guess they were being followed.
Their footsteps grew louder. They were moving back more quickly.
“Honorant, Agitant Fesen is gone,” she heard one of them say. “We searched the entire area all the way to the end.” A pause. “Well no, not the entire complex. We have no idea how large it is. We passed at least thirty different corridors on the way. It’ll take weeks. Yes, Honorant. We don’t leave until Cage is dead. Yes, my Lord. We’ll need more units down here if you want us to search the entire thing. Yes, my Lord.”
Abbey lifted the rifle she had taken to her shoulder, holding it close to her body with her back against the door. She had left it open enough to slip through, and now she was just waiting for the soldiers to make their way past.
“Sir, did we leave that door open?” one of the soldiers said.
Damn, they were more astute than she had given them credit for. She didn’t hesitate, rolling out past it, coming face to face with the squad.
“Shit,” one of them said, at the same time the first bullet pierced the helmet of the lead blacksuit.
She bounced the three meters between them before they could get their guns trained, dropping the rifle and flicking open the Uin. She caught an arm with her hand, turning it and pulling, slicing into the soldier’s neck as momentum carried him past. She ducked to the side as a second soldier fired, the bullets pouring into the ground a few meters away. She swung and kicked him in the chest, pushing him back with the strength of the demonsuit. She raised the Uin, using it as a shield against another punch, bringing it back and around and into the enemy’s neck.
The Gift was pulsing beneath her skin, eager to be part of her fury. She refused to unleash it. She needed to handle her own shit as much as she could. Gant had reminded her that she was a Breaker, a well-trained soldier. She didn’t need the naniates to take care of a squad of grunts.
She caught a powered kick toward her abdomen, turning the leg and breaking it, her demonsuit stronger than their blacksuits. Then she pulled the leg forward, bringing the soldier to her and slashing across his neck with the Uin. He joined the others on the floor, leaving only one enemy standing.
He put his hands up. “Please don’t kill me,” he said.
“How many soldiers are up there?”
“A lot.”
“How many?”
“Two dropships worth. Three companies so far.”
“So far?”
“I heard reinforcements were coming.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t know.”
She advanced toward him.
“I swear, I don’t know.”
“Are you stalling me?” she asked.
“What? Oh. Uh.”
She bounced to the side, turning her feet and pushing off the wall. He drew a knife from his suit to defend himself. She smacked it aside with one hand and drove the Uin through his neck with the other.
“Asshole,” she said as she landed.
She heard more commotion further away, and retreated the way the soldiers had come, finding the nearest adjacent corridor and moving along it. She couldn’t afford to linger too long. Not if they were sending reinforcements.
She almost laughed out loud at the thought. Three companies plus, just to keep her under control?
Good luck to them.
6
The shuttle ride to Seattle took two hours. Olus and Pahaliah used it to coordinate their systems and finish setting up secured comm links, as well as reviewing the data Goillisi had provided about Tridium.
The link between the corporation and the Nephilim that Gyo had discovered was a weak one compared to the stuff the Rudin had pulled out. While the Gilded Cafe had ties to one of Tridium’s shell companies, it was only the very tip of the iceberg. A slippery tip. The Cafe had been shuttered by the next morning, with all of its ties to Tridium vanishing overnight and the proprietor turning up dead. Not that Olus was surprised by that, it was standard operating procedure for dark ops of most kinds.
What Goillisi had uncovered was much more damning for Tridium Heavy Industries. Not just shell corporations linked back toward the Outworlds, but evidence of bribes, murders for hire, and all kinds of nasty bullshit that no one would have ever noticed if the Watchers hadn’t suspected the company of wrongdoing in the first place. The devil was in the data trails, and the Rudin had spent months untangling them, making correlations, and working the whole thing out.
The Republic had no idea they were funding the enemy’s war machine with the money intended to build their own.
The mission was simple. There was data that didn’t exist on the networks. Data that was kept separate from everything else. Data that was too sensitive to allow even the smallest risk of dissemination. It was stuff even a hacker or a Breaker couldn’t touch remotely.
It was data Olus wanted to see.
First, he wanted to know if Tridium had a manufacturing facility out in the expanse of space that wasn’t accounted for in any of their reporting. A skunkworks that might be building warships for the Nephilim like the fleet that had been destroyed on Kell. If there were, he would contact Ruby and pass the intel to Kett, in the hopes that the General might determine it a worthy target to either destroy or attempt to control.
Second, he wanted to know if Tridium had inserted a backdoor or hidden weakness in any of the equipment it had manufactured. The Apocalypse fighter wasn’t the only piece of Tridium gear in the military, and having any of it fail at just the right time could be a massive boon for the Nephilim on a number of levels. If such a weakness did exist, he needed to get that information to the right individuals.
But who were the right individuals? That was the piece dominating his thoughts. The Council was corrupt. So was the Committee. The main control of the Republic had secretly fallen to Thraven, and there wasn’t much he could do about it in the immediate. He could count their resources on one hand. The Rejects, Kett’s army, a handful of Watchers. That was it, and despite their win on Kell, they weren’t nearly powerful enough to push back against the Nephilim’s rising tide. Besides, this wasn’t the kind of fight that could be won through brute force alone.
He considered getting the media involved. If he could get the truth out about Tridium’s participation in what amounted to espionage, maybe they could force the Council to either reveal their true motives or take actions against Thraven’s best interests. Then again, if the public learned Tridium was intentionally fragging up their equipment to make it easier to defeat, they would point their fingers squarely at the Outworlds, which was the wrong direction. Despite all of Thraven’s maneuvers, most of the galaxy still had no idea the Gloritant or the Nephilim existed, never mind what kind of threat they posed.
“Thinking about how to deal with Thraven?” Pahaliah asked.
Olus nodded. “Still.”
“Ideas?”
“Not enough of them. He’s planned everything so well.”
“But not perfectly. There are cracks in the defenses. There have to be. We just need to find them.”
“Yes, but I’m worried I’m thinking in too much of a straight line.”
“What do you mean?”
&nb
sp; “Attacking the problem from the front, instead of treating it three-dimensionally. You can’t get outside of the box if you can’t see the box. That’s how I’ve ended up here in the first place. I charged headlong back to Earth, knowing Omsala was going to try to pin whatever he could on me. I didn’t stop to think of another way, and it cost me in more ways than one. Thraven used my desperation to his advantage.”
“He would have burned the Council one way or another. It wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s my fault for being there to be blamed for it. Instead of the OSI out looking for the real enemy, they’re out there looking for me.” He shook his head. “No, I’ve made some bad decisions. I need to start thinking more like an assassin again instead of a bureaucrat.”
“Like an assassin?”
“Yes. Subtle. Silent. Secret.”
Pahaliah smiled. “We can start with the tri-towers. We’ll be there in ten minutes. Just don’t get caught.”
“I don’t intend to.”
7
The tri-towers were the largest buildings along the Seattle skyline. The center tower was nearly three kilometers tall, while the two connecting buildings almost matched it. It made the structure visible from pretty much everywhere in the area and was an obvious testament to Tridium’s place in the galaxy.
A place made possible with the help of the Nephilim.
The shuttle touched down a few blocks away from the structure, in a drop zone that could accommodate the larger long-distance transport. Olus and Pahaliah jumped out, moving away from the craft as it headed back into the lanes of local traffic above.
Downtown Seattle had been “naturized” centuries earlier, after the invention of the anti-gravity generators had allowed most of the commuter traffic in and around the city to take to the sky. While designated landing zones were organized throughout the area, most of the surface was covered with grass and trees and plants, split by slim roads and plenty of pathways to walk along, most of them leading through gardens that featured hundreds of varieties of flora. It made for a landscape that gave the impression that the vegetation had conquered the city long ago, and was barely tolerating the continued presence of human and off-worlders among its bounty.