Dammit, the gel should have provided better protection than that—but Morgan had probably been stupid and fought the gel and the crash until the last instant.
Brooklyn leaned into the cab and touched Morgan’s cheek, taking disproportionate comfort in the faint exhale of air tickling her forearm. Breathing was a good sign, even if it was terribly weak. “Lekkas? Morgan, can you hear me?”
No response. Not so much as a flutter of eyelashes.
She shouted over her shoulder. “Get medical techs and a mobile gurney up here, now!”
The medics loaded Morgan into the ambulance, body immobilized and a crash unit in place around her, keeping her alive. Barely.
The adrenaline from the rescue evaporated, leaving behind a creeping frigidness in Brooklyn’s bones. It felt like fear, but not the fear of impending combat or a dangerous mission gone bad. The fear which seized her now marked a trepidation that her soul had been broken, snatched out of her body and stolen away. She didn’t want to move, lest it prove to be true.
She blinked. Falling apart now wasn’t going to do anyone any good, least of all herself. She was a Marine, and while she couldn’t do anything more to help Morgan survive right now, she could do her damn job.
So she wrangled the damnable emotions under a semblance of control, dug up a facsimile of her usual cool disdain, and located the on-scene commander back at the command post. “You’ve got security on the other vehicle?”
“We did, ma’am, but it’s empty, and wrecked enough that someone couldn’t have escaped from it.”
She nodded understanding. “Means the nav system was hacked. Don’t let anyone touch that vehicle until Forensics techs get here—and get Forensics techs here ASAP. This is now a crime scene. I want them crawling through every centimeter of the vehicle. Have them also scour Commander Lekkas’ vehicle for tampering and a possible tracking device, then impound what’s left of both vehicles.”
HarperRF: “Romane Investigations, I need detectives down here interviewing witnesses before I lift the perimeter blockade. In light of other attacks on high-value IDCC individuals on multiple planets, I’m declaring this an official IDCC matter. The lead investigator is to report all findings directly to me.”
While she waited on Forensics to arrive, she double-checked the blockade security and inspected the remains of the other vehicle. Three detectives arrived just after Forensics, and she spent several minutes explaining to them what she knew and what she needed to know.
Finally, there was nothing left for her to do here. She stood in the middle of the street and surveyed the scene a final time—then hurried to her skycar. Until investigators gave her a perpetrator to strangle with her bare hands, she could do her job from the hospital.
AMARANTHE
21
SERIFOS
ANDROMEDA GALAXY
LGG REGION VI
* * *
THELKT LONAERVIN MANAGED GUEST AMENITIES at Plousia Chateau, the largest resort on Serifos, a planet inhabited almost entirely because of its colorful, aromatic flora. The damn flowers were so ubiquitous at Plousia they’d all but constructed the buildings out of them.
Eren had met the Novoloume anarch on a mission nearly a quarter century earlier. Novoloume were, with a few exceptions, the only anarchs able to continue to operate fully within the bounds of Accepted society after they joined the movement. Those who did so acted as spies, information traders and brokers while continuing to present a public face of professional, deferential service to the Directorate.
They lived on a tightrope strung over the abyss every day, thus those who did it successfully tended to be quite adept at both manipulation and deception. The anarch leadership was cognizant of this, of course, and such individuals were thoroughly vetted. Novoloume were among the longer-lived Accepted Species, and Thelkt had been a loyal anarch for going on one hundred twenty years now.
Eren picked his way through the crowd filling the first floor ballroom. He worked to stay on a trajectory that would take him to the illuminated spiral ramp in the center while keeping an expression of glazed indifference etched onto his features.
Above, there would be room to breathe—and greater exposure—but here on the first level the air was too suffocating to even form a coherent sentence.
Someone grabbed his hand as he passed. Eren spun to find an Idoni woman sporting a stunning mane of cerulean curls and vivid rainbow irises attired in a wrap he’d hardly classify as ‘clothing.’ She smiled wolfishly at him and ran her other hand down his outer thigh. “Dance with me.”
I don’t dance, he grumbled to himself—but he suspected dancing wasn’t what she had in mind in any event. He’d activated his Idoni integral false-front layer before entering Plousia, accurately assuming a third of the guests at a minimum were going to be Idoni, so he should be safe for this sort of interaction. Still had to act the part, though.
He grasped her roughly at the waist and pulled her close. “Sorry, lovely, have a date to keep upstairs. Maybe I’ll be back.” He kissed her full on the mouth for a very long second then released her and allowed the crowd to swallow him up.
He made a hard right turn, weaving around to make sure she didn’t follow him and waiting until a group of people began traversing the ramp before heading up alongside them.
The atmosphere on the next level was noticeably more refined, if no less debaucherous. More relevantly, he was now able to move a meter or two in any direction without being jostled.
Thelkt’s booth was located far across the floor, near the ramp up to the third level. The entrance to the ramp was heavily guarded, and he chose not to contemplate what went on above.
The Novoloume had two customers occupying him, so Eren hunted for somewhere to loiter within line-of-sight of the booth. He settled for observing an interpretive dance routine staged near one of the refreshment bars.
Places such as Plousia could almost make one start to be convinced there wasn’t such a problem with the Directorate’s rule or the society it had crafted. Luxury abounded, with not a choke collar in sight—well, not an involuntary one.
One could live an effectively immortal existence of perpetual comfort and ease here…but it was an exclusive club. Anaden-only, and all you had to do to join was give up your soul in exchange.
He never did figure out what the dancers were interpreting, and when the guests in Thelkt’s booth vacated, Eren wandered over and slid in across from the anarch with a casual nod. Thelkt didn’t attempt to draw closer in greeting; he knew of Eren’s distaste for the Novoloume’s persuasive pheromones.
“Have a drink, my friend.”
Eren accepted the bubbling flute without argument, telling himself it should make their interaction look more natural from afar.
“Fabulous outfit.”
“Don’t start, Thelkt. It’s called undercover.”
“Only for an Idoni would ‘undercover’ mean so splendidly bright and garish.”
He scowled at Thelkt until the man held up a hand in surrender. “No offense meant. I’m confident it’s all suitably ‘brooding black’ underneath. So, this is a pleasant surprise. I didn’t realize you were on the Briseis mission.”
“I’m not. I’m here about something else. Information.”
“You know I must be careful. Too many delves at once will arouse suspicion.” Thelkt gave an elegant wave to a passing guest, his opalescent skin rippling to pale mauve in acknowledgment.
Eren leaned back and adopted a relaxed pose. “No additional work is required—this is information I believe you already possess.”
“Interesting. Ask your questions, but do try to smile every few sentences. You look positively morose, and no one at Plousia dares be morose.”
He made the effort, relying on muscle memory and genetics to don the proper deportment. “You know something about a mission several years ago to infiltrate the Machim data network. It failed, but I’m under the impression the goal was to cripple their warships’ targeting systems.”
“Send them flying in circles chasing their sterns. Yes, that would have been such a delight to see. Regrettably, Joyoun died attempting to complete the mission. He was a friend, so I mourn its failure for more than simply a missed chance for sadistic pleasure. What do you wish to know about it?”
He thought of Cosime. This was why he didn’t want to involve her in the very off-the-books mission. Infiltrating a Machim facility was a near-certain death sentence, and taking any action related to infiltrating a Machim facility came uncomfortably close to the same.
“I am sorry. I need to find out where Joyoun hit, what kind of information he believed was accessible from there and what his tactical method was—and the reason he failed.”
“I understand. Pardon me a moment.” Thelkt stood as an impeccably dressed Idoni approached, an unfamiliar serpent-like alien in a shock collar trailing along behind. It seemed he’d been wrong before; the collars weren’t necessarily voluntary after all.
Thelkt met the man halfway and well clear of the booth, dipping his chin in deference as the man gestured and talked for several minutes. Eventually the man turned on a heel and led his pet up the ramp to the third level, causing Eren to ponder what depravity the serpent might be intended for.
Thelkt returned to the booth before the train of thought led to too dark of a place.
“Who was that?”
“My employer. Avdei elasson-Idoni.”
“Arae anathema, Thelkt!” Eren shuddered, fighting against the impulse to crawl under the table and hide. He’d just been four meters from one of the Idoni Primor’s chief deputies, and he’d been sitting there whistling and lounging like he didn’t have a sane bone in his body.
“You are fine, Eren. Avdei has moved on to more stimulating pursuits.”
“Is that what they call what goes on upstairs?” He cocked his head and took a real sip of the drink. “Please, continue.”
“Joyoun’s mission took him to the Machim Hub in Sagittarius. It was his and my belief that not only were fleet distributions, routes and assignments for the Region VI Division accessible from there, standard live-updated operating code could be accessed as well.”
“But only for the one Division?”
“Yes. We learned in our mission preparation that the galactic hubs act as spokes on a wheel. Orders and decrees come from on high and flow outward through the spokes, and the path is by and large unidirectional. He failed for no other reason than the Machim security was too tight and pervasive to elude.”
Eren took another generous sip of his drink and forced himself not to glance over his shoulder, up the ramp, to see if this Avdei elasson was casing him. “So if one wanted to gain access to Amaranthe-wide information about the fleets—ship specifications and capabilities, formation strengths, locations and routes, chains of command?”
“One would have to go to either the Prótos Agora or Machimis.”
“Right.” He grimaced, pinching the bridge of his nose for good measure. This was insane. Laughably so. Too preposterous to even be worth the thrill of attempting.
“My friend, what have you gotten yourself involved in?”
“I can’t say.”
“Infiltrating either of those locations is impossible.”
“Oh, clearly.”
Thelkt studied him suspiciously for a minute. “Why don’t you stay for a while? For the night at least. Take some pleasures. I’ll arrange you a private suite with whatever and whoever you wish to populate it, on the house. You seem as if you could benefit from a respite.”
The man wasn’t wrong. Eren had seen nothing but a string of high-risk, difficult and frequently deadly missions for months now. Years, if he started to contemplate it. When he closed his eyes and breathed in, he felt the edges fraying.
So…maybe deciding what to do with the information he’d learned from Thelkt could wait a few hours.
He emptied his drink. “All right. Just for the night, though. I don’t need much—a soft, cushy bed, a steaming hydra shower, some tsipouro and a bit of canapé.”
At Thelkt’s skeptical expression, he gave in and folded a little more. “Fine. Also a mild charist hypnol bowl.” His gaze drifted across the room to where the lower ramp spiraled to disappear below. “And there was a woman downstairs.”
22
KATOIKIA
TRIANGULUM GALAXY
LGG REGION VI
* * *
ALEX DIDN’T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT she’d expected the Katasketousya homeworld to look like. Some kind of pandimensional meta-planet, perhaps? One that changed shape and color as you stared in various directions, or created an illusion of light dancing against perfectly placed funhouse mirrors, yet hollow in the center.
But it was just a planet, with real, tangible soil covering much of its surface and briny water covering the rest. A desolate one, yet starkly beautiful in its vast emptiness.
The rust and caramel plains reminded her of the North American southwest region—dry and desert-like, but not overtly hostile to life. She half-expected to see cacti and other xerophytes dotting the landscape, but the only vegetation they’d spotted so far was sparse scrub grass.
“Did they ever truly live here, I wonder? Or have they hibernated in these towers forever?”
Caleb rested on the dash as Valkyrie guided them to the location Mesme had provided. “I think they must have at some point in their past. For all their etherealness, they are still at their core physical beings. It’s why we’re here, ultimately. They have to evacuate because their existence remains tied to their corporeal bodies.”
“True….” She trailed off as another of the towers came into view on the horizon. The towers were the sole fabricated structures to interrupt the barren landscape, and they thrust upward into the sky like forgotten obelisks from a forsaken past.
Up close, the towers soared to nearly reach the clouds, and their subtle, dirt-free sheen suggested they had never genuinely been forgotten. But there were no roads leading to them, no visible power sources feeding them and no adjacent civilization centers to support those who supported the towers.
No one loved the stars so much as she; no one bore such a wanderer’s heart as she. But this…the ache in her chest invoked by the setting felt sorrowful. She shouldn’t feel sadness or pity for beings who lived for aeons and called space their playground. Yet she couldn’t help but wonder what had been lost in the journey.
One of the Metigen superdreadnoughts—of the ilk that had evacuated the Taenarin, not the ones that had massacred millions of humans—was parked beside the tower. A line of stasis chambers floated out a side entrance of the building and up a loading ramp, supervised by two Kats hovering nearby.
They set down on the opposite side of the tower, if only so their tiny dot of a ship wouldn’t become lost against the mammoth profile of the superdreadnought.
She turned to Caleb with a weighty sigh. “This is going to be…”
“Awkward? Depressing?” He gave her a rueful shrug. “Probably. But it’s…maybe important that we see this.”
“You think it humanizes Mesme.”
“No. Well, yes, but mostly I think the Kats are learning a hard lesson here. They’ve spent millennia evacuating endangered species from Amaranthe—out of charity and goodwill, but also for their own more shrewd reasons. Now they’re being forced into doing the same for themselves. They could use a bit of humility, and if this doesn’t teach it to them, I doubt anything will.”
She agreed wholeheartedly, though it struck her as an unduly harsh way to learn it.
She slipped on a breather mask before departing through the airlock. The planet’s gravity and atmospheric protection were nominal, but the air was abundant in argon, giving the horizon a pale mauve hue. The mixture was rare on life-supporting planets. Had this been one factor, if among many, which led the Kats to seek out a less physical existence? The question hinted at a complex racial history they’d likely never learn.
It required hardly a blink
on her part—a nanosecond peek into sidespace—to confirm it was Mesme who approached them as they exited the Siyane.
Welcome to Katoikia.
Caleb took an additional step forward. “We’re sorry it has to be under these circumstances. Can we help in any way?”
Your presence as witnesses is sufficient. Come. Allow me to show you what is held inside before it is gone.
They followed Mesme into the tower. The first floor resembled a hospital lobby—almost normal, almost typical, and for a moment the surrealness of the situation faded.
At their host’s urging, they stepped into a transit tube shaped in a way that implied it was used to transport pods, not people, and soared past several hundred floors. As they whizzed by, her enhanced vision picked out endless rows upon rows upon rows of stasis chambers, silent and nameless.
The lift finally came to a stop on the top floor, though she could only tell this by the fact that the tube ended in a ceiling above them. The collection of stasis chambers here looked no different than those on all the floors below.
Caleb gestured respectfully into the long room. “Are all of these individuals part of the Idryma? Do they all tend to the Mosaic?”
No. The Idryma membership numbers less than a thousand. The Anaden empire spans forty-four galaxies, Caleb. It is vast, and there is much work to be done within it. These consciousnesses can be found in Pegasus, Canes and many galaxies in between.
She cleared her throat, feeling…yep, awkward. “Didn’t any of them want to travel here and oversee their…body…as it’s moved?”
Why would they?
The response captured more about the Kats’ nature than any history lesson could. “Do you really think the Directorate will send warships here to destroy the towers?”
I am only surprised they are not here already. Perhaps we have been sufficiently duplicitous to give them pause, and thus give us time.
Caleb drew near her to murmur in a low voice. “I’m starting to get an idea of what living in this universe, under the boot of the Directorate, genuinely means. For most, it’s not about suffering—it’s about fear.”
Relativity: Aurora Resonant Book One (Aurora Rhapsody 7) Page 14