“He died of space,” Dolph said.
“He died of the Cluster,” I said.
“Technically, it was a drug overdose,” Dolph said.
“Oh, drugs,” Irene said.
“Hey,” Dolph said. “Just because you’ve never been tempted, doesn’t mean that good people aren’t.”
“Artie was a hell of a lot of fun to be around,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much since he died. But self-destruction was his middle name.” The snow was coming down more heavily now. I looked for the switch to put the windshield wipers on high. “We’ll have to stop by before we leave,” I said to Dolph. “Take the Artster a bottle of scotch.”
We drove through the newly constructed housing development. It looked like anything you might find on a Fringeworld, if slightly oversized. On the other side of that, we plunged into New Abilene-Qitalhaut proper. The snow and the darkness muffled the archaeological strata of buildings on either side of the deep, canyon-like streets, but we could see enough by the Corelight that Irene’s eyes grew round. “Wow. How has all this never been knocked down?”
“They were trying pretty hard when we were here last,” I said distractedly, switching my gaze between the road and the holobook on Dolph’s knees, which was displaying the map from our briefing.
Mittel Trevoyvox, they say, has been continually inhabited since before humans left the Garden of Eden. Ancient corners of masonry, like crags protruding from cement hillsides, stuck out of the mithrik warrens, which themselves had doors and windows knocked in them and holo signs in kinda-sorta English outside. Mithriks are furry creatures the size of cats. They were sapient at one time, but have devolved into an animal state over the millennia of their imprisonment here. They’d been on the path to extinction when we were here last, and I figured they might be gone now, judging by how many of their warrens seemed to be inhabited by humans.
The tops of the warrens formed sidewalks above our heads, and also served as foundations for human-built houses and apartment buildings. As much as we humans are wedded to right angles, the Eks love circles. Their favorite type of ground-based dwelling is the hubble, a sphere made of reinforced concrete or polymer that they can roll around as if it were a wheel. We passed several side streets filled with hubbles, hitched up, or not, to diesel tractors. This used to be the human side of the river. The Eks had lived on the other side. But it looked like the distinction had blurred since the war mysteriously came to an end.
“… on Eas Rudah,” Dolph said to Irene. He had been reminiscing about our years with Artie, and that led inevitably back to Tech Duinn. When he started telling war stories, it meant he was in a bona fide good mood. We were back on familiar territory, delivering a cargo on a potentially hazardous planet. Dolph was as happy as a pig in you-know-what.
I wasn’t. We had just passed a lone masonry tower with a hubble perched on top, which I didn’t remember at all. I glanced at the map again. It threw me that was no little red dot representing our truck. The map was static. No satellites. No GPS. No AI in this goddamn rustbucket. “Hey, Dolph. You sure we’re going the right way?”
Dolph’s smile faded as he studied the map. “You know, actually, I’m not.”
“Ask directions?” Irene said.
“Please,” Dolph said. “Women can’t read maps, and men can’t ask directions.”
Irene drew her handgun.
“Hey, I’m just saying …”
“I thought I saw something.” She slid down into the footwell, searched for the window release, cursed impatiently when she discovered she had to crank it down by hand.
Dolph whipped his Koiler out of his thigh holster and slid across the seat to kneel where Irene had been, covering our side arc.
Our headlights fanned across on an open, snow-covered space dotted with shuttered stalls. It might be a market during the day. Beyond it towered an immense monument like a termite mound with a thousand windows, snow-mantled. “I definitely don’t recognize this,” I said.
“Get out!” Irene screamed. “Out!”
Soldiering had instilled in my bones the life-saving lesson that when someone yells at you like that, you don’t sit around asking questions. I popped my seatbelt and slid out of the cab, while Dolph and Irene went out the other side, into the snow.
Before my feet touched the ground, the windshield of the truck shattered, and stuffing exploded from the headrest of my seat, right where my head had been.
*
I saw the shooter’s muzzle flash. He was in one of the market stalls, had fired through a gap in the shutters.
He fired again as I dropped flat in the slushy snow. The bullet glanced off the hood of the truck.
“That’s not the one I saw,” Irene gasped. She and Dolph had crawled under the truck from the other side. “There’s another one up on the sidewalk.”
Two or more shooters in the market were now peppering the truck with bullets. We would have driven straight into enfilade fire. I dragged myself under the truck, wet snow soaking through my pants. At least I now knew we were going the right way. They’d known where to set up their ambush.
The undercarriage of the truck caught on the back of my flak vest as I rolled to work my .22 out of its holster. I generally believed that if you need more firepower than a .22, you’re fucked, anyway. I might change my mind about that, if we lived through this.
Dolph crawled on his elbows to the rear of the truck. Irene stayed prone under the front bumper. Twisting onto her side, she supported her rifle at an angle and fired.
The gunman in the market stall, or one of them, or the guy up on the sidewalk, fired back. The noise bounced around the narrow, canyon-like street.
I crawled back to Dolph. “They’re after the cargo!” I bellowed in his ear.
“Ya think? That beardy shit. ‘Drive carefully.’ What an asshole.”
“Yup.” I gritted my teeth. “He must’ve checked the hold just to make sure the stuff was there. It was, but he couldn’t take it off us at the spaceport. So he lets us get far enough away that no one can hear us scream.” The truck’s brake lights were still on. The falling snow whirled in the yellow flashes, obscuring the empty street.
Irene’s voice filtered through the ringing in my ears. “I dropped the guy off the sidewalk. He’s still moving. Let’s see if they come to pick him up.”
I crawled back up to her position, leaving Dolph to cover our rear. The guy she had dropped lay about ten feet from the front of the truck. He wasn’t moving anymore. Gunshot plus a two-storey fall will do that to you. I thought I recognized his face from the spaceport. He’d been one of Burden’s armed retinue.
“Here’s what we do,” I muttered to Irene. “All Shift. Then run like hell.”
“That’s the plan?”
“At least it’s simple.”
Something small and black plummetted into the taillights on a curving trajectory. Before it hit the ground, it changed direction and zoomed straight towards us. Irene and I reflexively rolled aside. It thudded into the underside of the engine and fell to the ground between us.
“Grenade,” I howled.
Time seemed to slow down. My hand closed around the sleek, warm, finned cylinder. Slewing my body around, I hurled it as far as I could, side-arm. It skimmed out over the snow and fell.
“Shift! Now!” I wrestled with my clothes. It seemed to take endless seconds to get free of my parka and jeans. The grenade just lay there. Maybe it was a dud—
It went click, and broke in half.
Clouds of opaque gas puffed out.
Oh.
I contorted, faded out, endured the pain, and became a coyote. I chose that form without thinking about it, because it was the one I’d been using as my primary form when we were here last. Immediately, my coyote’s eyes started to burn and stream with water. Snot poured from my nose. “Run,” I tried to shout. It came out as a strangulated bark. Dolph and Irene didn’t need my urging. Jackal and panther writhed out from under the
truck and streaked into the snow, back the way we’d come. I followed.
Gunfire split the air. But the shooters had outsmarted themselves with that tear gas trick. They couldn’t see to aim at us through the billowing clouds of gas and snow.
Not that I could see where I was going, either. It felt like someone had poured gasoline in my eyes and lit it. Every breath drew fire into my lungs.
Through the tears streaming from my eyes, I glimpsed Dolph vanishing into one of the low doors in the mithrik warrens. I yelped to get Irene’s attention, and followed him. We all tumbled down a short concrete ramp and collapsed on a damp floor, coughing in helpless spasms.
“Dear dear,” said the hooting voice of an Ek. “Close the door.” Treetrunk legs moved into my field of vision, twin blurs silhouetted against a warm, crackling fire. “You are what? Not mithriks.”
I gasped, “We’re humans. I know, we don’t look like it at the moment.” We had fallen into an Ek hunting camp. A mithrik dripped on a spit over the fire, roasting. Guess they weren’t quite extinct yet. Another Ek knelt on the ramp, holding a knife in each of xis upper hands, watching the door.
The shooting outside had stopped. New noises intruded: growling engines, clanking snow chains, and amplified shouts.
The Ek sentry lifted the heavy curtain that covered the door. “The king is here,” xe said, lowering xis knives.
“The king?” I scrabbled up the ramp.
Outside, the tear gas had dispersed. Figures moved around our truck. They were tall, like Eks. They had four arms, like Eks. They wore dark uniforms, and their upper bodies were cartoonishly broad, to support the extra shoulderblades that sprouted from somewhere around their diaphragms. But they were slender, with small round heads.
They were humans.
They were Sixers, the alt-humans of Mittel Trevoyvox.
“Austin!” I yelled. “Your Majesty?”
The Sixers reacted instantly. One of them ran towards me. “Mike?”
I whined. My eyes still burned, and my vision was blurry, but even so, I could tell this was not Austin Kventuras, the king of New Abilene-Qitalhaut we had befriended seventeen years ago. This Sixer was way too young. Short, fair hair framed a boyish face.
“Don’t you remember me?” he said in disappointment.
It clicked.
“Justin?”
14
Justin Kventuras, the son of the old king, was now king of New Abilene-Qitalhaut in his own right. When we were here before, he’d been no older than Lucy was now. No wonder I hadn’t recognized him. But he had recognized me. As he said, coyotes are not a common sight on Mittel Trevoyvox, nor are jackals. When he realized our panther companion was female, he treated her with extra deference.
We were given one of the Sixers’ APVs to Shift back and change in. It was a massive vehicle, Ek-built, a metal house on wheels. We struggled back into the damp, muddy clothes the Sixers had recovered for us. They also returned our weapons.
The Sixers may have had another name for themselves something else once, but nowadays they accepted the dismissive nickname bestowed by the mainstream humans who exiled them to the Hurtworlds. The official reason for their exile was that they have inferior health outcomes, so their genes couldn’t be allowed to mingle with the mainstream population. But the truth is that they simply look too much like Eks. It’s a complete coincidence. Humanity hadn’t even met the Eks yet when the ancestors of the Sixers embarked on their gene-modding project. But we couldn’t have the mighty Ekschelatan Empire thinking that we considered them in any way admirable, or worthy of emulation. So the Sixers had to be repudiated.
Basically, they were exiled for being alt-humans.
No Shifter likes to think too hard about that.
But there was, all the same, a kind of kinship between us.
“I have always remembered you with great fondness,” Justin said, standing next to the APV. Dolph, Irene, and I were kneeling in the open side door, bathing our eyes with soda. Works better than water. The fizzy liquid ran down my face, into my already-wet collar, and dripped into the snow. “When I learned that you were shipping my order from Total Research Solutions, I was delighted.”
“We didn’t know it was you,” I said. “The documentation just says Hurtworlds Authority Trustee. We knew your old man was the HA trustee for New A-Q seventeen years ago, so we thought maybe … But it seemed like a lot to hope for that he would still be around.”
“He died five years ago.” Justin had one of those faces that show every emotion like wind moving across water.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dolph said. “Bet he went out in a blaze of glory.”
“No. It was a brain tumor.”
I tried to estimate how old Austin Kventuras would have been when he died. Fifty? The sad thing was, among the Sixers, that was about average. Humans aren’t meant to be giants with four arms. Unlike Eks, who come by their limb count naturally, the Sixers do not have outsized hearts or heavy-duty bones. Their extra limbs mean more blood to be pumped around the body, putting additional strain on their hearts. So they tend to have dangerously high blood pressure, and succumb to heart attacks at what we would consider a young age. They’re also prone to brain tumors. I wondered if those long-dead genetic scientists realized what they had done to their own offspring: if they, like our own ancestors, had had the moral conscience to pile up their supercomputers and set them alight.
Justin changed the subject, gesturing towards our truck. “At least they didn’t get that!”
Dolph and I followed him to the truck. The market square was now brightly lit by floodlights mounted on Justin’s APVs. Soldiers stomped through the market, methodically clearing the stalls. They were a mixed force of Sixers and Eks, all wearing the same dark uniforms, and there were a lot of them. Justin had seen our ship landing, he explained, and come to meet us—with thirty men (and aliens) armed to the teeth. He had clearly been expecting trouble.
“Has this kind of thing happened before?” I asked.
“It happens all the time.” Justin’s top set of shoulders sagged. “Burden is too clever to embezzle our subsidies. Instead, he lets us buy things … and then he takes them.”
“Guess most folks don’t shoot back,” Dolph said.
“No,” Justin said. “Mostly, they just run.”
But Burden’s gunmen had not intended to let us run, I reflected uneasily. They had shot to kill. That first bullet had been aimed at my head.
“He’s gonna be spitting when he finds out about this,” Dolph said, watching the soldiers dragging bodies into the market square. “Hey, Justin.” His light tone didn’t change. “Does it say anywhere that you’re allowed to use your subsidies to buy genetic engineering materials?”
Justin gazed down at him. He was eight and a half feet tall. It was a long way down. “No.”
“Just checking,” Dolph said. “We ain’t gonna squeal on you.”
Justin shouted to his soldiers. They dispersed back to their vehicles, leaving five bodies lined up neatly in the middle of the market square.
Irene was bending over the corpses, examining them. Suddenly she straightened up and shouted, “Mike! Dolph! Look at this!”
She waved at us so frantically that we broke into a run.
“Is that what I think it is?” She pointed at the three men and two women lying in the snow. They looked like ordinary mainstream humans. They wore nondescript dark clothing. Their faces were pale, drained of blood …
… but as I stared at the nearest corpse, I saw faint patterns on the woman’s face.
Swirls. Patches of color.
The patterns got darker moment by moment, as the woman’s body cooled, and the color-changing cells in her skin lost power.
The same process was happening to all the other corpses. All of them had living tattoos on their faces and necks. They’d turned them off, reverting the tattoos to flesh-tone to hide their identities. But technology that is powered by body heat stops working after de
ath.
Dragons. Crossed blades. Tribal knots. Semi-abstract designs that I recognized as symbols of the gods Cipactli, Cthulthu, Loki, and Legba.
“They’re Travellers,” Dolph breathed.
“Burden is a Traveller, too,” I realized. Now it all made sense. D’Alencon had said that the Travellers were no longer active in the Hurtworlds. It’s quiet out there, he’d said. Too quiet. Yes … because the Travellers had infiltrated the Hurtworlds Authority itself.
“We gotta get back to our ship,” I said urgently. I imagined Burden attacking the St. Clare in retaliation, starting a ship fight on the ground.
“Your ship will be safe,” Justin said. “Burden is very careful. At the spaceport, he plays the part of a conscientious administrator. Only we know what he really is.” He hesitated. “What are Travellers?”
“Oh boy,” I murmured. For a king, he was sheltered. Of course he was. He’d never left Mittel Trevoyvox.
“Whatever they are,” Justin said, “they won’t hurt your ship in the next few hours. Please do come back to the palace with me. I haven’t even paid you …”
“That’s right, he hasn’t paid us, Mike,” Irene said.
Even more than our fee, I wanted answers to the questions gnawing at my mind. “OK. We’ll take you up on that invitation.”
15
Our truck was too shot-up to drive. We rode in Justin’s APV, while one of the other armored vehicles towed the truck. After about twenty minutes we reached the old Mittel Trevoyvox Extraction Ventures building, a.k.a. the palace of New Abilene-Qitalhaut. This had been Justin’s father’s headquarters, and now, I guessed, it was Justin’s. A fifty-storey skyscraper with a convex frontage faced a snow-blanketed plaza. The snow had stopped falling. The sky was paling. The Core still lit the eastern horizon, but in the west, the battered city skyline stood out against paler gray clouds.
The APVs drove away into an underground parking garage, leaving clouds of blue smoke hanging in the air. Sentries snapped to attention as Justin led us across the atrium of the MTEV building to a bank of elevators. “Last time,” I said, “I remember we had to climb fifteen flights of stairs.” It was warm in the atrium. I could feel my face and hands thawing. Hurting.
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