Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1)

by Alex Kirko

  “My friend?” the woman asked.

  “Yes. The one you are picking up food for?” She offered her left hand. “By the way, I’m Mary.”

  The pipsqueak stared with clinical curiosity as if she was wondering what one might do with another person’s hand. Finally, she jutted forward her own, gave Mary’s a momentary squeeze, and drew back. “Kate. What if I were a doctor or biologist?” she asked cocking her head. “A lot of people need blood and nutrients for their work. Or so I’ve heard.” Her smile was the tiniest twitch of a muscle, easily missed.

  “The whole city is on vacation, darling.” Mary leaned in. “Plus, you were kind of loud on the phone.”

  Kate frowned and looked around, but the Ascended around them were discussing that they were now supposed to follow the same rules as the other ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the population. Nobody paid them any attention.

  “Are you free now?” Kate asked.

  “Oh my. Of course I’m free. The whole city has nothing to do except drink and gossip.”

  Even the entertainment centers needed people to work in them, Mary thought, so her options were currently limited. She couldn’t even find someone to help her unwind because the hotels were closed and sex in cramped sleeping quarters was like licking food off the pavement.

  Kate said, “Good. I’d like to talk to you.”

  Tara felt a snake uncoil in her stomach and had suppress a twinge of panic. Her first thought was that Kate recognized her somehow, but that was nonsense, so she plastered a smile on her face and hoped that her clumsy overblown body would distract Kate from probing deeper.

  The line moved with the speed of frozen yoghurt. Most Ascended preferred eating right at the vending machine. A small door would open in the man-sized burgundy cylinder, the person would stick their hand inside and then just stand for a minute while nutrients got pumped through their skin. Even with two dozen dispensers, the line still took a while. Mary fed and then grabbed three bags to go. She would have taken more but knew from experience that they wouldn’t keep.

  When they were out, Kate motioned for her to follow and started toward the residential district. The human walked with purposeful strides of a sergeant with iron bars tied to her legs. They were near the city center where everything intersected, so it was possible to get into any part of Seind on foot, but going deeper would require using public transport.

  “Do you work, Mary?”

  “I was a secretary at the City Hall. Everyone just left.”

  She didn’t struggle with putting irritation into her voice. She decided then and there that Mary would be testy. It felt right.

  “How do you feel about the Federation?” Kate asked.

  Tara embraced the role, burying her personality deeper and bringing forth Mary, who shrugged and gestured at the ruins of a fitness center. “We lived just fine before. But maybe it will be good, I don’t know. Mostly I’m pissed I lost my job.”

  Kate stopped and took a long look at her. She tried to smile, but only the corners of her mouth moved. She asked Mary, “And if I told you I could get you back into City Hall, only under new management?”

  Mary narrowed her eyes at the woman who had just happened to stumble into her path while she had been looking for something to do. “Who are you?” she asked. “And please don’t smile. You make it look creepy.”

  “It’s a long story. For now, it should be enough that I have pull with the Federation.” Kate started to walk again. “We are short on people. Nobody expected half the citizens to still be here.”

  Mary was still doubtful. Sure, Kate talked the talk, but she looked like someone barely out of her standard education. Giving her twenty-five would be pushing it.

  “Did everyone over thirty in Lankershire die or something?” she asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “I mean, not that I doubt you—” She cocked her head to the side, reconsidering. “Actually, you know what, I do. Are you even old enough to buy drugs?”

  Kate chortled at that, which was a surprisingly deep sound. No wonder she looked so constipated all the time. If Mary’s laugh sounded like that of a drunk two-hundred-pound man, she would be working hard to stay serious too.

  “I’m Katherine Lind, née Hallow,” Kate said.

  Mary blinked. “Is that supposed to mean anything? I’m not good with human celebrities.”

  Kate’s cheeks turned red. She said, “I can’t believe it. Katherine Hallow? The youngest person to get a dual doctorate in two hundred years? Molecular biology and nanotechnology? Does any of this ring a bell?”

  “Sorry. I’m more of a clothes and video series person,” Mary replied. She walked a few steps before stopping. “Hey, that must mean you are really good at Ascended stuff. Why aren’t you in the capital then?”

  “If you haven’t noticed, I’m human.”

  “Oh.” Mary didn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry.”

  “What for? It’s not your fault. Besides, it was a long time ago.”

  Centuries ago there had been scholarship programs that allowed gifted humans to Ascend, but lately the regeneration chambers had become too scarce a resource. The fact that Kyle Heatsworth had managed to secure an Ascension for himself just in five years should have raised more flags.

  Mary asked, “And you work for the guy who managed to do something you failed at? Must be hard.”

  Kate said, “You misunderstand my issues with the Council. But enough about this. Do you want the job?”

  Did she? There hadn’t been much to do in Seind before, and now that the war had started, Mary suspected that the usual kinds of entertainment were about to go out of style. Not like she was one of those pathetic people who buried their heads in the sand whenever something bad happened.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m from a minor noble family. If I leave the city now, I’ll probably be serving coffee for a century.”

  “If we don’t conquer Terra Nox in a couple years,” said Kate.

  Mary just snorted. Yeah, right, she thought. The Council were a bunch of old fools, but even they couldn’t lose with the kind of resources they had. Still, crawling back to her family empty-handed would set her back decades.

  “Let’s go meet my husband,” said Kate. “We’ll see if you make the cut. I haven’t even been near a microscope for a day—just hovering around Ascended meeting places, interviewing people. Hope you can be the one to fill my last spot, so I can get back to work.”

  They reached the tube station. People thought when they were idle, so Seind made sure they didn’t spend much time in transit. A web of tubes went through the entire city, maintained by an advanced AI that was manned by trained operators.

  “This didn’t work earlier in the day,” said Mary.

  Kate shrugged and said, “The Council forces tried to collapse the transport administration building. They failed but scared the hell out of people keeping the grid running, so we needed some time to convince them to work for us, but I think the Council did us a favor by putting the operators in danger.”

  Mary allowed herself to slip into her real personality for a moment. Of course, Nicastro would give the order that made all the transport people happy to switch employers. She suppressed the anger and steered her feelings into a direction that better suited a civilian.

  She said, “Good. There is this bar I like here—”

  “You can get drunk?”

  Mary said, “No, I just like the atmosphere. And, you know, if I really want to, I can get a bit tipsy, but it takes me like a bucket of pure alcohol,” she said. “Just a part of being Ascended, I guess.”

  “I don’t know about that. I met an Ascended at my graduation party at the Delmor University, and he managed to get drunk and go all sanctimonious on us.”

  She stumbled and had to look at her shoes for a moment, not trusting her facial expression. There was one Ascended in Delmor who attended all the parties and had enough control over his nanites to get smashed from a couple of bottles�
��Robert Linheld. He didn’t even need to drink to preach: her father could bury a person beneath an avalanche of ancient wisdom in three seconds flat, which made family dinners the worst. Mary stuffed everything connected with Tara deeper. There was only her—the girl who had lived in Seind her entire life and had never met Robert.

  Mary said, “Well, my control isn’t that good.”

  Five minutes passed in silence as the capsule navigated the network of reinforced tunnels fifty feet below the surface. Mary watched the metal walls out the window marveling at how different the engineering choices in different parts of the city were. The towers of the entertainment district were made using prefabricated blocks, their supports so bad that they needed bulky gravity compensators. The industrial district was better, but it was the infrastructure that had been built to last. These tunnels, you could drop a building on them and they wouldn’t even bend. Of course, it was much easier to reinforce a tunnel twelve feet in diameter than a 1200-foot skyscraper.

  They exited in the drabbest part of town—the part where people lived. Uniform gray buildings towered above, blocking the sun and closing in on Mary and Kate like the stomach lining of some great beast. There were no windows, just monolith walls of artificial stone on all sides. She shivered.

  Kate led them through one of the doors and into a lobby full of people chattering. Some battered folks carried bags, going between less ruffled individuals.

  “Hey, do you have space? Could you put me up for the night?”

  “Anyone have a charger for a UX-183 arm? Why did I buy a non-standard one—”

  “Got a bed for a pretty boy? I’m getting itchy with all this lack of work—”

  Kate said without turning, “You see what I mean?”

  Mary said, “What a mess. The Council blew up brothels and virtual reality centers on purpose, didn’t they?”

  She saw some people standing near the walls, looking around in confusion. They looked pale, and their clothes bulged around their legs and arms where computer ports were concealed. No matter how they hid, she could always recognize those who spent their lives mostly in virtual reality.

  “No, no that.” Kate shook her head. “I mean, yes, some of the people here spent decades sleeping in the same place, waking up at the same time, popping a nutrition capsule, going to the entertainment center, gaming fourteen hours, and then going back. Now the routine is broken, and they need help to readjust.”

  “Readjust? Look at them.”

  “Everybody wants to live. It costs the Council most of its power to keep the people numb. We will use this to our advantage.”

  They entered the elevator then, and Mary strapped down into a chair. The cabin lurched up, and she felt the acceleration squash her into the soft plastic. Inertial dampeners, gravity compensators, and pretty much all Old Earth technology the colonies had been able to reproduce were too expensive to squander on stupid things like how comfortable people were at home. She got tossed sideways a few times as the elevator got them to their destination. The building was a thousand feet on each side.

  The hallway was lit by equally spaced blue-white lights that made it look like a morgue—an image reinforced by the lack of decorations. A plain grey door had a nameplate that said ‘Lind’. There was a lighter rectangle around it. Kate pressed her hand to the door panel and it slid away. She said, “This is home”. They walked inside. “And this is Arthur.”

  Mary stiffened to stop herself from lunging at the man that sat in a chair and appeared to be asleep. She yelped before she could control herself.

  “He’s a sight,” said Kate with warmth that didn’t fit the image before them. “Arthur, honey, we have guests.”

  The man opened a blue eye and rubbed his forehead. Mary thought his face looked like an old leather boot that had discovered hangovers: a tapestry of scarred creases twitching from the smallest sound.

  “Kate,” he said. “What did I tell you about waking me up like this?”

  “Don’t do it, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I heard you. I just chose not to listen.”

  Arthur’s voice was buttered bells playing a melody, which didn’t go with his appearance at all. He was warped, she saw. His skin looked like somebody had peeled it off piece by piece and grafted it back onto random spots. The left side of his face was covered by a white ceramic mask, and the visible right side would jump from one expression to another and then get stuck.

  Mary asked, “Did they at least pay you to become like that?”

  Arthur said, “Kate, who in the name of Old Earth is this?”

  “This is Mary, I picked her up at the feeding depot. She wants to work for our office,” Kate said.

  Arthur slapped his forehead but his hand went too fast, and the hit made the back of his head bang against the large soft chair he was sitting in. Mary started to suspect that it was there for safety more than comfort.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  Kate said, “You need to rid yourself of that habit, honey. Involuntary movement is not safe for you anymore. So, Mary, do you think you could work with us after seeing what we are?”

  “No idea,” Mary said. “I don’t know what it was like for him before he went all leathery.”

  Arthur was staying perfectly still, and it was beginning to creep her out. He said, “And If I told you that before this I was just an ordinary guy who wanted to live forever?”

  “Then I’d say you should have waited for a better process. No offense, but it doesn’t look good.”

  Suddenly, Arthur was inches away, looming over her like a flesh golem out of legend. Thankfully, she was ready now and switched midway from a lunge at his throat to a startled flinch.

  “You think you are so smart, don’t you?” he said. “But I see how you look at me.” He leaned in even closer. “With pity and disgust.”

  He stayed in that position, either because he wanted to intimidate her or because he was incapable of moving back without jumping a few paces. She understood by now that Crawlers couldn’t move smoothly.

  “Well, I wouldn’t fuck you,” Mary said, staring into his eye.

  Arthur blinked and jumped back a step. He started laughing then—a strangled rumble punctuated by high-pitched hiccups when his torso twisted in the same jerky motions as the rest of him. “Oh, she is funny, Kate,” he said. “By the way, did you get it?”

  Kate tossed him a blood bag and he caught it in one sharp motion without any trouble. His full attention was now devoted to tilting his head backwards and bringing the bag to it in a series of tiny jerks. He overreached at the end, making his head lean backwards into a position that would have broken an ordinary man’s neck. Eventually, he got everything right and punctured the bag’s corner with a claw.

  “She asked me if whoever I was getting the food for was okay,” said Kate. “I thought, here is someone smart and outgoing. I knew somebody at that place would be suitable. And Moira has been complaining about needing more people who can go on with little sleep—you know how she gets. She is a good boss, but I didn’t get any work done today because of that crap. I tried checking the social network groups for receptionists and the like, but the Council bastards busted the ID system, and most people used their citizen record to log in everywhere.”

  Arthur had finished his meal by then. He drank in hurried gulps with too much time between them. Mary preferred to feed through her fingers—much less personal. But with the way Kate’s husband moved, she doubted he could draw from a standard bag carefully enough to not sent blood and meat all over the place. He needs a chalice, she thought.

  “Have you two been married long?” she asked.

  “Not long enough,” said Arthur with a smile that looked more like a grimace. “Now, let’s do this properly. I’m Arthur Lind, one of military advisors to Count Heatsworth. This is my wife Kate, our leading researcher on Ascension technology—she and the Count, when he has the time, do most of the work in that area. Sit down, Mary. What’s your
surname?”

  “Dorheftung,” she said.

  Arthur plopped down into his padded chair, and Kate and Mary took two stools. This apartment was two times larger than the standard one—for Arthur’s needs, she supposed—but it still wasn’t much. Home was the place where you slept, so the cluttered desk she saw in the corner was already a break from tradition.

  Kate said, “There are a lot of minor families out there.”

  “Mine is the bankrupt kind.” Mary shrugged. “I try not to talk about it.”

  “Fair enough,” Kate said. “Okay, Mary Dorheftung. Normally, there would be background checks and tests, but I’m a scientist, not a recruiter. And we don’t have access to the Council network anyway. So how about you tell us what you can do, and we’ll figure out where to put you. Fair warning, though: if after a week it will turn out you can’t do the job, you’ll have to go.”

  Tara had done some of this kind of work a century ago, so Mary didn’t have to lie.

  “Well, I know the city transport network, and where consumer goods come from. I can delay visitors and find out what they want before they reach my boss . . .”

  5

  Power Vortex

  “Son, if you ever find you’ve become a politician, just kill yourself,” his father had said once.

  Grant Heatsworth was as conservative and dull as a man could be, and Kyle hadn’t talked to him since clawing his way out of the galaxy’s asshole that his family called home. Still, his dad had a point: politics blew.

  He looked around the long table, taking note of who spoke to whom. This assembly was supposed to be the highest authority in the Federation, the best their emerging state had to offer. What Kyle saw was four tribes plotting to kill one another, start a ritual chant, and eat the hearts of the fallen enemies.

  “Gentlemen. Ladies,” he said. “Your concern is understandable, considering we were not prepared to accommodate half of Seind’s population, but please calm down. Nothing will get resolved like this.”