Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1)

by Alex Kirko

  “What?” asked the clerk.

  “Hello,” said Sheong. “I’m Sergeant Teller, we’re new. Could you tell us where they issue patrol routes for the city?”

  The man stared at him without blinking and said, “Well, Sergeant Teller, they should have told you that we hand out patrol routes in an hour and a half. You can wait on a couch.”

  Blake glanced at the rickety things. They looked like they might collapse if a child sat on the edge of the seat and coughed. He saw a small lanyard on the clerk’s breast. “Mitchell, you know getting out of these babies is a bitch,” said Blake. “Could you, maybe, just point us in the right direction? The bosses told us to start patrolling in an hour, so our asses are on the line.”

  His voice quivered close to the end, but Mitch appeared to be too interested in the show he had been watching to pay them more than a speck of attention. “Sure,” he said. “Knock yourself out trying to convince Corporal Matthews to give you the codes and the route before it’s time. A real stickler for rules, that one. Second floor, room 206.”

  Blake started saying thanks but noticed that the man had already gone back to watching his video. The holographic projection showed two unnaturally endowed women arguing in front of a small, balding man with grey-brown creased skin. Blake shook his head and moved toward the stairway. The sparse lighting stole chunks of space from the dark, and the floor sparkled with age-old steel dotted with rust. They went up a floor and into a hallway. The rooms on both sides were dark, door scanners black and dead.

  “Their security is shit,” said Blake. “I knew that things were bad with the regular peacekeeping forces, but this is just sad.”

  “Weren’t you in the military?” asked Sheong.

  “Yeah, but not in the police. Mortenton is supposed to have the best law-enforcement on Terra Nox.”

  They came to an open door with faint blue light coming from it. Blake stepped inside. He said, “Hello, I’m Sergeant Yung. We were told this is where we could get the patrol route for our squad.”

  A young redheaded man looked up from the terminal he had furiously been typing at. He glanced at Drummond and then at the other assassin mechs in the hallway. Blake let his mind touch the cyberspace and scanned the room for transmitters. There was an active one in the terminal, but the man himself didn’t emit a signal.

  “Good morning,” said the officer. “I’m Corporal Matthews. I handle authorization and route assignment. Think I would remember having a squad of assassin mechs scheduled for today . . . Let me check.”

  Corporal’s attention went back to the terminal. Blake saw a shadow flicker across the floor as Nat moved into the room with her stealth systems engaged.

  After five seconds, she said over the intercom, “I’m in. Doctoring the camera video feed now.”

  The corporal opened the database and looked through the list of teams going on patrol. It went on and on. By the time Blake had an idea of how many soldiers were in this town, he wished he didn’t. At least two hundred mech specialists were tasked with protecting supply trains and providing backup for Mortenton patrols. If this was a minor outpost outside the city, then the main force would be stationed up in the caldera. They were looking at thousands of soldiers.

  “I’m sorry, but there must be some sort of mix-up,” said Matthews. “I’ve checked the list and you aren’t on it, which is strange because your codes check out.”

  “Man, not this again,” said Sheong, stepping up to Matthews and blocking most of the room from view. “Some idiot in IT messed up, and now we’ll get an earful from the higher-ups. You know how testy they get about patrols in the city.”

  Matthews glanced at the mechs still standing in the hallway. He said, “I’ll check again, but if it’s not there, we’ll need to call headquarters. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour to sort this out.”

  He started combing through the list slower, and Blake engaged Aileen’s stealth system. This reminded him of the start of his military career when he would infiltrate terrorist compounds. His form shimmered and vanished, tiny cameras switching on all over his armor. Holographic projectors vibrated and covered him with the image the cameras saw on the other side of him. There was a tiny delay to the camouflage when the background changed, but nobody could see it without an AI’s help.

  “Turn on the noise cancellation, Aileen.”

  A light hum filled his ears, as the AI began anticipating the sound of his footsteps and releasing cancelling sound waves through miniature speakers installed in the suit. Simultaneously, special coolant bubbled into the network of tubes permeating the mech, capturing the heat, and siphoning it off into heatsinks. Blake stepped in front of the Corporal.

  Blake wondered what Will or any of his old comrades would say if they saw him right now. He remembered the talks they would have after a mission—almost always it would be after butchering a dozen or so youths who couldn’t fit in and lashed out at society with plasma and explosives. None of the mech pilots he knew supported the Council fully, but they were a brotherhood. And this officer in front of him had the implants Blake himself carried—he could see it by the bulges under the uniform.

  He leaned forward, preparing himself.

  The man looked up from the terminal and asked Sheong, “Weren’t there more of—”

  He was looking straight at Blake when the assassin reached out with his armored hand, grasped the corporal’s skull from above, and squeezed pushing his thumb into the right eye socket and crushing the head like an overripe melon. Brain and bloody splinters of bone went flying in a burst of gore. Blake caught Matthew before he fell and carefully lowered him to the floor. The corporal's face now ended at his l nose.

  “What the hell if wrong with you, Drummond?” asked Sheong.

  Nat said, “This wasn’t the plan.” She released the spear from where it was secured across her back. “It smells like the butcher’s now. Tell me why I shouldn’t just leave you corpse here along with his?”

  “There will be no corpse,” he said. “Not even a whiff.”

  The first few times there had been nightmares, but now reaching out of the shadows and plucking a life just left the taste of rotten meat in his mouth. He needed to buy the trust of these people, and death was the best currency during a war.

  Blake stretched and relaxed, imagining his joints pop inside the suit. He then opened a slot on his arm and started spraying purple liquid over the clerk’s body and on the walls. Where the spray touched flesh, meat turned into sludge, and small bluish flames started to flicker on top.

  Sheong said, “A right nutter, that’s what you are. Man, that was messed up.”

  “We were planning to kill him anyway.” Blake shrugged and started scanning the room with an ultraviolet lamp to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. “The Council sometimes implants a transmitter at the base of the skull—about one in twenty soldiers has the right brain anatomy to not go mute. It can send a warning signal as soon as the soldier realizes something is wrong—we couldn’t risk it. Breaking the skull above the implant, however, prevents the alarm from working.” He turned off the miniature lamp and put it back into the compartment on his left forearm. “The room is clean.”

  “You aren’t earning any points by not telling us this crap in advance,” Nat said. “That clean-up liquid. Why do you have it?”

  “You let me play with a chemical set, so why shouldn’t I? Anyway, all it takes is some chemicals to process the flesh into flammable carbohydrates and then burn it with a spark from a few nanomachines. I programmed them to take care of bones too.”

  By now, only minuscule piles of ash inside a smoldering uniform remained of Matthews. Blake picked up the ruined clothes and stashed them into a pouch on his right hip and then blasted the ash with a repulsor at minimal power. The light-grey cloud stayed in the air for a second, before the whirr of the ventilation became louder, and corporal's remains got sucked out of the room with a final whoosh.

  “I doubt that’s how he wanted to
be buried,” said Nat. “Let’s get to work.”

  The other hacker on the team was Melanie who insisted everyone call her Mel. She had the voice and mannerisms of a shy sixteen-year-old, and Blake hoped she wasn’t a kid. She did know her stuff though.

  The console was meant to be operated by two technicians when patrol codes needed to be issued, and it had only one nail-sized black key in it. Mel plugged her suit into a console slot. It took her ten seconds to get the data.

  “Symmetrical to the second key,” she said.

  “We should take advantage while we can,” said Blake. “I bet the Council are reworking their security now that they have to take the Federation seriously.” He downloaded updated city plans for the Mortenton Archives and plotted a route to the regeneration chamber.

  Nat said, “Blake, encrypt the route, upload it to our mechs, and let’s go. My AI is getting antsy.”

  He said, “Not my first infiltration.”

  They headed back down the stairs, their suits concealing all emotion. They passed the clerk without him looking up, and then the team was outside.

  Nat said, “Move as fast as you can without drawing suspicion. We have no more than forty minutes until guards start searching for this guy, and we still need to get to Mortenton.”

  Blake said, “I just hope they take some time before they raise the alarm.”

  They left the small town at a brisk walk. Droves of people darted here and there, not paying their team any attention. They passed three full squads of mech soldiers heading toward the guard station to get their patrol routes, and Blake had to hold himself back from walking faster. As soon as they broke line of sight, the team engaged stealth generators and dashed forward. The only sound was a slight rustle of grass that the sound cancellation software couldn’t fully compensate for. Aileen moved without any noise whatsoever.

  7

  Throne of Lies

  The Chancellor watched twilight creep across the night sky while he worked on his speech. Davis dictated, deleted, tried different variations and tones. He rubbed his neck and felt for the half-faded bumps of where his implants had been centuries ago. Davis didn’t miss having a direct connection to cyberspace: hearing his own voice made it easier to evaluate the weight of his words, and he needed his address to be as impactful as possible. He hadn’t done this in a decade. At least elections had kept leaders sharp back in the day.

  His wife joked that he worked when everybody else slept so that no one could get in the way of his overlord plans. There was something stimulating about pushing through the night and greeting the morning at his console, poring over blueprints for the hundredth time.

  The morning sun rose above the city center, and Davis stopped his walk to watch it cast onyx shadows on the streets. The golden light hit the central Circle, and twelve Council towers caught on fire, burning above the capital. He saw his own home from here, peeking from behind the tower that Akiha Ryuu took almost twenty years ago. Tonight would show if he had been right in making her the first human Council member.

  Davis turned back to his personal assistant and strode to the edge of the Upper city. Low-rise white square buildings framed the empty street. Occasionally he would walk past a servant or a robot hurrying somewhere on an errand for their Ascended master, but it wasn’t often. The lack of people calmed him as did the absence of welfare receivers who made up most of the population of Terra Nox. The morning sun made his skin itch, but he knew he still had an hour or two before it would become uncomfortable.

  “In these dark times,” he dictated, “it will not do to dwell on the mistakes of the past. We granted the title to Kyle Heatsworth out of kindness and in advance for the research contributions he promised. He spat in our faces instead,” he paused. “Delete the last phrase. He created abominations instead. We have been building our society for a thousand years, and he would smash its foundations and tear it apart. No. Too pompous. Delete. Damn it.”

  Had his virtual assistant been an AI, it would have rebelled out of sheer boredom. Davis rubbed his eyes in frustration. The words didn’t fit. He needed them to meld into a monolith, but it seemed to him that his speech was made of nothing but cracks.

  He reached the edge. Behind a waist-high fence a five-hundred-foot drop waited, and below it the University Circle framed the Upper City in a glimmer of viridian and white. Campus buildings drowning in gardens formed a barrier between the tiny platform of Upper City and the endless expanse of Lower City another five hundred feet below. On ground level, blocks of low-rise premium entertainment and residential buildings neighbored skyscrapers that the less lucky spent their time in. He leaned over, looking at a march starting between two cream-colored central towers of the University. At least a thousand were protesting. As if the war would go away because they took a walk whining that they didn’t like the way the world was.

  Davis sat down on a bench overlooking the rest of Delmor, opened ArchPro version twenty-eight, and said, “Show me the fifty-year plan.”

  He put on his glasses, and an image of the city superimposed itself upon reality. The differences were subtle: an additional residential tower near the Central Bazaar, a couple floors removed from the tallest building in the Casino district . . . Eventually, he decided they needed another guard outpost in the eastern section of the city, where the river looped around a block of research facilities. He had trusted scientists too much in the past. He reserved a construction crew that would be free in four years.

  It took Davis two hours, and the morning was beginning to blaze into midday. He didn’t notice such things when working, but now he felt the burns. Splotches of flaking red began to appear on his slightly wrinkled skin. The nanites took care of those, but as the damage was fixed, more spots appeared. He got up from the bench and went into the Upper City subway station nearby. Two servants were pacing, waiting for their trains, and it was enough to crowd the tiny chamber. When a two-man capsule arrived, he gestured them forward. They left, and a minute later he stepped into another capsule and pressed his finger to the DNA scanner.

  He said, “The Connelly tower, please.”

  “You have top priority, Chancellor.”

  When he arrived in the lobby, Davis brushed his fingers over the polished ridges of twenty-two names engraved on the family tablet. He greeted the guard and headed for the elevators. The gravity cancellation field enveloped him, making his black trousers billow.

  Debra was at her table, her face lit by filtered reddish sunlight. Her blond hair shone with orange and crimson, and her skin was alabaster. She turned and smiled when he walked in. Davis felt himself smile in return and moved to kiss her hello. She bit his lower lip before pulling back and peering at his face.

  “You look drained,” she said. “Erick, dear, will you come here?”

  A shirtless servant stepped out of a side room. Davis wasn’t the tallest of men, and his mouth was at Erick’s shoulder level. The hunger was growing stronger: the damaged skin had healed, but his reserves were nearly at zero. He grasped Erick’s left biceps, and sank his teeth into the right side of the neck.

  Of all the things in his endless life, feeding from a living soul never got boring. He felt the rush of life down his throat, the heat, the pulse of blood pumping into his mouth. Erick tasted like dried plums and burned cherry wood. Davis took three mouthfuls and sealed the wound with a single lick. He motioned the servant away.

  “Much better,” said Debra giving his lips a peck. “You shouldn't work outside so far into the morning. How is your speech?”

  “Still can’t find the right words. What are you working on?”

  She gestured to the holographic display occupying most of her table and said, “Seind was the main supplier of food for three nearby cities. I told you sacrificing it would have consequences.”

  Davis said, “But we learned what their forces are capable of in battle.” He sat down in a nearby armchair and looked at the projection, rubbing his forehead. “I didn’t think of the food shortage, t
o be honest. Maybe I’ll put it into my report if I can spin it into a reason to go with our plan.”

  She shrugged and said, “There is no leeway on Terra Nox when it comes to economy, and restructuring the supply lines is a nightmare. Heatsworth knew it when he attacked Seind. Also, your newest protégé wanted to speak to you. Norman, I think?”

  He nodded, smiling. “The future twenty-third Connelly. I’ll see if I can squeeze in a minute or two. Thank you, honey. I might just finish this blasted speech now.”

  Davis still had seven hours until the meeting. He sat in a corner and worked on the text for the next five. He didn’t get tired or hungry or thirsty, but there was a mental fatigue that came with beating his head against the same problem for half a day. Debra kept working on the Republic logistics, and he soon found himself staring at her more often than editing his speech—this is when he knew he should stop.

  “Do you think they’ll agree?” he asked.

  Debra laid her hands in her lap and turned to face him—in the red light, she looked like a goddess carved in stone. She asked, “Since when do you doubt yourself, my love?”

  “We can’t afford throwing the peacekeeping forces at the Federation. If Heatsworth attacks something crucial—” He sighed. “After winning, we will risk a major rebellion.”

  “There is your answer.”

  He nodded to his wife, kissed her, and headed three floors down to talk to Norman and some family members. The new ones still fidgeted when he approached them. As if they weren’t Connellys, because they hadn’t been born with the name. It was foolish: there had been no Connellys born after him. Everyone seemed eager to batter him with questions, but he had trained them well, and the family would stay silent until after the meeting.