Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1)

by Alex Kirko

  They walked for five minutes, their pace sedate enough to drive a saint insane. Blake could see the district they were walking into, but his brain refused to process the images.

  Aileen said, “Everything is so—”

  “Bright?” asked Blake.

  This entrance to Mortenton was marked by a fifty-foot arch that doubled as the canvas for the most disturbing painting he had ever seen. From left to right, it started with the images of rose-faced kids sitting in classrooms, then it showed them growing up, trying their first virtual simulation, first drug trip, first paid sex, first sensory implant, and then it really got going. Teenagers on operating tables, getting rid of their arms to get cybernetics. An emaciated blond girl: her head lolling back with a blissful smile on her face, black cables plugged into ports on every free inch of her naked body. Parents, stuck in front of a holographic display while their baby cried in the electronic crib behind them, only to be taken by social workers in the next picture. The parents didn’t even turn around. Blake stopped looking at that point.

  “How the hell is this city still standing?” he asked.

  Mel said, “If they want to blind others, they can’t be blind themselves.”

  Stepping off the deserted bridge and into Mortenton was like jumping into a scalding bath. The street was full of people hurrying about their business in a kaleidoscope of color. It looked like every inch of ground and walls was painted over, and where they couldn’t paint they had put screens cycling through a collection of pictures that were mostly black squares and red circles. The pedestrians’ clothes were covered with prints, and everybody either studied other passers-by or was glued to a personal assistant, flipping through images. Instead of eyes, painters had black multi-faceted implants swiveling in their orbits, lenses dilating, extra sensors in the forehead clicking.

  “Took you long enough,” said a guard in a red suit that stood by the gate. “Get this to the depot on the double.”

  “I think we are right on time,” said Sheong. “What’s the hurry?”

  “We are running out of oil base for paint. Last time everyone had their salaries cut.”

  They handed the train over near a low grey building that had somehow escaped the street decorating frenzy. At least the ground here wasn’t see-through: while plenty of transparent plastic was used for support, it was all covered with mosaics.

  “This place is giving me a headache,” said Blake.

  “Be happy we didn’t go to the Sculptors District,” said Nat. “What painters do with color sculptors do with shape. When I was stationed here, I once looked at a residential building too long and had to sit down to let the vertigo pass. Come on, let’s go to the drop point.”

  As they walked closer to the Archives, nobody paid them much attention. People huddled around small screens embedded in the walls every twenty feet or so, making notes. There was a list scrolling on the closest screen: upcoming games and video programs that needed designers for textures and illustrations.

  Mortenton was a bizarre city, and it was a shame that they needed to hurry. Small groups of workers wearing plain uniforms were removing protective covers from paintings and replacing old pictures with new ones. There was no cohesion to the cornucopia of styles. They passed a house that was entirely white but had a hundred different textures on it, making a portrait of a woman out of an entire wall. When Blake focused his sensors on it, he saw that parts of it looked like scales or leather or sand. Across the street from it there was a gallery of projected surrealist paintings, the central of which sported a couple having sex while melting into green goo. On the opposite side stood a skyscraper covered in traditional sunset landscapes.

  A young father, no more than fifty years old, was walking the street while a stroller rolled in front of him. The stroller was painted with pictures of summer meadows, and the chubby thing inside was poking at a small sheet of white plastic and smearing it with paint that was on its fingers. The result looked like a human figure the same green color as the father’s clothes. Or maybe it was supposed to be a tree.

  “How the hell do people stay sane here?” he asked Nat.

  She said, “You place a chili pepper into your mouth, and you will start crying, and snot will go everywhere. But eat one every day for a year, and you’ll get so used to it. None of the normal cuisine will ever be spicy.” She gestured to the father and child. “Well, they start at birth. And starting from the age of two they give the kids treats when they succeed in their future area.”

  That sounded suspiciously like the caste system of the Old Earth. Things worked this way in the other cities too, he realized, but most citizens there were unemployed, so he hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Somebody must do something different from what their parents did,” he said.

  Nat shook her head.

  Sometimes the street would twist, and Blake could glimpse the giant tower of the Archives surrounded by four smaller and much thinner spires. Before they got to the plaza where it was located, half the team split. He went with Nat, Sheong, and Mel.

  “Good luck,” Nat said to the others. “Don’t forget to catch up with us when we give you the signal.”

  They entered a street that was like no other in this section of Mortenton. While everything else was a mishmash of visuals that offended the eye, this narrow stretch of road was almost ascetic. Simple blocky buildings stood on both sides, there were no holograms above, and no paintings below. A grey road and normal two-floor houses stood out among Mortenton’s eclectic architecture more than anything else could. A single painting hung above each doorway. He took a closer look at one of them.

  It was a crystal ball breaking against a man’s head. Every sliver of transparent stone was painstakingly detailed, but the man’s face was just a smudge of light-brown. His eyes were in focus, though: black, peering at the breaking crystal. There was no blood, and his head was unaffected by the impact. Blake stopped to examine it a bit better: to look how the light fell, how the crystal turned out to be not so much a sphere as a mirror reflection of the man’s skull. There was a story here or maybe five.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. Nat said, “Drummond, snap out of it. This is the Golden Street where the masters live. There are one hundred and fifty thousand painters in Mortenton. There are thirty houses on this street and never in the history of the city have more than twenty been occupied.”

  A screech pierced the air like that of a steel nail scraping at reinforced glass. A low rumble followed, and the ground under their feet began to vibrate. An alarm blared three times, and a pleasant female voice came from all directions at once. It said, “All citizens, please return to your homes or places of work. A support beam under the Painters district has been damaged. The redundancies have taken the load. You will be informed when we discover the source of the damage and repair the beam.”

  A softer rumble rippled through the city, and the ground tilted just a little. Blake wouldn’t have noticed it without his suit, but he was sure the city administration also picked it up.

  “They’ll want to avoid evacuation at all costs,” said Nat. “Most of the guard should now be under the city. They’ll need to sweep for more bombs. Let’s move.” Blake heard the crackle of switching to the second communication channel. “Max, you’ve done your job, now get the hell out of there and prepare to meet us in the Musicians District.” There was only static. She waited for a few moments. “Shit, they are jamming long-range comms.”

  They got to the end of Golden Street and the central plaza unfurled before them. The five spires of the Archives stretched to pierce the sky: the central one was a red gold monstrosity three thousand feet in height. The satellite towers touched the central one. They were only a thousand feet each and they looked tiny next to their big brother.

  “We need to get to the top floor of that?” asked Sheong. “I don’t think I brought enough batteries for a walk.”

  “Sheong, shut up and move,” said Nat. “There will be no walki
ng. If we can’t use the elevator, we retreat. The place is a maze of isolated rooms, and it has the kind of guard that can compete with the Council towers in Delmor.”

  This was it. Blake focused on the heavy thuds of his mech’s boots on the artificial stone. Few concentration techniques were available to a pilot. There was no breath, no pulsation of blood in his veins, but he wasn't a beginner. Blake let his senses merge with the suit completely, feeling the movement of servos, the tension of artificial muscles, the rippling of fortified nano-material where the suit needed to be flexible. The rhythm of walking was almost like breathing.

  People began pouring out of the Painters District and flooding the plaza. Groups of guards ran by in bulky mech suits with red pulsing lines of coolant running across their armor. Nobody paid Blake’s team any attention: the citizens were too busy getting away from the part of town that could collapse at any moment, and the guards were too busy rushing to that same part of town to find the source of problem. Blake counted at least thirty enemies. It didn’t look good for the four of their group that had gone to create a diversion. He cursed. Irene—their lock picking expert—wasn’t a fighter.

  “The day isn’t over,” said Aileen. “And it isn’t your team. It’s Nat’s.”

  It was easy to push their way through the crowd while being two feet taller and several hundred pounds heavier than the civilians. They moved toward one of the satellite towers—Spire of Old Earth—and the hum of conversation around them provided the perfect concealment.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” asked a red-haired man with a small telescope in place of his right eye.

  “I heard someone say the volcano might be erupting,” said a woman with a dragon tattoo on her neck. The tattoo coiled, snarled, and breathed gouts of orange fire across her skin. She slapped the beast and it went still. “Settle down, Huey. Why the hell did I let the surgeon talk me into linking this thing to my nerves?”

  “The volcano can’t be erupting. I mean, there are defenses and backups and backups for backups—”

  They moved away and couldn’t hear anything more. The team reached the spire, which was smooth obsidian with a single door at the bottom. Craning his neck, Blake saw an image engraved on the wall in front of them in silver. He recognized it instantly, because it hung in every school on Terra Nox and in every mech pilot training center in the galaxy. The Tragedy of Kamarkvat, author unknown. The entire cycle was depicted here: from a tall silver-haired man emerging from a vat of translucent liquid, to him being invited into a home, to being taught to laugh and talk and understand, and finally to him opening a valve that released gas into his home, killing the mother, father, and their teenage daughter. What followed wasn’t a continuation of this personal story but depictions of the man blowing up buildings and poisoning people and cutting corpses up to find better ways to kill. Blake’s sensors captured the entirety of the gargantuan painting, seeing the final image at the top—of the man lying in front of a city burning in the background, his metal innards exposed, unseeing eyes staring at something in the sky while he smiled the smile that he had been taught by the family he had killed. Blake shivered and walked up to the door.

  “Look like you belong,” he said, and everyone moved to shield him from view.

  Blake approached the doors, ready to start hacking, but the entrance opened with a soft whoosh. A grey-haired plump man rushed out a group of twenty or so children.

  “Go along, my dears.” He said. “Got to get you back to your parents. Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”

  “Sir, we are here to ensure safety—” started Sheong, but the man just waddled past him, leading the herd of chattering kids. “Right, he’s gone.”

  Nobody had initiated a lockdown, it seemed. Their group filed in quickly, escaping from the chaos on the streets.

  “Good, the lower floor guards have left,” said Nat. “Let’s go up.”

  The air was drier and cooler beyond the threshold, humidity and temperature controlled to preserve the artifacts stored in the building. A thick burgundy carpet tickled his feet. He wanted to take off the suit, lie down on the floor, and stare up at the central spiral staircase leading to countless floors of data modules, books, movies, and paintings from a world long lost.

  “They try,” said Aileen. “But none of this is from Old Earth beyond the twentieth century, is it? Books written about books that used to exist. A drawing of how somebody imagined New York of the twenty-second century. That painting of the Tragedy of Kamarkvat is probably the most historically accurate representation of life on Old Earth here.”

  “It is easier for people to remember events soaked in fear,” said Blake.

  “Stop dallying, Drummond,” said Nat.

  Ryan pushed him in the back, and Blake allowed it.

  “Our credentials are legit, man, but they won’t hold,” said Sheong. “We need to hurry.”

  There was an elevator, and the four of them stepped into it. The engine whirred, the inertia dampeners did their job, and the floors of the building blurred as they rushed past them. Blake was recording everything he saw. Even if it was a sham, this place was where the citizens of Terra Nox had done their best to immortalize the birthplace of their race, and this made it special. A bell chimed, and the elevator doors opened with a soft hiss.

  “Fiftieth floor,” said Nat. “The library. When Old Earth cut the colonies off, they destroyed all knowledge that could help launch a rebellion. This is what they thought useless.”

  They went in the direction of the central building, making their way past the shelves stacked with electronic books. It seemed like a waste to devote an entire device to just one tome, but he knew it was for security. Knowledge was had to be guarded jealously and given out drop by drop.

  Blake stopped by a maintenance port on the wall. He had just plugged into the system when a tiny man with bulbous eye implants and a lilac mohawk scuttled over to them.

  The librarian tagged at the collar of his black shirt and said, “You can’t be on this floor.” We have paper books in the back. Your suits are too hot. Too much energy and ozone. Ozone is terrible for paper books.”

  Blake let his mind slip into the security network. He linked up with Mel’s suit to crack the encryption faster. They stood inside his mindscape, under the enormous luminescent tree that was Aileen. He saw Mel materialize, look up at Aileen, and freeze.

  “Wow,” she said. “I didn’t get a good look before. She is amazing.”

  At the same time, he stood in the hall. Manipulating his physical body felt like drowning in tar, and it slowed down the hacking. He and Mel dived into the scarlet web of the tower security system.

  “Excuse us, mister,” he said to the library employee. “We were sent to make sure the books are safe. There is a terrorist attack on the city, and we couldn’t come without suits. I’m sure five minutes won’t have any effect on your books.”

  “A terrorist attack?” the man said, paling.

  “Somebody is blowing up the supports under the city,” said Sheong. “Don’t worry, sir, there are redundancies. Although if you have loved ones in the Painters District, you might want to get them out of there.”

  By that time, Blake and Mel had peeled off two layers of encryption and broke through a firewall. The girl still seemed distracted by Aileen’s form, but she and her AI did help. Outside, the library employee hurried into the elevator and rode down.

  “Okay,” said Blake. “We need to go to the northwestern corner of this floor. Behind the twenty-third century urban fantasy section there is a wall that touches the central tower. We’ll be able to break through there.”

  “Five minutes to change towers,” said Nat. “Before somebody notices we aren’t supposed to be here, and the entire Mortenton guard come down on us.”

  The four of them hurried down the pathway between the shelves. Despite all the mayhem and the public announcement, they still walked by two dozen citizens so focused on books and videos that Blake could sl
it their throats one by one, and none would raise the alarm.

  The urban fantasy shelf was thirty feet tall and a hundred feet wide. Every title was more ridiculous than the previous one. The Lord and the Fairy, Pack and Family, How to Kiss a Vampire in Sixteen Easy Steps.

  Blake said, “No wonder they let us keep these. If the colonies ever tried to study these books to come up with a strategy against the mother planet, it would involve dieting and obsessing over whether screwing werewolves is acceptable.”

  Sheong said, “I wonder if the people of Old Earth knew they were going to vanish. They wouldn’t have bothered with hiding stuff if they knew, would they?”

  Mel stepped to the side to keep an eye out. Blake, Nat, and Sheong got close to the wall. Blake pulled a metal cylinder with two pounds of grey thermite paste from a compartment in his left leg. He squeezed some out and used it to draw a rectangle on the wall. He pulled a small can out of his right side and sprayed a coat of black powder on top of the door portal he was making.

  “Step back,” he said and followed his own advice.

  They retreated ten feet when embers of red started to appear under the black. A dot flared in the top right, a spot appeared in the left, and then the black line on the wall became sizzling, sparkling white. There was no smoke and no heat, only light. Twenty seconds passed and it subsided. Where paste had been, now there was a depression in the wall.

  “Sheong, help me move this,” said Blake.

  The two of them thrust their fingers into where he had put the thermite, and their hands went through the film of thermoresistant paint. They got a grip and lifted an eight-foot-tall slab out of the wall. Blake pointed with a shrug of his head, and they put it to the right of the opening. There was a server room behind the wall. Black boxes of databanks were covered with a thick layer of dust, and the air smelled of long-dead mold. Garlands of burnt cables hung off the ceiling. All the equipment looked like it hadn’t been operational in centuries.