by Tom Julian
On the levels above, giant iron doors rolled closed as red lights flashed and sirens wailed. One guard remained on the wrong side and pounded on the door as his colleagues looked through the porthole and shook their heads.
“We are on facility lockdown,” a computer voice repeated.
The guard emptied his weapon on Wrath, but the plasma bursts deflected harmlessly away. The beast approached closely, scanning the door, the guard struggling to reload. Wrath absently slashed the guard down as he examined the lock. Then with his shoulders flexing, he turned the wheel on the door until its gears snapped and spun free. Bayonets extruded from over his forearms and he dug into the lock mechanism. He peeled the door outward, tearing it off its hinges. He tossed it away as two guards on the other side unloaded their weapons on him.
Wrath lashed out with his razor-tipped tongue, taking one guard’s head clean off. His plasma clip empty, the other man just stood there, terrified and unable to make a sound. Wrath backed up, dropped his head and drove his iron-crowned skull into the man’s chest, smashing him against the wall. The guard crumpled like a rag-doll. Beyond the second door, there was no resistance.
The guards inside the command center watched Wrath’s silver flash go past twice, hoping beyond hope the Sabatin wouldn’t find them. But after a few agonizing minutes, he’d checked every other door and he approached the command center almost casually, panting lightly from the action.
He broke the handle on the locked door as easily as turning it and pushed it open. Inside, a dozen guards stood terrified, jaws agape. Some fell to their knees and gasped. One man took his fingers and traced the Believer symbol on his forehead as tears stained his face.
Wrath whirled into them, teeth and claws everywhere at once, gunfire and the screams of men ringing out. On Nemesis, the crew saw nothing but a blur of silver and red through Wrath’s camera. When he was done just a few seconds later, a red mist hung in the air and the bodies lay on the floor. Gray watched this over the monitor, his hand over his mouth, elated. “We are on facility lockdown,” the prison’s computer voice still droned over and over.
When Wrath was done he found a computer terminal. With the dexterity of a pianist, he scanned through the roster of inmates. He found the location of Ivan Dacha, all the way on the bottom level. Once he had it, Wrath bolted. Gray and the men watched the feed as Wrath made corners and rushed down ducts with nausea-inducing swiftness. In less than a minute, he was in the cryogenic storage area in the bottom-most level. Acres of chambers were stacked a dozen-high in a mausoleum of convicts. He rushed to Ivan Dacha’s location, his thick breath visible in the chilled air.
With equal parts dexterity and strength, he pulled out Ivan Dacha’s cryogenic chamber, releasing a puff of white vapor. The light on Wrath’s camera illuminated a picture of an impish man with a receding hairline. His breath fogged the image, but back on Nemesis, Gray nodded to Thomas that they had their man.
Wrath held the chamber under one arm and carefully made his way back to the main level, going back through the blasted entrance and over the series of walls. When Wrath was back in the forest, Gray dropped Nemesis’s gangplank and the men stood in anticipation, some thumbing their weapons.
Outside, a steady, thumping gallop grew closer and closer. A flash of silver burst from the tree line and in seconds Wrath rushed up the gangplank. He slid the cryogenic chamber across the deck and looked up at Gray, almost smiling.
Gray turned to the men, who stood awestruck. “That’s what we did with one Sabatin. You want to see what we can do with ten thousand? You think the Arnock will last a week against us? You think their friends in the damned Department of Peace Enforcement will last?”
Gray stalked the cargo bay, the men now rapt. He bellowed, “No, friends, the D.P.E. will fall and we’ll get our way of life back. Military men will protect the human race again against all not made in God’s image!”
Windwhistle, a very young man Gray had never heard speak before, shouted at the top of his lungs, “There is no god but God and we heed his judgment!” The others repeated the chant as Gray rallied them to shout louder. Finally, when they reached a crescendo, Gray motioned for them to be silent.
“There is no god but God and we heed his judgment,” Gray finished with his hand over his heart, pausing for effect. After a moment, he clapped his hands once. “Now move!”
The men scattered, Michael and Sol, Gray’s other lieutenant, herding them. They needed to prep their pressurized armored fighting rigs, check their gear, and attend to countless other things before the next phase. In an instant the cargo bay was empty, save for one. Izabeck still scribbled furiously in his electronic notebook. “How comes the Word of God?” Gray asked him.
Izabeck didn’t stop writing and didn’t make eye contact with Gray either. “God’s flowing through us here, Bishop.” Izabeck smiled, still looking down. Gray patted his shoulder, but not before considering giving Izabeck a new home here on Fangelsi. Gray’s backers were an order of Believers known as The Clergy and they had placed Izabeck on his crew to “document the sacred mission,” but in truth he was reporting back every single thing Gray said and did. Some in The Clergy had considered Gray’s religious conversion a little too convenient. Gray considered The Clergy a problem he would need to get rid of later.
“Brother Izabeck, these military matters don’t rattle your soul, do they?”
Izabeck stopped writing and looked up, his nervous energy flowing out of every pore. “I’m seeing things that will make God’s story complete,” Izabeck replied.
Gray nodded. What the hell is this guy talking about? Gray put his arm around Izabeck. “Someday, all of this will be immortalized in stained glass somewhere and you’ll be there with a halo and a stylus, looking down on some thankful souls sitting in church. Light will be bursting through you onto their faces.” Gray painted the picture with his hands. “Won’t that be grand?”
“I don’t ask God for much, Bishop.”
Gray looked through Izabeck, like he’d looked through thousands of young cadets. “You tell The Clergy everything. You let Cardinal Jacob know everything, understand? Remember, God’s watching you.”
Gray turned and left. “God’s watching you, too,” Izabeck said under his breath.
ARCHANGEL
D.P.E. Archangel—Nine Days Out from Tach-One Station
Timberwolf followed Conrad, a young Department of Peace Enforcement officer with a vacant stare and a perfect haircut, down the corridor. Timberwolf wobbled in the artificial gravity. His knees were never able to get used to the inertial dampeners that kept everyone walking on the same floor. Timberwolf didn’t like being in spaceships and Archangel was a beast. It bustled with crew, and Timberwolf couldn’t seem to keep out of their way. It was vast, but at the same time claustrophobic and every door looked the same to him. When he wasn’t in the field and instead confined in a steel and plastic warren, he became keenly aware of what could best be described as a “presence,” the alien mind-bender that inhabited his consciousness.
Five years ago, towards the end of the Arnock war, he had been on a smash and grab mission to capture an Arnock Master named Kizik. It had been a disaster. Everyone else on the team had been lost, driven mad by Kizik’s mind-bending and either killing themselves or each other. Timberwolf had been the only survivor and had been in Kizik’s presence for just a few minutes, but that was more than enough time for the creature to enter his mind and leave a part of itself behind.
He had the distinction of being the only human ever to survive capture by the Arnock. As Conrad led him through another heavy door, Timberwolf caught a glimpse of his reflection in a porthole. Survival was relative. His face was gaunt, his eyes sunken into his head. He was three days late for a shave and he hadn’t slept in a week. Nine days out from Tach-One Station and he had been given literally nothing to do. He grimaced, the presence of Kizik grinding in the back of his mind, teasing him like a mosquito from someplace light years away.
“What’s the Doc want?” Timberwolf asked Conrad.
“Dr. Tier has got her usual questions.” Conrad faked being friendly. Most Department of Peace Enforcement personnel had that trait. They were the sort that had no problem asking about your family before blowing you out an airlock.
“Tier’s questions are never usual. I keep telling her the same stories.”
Conrad opened the door to Dr. Tier’s office. “Today’s different. She wants to know about the box.” Conrad smiled deeply, the most sincere and friendly smile Timberwolf had ever seen. Shit, Timberwolf thought.
Dr. Tier was a top-ranking D.P.E. operative, so high up the food chain that very few people knew her name or even of her existence. Timberwolf thought that she might report directly to the President or to someone in the cabinet. If she had an official title, he didn’t know what it was. She was simply “Dr. Tier.” She’d let it slip once that she had only two other peers, but he didn’t know their names or purviews. She was a medical doctor by training, but at heart she was a stone-cold spook—a handler and a puppet-master who sent deadly men such as Timberwolf out to do the often nasty business of the Department of Peace Enforcement.
Dr. Tier sat behind her desk and Conrad took his usual place—behind her and leaning against a cabinet. She nodded at Timberwolf in acknowledgment with a vacancy that told him she was nothing but the job. She wasn’t an unattractive woman, but her features were severe. An angular chin and high cheekbones set the stage for large blue eyes that sucked in everything around them. Dark brown hair hung in a pristine but fashionable bob.
Timberwolf noticed someone else standing near the door behind him; a mountain of a man he knew as Capote. Timberwolf had never seen him speak, but he floated around whenever serious muscle might be needed. Timberwolf did his usual thing and mentally counted the moves it would take to kill everyone in the room.
“Twenty-two?” Dr. Tier guessed. She knew his game.
“Seventeen,” Timberwolf responded.
Dr. Tier didn’t fake smiles. It wouldn’t have fooled anyone, but she smiled now. “Even with Capote here, seventeen moves to kill the room?”
“Yeah, that’s all I need.” Timberwolf detected a slight shuffle from the man behind him.
“I hate games, Mr. Velez,” Dr. Tier said nonchalantly as she opened a manila envelope.
“Then you picked the wrong line of work, Doc. We’re on the cloak and dagger committee.” Towards the end of the Arnock war the D.P.E. was technically established as a diplomatic corps to enforce peace treaties, but its underlying mission was to stop new conflicts from arising. It countered the military and religious establishments and immediately gained the ire of both.
Since the Alchemy incident over a hundred years before, humanity had been in a constant state of war and had been wildly successful. Goaded on by The Clergy, dozens of alien species had been wiped out, or their populations reduced to trivial numbers. Interstellar conflict became a way of life, but with the horrific losses of the Arnock war, the cycle needed to be broken.
The D.P.E. was empowered at the highest levels to keep humanity out of conflict, and the agency quickly gained a reputation for not playing nice. Zealous generals were discredited and retired, xenophobic speech was exposed and ridiculed, and military spending was slashed overnight. When the game needed to become more hands-on, men like Timberwolf lurked in the shadows.
Not everyone agreed with the push for peace. Many in the Assault Corps and in politics felt the worst threats were the ones left festering and that the Arnock were just waiting for their moment to strike. Others stood to lose lots of money with the dawn of peace. War had been great for business. With peace, the economies of many worlds were in recession.
On monitors around the room in Dr. Tier’s office, the helmet cam footage from Timberwolf’s encounter with Kizik began to play. Some screens were in black and white, some were in color; some images jerky, some perfectly smooth. The monitors glowed with video of soldiers in armored pressurized fighting rigs running and dying, shooting at ghosts on a jagged red world. Some screens showed the video backwards and the soldiers leaped up and back to life. It was crass to show this, but Timberwolf might have done the same thing.
“You’ve asked to go back in the field. In your current condition, that’s insane,” Dr. Tier said.
“I’m in my current condition because I’m not in the field,” Timberwolf responded.
“You claim there is an Arnock presence called Kizik in your mind?”
“I don’t claim that. It’s there. When I’m not working, it comes over. Likes to chat.”
“You took any mission that would get you killed after the Arnock grabbed you.”
“Didn’t work out.”
Dr. Tier shuffled some papers. Timberwolf could tell they were photographs.
“You’re a bad liar,” she said softly. “Well, you’re a great liar physically. You have literally no tells. Let’s never play cards.” She motioned to the electronic surveillance surrounding them. “The machines can’t even pick it up when you try to deceive me. What you can’t lie your way through is the goddamned evidence.”
“The box?” Timberwolf knew when not to bluff.
“What’s in the box?” She turned the end of her question into a soft hiss. Before he could answer she went on. “You didn’t go to Telock Sen six weeks ago to discuss things with the insurgent leaders there. You picked up a box. It’s in your cabin.”
Timberwolf smiled. The monitors around the room showed his drop-lifter crashing, crushing fleeing men in its wake. “So tell me what you know about the box,” Timberwolf suggested.
“Sure, I’ll play. The box in your quarters, we can’t scan it. You know we tried. Not a speck of an image comes back. We thought about sawing into it.”
Timberwolf interrupted, “I wouldn’t call that safe.”
Dr. Tier smiled. “Don’t worry. We did get some clues from the exterior. It’s made of a unique plastisteel compound. It’s from Highland.”
“This whole ship’s from Highland.”
“Then you’ll have no problem telling us what it is and who you met with.”
Conrad froze the images. The hulking figure of Kizik stared down at Timberwolf from the monitors in a dozen variations: a giant spider with six glowing red eyes. “I want that thing out of my head.”
“Does this person look familiar?” Dr. Tier slid a photo of Ivan Dacha, the man Gray had broken out of Fangelsi, across the desk. Timberwolf was surprised by what he saw, but he barely raised an eyebrow.
The man was identical to Sergey Dacha, the person Timberwolf had met on Telock Sen, except for a slightly receding hairline. “Looks like the guy who gave me the box. Maybe a carbon copy.”
“That’s Ivan Dacha. Your old friend General Gray…sorry, Governor Gray…sorry, Bishop Gray, broke into a cryogenic prison and took him. Gray had a Sabatin with him. Tore the place apart, literally.”
Dr. Tier folded her arms. “This is why you aren’t back in the field. Why you have to feel the full brunt of whatever it is that’s in your head right now. Because you lie to me.”
“Sergey Dacha contacted me, told me he could get Kizik out.”
Dr. Tier leaned in closely, her eyes somehow getting icier. “These men are the only connection we have ever had to Highland. Gray has just snatched one of them. You’ve been in contact with the other. We’ve got intelligence on a third Dacha brother, Achilles Dacha.”
“So?” Timberwolf asked dully, on purpose.
Dr. Tier’s eyes roamed the room and her jaw quivered with a hint of anger. “I am about to make a very poor decision.” Timberwolf waited, cocking his head. “I bet you are wondering why we’re out here in a sixty-billion-dollar D.P.E. cruiser and why you’re just sitting in your quarters?”
“Let me guess; for me there’s door number one, where I do whatever the hell it is you want, and door number two, where I’m blown out the airlock?”
“Gray’s cracked something as it relates to Highland
. Guaranteed it’s the Dacha brothers or whatever they are. I have to decide on what to do with you. So yes, there’s the chance you take a very short walk.” Dr. Tier waited for a reaction from Timberwolf. She didn’t get one. “You’ve had contact with the Dachas and you and Gray go how far back?”
“We’ve killed lots of people together.”
“And above all of this, you say you have an Arnock presence in your mind, maybe watching and listening to what we’re saying now?”
“It’s not here now.”
“How do you know?” Timberwolf looked off absently. “How, Mr. Velez?” she demanded, her calm and calculated demeanor finally cracking.
“No, just shush a minute. It’s not here. Kizik’s on a break. This is some nice P and Q.”
“It tortured you. Went into your mind like nothing I could imagine and it’s still there. Can you hear them?”
“I can feel them. If they were coming, I would know.”
“Across light years?”
“I. Would. Know.”
“Don’t the Arnock kill their prisoners?” She let that hang as she met Timberwolf’s icy glare with her own. “You’ll be posted to station Leszer Zim 90. The Outpost. It’s a shit can. Most contraband in the sector goes through there. See how all this fits together and what it has to do with Gray and the Dachas. Listen for the Arnock, if that’s actually a real thing. You’ll be a special security consultant. The guy running it, Drogel, just fell out of the toolbox.”
“I’ll be sure to make friends.”
“Let me be clear to you about the implications here. If Gray has found a way of taking Highland, then you can be damned sure he will use what he finds there to restart the war with the Arnock and fire up a lot more trouble. The weapons factory there is a trove of attack ships, nukes, bio drivers, etcetera. He could create an army of Sabatin. It’ll be like Christmas morning for a psychopath.”