Lucifer's Star

by C. T. Phipps

“I doubt your husband would approve.”

  “Why would he not? You are he, he is you, and the two of you are brothers.”

  I wasn’t so sure as I didn’t feel any sort of fraternal bond to my unseen doppelganger. All I could think of him was as a copy created from me during my ignorant youth who was even now making the universe a worse place. I didn’t think I was making things better, necessarily, but I felt violated and angry at his existence.

  Still, I wasn’t about to say all that. “All right. Let’s talk.”

  Judith reached up and rubbed her fingers against my face, it stung terribly. “Janice wants you killed.”

  “I imagine so. She just murdered her brother and I’m a threat to her.”

  Judith pulled her fingers away. “A traitor brother who was trying to have her killed. I am trying to convince her you were acting under duress. That’s not a hard sell given your ear contained an earworm. Did you know your superiors had you rigged with a bug capable of killing you if you disobeyed?”

  I took in the fact they had managed to remove the object Hiro had been extorting me with. That was one less problem to deal with, though I had needed to jump out of the proverbial lion’s path into the snake pit to do it. “Yes. I was made aware of that after the fact.”

  “And you still feel loyalty to them?” Judith asked. “Your Commonwealth masters.”

  “No. I feel nothing but contempt for them.” I was tempted to lie to her and weave a tale of misguided idealism but strangely decided to tell the truth instead. I was tired of lying. “But loyalty to them and friendship to your Free Systems Alliance are two different things. What happened to the others?”

  “Others?”

  “My companions. I don’t care about causes but I care about them.”

  “My, how things change,” Judith said, shaking her head. “The Cassius I know regularly sacrificed his own men for an ounce of success on the battlefield.”

  I closed my eyes. “I used to believe causes were worth fighting for. I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “Keep telling yourself that and maybe someday you’ll believe it,” Judith took a step back. “Some are fine. Others…not.”

  “Please tell me specifics. For the memory of what we once shared if nothing else.”

  Judith looked half-amused, half-jealous. “Very well. Your doll is fine. As is Clarice.”

  “I don’t care about Clarice anymore.”

  “Liar.”

  I decided to let it go. “What about William and Hiro?”

  “They’re being interrogated. They are not fine.”

  “I see.” That was unfortunate. “And Ida?”

  “The Melampus has been impounded. Ida, however, is working for us. She’s the one who informed us of Zoe’s treachery.”

  I processed that. “You owe Zoe your life. What happened—”

  “She’s dead, Cassius.”

  It was like a punch in the gut. I couldn’t respond for a moment. “No, no, you’re…no. I can’t have lost her again.”

  “The real Zoe’s not dead.” Judith frowned. “She’s off on a space station overlooking Brigid and Belenus. The one we killed was just a copy, one made by her template to take the risks she was unwilling to perform.”

  I looked at Judith, disgusted. “The amount of hypocrisy there is immeasurable.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s still true. She betrayed our cause and killed many people to do it. The fact I owe her for my resurrection is immaterial. There are more important things afoot.”

  Judith reached down and opened the bag, revealing Zoe’s head, severed from her neck with white synth-blood filling the interior of its bottom. Her eyes stared outward, blank and expressionless. The cut wasn’t clean, and it was clear they’d taken a crude instrument of some kind to hack her head off. Zoe would have done anything to survive but sometimes that wasn’t enough.

  I took several shallow breaths. Then let out a scream.

  “Oh, don’t be melodramatic,” Judith said, rolling her eyes. “You knew her perhaps a day.”

  “Get out,” I whispered.

  “Cassius—”

  “Get out!” I snapped.

  Judith’s gaze hardened, then softened as she sighed. “You always were blind, deaf, and dumb to the world around you. I shouldn’t be surprised that hasn’t changed in five years. I’ll speak with you later when you’ve had a chance to calm yourself.”

  I cursed her under my breath, cursed Zoe for creating her, and cursed myself for believing this research could be anything but blasphemy. I lied to myself that Zoe’s murder of the Rhea’s crew and Judith’s actions were out of character for those from whom they had been cloned.

  It made me feel better.

  “You are not my wife,” I whispered. “I don’t care what Janice does to me. You’re not. You’re a—”

  “Copy? Like you were of your father.”

  I closed my eyes. “Maybe I am.”

  Judith looked at her feet. “I hope you feel otherwise soon, as the world you knew is about to fail. The Cognition A.I. is almost ready and our agents in the Sector Network and Jump Beacon Navigation Core are going to render all of the Commonwealth’s advantages moot.”

  “Vengeance won’t solve anything.”

  Judith smiled. “Foolish, for vengeance is a salve which heals the heart better than any lover’s caress. It is, however, but a welcome bonus to our goals. When you are in a better mood, I will show you this is nothing less than preventing the destruction of humanity itself.”

  I tried to get myself to care, tried to muster some last bit of curiosity about my situation, but the combined weight of it all broke me. Instead, I just lowered my head and stared at the bloody gore around the drain at my feet. There was nothing more to say and I was ready for death, whatever form it took.

  It didn’t come.

  Instead, Judith just picked up her belongings and departed through the cell door, leaving me alone. To add insult to injury, she turned off the power and left me alone in the dark. The smells, fear, and guilt assaulted me even as I couldn’t but shiver in the cooler-than-normal humid air.

  Bastards.

  The dark held no solace, nor did death come. Instead, it only held a burning desire to finish what I had started. Hoisting my legs up, I climbed up the chain I was suspended from and braced my feet against the ceiling. Pressing with all of my weight against the metal plate above, I tried to rip out the electric winch that kept me suspended.

  I was a cyborg after all, better than human, and would not allow myself to be held prisoner like this. I pulled for the better part of ten minutes until the sweat of my hands caused me to lose my grip and fall downward, causing my arms to snap once more above my head.

  “Dammit!” I shouted, feeling the handcuffs dig deeper into my wrists. “Fuck you, Lucifer, for putting me in this situation! Fuck you, ancestors! Fuck you, Go—”

  I was about to say more when red emergency lights illuminated the room and the chain above my head suddenly released itself. I tumbled onto the bloody ground below and felt my handcuffs open next, leaving me confused as well as battered.

  Looking around my cell, I saw the metal room’s door slide open and a brown-skinned man in a gray security guard attire walk in, carrying a shock prod. Wrapping my hand in the chain, which had suspended me, I smashed him across the face, then grabbed the shock prod and jabbed it into his throat. The man tried to let out a scream but gurgled and fell to the ground unconscious.

  Looking up at the ceiling, I saw there was a Security Eye staring down at me, but it wasn’t moving. Whoever had released me had also turned it off. It made me briefly wonder how the security guard had known to come in, but I decided I didn’t care. Stripping him of his clothes and plasma pistol, I decided I would rather risk death at the hands of Rin-O’Harra guards than rely on Judith’s mercy.

  Stepping out into the dungeon, I saw the octagonal halls were littered with the bodies of bioroid guards, all of them coughing up white blood on the ground as they mo
ved their hands erratically. There was a single human guard, a Shogun female, looking down at her fellows. Looking up, her eyes widened as she realized I wasn’t her companion.

  I shot her in the face before she could draw her weapon.

  What was going on here?

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I was reminded of the revolt on Prisoner-1138 or, as my father called it, the Gulag, when Prince Germanicus exiled hundreds of political prisoners to serve time with the absolute worst and most violent of offenders in the Archduchy. It had been a simple enough plan—get the rabble-rousers and dissidents killed by the hardcore offenders. As my father explained, Germanicus was too much of an idiot to think a bunch of charismatic speakers with an army of hardened killers might be a problem.

  The situation here wasn’t exactly comparable, all of the prisoners seemed to be locked up with the exception of me, but the aftermath looked identical. The ground was littered with bioroids who’d all been subject to a kill command with the surviving staff being few and far between. Also, the entire prison was locked down with the aforementioned staff as trapped as I was.

  “Do you think they’re going to purge us?” a brown-skinned woman in a gray jumpsuit with a cap asked. She was sitting at one of the guard stations near my block with a set of blank monitors in front of her and lockers against the walls. Cassie, as her nametag read, wasn’t very observant or guard shifts changed often enough that she didn’t seem to mind my entering wearing the clothes of one of her dead comrades.

  “No,” I said, typing away at the computer in front of me. “It’s probably a drill.”

  “A drill where they destroy fourteen million credits worth of bioroids?”

  “If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead,” I said.

  “Oh, right.” Cassie was seemingly glad to have any kind of reassurance.

  Whoever had disabled the security on my cell had also left all of the information centers on the prison open, too. I was able to download schematics for the dungeon, prisoner locations, and the codes for their individual release to my brain without difficulty. What I couldn’t do was lift the lockdown on the dungeon, find out what was going on the outside, or make use of the elevators. The last part was especially galling since the dungeon was, essentially, one long octagonal tube with several dozen levels stretching down into the ocean.

  I’d make do, though.

  Cassie turned around to look at me directly. “So, do you work on level 16 or 18? I haven’t seen you before.”

  “You know, that’s a very interesting story,” I said, turning around and jabbing her in the throat with the shock baton.

  Cassie threw up before passing out on the ground, falling out of her chair. Checking her vital signs to make sure she wasn’t dead, I looked at the shock baton. “Overpowered Shogun pieces of shit.”

  Handcuffing her to her chair, I checked the lockers and found a small armory within. I removed an AP-81 plasma rifle for myself and took two more, which I strapped over my shoulders. It made me look less like a prison guard and more like an insurgent, but I was going to need to arm my friends.

  Assuming they were still alive.

  Judith hadn’t been lying about their treatment, at least with Isla, William, and Hiro all present down here. I was tempted just to fetch Isla and William, but I didn’t like loose ends. Heading out of the guard station, my stolen magnetic boots clunked against the white goop covering everything. There were a dozen dead bioroids, male and female, scattered across the ground of this level alone, their glassy vacant eyes staring outward.

  Even when it was benefiting me, I couldn’t help but be disgusted at the casual waste of life on display here. I had no idea how many bioroids had been working here but they’d all been snuffed with the same disdain as the crew of the Rhea. In that respect, I supposed, bioroids and humans were equal. I hadn’t given any thought to the individual faces on Kolthas after all but, now, I couldn’t help but think of them.

  Hiro was located on this floor and counting the unnumbered metal doors, I eventually came to #7 and proceeded to enter the code for his chamber on a keypad by the doorframe. When the large metal panel slid open, I was surprised by the sight that greeted me.

  My associate was strapped to a crucifix-like device that held his arms and legs bound with hundreds of needles into his legs, arms, and the sides of his head. He had been stripped naked and there were numerous tubes to allow the device’s torture to continue if he lost control of his bowels. Monitors checked his vital signs even as a real-time scan of his brain was conducted.

  The Embrace of Lamia.

  I came from a world I now acknowledged to be one of the most barbaric in the Spiral. A world that thought nothing of duels, neo-feudalism, and assassinating your rivals’ children but the Embrace of Lamia had been banned by our government for centuries. It was a device designed to inflict the maximum amount of pain a human body could endure, then inject the right combination of memory drugs as well as stimuli to prevent permanent brain damage. A subject could be tortured without ever going insane or breaking down enough for it to stop.

  “My God, Hiro, what did you do?” I asked, staring at the sight, unable to fathom they would do this to any normal prisoner.

  Hiro gave a mirthless chuckle. His body was covered in sweat and there were numerous signs they’d been at it for hours. “I threatened Janice and said the Commonwealth would burn her planet from orbit.”

  “That was…stupid.”

  “So it seems.” He closed his eyes then opened them. “Are you here to rescue me?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  I lifted up my stolen plasma rifle, looking to both my sides to make sure no one was coming. “Don’t take this personally but I’m not going to let you threaten my people again.”

  “I never called in about Cognition A.I.” Hiro spit some saliva, which had been building up in his mouth.

  “What?”

  “I should have done it. The moment I encountered it, I should have killed everyone involved and called for backup. We then should have traced the signal back to Shogun and shelled the planet from orbit. I couldn’t, though. I’ve followed orders since…but I couldn’t…”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “Not if the madmen here destroy the Commonwealth.”

  “Cognition A.I. aren’t capable of doing that anymore. There are safeguards.”

  “They don’t work.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Hiro took a deep breath, which was funneled through a ventilator. “The defenses against Cognition A.I. don’t work. For a system and economy to function the way it does, it must have a constant free-flow of information. Cognition A.I. are designed with universal keys to access that information in order to collate it. The Fixers have three working for them and the one built by Zoe contains all the information she gained from ours.”

  “Zoe was working for Ida. She sabotaged her project.”

  “So Ida let her believe.”

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Destroy it, please.”

  “All right.” I aimed my rifle and shot him in the head. All of monitors immediately flatlined, filling my ears with a ringing noise, which only stopped when I shut the door in front of me.

  One more life lost to this insane business.

  Listening to the sounds of magnetic boots walking around the grate walkways above me, I proceeded to look for a way to the level below where William and Isla were located. There was no stairwell beside the four elevators in the center of the chamber and I wasn’t capable of prying open the doors.

  Searching on the ground, I saw an emergency trap door built into steel bars and pulled it open, finding a collapsible ladder at the bottom which I unfolded and shimmied down. Much to my surprise, there were dead humans alongside the deactivated bioroids. They looked like they’d had their chests pulled out and necks broken.

  “Yeah, that’s not good,” I muttered, count
ing the cells again. I found William’s first and hoped to God it wasn’t another example of Janice’s hospitality.

  I wasn’t so lucky.

  The chamber lacked the Embrace of Lamia but, instead, possessed merely William sitting on a bench and staring at the ground in front of him. He was still wearing his clothes from earlier and there were no signs he’d been tortured.

  They’d just taken his arm.

  William’s right arm had been surgically removed at the shoulder with several surgical gauze and synthflesh patches where they’d sliced it away. It was a simple but effective manner of preventing further resistance from a prisoner.

  Or so I thought.

  “Fuck you!” William shouted, leaping from his bench, and charged at me with his shoulders aimed to tackle me. I was so taken aback by his sudden assault that he slammed directly into my chest and smashed me against the elevator doors behind me. The result was like being hit by an aircar, only to be compounded by William driving his knee into my sternum before head-butting me across the back of the neck. William then used his left hand to make a grab for my plasma rifle while I was dazed.

  “You imbecile, it’s me!” I shouted, fully aware I was seconds away from getting killed by my own comrade.

  William stopped struggling. “Cassius?”

  “Yes!”

  William pulled away and stared at me. “They gave you a fucking facelift? They took my damn arm!”

  “Speak up, I don’t think they heard you in Lucifer City.”

  William slammed his forehead into my nose, knocking me back.

  I grabbed my bleeding nose with my free hand. “What the hell was that for?”

  “Being an ass!”

  I paused. “All right, that’s fair. Either way, we need to keep it down. There’s still guards around here, just not many. I also don’t think they’ve been able to contact the outside palace because, well, no one has come to reinforce them.”

  “Give me one of those guns.”

  I stared at him. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

  William glared.

  “Fine,” I said, handing him a rifle.

  William set it on spray and rapid fire with his teeth, increasing my respect for the man. I didn’t know if he’d be any good with it, but I knew he’d do his damnedest either way. It was about that time that I stopped hearing boots moving above us.