“I’m right behind you.” Gau mounted the rooftop ledge and rappelled down in great bounds, pushing off the building’s side with front and rear legs. He detached the grapnel and spooled the rope into its holster on his armor, watching from the alley as the wedge formation of the assault team poured into the wound Kevret’s bombs had gouged in the base’s front entrance.
He counted the last of the forty-five seconds, then followed.
The shaped charges’ explosive yield had been funneled into a cone shape that burst the base’s doors inward. Smoke was everywhere inside the semicircular lobby, obscuring its grand skylight in veils of choking black. No alarms rang; the EMP spikes had cut those nerve endings. Gau flipped down the filter lenses on his helmet, unslung his rifle, and entered the room. The lenses’ embedded display tagged five friendlies, their names labeled in O’o Nezz script. There was only one other warm body visible on the infrared.
The doors had been blown backward off their hinges.
They’d carved a gouge in the curved reception desk below the skylight. Gau glimpsed a spilled pile of plastic flimsies and the wheels of an office chair protruding from beyond one edge of the desk. From around the other crawled a Terran man, coughing dust from the explosion. Dust caked his clothes, face and hair. He rubbed it out of his eyes and peered up at the five Djandjer-Pralsh and Gau.
“What the hell—” His eyes were just beginning to widen when Lorsk shot him. The man sagged, splayed, rolling vulnerable onto his back. The plasma bolt had hit his heart. Lorsk crouched over him and searched his clothes until he came up with a keycard.
“The garrison should be just back there.” Lorsk pointed with the muzzle of his rifle to a door beyond the sprawled corpse. “Form two groups. Gau, Kevret, you’re with me. Uril, Reth, Iqerh, hang back. Provide covering fire if we need it.”
The keycard door opened onto a small antechamber, almost an airlock, that contained another desk. A single Terran in a white uniform trimmed with gray piping was rushing from behind it toward the lobby door. Gau’s plasma bolt took him in the head and he fell in midstride without even a shout. Kevret caught the body before it hit the floor, staggering until Lorsk joined her in propping up the dead weight. At his signal, they dragged the body over to the palm reader.
But before they could get there, the door to the garrison slid open from the other side. Two more Terrans in white uniforms were framed within it, blinking stupidly as they stared at the six Osk. Later Gau would realize they’d been alerted by the shock of the initial blast: Even muffled by the guardhouse door, it must have shaken the whole base. But now there was nothing in him capable of such analysis—he was no more than a smooth machine that swiveled to bring his rifle to bear on the enemy, in near-simultaneous motion with the three Osk behind him. Brilliant plasma bolts seared the air and cut down the two Arrows in the doorway. They fell across the threshold.
There came the smack of flesh and bone against concrete as Lorsk and Kevret dropped their burden. “Go!” Lorsk roared, packing every ounce of volume he could muster into the word.
The six of them surged forward, a wave of armor and weapons and hatred, into the stunned silence of a dormitory that must have been wrapped in evening languor a few minutes before.
Arrow soldiers were everywhere, in those white uniforms or white-and-gray fatigues, half risen in surprise from their bunks or frozen halfway to the door. A group of three sat around a card table, still as a holo-photo, card flimsies falling from their hands. None wore any armor. No rifles were in evidence, not even slung over the back of a chair.
For the space of a heartbeat, no one on either side moved or spoke. Then Lorsk’s command split the silence. “Kill them.”
The tableau exploded as six Osk fired deadly bolts of light into the packed room. Screams and the sizzle of burning flesh filled the air as the Arrows frozen in the room’s center took the brunt of the first volley, collapsing dead or dying where they stood. The card table crashed sideways to the floor in a flurry of cheap plastic cards as the Arrow soldiers tried to take cover behind it. But the surface of the table was no match for streams of superheated plasma; the bolts carved holes in it and the bodies of the soldiers sheltering there. Two of them flopped to the floor, their torsos smoking. The third writhed clear, screaming and clutching the charred mess of one hand. A bolt from Uril’s rifle took care of the screaming.
The survivors of the first wave were scrambling down the aisles of bunks, climbing over their fallen comrades. Not trying to escape, Gau knew in a flash, but going for the rifle racks at the back of the room. “Lorsk!” he shouted, and jerked his head toward the racks.
Lorsk saw the soldiers’ trajectory and its meaning at once.
“Two groups, one to each aisle,” he shouted. “Do not let them get those guns!” The phalanx of Djandjer-Pralsh flowed into two and filled the aisles between bunks with precise, deadly shots, cutting down the soldiers as they raced for their weapons. Gau’s lenses made a lightshow of the slaughter: warm bodies running, twirling as the bolts took them, finally falling and fading from living red to cold, inert blue. He lost count of how many he personally picked off, though it couldn’t have been many—the garrison only employed thirty. The number didn’t matter; what mattered was the smell of burning flesh, of fear and desperation, fading on the ash as their enemy fell and died.
Then it was over. Gau stood with the others at the center of a circle of destruction, breathing hard as though he’d been running. The scents of charred meat and clothing singed his nostrils, but he couldn’t seem to breathe in any slower. “Well,” Iqehr kept saying as she looked around. “Well.” As though the carnage they had just inflicted was an argument she couldn’t refute.
Lorsk was first to snap out of the reverie. “Fan out. Check the bodies,” he said. “Use your hooks on any survivors.” He fished out the metal hook from his cloak and slipped one hand into its cunningly designed grip.
Gau was aware of the weight of his own device in his cloak pocket. He shouldered his rifle and withdrew the faux Baskar claw, hefting it. The inner edge had been sharpened, making a sickle of the meat hook. Crude and clumsy compared to his blades, but it would do the job.
They fanned out down the aisles and common area, six spokes of a deadly wheel. What few survivors there were, given away by their gasps and bubbling groans, were too injured to put up a fight. Gau helped dispatch them as a matter of thoroughness, of making the “Baskar” aspect of the assault look realistic, but he was detached from the motions his hands and arms were performing. He felt dazed and dozy from the battle comedown. The expressions on the others’ faces were as closed as his own must be, their scents blank as stone. None of them were as alert as they should have been.
Gau almost missed the man limping down the aisle that paralleled his. The Terran’s shuffling gait was masked by the sound of groans and hooks cutting flesh, his breathing muffled by a hand held over his mouth. But though the man could muffle his breathing, he couldn’t mask the whoosh of a door sliding open as he slapped a bloody palm against it.
Gau didn’t call out to alert the team. Instead, he dashed almost silently to the end of his aisle, toward the revealed door.
The man’s back was to him, his attention distracted by what he must have imagined the nearness of his escape. He didn’t see Gau curve the sharpened hook around his neck. The man jerked forward—out of surprise or instinctive momentum—
and the hook bit flesh with a warm hiss of blood. The trickle became a gush as Gau pulled back on the hook. It needed more force to cut and tear than his own blades would have, and the result was comparably excessive: The Terran’s head flopped back too far on his neck, the tendons on either side of the trachea severed. Gau sidestepped as the Terran fell straight backward. The hook had lodged in the neck, and Gau cursed as the leather grip was yanked off his hand.
Kevret padded up beside the twitching body. “Nice work. I didn’t even see him.”
Lorsk appeared beside her like a shadow, standin
g above Gau where he crouched. “Looks like he nearly got away from you, too,” he said blandly.
Gau didn’t rise to that. “He was trying to escape through there.” He pointed at the door. The room beyond was unlit, hard to make out through the relative glare of the barracks.
“What’s in there?” Kevret asked. “Some kind of armory?”
“Let’s see.” He stepped over the Terran’s body into the next room and waited for his eyes to adjust. The outlines, not of weapon racks, but of desks and consoles leapt out of the dimness. “It’s an office. A command center, maybe.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Why would he run in here? Why not make for the rifle racks?”
Kevret was right. It didn’t make sense. The circular office had no other exits Gau could see—the man would have only succeeded in trapping himself. Unless escape hadn’t been the goal. The palm lock and the office’s central location, behind two keycard-locked doors and the garrison itself, indicated it was probably a restricted area, possibly the center of operations for this particular node. Lorsk had chosen this base for their first attack because it was relatively small and out of the way—not one of the larger, visitor-facing branches closer to Central District. But the White Arrows were ostensibly a missionary outreach organization; if this base wasn’t greeting visitors or hobnobbing with Terran government officials, what was it doing?
On a hunch, he crouched next to the cooling body of the man he’d just killed. A search of the pockets revealed nothing, but then he thought to check around the neck, and pulled up a bloody lanyard with an ID tag dangling from it. Printed on it was a name and below that, an embedded chip. Gau wiped it on the man’s clothes until it was as clean of blood as he could get it.
“What are you doing?” Lorsk said.
“Following a hunch.” He turned back into the command center without waiting for Lorsk to answer, scanning the workstations hoping to find one that matched the name on the ID, but none of them were labeled. There was, however, a flimsy printout sitting on one of the desks. Gau looked closer—it seemed to represent layers of complicated machinery, arranged in a way that looked familiar. Almost like a schematic of a spaceship. He moved to pick it up.
“Leave it,” Lorsk said. “None of us should be touching anything.”
“But there’s something here,” Gau said. “Anyway, I know how to wipe down a crime scene.”
“And you can wipe down DNA, can you? After you’ve spread it everywhere?” Lorsk stretched out his arm. “This is to be a controlled, contained strike. Now give me the lanyard.”
Gau gripped the ID card tighter. “That Arrow was trying to get in here for a reason. There could be something here they don’t want us to see.”
“I said leave it, Gau!” From the sudden rough curtness in Lorsk’s voice, Gau realized he had pushed too hard. Kevret looked between them uncertainly. Anger glittered in the faction leader’s eyes, under the strain of field command, that promised later retribution if Gau didn’t back off. It might already be too late.
Gau stood halfway between the desk and Lorsk for a moment longer; a near-physical pull seemed to be trying to turn his gaze back to the schematics, if that was what they were.
But the mission clock that counted the seconds along with his heartbeats knew the six of them had been there too long. He handed over the lanyard. Lorsk took it with a jab and placed it back around the corpse’s neck.
A further few precious minutes passed as the six of them sprayed the barracks, antechamber, lobby, and any likely surfaces in the office with hydrogen peroxide to break down any traces of cells and DNA. As they slipped into the security of the dark alleys around the base, Gau touched his gauntlet radio to his mouth.
“I’ll retrieve the EMP spikes and meet you at base.” All as planned.
Six voices acknowledged their receipt. Gau counted the time until the others were out of shortwave range, chewing his cheek to dispel the tense dread that had hardened his stomach. He shouldn’t have pushed Lorsk like that, especially not on this first mission. Gau needed to keep in his good graces by delivering uncomplicated victories, not going off-mission to follow his instincts.
Yet Lorsk was a fool to ignore those instincts. Those instincts were what had gotten Gau out of Za alive.
Gau crept back into the ruined base. Six Osk outside in Diego Two were indeed at risk. But one Osk, he figured, could cover his tracks.
Chapter Eleven
Gau reached the border of the Thicket only fifteen minutes behind schedule. The alley he was in simply ended in a ten-meter-high retaining wall, its white convex side turned sodium yellow by the night-lights embedded in it.
Small access tunnels punctured the wall, which was more like a supporting scaffold than any kind of barrier to the living fungal forest beyond. Within the tunnel a railed catwalk ran along the Thicket’s floor, one of dozens of fast-travel corridors that wound through to accommodate foot traffic.
The Thicket climbed in a crimson profusion of shapes another fifteen meters above its trellis. Far above his head, Gau glimpsed clubbed stems the size of buildings, sprouting from nests of feathery tendrils. Massive latticed domes supported thin spires that looked as though a stiff breeze would crumple them. Thick twisting hoops arced up from the mass and down like the trunks of enormous trees, jostled by swooping wedges of matter that looked like wings or sails or, in one disturbing case, hands. The entire morass was made of the same glistening, luxuriantly red fungus, a wall between the worlds that ran all around Florisal District and separated the affluent side of Diego Two from the poorer districts and non-Terran enclaves.
But the Thicket barrier, like Diego Two’s Terran and non-Terran sides, was a more porous membrane than the powers that be would have liked. Gau slipped into the reddish gloom of the access tunnel, savoring the fecund, vegetable smell wafting from the far end as he sidled along the railed walkway. This shortcut would make up for the unauthorized time he’d spent searching the White Arrow base’s files, but only if he moved quickly.
Automatic lighting winked on along the path as it sensed his movement. He squinted in the glare, looking off the path until he found the patch nestled between two hyphae like huge buttressed roots. Gau hunched his upper body and squeezed through a gap in the railing, dropping the few centimeters to the Thicket floor. The motion-activated lights cut off, returning the comforting red-tinged darkness.
Despite its spongy appearance, the ground didn’t squish under his boots. Most of the moisture was locked up inside the Thicket’s giant tap hyphae, and the low light–tolerant parasitic vines and creepers that grew on the fungal forest’s trunks absorbed the rest. Aival-native insectoids and less identifiable creatures scattered, chittering in indignation, as Gau crouched before the hollow he’d spotted. The sides of the hollow trunk were layered with shelves and folds of fungus stippled with silky mycelia that hung in a curtain over the interior. He parted the hanging overgrowth and found the almost-invisible seam in the mycelial floor within the trunk’s hollow.
Gau carefully flipped up the lid of fungal flesh covering his cache and did a quick survey. In the shallow hole hacked from the ground were emergency credit chit packs, a second set of keys to the Djandjer-Pralsh’s tenement, disposable comm units that could be topped up by vendors in the slum city who wouldn’t ask questions.
He began to strip out of his armor, decoupling each plate and laying it on the springy substrate of the Thicket. From secret compartments in his helmet and chest plate, he removed the tiny cameras he’d used to record that night’s raid and popped open their data ports.
The two data slivers he removed were needles of spun diamond no longer than his fingernail. Cheap one-shot models, the data burned onto them impossible to overwrite or hack.
Now that the faction’s assault on the White Arrows was officially underway, it was time to set his own campaign in motion. He’d promised Torres. More importantly, he’d promised himself.
Gau laid the data slivers besi
de the supplies in the cache.
He removed a small aerosol can from the folds of his cloak and sprayed the ragged edges of the hole. Standard kit for a resident of D2, the anti-fungal spray would slow the Thicket’s growth and destroy its fledgling spores. It could only be legally used outside the confines of the Thicket where the fungus was not permitted to root. But if his spraying technique had been good, it should keep his cache from being overgrown. Anyway, he’d given it only inorganic matter to chew on. Even this red jungle could not digest plastic and metal without help. Instead, it would keep the evidence he’d recorded safe until he needed to collect it.
The sky had dulled from black to dark gray by the time Gau arrived in the side alley bordering the Djandjer-Pralsh’s tenement. The detour to his Thicket cache had taken a little longer than he’d have liked, but it was worth the peace of mind of using a new cache rather than one of those he kept around Tarbreak and Los Gatos.
As he watched the fading points of stars above the canyon of the alley, Gau felt a belated rush of fatigue. He flopped down beside the wall, cracking joints and stretching muscles languidly.
Though he scanned the entrance to the street as he stretched, it was an automatic reflex, drilled into him from his seph training and his years on the streets before that. Gau felt more self-assured than he had in all the months since returning to Diego Two. Despite the fight it had almost precipitated with Lorsk, Gau’s search of the base’s files had been worthwhile; if he had time, it would be quite illuminating to learn why the Universal Church had leased a hyperstream gate that led to a tract of empty space. The schematics had been less forthcoming, but he’d understood enough to know they depicted spacecraft of some kind—spacecraft whose existence the Church didn’t want anyone to know about. Unfortunately for them, they hadn’t counted on him. Gau would expose their secrets, turn them to his own advantage as he always had.
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