by M. R. Forbes
He climbed three flights of steps, covering half the height of the mansion before a light went on and he had to duck into a dark corner while a servant passed by, carrying a tray of half-eaten food. He waited a minute for the woman to vanish, and then continued up, all the way to the top. If there was one thing he had learned in his years as a trained killer, it was that despite all of the property at their disposal, the powerful still kept a fairly tight radius, placing their most commonly used rooms in close proximity. What he wanted was Mars’ office, and access to her mainframe. He wanted to check her messages, her logs, her data stores. He wanted to prove his hunch.
If he couldn’t?
She would never know he had been there.
He padded across a long, open corridor, with a view all the way down to the ground floor. A massive chandelier hung in the center of the space, crystal and gold, probably another Earth relic. He checked each room quickly, scanning through for occupants and seeking the familiar signature of a terminal.
He knew he had found Mars’ bedroom when his scanner picked up two bodies on infrared. They were awake and in motion, one on top of the other. Distracted. Good. He moved on, not surprised to find the Director’s office, and her terminal, was only two doors down.
He slipped in and sat at the desk, running his hand over the surface to activate it while sending a signal to the bot to contain its jamming radius to the room and keep a watch for him. Then he took out another extender, placing it under the desk and connecting through his softsuit. The terminal was locked, and there was only one other way in.
Strong outer security usually meant weaker internal security, and Olus found that true in Mars Eagan’s case as well. He cracked her password within seconds, making his way into her mainframe. He ran a query for the serial number of the part Ensign Klar had discovered. It turned up a short missive about a hijacked shipment. Not helpful, but also not surprising.
He moved on, seeking out the Director’s lifestream storage. It was all organized by date, and that made it easy to find the footage recorded during her abduction. He was surprised to find there was nothing missing. What she had given him was honest and complete. Was he wrong about her? He dug a little deeper, finding his way into her messaging system and scanning the missives there. He found mention of the Fire and the Brimstone, but nothing that would suggest she had been in on the theft, or that she had any connection to anyone named Thraven.
He could hardly believe it. He had been distrustful of her because she was too clean. Now it seemed she really was spotless.
He looked at the code on his visor, and then at the projection rising from the desk, and then back again. There was still something about it that was rubbing him the wrong way. Something he didn’t trust. How would an Outworld ship manage to get so close to Feru without being seen? How could they have the means and know-how to steal the ships without inside help?
He had already checked the employee manifests against the casualty reports. There was no one else who could have been responsible unless they had sacrificed themselves for the cause. While it was possible, it was a hard pill to swallow.
There was one other option. A long shot, maybe. Maybe not. All HSOCs were taught that things are rarely what they seem, and he had enough experience to know the accuracy of that lesson. He regained his momentum, digging through the mainframe until he found a second lifestream.
The one that belonged to Emily Eagan.
He didn’t go to the date and time of the theft, or even right before it. He went back two weeks, quickly scanning through the retinal recordings. If she had anything to do with the attack, she would have needed to contact someone to plan it.
It only took a few seconds of scanning for him to reach the first moment he was sure Emily Eagan would have preferred to keep private. She was with Mars in the bedroom, standing in front of the older woman. Mars was on the bed in some form of white lingerie. Olus didn’t particularly care about either one of their sexual escapades, but he did care about what he caught as he moved through the stream at twenty seconds per frame, something that caused him to back the stream up. He scrubbed forward again more carefully this time, to the midst of their passion.
Only it wasn’t passion, and despite what Mars had told him earlier, he discovered that it just wasn’t true. The older woman laid on the bed, almost still, while the younger directed her in everything, controlling her as though she were a slave, not the owner of one of the most important companies in the Republic. And then, as Emily Eagan seemed to reach the height of her enjoyment, he watched as she leaned forward, tucking her face into Mars’ neck. He could hear the sucking noises. He could hear Emily’s pleasure. She was there for nearly five minutes. When she pulled away, Mars’ neck had two clean puncture wounds in it, a small bruise around them. Emily reached up and wiped her mouth, her hand coming away with a small trickle of blood on it.
He filed the activity away, moving forward in the stream. The episode repeated itself the next night, and the night after that. He glanced over at the door. He had picked up the two bodies on top of one another. Was the same thing happening right now? It didn’t matter. He needed something else. The activity was a curiosity but didn’t prove a damn thing.
Not yet, anyway.
He stopped the stream again a few seconds later. Emily had finished with Mars and had gone to the bathroom to shower. She dressed, and then came into the room he was in, locking the door before turning on the terminal. Her terminal, not Mars’. She had glanced around slightly nervously before switching on the communications relay.
“Gloritant Thraven,” she said.
Thraven appeared before her a moment later, projected to the other side of the desk. Olus thought he was a handsome man, though he found his age hard to place. He could have easily been well over one hundred, depending on whether he used stasis regeneration or not.
“Venerant Alloran,” Thraven said. “Is everything ready?”
“Yes, Gloritant. The arrangements have been made. The assets are in position.”
“And Director Eagan?”
“She has no idea what the ships really are.” She smiled. “She has little idea of anything beyond what we want her to know. My control over her is complete.” She paused. “They work, Gloritant. The ancient technologies. The blueprints of the Covenant. We have proven them.”
“And once we have the Fire and the Brimstone in hand, we will begin to duplicate them,” Thraven said. “The Great Return will be as it was promised. Remember, Venerant. There can be no witnesses.”
“There won’t be. I have arranged it with your Evolent, Trinity. Only Mars will survive. Her lack of complicity will be suspicious to the OSI, and will lead them away from the truth.”
“Do not underestimate Olus Mann. Killshot. He is a worthy adversary. A true Hunter.”
“It was your decision to get him involved.”
“Do not question my decisions,” Thraven snapped.
“Yes, Gloritant,” Emily replied, shrinking back. “I trust your judgment explicitly.”
Olus stopped the stream. As he had guessed, it was Emily Eagan who had betrayed Eagan Heavyworks and the Republic. She was working for Thraven and using a title like the ones Lieutenant Cage had described. Ancient technologies? Blueprints of the Covenant? No witnesses? What had they done here on Feru? What were the Fire and the Brimstone, exactly?
He abandoned the recording, moving through the mainframe in search of the answers to his questions. Had any of the data surrounding the construction of the two ships survived?
He went deeper, scanning through files stuffed with data. It could take a year or more to properly digest the contents of the system, and he had minutes at best. He needed to find something, fast.
His eyes paused on a collection amidst the sea of collections. Not for any other reason than because he didn’t recognize the text of the label. He moved into it, revealing a list of simply numbered documents. He opened the first and froze, staring at what appeared to be a scan
of a scrap something old and yellowed and faded, with dark symbols scratched across the surface in an alphabet he had never seen before.
“It predates humankind,” a voice said behind him.
He turned, reaching for his sidearm as he did, getting it drawn and aimed by the time his eyes landed on Emily Eagan. She was wearing a light nightgown. A small stain of blood rested on her lip. Why the hell hadn’t the bot alerted him that she was coming? For that matter, how the hell had she gotten in here?
“Thraven warned me not to underestimate you,” she said, raising her hand. Immediately, he felt a pressure on his body that left him unable to move. “He had hoped our misdirection would be enough to satisfy, but then you went to Hell and got involved with Abigail Cage. It’s a mistake you’ll come to regret much more than we will.”
Olus struggled against the pressure, but it was no use. For the first time in a long, storied career, he had been caught.
“Kill me and be done with it,” he said, his lips barely able to move.
“Kill you?” Emily said. She shook her head. “No. That would be a waste, and I abhor waste. You’ll make an excellent Convert, Olus. Even if you won’t ever know it.”
“The text,” he said, shifting his eyes toward the terminal. “What does it say?”
Emily laughed. “Always the investigator, aren’t you? It is the cover of a contract so old that it has been long forgotten by many, but not by all. It is the written Covenant between the first true children and our lord and master. The premonition of our Exile, and the promise of our Great Return. It has been carried throughout the millennia, away from the place of our creation and to the furthest reaches of the universe where we have waited for the fruit to ripen, the seeds of our eternal dominance planted and sewn.
We are the sons and daughters of the Slayer of God. We are the Nephilim, and our time has come.”
59
Gant moved quickly through the corridors of the Brimstone, doing his best to keep himself out of sight. It wasn’t that difficult, really. Not when the ship had so few crew members on board, and not when those crew members were mainly stationed on or near the bridge.
He was still struggling to calm himself, still fighting to let go of the torment that followed losing another alpha. Another friend. He still couldn’t accept that he had listened to Abbey and gone to the comm tower, only to return and find her dead, gunned down by a line of soldiers and another one of them.
He still couldn’t quite believe that he had made it to the shuttle before the ramp had finished retracting, squeezing on board and shoving himself into an access hatch in the back of the vessel while the enemy soldiers were still getting settled and clamped in. He wasn’t quite sure how none of them had seen him. Everything was a dark blur since the moment he saw Abbey flailing, the bullets sending blood and flesh and cloth bursting away from her. Since he had felt the thing that reached out for him, trying to control him, to stop him. It had drawn near, and when it had sensed his anger, his resolve, his pure, unadulterated desire to kill, it had withdrawn.
In fear?
In pleasure?
Whatever.
He had done good work, killing five of the soldiers before the one with the power had stopped him and called the retreat. It had been a quick decision to hitch a ride, and at first he had done it so he could finish what he started, killing them as the opportunity came.
He still planned to, but not right away. Queenie wouldn’t have wanted that. The mission was to recover both starships, and he was sure the commander of this one would know where the other one had gone. She would have wanted him to finish the mission, to earn his freedom, and to help the others earn theirs, too. It didn’t matter if he only barely tolerated them, and outright disliked that asshole, Bastion. It was what she would have wanted, and so it was what he would try to do.
Now he was trying to find the engines, eager to dig into the mechanics and start fragging things up. Step one, force the Brimstone out of FTL. Step two, hijack the communications array and start transmitting a beacon that the Faust couldn’t miss. Step three, disable the weapons systems. Step four, continue killing crew members until only the commander remained.
He couldn’t wait to get to step four.
He continued running along the corridor, happy to find that the back of the ship was uninhabited and untended. It seemed the individuals that had stolen the ship didn’t give a shit about how it worked or ensuring that it was operating efficiently. That it worked, that it was operating, seemed to be good enough, even after their targeting systems had somehow gone completely to hell, their torpedo missing the mark and hitting a friendly instead. He was planning to laugh about that one later when he related the story to Pik and Airi and the others. Not Abbey. He clenched his fists. Focus.
It took him nearly thirty minutes to locate the door to the engine room. It was a thick alloy blast door, but the control pad was surprisingly unsecured. Maybe not surprisingly. He doubted the builders thought anybody would ever get onto the ship if it was as nasty as Captain Mann claimed.
He checked the corridors before opening the hatch, slipping in and closing it again from the other side. The onboard systems would register the activity. Would the bridge crew notice? Would they think much of it? He hoped not.
Banks of computers sat on either side of him, a larger diagnostic terminal in the center. A second door sat behind it, another blast door with a small transparency at Terran eye level. The damn Republic insisted on putting things at human height, and it was especially annoying for the more vertically challenged species like himself. Even so, he made his way to the door and looked up at the window. He would need to get into the security systems before he would be able to gain entry, but maybe if he could see what reactor manufacturer Eagan had used he would be able to pre-plan his mischief. He was familiar with all of the latest designs, including the newer ones that had been produced while he was in Hell. He had good connections despite his lack of friendships, or maybe because of it. The other cons had always trusted him to keep his mouth shut.
He reached up, feeling a slight lip between the alloy and glass. He wouldn’t be able to hold himself up for long, but it would only take a second to identify the reactors.
He put his other hand up and dug in with both, jumping and pulling at the same time. His face reached the window, his eyes barely clearing the lip.
He dropped to the ground, slumping against the door, his entire body shaking. He blinked a few times, trying to decide if he had just seen what he thought he had just seen, too terrified to look again.
60
The medical bot stood over its patient, looking down at her without moving. It had been programmed to deal with over two thousand potential injuries to over a dozen intelligent species, its understanding of Terran physiology the most complete of all.
It had no idea what to do.
The body strapped to the gurney in front of it barely looked like a Terran. It had so many wounds and so much shrapnel embedded into it that it appeared as a singular lump of flesh coated in a sheen of blood, and certainly not something that could ever be brought back to its prior condition. Even so, the individuals that had delivered it ordered the medical bot to do something, and so it had processed the instruction and come to a conclusion.
It decided to observe.
It had been observing for nearly an hour. The others had come and gone in turn. It registered that they appeared upset and unhappy, but it was a medical bot and not programmed with emotions. It was programmed with skills that were useful in most cases, but not in this one. It was obvious from the signs that this Terran was dead. How could it heal something dead?
Answer: it couldn’t.
It would stand here and observe until it was ordered to stand down. That was the maximum that it could do. It didn’t understand impatience, and so it remained still and unblinking for two hours more, eyes fixed on the patient. Somewhere in its systems, it registered that the flesh in front of it was changing, altering,
but the impossibility made it struggle to compute.
By the time the patient opened her eyes, its operating system had crashed, and it was nothing more than a dead mass of mechanical parts.
61
The Watchers released the Focus, their hands lifting from the glowing blue orb that floated in the air at their center. The moment they did the glow subsided, the device powering down and sinking back to the pedestal from which it had risen. They looked at one another silently, knowingly, before dispersing back to their prior duties. Mainly, shoring up the damage that had been done to them and taking proper care of the bodies from the remains of the colony on Drune.
One of the Watchers, younger than the others, broke further away, retreating from Central Command and returning to his quarters. It was a simple space, a three-meter-square hewn into the rock, well-apart from the larger cavern where their hidden forces had been stashed. She took up a position in front of a small terminal there, turning it on and checking the connection to the colony’s communications spike. She was pleased to find the spike had remained unharmed. It would have been a challenge to make the report otherwise.
“Sylvan Kett,” she said.
A projection of the Terran appeared a moment later. General Kett was hardly an imposing figure. His build was slight, his features delicate. That spoke only to his physical strength. It was his mind that was the dangerous tool.
“Jequn,” Kett said. “Is it over?”
“Yes, General.”
“What about Cage?”
“She was badly wounded.”
“She escaped?”
“We were forced to use the Focus to protect her, but yes, she escaped.”
“Did the Evolent make the offer?”
“Yes, General.”
“And she refused?”
“Yes, General.”
Kett smiled. “And Yalom?”