by Brian Trent
* * *
It wasn’t possible to assail Quinn’s port. The place was a fortified citadel built from the wealth of his coffers. It looked like shit, but the subterranean levels would be impregnable to all but a goddamn drillbot, and there were guards, mechs, and enough wetware to discourage an arky assault. Quinn was a savvy survivor. He wanted the future.
But he wasn’t their target anyway. The missiles would need to leave port sometime, and Quinn never permitted anyone to enter his airspace. Stillness would have to cart the missiles off-site for a pickup.
And we’ll be ready for them when they do, she thought.
Celeste’s first order of business was to launch a Hassan airhound from the Mantid. The probe stayed low to avoid detection, and quickly confirmed that the missiles were still topside. The news made her smirk. Quinn wasn’t about to risk his ass (or the perfect asses of his prized harem) by carting antimatter missiles through his underground tunnels. One misstep and he really would end up in space.
While her squad waited, they recharged their CAMO and loaded all weapons. Everyone realized what this meant.
The time had come to abandon the Americas.
She called King D. through the Mantid’s secure channels.
“It was going to happen sooner or later,” she told him via comlink.
King D. was a black silhouette onscreen. In person he was a bear of a fellow, thick, with hands like catcher’s mitts and arms like tree trunks, but he carried the pounds well.
“The time has come to put your skills to better use anyhow,” D. said thoughtfully. “The timetable, Celeste. It’s approaching fast.”
She felt herself wanting to grin. “And Quinn?”
“Rest assured I won’t forget him.”
“How did Stillness even know about this trade?”
King D.’s black silhouette sighed. “There are no secrets in the world anymore. We’ve all become the guy who whispers his secrets into a hole in the ground…”
Celeste nodded. “…and every flower opens the next morning to broadcast it to the world.”
“Get my heirlooms back, Celeste.”
“I will. I promise.”
The comline cut. Celeste cracked her back and joined her compatriots in the main room.
Twelve minutes later the Hassan pinged an alert. A small truck was departing Quinn’s. The airhound tracked it into the Wastelands north-east of Quinn’s compound. Celeste tapped behind her ear and a map sprang onto her eye. Old roads crisscrossed the country.
Then she saw the airfield.
Stillness was going to fly the missiles out of here.
“Suit up,” Celeste said. “The Hassan counts twenty-four soldiers accompanying the missiles.”
Jeff shot her a look. “Twenty-four soldiers? Really?”
She slapped a needle-cartridge into her assault rifle, ignoring him and feeling an irrational flare of anger at his doubt. The Mantid’s interior glowed in winter blue; the squad moved in machinelike synchronicity, like figures in a grim clockwork panorama. Allie popped two canisters into her haze guns, her tightly cropped blond hair and palish skin giving a metallic patina in the light. Silent Rajnar strapped his CAMO suit on and sleeved a shieldfist on one arm, like some futuristic gladiator about to perform before a Roman crowd. Jamala was already suited and loaded, her heatlance in hand and a Gauss sniper rifle slung at her back. She gave Celeste an inscrutable look.
The cargo ramp dropped behind them. Jamala glanced once more to Celeste, her eyes flicked to Jeff, and then she hopped down into the Hudson’s ankle-deep shallows. Allie and Rajnar followed.
Jeff didn’t move. He swiveled on his chair, looking less like a seasoned soldier and more like an Old Calendar small-town football player with rosy cheeks, freckles, and promises of Mom’s apple pie in his eyes.
“Celeste,” he began, “Twenty-four soldiers…”
“We’ve handled numbers like that before.”
“In an open airfield? With no cover except for fucking grass?”
“Move your ass,” she hissed.
Jeff stood fluidly. “Quinn will expect this.”
For a horrible moment Celeste thought her lover was actually going to defy her. But he only brushed past her and leapt into the river below with an empty expression that made Celeste want to cry.
To the Mantid, she said, “Standby if we need aerial support. Let me know the instant an aircraft enters the vicinity.”
[Of course, Celeste.]
The night was cold for July. Reeds slapped at them as they pushed towards the airfield with the Hassan’s datamap feeding them real-time updates. At Celeste’s command they went CAMO a half klick from their target, spreading out and approaching the field from as wide an angle as possible. Celeste found her eyes straying to the dark sky. The Mantid would detect approaching aircraft far before her eyes could spot one.
She decided to focus on the twenty-four Stillness soldiers. That constituted a formidable opposition.
Stillness was a fanatic’s fanatic. Decrying the perversion of humanity through technology.
Meaning they rarely had wetware or augs of any kind.
Stillness tapped the Wastes for recruits, whipped them into shape, and set them to work. Twenty-four soldiers, even well-armed, couldn’t stand up to a pair of experienced arky hunters.
But technology wasn’t everything. Twenty-four armed opponents equated to a lot of chances for something to go wrong.
Celeste exhaled forcefully and steeled herself.
The reeds ended at the airfield’s circular perimeter. She pressed on, careful not to rustle the vegetation more than what a riverside breeze should produce. She amped her optics and studied the visible troopers, each armed with low-grade fleschette rifles, each surveying the airfield with insectile thermoptic lenses.
No aircraft yet.
She frowned at this. The Mantid’s sensors weren’t picking up anything en route, either. Why the hell did they bring the missiles out here so early?
She gazed at the trucks. There was a huge guy patrolling between them, a cigar in his mouth, and a beebomb launcher cradled in both bulging arms.
Celeste tapped out commands on her virtuboard fingertips. She ordered Silent Rajnar to take the beebomber, and advised him to be careful around the trucks. A single round puncturing the missile carapace could disrupt stasis, and the IPC would spot the resulting explosion from Mars.
In the center of the airfield, two men were intently talking. Celeste didn’t know a lot about Stillness hierarchies, but clearly these two fellows represented command ranks within the organization. She knew the cult had begun in the Wastes three centuries ago. Recruits were always Outlanders; the deprived and depraved, the weak-willed who wanted to belong to a stronger gang. No government, no technology, no society other than pure, true democracy where people lived off the land and by their own rules. Even their robes – green and gold – were the colors of harvest.
Bunch of fucking anarchists.
Celeste had always shrugged them off as mindless idiots. StrikeDown was altogether different (though arkies tended to lump the groups together.) King D. wanted to shake civilization’s ivory towers and let Outlanders draw from the technological well. The medicines, treatments, and a rightful vote in Earth Republic were his coveted prize. Quinn had it wrong; it was StrikeDown’s concrete promises that were gaining popularity, not the brainless evangelism of anarchist priests.
Wasn’t it?
Celeste knelt, aware of two soldiers only five meters away. Their robes scintillated like eelskin in the breeze, simultaneously stiff and fluid.
Over the comlink, Jeff said, “That must be the High Priest.”
Celeste frowned, glancing again to the commanding officers. The shorter man was dark, squat, and mustachioed; he looked like a Mongolian Warlord from the Gobi itself. But the second commander
formed an unexpected contrast, like a well-dressed CEO surrounded by underpaid millworkers. His clothes were fine livery, not the green beetle armor and cloaks of his brethren. The man was tall, Nordic-skinned and blond, with peculiarly bland stone-cut features.
“That guy is jacked with tech or I’m a glop,” Jeff said. “He might even be a Seraph.”
Celeste heard the others hold their breaths at this comment. They had dealt with Stillness Seraphs once before. It wasn’t the kind of encounter any of them wished to repeat. They might eschew wetware, but they permitted use of deadly tech.
The High Priest (if that’s what he was) rotated his head as smoothly as a ball bearing in Celeste’s direction and she got a clear view of his eyes through her scope. Twin starbursts of wintry blue irises like four-pointed diamonds over black pupils. She wondered if Stillness had benefactors in arky society.
She steadied her breathing. None of her questions mattered right now. The missiles only.
StrikeDown.
“Ten seconds,” she whispered to her posse. “I’ll take the leader. Rajnar, Allie, follow me. Jamala’s got the scatter. And don’t hit the damn missiles.”
“Thanks,” Jamala countered. “Don’t feel like dying today.”
Celeste’s rifle-mike was picking up bits and pieces from the tall man.
“…will be sequestered for the duration. Mother Eris is on a very special mission in the meantime. Time slips away from us.”
You got that right, she thought, putting his head in her targeting reticle and squeezing the trigger.
The high-caliber silenced round blew out the side of his head in a spatter of skull. The lieutenant he had been addressing stared dumbly at the fallen body. In the microsecond after she pulled the trigger, the two nearest soldiers must have detected the whine of the shot in the hypersonic band. They jerked their rifles in Celeste’s direction and fired.
A blaze of fleschettes exploded off her breastplate. She smelled hot metal and allowed the force to knock her backwards, where her head smacked against cold mud. The other stream missed her and turned the reeds into confetti over her head. Jamala’s response came at once. A searing lash of heat and fire turned both soldiers to ash.
Celeste rolled, flattening the reeds, and hopped up. Any pretense of organization from the Stillness troops evaporated, and they fell into the chaos of a disrupted ant colony. She glimpsed the beebomber perform an agile combat roll between the two trucks as Rajnar’s fire perforated the tires.
The Mongolian-looking lieutenant was still crouching by his master’s fallen body, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Celeste killed him where he was, then tucked and rolled again.
A blast of crackling light swept out in a halo across the reeds. It missed Celeste’s head by an inch, but caught Jeff and Allie where they stood, invisible. As the light died, Celeste saw that her compatriots were now stained white.
Phosphire. Painting them as bright, white targets.
Celeste raced towards the trucks. Bullets whined and zipped around her. She saw the beebomber’s legs beneath the first vehicle.
There was a hollow-sounding whump! as he fired off a golden canister into the air.
“Got it!” Jeff cried. His half-invisible, half-striped body took aim and fired an EMP charge just as the canister exploded into an angry cloud of waspbots. There was a hiss and crackle, and then their steel bodies littered the reeds like rain.
Celeste threw herself to the ground, switched ammo, and fired at the bomber’s legs. The blaze chewed straight through both calves so fast that he was suddenly twelve inches shorter, standing on shredded stumps, shrieking wildly in horror, tipping over. The next shot pureed his head off his neck.
The gunfire was dying down. She got back to her feet, surveying the destruction. A surviving waspbot landed on her neck; she slapped it off and hastily crunched it underfoot.
“Celeste!”
It was Jeff’s voice, and she hurried over to see Allie on the ground, her facemask peeled off her camouflaged, white-streaked body. Blood spurted from her neck.
Jeff’s forehead creased as he worked to stabilize the wound with a medpatch. “Artery’s hit.”
Celeste signaled the Mantid for extraction. Jamala and Rajnar crisscrossed on the far side of the field, trying to ferret out survivors.
“The missiles!” Celeste called to them. She gave her lover a pained stare. “Grab them! I’ll take care of Allie.”
Jeff looked once more to his wounded comrade, then back to Celeste.
“StrikeDown better be fucking worth it. I’m tired, Celeste.”
He gripped her hand and squeezed hard. Then he joined the others to load up the first of the missiles onto their moving straps.
Celeste’s heart was pounding. Allie looked dead already, like a blond corpse, despite the medpatch halting the bloodflow below her chin.
“Hang tight,” she told her friend. “Mantid is on its way.”
Allie’s breathing came in ragged gasps. “You…and Jeff?”
Celeste drew a breath. She laced her fingers with Allie’s and kneaded them together as if in prayer. Helplessly, she answered, “Yes.”
Allie smiled. “I already…know…what to get you two when—”
Celeste heard something come scuttling behind her.
She assumed Quinn might send one of his Bombay-model mech-spiders to guard his new friends. To that end she had attached several EM rounds to her multigun rifle. The blasts probably wouldn’t disable the heavily shielded body, but the leg actuators might be paralyzed and that was good enough. She switched over to this tertiary ammo and swung the weapon around.
It wasn’t a mech-spider.
Her eyes widened at the sight of the High Priest she had just killed, the man with wintry blue eyes, rushing at her. His face was a crimson mask of hatred. At this range, she saw that his brilliant eyes were throwing wild incandescence like search beams.
Celeste was almost too shocked to move. It was only her years of training that galvanized her. She lifted her weapon, suppressing her bewildered questions for later examination, and flicked to the needle rounds.
“Plaga!” the man shrieked, and he transformed into blurred mass faster than she could pull the trigger. She was struck headlong as if by a train, instantly airborne, the air expelled from her lungs in a painful burst. Her body collided with bone-snapping force against a storage crate.
Celeste blinked stupidly, dazed beyond comprehension. Blazing, liquid pain crackled through her fractured skull and pulverized left leg.
She stared as Jeff and Jamala saw what had happened. They lowered the missile. Silent Rajnar came in, fleschettes burning the night. The spray turned the High Priest into a cloud of meat, through which those burning searchlight eyes never wavered.
Jeff and Jamala rushed in, adding to the execution. The High Priest was disintegrating under the attack, but his luminous eyes seemed to stay above the amorphous cloud of viscera, and those eyes flushed a hellish shade of scarlet.
Looking more enraged than in pain, he burst into a dazzling fireball.
Blue-white forks of electricity arced across the airfield. The shockwave flopped Celeste over like a Styrofoam doll until she landed face-down in a small brackish pond. But even in those surreal microseconds before drowning, she knew her friends – and the love of her life – had been killed.
Celeste sobbed against the water.
Then, with her final conscious thought, she breathed it in to drown.
Chapter Six
Gethin Gets Angry
In Tycho Hospital’s security office, Gethin sat in a chair like a reprimanded child while two officers watched him. A third was accessing the hospital’s surveillance feed.
Gethin’s green eyes glared. On his optics, little ID tags appeared near the men: VICTOR SLOTKIN, PAUL TERRY, and crouched at the security terminal wa
s DAMIAN DELGOBBO. Their corporate profiles swirled as tiny lavender icons at the bottom corner of their names.
Gethin’s nose itched, but he resisted scratching it; his hands were entirely encased in glasstic cuffs, anyway. He wanted to enforce an image of tranquility, especially since, to his utter embarrassment, he found himself stricken with a compulsive need for food and sex.
It had started while the officers marched him down to the security office. Side effects of the regeneration. He suddenly hungered for wine-cooked mushrooms…and a partner for rutting. By the time he was seated in the chair, he was sweating. Waves of heat poured off his chest like a radiator implanted beneath his sternum.
Gethin swallowed and breathed evenly. “We’re on very dangerous ground right now. I’ve already identified myself as an IPC agent.”
The guard named Slotkin regarded Gethin with a calm so convincing it was like he’d been drugged. “And IPC Law requires that we release you.”
“Very good.”
“Only you entered the hospital illegally, used a false ID, and were discovered with the murdered body of a high-profile corporate witness. Your behavior has been so atypical of an IPC investigator that we have probable cause to doubt your story and credentials.”
“Check your security feed,” Gethin said pleasantly. “I suspect you’ll find it only confirms what I’ve been telling you.”
“We are checking it,” Slotkin said, glancing at the officer who was doing just that. Gethin couldn’t see the display from where he was sitting.
“Taking your sweet time doing it, no?”
Slotkin’s eyes actually glowed. Gethin was impressed; he wondered if the optical effect was something that activated manually, or was tied to emotional reaction. “We’re thorough.”
“I am here investigating what happened to Flight 3107,” Gethin said for the third time.
“With a fake ID?”
“Yes.”
“Is that standard IPC policy?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to quote standard IPC—”