Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  Jonas was dimly aware that he was coughing again, that blood was dripping down his chin, his lungs shedding more pulpy, infected matter. The glowing screens of Arcadia began to wheel around him.

  Quickly, he said, “I have seen enough, Anju. Transmit the entire video. I will agree to your terms.”

  Anju’s elation was pure disbelief. “You…you will protect me from the Judgment Fiends? Really?”

  “I will,” he said, after muting his audio to get through another coughing fit. He was aware that in the real world, Maximilian was flashing a warning message, but Jonas couldn’t read it. He couldn’t even see straight.

  “Thank you, Exile!” Anju was saying. “Thank you, thank you! I knew I had come to the right person. The Fiends have destroyed every one of my characters. Thank you so much for—”

  “Transfer the entire file to me,” he repeated, panicking as he fought to stay conscious.

  “Of course, Exile. There’s only another minute left to it, but I think you’ll find it just as interesting—”

  Jonas hacked up salty pulp. “Now!”

  He tore the VR rig from his head and blindly groped for Maximilian. It was too late. The world seemed to spin away from him, and his head crashed into the corner of his desk. White lights exploded in his right eye like a supernova…darkening fast.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Attack Patterns

  The blue-green corridor leading back to Poseidon Suites smelled of fresh citrus – lemon touched with saffron – but Celeste felt nauseated with each breath. She steered her arky companion by the arm, the oysters shifting slimily in her stomach.

  Gethin glanced sidelong at her as they walked. “Where are we going?”

  She hoisted a grin onto her face. “Your room.”

  He raised an eyebrow. The wine had given a blush to his pale, stone-cut cheeks. “Why?”

  Celeste gave an unbelieving look. “Judging from the way you fucking people dress, I wouldn’t figure you for prudes. We wined and dined, and now I want to go to your room. Are you Greek or Victorian?”

  “Neither, if you want to be precise about it. What I am is sensitive to loss and the need to mourn.”

  And who have you ever lost? she thought savagely. Really, truly lost? “I lost some coworkers of mine,” she grunted.

  “Still, if they were friends…”

  “Better them than me.”

  The comment visibly stunned him, and he was quiet as they rode an escalator down past friezes of Greek titans and Peloponesian meadows. Some people riding the opposite way glanced at Celeste’s raiment, at the scars on her arms, and then they looked away. Most appeared half-tranced by virtual fantasy, hands tickling the air, shuffling through private distractions.

  Celeste supposed she had her own distractions too. As they stepped off the escalator and turned towards Triton wing, she found herself imagining Athens cracked open like a great Fabergé egg. A single antimatter missile could do it, launched from the Mantid or StrikeDown’s other secret ships. Earth’s lofty capitol would be transformed into a smoking crater like a new Yucatan smackdown.

  Of course, as best she knew, Athens itself wasn’t one of StrikeDown’s targets. If your objective was forced negotiation, it was poor strategy to lop the head off your enemy. King D. wanted to chop the knees, not go for decapitation, and when the collective arky was bleeding at the stumps, he intended to shove a grocery list of demands under their snouts. The major Save centers were his targets…a carefully calibrated kick to the world’s balls. Let the immortals get a whiff of the grave, a wake-up call for three centuries of segregation and cruelty, delivered by antimatter petition.

  How many missiles has King D. stockpiled now? Twelve? Thirteen? And perhaps twice that in nukes.

  The IPC could easily retaliate, sure. Hell, with their terrifying battleships patrolling Sol, they could turn the Outlands into one planetwide glass crater from orbit. But surely they didn’t have the stomach for that. Arkies, shaken from their citadels, would demand negotiation. With cities lying in smoking ruin and the threat of further destruction, King D.’s demands would suddenly seem very, very reasonable to the peacekeepers in the sky.

  Still steering Gethin, Celeste entered the final stretch of corridor leading to his room.

  “What are the sexual mores of arkies, anyway?” she taunted.

  “Anything goes,” Gethin said thoughtfully.

  “I’m sure it does. From what I’ve seen, you people probably download fantasy men and women to your optics, regardless of who you’re actually screwing.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  Celeste shrugged. “Imagining someone else in bed is nothing new.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  They were nearing the end of the corridor. The painting of the Garden of the Hesperides once again pixelated to insert her and Gethin into the mix; what had surprised her last night now only conjured derision. But suddenly she noticed two additional faces. Two men she didn’t recognize. Large, blocky figures with glowing eyes.

  “Don’t turn around,” Gethin whispered. “I just noticed them too. Closing in on our six.”

  Celeste had to fight the urge to turn. The spectral-eyed humanoids in the painting glared at her, as surely as the actual men must be glaring as they closed the distance.

  Gethin palmed open his door and pulled her inside. He hastily twisted the deadbolt.

  “My goddamn equipment hasn’t arrived yet,” he hissed. “Quick! Give me that chair!”

  She obeyed, and made an instinctive grab for her pistol before remembering that all her weapons had been confiscated: they were, quite unhelpfully, sitting in some Prometheus Industries security locker in Babylon. Swell.

  “Who are they?” she asked, handing him the chair.

  He wedged it under the doorknob. “The same duo I noticed on Luna’s Night Train. I’m calling Saylor to—”

  The door was kicked open with such force that it shattered the chair, sending one wooden leg spinning madly around the floor to crack open a potted plant. Gethin cursed, staggered backwards.

  Celeste sized up the men as they came. Both large, broad-chested specimens in the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound range. Flat, eerily clayish features and hooded eyes. Pit fighter bodies. Her first instinct was to aim for their throats and groins; a dragged-out scrap meant certain death. And it was death they were bringing too. Celeste was flooded with unaccountable certainty.

  This is a planned assassination.

  She had time to snatch two pens from the nightstand when, with no indication whatsoever that it was going to happen, both men disappeared into a vibrating blur.

  * * *

  Blurmods were military-grade augmentations restricted to corporate security, Republic peacekeepers, and IPC personnel. Outlanders desperately coveted them for their tactical advantage, and various black markets claimed to offer reverse-engineered knockoffs. At best, such imitations failed on activation; at worst, they killed the person using them. Accelerating a human being was tricky. The heart and brain couldn’t keep up. Resonance frequency destroyed tissue, imploded organs, turned circulatory systems into gory ribbons.

  To counter this, official blurmods required all sorts of fine-tuning systems implanted throughout the body. They spiked the nervous system with adrenal stims and neurosynths that, to a non-accelerated bystander, lasted five standard seconds. It was all the juice a blurmod cell could hold. Some blurmods could even be rigged for auto-triggering whenever a high-velocity shape – a bullet, or another accelerated individual – came within proximity.

  Like Gethin’s.

  He was afforded a passing glimpse of the intruders before they blurred, and his own systems kicked in with a low-pitched whine. Suddenly there was a sensation of elastic bands wrapped around his uni
verse, a rubbery resistance miring the world down to a crawl while he tacked against the pressure.

  He looked to Celeste. She was a beautiful waxen doll, frozen in place, each of her hands closed around a pen.

  The intruders barely registered her. Grinning, eyes shining, they fanned out to make the most of the small room.

  Golems, he thought. But who the fuck sent them after me?

  He was able to hop a half step backwards, towards the foyer counter and away from the locus of their center. The nearest assailant grabbed Gethin roughly, hauling him off his feet. Its mouth stretched impossibly wide. Double rows of serrated teeth glinted like broken glass.

  Gethin realized the thing was going to bite for his throat. He headbutted the attack as it came, his dome smashing into the golem’s nose. The force was enough to add slack to its grip, and he disabled the grappling hands, twisted his body inside their breadth, and flipped his assailant over him. Then he dropped to one knee and drilled a punch into its throat, collapsing its windpipe.

  The low-pitched whine of his blurmod rose to a shrieking whistle.

  The second golem tackled him. It was like getting impacted by a train.

  Gethin’s breath burst from his lungs and he hit the linoleum, slid a meter, and crashed into the kitchen counter’s baseboard. From there, his attacker clubbed him with its fists, gorilla-like. Gethin was forced into a protective ball, squinting up at his attacker.

  The face was blank. No anger, no murderous hate. It pounded him with the brute, detached efficiency of an assembly-line bot.

  Gethin couldn’t retreat. Already, he was scrunched against the baseboard. Each punch fell like a wooden bat on his arms, head, and legs.

  He grabbed for the creature’s head, but succeeded only in taking a blow to the face. He tried again. A blow caught him in the kidneys and he cried out. Once more he made a grab for the thing’s head. This time he knitted his fingers behind the misshapen skull, and heaved down as he brought a knee into its face. Then he planted his foot against the construct’s chest, shoving with all his might.

  The creature toppled backwards, rolled with an odd grace, and was on its feet again. Gethin scrambled up to meet him.

  The attacker with the crushed windpipe made a choking sound and groped for Gethin’s leg. He sidestepped the clumsy attempt and edged closer to Celeste. She was moving now, as his blurmod timed out, his own speed reducing to match hers. With the slow-mo grace of being underwater, her right hand drew one pen back, reached the zenith of an arc, and began the gradual jab at an opponent who was no longer there: her eyes telling her brain there were still two intruders at the door.

  The second golem lunged at Gethin again, swinging its heavy fists. Gethin tucked and rolled beneath the blows, rushing for the door. Predictably, the golem dashed after him, putting itself back in front of the Wastelander.

  And the blurmod ended.

  The world snapped back to normalcy.

  And Celeste buried her pen into the golem’s ear.

  Black blood spurted from the injury. Gethin shoved the creature farther into the room. The other one, despite its ruined throat, was clambering to its feet, ready to re-engage.

  Gethin tugged at Celeste. “Fall back! They’ve got blurmods!”

  Celeste tossed her pens away, scooped up pieces of the shattered chair. Gethin wrenched open the door.

  And as he did, a tornado seemed to fly into the room.

  Gethin’s blurmod kicked in once more.

  The tornado coalesced into a large, formidable-looking man.

  Jack Saylor.

  The Promethean collided with both golems, tossing them about like rag dolls. Mr. Windpipe was hurled into the open bathroom, where he collapsed like a folded chair in the tub. The other golem, pen sticking from its ear, tried to bite his arm; Jack avoided the blow, and chopped his other hand on its neck, killing it.

  Gethin rushed to Jack’s side. They cornered the glowing-eyed monster in the tub.

  “I’ve got it,” Jack said.

  “It’s yours,” Gethin breathed.

  Jack slammed into the construct as it stood. The impact crashed them both through a glass shower door. Shards danced like magic crystals, spinning in dreamy cartwheels, all jagged edges and glitter clouds. Jack seemed to slap the creature around, neatly hitting the ears, neck, and ribs. Then the blurmod was screaming.

  The floating glass tinkled onto the linoleum.

  “Don’t kill it!”

  It was Keiko’s bark. She came sprinting up behind them.

  “Wasn’t going to,” Jack said, voice clean and neutral. He dragged the incapacitated foe into the foyer. Keiko reached for something in her beltline pouch.

  The construct’s eyes, dazed and faintly glowing, rolled white.

  Gethin shouted, “No! He’s suiciding! Goddamn it!”

  Keiko scrambled forward. She pinned the golem in place with one knee against its chest, and rammed something like a medical cylinder into one of its eyes. Blood popped around the tube. The body twitched and kicked. She shoved the cylinder as far as she could.

  The creature stopped kicking. Its hands fell aside.

  Jack said, “Did you get enough?”

  Keiko staggered to her feet. The cylinder was in her hands, dripping gore. Gethin recognized it as a magpie extractor.

  She frowned. “Don’t know. Looks like a good core sample. Maybe enough to trace the manufacturer.”

  Celeste tossed the chair legs aside and peered at the body. “He’s dead?”

  “He was never alive,” Keiko muttered.

  * * *

  “A golem. Essentially a false consciousness planted into a homegrown body, given a set of directives, and set to self-destruct if it fails.” Jack shook his head, enraged at the loss of opportunity. “The only chance we had was to knock him unconscious long enough to use the magpie. Maybe even get the time to do a flash-capture.” He glanced to the mush in the cylinder. It was visibly bubbling, popping, disintegrating before their eyes.

  Gethin looked dangerous, eyes large and rage-clouded. Celeste had seen the look before; a man clearly not used to this kind of battle, surprised that he had survived, and now galvanized by adrenaline thinning out in his blood, cresting the combat high.

  But what did he have to lose? she wondered. He’s already died and come back once. Guess instinct runs deep.

  By comparison, Jack and Keiko looked as calm as monks. Keiko methodically withdrew a wicked-looking tool from her beltline and, without any fuss, plowed a retractable blade into the remaining golem’s forehead. The blade slipped twice across the skull as she made short work of the skin, peeled it down over the nose, and broke into the skull. Chips of white bone came away like sawdust.

  Using the other side of the blade, she produced a cone of light.

  “Wetware circuits in a vat-grown substrate,” she muttered, tilting the ruined head so Jack could see. She used the magpie again, took a sample with its spare tube. Celeste watched her rise tranquilly and rinse her hands in the kitchen sink.

  “Worth a shot,” Gethin muttered.

  Jack stared hard at him. “Any idea who did this?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you go earlier today?”

  “The University to see Doros Peisistratos,” Gethin confessed. “I had reason to suspect he might be involved with all this.” He looked at the bodies. “I still do.”

  Jack gave him a bewildered look. “Senator Peisistratos?”

  Gethin started to reply – intrigued by the awe in Saylor’s voice – when Keiko cut him off. Blotting her hands dry on her clothes, she said, “You were the target of this, Gethin.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many people knew you were in Athens?”

  Gethin sighed. “Doros did…but…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I recognize
these two from Luna. They were on the Night Train with me. So I really doubt that Doros is behind this.”

  The hotel room looked ghastly. Two dead blodies venting oil-black blood, and debris strewn across the floor. Celeste squatted near the closest body. She stared into its blank, blood-spattered face.

  “I still don’t understand,” she said. “If they succeeded in their mission, you’d just come back to life. So what’s the point? How is this an attempted assassination?”

  Gethin rubbed his chin. “Maybe to delay me. They followed me down from Luna. We’ll have to check shuttleport logs. See what names they were using.” He pointed to the magpie in Keiko’s hand. “I’d like to see the magpie. In the spirit of sharing information.”

  Keiko gave a short, caustic laugh. “Don’t trust us, Gethin?”

  “Not entirely.”

  She handed him the device. Gethin pressed his fingertips against the cylinder’s datareader, downloading the magpie’s assessment of the neural composition. It would take a forensics team to get a good look at the sample on the microscopic level and attempt to sift for telltale residue, but he downloaded the preliminary data anyway.

  “Prometheus doesn’t make golems,” Keiko said, watching him.

  “Glad to hear it.” He completed his scan and tossed the cylinder back to her.

  “Prometheus has better things to do than assassinate you, Gethin. Now how about sharing with us. What did you and Peisistratos talk about?”

  “I’ll tell you in due time.”

  “Now, Gethin.”

  He saw her calm countenance blushing red with controlled anger. The eyes as slender as knife-blade flats. She had turned her body into a confrontational pose, squaring off to him, extraction blade still in her hands.

  Gethin matched her posturing. “For the moment, I am classifying my conversation with Doros. The details of my inquiry are none of your damned business. However, you will continue assisting me as your superiors ordered you to.”

 

  “Good,” he said aloud. “Arcology security is here.”