by Brian Trent
Apophis’s eyes watered. Tears ran down his face at a snap, his lips curling in anguish. “Don’t yell at me!” he pleaded. “It hurts me when you yell! Those bad people at Base 59 made a bad thing and someone has to know. Punish those bad, crabby people! I thought…” He sobbed. “I thought you cared! Who else can I go to, if not you?”
Hanmura2 was agog. Was he serious?
Apophis sank down to the floor, grasping both knees and rocking back and forth. “They will just do it again! Make more bad things to hurt more people. You can’t let that happen!”
Hanmura2 looked to the door, calculating his chances of reaching it uninterrupted.
He looked back.
Apophis stood right in front of him. As if he’d teleported from the floor.
“Will you accept my proposal, or no?”
Hanmura2 panted. “No.”
“Then it would be disadvantageous to allow you to live.”
The corporate chieftain feinted for the door. Then he secretly popped the nanoblade from his arm. Turned to the side, it was virtually invisible.
Apophis was upon him. Hanmura2 let out a yell and dropped into a samurai’s lunging stance, one leg splayed back while the other crouched like a spring. He shoved his blade into Apophis’s heart.
The man looked stunned. Hanmura2 shoved it in another few inches, then pulled it out and ran for the door. He didn’t bother retracting the blade; there was no telling what awaited him elsewhere in the club.
Suddenly he was seized from behind, spun around, and shoved against the ceiling. His body stuck there like glue.
Apophis held him there, grinning like a crocodile. But Hanmura2 knew rage when he saw it. The hate emanating from this creature was deep and powerful, far more than a child’s demanding tantrum or a righteously enraged fanatic. Hanmura2 felt despised as if he was a parasite.
“May I see the arm that wounded me?” the man asked, brown eyes twinkling.
Hanmura2 didn’t even have time to consider complying. As if an electric current were branching through his body and manipulating it like a sock puppet, his right arm extended. Hanmura2, pinned against the ceiling, couldn’t budge.
“Mittai desu, kudasai.” The Japanese accent was perfect: Watch this, please.
And then Hanmura2 screamed.
It wasn’t merely that his arm caught fire. The burn started deep in his flesh, setting every nerve ending alight with excruciating agony. A million swords sliced in his muscle. The skin cooked, shriveled, collapsed into red ash that danced like ants over the metal blade.
The stink reached Hanmura2’s nose. He vomited at once, from pain and horror. The vomit splattered down from the ceiling. His head lolled, sweat spilling down his cheeks.
“Stay awake,” Apophis purred.
The magical field holding him to the ceiling vanished. Hanmura2 plummeted to the floor and he flopped like a poisoned cockroach. The pain was too much to bear. He rammed his head into the wet floor.
His body’s pain dampeners went to work, cutting off all sensation. But his arm! It had become a blackened twig, his nanoblade just visible against the ash and melted bone, like some hideous candle.
“Shall I continue?”
Hanmura2 shook his head. He could hear his ruined arm sizzling. Sleepiness overtook him. His mouth felt slurred and half-paralyzed. He knew it was the beginning of shock. His bodily defense, detecting this alarming shift in blood pressure, pumped him full of endorphins.
“Stay awake,” Apophis said gently.
“What…do you…want of me?”
“I request that you inform the IPC of what I have told you. Prometheus Industries has created a terrible monster, and it destroyed the lab, the shuttle, and will certainly kill again. You must tell them about it. You must tell them where it is.”
Hanmura2 shuddered, dangling in the man’s grip. Voice slurring, he asked, “Where is it?”
Apophis stared at him as if he was unbearably thickheaded. “Why, right in front of you, Hanmura-sama.”
Chapter Thirty
Gloplands
Light.
Shadows moving around him, touching him. Pale afternoon and the sounds of a forest. Birds trilled in a dozen native cries. Gethin dimly recognized the steel-whistle chirp of a bluejay.
Something wet tugged clumsily at his tunic.
Gethin opened his eyes in time to see a pulpy, red-purple face inspecting him, tentacles prodding at his hair, face, and shirt. He stared dumbly, aware of sharp bristles of pain racking his body. His right leg was twisted and throbbing and his sensorium splashed a half dozen screens across his eyes.
But the immediate concern was the tentacled creature. Gethin swallowed, tasting an acrid ammoniac smell in the air. Suckers quizzically pulled at his shoulder strap and sash. A tentacle entwined his hair and yanked.
“Hey!” Gethin snapped.
The pulpy creature recoiled in panic, springing away and bumping into pieces of wreckage as it went. Gethin spied a dozen other mollusks scattering in every direction, propelling themselves on their eight legs in rapid, ungainly strides.
As soon as he sat up, he cried out from stabbing pain in his leg. His sudden movement summoned his medgrid overlay, congesting his vision with red crosses flashing around a diagram of his body.
He took a few seconds to appreciate what the medgrid was telling him. Nerve suppression was running high on his injured areas…but not high enough as far as he was concerned. There was trauma to his forehead; he touched the spot, found it sticky and swollen like a bulging insect hive growing out of his skull. His left wrist was broken and being flooded with synthetic glucocorticoids to arrest swelling. There were two pulled ligaments in his right leg, and his right foot was cracked at the fifth metatarsal.
A large, bearded piece of debris moved across from him. “Fucking glops,” it said. “They probably shit all over us.”
Gethin’s breath caught in his throat. “Jack? You’re alive?”
The Promethean nodded. “Keiko and I blurred to the pilot cabin. Then again at the moment of impact.”
The security chief ambled over and helped him stand, but as soon as Gethin leaned on his broken foot, the pain blossomed. Jack caught and braced him.
“You okay?”
“Could have been worse. You look unscathed.”
Jack held out his hands helplessly. “Not a damn scratch. Like I said, we blurred at the moment of impact. Took a hell of a tumble, but no injuries. Keiko was right behind me.” The sector chief swallowed and glanced around anxiously. “I hope she’s okay. We came down at four hundred miles per hour.”
The airship looked like a marine creature that had somehow managed to beach itself in this deciduous inland and been picked at by scavengers. The ruptured shell exposed a whalebone frame. Fires crackled amid gushing smokestack plumes.
Gethin took a hobbling step. He wasn’t concerned about his wrist; it was his right foot that would be the problem. Rescue craft were almost certainly on their way and Gethin had no intention of being here when they arrived. The only solution was to disappear into the woods. How far would he get on a broken foot? Again, he examined the medgrid overlay. If they could make a splint…and if he upped the painkillers…
From the smoking carcass, a shape emerged. It hacked violently and made a drunken stumble towards the pulverized forest. The ground sizzled from heat and the shape wavered, mirage-like.
Jack and Gethin looked at each other.
The stumbling shape tore through the mist in front of them. A Stillness soldier stood revealed, clutching her side as she weaved. She saw them. She froze.
Jack took a single step. That was the only incentive the woman needed; she whipped around and fled like a crippled spider for the woods. At the tree line, Keiko appeared and tackled her to the ground.
“Behind you!” Keiko yelled. “There’s an
other one.”
Jack noticed what he had originally thought was a piece of wreckage. Now he realized it was a Stillness soldier half-buried beneath his cloak. The man stirred as Jack rolled him onto his back.
“How is the one you have?” Keiko asked, shoving her quarry to her knees. Gethin recognized the soldier at Keiko’s feet: she was the woman who had been clutching for dear life to the ceiling I-beams, howling for all she was worth.
Jack inspected the man he’d apprehended. “He’s unarmed,” he told his partner.
“I mean his physical condition.”
“Aside from a few scrapes and bruises, he looks good.”
“Fit enough to walk?”
Jack hoisted the man to his feet. “Yes.”
“Good.” Keiko drew her pistol, pressed it against the woman’s head, and splattered her brains onto the ground. The muffled gunshot was like someone spitting; the impact of cranial matter on rocks was louder than the report itself. Keiko calmly holstered her pistol, making a visual scan of the steaming crash site and absently tucking her hair behind her small ears. “We only need one to interrogate.”
“Two would have been better,” Gethin said reproachfully. He limped forward a few paces to gaze at the bloody ropes of brain pulp coiled on the rocks. Jack was staring also, and Gethin caught a flicker of disapproval in the big man’s face.
Some of the wreckage upended behind them. Keiko sprinted to the source and kicked over a section of floor. Two bloody soldiers stretched their hands feebly towards her. She shot them both in the head. This time she didn’t bother holstering her weapon, but did a quick scour of the airship’s exposed carcass for other survivors. She found one more, legs broken, and executed him where he had been dragging himself from the scene.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gethin called after her. “Witnesses or not, the IPC will dispatch airhounds. There’s no way to evade that.”
Jack hawked and spat onto the rocks. “Actually, there is.” He tapped a yellow hexagon at his tool-belt.
Keiko marched back to them. Up close, she looked bad. A gory weal formed a crescent moon around her right eye. The wound bristled with glass fragments, giving her a frightful visage. A wide-eyed goddess of war.
She had holstered her pistol again and now bore three multigun rifles salvaged from the wreckage. The only remaining Stillness trooper stared at her, steeling for violence. Keiko gave one rifle to Jack, one to Gethin.
Jack checked the magazine. “We need to vacate this crash site ASAP.”
“I know. Hold that bastard steady.”
The soldier stiffened in Jack’s viselike hands. Keiko extended her palm, moving it slowly over the man’s face, head, neck, chest, limbs, and torso…anywhere a tracking device or other wetware could conceivably be stored.
The soldier grinned. “Healthy heart? Good blood pressure? You won’t find any metal cancers in my sanctum.”
Keiko persisted in her scan, however, until satisfied. “Maybe some metal cancers are woven into your clothing fibers, though? Strip him.”
The soldier didn’t protest as his cloak was torn off him. He even helped kick off his boots and stood proud, pale, and lean, thrusting his hips forward to show off his genitals. Jack produced a glasstic tie to tether the man’s hands behind his back.
Their quarry was reduced to a naked white ape of strange proportions. His legs seemed too skinny. His arms were sinewy, and yet his midsection swelled with flab. There were faded stretch marks on his back.
The soldier laughed at their expressions. “You’ve never seen a real man, is that it?” He thrust out his genitals farther. His penis waggled in the air. Remarkably, it began to thicken.
Jack slapped one massive hand around the guy’s neck and shoved him towards the forest. His bare feet were cut on the rocks and left dimples of blood which Gethin tried to avoid stepping into as he hobbled behind, using the rifle as a cane, muzzle pointed into the ground.
“Movement!”
Keiko snapped her pistol to the crash perimeter. Her augmented senses were running with manic efficiency, flooding her visual field with data-streams calibrated for motion. She zoomed in on two crouching shapes at the tree line.
Octopi.
Keiko relaxed. The glops studied her with cautious interest. One lifted itself up on a nest of tentacles and retreated a few feet behind a tree. From there, the shapeless head peeked at her. Its partner began gyrating its limbs in an odd rhythmic beat like a primitive drum circle. Not far away, three more mollusks followed suit, undulating tentacles in the same creepy coordination, which might have been a general broadcast of caution or an elaborate theological discussion on the arrival of four two-legged gods from a skyborne chariot.
Jack followed her line of sight. “Just glops. Forget them.”
“Poisonous?”
“No.”
A few steps into the tree line, she lowered her pistol an inch and looked beyond the transgenics to the deeper woods. “Our immediate priority is to disappear. Gethin, where are you hurt?”
“Looking for an excuse to splatter your ex-husband’s brains?”
She stared from what seemed a grisly mask of blood and glass. He tried searching that face for signs of the woman he knew. Again, he wondered what her employers had done to train her. The chilling way she had executed those soldiers – no hesitation – played out in his mind. It made him wonder if such a reflexive talent for murder had always been festering inside her.
Keiko wasn’t leveling the rifle at him, but a narrow few inches could create the threat. She hissed, “Right now you’re aligned with an enemy power—”
“Aligned? Were you watching what happened up there? If there’s a coup at the IPC, they didn’t see fit to invite me. Their intent was obviously to sequester every investigator at the orbital station. Keep them distracted working on a false puzzle. At the same time, they were using the airship to transport these soldiers somewhere else.”
“To where?”
“Don’t know.”
Jack shook his head. “Those soldiers were en route to the orbital station to contain us.”
“I don’t believe that,” Gethin snapped, and he glanced at the smoking interior of the airship. “Why waste the personnel? An orbital station is an efficient prison all by itself. Once we were to be contained, imprisoned without realizing it, this ship was bound for other destinations. To transport those soldiers into civilization. What better method of smuggling than aboard an IPC vessel?”
“How can you be sure they were meant to be—”
“Because I’m brilliant, remember?” Gethin leaned awkwardly against his rifle. “We were never meant to discover the soldiers. Celeste stumbled on them by accident.”
Keiko considered the deciduous woodland around them. “What happened to her?”
Gethin shook his head, not wanting to think of the way she had killed herself.
Jack detached the yellow hexagon from his beltline, wound his arm back and pitched an underhand toss into the air above the crash site. The device unfolded its petals and spun like a top, discharging invisible cargo. Countermeasures. Little anti-hounds which would swarm the area and create false leads for Hassans to track.
Jack said, “That should throw the hounds off our scent. But we need forest cover to hide from satellites. And the IPC can track our sensoriums. We need to power them down.” He looked at Gethin. “You especially.”
Gethin gave a quick, pained nod. He kept the nerve suppression active, but shut the main system; the soft thrumming spun down to silence. By contrast, the volume of the world amped up. A choir of birds, bugs, and frogs tickling his ears.
“If we head east we can reach Cappadocia,” Jack continued, and he shoved his captured Stillness trooper ahead. “I think that’s our best bet. Independent territory.”
Gethin nodded, hobbling after them. “Fiercely independent. T
hey politely tell us…the IPC, I mean…to go to hell.”
“Hell is where you’re going anyway,” the soldier breathed.
Jack regarded him with all the empathy a man might show to the tick that’s attached itself to his thigh. He started to speak, decided against it. Gethin thought: Now here’s the most cool-headed person among us. Gotta admire that.
They pushed deeper into the forest, losing themselves beneath the deciduous canopy. Their march was brisk, and it was all Gethin could do to keep pace. His multigun cane made neat, circular marks in the soil and he grimaced. Might as well leave our enemies a fucking map.
* * *
The forest used to be a city. Fire hydrants appeared every so often like oversize mushrooms popping from the forest floor, their cast-iron toughness preserving their overall contours while the centuries had seen nature overtake the asphalt, concrete, and steel of whatever metropolis had been here. When the group finally halted after an hour’s forced march, evening was pooling beneath trees and boulders and sheared-away walls of yesteryear.
Gethin panted, resisting the urge to check his medgrid overlay. It was separate from his sensorium, but there was little point in creating strange energy signatures out here. Along the route, he had pointed out a few good pieces of lumber to use for a splint, and Jack helpfully gathered the materials. With his beard, height, and the woodsy surroundings, Saylor looked like Paul Bunyan merrily at work.
The Stillness soldier was made to sit on a tree stump. The fellow didn’t look anxious to escape, but the Prometheans never strayed far. If anything, he seemed amused by his situation. Every so often, Gethin caught him muttering prayers.
Jack crouched beside Gethin and set to work on a splint. He used his own shirt to tie the wood behind Gethin’s leg, bending the bark as far as it allowed to support the foot. Then he stood, bare-chested and muscular. Less Paul Bunyan than Hercules now. Give the man a lion’s-skin cloak and a club. Gethin noticed a curious tattoo emblazoned across Saylor’s flat stomach. It resembled some kind of antiquated purple heraldry.