Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  “I possess a formidable network of contacts in Arcadia,” the boy explained. “And I have known for some time that corporations make use of its Caves. This is not wise of them. Fearing nothing in the real world, they naturally deem themselves infallible in virtual. I have associates who look for the ripples they make. I know who was responsible for the attack on the Promethean offshore rig.”

  Keiko straightened at this.

  “It was rehearsed in Arcadia before the actual event. In a game called Tengu Castle. Most people do not realize this, but Tengu Castle is entirely run by Hanmura Enterprises. They are the ones who attacked your ocean base.”

  Something happened in Keiko’s eyes. Like plates of black glass sliding across each other, a cold flame glinting and reflecting in each facet.

  “And yet they are a minor player,” Jonas continued. “A vulture pecking from the sidelines. Hanmura Enterprises is not your true concern.”

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  Gethin said, “Our true concern is a creature called Apophis, and the Stillness troops it commands.”

  The boy cleared his throat, a wet, slimy sound. “An associate of mine recorded a most peculiar conversation in a remote landscape of Arcadia. Three beings discussing something secretly.” Jonas weakly touched Gethin’s arm and his eyes crinkled. “I believe you will find this recording most—”

  Bahara leapt to her feet. “Jonas! Wait!”

  Her little boy gave a startled jump.

  “You need to think this through,” she pleaded, and she whirled on Gethin and Keiko. “What will you give us for this information? My boy found something that can benefit you? Why should you get it for free?”

  Gethin pushed aside the plate of food and folded his arms. “What’s wrong with your son?”

  Bahara trembled as she spoke in a hurried rush, as if to delay would miss this single, shining opportunity. “A weaponized nano-replicating cystic fibrosis. He contracted it while just a baby, do you understand?”

  “Why does he still have it?”

  “You’re an arky,” she said flatly. “We are not as fortunate as you. There is no cure.”

  “There is.”

  She compressed her lips into a hard line.

  Gethin spoke decisively. “I’ll have the two of you transported to an Athenian hospital.”

  “I have petitioned Athens and every enclave for years!” she said angrily. “What power do you have, that my letters lacked?”

  “You’re not civilized,” he said plainly. “Keiko and I are. We can do it.”

  “Then you had best do it soon,” Bahara said bitterly. “Because he won’t survive his next collapse.” Her eyes went to her son, to his fogged breathing mask, to how frail he looked in his robotic wheelchair. “The doctors told me straight. His life is over in weeks. Maybe less.”

  “Your boy is remarkable by any standards. We will have him brought to Athens and treated there, you have my word.” He touched Jonas’s pale hand. “Show me what you found in Arcadia, Jonas.”

  Bahara began to protest. She caught herself, and at long last sank back onto the edge of the bed, rubbing her hands as if kneading dough.

  The bedroom wall sprang to life with projected images and audio.

  “What does the piece do?”

  “It can alter matter’s charge. Perhaps allow construction of a Midas Hand.”

  “They can do that?”

  “It was only a matter of time.”

  “Then they can also—”

  “The question now is how do we mobilize? How many of them are even left?”

  “Four, maybe five. Perhaps less than that.”

  “But why would they expose themselves like this? Destroying that base and shuttle in such a public way? Surely they know we’ll come for them!”

  “There are two possibilities. One: they are setting a trap for us. Two: They are so close to completing their plans, which we can assume involves this negative matter device, that exposure is meaningless now.”

  “Forget theories! Track them down and end them! For good this time!”

  “They hardly expect you to be cautious, Sy’hoss’a. Perhaps that’s their intention. Get you to come out of hiding. Get you to do something stupid. Doesn’t take much.”

  When the recording ended, Gethin slowly drew back.

  “Thank you, Jonas,” he whispered.

  “It is intriguing, yes?” Jonas said, watching his guests.

  It answers everything, Gethin thought. Now, what can we do about it?

  Chapter Forty

  Blackmarket

  Celeste prowled the drafty underdark.

  The corridors were porous and sepulchral, like Wasteland tunnels she had encountered but with a clean, after-the-rainstorm aroma which made her feel young and savage. She pictured herself as a primitive hunter, bow at her back with a deerskin quiver, stalking prey along a night-shrouded trail.

  Derinkuyu was remarkably advanced for a colony of burrowers. There was an aug shop not far away, and she went there, aware that Jack Saylor was tailing her. She didn’t know what Keiko and Gethin were up to, but it had to be serious if stakeout duty was being assigned to a seven-foot-tall Samson.

  She lost him a minute later, ducking through the warrens of the main plaza, hiding behind a clothing rack until he went hurrying past, and backtracking to a web café she had noticed earlier. It was modeled on the Paleolithic caves of Lascoux. The walls were porous stone, splashed with ochre handprints and charcoal reindeer, bison, and stick-figure hunters. The tables were slabs of stone. The chairs resembled tree stumps. Veins of bioluminescent algae burned in the walls.

  The shopkeeper was a copper-skinned Turk, burly and cherubic. “Hello!” he roared. “Please tell me I can assist you!”

  “I need to use a terminal.”

  “You have your choice.” He indicated the lack of people with a sweep of his hand. “Business is slow tonight.”

  “I also need a blurmod.”

  His face petrified in an expression of bemused interest. “May I see your Republic ID?”

  “It was eaten by dire dogs,” she said with a smile. “But they spared my wallet.”

  The shopkeeper chuckled. “I’m afraid a blurmod is military-grade tech. We commoners aren’t allowed to peddle such things.”

  Celeste glanced around the café. “You might consider turning the lights up.”

  “It’s night. Doesn’t the sun still go down topside?”

  “So you dim the lights to pretend?”

  “Gotta respect the circadian rhythms. Listen, I’m sorry about the blurmods, but there are plenty of other things here that might interest you.”

  Celeste peered over his shoulder and inspected an entire wall of devices for sale in shiny plastic covers. There were wetware armbands, sensorium upgrades, eyepads, mnesis cubes, sleep-deps.

  So much glitz and glimmer. Like a shopping mall for the gods.

  These were the things King D. wanted, so he could hand them out like Santa Claus on Solstice to the world’s unfortunates. The strict distinctions of capitalism and socialism were absurd, he often said, when civilization had attained post-scarcity divine power.

  A scarce post-scarcity, she thought. Let them eat mortality!

  The shopkeeper laughed suddenly. Celeste looked at him, having forgotten he existed.

  “You spaced out on me, my dear,” he said. “May I get you some coffee? Or maybe a soda. We have wonderful flavors here.”

  She ordered a coffee just to give the guy something to do. Then she took a table and clicked onto the web, found a StrikeDown ghost site, logged in and went to the forum. There, she posted a message for StrikeDown’s people to decipher: Star Lady here. In Cappadocia. Squad all dead, killed by greentribe. Believe they are behind Lunar attacker. Will attempt to reach Alpha rendezvous point ASAP
.

  The shopkeeper brought her the coffee. “Where are you from?”

  “Odessa,” she said. “I like your decorating tastes.”

  “The Planning and Zoning board encourages every café to use culturally themed designs,” he eagerly explained. “They encourage the celebration of Derinkuyu’s colorful history. Many different peoples have called these caves home, all the way back to early man. The shops and stores around you celebrate this historical diversity. I do like mine.”

  “Did you choose it yourself?”

  “I bid on it. Planning and Zoning gave us a pool of designs to select from.”

  “Planning and Zoning sound like a bunch of fascists.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “We are very proud of history here. I was only too happy to celebrate a chapter.”

  Celeste nodded absently and stirred her coffee. It smelled obscenely strong.

  “So is there anything else you’d like?” he inquired with a curious tilt of his head. “Perhaps a hot egg bagel?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “An artichoke-and-chicken sandwich?”

  Celeste shook her head.

  The man smiled warmly, his eyes twinkling. “How about a blurmod?”

  * * *

  Jack adored Derinkuyu.

  The Stygian city fed into his greatest fantasy of being on another world – the dark blasted-out tunnel work of colonists. It was the company line to say you wanted to go to the stars. He knew Prometheus was destined to take over the galaxy someday, and there would be thousands of worlds as destination points for the seedship diaspora which was sure to follow. Prometheus thirsted for frontierist souls.

  And Jack really wanted it. He knew it would be a while, even without the colonization ban. He was still young, and his short résumé had plenty of competition from other Prometheans who could boast interplanetary postings from all over the solar system. An entire generation of PI veterans, centuries old, had purposefully served on every outpost, planet, moon, spaceship and space station just to sculpt a perfect résumé for the day that the far shores were made available. Even Keiko’s experience paled next to theirs; Jack was probably dead last in the roll call.

  Derinkuyu made it easy to pretend he was already in that distant future. He didn’t even care that Celeste had lost him. Let her have her freedom. He fancied he was patrolling a colony, and the few Derinkuyans he saw at this late hour unwittingly aided the fantasy. From what he could see, they were an industrious lot, what he imagined frontier folk would be. Optimistic, social, helpful, friendly, cognizant of how much everyone depended on one another, bound together like an offworld colony would be against the collective threat of nature. For wasn’t that the ultimate enemy anyway? Nature was constantly the archnemesis throughout humanity’s short career.

  Jack nodded pleasantly to people as he entered the main shopping plaza. It looked like a peculiar fusion between an eleventh-century Islamic city and classical Parisian streets, with the arabesque doorways of the former and the patio cafés of the latter. The architecture was also painted in biolume so that it glowed like black-lit neon.

  On holopanels high above, images from Luna were playing. Apophis killing and screaming, destroying everything around him while professing his innocence. The PI logo on his uniform.

  Jack’s good mood faltered.

  What the hell is he?

  The holopanel froze on the entity’s twisted face. Panelists began discussing the IPC shutdown of Promethean properties. Jack contemplated that crimson visage.

  Maybe nature wasn’t the only enemy, he mused.

  From the holopanel, the monster seemed to be staring straight into his soul.

  * * *

  In the café backroom, Celeste sat perfectly still while the man took her measurements with a handheld scanner. He was impeccably professional, like a carpenter wielding a stud finder, even when he pressed it between her breasts to determine the depth of her sternum. His eyes remained fixed to the tiny screen on which her data composite was being configured. Then he wheeled over a medcart, complete with an array of tubes, drives, and industrial syringes. Celeste felt her skin crawl.

  The Turk, whose name was Onat, chuckled. “You’re thinking I raided a mechanic’s dumpster, glued everything together, and didn’t bother washing the needles?”

  “Remarkable deduction.”

  Onat pointed to the gunmetal storage cylinder. “Nano seed-clusters.” He pointed to the nearby drive. “Programs and etchers. I’ll give you the full spread, and throw in a blood rerouter.” He touched the syringe and grinned. “Needle. It hurts.”

  Celeste considered, reconsidered, and re-reconsidered. Finally, she skinned out of her shirt and said, “My body has some defenses. If any of those seeds tries for my sensorium, I’ll know it instantly. Then I’ll be fighting mad, señor.”

  He shrugged. “I offered you a blurmod.”

  “And I changed my mind, now that I’ve seen the extent of your operation’s secret menu. Something better than a blurmod. More practical for…um …me.”

  Onat lifted the syringe in one hand, scanner in the other, and set about finding the best entry points.“When I am done, you’ll be nearly as nifty as your arky pals.”

  Celeste looked at him. “My scars do give me away, don’t they?”

  “I could remove them for a bit extra.”

  “Why? I worked hard to earn them.”

  “They become you. Now exhale completely.”

  Celeste obliged. The syringe made a snapping sound like a crossbow and she felt the first seed-cluster driven hard into her body. Onat circled her, an artist contemplating the next step in his project.

  “So what’s the deal with you people, anyway?” she asked after the third cluster. “Why not join the Republic? You could pass the Outland Charter in your sleep, from what I can see.”

  “Selling autonomy is too high a price. Exhale please.”

  She obeyed. A cluster snapped into her stomach wall and she gritted her teeth from the pain, managing to say, “You just have to submit to global hegemony.”

  He flashed a smile. “We don’t like the word ‘submit’. We are very proud.”

  “Pride goeth.”

  “Ah!” He had been pleasant and friendly, but now his eyes lit up in real interest, as if he had been performing an automated task until this moment. “Pride goeth before a Fall. But we never did fall. We shut ourselves up here, lying low, munching in the shadows. And when arcologies grew from the ash, we were still here. These caves are more than my home…they are my heritage.”

  Celeste hopped off the chair and paced around the room, rolling her shoulders and testing the sore patches in her body. “My paycard really afforded me all this?”

  “No,” he said with a cautious smile. “Your credit line was tagged for Babylon and Athens only.”

  Celeste froze. The thought possessed her that this blackmarket peddler had injected a suicide seed into her, to blackmail her into returning with regularity to make future payments. Her heart galloped for a fight.

  “I depleted your paycard,” he said quickly, holding up his hands. “Channeled it through a dummy shop registered to Athens. But you don’t owe me the remainder of the cost. I simply ask that you give me good word-of-mouth when you return to the Wastes. I can arrange for outside customers to come here.”

  She halted. “You have a business card I can hand out?”

  “You, my dear, are the business card.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The Price for Arcadium

  In the Bolat residence, Jonas detached his breathing mask. His mouth had the wrinkled texture of shriveled fingertips. He sipped water, watching his guests in quiet, studious fascination.

  “Would you rule the universe if you could, Mr. Bryce?” he asked suddenly. “The Faustians believe you were born to help them do
just that. Arcadia was a training ground for a mind like yours, they say. The future must be unification.”

  Gethin tiredly rubbed the gash on his forehead. “The age of the Warlords is past, Jonas.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’m just an investigator with the IPC now. I have no dreams of conquest.”

  The boy looked at Keiko. “And you? Do you share this sentiment?”

  Keiko gave a curt nod. “I was planning on running for governor of a far shore, should the ban ever be lifted. That’s an administrative post, not exactly known for despotic powers.”

  Jonas fumbled to reattach his breathing mask. Keiko helped affix it. His shoulders were damp.

  “I received a message from an associate of yours, Gethin. A man named Dion Bellamy. He received the sample of the golems you sent him, and made some discoveries about them. He wishes to meet you in Arcadia to share the results.”

  Keiko looked at her ex-husband. “You sent the samples I obtained to Dion?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t in the mood to trust the IPC.” He went to the VR rig to log into the web.

  The boy stayed him with a small hand. “I am unable to login to Arcadia from here. My body is too frail for a wetport or sensorium, but there are uplinks at the net café.”

  “I don’t need to wetlink merely to speak with Dion…”

  Jonas shifted uncomfortably in his wheelchair. “Perhaps not, but I am regrettably forced to insist that you do. Forgive me. The information I provided you comes at a price, as does interface with your friend from Caricom. You see, I need your assistance with something.” Jonas smiled weakly, as if embarrassed by the request he was going to make. It was the expression of someone squirming to get an autograph and nervous to ask.

  * * *

  Jonas’s computer room was not sufficient for what needed to be done. Gethin was amazed, actually, that the boy had achieved so much with so little. Arcadia was meant to be experienced through a sensorium. You tasted the ozone of laser fire, you felt the crackle of sonic grenades or the rumble of your Ashoka asteroid tank as its treads crushed enemy resistance. And while you never experienced actual pain, an injury in virtual meant a decidedly unpleasant vibration.