Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  The eleven-year-old Turkish boy was too sickly to have an implanted sensorium. When he played Arcadium hubs, it was on flatscreen monitors. The depth of experience was lost on him…and yet, he had excelled.

  Gethin and Keiko went to the district’s net café on the same residential level as the Polat household. It was nearly deserted at the late hour. Two young girls were jacked into an overseas concert in one dim corner, while Keiko and Gethin quietly seated themselves at the wetports of another.

  Gethin felt his heart pound at the thump! of the hub loading. The crimson pinwheel of Arcadia flowered into his optics. He was suddenly standing at the arrival port: a massive steel ring suspended in blackness. Galaxies swirled above, behind, and below like gold hurricanes rotating spiral arms. Each galaxy represented Arcadium hubs. Gethin narrowed his eyes at the pinkish-purple shape of the Faustus hub far below…an unpleasant island to be avoided during this brief voyage.

  On the reflective steel of the ring, he regarded his appearance. He was his old avatar again: black hair, silver eyes, skin the color of quartz. He was dressed in a form-fitting black tunic which worried Gethin in its resemblance to the Wyndham Save Center’s post-resurrection complimentary robes. He hadn’t accessed his avatar in many years. Must have been the last outfit he was wearing when he retired.

  The steel ring looked empty. Of course, there must be hundreds or thousands of other players here, unviewable to each other. You were only allowed to see members of your team at the loading hub. A smart arrangement really, since it was neutral territory and anonymity kept it that way.

  Keiko appeared beside him in a flash. She was also wearing her old avatar, which looked exactly like her, aside from the silver retro-futuristic bodysuit cladding her body like shrink-wrap. In her heyday, it had been in vogue. Now it served to make her look like a charmingly outdated pop star sexpot.

  Jonas was last to arrive. Stars! Gethin thought, awed by the little boy’s virtual appearance up close. The Exile was a preternaturally tall, spindly, shiny black exoskeleton.

  “Are you both prepared?” the Exile asked. “I fear there is little time for a refresher course.” His voice was deeper here, authoritative and serene. Who would ever imagine it belonged to a prepubescent invalid?

  Keiko gave a soft laugh. “When we arrive, just point out who you want us to kill. I’m ready.”

  The insectile form strode to a glowing circle in the floor of the ring. “There is a gathering of Judgment Fiends in a fleshfactory on Dilok, Zone 6882. I’ve set coordinates. Your friend Dion shall meet us there.”

  Gethin tingled, the old excitement like bubbles in his stomach. “Let’s go.”

  They stepped onto the circle and instantly materialized in a world of organic walls, muscular piping, and skeletal rib-vaults. It was like being in a gigantic heart. Valves branched off in every direction. The air was oven-hot and fans twirled uselessly in the high flesh-colored ceiling. It smelled like an old meat locker.

  Keiko wrinkled her nose unhappily. “Now I remember why I stopped playing.”

  Jonas nodded towards the balconies – cartilage overhangs whose points of attachment appeared infected and swollen.

  In the past, Gethin would have studied everything about Dilok and its strange fetish for wetwork constructions. He would have spoken to all locals, collecting data to feed into his tactical analyses. Only then would he craft a strategy.

  He had neither time nor desire for that now. He, like Keiko, was realizing why he no longer came here. Arcadia was illusion. What the Martians would call noisy flash. There was enough drama occurring in the real universe to make this unnecessary.

  “You can tell the Judgment Fiends by their uniforms,” Jonas said, indicating the many balconies. “Notice the women and men clad in those spiked maroon armors? Foolish if you ask me. Your group never wore matching uniforms and yet you acted with uniformity. People could never pick your squad out in a crowd. That made all of you dangerous.”

  As Gethin was peering at the cartildge balconies, a pair of Judgment Fiends pulled out cheesy-looking laser pistols and shot someone they had been conversing with. The body blew apart messily. The corpse’s companions backed away, hands up in submission. All heads turned to the action. One of the Fiends was squaring off to the retreating players, daring them to fight. In this fictional city of Dilok, the Fiends were open and unafraid, like ‘made men’ of ancient mafia families.

  Gethin grinned. “The more things change, eh? I count sixteen Fiends in this room.”

  Keiko glared. “Always hated people like that.”

  “Yeah. But not people like that.” Gethin pointed.

  A smiling black man in forest-green fatigues was approaching them. Forty years ago, he had worn yellow armor with a winged helmet, but he apparently was more up-to-date on Arcadium fashions than his old teammates.

  “Dion!” Gethin smiled.

  Dion Bellamy wore his real-world face. A resident of Caicom, he must have been patching in from the Bahamas, at his wetport in Nassau.

  “Bryce and Yamanaka?” Dion threw back his head and guffawed. His laughter was so rich and contagious that they were all chuckling in an instant. “Holy stars!”

  Gethin noticed three more Judgment Fiends coming into the fleshfactory, walking with a purpose. Something was going on. The place was going to clear out soon.

  “You got my delivery?” Gethin asked Dion in the few moments they had.

  “Did indeed.” Dion’s grin dropped. “Had several of my sources run that golem sample against everything we had.”

  Keiko sighed. “But you found nothing.”

  Dion raised an eyebrow. “Au contraire. Found everything.”

  “Who made the golems?”

  “Xibalba.”

  “So?” Keiko scoffed. “Dion, that doesn’t tell me—”

  “Vector Nanonics placed the order.”

  She stopped. Conversations wafted in the humid air. The fans spun noisily in their swollen slots.

  Even Gethin raised an eyebrow. “You know this, or you’re guessing?”

  Dion hugged himself. “Me, guess? I took your sample to my people. Golems were off the rack, nothing special. But I thought, ‘I can’t be disappointing my friend Gethin!’ So we did some datamining, found that the nanorod imprinting matched profiles in Xibalban subcontractor labs loaned out to Vector Nanonics.”

  Keiko narrowed her eyes. “First Hanmura Enterprises. And now Vector?”

  Jonas’s Exile avatar was suddenly in their midst. “Seems that your corporate rivals have agreed to a disconcerting marriage.”

  “And there’s at least one more in the mix,” Keiko added. “TowerTech. They’ve been orchestrating a media circus to time with our misfortunes.”

  “You’ll never prove that one,” Gethin muttered.

  Keiko’s eyes shimmered. “Don’t need to convince a jury.”

  Dion was giving the Exile an appreciative, up-and-down appraisal. “Nice skin! So, we going to war with these local punks or what?”

  The Exile turned expectantly to Gethin. “What do you suggest?”

  “Spread out,” Gethin advised. “Four against nineteen, not the best odds. And there might be more outside.”

  “I have the outside covered,” Jonas retorted. “A friend of mine, who can turn into a manticore.”

  Dion laughed anew. “Miss these days!”

  They diffused into the crowd. The Exile was attracting attention; people knew who he was and were wondering why he was here.

  Jonas addressed his admirers. “I am about to go to war. It will become legend, talked about for years to come. Are there any volunteers to assist me?”

  Several of the Judgment Fiends were noticing the sudden hoopla.

  “Mr. Bryce?” Jonas said in his audio.

  “Yes, Jonas?”

  “Thank you for this, my friend.�
��

  The Exile withdrew fanciful pistols from his holsters, turned towards the Judgment Fiends on the balconies, and opened fire.

  * * *

  Gethin disconnected from the wetport, sweaty and gasping. He glanced to Keiko. Her eyes were closed, perspiration dotting her forehead, and her pulse visible in her neck. When she opened her eyes, she looked at him for a long time before she spoke.

  “That’s why we played,” she managed. “And that’s why we can never go back to that world.”

  “Agreed on both counts.”

  The two girls were gone and the café was empty. The clock showed that four hours had passed. The battle of the fleshfactory seemed to still be exploding around them. Gethin’s fingers twitched with the pulling of virtual triggers, his eyes playing the afterimages of the fleshfactory lighting up in the wondrous violence of battle. His face was fever-flushed. The Judgment Fiends had been cut down, and were being cut down, by Jonas’s webwide call to arms.

  Gethin touched his ear. “Jonas? You okay?”

  There was silence on the other end of the comlink.

  “Jonas?”

  The audio crackled. “I don’t know how to thank you,” the boy replied in his high-pitched, natural voice again.

  “I do,” Keiko said gently. “You had a lead on that Pacific offshore assault. Follow it and keep me posted until we send an extraction unit to bring you to Athens.”

  “Done.” A pause. “Derinkuyu security is about to summon the both of you. It appears that your request for an evac has been granted, and Prometheus has agreed to send a transport.” He sighed unhappily. “It’s too bad, actually.”

  “Why?”

  “I was hoping you both could stay for dinner. My mother makes the best okonomiyaki.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The Headlines

  PROMETHEAN, IPC FORCES CLASH IN MEMPHIS, AKIHABARA

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  DID PI MURDER SALVOR BEAR?

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  TWO IPC SATELLITES SHOT DOWN BY PROMETHEUS INDUSTRIES, CLAIMS SELF-DEFENSE

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  IPCS SHAKA, BATU, AUGUSTUS DEPLOYED TO EARTH ORBIT

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  Chapter Forty-Three

  Rescue

  At 5:09 a.m. they reunited in the Derinkuyu security office, were offered coffee, and then escorted to the topside tram. The storm had not abated, and the sound of rain on the tramcar was mesmerizingly rhythmic. At the station they were met by the scarred woman coming off her shift, and she agreed to drive them to the western gates not far from where they had entered.

  “In and out,” she told them. “Your transport has been granted access to Cappadoccian airspace just long enough for your evac. Can’t guarantee that the instant you leave our space, the IPC won’t shoot you down, however.”

  “Expect another transport, from the IPC, to evac one of your citizens,” Gethin said, riding in the front passenger seat of her jeep. It was a six-wheel model, maneuverable, resilient, and the officer obviously enjoyed driving it down the narrow channel winding around the mountain’s base.

  She looked at him in surprise. “What transport? What citizen?”

  “Jonas Polat is a Derinkuyu citizen essential to my investigation. I need to bring him to Athens for medical treatment.”

  The woman was quiet for a while. Accessing Jonas’s file, presumably.

  The jeep passed through one small gate and stopped before another. The fence slid open, and she pulled over to let them disembark into the rain.

  In the relative security of a large oak they waited. At 5:47 a.m., a small blue PI transport parted the rain and glided into the clearing. Its bay doors slid apart. Half a dozen armed troopers waited within.

  Keiko waved to them.

  One of the officers waved back. “Officer Yamanaka, Chief Saylor. Let’s get you both out of here.”

  “They come with us,” Keiko said, pointing to Celeste and Gethin.

  She thought the officer was extending a friendly hand to them, but instead he leveled his rifle at Gethin.

  “We’re authorized to take the two of you,” the officer told Keiko. “No others. Sure as hell not the IPC agent.”

  “The IPC is hunting him,” Jack explained. “He’s proven invaluable in—”

  “No. These orders come from the top. They stay.”

  Jack hesitated. “Then we stay.”

  The transport’s wing rotors whined sharply, flinging rainwater.

  “Jack?” the officer said. “Get onboard or we drop that IPC spy where he stands. War has begun.”

  Gethin spat. “The four of us have learned that your war is—”

  “Another word,” the officer snarled, anger twitching a vein on his forehead, “and we send you back to your superiors through a purchase signal.”

  “No!” Keiko shouted, placing herself in the line of fire. “He has invaluable information! Don’t kill him!”

  Gethin’s heart pounded ferociously. He touched Keiko’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Get onboard,” the officer repeated. “That is an order from HQ. Now!”

  Keiko looked at Gethin sadly. “Gomen nasai.”

  “Not your fault. You better go.”

  The Prometheans climbed aboard the ship. The pilot wasted no time; the transport tilted away from Gethin and ascended at a diagonal angle, vanishing into the storm.

  “That might have been for the best,” Celeste said, watching it disappear. “Not my kind of company.”

  “And I am?”

  Celeste smirked. “I don’t know what to make of you, Gethin.”

  “Ironic. I know exactly what to make of you.”

  “A StrikeDown rat, right?”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter now. The two biggest powers in the known universe are going to destroy each other for the wrong reasons.”

  Celeste wiped the merciless rain from her face. “Why precisely should I care?”

  “The thing that killed your friends? It’s still at large.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you want revenge?”

  “We have no idea what it is,” Celeste snapped.

  The rain ran off Gethin’s chin like a liquid beard. “Actually, I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Celeste stalked around him in a circle. Her hair was plastered to her face and neck. “Yesterday we were spinning our heads, trying to figure out who was responsible. Now you’ve got it all figured?”

  “I’m something, aren’t I? If you want details, we need to get out of here first.”

  As soon as he finished speaking, a remarkable thing happened. The rain was no longer falling on them. Gethin could still hear it, but he realized it was magically sparing the two of them, as if an invisible umbrella had appeared over their heads.

  Gethin looked up.

  The Mantid materialized.

  Part Four

  Shimizu

  History seduces us into wondering how the future might have turned out if pivotal events had gone differently. Such a fragile thread of chance and choice determines our lives. Some used to believe that every moment could shoot off into wildly different futures. Oatmeal or bran for breakfast? Shower at night, or in the morning? While these microhistorical moments can occasionally have far-reaching effects (choking to death on the oatmeal when you wouldn’t have with bran, slipping during your groggy morning shower and breaking your neck on the linoleum floor) we can now be confident that these microhistorical events typically disappear into the ‘white noise’ of our lives without much consequence. Computer models have demonstrated this beyond doubt.

  When a microhistorical flowers into the macrohistorical, it is a different matter entirely. The remarkable events of 322 remain a
matter of endless interpretation, debate, and mystery, though the little we do know terrifies – not seduces – our fragile sense of security. Perhaps there are indeed alternate universes where those events turned out differently…and the Earth is even now a lifeless rock in space, spinning with dull repetition. Or that it fell under the sway of a frightful despot.

  Instead, we are left with the way history did turn out. The human race so hopelessly fragmented that they can barely be called human any longer.

  And we know that it is all the fault of Gethin Bryce and his conniving conspiracy operating in the shadows.

  – Points of Impact, Human Liberation Front, December 17, 561

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Lord of Chaos

  It was an unusual place to hold a meeting.

  King D. kept repeating that in his head, trying to come to grips with the bizarre course of events over the last few days that had twisted, turned, and now led to this eccentric location for an Outland parley. As the newest messiah of StrikeDown, King D. was accustomed to clandestine huddles. He appreciated – even relished – the fact that he was embroiled in the deadliest conspiracy of recent centuries. He figured an unexpected location was, well, to be expected.

  King D. was tall, thickset, and massive like a fleshy tank, with muscular, tattooed arms. He wore a trim moustache, and with his wide, flat cheekbones and small eyes, he exuded a vaguely Mongolian visage. His wide frame lent the impression of being inert, plodding; most people were therefore surprised by the speed at which he moved, as if he were a Godblood junkie itching for action.

  “The point,” King D. bellowed to the crowd below him, “is not to dwell on our ideological divisions, but to find middle ground for compromise. We both have a common enemy. Only through collaboration can we bring the Republic to its knees. Unless you prefer being their slaves?”

  At these words, the audience murmured. Father Chadwick, local shepherd of this Stillness flock, scowled. The first hint of real emotion washed pink into his pasty face. The man was shaped like a top, wider in the middle than the terminating points of his head and feet. He wore a full Abrahamic beard, and he licked his lips anxiously in that weedy mass.