by O. J. Lowe
“Mister Arventino, Mister Battleby, I was unprepared before. But I am with Unisco.” I drew myself to my full height as I said it. “One of the founder members no less. I fought in the Unifications War. I’ve killed people before.” I saw Amadeus looking at me curiously out the corner of his eye at my revelation. “I will fight alongside you.” I shot the night man a look. “If there’s more like this, you may need all the help you can get.”
Nick considered the words. He’d fought a Vedo before, hadn’t even come close to a victory. Wim Carson had been rusty, out-of-sorts by all accounts, his powers only recently back to him, and he’d very nearly killed him with minimal effort. If Frewster had willingly gone up against them, he had some balls. He felt something growing in his stomach, a new-found respect for the man.
“Anyway, I searched the body and found an apartment key fob in his pocket, though the key had been damaged when he’d been killed. That was convenient of him, it gave us a place to start and the three of us set out, all the while, I was pumping Arventino and Battleby for the best way to combat them if one wasn’t skilled in the art of waving around an energy sword or fluent in magical mumbo-jumbo. Not that I described it as such. It’s hard to be flippant about something when you’ve been on the receiving end of it. I still remembered how he’d thrown me up against the wall with little more than a flick of his wrist. Terrifying.
“Our blades repel other sorts of energy,” Arventino said. “They’re powered by crystals infused with the power of the Kjarn and because the Kjarn is in everyone and everything and everywhere, it has a deleterious effect on everything it meets. Kjarnblades will repel energy, split apart material on a molecular level. Very few things can resist it. Denser materials do fare better but only moderately. Best way to defend against it is with another blade, they repel each other. That’s why we all carry them, though it is with the hope that we may never need to use them.”
“Walk softly but carry a big stick?”
“Exactly! That said, energy blasts are repelled, but they do better against some types of impact than others. We’ve found out the hard way that stun blasts are harder to repel, more force behind them. Ditto for kinetic dispersers.”
Now that was interesting, for back at headquarters we had plenty of those and as the boss, I could get hold of them with ease. I put the call in to my number two, ordered him to meet us at the apartment with kinetic dispersers. I could tell that Battleby and Arventino were unhappy about the situation and yet I could not bring myself to care. They’d brought their fight to me, they weren’t the ones who were being threatened with death by enemies they’d never heard of.
The other worry was that for a secret organisation, they were being remarkably cavalier with their secrets. It made me wonder if there was something I couldn’t see coming in store for me. Maybe they weren’t planning on my being around after the event to tell the story. I didn’t want to think that, both gentlemen had been nothing but courteous with me, but it is easy to think the worst in people sometimes. More so in the days that followed this event than ever, there’ve been plenty of them.
Joey was in place, he’d brought a holdall with the weapons in, I was pleased to see. Joseph Butcher always was a fine man, not necessarily a good one but the sort you’d want at your back. He’d do the dirty things without flinching. He was the sort of man for whom ‘whatever it’ll take,’ wasn’t just a trite soundbite. He really would go above and beyond for the kingdom. We served together in the Unity war, I recall all too well. We were caught under fire, I don’t think I’d have made it out of there without Joey having my back. The man was a savage, but he was my savage and I wanted him here if we were going into hostile territory for the first time.
It might sound not particularly brave on my part to an unenlightened observer, but anyone who has ever experienced combat will know the value of it. I’m talking about when it’s life and death, not just a bunch of drunkards laying into each other outside a fast food outlet on a weekend. If you can, you have people to watch your back whom you trust without fail.
Anyway, Joey divided up the weapons between us, Battleby and Arventino put their hands on their blades and we walked through the door into the apartment block. Dear Divines, it was a tip in there, like the last fading refuge of society leaving civilisation behind for good. I’m not sure what the building manager was doing, but it wasn’t his damn job. The number on the key we’d found directed us to the fourth floor. More than once, people came out to ask us what we were doing. The first few times, Joey was polite, told them we were here on official business and to go back to their homes. The fifth time, a rather scruffily hirsute fellow got up in Joey’s face, never a smart idea especially given that he stank, and Joey hit him in the guts with the butt of his gun. If Unisco these days has gotten a bad reputation for excessive violence and brutality, it probably devolves back from those days. It makes it harder for you guys today, but that was what we had to do back in the day. It was a different time. People were harder. Life was harder. Sometimes, just to get results, you had to be even harder than them. If they tried to fight you, it was important to ensure that they would break in the process.
I don’t know if our two companions on the mission had ever seen anything like it. Maybe they hadn’t, and they were shocked by the state of the world they found themselves in. Maybe, I personally believe this one, I think they knew what sort of world we were slouching towards and they’d already inured themselves to whatever bleakness may yet come. They certainly gave the impression that they knew things and given what little I found out about the Vedo after the mission, I wasn’t surprised to find that the impression was correct.
We arrived at the door, looked at each other as if in silent debate as to who’d take the first step of knocking. I didn’t want Joey volunteering, I wanted one of our companions to go first. If there were more people with laser swords on the other side, I wanted someone capable of at least doing something about it to go through the door to meet it. Eventually Battleby volunteered, put his hand on the knocker and rapped it three times before hustling clear.
Smart, I had to admit. That way, if anyone tried to ram a blade through the door, he’d be safe. Nobody did. Not a hint of life anywhere. I gave Joey the nod, watched him size the door up and then bring his boot against the lock with crushing force. It shook under his blow, stood firm until he kicked it again and again, each strike echoing down the corridor. Another door opened, a haggard-looking woman poking her head out. In another life, she might have been pretty. Here, she looked worn down and defeated, little older than a teenager but already beaten by the life she’d stumbled into.
“What the hells are you people doing?” she demanded. “Some of us are trying to bloody sleep in here!”
“My deepest apologies, madam,” I said. Behind me, Joey kicked the door again, damn near broke it off its hinges with that final blow. I showed her my ID, gave her an apologetic smile. “We’re here on official business with Unisco. Tell me, have you ever met your neighbour?”
“The one whose door you just kicked in?”
I nodded.
“Nobody lives there. Hasn’t for as long as I’ve lived here, and I’ve been here four years next month.”
I stroked my chin. Curious. Curious indeed. The fob didn’t lie, I’ve always believed that if something cannot speak, it cannot lie, although the truth may not be the obvious one is always worth remembering. That he had the key to that apartment meant there was a link there.
“I wouldn’t live there though,” she said. “Sometimes I walk past it and you can feel it. You just feel dirty looking at the door. Like every bad thing you’ve ever done is on the verge of being released to the world. You ever get that feeling?”
Given my list of bad things was probably infinitely larger than whatever she had perpetuated through the course of her life, I nodded, not that I had experienced that feeling for myself, but because courtesy costs nothing, and a helpful witness is always more useful than one who wants yo
u dead for wasting their time.
“Thank you, madam,” I said. “You’ve given me a lot to think about here.”
Things hadn’t changed that much in fifty years then, Nick thought. The job was much the same as it always had been at the very core of its essence, even if the approaches had had to be relaxed. Talk to who you need to talk to for answers. If someone needs their head cracking, do that. Just a little more on the sly, definitely not with any witnesses. There’d been more than once he’d wanted to punch a suspect who wasn’t talking. Wasn’t in the Unisco rules to say they could do that. Even if they were, the Senate would probably have words about it. Human rights and all that. They got a little hung up on that.
A simpler time, simpler problems. Allegedly.
“I followed the rest of the team into the apartment, immediately struck by how bare and sparsely decorated it was. The walls had never seen paints nor papers, if there had ever been a carpet in here then it had long since gone and any touch of domesticity with it. It appeared the woman I interviewed had been right. Nobody lived here or had for a while. Back to my earlier point. What cannot speak cannot lie. I should have said it can’t be wrong. Because while the neighbour had told me nobody had lived here for years, the five bedrolls on the floor told me differently. They told me that people had lived here. They told me that people still lived here. Some cans of food remained at the back of the room, still sealed shut. Labels hadn’t faded. Still in date, I’d wager. Beans and preserved meats. Not the healthiest meal but sustaining.
“What the bloody hells is going on here, Director Frewster?” Joey asked. He’d lowered his weapon, a flashlight strapped to the side of the barrel. Arventino and Battleby both held out their hands, a touch of luminescence rippling across their skin. At the time, I thought it brought an entire new meaning to the phrase hand-held light and I must have laughed for all eyes went to me.
“Hells if I know, Agent Butcher. Hells if I know.”
I never liked not having the answers. A good stance for one in my position for the answers are something they seek to conceal from us and we must ferret them out. I took that dislike as a challenge and used it to find the truth, to drive me on. Here, I couldn’t even start to comprehend where to look. Not without more information. With no other avenue immediately obvious to me, I decided that searching the apartment was perhaps the best bet. Sometimes you’ll enter somewhere, and they’ve left it instantly obvious what you need. A more stupid breed of criminal you couldn’t hope to find, unfortunately they very quickly go extinct. Natural selection is not always a good thing, you’ll find.”
Chapter Thirteen. Assault on Graham’s Field
“I never worked out why Graham’s Field is so popular. The Guypsians love it there. We know what happened a year ago. They might never do the carnival again thanks to that blatant bit of urban terrorism. I’m just glad Unisco caught the guy responsible. Makes me glad we pay our taxes. I sleep better knowing that guy isn’t out there.”
Belderhampton mayor Morgan McCarthy on his city’s most famous park.
With four rooms and four of us, we split up. Joey took the bathroom, I didn’t envy him because it made the rest of the apartment look well-heeled and kempt. I took the bedroom, found more bedrolls in lieu of any sort of bed, while Arventino and Battleby took the main room and the kitchen respectively.
I could only hazard a guess as to how long these bedrolls had been here and how recently they’d been used, but they had that human stink about that that is hard to miss. My estimation was that they’d been used frequently, enough for the smell of their occupants to rub off on them. I gave them a cursory examination to check none of them had anything hidden within them, yet I was disappointed. That said, the sparseness of the room required only a short search, the only feature of note being a cupboard which I opened to find some papers and handwritten notes. I pulled them out, started to read through them.
I know paper is rare these days, Nicholas, but back then not so much. Words on a screen are easier to read, but there’s so much to be said for a delightful form of penmanship that has long since been lost to us. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all this was that it was written in blood. Imagine that, if you will. Blood or almost certainly crimson ink. I couldn’t tell from here. I wasn’t entirely sure it mattered, other than to prove my point I was dealing with some wholesomely deranged individuals here.
After all that, I couldn’t read the words, they were written in an unfamiliar tongue, so I retreated to the main room where Battleby had turned up something in the kitchen, a small bronze container about the size of a teacup, but with a sealed lid covering the top, a tiny tube protruding from the side. Doubtless it probably meant more to the two of them than it did to me or the disgruntled looking Joey. He’d gotten a truly shitty job, he knew it, I knew it and even though I doubted they cared, our companions knew it as well. To add insult to injury, he’d come up empty.
Arventino on the other hand, had hit a jackpot. He’d found a concealed section of the wall… How I didn’t know… and removed some of the bricks. I suppose with a careful eye, it might have been possible to spot that the mortar was loose, that some of them were piled back in unevenly, all the other signs that they’d been recently removed. Easier said than done. Out of the cubbyhole, he’d pulled more papers, a wicked-looking knife with a hooked blade and covered in rust-coloured stains that might have been blood and finally, a mini-projector. They’re so common these days, you don’t give them a second thought. Back then, they weren’t rare, but the average man on the street certainly didn’t have them. It was probably comfortably worth more than everything else in the apartment and given the shit state of it, probably the apartment itself. This model was only set to receive, rather than transmit, we realised immediately as we placed everything we’d found atop a bedroll in the middle of the room.
Battleby and Arventino looked towards the papers, Joey and I looked at the projector. Felt reasonable. I had no reason to assume those two weren’t tech-savvy, but many hands, Nicholas. Given neither of us could read the language on the papers, it was an easy decision. The cup remained ignored for the moment. I thought about asking about it but neither of them looked interested in talking for the moment.
“Got some messages stored in it,” Joey said, running his fingers across the readout. “Hold on, if we can just access them, we can see what their orders were. Hells, maybe we’ll know where to hit these guys then.” He looked at me. “Director are these guys trouble?”
I looked around the squalid apartment, from the bedrolls to the food, to the door that led outside and how nobody had known people were in here. “I’d say they’re the worst sort of trouble. They’ve not got good intentions for someone, that’s for sure.”
He inclined his head towards Arventino and Battleby. “I meant those guys.”
If either of them was offended by his remark, they didn’t show it. I only needed the trust to hold out a little longer, until we reached a conclusion and these guys were off the streets. Battleby even laughed as Joey said it, a deep, rumbling bark of mirth that started off like the complaint of thunder.
“Your partner is remarkably perceptive, Mister Frewster,” he said. “If what we see is right, there’s a few people in for bad days soon. These papers are birth records of children being born going back the last forty years.” He paused, ran a finger across the page. “There’s huge sections that have been crossed out though, which is interesting. Maybe one name in a hundred left. Bears further examination, perhaps?”
“And mine,” Arventino said. “Are an examination of the parents of those one in a hundred names. Looking into the exact nature of the relationship, how it started, how long it lasted, how it ended. Usually in death. Adds weight to the theory that they’re after the Forever Cycle.”
“The what?” Joey asked. I suddenly remembered he’d not been in the room when we’d had that earlier conversation with Amadeus. Probably for the best. Poor Joey looked well out of his comfort zone, eve
n more so as Arventino and Battleby went through the idea of half-breed Divine children out there in the kingdoms. I was out of mine too, but at least I’d had the chance to come to grips with that knowledge.
“Your name is on here too, Frewster,” Battleby said. “I’d imagine that it is also…”
“That’s correct,” Arventino offered. “A complete dissection of the relationship between your parents.”
I felt more than a little insulted by that, the knowledge that something so private had wound up in the hands of people like this. One more reason to ensure that they were eradicated quickly. They had the means to find things they shouldn’t have. As far as I knew, what had happened between my parents was between them alone. So how did they know things like how long they were together and how they’d met? Because I was sure as the hells that my dad didn’t tell them. I didn’t know the whole story myself, it always came out a little vague and when I’d pressed on it, the reply had always been ‘well that was how it happened, Bren.’
“Arse,” I muttered, quickly realised that could have been taken the wrong way. Having a go at Arventino wasn’t going to help things, he was only the messenger. He didn’t look too bothered, I suppose that was a good thing.
“We got an address for where these guys are based?” Joey asked. He cracked his knuckles. “And what the hells is that cup for?”
“It’s not a cup,” Battleby said. “It’s a receptacle.”
Joey gave him a sour look, perhaps not the wisest thing to do to a man with a laser sword and the compunction to use it. Still, he had a great pair of brass bollocks did Joey, I’ll give him that. Took no shit from Divine nor man and he wasn’t starting here. “A receptacle for what, pray do tell?”