by O. J. Lowe
It wouldn’t be that simple, of course. Weapons flew back to hands, lightning crackled from fingertips and fire hissed and spat out of palms and rather than stay on the offensive, Battleby and Arventino were forced to bring their own blades up to guard themselves, enemy blades striking harmlessly against their own.
We’d already formed a plan, Joey and I, worked on it ourselves in the last few moments of calm. I raised my disperser, made for the camp. The closest one I could see was little more than a lad, but he looked a real mess, like he’d overdosed on the bad stuff long since and was running on autopilot now. I pulled the trigger, sent a blast of hardened kinetic energy towards him. His blade came up, he blocked it but with great effort. I saw the blast force him back a few feet, Joey put him down with a trio of blaster bolts to the chest. I dropped to my knees, ducked under the strike that might have taken my head off had it connected before Joey’s blaster roared out, shots hammering harmlessly off the blade. From my knees, I raised the weapon and blasted the Cavanda cultist right through the lower back, point blank range. I think he nearly hit sub-orbit. That accounted for seven, nine even as both Arventino and Battleby had torn through their opponent, leaving the pieces of the ground. They both had rounded on the last one, he had a modicum of skill with the blade, even I could see that, but it wouldn’t do him any good. He got a few good strikes in, too late to do him any good before Arventino cut his legs out from underneath him. He hit the ground, Battleby buried his blade into his face.
I blinked. That was easy. The fighting was over before it had even had the chance to truly start. I looked at Joey, held a hand and gripped his, almost drew him into a hug. Not quite. Wouldn’t have been appropriate. We hadn’t done that even when we’d almost been killed by Serranians in the Battle of Hoag Island. Those were stressful days. This hadn’t even come close, now it was over. Hoag Island, there were men getting shot down by the dozens, body parts everywhere. This had been a minor skirmish at best. Between friends, the simplest gestures will always suffice.
We stepped out into the carnage we had helped wrought, Battleby and Arventino had already deactivated their weapons. I made a mental note never to screw with either of them. I’d thought the earlier assassin was scary with his energy blade. Seeing these two cut their way through five of the same people in as many seconds was downright terrifying.
“This wasn’t as tough as you made out,” Joey said, surveying the bodies with casual disinterest. One thing that made Joseph Butcher such an effective man to have at your back was he’d never been overtly too bothered about the suffering of his fellow man once they’d been snuffed out.
“The element of surprise does have its fortuity,” Battleby said. “Even so, you’re right. This many of them, one of them should have seen us coming.”
“Don’t complain,” Arventino said. “We caught a break here.” I saw him kick one body in examination. “Although, Adrian, didn’t some of them look a little green to you?”
“Green? I’ve seen less greener blades of grass! The cream of the crop these gentlemen were not.” Battleby looked disgusted as he said it. “We were expecting ten Cavanda, we got maybe two of them worth that name. Master Arventino and I are a match for any two they have. The rest of them are just boys with blades they couldn’t hope to control and forces they couldn’t hope to master. Lads with ambition outweighing their talents.”
I wasn’t complaining. I wasn’t an expert on these things, so I didn’t want to pass comment. I’ve always believed in leaving that to the experts.
With little more to say, we searched the area, ran our hands across every single dismembered body until finally Arventino came up with what we were looking for. He found it in a chest towards the back of the overhang, right in the crevice. Perhaps not its final resting place but that was where they’d left it for the moment. The device wasn’t huge, not at all but it reminded me of an old-time compass, a large bronze circle with an onyx-coloured face that had the consistency of glass and seven indentations around the edge of it. I took the receptacle we’d found from the apartment, held it against one of them. It fit neatly, would have been held there if we’d forced the two parts together.
“When the seven come together, the lock will turn,” Battleby said. “The Forever Cycle itself. Hard to think that so much bad could come out of something so small.” Arventino had come up with five vials, all of them filled with something crimson and sloppy. I didn’t need to guess at what they were. It fed on blood after all. I felt a little queasy looking at it. Maybe my own blood was responding to it. Maybe I was imagining things. I hoped not.
“Why do they call it the Forever Cycle,” Joey asked. “It’s a strange name.”
“It’s a High Sidorovan variant word,” Battleby said, looking at the device. “Originally was something like fuh-evar-sekel. The translation stuck. Means eternal lock, roughly translated.”
Huh, I thought. How about that. Instead, I vocalised the question that had been troubling me ever since we’d put the last of the cultist Cavanda down. “What are you going to do with it now? Use it?”
Arventino shook his head. “Hells no, that’s the last thing that we want. With the use of the Forever Cycle, it costs far more than you’ll ever get. You can’t hope ever to use it and remain the same. It would have burned these people alive.” He threw a hand out towards the bodies of the men we’d killed. If there was any compassion left in him towards them, he didn’t show it. They were just meat. End of. “Best thing we can do is lock it away, hope that nobody else ever gets their hands on it who might use it for ill purpose.”
“I’m going to take it back to our temple,” Battleby said. “I’ve got a ticket booked onto the Aerius a few days from now. Her first voyage. I’ll get off in Serran and head north to our temple. Once we’re there, our grandmaster can lock it away, we’ll never hear of it again if we’re lucky. But first!” He looked at the vials, extended a finger into each of them and I saw a brief flash of flame and a whisper of smoke from each in turn. “Just make sure what they gathered can’t be used.”
That was it then. I wasn’t going to argue with them, they had the capabilities of dealing with it far better than Unisco did, they knew what they had, and I trusted them not to use it. There weren’t many others whom I could say the same thing about. Of course, what happened next was disastrous. The Aerius disappeared, with it went Battleby and the Forever Cycle. I don’t know if he ever made it back to Serran, but given the ship never showed up there, I assume he didn’t. This is the story I wanted to tell you in person, Nicholas. The past has a way of coming back around. I watched what Claudia Coppinger said during her address of the Quin-C final, when she killed all those people. I have no doubt in my mind that the Cycle is what she seeks, she wants to fully embrace divinity the way those men did fifty years ago. In the aftermath of all this, I spent time with Amadeus King to understand the legends. Should something like this ever happen again, I wanted to be prepared. I knew that they would come for me. This is the reason why my body needs burning before my blood can be harvested. You need to find the other Divine-born and keep them safe. They might not believe that they are in danger, they might not understand what they are. But they are out there and Coppinger will be looking for them.”
A resigned sigh broke from the recording. “I don’t have much time left. She came for me, just as I thought she would. You’ve done your best to keep me safe, Nicholas. You went above and beyond. Not just for me but for Helga. Keep an eye on her. She’s precious. I never had a better companion in all my years. The one true constant in my latter years, a gem of a woman. Talk to her, she might be able to help you with finding them. Good bye, Nicholas Roper. And above all else, thank you. I’m sure you did everything you could to try and save my life.”
Not quite enough, Nick thought as it died to a close. He’d done everything he could and Frewster had still died. He hadn’t been able to save him. A horrible thought struck him that just maybe the old man had committed suicide, walked in front
of those blasts to get away from all this. Given the nature of his story, it wouldn’t surprise him. It was fanciful, almost as fanciful as the idea that Frewster had managed to record all that while he was fighting Saarth? How long had that bloody battle gone on for then? Very easy to lose track of the time when fighting for your life, it would appear.
His summoner trilled once again, cutting him out of his reverie. This time he answered the call without thinking, saw the image of Davide Icardi on the screen in front of him. His boss. Nick winced inwardly. Terrific. This was going to go well, he could see it already. He never thought he’d miss Brendan King. The sooner Arnholt kicked Icardi to the kerb, the better. He could see the island of grey hair at the front of Icardi’s balding pate all too clear, the repeatedly broken nose prominent. He’d once heard Wade say that it was a good thing the nose looked like that, it broke up an otherwise uninteresting face. Harsh but fair.
It told him Icardi wasn’t the best fighter ever. To have had his nose broken that many times by his fifties, he didn’t know how to duck a punch.
“My, my, Agent Roper. You have been busy, haven’t you? I’ve got a steady stream of reports coming in about what you’ve been up to today, none of them from you first-hand. Now, I wonder if you can tell me why I find that deeply unsettling?”
“I suppose you know your own mind better than me,” Nick said. “And I’d imagine that the lack of information upsets you because you like to feel like you have a grip on things. That’s understandable. If I was in your position, I’d want to know why I’ve not heard from me either.” He cleared his throat. “All I can assure you, Chief Icardi…” The title was only temporary, but nothing like mollifying an ego. “… I’ve been on the run, fighting for my life all day. I didn’t get the chance to call in, lest my position be betrayed.”
Not entirely true, but it sounded convincing enough. And there wasn’t much Icardi could do to call him on it. No witnesses. Unisco protocol would back him up. It had been a dangerous circumstance.
“Can’t you behave like a normal agent rather than turning everything around you into a disaster zone?” Icardi asked grumpily. “I want you back here, right now! I want a full report as soon as possible.”
“Understood.”
“Roper?”
“Yes sir?”
“What did Frewster want from us anyway?”
How best to answer that? The answer caught in his throat, a dozen possible replies and none of them felt like they’d do.
“Not entirely sure, sir. I’ve yet to examine everything he said and did and arrive at the conclusion he left for us.”
He cancelled the call, determined to not have to answer any further questions. Icardi was going to want those answers sooner rather than later, he’d have to give them eventually. No point in repeating himself.
Chapter Fourteen. Subtractor.
“Why do I trust her? She has a certain charisma about her, that’s to be sure. A real find of a woman. Perhaps when someone like her takes their attention to governance, it should be discouraged. Too many business people have struggled in politics. I think she could make a real success of it. A shame that’s beneath her scope. Why settle for kingdoms when she wants even more? I wonder sometimes if she can do it, then I realise that’s not the question that needs to be asked. The way things are going, it’s only a matter of when she does it, not if. And when she does, I’ll be at her side. The Mistress will triumph.”
Excerpt from Subtractor’s private journal.
The man calling himself Subtractor came here every night when his day had finished and pondered, sat down with a glass of Black Briar beer on the balcony overlooking the city. Here, he considered everything that had happened, everything he had been in a position to affect and whether he had done everything he could to ensure things went the best possible way they could for the Mistress.
At the end of most days, the answer was yes. He’d done everything and would continue to do so, and not just for the fees that she paid him though exorbitant they may be. He’d gladly have done everything she’d asked of him for free, though he’d never let her know that. If people think you believe utterly in a cause, they tend to make unreasonable requests of you. If they think that you’re only in it for the credits, things tended to remain a little more sensible. There were no suicidal requests they’d expect to be carried out under pain of death.
Not that the Mistress was like that. Far from it. Best employer he’d ever had, beat shades out of Unisco in that respect. They demanded secrecy concerning their employees, the Mistress understood the need for it but spoke of a day when everything he’d done would come to light. The organisation would be dead, and he would oversee her secret police, he would be the one who saw that the world set out to be what she desired it to be from a law and order point of view. Her vision was absolute, it was flawless, how many simply desired a painless transition, an idea of same shit but different boss? The Senate and the kingdoms had pushed that idea for years. Revolution was dead before it had even started. If you wanted change, you were probably going to be disappointed. Too many had invested in making sure things remained the same.
If you wanted things to change, you had to strip everything down to the bare basics and rebuild from scratch, it was the only way to do it, the Mistress had worked that out years ago. Only now were the kingdoms seeing the fruits of those efforts bloom. Not that most of them appreciated it, the ungrateful little oiks. They set to try and keep things the same, frantically defending what they had as if it were something precious instead of the squalid little thing it had become. Value faded but principle lasted only if they mattered and the principles of the five kingdoms had died a long fucking time ago. People didn’t know what that meant any more. Subtractor remembered sitting at his grandfather’s knee, being told what mattered. “Do what’s right,” the old man had said. “If you know something’s wrong in your heart, it’s probably wrong. Always be your own barometer, lad.”
He’d tried. He’d joined Unisco because he’d thought it was the right thing to do. He wanted to make his own difference on the kingdoms, ensure that the law was upheld. Who he had been before didn’t matter so much, just a boy with big dreams and the will to follow them. That boy would have looked at the man he’d become and… Well that was the question, wasn’t it? Would he approve? Or would he recoil in dread? Yes, he’d done horrific things. He’d betrayed those he’d sworn an oath to. When they found out, his name wouldn’t be worth spit. Any agents who were left would probably try to kill him out of spite. He’d put a big brass bullseye right on his forehead and for what?
Well, for the Mistress for one thing. If that wasn’t reason enough, he didn’t know what was or would be.
He’d graduated the top of his class naturally. He’d had the will, he’d had the application and he’d had interests in Unisco academia that had extended far beyond pulling triggers and throwing punches. Everyone wanted those jobs, they were glamorous, and they were romanticised as hell, the womanising, hard-drinking spy regularly saving the world. There were more shows and movies along those lines than he could count. He’d wanted more, especially when he’d finally found out what a professional career at Unisco was like. The first case he’d been assigned to, he’d seen the very worst of the agency in action. He’d seen slovenliness and laziness, corruption and wanton brutality towards suspects and witnesses alike. It had been some hells of a first day in retrospect. Only then had he realised the true size of the task ahead, realising that should he wish to rise to the top then it was up to him to stick his head above the parapet, to make them wonder about this junior fellow and how he was embarrassing people with ten times his experience.
Getting promoted was his aim. From the act would spring everything else and once he’d hit that target, he could move onto step two. He wouldn’t be here in five years’ time in the same position he was now. That would have been wasted effort. If he wished to enforce change, he needed to be in position to do that.
He’d c
ontinue to climb the ladder, he’d already made up his mind his time with Unisco would not be permanent. The spell might be temporary, he’d since encountered many fellow agents who’d proved to be cut from the same cloth as him in all ways but one, they would never betray the agency. They acknowledged that they’d made a commitment, they would honour that, and he could respect it in a strange sort of way. He didn’t agree with it, but he respected them for it. Yet even with that number of clean agents he encountered, it took only a few to sour the reputation of the lot of them. Unisco’s reputation was hurtling towards an all-time low even before Claudia Coppinger came onto the scene.
He’d met Claudia Coppinger long before ever going to work for her. Subtractor had always been skilled with his hands, some of his inventions had been famed back in the day before he’d been overshadowed by larger names in the organisation. Just because someone was a famed spirit caller apparently meant that their work was better. This sort of vile favouritism had always existed there, and he’d had enough. A job had come up at Reims, given the title of Head of Innovation and he’d applied for it. He’d put his resume through and he’d gotten the call to go for an interview. They sounded excited about him, more than his superiors who were masters at taking the wonders he’d made for them and stripping them down to the cheapest sum of their parts, mass-producing an inferior version. It was a wonder they’d moved him into the labs at all, that someone had allowed themselves the chance of seeing something past the end of their own nose to appreciate his value as an inventor over an assassin.
They hadn’t even moved to give him Alvin Noorland’s old job when it had come up, they’d handed it off to a fricking HAX mechanic. Of all the insults he’d borne, that ranked amongst the fiercest.
When he’d met Coppinger, spoken to her and revealed a little about himself, she’d seemed excited and given what he knew about her now, it was perhaps unsurprising.