Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

Deke, I transmitted, if you're reading me, the director of this project's in the stasis chamber, where Kara found the corpses. See if you can find him.

  Still no answer. Maybe the Predecessor machines were blocking the signal.

  I turned my attention to my captive. "All right, Technician Prohl, you obviously know about the Predecessors, so am I right in assuming that you know what this place is?"

  "Yeah," he replied in a choked voice. "We...we weren't really supposed to, but it's pretty obvious. I...I kind of heard Director Costanza talking about it to some high-up Council exec that visited."

  "Are the bodies still in the stasis chamber?" I asked him, already guessing the answer.

  He shook his head slightly and I backed my talons off enough to let him do it. "They were taken out right after we got here. It was all real hush-hush."

  "And you wouldn't have heard where they took the bodies, and all the rest of the gear they moved?"

  "They kept it real quiet," he insisted. "They didn't want us to know."

  Now, another side benefit of my implants that their designers probably hadn't intended was that the thermal imaging and sonic analyzers could be used as a kind of lie detector---when unaugmented humans lie knowingly, their body temperature goes up, and there's a barely-perceptible change in their voice stress. I got that kind of reading from Prohl when he tried not to answer my question.

  "Now," I said, pressing my talons against his neck just hard enough to break the skin and draw a trickle of blood, bringing a sharp gasp out of him, "let's try that again, Technician Prohl. Where did they take the bodies?"

  "All right, all right," he hissed, and I drew back the blades. "I...I heard that Council guy say something about how they would be going crazy over the bodies at 'the Rock.' I don't know anything else, I swear!"

  "'The Rock'," I repeated. "That's all you heard?"

  He never got a chance to answer. I don't know if it occurred on a conscious level, or if my headcomp detected the danger and put me in motion for my own survival---it happened too fast. But one moment I was leaning over Prohl, and the next I was lunging away from him, one hand snagging the Gatling laser. I was only a half a second ahead of the barrage of crimson pulses that nearly sliced the luckless technician in half, impacting all around him on the Predecessor column/machine.

  I rolled into a crouch, pulling the Gatling off of the floor where I had dragged it to and swinging it around to cover the squad of CSF mercs that had closed in on me. I walked the heavy weapon from left to right, the high-power pulses blowing dinner-plate-sized holes through four of the guards who were attempting to outflank me.

  I didn't wait to see where the others were; I just sprang to my feet and ran through the area the four mercs I had shot had come through, forward and slightly to the left of the column I had been hiding behind. If they'd been trying to surround me, they'd have spread themselves thin, and maybe I could surprise them.

  Sure enough, I heard panicked shouts from my right rear, as they realized I'd slipped through their trap. Bright threads cracked into machinery and rock all around, but I was too difficult a target moving at superhuman speed through the spirals and curves of the Ancient's devices. I passed between a low block of equipment and a huge vat that bubbled with chemical activity, nearly running headlong into another pair of guards coming around the other side of the vat. They stopped short at the sight of the Gatling's muzzle, then stopped forever when that muzzle flared with the light of half a dozen hyperexplosive lasing cartridges. The dazzling pulses of coherent light, calculated to cut through vehicle armor, heated the internal fluids in the two men's chests and blew them apart in a steam explosion that splattered me with gobbets of tissue and burning blood.

  I wiped my eyes clear of the offensive material, idly wondering how much the CSF paid their hired soldiers and deciding it couldn't be enough. I paused for a moment to scoop up one of the dead men's pulse carbines and sling it across my back. If it came down to any closer quarters than this, I might have to dump the Gatling. Spare weapon secured, I pushed off across the mildly slick floor, detecting the rest of the squad moving up behind me and to the right, and more movement ahead and left. I heard an alarm going off in the distance, and I hoped that Deke or Kara had found the director, because I seemed to be in the center of a rapidly converging shitstorm.

  The CSF mercs came up quickly to block my path, pairs of them stringing through every open pathway, aiming bursts of laserfire my way. Pulses striking all around me, I hosed almost fifty rounds at the closest of them, downing two before the others took cover. That gave me the opportunity to head down one of the unblocked paths between a large clump of tall, spindly poles and a pyramid-shaped structure with no visible doors.

  "God damn," I whispered to myself. Open paths were quickly becoming scarce, and I knew I couldn't take them all on, not on the run like this. I had to find a place to make a stand, somewhere with three walls to make them come at me right down the maw of my Gatling.

  Either that or I needed someone to get behind them and drive them into my fields of fire...

  Almost as if on cue, cries of surprise and panic arose from the rear of the troops, intermingled with the sharp cracks of pulse weapons, and several of the mercs broke from their positions. I cut down three that mindlessly came down my way, then waded in through the ranks of the others while their attention was turned to whoever was hitting them from their rear.

  I had to pick them off by ones and twos as they showed themselves, but it wasn't another five minutes and six dead mercs before the firing died out. I made my way forward slowly and cautiously, finally walked up to Kara McIntire, who was advancing from the other direction, her pulse carbine held at high port.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "Heard the firing," she told me. "Thought you could use some help."

  "Let's find Deke." I turned back to the direction of the stasis chamber. "I haven't been able to get ahold of him."

  "There's a lot of interference in here," Kara said without conviction, following me back around the pyramid, past a large, spherical construct.

  "Yeah." I shrugged, hoping he was all right.

  Deke, I tried again. Deke, where are you?

  Over here. I finally got a reply and homed in on the signal. Between the big mushroom and the wall.

  "This way." I led Kara past the sphere, angling farther to the left, through a forest of tall cones, up to a vaguely mushroom-shaped...thing, and around it.

  Deke was there, leaning against the wall, the left sleeve of his black fatigue shirt shredded beneath the armored vest he wore. Blood was dripping off a nasty slash on his arm, but the blood that coated the front of his vest wasn't his---it belonged to the body on the floor in front of him.

  "You okay?" I walked up to him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  "Yeah," he grunted, leaning down to pick his Gauss machine pistol off the floor and reholster it. "No thanks to this jackhead," he added, motioning toward the corpse on the floor.

  He was a human male, dressed in a chameleon-camo armored suit and half a hood---the other half of the hood and, not incidentally, the face within, had been ripped away by Deke's talons. A quick thermal scan told me he was packing some bionics, and the wrist sabres extending from both arms looked to be implanted rather than worn.

  "What the hell is he?" I wondered. "I've never seen anything like this with the CSF."

  "I have," McIntire told me, staring at the corpse. "He's part of the Executive Group's personal bodyguard. I saw a holo of them in briefing on the Council Chairman, Andre Damiani."

  "I'll be damned happy if I never see one again." Deke walked over to where his pulse carbine lay by the wall, picked it up and examined it ruefully. The thermoplastic stock had been sliced clean through just behind the pistol grip, rendering the weapon nearly unusable.

  I unslung the one I'd picked up, handing it to him. "You never could learn to take care of your equipment," I told him, grinning.

  "Let's get to the stasis chamber," Kara
urged impatiently. "If the director's even still there."

  "She's right," I nodded. "I got a little from that tech, but we need more."

  I took the lead again, Kara and Deke in a loose wedge behind me, and we hugged the wall all the way up to the stasis chamber. I recognized it from Kara's description---a large, high-ceilinged room offset from the rest of the cavern, yet open to it. The glassy wall she had told us of, which had enclosed the Predecessor corpses, was gone, along with the corpses. What was left was whatever machinery that had been too deeply entrenched in the rock to easily remove...and a dead man.

  I kept half an eye on the chamber entrance while Kara turned the body over. He was a human male with pale skin and almost white hair. He was a bit on the thin side, and nearly two meters tall, dressed in tailored white coveralls with numerous pockets for various instruments. His throat had been slashed wide open, and he was lying in a pool of his own blood.

  "Director Costanza, I presume," I muttered, any feelings of hope I'd had fading quickly.

  "Who killed him?" Kara asked, looking straight at Deke.

  "Hey," Deke protested, "how the hell should I know? Maybe it was that goon that came after me."

  Kara seemed to think about it, finally shrugging.

  "It's possible," she admitted. "He could have had orders to kill the director if anyone attacked."

  "So what do we do now?" Deke wanted to know. "Try to snag some of the other techs?"

  I shook my head, trying not to think the dark thoughts that floated at the edge of my consciousness. "It'd be a waste of time. If any of them knew anything valuable, they'd have been killed, too. We need to get out of here, get to a long-range transmitter."

  "What about this place?" Kara wondered.

  "What do you mean?" Deke asked her, not comprehending.

  "Can we just leave it all here for the Corporates?" she asked. "Shouldn't we try to destroy it? After all...what if we can't stop them?"

  I frowned thoughtfully. I honestly hadn't considered that.

  "We could use the heavy cargo lifter outside," she proposed. "It's probably fusion-powered. We could program it to fly into the entrance and overload its reactor."

  "Well, it certainly fits in with our pattern of wanton destruction." I looked to Deke. "What do you think?"

  "I hate to do it," he admitted, rubbing his injured arm. "The technology in this place could be worth a fortune...enough to buy your own Goddamned planet."

  "Assuming we're alive to buy it," I muttered. I mulled it over for a second. If anyone was going to believe us, we might need this place for proof. On the other hand, I wasn't honestly too sanguine about our chances of surviving, and at least we could deprive the Corporates of the high-tech treasures they'd left here. "All right," I decided. "We'll blow the place. Deke, you go prep the Dutchman for takeoff. Kara, go program the lifter." I hefted my Gatling laser. "I'll stay at the front entrance and make sure no one interferes with us."

  We were in orbit before the lifter's reactor went critical, but the fusion blast that resulted was clearly visible on the daylight side as an eye-searing burst of light that blanked out our screens. I watched it with little satisfaction, as it signaled a realization deep inside of me that I had given up any illusions of living through this. At least we were royally screwing up the bastards' plans.

  Kara didn't say another word till we were in Transition Space. Deke had gone back to have his arm taken care of by the automedic, leaving her and I alone in the cockpit. She waited a few minutes after he left, then turned to me from the copilot's seat.

  "Do you trust him?" she asked me bluntly.

  I wasn't surprised at the question; I'd seen the look on her face back in the stasis room. I thought about it a second before I answered her, finding the subject troubli "Maybe I'm naive," I finally replied, "but he was my partner. Until he proves different, I've got to trust him."

  "It could have been the Executive bodyguard," she admitted. "And I guess the machinery could have blocked off your signal."

  "And that's the way we'll have to play it," I told her. "But you keep your eyes open. If he is..." I couldn't bring myself to finish the thought.. "If he is..." the words hissed out reluctantly, "I might be blinded by my loyalty to him." She nodded, patting my shoulder comfortingly.

  But there was not a damn thing that would make me feel comfortable again.

  Interlude: Damiani

  Trint stepped into the ViR chamber as hesitantly as he'd ever done anything in his life. He'd been advised when he'd come into Damiani's service never to disturb the man here, no matter what the circumstances, and he'd never been called in here...until now.

  Damiani was in the center of the padded room, dressed in a loose-fitting white gi, going through the motions of martial arts combat with an opponent only he could see, a man or woman somewhere halfway around the world in another chamber like this one. It was all so convenient and bloodless. Trint found it somehow...effete. Was this culture so morally bankrupt that they could not bear the sight of their own blood?

  He watched in silence as his master---he'd long ago abandoned the fiction of "employer"---put the finishing moves on his spectral sparring partner, bowed and wiped sweat from his brow. Why not simulated sweat, Trint wondered.

  "I've received a message," he told Trint without preamble. "He tells me they've attacked the dig."

  "Is it damaging?" The Tahni asked, digesting the information.

  "Not as badly as it could have been," Andre replied, retrieving a towel from a hook on the wall and wiping himself down. "He managed to kill the director of research before they could question him. Still, they destroyed the Predecessor equipment we hadn't been able to relocate, and they probably feel they have enough to go to Murdock."

  "The Fleet Intelligence General?" Trint guessed. Damiani nodded. "Still, your plan will come to fruition before they can discover anything." It was half statement, half hopeful question---though not hopeful in the direction Damiani would have thought.

  "Possibly," Damiani allowed. "Perhaps even probably. They plan to meet at the Centauri Belt---he feels this would be the best time to hit them."

  "These people were his comrades in arms," Trint pointed out. "Will he be able to have them killed?"

  "I've been considering that," Damiani admitted, stripping out of his top as he led the Tahni out of the room into the showers. "I'm not certain whether or not I want them terminated yet. There may be a way to use them to further our objective. I want you," he told Trint, stepping out of his trousers and hanging the gi on the wall outside the shower stall, "to manage this for me. Take a Corporate courier---one's been prepared for you---and go to the Belt. Watch him. If he can make this work, leave him alone. But if you judge there's a probability that he might be turning on me, kill everyone. Whatever the outcome, contact me immediately."

  "Here?" Trint asked, trying to conceal the excitement that coursed through him. This couldn't be happening...it was some cruel trick Damiani was perpetuating for his own amusement.

  Andre shook his head. "I'll be at the Capital. Events there will soon require my presence."

  "Yes, sir," the Tahni nodded, as the Corporate Chief Executive pulled open the shower door.

  "Oh, and Trint." Damiani turned back to him, tone businesslike, but eyes hard. "I believe you've known me long enough to realize that I am not a trusting soul. Just in case you start feeling overly independent while your out there on your own, you should never forget that little guarantor of loyalty implanted in your cerebral cortex." He pursed his mouth thoughtfully. "You know, I'm not even sure if it would kill you, considering your...construction." He smiled coldly. "But I doubt you'd be enjoying life. Besides," he concluded, entering the stall and closing the door, "where would one such as you go?"

  "As you say, Monsieur Damiani," Trint muttered quietly, not caring that the water muted his words, "where could I go?"

  Chapter Nine

  I have never felt so naked in my life as when I walked into the Wanderer's Home wi
thout a gun. I knew, on an intellectual level, that it was necessary. No self-contained space habitat, not even on the wild fringes of the Centauri Belt, allowed any civilians to carry firearms, simply because of the risk of decompression.

  Not that it was a real danger on Belial. The aptly-named pleasure station was constructed from a "blown" asteroid. Some independent investors---back before the Corporate Council, when there had been such a thing---had taken a basically spherical, nickel-iron asteroid, drilled a narrow hole down its center, filled it with water and then exposed the thing to sunlight amplified by large mirrors. The resultant steam pressure produced a hollow tube of compressed ore, in this case nearly thirty meters thick. Spin was imparted to produce near one gravity at the lowest levels. The "open" ends were sealed by transplas, with reflectors mounted to provide natural sunlight, and a pair of huge docking rings were connected through the core with a non-spinning transport tube.

  You'd have to have a hell of a handgun to penetrate thirty meters of nickel-iron, but I suppose it made sense on a pleasure station to try to keep the customers from shooting each other indiscriminately. I was allowed the vibroshiv I carried tucked in my belt---after all, this was the wilder end of the Belt, and knife duels were a cherished tradition.

  Deke also concealed a blade, beside the talons that were our constant companions; and Kara had decided to pack two, after the customs officials had forced her to drain the power pack for her implant laser. They hadn't wanted to allow her in at all after their security scanners had revealed the device, but had finally settled on an interlock chip inserted beneath the surface of the synthskin on her wrist that would notify them if she attempted to recharge the weapon. She wasn't too thrilled about being quite literally disarmed.

  Myself, I'd carried a gun for most of my adult life, and I'd grown accustomed to the weight. It was oddly disconcerting to feel somehow lighter, and the knowledge that any enemy I might face was likely to be in a similar state wasn't great comfort.