by Rick Partlow
"Collision alert!" Navarre yelled at the same time as Lt. Price, and he tensed up instinctively, even though he knew he wouldn't feel the impact from where they sat deep in the armored core of the station.
Then his display whited out completely before disappearing in a spray of grey static, and he did feel something: a rumbling that was not like an impact at all, but more like the entire station wobbling on its axis as if the whole thing had been struck by a giant hammer.
"What the fuck?" Sal had time to exclaim as he stepped away from the shuddering bulkhead.
It was the last thing Salman Kapoor ever said. Before he had time to draw another breath, the Commonwealth Spacefleet Orbital Garrison at Tahn-Skyyiah erupted in a fusion explosion as hot as the heart of a sun, and abruptly ceased to exist.
Chapter One
Seen by the light of day, Skintown was a warzone. It had burned on that night five years ago, when the Skingangers had gone to war with the Predecessor cultists in a paroxysm of violence that had left entire blocks of Harristown in ruins. They had killed each other and leveled buildings in a conflict over whether humans were created in perfection by lost alien gods or the human body was a flawed product of random chance that could be and should be replaced by the cold efficiency of machinery. Harristown's government lacked the funding to rebuild the neighborhood, so it stood in all its stark ugliness, a monument to a larger war that had stretched from Earth to the farthest reaches of the Commonwealth.
The battle had been about ideology, but the war had been about money and power, like all wars. At least the ones who had started it, the Corporate Council that had controlled the Commonwealth economy for a century, had fought it for money and power. Caleb Mitchell had fought his war for his family and his home.
So why are you fighting this one? he asked himself as he stepped carefully through the wreckage of the old black market bionics lab.
"What exactly are we hoping to find here, Cal?" Pete asked. Caleb turned and saw that his younger brother was kneeling beside an overturned operating table, careful not to touch the crimson stains that darkened its white polymer surface.
It was easy to forget that Pete was in his thirties now. He still had the same boyish look to his face, though his hair was cut shorter and he seemed less worried about whether it or his clothes were in style. Actually, it had been months since Cal had seen him---or any of them---in anything but grey utility fatigues. Hell, he'd only seen Rachel out of them because they slept together.
Sometimes anyway, he stifled a snort. Rachel wasn't exactly happy about all this, and he couldn't blame her. She'd thought they'd been done with all this five years ago, after they'd taken down Andre Damiani and the Corporate Council. Then a hired assassin had come after him at home on their farm, and they'd been dragged back into another web of intrigue, this time in a race for the Northwest Passage, the Transition Line that led out of the Cluster and into the rest of the galaxy. They'd thought they'd been up against a group of mercenary former intelligence agents bent on retrieving Predecessor technology and using it to seize power, but things hadn't been that simple.
"This was one of Cutter's secret labs," Cal reminded Pete. "It's where he had his..." He hunted for a word. "...duplication technology." He shrugged. "The General thought it would be a good place to start trying to track down what he was up to five years ago."
"I still don't get how Cutter did it," Pete said, stepping around a charred support beam that stuck out of the ground like a grave marker. "I mean, I understand how he made the clones of himself..."
"Not really clones," Cal corrected automatically, after having heard the same lecture from Cutter himself many times. "Genetic duplicates, assembled in a lab by nanotech. Clones are just like an identical twin born as a baby."
"Okay, whatever." Pete rolled his eyes. "Anyway, I get how he could make the duplicates of himself, put a headcomp and a neurolink in them and then upload his memories to them and make a copy of himself." He made an expression like he'd bitten into something distasteful. "I mean, it's kind of creepy, but I understand how it works. What I don't get is how he's supposed to have replaced military officers with these genetic duplicates."
"He started small," Cal explained. "He got that DSI agent Laussel while he was out in the field, and whoever else he got after that he used Laussel to lure in."
"Not how he got access to them," Pete clarified, "how he got control of them. I mean, if you construct a duplicate and read the original's memories into it, it's just like the original. How did he turn them into his flunkies?"
Cal frowned, seeing something in the wreckage. He reached through a stack of splintered and peeling buildfoam flakes and began clearing away the twisted and burned remains of a supply cabinet. Beneath it he could just barely make out a gap between two sections of the building's foundation, and with the thermal filters implanted in his eyes, he could see a difference in the heat background in a small square of the fusion-form aggregate.
"I don't know how he did it," Cal admitted, brushing the square clean as he spoke. "But he was able to do some serious cutting-edge shit penetrating headcomps the last time we were with him. I wouldn't put a little brainwashing past him."
"Did you find something?" Pete wondered, stepping over to where Cal was kneeling.
"There's something down here," his older brother said, digging his fingertips into the crack in the foundation. Muscles rippled under his sleeves and, unseen beneath them, byomer muscle augments connected to his headcomp with superconductive artificial nerves worked in concert with the natural musculature to lift over a hundred kilograms of fusion-form aggregate and biphase carbide reinforcement out of five years' worth of built up soil and detritus.
He didn't grunt with effort and there was no strain on his face as he pulled the meter-square trapdoor up on its side, then dumped it backwards to crash back into the debris with a heavy crunch of buildfoam being crushed to powder. A cloud of dust rose in the air, obscuring everything for a moment; when it cleared, Cal could see the upper end of a ladder that led down a shaft as narrow as the opening, only the first few meters visible even in the direct sunlight.
Out of the corner of his eye, Cal could see Pete staring a little at the massive hatch lying in a still-settling cloud of dust; and he realized that his brother hadn't often seen him use his full strength.
"Let me know if you need any help with that," the younger man said quietly, mouth quirking up at the edge.
Cal snorted a laugh, then lowered himself feet first through the hole and began climbing down the ladder. He paused just before his head passed below the entrance and fixed Pete with a look.
"Give me a couple minutes to make sure it's not rigged with a trap or caved in or something," he instructed.
Pete nodded silently. Cal fought back another laugh at that as he began descending. A few months ago, he would have expected an argument; but Pete had seen for himself in the interim just how hard his big brother was to kill.
Have to write a thank you note to the Spacefleet techs that did the work, he thought. It surprised him that this time, he was half serious. In years past, he'd thought of the augmentation he'd received during the War with the Tahni as a curse, a burden he'd shouldered to protect his world, Canaan, from an alien threat. Even when he'd been fighting the Corporate Council five years ago and his only advantage had been that augmentation, he'd still felt as if giving into the need to become the Killing Machine once again was sacrificing his humanity.
This last few months, though, he'd seen people---and things that used to be people---who had truly given up their humanity; and he'd seen that even an alien cyborg "born" in a lab could prove himself more human than most men. He let out a hiss of breath as the thought of Trint stung his memory with fresh pain. During the war, he and the Tahni Imperial Guard cyborg would have been the most vicious of enemies, but circumstances had thrown them together against the Corporate Council and they'd wound up saving each other's lives.
Trint had lived with him a
nd Rachel and Pete, as one of the family, for four years there on Canaan; and Cal had let himself believe that he was through with the violence and corruption and intrigue. Then Robert Chang, the former DSI Cadre infiltration specialist who had become the street surgeon they knew as Cutter, had maneuvered and manipulated them into leading him to the fabled Northwest Passage, the one Transition Line that led out of the Cluster and into the larger galaxy, where the technology of the fabled Predecessors waited for the taking.
What Cutter hadn't counted on was the Skrela. The ancient, genetically engineered enemy of the Predecessors, they spread like a virus and destroyed any civilization they encountered; and they were still there, waiting in hibernation just on the other side of that Transition Line for the door to re-open.
Cutter had forced Cal into using the Predecessor AI to open the closed Transition Line that led into the greater part of the galaxy and the Skrela had come through it. That demented bastard had left them there, of course, and they'd nearly been killed before General Murdock had picked them up. But Trint had stayed. Someone had to stay to close the Transition Line back into the Cluster, and Trint had insisted he be the one to do it, even though it meant he would have to stay on that side of the passage, with no hope of ever returning.
Cal knew that it had been Trint's choice, but guilt still ate at him every time he thought about it. He suddenly had the thought that perhaps guilt over leaving Trint behind was the reason he'd agreed to help General Murdock with this operation in the first place.
He shook the thought away and concentrated on trying to discern what was below him. Even using his thermal and infrared filters, he couldn't see much; the shaft was too narrow and the bottom of it was an indistinct blob. There was no noise from below, not a heartbeat nor a sound of movement, and Cal kept descending. The ladder took him down a good twenty meters before he could see a floor beneath him, and it was a floor coated with dust but otherwise free of debris or wreckage. The battle that had demolished the building above hadn't touched what was hidden below.
Cal sighed as he considered the bare tile floor a meter below him. He couldn't detect any electromagnetic activity with his implant sensors, couldn't see any power conduits active on thermal, but there was only one way to be certain that the room wasn't rigged. He let go of the ladder and the soles of his boots impacted the floor below with a hollow, echoing thump.
Nothing. No sonic stunners, no electrical incapacitation fields, no explosives, no traps of any kind; just a dead silence that grated at his nerves. He tried examining the space around him on thermal and IR, but the total lack of ambient light down there made it difficult: the sun coming down the shaft only illuminated a few meters of floor. Cal took a chance and pulled a small flashlight from his belt, shining it around and following the beam with his eyes.
The hidden chamber was as large as the building's foundation, but packed with gear, and high end gear at that. Bank upon bank of holographic computers stretched from floor to ceiling, worth a fortune on the open market, with enough storage capacity to record every memory of a man's lifetime; which was exactly what Cutter had used them for. They were silent now, their power supplies long cut off, and all the memories that they had once held were gone like leaves on the wind.
"I don't see anything," he called back up to Pete. "You can come on down."
Pete only climbed about three quarters of the way down the ladder before dropping the rest of the way and landing in a crouch to absorb the impact as a cloud of dust rose around him. Caleb saw him wince slightly and grinned.
"You've been spending too much time in lighter gravity lately," Cal reminded him.
"Not all of us have government-supplied super-muscles," Pete returned, taking out his own flashlight and looking around. "So, this is another one of Cutter's memory storehouses? Damn, that guy is paranoid."
"He died twelve times," Cal reminded him. "You'd be paranoid too."
Pete stopped and squinted at his older brother. "You sound almost like you've forgiven him."
Cal considered that for a moment before shrugging philosophically. "Well, it's not like I can hunt him down and exact revenge, is it? I mean, he's so far gone he may as well be dead. All me sitting here stewing about how much I hate him will do is give him power over me from clear the other side of the galaxy."
"Yeah, but the mess he left is still screwing with our lives," Pete pointed out, stepping across the chamber to kick sullenly at one of the computer housings. "And I'm not so sure he isn't still running things." He looked back to Cal. "How do we know he didn't leave behind another copy of himself so he could have his galaxy and eat it, too?"
"I talked about that with Kara and General Murdock," Cal admitted, still searching the room. He ran a finger across the surface of a computer bank then wiped the dust off on his pant leg. "We're pretty much in agreement that it doesn't fit with Cutter's personality. He thought of the duplication process as a means to immortality, a continuation of himself after death. He had to know that the moment two of his duplicates existed at once, they'd each develop different memories and different personalities from that point on. That would make his entire concept of himself as an immortal meaningless: he'd just be one copy of many."
Cal paused, focused on a section of wall between two banks of computer consoles. The echo of his voice had come back just slightly different from that patch of buildfoam, according to the analysis his headcomp had done automatically. He approached it carefully, kneeling down beside it and tracing a finger along the gnarled surface.
"What is it?" Pete asked, coming up behind him to look over his shoulder.
Cal whispered a thought to his headcomp and twin plastalloy talons slid silently out of synthskin patches behind his right wrist. Anchored in the byomer bone reinforcement along his forearm, they were surrounded by nerves and muscle tissue, a permanent part of him for the last twenty years. He punched the talons into the buildfoam where he'd sensed the gap, and he could feel them penetrate the outer surface and then through into empty space. He wrenched the blades back and forth, breaking loose chunks of buildfoam in a spray of dry powder, then wedged them in as far as they could go and pried downward. A twenty centimeter square section of wall crumbled into bits.
He shined his flashlight through the cloud of dust and saw a dark-colored plastalloy case about ten centimeters squared covered in bits of buildfoam. A corner of Cal's mouth turned up with the beginnings of a satisfied grin.
"I knew Cutter wouldn't risk his memory to a volatile storage medium," he said, gesturing with his flashlight. "This has got to be the physical backup."
"Great," Pete said without much enthusiasm. "I hope I'm not the one who has to sift through Cutter's head for the last four or five years."
"Pete," Cal said, his face turning grim as he regarded the metal case, his tone suddenly serious and business-like, "get out of here now."
Pete tensed, eyes darting around, his right hand falling to the grip of the pistol holstered at his hip. "What? Is someone coming?"
"There's about a kilo of HpE sitting behind the case," Cal told him, still staring at the container, trying to keep his voice calm despite the fact that his stomach was churning. "Get up the ladder, now, and get the hell away from here."
Pete automatically made a move towards the ladder but hesitated, looking back to Caleb.
"You're coming too, aren't you?" he asked.
"Pete, there's enough here to collapse this whole block on top of us," Cal said, head snapping around toward his brother, the strain starting to make its way into his tone. "Get the fuck out of here now."
"Only if you go too," Pete insisted. Cal almost laughed; the stubborn look on Pete's face could have been a mirror of his own, he realized, and they were both a mirror of their father when he had his mind set on something.
Wish I'd had a chance to make things right with Dad before the Tahni killed him. The thought struck Cal suddenly and unexpectedly, and it took a moment's effort to shake it off.
"We ne
ed this intell, Pete," Cal tried again. "Go...I'll be okay."
"Don't bullshit me, bro." Pete made a chopping motion with his hand. "You're hard to kill, but not even you could survive that. Just get out with me and we'll come back with an explosives disposal crew from the Constabulary office..."
"I don't think we're going to have time for that," Cal said, shaking his head. "This is a low-tech booby-trap, no electronics to set off detectors; but I'm hearing some sort of analog timing mechanism. I must have tripped it when I broke through the wall."
"Can't you just grab the case and we'll get out of here, then?" Pete asked, taking a step back, seemingly really believing for the first time that they were in actual danger.
Cal sighed, grabbing for patience. His younger brother, despite having fought the Tahni as a teenager and then spending several years as a Constable, had never been in the military and never got in the habit of following orders and saving the questions till later.
"I can't be one hundred percent sure," Cal said quietly, "since it's unpowered and analog, but I think there's a pressure pad under the case that will blow the bomb if I move it."
"So what the fuck are you gonna' do?" he demanded.
"The detonators have to be thermal," Cal mused, kneeling down in front of the hole in the wall to get a better look. There was a way to overload a thermal detonator. They'd taught him about it in his training during the war, and thanks to his headcomp, he never forgot anything.
The success rate for that method, however...
"If you want to help," Cal told Pete, resigning himself to the fact that his younger brother wasn't going to leave, "grab this handle on top of the case and, when I say, jerk it out of the hole as quickly as you can."
Pete stared at him with wide eyes, doubt written all over his face, but then he shook his head and moved forward, hesitantly reaching past his brother and holding his hand poised over the recessed grip that topped the plastalloy case. Cal retracted his wrist talons and pulled his sidearm from its holster.