Blood Siren

by Michael Formichelli

  “Come on.” She shook her hand up and down in the air, almost smacking that beautiful, sensitive nose.

  He grasped her wrist with his hand, holding it firmly between his thumb and three fingers. Her skin was at least two-shades darker than his. She joked when they met that he was the golden-brown toast to her coffee and cream. The reference was wasted on him—Nyangari were carnivorous scavengers that preferred congealed blood to coffee. Cooking breakfast for him had been an adjustment.

  The fleshy-pink petals pulsed, pushing the air through their legions of olfactory cells. Cygni loved watching them work—it gave her chills that made her intimate bits tingle.

  “You used the almond soap again, and tried to rinse it off with water tainted by traces of polyvinyl chloride, chlorine, and iodine. You’ve been eating a lot of carbon-based vegetable matter recently—is that a reaction to my diet?” His yellow eyes snapped open and met her gaze in a jerking motion.

  “Shush, keep going.” She struck him lightly across his muscular stomach. The blow caused his jaw bones to twitch down and away from each other revealing the rows of backward curving teeth within his mouth. With a thick, black tongue he licked his drooping upper lip. The top part of his maw was much shorter than his jaws, and the difference in their length left the scimitars of his four lower canines exposed even with his mouth closed.

  The nose-petals resumed their palpitation.

  “You smell healthy for your species, though you drank too much alcohol last night. It is still in your blood.”

  “I had to cover the fundraiser for Representative Chalmers.” She answered as a knee-jerk reaction, then felt foolish for trying to defend herself.

  “I don’t have to continue.” Shkur let go of her hand.

  “I want you to.” She kept it over his nose.

  His lips pulled back from his teeth and the long, pointed ear-pinna atop his head twitched. The gesture was brief, but Cygni was learning to read Nyangari body language and she recognized it as irritation.

  “Fine.” She withdrew her hand. “You’re no fun.”

  Shkur sat up, bracing himself on his elbows. The muscles in his arms bulged like a row of rolled up socks.

  “You did not complain last night.” His mouth hung open and his tongue flopped out to the side—a Nyangari smile.

  The words reminded Cygni that she was still sore between her legs. The delicious memories crawled into her brain with the pain, and brought a smile to her face. Her lips parted briefly before she remembered that bared teeth were a sign of aggression to Nyangari—it was like spitting in his face.

  “Sorry,” she muttered.

  “I am learning to tolerate humanisms. No offense was taken, Cygni Aragón.” He always got the inflection right in her name. She was impressed every time.

  “How long before you just call me Cygni?”

  “How many days are in a Solan year?”

  Cygni hit him across the face hard enough to make the sharp sound bounce off the walls. She was playing. She wouldn’t have been so rough with a human male, but Nyangari were tougher, and Shkur’s smile widened as expected. Hitting in Nyangari culture was both an aggressive act and affection as long as it did no actual damage. Nyangari had an expression to sum up the peculiar cultural practice: “Pain is sweet, but blood is blood.”

  “You are learning, Cygni.”

  “I have a good—” The message popping up in her field of vision stopped her. “It’s work.”

  A mental commanded to her implant opened the message feed.

  CYGNI, DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND GO TO INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, INCORPORATED TOWER IMMEDIATELY. RECORD EVERYTHING. —AX’XOA IAI

  “I have to go. My editor just sent me a priority assignment.” Cygni rolled out of bed and started gathering up her clothing from the plush, red carpet.

  Shkur sat up. “Do you need protection?”

  Intelligent Systems, Incorporated Tower was the home of the Cronus family. If she was being told to go there immediately, something huge must be happening. The Cronuses were legendary for creating Daedalus, the machine entity that won the war against the VoQuana Remnant a generation ago. They were also atypical among the barons for engaging in widespread philanthropy, charity, and in being one of the few ultra-rich Barony houses to champion fair pay laws in the Confederation. The sister of the ruling baroness was even an elected representative in the Sovereign Conclave. As far as Cygni knew, the family and the company were as squeaky clean as a Barony house could be. Whatever her publication—The Spur Herald—was interested in must be juicy, but she doubted it would be dangerous. The Cronuses weren’t the Revenants, after all.

  “I should be all right, but I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.” Cygni prompted her cerebral computer for the time. It was getting on to mid-evening. “You don’t have to be here when I get back.”

  “Why would I leave?”

  “I might not be back tomorrow. Something big must be going on.” Cygni put her arms in the sleeves and finished pulling her navy-blue jump suit up over her shoulders. She held the seams of the material against each other and the smart fibers within knit themselves together from her navel to her neck.

  “Do you want me to go, Cygni?”

  “I’m not throwing you out, I just thought you had work tomorrow.” She grabbed her brush from the nightstand and ran it through her straight, black locks.

  “I am not on duty again until tomorrow night. I—” Shkur stopped speaking. His yellow eyes unfocused for a moment. “I have just been called in. The ambassador is holding an emergency meeting.” Shkur vaulted off the bed and landed squarely on his feet.

  Cyngi bit her tongue to stop from giggling as the one functionally similar feature Nyangari males shared with their human counterparts flopped about wildly during the maneuver. The sound that did escape—a strangled snort—made Shkur cock an ear in her direction and roll his eyes in a very Solan-like gesture of disdain.

  “Sorry,” she said, grabbing her yellow jacket off the floor. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “You never can, Cygni Aragón. That’s part of what keeps me coming back.”

  “What’s the rest? What keeps a Nyangari warrior like yourself involved with a human woman like me?”

  Shkur found his pants and deftly jumped into them with both legs at once. He secured the belt, then swept his shirt off the floor around his shoulders in one, smooth motion.

  “I like the ride,” Shkur said.

  Cygni laughed. It was a kind of Nyangari joke, since in his culture females usually rode their lovers, but not the other way around. Shkur’s comment had a double-meaning, since the verb ‘to ride’ in Nyangari meant ‘to mount,’ ‘to be a mount,’ and ‘to fuck.’ Although Shkur was speaking Solan, Cygni was sure he knew she would get the nuances. Her suspicions were confirmed by his dangling tongue.

  Shkur reached under her bed and pulled out his gun and rigging. He checked the charge and ammo, then strapped it on across his chest before retrieving his suit jacket. He turned, offering her a smaller pistol from the jacket’s pocket.

  “I won’t need it,” Cygni said. She was flattered at his protective gesture, but she couldn’t imagine any use for the weapon at the Intel-Sys Tower. Besides, she didn’t have a permit for a weapon—not that it would stop her under other circumstances.

  “Always be ready,” Shkur said.

  Cygni shook her head.

  “You know my direct comm channel, do not fear to use it.” Shkur replaced the small weapon in his pocket.

  “You’re sweet.” Cygni bent down and kissed him between his tall ears. He hated that, but she knew he tolerated it just as she tolerated his insistence on carrying her much taller body around the apartment—a Nyangari custom for romantic couples.

  Shkur made a growling sound, but stroked her inner thigh just the same in the traditional Nyangari symbol of intimate affection.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I will.”

  Cygni landed her air
-car five blocks from the tower. She would have flown closer, but the police cars zipping past her emphasized the need for a more stealthy approach. In the Confederation the press had the right to enter any public area and gather information for the common good, but not until after law enforcement had declared the area press-accessible. As a young investigative reporter, Cygni found out that usually meant the cops left behind only the details they wanted you to see. To really get a scoop, one had to bend the rules and get in before the area was released for news media.

  She activated her chameleon implant as she climbed from the vehicle. Nanomachines in her body lightened her skin and turned her hair blond. Her inorganic eyes changed iris colors from dark brown to blue-green with a thought. If she had a few days warning, Cygni could have directed the chameleon nanomachines to alter her bone structure as well, but tonight she would have to hope that her last alteration wouldn’t be in the Confederate Space Authority database, yet. If it was, she wouldn’t have long before law enforcement crowd-scanners picked out the face she was wearing in violation of the media access law. The cosmetic changes she just made would only confuse the identity recognition software for so long.

  She emerged from the nighttime shadows of the city’s canyon-like streets as the police were coaxing a crowd to move back from the scene. Before her, the four, triangular buildings of the Intelligent Systems Incorporated Tower rose a kilometer into the air clutching a silver egg-like construct at their apex. Directly below it among the hedges of a well-manicured garden, the crowd of Intel-Sys workers in blue and gray jumpers stood silently in a semicircle; unmoved by the police’s efforts. Cygni could see the top of a fountain depicting some kind of fish-man and a bunch of naked women around him. Her implant flashed the fountain in her vision and identified the figures as the ancient Earth deity Poseidon with a host of water-nymphs.

  At a signal from her cerebral implant Cygni’s clothing shifted color to match those of the workers in the crowd. She moved quickly to join them trusting that her clothing, the size of the company, and the shock they all seemed to be in would keep them from noticing she was not a familiar face. She ordered her cerebral computer to start recording what her cybernetic eyes saw when she crossed the dark street. A few beings, mostly humans, took note of her but said nothing when she pushed her way to the front of the group. At the glowing yellow police line, the subject of their silence came into sharp focus.

  Strewn across the bottom two levels of the three-tiered fountain lay the form of a man dressed in elaborate black clothing with three white lines—the first of them bent—within a like-colored circle over his shoulders. His body was twisted at unnatural angles over the fountain’s marble edges like boneless putty someone had pushed against the stone. His head hung over the edge facing the ground with a disturbing bulge deforming the waxed cue behind it. His oval eyes were black with coagulating blood, and his gaping mouth dripped dark rivulets from its corners. Around him, both the water of the fountain and the pavement were stained with the dark fluid.

  Cygni’s implant identified the man as Baron Mitsugawa Yoji of the Shiragawa Zaibatsu Barony.

  “Oh shit,” she whispered. This was the scoop of the decade!

  A police officer with crystal horns and a short, furry muzzle protruding from beneath his patrolman’s hat gave her a sharp look. She quickly looked away from the Volgoth, hoping he wasn’t enough of a fan of news broadcasts to recognize her through her disguise. After a moment the officer looked away, and Cygni breathed a sigh of relief.

  Once she was sure she had evaded detection, she zoomed her field of vision in on the corpse and performed a slow pan from a boot, half-submerged in the fountain water, down to the baron’s ghastly face. She analyzed the light coming off the man’s skin and blood with the suite of spectrographic scanners in her eyes. She could not make use of the forensic scanner in her left palm without getting closer, but walking over to the body right now would be like walking out onto an empty stage while hoping not to get noticed. She would have to wait for an opportunity, and hope one came up.

  Whatever was going on, the death of a baron was big news and Cygni wanted to be the first to report on it. She didn’t delude herself into thinking she was the only reporter here, so she concentrated on getting the data as quickly as possible. She linked to the local Cyberweb and willed her implant to keep her body upright while she dove in. The moment she shifted her awareness her consciousness was plunged into darkness. She perceived herself as floating in a starless void. A softly glowing rectangle appeared Before her digital incarnation with a command prompt. The blinking curser raced across it, heralding the appearance of commands just as fast as she could think of them. By her will, more windows appeared around the first. One showed the feed from her cybernetic eyes, others displayed prompts from the databases and systems her implant accessed.

  The one that drew the most of her computer-enhanced attention was the tower’s system. She knew the odds of hacking into the databases of the Orion Spur’s leading computer software company were remote. Intel-Sys’ government contracts ensured they had military-grade cyber security, but as Cygni knew very well, every system had its weaknesses. If she had the time, she could probably find and exploit them without exposing herself to a trace back that would land her in an interrogation cell. Even here in the Cyberweb, where every perceived second was a tenth its time in the real world, she still didn’t have the time to break into anything truly sensitive. Instead, she prompted the system directory and chose a relatively unimportant database of employee names attached to Intel-Sys’ secretarial department to upload a search program.

  Her program scanned the central directory for certain keywords, accessed the databases that came up, and attempted to decrypt them. She made sure her search terms did not include anything that might try to access a sensitive database and trip any serious system alerts. She wasn’t after corporate secrets, but clues as to how one of the Confederation’s most important barons wound up broken beneath Intel-Sys’ tower. While the search ran, she called up the tower’s security systems and started trying to break in.

  This part was tricky. A misstep here could land her in serious hot water and she decided to tackle it with her full attention. She took a deep breath—symbolic in the digital world—and began the process.

  A glowing blue sphere appeared before her.

  “Password?” A disembodied voice said.

  She ran her lock pick program and turned part of her attention to the feed from her eyes to check on her physical self.

  Several individuals arrived causing a stir in the crowd. Two women dressed in white with bells in their blonde hair preceded two men across the police barrier unchallenged. One of the men was attired in an outfit almost identical to Baron Mitsugawa Yoji’s including two swords in white scabbards tucked into a wide sash. His features bore enough of a resemblance to the baron’s that she suspected a familial connection. The other man had a long, scraggly beard and copper-colored hair trailing down his back. She might have thought him a vagrant but for the richness of his clothing and the company he kept.

  Cygni directed her implant to identify the group, and the Cyberweb image comparison search quickly came up with the names Baroness Cronus, Heir-Representative Cronus, Heir Mitsugawa Ichiro, Baron Keltan.

  “Holy shit,” she said. The top barons of the Democratic Labor Party were all here. There must have been some kind of high-level meeting prior to the baron’s death.

  Baron Mitsugawa Yoji was Heir-Representative Cronus’ second husband, and the father of the younger Mitsugawa Ichiro. Their presence at Baroness Cronus’ tower would have been unremarkable if not for Baron Keltan. Baron Keltan was widely known to be highly reclusive since his family was murdered by Broghites while serving ambassadorial functions on Brogh Prime. The incident sparked the current war with the Broghite Commonwealth, and it was said, drove him mad with grief. He hadn’t been seen in public, with the exception of this year’s war memorial service, in six years. He was suppos
ed to be on Anilon by all accounts, so why in the Spur was he here at House Cronus’ tower?

  Cygni directed her body’s eyes to pan across the group and was glad she did. Representative Cronus’ daughter, Heir Sophiathena Cronus, had been standing just outside of Cygni’s visual field behind Baron Keltan. While the others ran towards the fountain and had to be restrained by the Volgoth officers, Heiress Cronus stood with the hood of her dark green robe thrust back, watching the macabre milieu with gleaming, icy blue eyes. Her thigh-length ivory braids swayed in the air behind her when she crossed her arms, and a smile appeared on her face. Her eyes flickered towards the crowd and the expression vanished, but Cygni had the shocking expression recorded. The whole Confederation would see it when her piece streamed.

  She gestured with her digital incarnation’s left hand and brought up another floating screen. On it she willed the freeze-frame of the Heiress’ triumphant expression, and a chill went down Cygni’s spine.

  “What the hell is going on?” She whispered to herself.

  A pulsing sound brought her attention to another of her screens. Her cochlear implants detected the thrumming whine of an air-car landing behind the crowd. In her altered state of awareness it sounded like a slow-motion heartbeat. She willed her body to turn enough so the feed from her eyes could try and pick up who just arrived, but the crowd behind her was too thick. She directed her body to hold the pose until the people around her started moving.