The Way of Death

by James Von Ohlen

  By the time he was ready to retire from the training hall, Reiji had a good grasp of the weapon and how to use it in a fight. He wouldn’t be defeating any master swordsmen with it in the real world anytime soon, but he would be far from helpless.

  Reiji knelt on the tatami before the assembled ancestors and touched his forehead to the mat. His father’s shade hovered near him, face filled with what looked to be pride. How ridiculous was it, Reiji wondered, that in order to win the approval of his forefathers, he’d had to be nearly killed and lose the most valuable items the Ikeda clan had ever owned?

  “Rage,” the boy’s voice reached him in the training hall. “Rage,” he repeated. “Rage,” a third time, with some force behind his voice, but the boy hadn’t touched him yet. Perhaps he’d learned some respect after Reiji had nearly dislocated his shoulder the last time he’d been interrupted.

  Reiji plucked the data plug from behind his ear and the training hall vanished. The real world coalesced around him, filling his view with the sheet metal and chain-link interior of the Cent-Sec installation. Tod crouched in front of him, keeping a meter or so of distance between them. Pretty smart for a retard, Reiji thought.

  “What is it?”

  “I just woke up. I took a nap like you told me.” The boy paused and seemed to think about something for a few seconds before continuing. “And I ate and drank more from the kitchen, but not the room with the dead guys in it. Like you told me.” Tod spoke fast, but his speech slurred. Like his tongue was too big for his mouth and he couldn’t be bothered to work around it.

  Reiji reached for a nearby bottle of water and took a long gulp from it. His arm trembled as he did so. Still weak, he thought. He’d had several bottles and still hadn’t had to piss yet. He must have been on the verge of death from dehydration when the retard had found him.

  “Oh and your stuff is making noise,” Tod said as Reiji put the bottle back down. Reiji turned his head to the side. The large metal box on the other side of the room, that resembled nothing so much as an old coffin, was indeed making noise. He pushed himself to his feet and gingerly stepped to the machine. Above a small embedded screen it bore the same design and letters found on the med kits that had saved his and the boy’s lives.

  CCG

  Coalition Colonies Government.

  Inside the huge box was what remained of the exoskeleton left behind by Gavin. If he’d picked which suit to take at random, he’d picked correctly. The suit left behind was in bad condition and several systems on it were failing. At least that was what the diagnostic equipment in the storage area had claimed.

  Reiji had been clueless as to how to activate and use the exoskeleton until he’d found data plugs lying about the warehouse in odd places. Pockets of dead soldiers, in drawers on desks, a few in the kitchen, and one on the ground next to a shower.

  He should have known better than to put them into his neural interface implant without first scanning them somehow. There were stories about men having their brains fried by booby-trapped data plugs. But curiosity had gotten the better of him, and Reiji had taken the plunge.

  And that turned out to be something he did not regret. Among the things he’d learned was how to pilot an exoskeleton, how to repair the damage done to said exoskeleton, how to operate the repair unit which he now looked at intently, and a whole host of data that was marked as secret. Nothing among that data seemed all that important, though there was something he planned on revisiting later. The location of a global surveillance system. If anything could help him find Gavin, that would be it.

  Definitely nothing worth killing a dozen men for. Whatever Gavin had found here that had resulted in his attempted murder of Reiji, it was long gone. Along with the man himself. Perhaps he’d tried to hide his own presence, or obscure the existence of what he’d found. Either way, there was little to show Gavin had ever set foot there.

  If Reiji wanted to kill the man, first he would have to find him. And to find him, he would have to leave this place and survive long enough to do so. And the exoskeleton could only help. Or so he figured.

  After disassembling the components of the exoskeleton and moving them into the huge repair box with the help of the retard, Reiji had activated the unit. Then he’d told the boy to go eat and get some sleep. He followed his own advice up until the sleep part. He could rest physically while he trained. But he would have to deal with the wear on his mind for another day or two.

  If things went right now and in the next few hours, then Reiji would be able to sleep on the road. Armed with what he had learned through the data plugs literally littering the installation, he had a destination in mind.

  Such a bounty of data plugs was a rare thing these days. Only a few of the highest ranking within Cent-Sec had the neural implants to use them correctly. Outside of the government and military, even fewer had them. At one point in the distant past, the implants had not been a rarity, or even very expensive for that matter. They had cost less than a personal transport vehicle. With the world having been left behind and the slow decay of all tech, that was no longer so.

  There had never been a place that manufactured them on Lexington. They were imports only. Over the years, the implants failed or the men and women with them died or left Lexington for greener pastures. The numbers continued dwindling and at some point in the not too distant future, there would be none left on the planet. The libraries of data plugs found in places like this Cent-Sec installation would become little more than fancy paper weights, and the knowledge they contained might be lost for a very long time.

  Reiji had never found himself overly concerned with the direction that society was heading. For men like him, there would always be opportunity. But the thought that things were unlikely to stabilize until a tech level just barely reaching the steam engine was crashed into, that gave him scant comfort. Who wanted to live in conditions like that, when there was much better available?

  Yeah, Reiji thought, the installation was full of depressing information. Such as the data detailing its history. Built in the distant past, some hundreds of years ago, as a housing and supply depot for prospectors searching out rich lodes of various minerals that the surrounding desert was peppered with.

  As more colonists had come to Lexington and the easily accessible ores had been depleted, the facility had become a communications hub. After a failed miner’s rebellion, it had become a military installation for the maintenance of the combat exoskeletons that now enforced Coalition Colonies Government rule on Lexington. Hence the repair equipment that resembled a coffin. Since then, well, the world had been left behind. There was no CCG running the show anymore.

  The box contained tech that Reiji could only pretend to understand. Something about rearranging molecular bonds. He didn’t bother trying to find data on how it happened. It would be beyond his grasp. The fact that it did happen was good enough for him.

  The same box was the very reason that Cent-Sec still used the installation. They didn’t dare move the repair unit, for fear that they would damage it in doing so.

  Something as rare and valuable as a combat exoskeleton, the possession of which could elevate one man over hundreds without the same on a battlefield, was worth almost any effort to maintain. And the effort of simply driving for days on end out into the desert was a no-brainer in light of the benefits of the suits being kept in pristine condition.

  The details were sketchy, but from what Reiji could tell, the last group of soldiers who’d come here to repair their combat exoskeletons had grown curious about the data plugs found in the installation and brought some equipment that could read them.

  They’d reported their findings back to Cent-Com and that had set in motion the deployment of an elite unit of scouts to secure the area and to repair their own suits while doing so. They had begun sifting through the available data until something so monumental had been found that it would require a regiment of soldiers to secure it. So monumental that Gavin would spend a fortune to lead a ba
nd of thugs and murderers into the desert to kill the scouts securing the data ahead of their relief force.

  Something so important, or valuable, or both, that the man would risk signing his own death warrant by betraying the scum he led, after using them to do away with those same elite scouts.

  The Cent-Sec scouts had turned out to not be so elite. The sentries had been masturbating and drunk on duty, and the rest killed in their sleep. Only the exoskeleton pilots had performed their duty. Seeing to the upkeep and repair of their units until Reiji killed them.

  Lights danced across the display on the side of the huge steel coffin as Reiji watched, indicating the repair cycle had been completed. His fingers moved of their own accord, typing commands into the display that elicited a series of beeps and a finally a hissing sound as the lid of the repair unit began to open.

  A fogging of the air clouded Reiji’s view as the super-cooled air within the coffin met the relatively hot air of the warehouse. A fierce face, half human and half beast, snarling and barring fangs in anger, greeted him. For a moment he almost stepped back. He’d nearly forgotten that he had tasked the repair unit with not only fixing the exoskeleton, but reshaping it as well.

  The fog cleared rapidly and revealed the reworked form of the combat exoskeleton. Modeled after the Kozane armor that the ancestors wore in combat. A nightmare of gleaming nanostructured alloys, sweeping surfaces that would turn aside a blade or entrap it in spikes and switchback blades, topped by the head of a powerful Oni.

  Like a demon walking through time and space from the fields of slaughter at Sekigahara and arriving on Lexington some centuries later.

  Onryo.

  That was the name Reiji had given to his new creation. A spirit of vengeance from the long ago stories of his father’s people before they had left Old Earth. With the completion of the unit’s repair, it was time to go.

  Reiji and Tod gathered the equipment they could, packing into the cargo compartment of the single tracked vehicle in the crowd of trucks outside the warehouse. Gavin likely had his reasons for leaving the vehicles behind. Not being able to drive them for one, and not wanting to be easily tracked, but Reiji had no such problems or compunctions.

  It had been the vehicle that carried the two combat exoskeletons and their pilots to the repair facility, and it would carry Onryo now until the Oni was needed. Several weeks’ worth of supplies could fit in the space where the missing suit had gone, and another week or so in the area that was reserved for ammunition. With Overlord on watch the turret mounted cannon on top of vehicle was useless, and Cent-Sec had taken to removing all munitions from vehicles in service to avoid the temptation of blasting away with them and losing an armored vehicle. Up front, Reiji and Tod could travel in the pilot’s cabin in relative comfort.

  Reiji turned back to Tod who stood as if pinned in place, staring at the reshaped exoskeleton. As if Onryo had cast a spell over the boy. His face showed nothing, but his eyes alternated between fear and awe. Exactly the response that Reiji had hoped for in his opponents.

  He left the boy to stare at the Oni and fetched the heavy blade that had been left in the maintenance room. The same that the Cent-Sec pilot had tried to use against him moments before he’d first seen the exoskeletons. The blade had seemed ridiculously oversized and far too heavy for a man to wield effectively. And then Reiji had put two and two together and realized that it was the weapon intended for use with the exoskeleton.

  The Claymore he’d been training with upon the tatami of the ancestors was a perfect mirror-image of the blade in length and weight distribution, if not shape. But he’d put in enough time to be comfortable swinging the blade around. In the Oni, he would be neigh unstoppable to begin with. With the blade, the destruction he could bring to his foes was enough to make him smile with pleasure.

  In the meantime, he would be okay with the broadsword hanging on his hip. It was close enough to Kai that he could put it to good use when needed. After all, he didn’t think running around in a stolen Cent-Sec exoskeleton was a good idea. It would only be brought out to play if absolutely necessary.

  To his left, Tod finally turned away from Onryo and looked at Reiji, hefting the huge blade for the exoskeleton. The boy carried the blade that Reiji had turned down when they entered the warehouse. A strange shape, somewhere between a longsword and a scythe, Reiji had no interest in the weapon, but Tod had taken a liking to it. Reiji just hoped that the retard didn’t accidentally stab himself or Reiji with the blade if it ever needed to be drawn.

  “Tod,” the boy’s eyes focused intently on Reiji’s when he spoke. “Let’s get packed.” He nodded his head enthusiastically and ran off. Reiji gathered what things he planned on taking that he could carry along with the huge sword and began making his way out. Tod came running by him, carrying a crate marked ‘EXPLOSIVES’ without a care in the world.

  Reiji instinctively took a step back, and considered throwing himself flat to avoid the coming blast when the boy would invariably trip and drop the crate. But the explosives had not been primed or armed. The boy could set them on fire and they would be unlikely to detonate anytime soon.

  Within the hour Reiji and the boy had packed Onryo into the cargo compartment on the tracked vehicle along with the other gear Reiji saw fit to take. To Reiji’s eyes it looked like the armored vehicles that had seen combat in the shows and comics he’d watched and read as a child. It bore some superficial resemblance to the riot tanks occasionally deployed by Cent-Sec. Heavily armored, it would take quite a bit of damage to stop this one.

  Armored Personnel Carrier. The name of the vehicle came unbidden to the forefront of Reiji’s mind. With Overlord constantly vigilant far above, the number of weapons that could be fielded and that would present a threat to the APC were few and far between. Suicide bombers and projected force field weapons were all that Reiji could think of on the spot. Both a rare thing indeed on Lexington.

  The doors to the APC had been set for the biometrics of one of the Cent-Sec pilots Reiji had killed. When he’d first opened the pilot’s compartment, he’d had to cut off the dead man’s hand and place it against a scanner to unlock the doors. Once inside, he’d been able to change the biometric settings to his own.

  Driving the vehicle seemed to be a complicated task using poorly designed manual controls, until he’d found the neural interface input cable. Laying back and relaxing in the pilot’s seat, Reiji was able to plug directly into the vehicle and guide it with no more effort than a thought.

  The APC pushed aside a transport truck, ripping a panel off of the other vehicle’s body and crushing it beneath the armored vehicle’s treads. Tod shouted excitedly from the copilot’s seat, but Reiji ignored him. It hadn’t been intentional, just a by-product of putting what he’d learned into practice. But he’d let the retard think it had been on purpose. A few moments later, and the APC reached the winding road, leading from the warehouse and back into the desert. One step closer, Reiji thought as the warehouse faded from view.

  BENEATH a towering obelisk, they found the first signs of civilization they’d seen in five days. The pitch black structure soared into the sky, reaching for the heavens above. By some trick of the terrain and the light of the sun, it was visible for nearly a full day before they’d reached it. The internal systems of the APC identified it as the Milton Tesla Spire.

  Reaching some 1500 meters into the air, and almost as far down into the bedrock, it had been the hope of generations long past.

  An uncompleted attempt at building a spire that reached into the planet’s ionosphere and that would provide almost unlimited free energy for the nearby colonial cities of Lexington. Broadcast power systems would carry the free energy without the need for transmission lines, providing electricity to any within range. Some thousands of kilometers if the data was to be believed. The system didn’t go into detail about why it had never been finished, only that it was several hundred years past its expected date of completion.

  Like everything el
se on Lexington, it had been left behind.

  The sides of the towering obelisk reached far higher than any building Reiji had seen in his life. And the part of the obelisk that now stood was supposed to have been just a small fraction of the base upon its completion. As much of a clusterfuck as most of Lexington was, at one point in time the men running the show here just might have known what they were doing in order to build such a monstrosity, Reiji mused as he craned his neck to look up.

  Here in the space beneath the obelisk, a small town had grown. Though the construction had never fulfilled its promise of free energy for the colonial cities, the solar panels covering most of its surface had provided power to construction crews in the past. And now they provided a dwindling supply of free energy to the men who controlled the settlement.

  Nominally, they were Cent-Com subordinates, but the reach of Cent-Com was weak this far out from the major cities. They paid lip-service and the taxes required to keep Cent-Sec out of their business. A de facto independent nation, springing forth in the midst of the desert in the shadow of a dead giant.

  There was enough energy to produce water from deep wells and mineral extraction, and grow food in labware and the ground itself. Electric arc furnaces seemed to be running twenty-four hours a day, giving the small city its own cloud of smog. Coupled with a few large ore deposits found in the not too distant desert, the city had enough promise to draw the occasional misfit and renegade to the town of Milton. It boasted a slowly but steadily growing population.

  The sun had been down for an hour when Reiji piloted the APC into town. He slowed down to a comfortable pace as men and women alike glared from porches and dimly backlit windows as he passed through the dusty streets. Hands never far from blades at their waist or at rest next to their seats. As if they might leap down from the decaying synthetic floorboards of their porches and stab Reiji through the walls of the vehicle. As if anything short of a projected forcefield was going to damage the armor of the APC.