by M. S. Farzan
Convinced that the coast was clear, we filtered out into the street, catching our breath and hearing the sounds of destruction from They Might Be Giant’s direction. The night was quiet in comparison to the burning building, and I stood with my hand on my knees for a few moments, my lungs still on fire and my heart pulsing in my chest. Tribe coughed his way over to a nearby SUV, using his digitab to disable the security systems. He engaged the engine and opened the passenger doors with a button, beckoning towards us.
“Come on, we’ve got to go before everything else falls apart,” he called from the driver’s seat.
I couldn’t disagree. I gently pushed Alina forward, noticing silent tears running down her soot-stained cheeks. She joined Tribe in the cab of the black truck, and I jumped into the back with Buster. Closing the doors, the auric gunned the accelerator and took us away from the Richmond.
Through the SUV’s insulated windows, I could hear muted police sirens begin to wail into the night.
FOUR
We are one race, one people, one family. From today until the end of eternity, we now have one home.
-Thog’run II, King of Aurichome
The faintest grey light of dawn was just beginning to stain the horizon by the time we made it to the outskirts of Gloric’s neighborhood in Santa Clara. The highway had been relatively quiet after we had passed through San Francisco’s southern borders, picking up again slightly as we reached the fringes of the technological center of the world. I fought to stay awake as my normal bedtime came and went, the SUV’s ergonomically cushioned seats comfortably embracing my exhausted body.
The others had kept to themselves for most of the drive, as tired as I was and less in practice at being shot at. Alina sat staring out of the tinted windows as the city rolled past us, coming out of her shock only to heal my injuries and scratch at Buster distractedly. Tribe, for once, held onto his own thoughts, driving the speed limit and keeping to the lower level of traffic to avoid drawing unnecessary attention upon us. The silence was broken only by the sounds of the road and Tribe’s retro hip hop music, softly playing through the truck’s sound system.
I forced myself to remain alert, focusing on our current plan of action. If Tribe and Alina were correct in their assessment of Gloric Vunderfel’s abilities, the hacker would be able to gain access to the NIGHT database and trace any communications that would have happened before my mission briefing. If we could establish any inconsistencies between the intel our informants had provided and that which was given to me, we could put together some sort of proof to clear my name. Tribe’s fate would depend on the quality of evidence we were able to conjure, and so would Alina’s, as the auric and half-auric were both now undoubtedly on whatever hit list I had the honor of headlining. At best, they would be incorrectly assumed to be co-conspirators in my continued well-being. At worst, they would be thought of as collateral damage.
My lens recording would be key in putting together a believable case towards my ignorance of the downtown storefront’s true setup. Whoever was behind the faulty intel wanted me to die in that dispensary, and didn’t mind the waste of life represented by blowing up fifty or more ragers. Finding the task to be more difficult than they anticipated, they somehow tracked me to They Might Be Giant, putting Tribe and Alina under the searchlight as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were trying to put a bead out on Buster, too.
The more my exhausted mind ran through the scenarios, the less answers it came up with. None of the night’s events made sense. I had already ruled out revolutionary involvement on the informants’ part, trusting that the auric king had enough sway over his people to have instilled the fear of dragons in any potential defectors. That left only the NIGHT higher-ups with the kind of clearance to tinker with mission information like the bomb’s timer, access codes, and the presence of innocents in the dispensary.
The composition and skillset of the hit squad sent after us would corroborate this theory. The presence of auric assassins would ordinarily suggest revolutionary involvement, but I couldn’t think of what Aurichome had to gain by killing their own people in the dispensary, or by my death. More tellingly, the assassins’ training and coordination was of a different stripe altogether. It was too organized, too similar to my own for the hit squad to have been solely the auric king’s lot. The lead assassin in particular, for all his indistinctiveness, was unlike any auric I had seen.
The image of the mancer was like a spectre burned into my vision, his pale hands moving strangely and eyes burning with an evil light. I had no idea who he was or what kind of magic he had used against us, and that worried me. He exhibited neither the shadow arts training of a Nightpath, nor the life-affirming photomancy of a Daypath, nor the destructive and mind-controlling powers of an Inquisitor, placing him outside the traditional NIGHT magic education. My lenses had picked up no information on him whatsoever in their local database, not even a name or base personal record. Nothing. He might as well have been a ghost.
More importantly, I didn’t know what was his stake in my death or for whom he was working. If it was indeed an inside operation by the NIGHT leadership, there were only a few people who could hold that sway, rigging an entire elite mission and hiring an unknown assassin when it went haywire. Karthax was the easy answer, but the Inquisitor General’s potential motive was impenetrable to me. The man had been in charge of the Pacific South NIGHT headquarters for over a decade, with jurisdiction over Pacific North and Central Mountain as well. I couldn’t think of a single reason why he’d want me dead, and a building full of ragers with me.
“The hell?” Tribe’s voice came floating back from the cab, waking me from my reverie. I had dozed off despite myself, lulled by the long ride. I opened my eyes, blinking against the weak sunlight coming through the thief’s open window.
“I’m off the network,” he said, holding his digitab outside of the window, as though that would solve his problem. “I can’t get back on.”
“We’re getting close to Gloric’s neighborhood,” Alina explained distantly, still staring out her window. “He only lets in who he wants.”
“Weren’t you supposed to text him or something?” Tribe complained.
“He’ll know we’re coming.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because he knows almost everything that happens within a fifty mile radius,” the Pitcher said, giving Tribe a sidelong glance. She rolled her shoulders, stretching. “And because we have nowhere else to go.”
I peered outside the SUV’s long side window, noticing the large track houses and apartment buildings with simple printed signs and electric street lamps, still on at this early hour. Unlike San Francisco or its South Bay cousin, San Jose, Santa Clara looked much like it would have a hundred years ago, with only a few augmented reality digads popping up here and there at small local shops.
Tribe pulled us into a nondescript driveway adjacent to a squat suburban house, ancient by modern standards. It was painted a pleasant color of peach, with a little garden in the front and a small picket fence bordering the sidewalk. It looked to me less like a technomancer’s unbreachable fortress and more like a quaint bed and breakfast, but I suppose my small city apartment wasn’t much to look at, either.
I stretched as I got out of the SUV, feeling the past twenty-four hours weighing heavily on my body and mind. I was used to being in mortal danger, but not usually several times in one night.
I stopped Tribe as he walked past me, reaching out to snatch the tracer from his neck with my thumb and index finger. He jumped at my touch, grabbing at his collar and looking at me accusingly.
“Neurotoxin!” he protested.
“Not really,” I said evenly, disabling the little gadget and dropping it into a pocket. “Would you have stayed put if I told you otherwise?”
The thief stared at me for a moment, his eyes narrowing suspiciously, then shrugged and harrumphed in acquiescence.
Alina led us down the side of the house and through a
wooden fence into the building’s backyard, which held a larger version of the front garden. All manner of fruits and vegetables were being grown in neat rows, alongside a number of different decorative flowers. The heady fragrance was a nice contrast to the interior of the SUV, which had smelled mostly like wet dog. I breathed deeply, invigorated by the garden’s motley bouquet.
The Pitcher walked briskly over to a small stairwell leading under the back wall of the house, stopping in front of a large metal door that was conspicuous in contrast to the rest of the decor. She pulled out her digitab and synced it with the door’s intercom system, waiting for the other side to pick up.
“Alina,” a tinny voice spoke out of the digitab. “It took you four minutes and twenty-five seconds longer than traffic suggests to get here.”
The Pitcher looked up to a small camera lodged in the corner of the doorframe. “We stopped to get a drink for him,” she said, pointing at Tribe. The auric waved sweetly at the camera.
“Very well,” the digitab said. “Come in.”
The door unlocked and swung ajar. On a hunch, I enabled my lenses’ nonvisible spectrum analysis, and could see a grid of beams criss-crossing the entryway. An alarm sounded ridiculously as we each entered the building, cataloging each of us as being armed and chiming for each registered weapon. I counted eleven beeps.
“Ignore that,” the voice on the digitab offered. “Outdated system; next version will just kill intruders on sight.”
We continued into the interior of the building, which was in every way the polar opposite of its exterior. Cold stone walls lined the entry corridor, lit only by working pieces of computer gear piled up on either side of the walkway. Machines whirred, beeped, and clicked, echoing through the building in a strangely soothing cacophony. The air was dusty but dry, smelling sharply of metal and plastic.
Alina took us deeper into the house, down a few levels and around a few turns. The hodgepodge of electronic products increased like a breadcrumb trail, leading us to a central room that I estimated to be two floors directly under the backyard garden. Over twenty display monitors lined the walls directly ahead of us, fanned out in a semicircle around a huge leather chair. Several different kinds of antiquated keyboards and other input devices littered a large metal desk in between the chair and monitors.
“Welcome, guests,” the voice from the digitab called from behind the chair, still a little tinny. “Why do I only get a visit when you’re in trouble?”
The chair swiveled around, revealing a tiny bespectacled auric sitting cross-legged on its vast brown cushion. Wisps of white hair and long, perky ears peeked out from under a faded Santa Clara 49ers cap, and a secondary single-eye display jutted out in front of his glasses. His simple t-shirt and jeans were old but neatly pressed, and his abnormally large, sandaled feet poked out from under his legs. A rounded Canterbury cross rested at the hollow of his throat, standing out against his ebony skin.
“Hey, Glory,” Alina said as she moved to embrace him. I used my lenses to quickly scan for any information about the gnome, and came up again with nothing. I was beginning to doubt my local database, and made a mental note to search again for him and the assassin when I was back on the network.
Tribe also went over to give the technomancer a fist bump and exchange pleasantries. The gnome turned his attention towards me, cocking his head to the side like a parrot considering a treat.
“What brings you here, Nightpath?”
“Gloric Vunderfel,” I began stiffly, clearing my throat. “My associates here tell me-”
“I’m just kidding,” he interrupted me with a chuckle. “I know why you’re here.”
The gnome spun in his chair back towards the desk and monitors, tapping with one hand at a mechanical keyboard and with another at an augmented reality holodisplay. Scenes from the past evening began to pop up on random monitors, from closed circuit cameras outside of They Might Be Giant to my lenses’ current view of the back of Gloric’s chair.
“What?” I asked, bewildered. I moved to the table next to the gnome, watching footage of myself stalking through the dispensary. “How do you know…” I trailed off.
“Ha!” the little auric exclaimed excitedly, typing away. “You can know anything if you have the right tools!”
The technomancer brought up several records on screen, reading bits and pieces of them out loud as they flashed through the various displays. “Eskander Aradowsi, born Eskander Arabiyya-Ferdowsi in modern Kurdistan, twenty thirty-nine. Family immigrated to the Ukraine in twenty forty-two, then to the United States in twenty forty-seven after the troll uprising. Military schooled, enrolled in NIGHT through special placement at age sixteen. First Nightpath of-”
“OK, OK, I get it,” I said uncomfortably.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Tribe said pointedly. I gave him a helpless look in response.
Gloric clicked a few more buttons, bringing up frames of the NIGHT headquarters on Alcatraz, the Oxidium dispensary, They Might Be Giant, and the auric assassin. “Where shall we begin?”
I took a deep breath, then launched into my recounting of the botched mission, attack on the sports bar, and encounter with the hit squad. I omitted my suspicions of Karthax and the NIGHT leadership, explaining only that I needed to hack into the headquarters’ database to fill out the parts of the story that I didn’t have access to.
The gnome listened patiently, swiping through different records and footage as I talked. When I finished, he sat back in his chair, lacing his hairy hands behind his large head. “So, as I understand it,” he said at last, “you want to break into the NIGHT mainframe to gain access to their records, proving you were set up and that there was a conspiracy to kill you.”
I nodded.
“You probably also want me to reconfigure your digitab so that they can no longer trace you.”
I nodded again, a bit sheepishly.
He turned his attention back to the monitors, tiny fingers working furiously as he brought up and edited several lines of code.
It took less than a minute. My digitab beeped, and I took it out of my pocket to see a smiley face blinking on the display. My lenses re-initialized, connecting to the network under an alias that the technomancer had set up for me. Classified records and images popped up on several of the monitors and my lens display.
“It’s done,” Gloric said, cracking his knuckles.
I read through the records, trying to ignore the fact that the little gnome had undone some of the country’s most impregnable security systems with a few clicks.
“They have indeed been trying to kill you,” the technomancer continued, “but it seems like it’s nothing personal.”
I sifted through the information, a vague map of the conspiracy beginning to form in my mind. It coalesced into an ironic image of Karthax, hero of the Fourth Gulf War and Inquisitor General of the NIGHTs, steering the free world out of the underrace-filled darkness and into the light. Armed with the military and magical might of the country’s strongest forces, he would need only cede to the lesser evil to complete his conquest in the name of a perceived greater good.
“He wants to start a war,” I breathed.
Tribe shifted awkwardly, a little bored. “Can somebody please explain what you two are going on about?”
“Our good Nightpath is discovering that his bosses aren’t exactly what they purport to be,” Gloric said.
I looked through the mission notes from my briefing, putting the pieces together.
“Karthax wants to start a war,” I explained. “The dispensary was a front to generate military support to take the fight to the revolutionaries in their own house. I was meant to be collateral damage, my death a catalyst.”
It made a certain kind of sense. The political and public outrage at losing a NIGHT operative in an act of terrorism could easily spark the already uneasy racial tensions into an all-out civil war. The strategy would be particularly convincing if Karthax could show that the revolutionaries didn’t car
e about killing their own people, which is where the ragers came into the picture. Thus encouraged, the NIGHT leadership and its factors in Washington would almost have to give the Inquisitor General the green light for an all-out assault on Aurichome. It was an unthinkable proposition, given the size of the auric king’s forces and their proven tenacity in guerilla warfare, but Karthax had always been ambitious.
It was something to go on, but there were several pieces still missing. I decided to press Gloric for more.
“The revs would never put their own people to the sword, so how did Karthax’s people get access to the dispensary or switch the intel?” I asked. “And who was the auric assassin following us?”
The gnome slid a different keyboard into his hand, still double-typing. A number of monitors lit up with images of Karthax in his military uniform and beret, with the assassin lurking behind him, sending a chill down my spine. I could pick out a few words here and there embedded in several lines of code on-screen.
“The first I can’t tell you much about,” Gloric said at last. “Something about Project Watershed, but the information is behind a wall in the NIGHT headquarters.”
“I don’t understand, Glory,” Alina chimed in for the first time, her hand resting in between Buster’s bushy ears. “I’ve seen you get through all kinds of firewalls.”
“Not a firewall, my dear. A real wall!” the gnome said, waggling his fingers excitedly. “In many ways, the NIGHTs’ best protection is their isolation. Just like their island fortress, they keep a small portion of their classified files behind a physical wall off of the network.”
“Like a safe?” I asked.
“Could be. Could be a cardboard box.” The technomancer shrugged. “The important thing is that it’s off the network. It allows them to keep some secrets, even away from their own people.”