Once again, the titan’s voice resonated in his skull: “The metamorphosis is complete. I know you have begun to explore your body’s new abilities.”
“Yes, it’s… exhilarating,” Vassili replied, noticing that the conversation was taking place in the Primordial’s language.
“I must warn you: your lifespan has been reduced by ten or twenty percent because of the stress on your organism.”
The man shrugged. The ktol had made him indifferent to such considerations. Axaqateq changed the topic: “Find the human you met at the embassy and gain her confidence.”
Vassili had acquired information from the Primordials, but in exchange, they had gained access to his memory. He replied, “The tattooed girl and her cybrid? Why are they important?”
“They work for the Vohrn. Furthermore, you should avoid that species in the future. They are able to detect the changes made by the ktol in an organism such as yours. Using the human is therefore even more prudent.”
Vassili asked, “What’s the appeal of the Aldebaran system?”
“The Vohrn suspect what we already know: this sector is of interest to the Saharj, a group of artificially constructed warriors previously on the edge of extinction. Depending on how events unfold, we may take the side of one of these species.”
Vassili eyed the gigantic alien standing next to him. The wide face with six pairs of eyes made the human feel like an insect under a microscope. The effect was enhanced by the light of the setting sun, which made the extraterrestrial’s ocular globes glow eerily.
Vassili wondered about the Primordials’ goal. On one hand, they knew more than the Vohrn, and on the other, they were using him to collect information. The paradox was highly intriguing.
He had climbed the ladder at the consortium where he worked thanks to his abilities, and especially thanks to his crafty mind, which had been able to survive the transformation engendered by the ktol. Finding out what motivated his new masters and eventually using this information to his advantage was going to be entertaining.
Axaqateq rose to his full height and turned his back. While he moved away, a last sentence echoed in the human’s head.
“Once your work is complete, I will decide whether the Aldebaran system still deserves my attention. For the moment, it has value because it is the focus of the game, but if it declines in importance, I will have to be satisfied with bringing about its destruction…”
IX
PURSUIT
ONLY Laorcq’s reflexes, honed during years of service, saved Mallory. As soon as he heard the weapon’s metallic click, she felt the veteran’s hand grab her shoulder and throw her to the ground, out of the robot’s line of fire.
The pilot reacted in turn. Imitating Laorcq, she rose, gripping the pistol he had given her, before retreating from the embassy’s entrance. Behind her, the war machine’s tall form emerged onto the street.
She risked a glance behind her: their attacker appeared to be a hunchbacked chrome skeleton, all articulations and reinforced cabling. It was extremely fast, but it moved in fits and starts, which made it look like a marionette that was about to fall apart. One of its upper limbs held a gun, and another reminded her of a butcher’s cleaver.
Once they had taken cover behind a wall, the two Earthlings watched this mechanical incarnation of death.
“I was really hoping for an adversary I could just pound on!” complained Mallory, who was fond of hand-to-hand combat.
On her hands and forearms, the sensitive tattoos transformed into thick brambles.
Laorcq pulled two six-inch-long tubes out of his inside pocket. The pilot recognized the containers for the bulletproof suits that had saved their bacon more than once in the past. She took one and said happily, “I don’t know what I’d do without you…”
The scarred man smiled back at her. “Oh, you’d somehow manage to be assassinated a dozen times, nothing too serious…”
A burst from the robot’s machine gun forced them to dive back behind cover. They heard the irregular hammering of the steel killer coming towards them step by step.
Laorcq grew serious. “It’s a fairly standard model guard. We have to get behind it and blow up its energy pack, that hump on its back.”
“Yeah, easy-peasy,” Mallory said sarcastically.
With these words, she attached the tube to her thigh and squeezed it. Thick blue liquid spurted out and covered her from head to foot, becoming a full-body suit. This outfit absorbed impacts by distributing them across its surface, but it did not make the wearer invincible: a large-caliber weapon or a powerful blow could overwhelm the system and cause serious injuries.
Laorcq also activated his protective suit, and they set out to assault the deadly machine.
It welcomed them with a burst of gunfire that brought them up short. The humans’ suits absorbed the impacts, but the kinetic force almost got the better of them. Without training, the pressure could render the wearer unconscious.
Realizing its machine gun was now useless, the robot stopped firing and adopted a different strategy. It leapt forward and struck at Mallory with the long blade attached to his right arm.
She dodged by throwing herself to the side and realized at once that it had been a feint: the machine concluded its jerky movement with a wide arc aimed in Laorcq’s direction.
The enormous cleaver hit him hard in the torso, taking him by surprise. The shock, while partially absorbed, nevertheless broke one of his ribs.
Mallory used her momentum to roll forward and managed to get behind her opponent.
The steel skeleton lifted its blade again to strike the injured man. She advanced and pressed the barrel of her weapon against the hump that jutted out between two iron plates in the place of shoulder blades.
“Take that, asshole!” she cried as she pulled the trigger.
The revolver Laorcq had given her shifted into burst mode. With a harrowing din, twenty or so bullets slammed one after the other into the reinforced battery. The first pierced the armored shell, and the remainder gutted the composites and polymers inside.
After one last jerk, the robot came to a stop. Through her suit, Mallory could smell the substance inside the energy pack mixing with the white-hot metal of her weapon.
Laorcq stood, groaning. He rubbed his injured ribs and said, “I’ve got a feeling that Jarvik is already long gone…”
That’s exactly what Mallory had been thinking. They entered the embassy, leaving the steel skeleton standing in the middle of the street for the curious, who would certainly come to investigate.
Their fears were confirmed: there was no trace of the black-scaled Vohrn or anyone else, for that matter.
Mallory decided to take a look in Jarvik’s “office.” The room was empty, as she expected. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and saw the dark liquid that had covered the Vohrn’s upper body during her last visit.
The substance was dormant, perfectly smooth, suspended above her like a gravity-defying oil slick.
Mallory’s new credentials allowed her to unlock all of the doors. They searched the embassy carefully but found nothing of note. The place was completely deserted.
Laorcq came over to the young woman. “Forget it,” he said. “All that’s left is to cancel his diplomatic status and get out. I certainly don’t feel like talking to the neighborhood cops.”
Mallory nodded. They went back to the lobby, where she approached a Vohrn terminal, easily recognizable because of its organic features. She activated it by brushing it with her hand and deactivated Jarvik’s credentials. From now on, the insane alien would have no access to Vohrn facilities, and all of his funds had been frozen. Moreover, the Aldebaran police force had issued a warrant for his arrest.
This latter event had an unexpected effect, which manifested in the form of a phone call from Alrine.
“Space control just informed me that Jarvik left the surface of Solicor aboard an unauthorized shuttle. Apparently, he was going through customs when you cancele
d his diplomatic status…”
“Why didn’t they arrest him?” the pilot demanded.
Alrine sighed. “I asked. Hold onto your hat: you’re going to love the answer. As a Vohrn agent, you have priority over the local police, since he’s their ambassador… As you may have guessed, they interpreted ‘priority’ to mean ‘your problem’.”
Mallory hung up and ran towards the exit, calling out to Laorcq. “To the orbital elevator! I’ll explain on the way.”
Alrine deactivated her navcom. She and the cybrid were on their way to the morgue. The Xilfs had put the Orcant cadavers in storage, being too preoccupied by the current crisis to examine them. Frrrj had been reticent when the policewoman had announced that the autopsy was going to happen now: the only available medical examiner was a Gibral.
She managed to reassure the Xilf by promising that she and the cybrid would attend the autopsy. For some reason that eluded the policewoman, Torg had gained their trust.
After the riots following the destruction of the Xilf larvae, the city-planet’s streets seemed completely different. Previously, the fly-eyed aliens had been discreet—now, they had completely disappeared, and the Gibrals were trying hard to follow suit. The few Alrine saw were traveling in groups and seemed to be in a hurry to get out of the open. The cyclopes with the long necks and blue skin looked disoriented; they seemed to fear that they could go insane at any moment, just as their infanticidal comrades had done.
The cybrid’s presence reassured Alrine. Traveling through the empty, sprawling city was somewhat nerve-wracking.
Originally from Kenval, Alrine was accustomed to overpopulated megacities. The sight of wide, deserted avenues that were normally packed with people made her uncomfortable. She glanced at the cybrid. Walking calmly at her side, he seemed to be rather enjoying the crowd’s absence. Claustrophobic, the policewoman remembered. He must be able to breathe more easily.
“I don’t like it,” she muttered. “It’s as if the city is holding its breath before everything explodes.”
“You think too much,” Torg objected. “The situation will probably continue to deteriorate for days. And if it becomes a civil war, I doubt we’ll be the first to be attacked.”
The conversation came to an abrupt end as they arrived at the morgue. The edifice resembled a three-hundred-foot-wide pillar punctuated by an incongruous set of pink floor-to-ceiling windows. Its shape resembled an eroded stone column.
Inside, the rosy extravagance continued. The pale color shaded everything from the walls to the furniture to the floor.
A glass sphere dominated the middle of the hall. In the middle, a hologram rotated slowly on its own axis: the Gibral symbol for Artificial Intelligence. The policewoman and Torg presented themselves to it.
“Lieutenant Alrine Lafora. We have a meeting with one of your medical examiners.”
The AI, which was rather taciturn, simply assigned them a guidance drone: a tiny glowing ball, which they followed to a large circular room decorated—to Alrine’s great relief—in white and stainless steel. Irritated by the excessive pink, Alrine’s retinae welcomed the change. A Gibral with a hunched back and a drooping neck ambled between the thirty or so tables. Wearing a sort of light gray tunic, he seemed to be extremely old, particularly given the number of folds under his one eye and along his limbs.
He approached the human and the cybrid and, as he looked them over, attached a translator box just under his jaw.
“You got here quickly. Come on, we’re about to start the autopsy.”
The elderly alien led them toward an Orcant body lying on one of the tables. The dead extraterrestrial gave off a repulsive odor. It lay on the polished steel surface with two of its four legs raised at a forty-five-degree angle.
Alrine studied the thick brown carapace, thinking to herself that the multiple layers of chitin weren’t going to make the autopsy any easier. The creature’s powerful arms lay next to its short, wide torso. Six green eyes jutted out from a head with a prominent jaw.
The Gibral waved his hand. At this signal, a thin, cylindrical robot emerged from an alcove tucked into the circular room’s wall. It approached the tall cyclops and transformed into a stack of discs pivoting around an axis, resembling a set of plates attached on one edge along the length of a central peg. Each “disc” constituted a set of surgical instruments, ranging from scalpels to tools that were completely unfamiliar to the policewoman.
The alien picked up an object that looked like a funnel and turned toward the corpse. He pointed the tool at the part of the carapace that formed the equivalent of a breastplate. A sort of veil appeared immediately between the device and the organic matter. The latter disappeared like snow in sunlight. A thin rivulet of brown particles flowed from the cadaver and ran toward the edges of the operating table, where it was sucked up by a vacuum system.
The Gibral ran the strange device over the entire body. Soon, the quadrupedal alien’s remains began to look like a medical textbook illustration of a flayed body.
Contemplating his work, the medical examiner declared, “A specimen in excellent condition, in the early years of adulthood.”
He bent his long neck toward the Orcant’s bare flesh and examined the fatal injury received during the fight with the Xilfs.
“The fatal blow was precise, delivered through a seam in the carapace and plunging directly into the heart.”
His one eye blinked rapidly, and he retracted his head. Alrine guessed that something was bothering him. He explained, “There are post-mortem marks on the edges of the wound. Apparently, one of the Xilfs who transported the body decided to conduct his own exam.”
This carelessness visibly irritated the old Gibral: he continued to work in silence.
The spectacle of the dissected corpse wasn’t very appetizing, but Alrine had seen it all before. Ten years on the police force in the streets of one of Kenval’s megacities had generated many stomach-turning memories. While the cyclops continued his work with the biopsy probes and scanners, she decided to restart the conversation. “How long have you been in this job?” she asked.
“Thirty-five cycles,” the Gibral replied flatly.
Alrine did a quick calculation: about 110 Earth years. Now that’s what you call a long career. She pointed to the cadaver. “We think he may have been under someone else’s control somehow, using an implant or possibly drugs…”
“The Xilfs who delivered the body told me about this theory. It’s pretty shaky. I don’t really believe that species as disparate as Orcants, Gibrals, and Vohrn could be controlled using the same technique. Besides, I’m going to disappoint you further: the scanners haven’t detected anything, and the results from the other analyses will almost certainly be the same. I highly doubt that I’ll find anything other than currently popular illegal drugs.”
Torg groaned with disappointment, but the policewoman stopped to think. What could the connection between all these senseless events be? How could such different people be influenced to break their own laws?
Staring at the cadaver as if she could compel it to speak through force of will, she blurted, “We absolutely must capture one alive! If we…”
Her navcom beeped, interrupting her with a number of messages. She saw Torg’s and the medical examiner’s faces adopt the same faraway look and realized they must have received the same messages as she had. The Gibrals who had massacred the Xilf larvae had just been found. Surrounded by the police, they had all committed suicide by throwing themselves into a garbage incinerator.
Alrine and the cybrid left the morgue in a bad mood. The only good thing was that the announcement had dampened tensions between the two species. Slowly, the streets returned to normal.
Inside the morgue, the medical examiner replaced his tools in the cylindrical robot and got ready to leave. He had already forgotten the human and her cybrid companion. His mind was so dulled by routine that he didn’t notice the strange noise, which sounded like something boiling. The sound came from u
nder one of the stainless-steel tables. On the ground, hidden behind one leg of a table, a small creature resembling a four-legged leech had just rapidly decomposed there, leaving behind only a greenish stain.
The thing had emerged from the Orcant cadaver’s wound, and it was the source of the marks the Gibral had thought were the result of a sloppy exam…
Mallory and Laorcq had just boarded the Sirgan. Wordlessly, they headed straight for the hold. While they traversed the ship, Jazz’s voice rang out from the on-board loudspeakers. “Are you after the ambassador?”
“Bingo!” the pilot confirmed. “He doesn’t have much of a head start; on the other hand, we’re on our own: no one else wants to get mixed up in this business.”
The Natural Intelligence began to laugh. “As expected. The Vohrn can be as rational and poised as they want, but some people will still be wary of them… At least I’m reassured: narrowmindedness is not restricted to our species…”
Leaving Jazz to his philosophizing, the two humans entered the hold. They approached the tear-shaped aeroglider, whose doors lifted automatically. Each took a seat: Mallory at the wheel and Laorcq on the passenger side.
They launched the small vessel immediately. Once the passenger compartment had been sealed, Jazz activated the air evacuation pumps. The Sirgan’s hold became a sort of giant airlock. As soon as the pressure dropped to zero, the hatch opened, and the aero shot out into space, instantly obeying the pilot’s commands.
The on-board navcom covered the windshield with data: the positions of nearby ships, speed, estimated range, weapons status… The communications link to the Sirgan was open.
“Location of the Vohrn shuttle?” Mallory asked.
Thanks to the pilot’s credentials, the aero’s navcom could access the transponder on the fleeing ship. A new icon appeared on the display, accompanied by a series of numbers.
“His course will bring him near to Reival, Solicor’s forest moon,” noted Jazz, who was receiving all of the same information. “If you’re careful, you can catch him before he leaves orbit.”
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