Deep Hydra

by Michael Formichelli

  “They’ve all been arrested by the Praetor, Dorsky, Zhào, Vargas, LeRoux—”

  “Baroness LeRoux,” Ben clarified. “Her husband has not yet been connected to the conspiracy.”

  Cylus looked perturbed. “But Xitar escaped.”

  “Escaped?” Meia cocked an eyebrow.

  “The Praetor reported him gone from Kri’Cho Tower when she went to get him. She is searching for him now, but the Cleebians have an impressive knowledge of the city and an extensive network throughout the Confederation.”

  “Are you worried he’ll come after you?” she asked as they came around a turn and ascended a staircase. The ancient wood creaked under her feet and groaned under Iapetus’.

  He sighed. “I don’t know. Any number of my enemies’ supporters could be coming after me. That’s why I asked Ben to have you upgraded as soon as he told me about the Umbral Service.”

  “Yeah, what is that—ah, this? I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “It is a secret organization within the Confederate Space Authority responsible for protecting the Premier,” he answered.

  “And checking the power of Daedalus,” Ben added.

  “What? Really? I thought Daedalus’ authority was unquestioned.” She twisted around enough to cock an eyebrow in Ben’s direction.

  “After the Quae-Sol War the CSA and Premier Xar’Vota felt that Daedalus’ unquestioned authority might lead to a disaster. Publicly opposing the entity that saved the Confederation from the VoQuana would be political suicide, so they made the Umbral Service in secret.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m glad. With Zalor coming back and the enemies I’ve just made I’m going to need someone as strong as you are now.” Cylus brought them to the lift that lead to the Premier’s private apartments three floors above them. The dark, varnished wooden doors had images of Cleebians and humans working together carved in low relief. The doors slid open revealing the ornate lift car with its vibrant-green carpet.

  “I’m sorry. I promised you rest. My mind just won’t stop. I have the travel ban to lift, and this meeting with Helena and Sophi, and…” He stopped himself and took a shuddering sigh.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said

  “I miss her… Why did she have to side with him?”

  Meia didn’t know what to say. Her mind strayed to what she knew she had to do to save him and everyone else. Sanul’s information indicated a Siren factory here in the Palace, though she didn’t dare approach it until she was ready. There was no telling what or who might be down there, and she couldn’t risk giving herself away. She also wanted to find this Doctor Rega and question him, or rip his lungs out for manufacturing Siren—one or the other. Either way, she needed to make contact with her reluctant ally soon.

  “Ah, I need to get some things from the city,” she said.

  “Ben will do it.” Tension lines formed on his face.

  “I’d rather do it myself. I’ll leave Iapetus with you to protect you. Thanks to what you’ve given me I can stay linked to him the whole time. Okay? I’ll be back before your meeting. I promise.”

  “This is not advisable.” Ben’s pinhole gaze was fixed on her.

  “I will protect the Premier,” Iapetus stated.

  “He’s a walking tank. You’ll be fine.” She gave him her best try at a look of reassurance.

  Cylus tensed again, then nodded.

  “Okay. Don’t be long.”

  “I’ll make it as quick as I can.” Meia winked with a confident smile.

  Steam rose from the water and collected in droplets on the sandstone dome above. The air was as thick in her nostrils as it was difficult to see through, and smelled like wet grit. She identified three dark shapes in the sweltering air ahead of her in the middle of the pool, but though she was close enough to tell they were all around her height the steam obscured any hope of identification. There was a fourth being to her right seated on the submerged pedestals by himself.

  Meia gritted her teeth when she plunged her foot into the waist-deep water. The heat sent needles of pain racing up her skin but she didn’t let it stop her. She sat down on the stone edge and briefly enjoyed the rough, cool touch on her derriere before pushing herself all the way in. The heat and pain shot up to her waist intense enough to feel like it was running though her, but she grimaced and kept going.

  “Impressive,” Sanul said from his perch as she approached. “I’ve never seen a human just jump right in like that. I thought they kept these pools too hot for your kind.”

  “For some of my kind, maybe,” she responded. Her body was already adjusting. The scalding heat became something that was just uncomfortable.

  She saw herself reflected in his large, geode-like eyes when she reached between her legs and hoisted herself up on the pedestal beside his. She squatted on the balls of her feet, mimicking the position he held on his crystal hooves as best as her anatomy allowed.

  “You know our etiquette, and it looks like your tracker works.”

  “My father took me many places as a girl. I learned a lot—and yes it does,” she said in Volgothic and took pleasure in the flickering of his ears against his horns.

  “Nice chains.” Sanul indicated the tiny links running over her shoulders, down through her cleavage, and out over her hips. In addition to the traditional bathing necklace, she fashioned several rings on her fingers and toes, an anklet, and metallic silver hair from which now dripped beads of sweat from her scalp.

  “Thank you.” She didn’t feel the need to tell him they were made of armacorium instead of real silver.

  “What brings you to me today? Is it time to pay up what I owe you for freeing me?” His tone was melancholy.

  “Time to start.”

  She turned at the sound of hooves on the stone and watched a light-brown confectioner, who had rather obvious musculature beneath his fur, enter the chamber. Meia waved him over and unabashedly looked between his legs as he squatted down in a way that only someone with two knee-like joints could. She let her eyes linger, then her attention to the metal tray he carried with an appreciative smile. She picked out a roll of the dried phytrophor leaf and a rope of black candy, taking each between her fingers and paid for it with Carina Starblood’s account. The handsome Volgoth gave her a nod and climbed into the pool heading for the group in the middle.

  “Thank you,” Sanul said when she handed him the phytrophor.

  “When did your people start eating licorice?” She twirled the black rope in her fingers and stuck it in the side of her mouth, savoring the sharp, sweet taste on her tongue.

  “It’s a fad,” he said with a wave of his four-fingered hand.

  “I hope it sticks.”

  “Are you planning on coming back here?”

  “You spend a lot of time here. I can see myself spending a lot of time in a place like this too.” She paused and cocked her head to the side. “I like it here. Your people have good taste in fashion when they’re away from the prying eyes of civilization, and I love a good spa.”

  He snorted through his large, black nostrils. “Don’t mock us.”

  “I’m not. I prefer this to the stuffy jumpsuits and jackets.” She ran a finger under the chain crossing her stomach, recalling the months she spent in her envirosuit, unable to take it off. She remembered the itching, the sores and infections… “I wouldn’t lie about something so serious.”

  “Huh.” He snorted again. “So, what do you want?”

  She glanced over at the other dark forms toward the middle of the water.

  “My people know how to keep secrets,” Sanul said in a low voice.

  She gave him a sharp look for the criticism and leaned in closer. “I’ve gone through your records and I’ve been thinking about how best to approach this.”

  “This?” He stuck the roll of phytrophor in his mouth and started masticating.

  “I am going to see that Siren never gets used again, and I’m going to see that CK gets free of whatever they have o
ver him.”

  Sanul chuckled, spraying green foam out over the water. “Why do you care about him?”

  “I owe him.”

  He stared at her chewing at the leaf roll with deliberate movements. “I’m not good at reading humans, but you sound like you mean that.”

  “I am as serious as a bullet.” She stared into his glassy eyes to make the point. “That thing in the basement you found, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Who’s this Rega person?”

  “Zalor’s—”

  She cut him off with a hiss. It was one thing to trust his people but quite another to be stupid about it. The gang she ran with on Ninlea had an expression, “Never trust a Volgoth when money is involved.” It was speciesist bullshit, no doubt, but if her travels taught her anything it was that greed and stupidity were not the exclusive domain of humanity.

  “Eh, fine. I told you who he is already. Rega’s the scientist who refined Siren.” Sanul shook his head, sending water droplets from his twisting crystal horns. “He works for the big Z and used to work for a certain three-river people before that.”

  She frowned. Three river people?

  “Three rivers is the translation of Mitsugawa into Solan,” Iapetus’ voice said in her head. It was too risky to be in direct contact with him just as it was chancy to use her implant to have this conversation with Sanul. Her communications were probably being monitored, but Iapetus found a way around that. He planted a seed of himself in her PLIA hardware which had his personality and would reintegrate when they reunited.

  Sanul continued, his words increasingly slurred. “He had shom ashoshiation with Cleebian Univershity before that.”

  She nodded. “He’s the weak link, and he happens to know how the damn thing works. Where is he?”

  Sanul swayed on his pedestal and shook his head before meeting eyes with her. “You’re going after hi—him?”

  She stared at him, waiting for him to answer.

  “I don’tsh know,” he said.

  “You fleshrode him. What’s his access cypher?”

  The Volgoth did a double-take. “You’re going to—? No way!”

  “I’ll do what I have to do. What is it?”

  Sanul blinked several times and looked more animated than she had yet seen him.

  “Do you do this often? Who have you—”

  She flicked the end of his nose with her finger hard enough to hear it. He flinched back, blinking.

  “Shorry. I get exshited when I meet shomeone who… Shorry.”

  Incoming transmission, Iapetus’ voice stated. She accepted the file and took possession of Doctor Suman Rega’s implant access code. The truth was she hadn’t fleshrode since she was a teen, but she remembered how.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You don’t give mesh too muchshhh choishe…” His eyelids drooped.

  “Thank you anyway,” she said, stroking her chin with a finger. “You know, there is no reason to make this hostile. I lied to the Praetor to save your life.”

  He stared at her. “Why?”

  “I’ve had a Praetor try to kill me before. I’m sympathetic.”

  Something nudged her leg. She looked down and saw the confectioner’s tray floating in the water. Frowning, she followed the ripples in the water. The Volgoth in the center of the pool were gone. The room had only one exit and she didn’t see them leave.

  “Sanul, I think you—”

  Something grabbed her around the throat and suddenly she was under water.

  “Armor mode. Activating combat protocols,” Iapetus’ voice said into her thoughts. She felt the armacorium coat her skin in less than a second, pushing whatever it was around her neck back and letting her breathe again—if only she wasn’t under water. Whatever had her slammed her body down against the bottom of the pool and held her there. The armor vibrated around her—a curious sensation—as it absorbed the energy of the impact.

  Monoblade, she thought as her training and implanted engrams kicked in. She pressed her middle and ring fingers together on her right hand and the liquid armor flowed upward to form a 30-centimeter-long blade sharper than glass. Conscious thought faded and she swept the blade up and through whatever held her in place. She felt only a slight tug as it passed through, and then she was free. Her body twisted, bringing her legs to bare and she saw her attacker for the first time. He was the Volgoth confectioner, only his eyes were glowing red spheres instead of geodes.

  Her legs kicked out without thought, slamming into his and sending his body pitching forward. At the same time she brought the blade up and plunged it into his chest right where the Volgoth heart was. It should have stopped him.

  It didn’t.

  Meia felt his four-fingered hand close around her wrist and start to squeeze. Her armacorium vibrated as it shifted the energy away from the building pressure, but she felt it increasing. Slowly he began to pull her blade from his chest.

  He’s not a Volgoth. What the fuck is he? Her lungs were starting to hurt. She hadn’t had the chance to take a breath before being plunged into the scalding water.

  “Data insufficient for a full determination, but he appears to be an artificial,” Iapetus responded.

  She stared at her attacker, noting that the blood seeping from his severed hand was milky-gray instead of red.

  Electrify—

  “Sanul Mondu is still in the water.”

  She glanced up, seeing the Volgoth wide-eyed and drooling on the pedestal above her. Shit.

  Her attacker wasn’t waiting around to let her figure out what to do. He yanked his hoof up and sent it flying at her elbow with blinding speed. Meia barely got her knee up in time to deflect the blow away from the vulnerable joint. A loud “thump” sounded in her ears from the cavitating water and the side of her knee exploded in pain. Her attacker reared back for another blow—

  The armacorium coating her hand exploded outward in a thousand needles, shredding the fingers holding her wrist in a spray of gray flesh and blood. Momentum carried the false Volgoth backward and it slipped on the floor of the bath.

  She was free.

  Meia rolled back and kicked off the ground. Her body burst forth from the water and she back-flipped up to the pedestal beside the stunned Sanul and gasped in a deep breath of air.

  “Come on!” She grabbed him and tossed his body to the walkway with ease.

  She didn’t have time to marvel at her enhanced strength as her attacker lunged at her in a spray of white froth. It slammed into her too fast for her to react and carried her back through the air. She felt the wall of the bath chamber smack her a moment before it gave and she plunged through into the chamber beyond.

  The Volgoth in the next bath screamed as the wall exploded, scattering sandstone bricks about the floor without warning.

  The air spat from her lungs when she hit the ground. Her attacker, still holding her about the waist with one arm, sent the shredded stump of its hand plunging down at her face. She felt the armor vibrate again as she yanked her head to the side but still took a glancing blow. Her attacker’s momentum sent its arm deep into the stone floor. It tried to yank it back up but shuddered in frustration as it remained in place.

  Meia gritted her teeth and plunged her fingers deep into the artificial’s sides, threading them between his reinforced ribs.

  Fry this motherfucker.

  “My pleasure,” Iapetus said.

  Electricity hissed through its body and sparks flew from the points where her fingers met its artificial flesh. The thing convulsed around her, its whole body jerking around in place until she saw the red light fade behind its eyes.

  With a grunt she yanked her hands from it and wriggled herself free.

  “By the gods below! Cygni never did any of that!” Sanul stood in the hole in the wall.

  “No? She never fought?” Meia said in Solan between panting breaths. She absorbed the armacorium from around her head to better catch her breath in the thick humidity.

  “Never like
that,” he said.

  “Maybe she didn’t download the right engrams.” She shrugged and knelt down beside the fried corpse of the artificial. Its fur melted into a gray goo that was oozing onto the ground beneath it.

  Hostiles?

  “Scanning.” A window opened in her UI and electric-blue lines rippled through it showing the walls and locations of everyone within twenty meters. “The ground is thick here and interfering with your radar, but none within range. I advise we move soon.”

  One sec. She reached down into the artificial’s gut and felt around.

  “What are you doing?” Sanul looked between her and the scared Volgoth huddled on the far end of the pool. “It’s all right. She’s with me.”

  Meia bit her tongue not to laugh. He sounded ridiculous.

  She pressed on with her task, groping around in the sludge the thing’s artificial muscles were becoming until she found what she was looking for and pulled. Her arm emerged from the thing’s sucking guts with a slurping sound and she held up a ten-centimeter long, one-centimeter wide box in her silver fingers.

  Sanul stared at it for a long moment. “It doesn’t have a registration.”

  She frowned, her own scan confirming it. A chill ran down her spine and she gave a hard stare at the thing laying on the ground before her. The box tumbled from her fingers and clattered on the stone floor. What do you think, Iapetus?

  “Analysis: Illegal artificial with mimetic capabilities beyond commercially available technology.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” She put her hand over the thing’s skull. The melting flesh parted like wet clay as she pressed her fingers in and activated the armacorium’s vibro-location function.

  “What? What were you afraid of? What are you afraid of?” Sanul asked in rapid succession.

  Meia took her free hand and flicked the side of the thing’s head as hard as she could. An image formed in her UI as the vibrations traveled through it to her palm.

  “Fffffuck.” She jerked her hands off the thing’s skull.

  Sanul snorted. “You’re scaring me, lady.”

  Is that what I think it is?

  “I will need my main program’s data to confirm.”