Deep Hydra

by Michael Formichelli

  Meia shook her head and smashed her fist into the ground. Could she even go back to the Palace now? Would she be in danger? Of course she had to, and of course she would be. She couldn’t leave Iapetus there and they couldn’t escape without bringing hell down on their heads. She had to keep going, there was no other way. It wasn’t like she didn’t have experience living in places where death stalked her at every turn. Still, what she saw turned her stomach.

  “What is it?” Sanul stamped his crystalline hooves. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on I’m going to run.”

  “I’d find you, but in this case you’ve got the right idea. We have to get out of here as soon as possible.” She tilted her head to the side, listening to the sounds coming from beyond the chamber’s door. The racket the fight made was attracting attention.

  “Come on, we have to get your clothes.” She absorbed her armacorium, drawing shocked snorts from the Volgoth in the pool. Ignoring them, she grabbed Sanul by the arm and pulled him behind her as she made for the exit.

  “What the hell is going on?” Sanul sprayed green foam from his mouth.

  With a snarl she pulled him in close and whispered harshly in his ear. “The Praetors are after us. That thing has the same type of memory core as Modulus and…”

  She blinked. The memory core was likely still in Lina’s room at Keltan Tower—unless somehow the Praetor Prime knew about it. Perhaps Iapetus could hack into it and find out what the hell was really going on with Calemni and the Praetors—Iapetus, or a master hacker like the one she held in her hand.

  “Memory core? What is a modlulus?” Sanul shook himself free. “What makes you think I’m going anywhere with you?”

  She gave him a long, appraising look. “You’re good with breaking security, right?”

  “Yeah.” He puffed up his chest.

  “Come on.” She started through the doorway into the wide hall leading to the changing rooms. Several Volgoth ran past her with clopping hooves. She heard them exclaim in surprise as they came across the carnage. She half expected Sanul to stay behind as she hurried on into the cavernous, locker-lined chamber, but when she glanced back he was clopping along with her.

  “What do you need cracked?”

  “Modulus is a Praetor,” she whispered. “And Lina had his brain core at the tower.”

  Sanul cocked his head to the side, then hurried to hers and matched her pace. “You’re going to continue our work?”

  She nodded. “It’s why I let you go. I need to figure out what’s going on with Siren and those that used it. I need to know what’s happening with Baron Keltan. If that means I have to finish what you and the others were doing then I will.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I owe someone, okay?” She kept walking, getting four more steps ahead before he put his four-fingered hand on her chest and stopped her. His finger pads were warm and leathery against her bare skin. She met his gaze and cocked an eyebrow.

  “Ah, sorry,” he murmured and took his hand away.

  She kept looking at him.

  “You won’t find the core there, at least I don’t think you will.”

  “Why not?” She felt her stomach drop. Did the Praetor already have it?

  “Because the heiress didn’t keep her secrets in the tower where they could be found. Cygni found out where she did, though.”

  “And you know?” Meia asked.

  Sanul nodded.

  Behind them someone was calling for the Injeraab, an illegal Volgoth gang that functioned as the ghetto’s secret police.

  “Lead on, and hurry.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Katozi Slynn,

  Near Ol’Lekhura, Deep Space

  J2400:3294

  Seated in the acceleration chairs around the octagonal table in the ‘Slynn’s common room, their guest made for strange company. Cygni Aragón was a reporter who Nero watched on and off over the years on some of his more boring missions. She shocked him with her cybernetic, silver-skin armor when they found her with Rune. He never would have guessed in a million years that he would find this woman on a known slaver’s ship professing to be on the same mission he was. Kae couldn’t get enough of her. He fawned over her at the table, refilling her drinking orb from a spigot beneath its rim before she could finish while telling her over and over again how lucky they were to have run into her.

  He’s just happy to have his son back, Prospero stated.

  “Yeah, I know,” Nero muttered.

  There’s just no pleasing you, is there? Prospero snapped.

  “Guess not.” He moved over to the distractions by table to avoid having the conversation with his SCC. Thanks to the gravity provided by the Orgnan Marauder the ‘Slynn was piggy-backing on, he was able to walk instead of float.

  “What is this game called again?” Cygni asked. She held a translucent holographic controller in her hands and operated it like it was physical thanks to the somatic feedback mechanism in her implant. In front of her, hovering over the common room table, holograms of two mustached men leaped over wildlife and dodged fireballs.

  Kae looked about to answer but Sorina cut him off.

  “Pipes and Plumbers.” Her man leaped on top of a wayward lobster and kicked it off the table.

  Rune chortled from his seat across from the two women.

  “Are you sure?” Cygni asked.

  Kae cranked his lips together and started picking at some grime in the seam of the table.

  “I am an expert in ancient Earth,” Sorina responded with vibrating ears. “I researched this extensively before downloading it.”

  Nero suppressed a smile. He hadn’t seen her so ruffled before. Rune opened his mouth, but he shook his head and the boy closed it.

  “Okay, okay. Pipes and Plumbers it is,” Cygni said. “Why is there plant life inside a sewer? There’s no sunlight.”

  The action froze in place. Sorina’s shining, golden eyes blazed at Cygni.

  “It is a game. It does not have to be logical.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. None of this does,” she responded.

  “The point is fun, not sense. Yes, Rune?” Sorina stared at the ex-reporter like she had three heads.

  “Yeah, sure it is. But it isn’t as fun as yo—”

  “Rune, ah, wanna give Athame a hand in the cockpit?” Kae asked.

  “What? No! I’m not missing this!”

  “Pipes and Plumbers… Well, okay… Can we keep playing?” Cygni’s eyes rolled up to the display.

  “Nero, would you like to play? I think my playmate is getting tired.” Sorina gave him a pointed look.

  “Ah—” he stammered. This was too dangerous for him to get involved in. “Cygni, I’ve been meaning to ask you since the world ship authorities cleaned out the ‘wormer—”

  She smiled as though that brought her personal pleasure.

  “—how did you wind up in a sleeper on a slaver ship?” he finished.

  She squirmed under their collective gaze. “It’s a long story.”

  “We have weeks before we get back to the capital,” Nero said.

  “That we do. I guess I owe you an explanation.” Her expression grew grim. “I was trying to investigate Baron Mitsugawa’s death. That lead me to you, actually, but you were gone by the time I put a few things together, so I worked it a different angle. I used… A contact of mine to get on board the Queen Gaia and attend Baron Keltan’s engagement party.”

  “Baron Keltan’s engaged?” Nero cocked an eyebrow.

  “To Pasqualina Olivaar,” she answered. “Um, he was, I mean. I think she’s dead.”

  Dead? Prospero sounded surprised. Nero frowned and waited for Cygni to continue.

  “So is my friend Giselle… Um, I’m sorry. I’m not there yet. Fuck, Boa was right…”

  “Hey,” Kae nodded toward Rune.

  “What? I say fuck all the time!” he said with wide eyes.

  “And you shouldn’t.” Kae scowled at him.

 
Rune shook his head. “It’s how people talk…”

  “Let her talk, okay?” Kae gestured at Cygni.

  “Fine.” Rune crossed his arms before his chest.

  “So… I’m skipping over a lot, but I wound up finding out Baron Keltan got attacked by a VoQuana.” She paused and her eyes flickered between them.

  “We know the quarantine’s broken,” Nero said. “At least on Zov.”

  “Oh… Okay. Well, he came after me next and I managed to kill him.”

  “Impressive.” He gave her a thumbs-up, reassessing his opinion of her. Fighting Ameluan hadn’t been easy.

  “I don’t know if it meant anything, though. Baron Keltan could still be under their influence.”

  That’s not good, Prospero said. Nero, with Baron Mitsugawa dead Baron Keltan was our last chance to get Kae’s testimony about Siren into the Barony.

  Maybe not, Nero thought back. Shut up and let her continue.

  “I managed to get a job at Cosmos Corp working for Zalor Revenant. That’s how I met Giselle, who turned out to be a spy for Baroness Cronus—Sophiathena Cronus I mean. Ah, it’s complicated, but she tried to force me to supply her with information from the spy grains I had in Zalor’s office.”

  “You have spy grains in Baron Revenant’s office?” Sorina leaned forward and her long, pointed ears rotated to aim at Cygni.

  “And Sophiathena’s assistant’s office,” she said.

  Sorina looked impressed.

  “Baroness Cronus was working with this Orgnan, Targhth Rogkoth. She threatened to sell me and my friends to him. I guess she did…”

  “I’m sorry.” Kae put a hand on hers.

  She gave him a slight smile of acknowledgment. “They caught me because I found out that Baroness Sophiathena was plotting with Premier Dorsky to kill her mother and aunt. I was working for Dorsky by then and… Goddess, my friends… We were working with Heiress Olivaar to stop it. When we got to IntelSys Tower it looked like everything was as we thought, but it was a trap. The Praetor Prime was there. Oh, I didn’t talk about the Gaian biodome, and Thuban, and…”

  “It’s all right,” Kae gave her hand a squeeze.

  “We fought a Praetor on Zov. He was working with the VoQuana. We think that either someone managed to hack him, or more likely, Daedalus knows they breeched the Quarantine and wants it to happen for some reason.” Nero stopped, not sure he should fill her in on the rest.

  Sorina gave him a pointed look and he nodded.

  “Daedalus is planning on ‘upgrading’ all of us.”

  “Upgrading? What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Turning all of us into—” he stopped. Should he say it?

  Nero… Prospero said.

  He sighed. “I’m not a real Abyssian. Abyssians are made, but I was once a regular man. Daedalus took me from the war on Savorcha and upgraded me as an experiment to see if it could be done. It’s planning on doing this to the rest of the Confederation to unite us under its control.”

  “Goddess,” Cygni whispered. “How?”

  “We’re not sure,” he said. “But if you want to get people to accept the unacceptable, releasing the VoQuana threat is a hell of a way to do it.”

  Cygni chewed her bottom lip. “Zalor is involved in Siren—”

  “We know,” he said.

  Don’t interrupt!

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “—and the Praetors are working with Cylus Keltan, who is under the influence of the VoQuana, who are also working with the Praetors… possibly.” She chewed some more.

  “I think she’s eating her face,” Rune said.

  Kae shushed him, then his eyes grew wide. “Nero, I never met who hired me to bring that shit around the Spur. Do you think…?”

  “The VoQuana, the Praetors, and Baron Revenant are all the same enemy,” he said. “That’s why he destroyed Taiumikai. If Baron Mitsugawa hadn’t given me the evidence from Elmorus, doing so would have destroyed the record that links them and the Siren factory.”

  “So you did go to Elmorus—and wait, you know who destroyed Taiumikai?” Cygni sat bolt upright. “It wasn’t the Brogh?”

  “Is that what they say in the capital? No, it wasn’t. It was Qismat, Zalor’s pet artificial—now deceased, by the way.”

  Destroyed. You can’t kill us the same way, Prospero muttered.

  “And that means they all are involved in Siren,” Sorina stated.

  “You have proof Qismat destroyed Taiumikai?”

  “Athame’s memory and mine count as evidence… Well, they did before we went rogue.” He sighed. “The difference is hers can be downloaded.”

  Cygni perked up, looking excited. “I’ve got evidence of Zalor meeting with—shit, it’s gone.”

  She deflated like a balloon.

  “What were you going to say?” Nero asked.

  “Well, I had evidence of all of this—Zalor meeting with the VoQuana, Cylus being under their control—but someone wiped my implant’s drive. Fuck—oh, sorry!” She grimaced at Kae. “Ah, probably the goddess-damned Orgnan. Shi—dammit.”

  “You can curse, go ahead.” Rune’s eyes were beaming.

  Kae shook his head.

  “Sorry… Ah, if any of my people got away they might have it.”

  “We’ll try and find out when we get back to the capital. Back to Siren, how does it fit into this triangle? Why would Daedalus allow attacks on the people he is programmed to protect?” Nero asked.

  “He is already using the VoQuana to push the popular will to his ends,” Sorina stated.

  “Maybe Siren is there to push things over the edge? If they release it on a civilized wo—” Cygni stopped. “The capital, it’s been laced with Siren canisters.”

  “What?” He felt a shock of cold run through him. Of course the capital would be a target. The terror of having it hit might just galvanize the public into doing what Daedalus wanted. “Dammit. It’ll be weeks before we get back. We’ll be too late.”

  You don’t know that, Prospero chided.

  “He is correct,” Sorina said.

  “Wait, who?” Cygni asked.

  “My SCC. Prospero, patch her in,” he said.

  Security protocols—

  “Now!” he snapped.

  Fine… We’re connected. Greetings Cygni Lau Aragón.

  “Oh my, hello. You’re an AI.”

  Yes, but unfortunately stuck in this oaf’s head.

  “Watch it,” Nero growled. “We’re off topic. What about those canisters?”

  He watched Cygni grimace and stare into the space before her.

  “We never found them. I told Thuban Vargas, a CSA agent I became acquainted with, but he didn’t find them either. Doctor Rega hid them too well.”

  Nero glared at her. “Who?”

  “Thuban—”

  “The other,” he said.

  “Doctor Rega?” She looked worried.

  He knew Kiertah Rega’s father as the man who killed his wife on Savorcha while Nero was trying to save him. He was the man who took his own daughter into VoQuana territory and let them experiment on her… Something clicked in his head. Rega was working on something during the war, something that Nero saw a glimpse of when he barged into the lab to extract his family.

  Prospero, pull up that image.

  On it. Good leap of logic, by the way. I’m proud. I must be rubbing off on you.

  He ignored the comment and focused on the image that formed in his mind. There was a hologram running behind Rega that day. One with diagrams and ancient writing he couldn’t understand—but the diagram, that he’d seen before.

  “Pull up the image of the molecule Sorina took from Mitsugawa Yoji’s blood when he was murdered.” Nero’s fingers were tingling.

  Prospero produced the image and overlapped them.

  There are some differences.

  “Share it,” he said.

  Sorina and Cygni both gasped.

  “That’s what I saw in his lab at Cosmos,�
�� Cygni said.

  “It is Siren,” Sorina said.

  He nodded. “The son of a bitch has been working on it since the war. I was sent in to extract him. I thought I was serving the Confederation at the time, but I was an Abyssian already.”

  “The mission was really Daedalus’” Athame said as she entered the room from the cockpit. “He sent you there to extract the doctor and Siren. The rest were expendable.”

  “How do you know?” He looked into her purple eyes.

  “It is in your dossier. I downloaded your data before leaving to retrieve you for Daedalus.”

  “What happened?” Cygni asked, but Kae waved her off.

  “So, there’s Daedalus’ direct link to Siren, but why use it to terrify the population when the VoQuana and Brogh threats will already do that?” Kae asked.

  “Linking the Marauder’s controls to the Katozi Slynn is complete. I do not know what you are discussing, but I came in to ensure that Rune is properly secured,” Athame stated.

  Nero frowned. “Secured?”

  “I must also report that there are three Abyssian Annihilators which have just arrived in this system.”

  He felt his heart race. “Three?”

  “Daedalus isn’t messing around.” Kae got up from his seat and headed toward the cockpit. “Our only hope is escape before they notice us piggy-backing on this Orgnan tub.”

  “He is correct,” Athame stated. “I calculate the odds of surviving a battle with three Annihilators to be 12,000 to 1; rounding off of course.”

  “Then get us the hell out of here!” Nero said.

  “Affirmative. Course?”

  “Wait, they are firing on the Ol’Lekhura. There are millions on board that ship,” Sorina said. Her eyes had the distant look of someone watching her UI.

  His mouth was dry. “We can’t engage. We don’t have the firepower.”

  “I could transmit the virus I used to stop Login,” she said.

  “That is unwise,” Athame countered. “Even if they accept the transmission, the moment one ship was infected the other two would shut down communication and triangulate the source of the transmission. The odds of survival in that scenario—

  Nero waved her to silence. “Sorina, we can’t.”