Sol in Flames (Battleborn c23 Book 1), page 8
"I ... no ... I mean ..." Kareena took another breath and sorted through the next words before speaking them. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to seem disrespectful. I really appreciate you keeping that Chako away from me. And I'm sorry that I may have misjudged you, as well."
The Slag grinned at her. "It's all right, little one. It's just a different world here. But I'm a little curious about what you're looking for here, myself. You're not one of those USI guys who were crushing everything here yesterday?"
"No. I don't work for USI."
He looked at her in a prompting manner.
Kareena decided to tell the truth. "Cynarian."
The Slag nodded knowingly. "Cynarian. They build pretty implants."
"Among other things."
"And what are first the USI and now Cynarian doing here?"
Somehow, Kareena couldn't shake the feeling that the man already knew the answer to his question. "Do you know a woman named Chrome?"
The twitch at the corner of his mouth gave him away before he spoke. "The Beta whose picture is flickering through all the news channels right now? Yeah, I know her. Came by here occasionally."
"Well, then you can guess roughly what I'm looking for here."
"I guess." Judging by his expression, the Slag seemed to be having fun with the verbal cat-and-mouse game.
"So, did it happen here?" she asked him.
"What?" Now he really didn't seem to know what she was getting at.
"Well, for Chrome to have children."
"Oh, that. I don't know. I only knew her by sight and we exchanged a word or two occasionally, but she didn't share the details of her treatments with me. The last of her children was born here, as far as I could tell. But where and how they were conceived ... no idea. It certainly wasn't me." He grinned broadly at the last words. Then a sudden jolt went through his body. He gasped and shook himself under a fit of coughing. Kareena went to him and supported him so he wouldn't go down, he was jerking so violently. Slowly the attack subsided. The blood he wiped from the hand he had held in front of his mouth did not escape Kareena's notice.
"Are you all right?" she asked when he had regained some control.
"Yes, yes. Aside from my organs digesting each other, everything is fine." He made a sweeping gesture across the ravaged room. "Guess I'll have to get my medicine elsewhere now."
"Maybe I can help you with that," Kareena offered.
"You?"
"If you help me."
He grinned. "Sure thing. What can I do for you, little one?"
"First of all, please don't call me 'little one'! My name is Kareena. Kareena Toran." She held out her hand to him. He grasped it, a little hesitantly at first, but then forcefully with his scabbed fingers.
"Pleased to meet you, Kareena Toran. I am Theophilos."
Kareena had no idea what kind of name she had been expecting, but certainly not this one. She struggled to hide her surprise. "Pleased to meet you, Theophilos."
"To my friends, 'Phil'."
"I would be honored to call you Phil."
He nodded in agreement. "Anything else?"
"Indeed. Did the USI people take the former owner of this practice?"
"No. The doc took off when Chrome first showed up in the feeds."
"Did he say anything to you about the matter?"
"Not to me."
Kareena pondered. The impromptu escape suggested that he might have had something to do with Chrome's ability to produce children after all. Possibly, though, he thought it was dangerous enough just to have helped with the birth.
"Do you have any idea where the doc went?" she asked.
"Not really. We didn't know each other that well. He supplied me and my people with some drugs. We tolerated his store in our tunnels. That was about it, in the grand scheme of things. Close friends we were not. Maybe he went back to where he came from."
"And that would be?"
"The Combine."
Kareena bristled. "Are you sure?"
The Slag seemed a little offended at her doubts. "Quite. He may have been a Beta, but you could clearly see the Slag eyes."
"He was a mutant?"
"That's what I said."
Now it was getting interesting. Chrome's doctor was a mutant himself. And he was from the Shigano Combine. The second nation on Mars next to the Ares Republic. A nation whose population consisted of more than half mutants, who had extensive civil rights from birth. Was Chrome's secret hidden in the Combine? That would not make Kareena's investigation any easier. Relations between the Ares Corporate Republic and the Shigano Combine had traditionally not been on the best of terms. The last open war was about thirty years ago. Kareena had been a child then, but she remembered that the Combine had always been 'the enemy'.
"And you think he has returned to the Combine?"
"Just a guess. If he's still in Elysium City, I don't know where, anyway."
"Did he have a name besides 'Doc'?"
"Overheard someone call him Stargazer once."
Stargazer. Another typical mutant name. But still.
"And you don't know where he came from at the Combine?"
Phil mused. "He occasionally told stories about the Valles Marineris. Maybe from there somewhere."
That helped only so much. Some of the largest cities in the Combine were in the Valles Marineris, the most massive canyon system in the solar system. But better than nothing at all.
"All right, Phil. At least I've made a little progress. Thanks for the information."
"What do you want with the doc? I hope he doesn't get in trouble because of me now?"
Kareena noticed that the Slag was adjusting to her, switching from the condescendingly familiar tone to a more formal tone. She interpreted it as a sign of appreciation.
"No, no," she reassured him. "Don't worry. I just want to find out what happened to Chrome. If the Doc can help me with that, I'd be much obliged to him, too. I'd just like to ask him a few questions. Do you have access to a ComLink?"
Phil rolled his eyes. "We may be in Hades here, but we have one or two achievements of civilization even here." He pulled an old but apparently functional handheld device from his coveralls.
"I get it. Sorry." She sent an unencrypted short-range message with her contact information. A blink on Phil's ComLink indicated he had received the message.
"If you think of anything else or get any more information on the matter, please contact me!" she urged him. "And also send me a list of the medications you need. I assume I can find you somewhere around here?"
"Mostly." He looked at the display on his ComLink and raised his sparse eyebrows in surprise. "Captain Toran? Internal security? Oh my goodness! What have I gotten myself into?"
"Don't worry," Kareena reassured him in the same ironic tone with which he had spoken. "I'm not here to arrest ID-less Slags who have fun scaring strange women."
"Well, lucky me." Again, the broad grin. "I'll be contacting you, Captain."
"Good, thanks again for your help, Phil."
"As I said, you paid and I'm a man of my word."
She gave him another parting smile, which he returned profusely. Then she walked past him and left Doc Stargazer's former office. The corridor was empty except for sleeping Slags. She walked back the same way she had come. Phil's cronies had disappeared. As she marched through the tunnels lit only by her flashlight, she reviewed her visit to Hades. She had taken a not inconsiderable risk. But at least she had gotten some information. Overall, she considered her excursion a success. The fact that she had met Phil had turned out to be a special stroke of luck. The Slag was almost likeable. He definitely wasn't stupid, and in some ways, he was even charming. Kareena laughed inwardly. The day before yesterday, her worldview about mutants had been upended, and now she was befriending a Slag. Her life seemed to be undergoing a huge upheaval right now.
As soon as she arrived back in the busy tunnel with the stores, she felt quite a bit safer. She kept walking briskly toward the plaza through which she had entered Hades. She wondered if there were any other nice guys among the Slags who hung around. She observed one whose bald skull seemed to be half scab. Laughing, he was arguing with a Chinese man. A woman with a crooked face and severely shortened arms was checking out the display at a grocery store. A horde of children ran across the crowd as if playing tag. No doubt about it. The Slags, too, were largely ordinary people. Not surprising, really. Kareena had never seriously thought about it until now. Perhaps it was also because of her work. The radiation-damaged had no chance in the corporate world. The only way to get money was usually through crime. Therefore, Kareena had met Slags mostly as suspects and not uncommonly as convicted criminals. And everyone else fled as soon as they saw a uniform, because they knew exactly about the prejudices held by the security forces.
Regardless, she could not forget her real task over all the moral and philosophical questions. She needed answers, as did her superior. She hoped to appease Sal Haggard a little with what she had just learned when she told him about how the USI had grabbed Chrome. That is, if he didn't already know.
She worked her way through the plaza, still filled with a colorful cross-section of humanity, and headed for the transport terminal. In front of her in line was a would-be cyborg in a skin-tight space suit imitation with a whole array of equally conspicuous and pointless skull implants. He probably would have been green with envy had he known how much hardware was in Kareena's body and what it had cost. The internal memory in her head alone was worth a fortune. When she had gotten it, it had been the absolute top of the line. Not an implanted memory crystal, as had been standard in the past, but a neuroinformatic chip that stored data directly in unused parts of her brain. One only had to be careful not to collect too much information, otherwise there was the danger that something would be overwritten, such as one's own memories or abilities. But Kareena hadn't had any problems with that yet. By now she had saved enough to pay off a good part of her hardware. But since she wasn't planning to leave Cynarian, she might as well spend the money on something else. Whatever that might be. After all, thanks to her eagerness to work, she hardly had time to spend large amounts of money. At some point in her life, she would let it all hang out. Retire early and then just do what she wanted - whatever that would be.
But for now, she dutifully ordered a transport pod home, and was glad when she finally left Hades behind. In her quarters, she changed her clothes. The uniform dispelled any doubts about the meaning of her life. She was a member of Internal Security, and she was good at it.
As she made her way to Cynarian headquarters, she contacted Sal Haggard to announce her arrival. To her surprise, his secretary put her through to him personally on the spot.
"Captain Toran? Where are you?" his voice rang in her auditory nerve. "I've been trying to reach you for an hour and a half."
"Um, excuse me, sir," she mumbled into her throat microphone. "I was on a field assignment. I was following up on some leads, trying to figure out the origin of the mutant kids."
"Well, that's settled," Haggard commented.
"Settled? I don't quite understand..."
"Haven't you been following the news?"
"Not in the last few hours, sir."
"Well, catch up on it quickly! And then come here! We've got a whole other set of problems right now."
He cut the connection.
The conversation had thrown Kareena off her game a bit. She took a few seconds to comply with her supervisor's request and dialed into a news feed. She stood at the side of the corridor on the way to the terminal and closed her eyes so as not to overlay the news image with her own vision.
"... Suspicions have been confirmed that the freeborn mutants found in Elysium City a few days ago are not an isolated case."
The superimposed image showed a pair of Sigma-class mutants. The woman was carrying a bundle wrapped in cloth in her arms. Even before the camera panned to it, Kareena knew what was inside. The baby so obviously possessed the stocky physique that also distinguished its parents that there could be no doubt about its genetic origins.
"We have always wanted a child of our own," the father announced, not without pride. "Why should mutants not be allowed to do what is the most natural thing in the world for everyone else."
The anonymous spokesman took the floor again, "Several independent searches have revealed further evidence that mutants can indeed reproduce, even though their manufacturers have claimed otherwise for years. Now, some reactions to the latest revelations..."
Kareena terminated the feed. She had a hunch what these reactions would be like. It was difficult for her to think clearly. She had just thought that she could bring the events under control again. And now she was completely overwhelmed once more. Not only her own world was about to change. In the rest of the universe, as well, a few long-held certainties were being shaken.
10-18-2210, Hovercraft from The Hague to Nijmegen, Earth
Skip stowed his duffel bag under the seat and flopped himself down. He swiped his hand across his face, swaying his head first to the left and then to the right. The vertebrae of his neck cracked in unison. He carefully pulled the hood of the jacket he wore under the thick anorak back over his forehead. None of the other passengers on the hovercraft needed to see more of him than absolutely necessary. The experiences of the last two days had been quite enough for him. He had been through quite a lot in his life, but never before had he been so badly insulted and attacked. And all that without being guilty of anything. They had spat at him, and only with great effort had he been able to avoid several physical confrontations. Only because he had not been conceived in the womb of a woman, but in an incubator. He no longer understood the world.
As inconspicuously as possible, he eyed the people who were gradually filling the other seats in the narrow rows. Everyone was busy putting their luggage away and finding a reasonably comfortable seat on the simple plastic benches. Many closed their eyes immediately after settling down. Skip was obviously not the only one to leave The Hague totally exhausted that morning. The hovercraft was mainly carrying workers who had done their shift at the arcology and were now returning home to the mainland. Skip was just fine with it. The less attention his fellow passengers paid him, the better. A woman wrapped in thick clothing squeezed into the seat next to him. What he could make out of her skin under the matted hair looked unhealthily red, almost inflamed. A Slag, perhaps. They existed in significant numbers on Earth, too. As in the colonies, they constituted the lowest stratum of society, too poor to have their children's genetic makeup purified after fertilization, so they had to endure the full brunt of radiation and environmental toxins with all the resulting aftermath. Both here and beyond the earth's atmosphere, there was an almost one-hundred-percent guarantee that their offspring would suffer the same fate as themselves.
At the moment, however, it almost seemed as if a place below the Slags had become vacant in the social pecking order and was reserved for mutants. At least the looks given to the Slags were only full of contempt or at best pity, and not filled with sheer hatred. Moreover, he had never once seen a Slag spat upon or spontaneously insulted by complete strangers. No, this was certainly not how he had imagined his vacation. After his arrival half a year ago, he had already noticed that the genetically modified were treated somewhat more critically on Earth than in the rest of the solar system. But since the news feeds knew no other topic than freeborn mutant children who suddenly seemed to appear everywhere, the situation was slowly getting out of control.
Instead of checking out the massive arcology as planned, Skip had spent most of the last two days holed up in his cheap hotel room. This still served him better than the corporate mutants, who, not unlike in the colonies, did their work here in large numbers in maintenance and construction teams. They could not easily hide and were largely unprotected against the hostility of the mob. He had seen two Betas, who were trying to attach scaffolding to one of the galleries, openly attacked. One had nearly fallen over the parapet, fifty stories above the abyss. A squad of the corporation's own security had rescued the two at the last minute, exposing themselves to savage insults.
It was at this point that Skip had decided to end his visit to Earth as soon as possible and return to the colonies. First to Luna, or at least to orbit. The spaceport of The Hague was only accessible to group members. Since his contract with Ascon had ended, this option was ruled out. The nearest public spaceport was on the mainland, in the north of the Rhine-Main-Neckar metroplex, in a sector called Düsseldorf. Federation territory. To fly there, he would have had to provide his ID. That was too risky for him currently, because it naturally included his genetic status as a mutant. The hover ferry, on the other hand, he could pay for anonymously with a CashCard. He had procured a whole stack of them so that he wouldn't have to constantly use the implant in his forearm. Although this would no longer be avoidable for entry into the Federation at the latest, he wanted to keep the risk of being recognized as a mutant as low as possible until then.
Finally, all the passengers seemed to have found their seats. Tightly packed, they waited in the cabin. The ventilation did not work, so the smell of sweat, foul breath and other less than pleasant scents spread steadily. A vibration in the seats finally announced the start of the turbines after a long moment. The air conditioning system also awoke from its slumber and dispelled the stale air with fresh oxygen. Then a jolt went through the hovercraft, and with a roar, it rose onto the air cushion and began to move. The artificial light of the hangar bay gave way to dull sunshine which filtered through thick clouds as the hovercraft passed through the gates. In an instant, thick raindrops pounded the windows, their drumbeat drowning out even the howling turbines. The people around him barely acknowledged the raging forces of nature. Just normal weather here on the coast.
The hovercraft quickly picked up speed. A glance back revealed the huge silhouette of the arcology, which continued to fill the entire field of view in that direction of the sky for a long while. Skip tried to make out anything through the side windows but failed. The pelting rain hid all detail. But the silhouettes rising out of the water on either side of the hovercraft were clearly buildings, or to be more accurate: Ruins. Rusty skeletons of former high-rises and stone pillars that had once been church steeples testified that people had once lived here. As far as Skip could remember from the map of the coastal region, a town called Rotterdam had once been located here. Exactly when it had been abandoned because of flooding, he had forgotten. He avoided taking the data chip with the guidebook out of his jacket so as not to stand out too much as a stranger.
