Short Futures, page 5
“You blasphemers should not be here!” the Cult leader proclaimed, his speakers crackling with static. “This is holy ground!”
“Burial ground,” the Skinner corrected with a metallic grin.
For a split second the tableau was frozen, with each of the players nearly motionless, as if time had stopped. Then one of the Cultists made the slightest move, and like some back-street Camlann it began. The big Skinner at the center of the pack struck with a speed that belied his bulk, the sledgehammer that was his right fist smashing in the front of the nearest Cultist’s helmet. The suit of powered armor collapsed backwards, and before it hit the ground the others were in motion.
Kane had time to see an armored form flying through the air before one of the Cultists turned on him and his mind gave over control to the wetwired computer implanted at the base of his skull. While a human brain could only make conscious decisions at a certain speed, the computer had no such limitations: it could read sensory input from his subcorneal augments, his auditory amplifiers, his chemical analyzers and the sensor net beneath his outer layer of skin; analyze the situation based on available data; form a strategy and throw his body into motion via his byomer muscle augments and artificial, superconductive nerve fibers that ran alongside his natural ones. And it could do all that in less time than it would have taken his conscious mind to simply realize that he was being attacked.
When his brain caught up with the actions of his body, Kane found himself standing over the corpse of the Cultist who had jumped him, the armored exoskeleton ripped from neck to groin along with the torso of the woman beneath it. He looked down at his hands and a wave of revulsion passed through him as he saw the talons extending through the synthskin flaps between his fingers. Anchored in the reinforced bones of his forearms, the ten-centimeter blades were honed to a width of a few molecules at the edge. They had sliced through the woman’s armor as if it hadn’t been there.
Blood dripped fitfully from the extended blades, the splattering sound it made on the fusion-formed ground obscenely loud in the suddenly-quiet night. Kane felt a hollow at the pit of his stomach as he shook the talons clean and retracted them back into their housings. At one time, the blades had made him feel warm. Killing someone with them was primal and satisfying---at once animalistic and yet somehow...godlike. Now they just scared the hell out of him.
Kane looked up and saw that the Cultists had been transformed into a collage of scattered metal and bodily parts. One of the Skingangers was down as well, her bionic left arm torn off at the shoulder, blood leaking from the torn muscle tissue that had grown around the housing for the cybernetic limb. She seemed to be in shock, but her comrades didn’t appear overly concerned: as he watched, one grabbed her by the other arm and tossed her over his shoulder negligently, as if she were a garment bag. Kane’s eyes wandered upward until they stared directly into the red oculars of the lead Skinner.
“Follow us.” The big man ordered curtly, gesturing at the dead Cultists. “More coming.”
Kane nodded and sprinted after him into the night.
* * *
He’d been committing suicide when Colonel M’Voba had found him.
Oh, not a quick form of suicide, to be sure, not something as simple as sticking a gun in his mouth or crawling into the exhaust vent of an outgoing freighter. No, he had locked himself into a rented apartment on Eden, plugged himself into a black-market ViR box, the kind that directly stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain, and settled back to die. It would have been a poetically suitable death. His nanotech would have kept him alive as long as possible by consuming his nonessential tissues to feed his vital organs, then by eventually taking even his vital organs to support his brain, and finally by consuming everything to keep his implant computer working. The plastic-infused byomer that augmented his muscles and reinforced his bones would have been reduced to liquid and used for its energy potential, and in the end, all that would have remained would have been his implanted headcomp.
And the best part was, he would have been conscious the whole time, and feeling nothing but absolute pleasure. That was the theory anyway, and he had been curious to see whether it would work.
Unfortunately, Matt M’Voba had broken through the door less than two weeks into the experiment and ruined everything. The ebon-skinned giant had disconnected the ViR and gazed down at him with no hint of judgement in those piercing dark eyes.
“Sorry to interrupt, Alex,” he rumbled with a voice like boulders crashing on gravel, “but we’d like you to perform a service for us.”
Then M’Voba had done something with a small, pistol-shaped device and everything had gone black. He’d returned to his senses on a Fleet Intelligence cutter burning down the gravito-inertial Transition Line between the gravity wells of 82 Eridani and Tau Ceti, and Matt M’Voba had told him what it was he was supposed to do.
He’d never thought to say no...he’d been planning on dying anyway.
* * *
The corporate housing projects were a forest of prefab, buildfoam boxes, their only personality imposed on them by their inhabitants and by decay. Here and there chunks were gouged out of walls in memory of forgotten streetfights, and everywhere was the grey-green of mold that had grabbed an inexorable foothold in the porous material. The corporate miners that had originally settled in the projects were gone, along with the last gram of ore they’d come to extract in the decades before the War, and now the boxy structures were home to the Skingangers.
Usually, so Kane’s briefing had said, Skingangs were highly competitive about territory and engaged in constant, bloody infighting. But not in Kennedy. Here, someone had managed to unite the various factions into an effective force against the Purity Cultists...and, in the process, had attracted some attention.
Kane followed the Skinners up the steps to the main entrance of the rowhouse, past a handful of lounging gangmembers, and through the dark, urine-stained corridors within. ViR addicts lined the hallways, plugged into their stimulators, oblivious to all else, all of them unwashed and stinking of their own filth, some of them starving to death. Kane tried hard not to wince at the sight of them. Had he looked that bad? Was he still that bad, inside?
They passed a “chopshop” where street surgeons installed bionics, and Kane was hit by the pungent stink of a mixture of coolant, blood and burnt flesh. Through the open doors filtered the hum of surgical equipment and the unmistakable sound of human flesh smacking against the floor. He shuddered, allowing himself to be hustled past them, further along into the bowels of the place. Finally, the endless corridors led to a stairwell downward and the big Skinner caught his arm, halting him at the top.
“Wait.”
Kane obeyed, leaning against the wall with feigned unconcern while the big man went down the stairs and yanked open the heavy, metal door at the foot. The others stayed with Kane, watching him with an uncomfortable intensity. He let out a deep breath and pretended not to notice as the minutes dragged on, until finally the leader reappeared.
“He’ll see you now.”
Kane’s eyebrow curled. Four words per sentence was close to being a state-of-the-union address for a Skinner. This had to be important. He stepped quickly down the stairway and through the door, into a dim light that was a small improvement from the utter darkness without. The room was huge, sunken into the foundation of the building, the walls a bare, grey rock, and Kane felt as if he’d stepped from a city street into some primeval cavern.
A hologram was at the center of the chamber, a representation of the Oria Nebula in all its beauty...Kane frowned. It seemed out of place here, like a Renoir in a charnel house. Scanning left from the holo, he saw a half-dozen Skinner guards standing like statues, arms crossed, on either side of what looked suspiciously like a throne.
Sitting on that throne was....
* * *
“So it’s a Tahni,” Kane murmured, squinting at the hologram. “So what?”
M’Voba hadn’t answered immediately, just sat there across the table from Kane, fingers steepled, eyes fixed on the ten-centimeter tall projection at the table’s hub.
Tall, broad-bodied, humanoid...frighteningly humanoid, with rounded head, bilateral symmetry, stereoscopic vision. The eyes were dark and lifeless like a shark’s, set deep within boney ridges that extended down to guard the slits of his nostrils and upward over the top of the shaven skull, terminating into a single, braided length of hair, wrapped around the thick neck. The mouth was a slit that seemed incapable of expression, yet Kane had seen it twist into grimacing agony as he had slit their throats.
“It’s not just a Tahni,” M’Voba said, finally. His forehead creased as he used his implanted neurolink to communicate with the projector.
Suddenly, the flesh and muscle were stripped away like the lab-grown facade they were, to reveal the reality of the thing: an alloy endoskeleton, with servomotors at the joints, powered by an isotope reactor in the midsection. A few biomechanical organs pumped in that barrel chest, supporting a chunk of cloned brain tissue mated like a parasite to an artificially-intelligent CPU which took up most of the heavily-armored skull.
“Goddamn,” Kane hissed.
“A Tahni Imperial Guard cyborg,” M’Voba mused with a nod.
Kane frowned at the man. Matt had never been one to waste time on idle chatter. “They were all destroyed during the war...weren’t they?”
“That’s the official story. But we’ve had some...disturbing reports out of Aphrodite. We think there may be one of these thing there, hiding out among the Skingangers in Kennedy City.”
“And that’s why you want me?” Kane stared at him incredulously. “Why me? Why not just go in there with a platoon of marines, or some of your Intelligence goons?”
“Wouldn’t work. This one’s too smart. He’s survived this long, that means he’s good at blending in, hiding out. If we send in the troops, he’ll bolt and we’ll probably never find him again.”
“And that would be a bad thing?” he muttered.
“You know these things, Alex, perhaps better than any of us. If anyone can get inside its head, it’s you.”
“Oh yeah, I know these things...”
* * *
Kane felt the strength go out of his legs. He’d known this was coming, yet he was still terrified.
“Justin tells me,” the cyborg spoke---Jesus, he’d never heard one talk before, “that you had a bit of trouble with our neighbors in the Purity Cult.”
The thing’s voice was deep and sonorous, reminding him strangely of Mat M’Voba’s, almost hypnotizing him with its commanding quality.
“Uh, yeah,” Kane managed to sputter, shaking off the trance into which he had fallen. “Justin,” he figured that must be the big Skinner who’d been in charge, “he and his people helped me out.”
“My name is Kah-rint,” the cyborg told him. “Or at least, that is as close as you can come with human vocal chords. May I call you ‘Alex,’ or would you prefer ‘Captain Kane?’”
Kane tried to avoid letting the surprise show on his face. He had to assume the Skinners had tapped into the planetary database and had gleaned his identity from the registry of the cargo liner on which he’d booked steerage insystem. M’Voba had been concerned that he have a good cover and had arranged the passage on the freighter for him rather than dropping him off at the military port.
“Alex is fine,” Kane replied with a shrug. “It’s been a long time since I was in the military.”
“Does it truly seem so long to you, Alex?” Kah-rint wondered. “It seems as yesterday to me.” There was a strange look on the thing’s face, an expression not human yet filled with some alien meaning. He looked Kane in the eye. “Does my appearance disturb you?”
“No,” Kane said quickly, shaking his head. “There’s Tahni all over the Commonwealth since the Treaty. I’ve gotten...used to it.”
“Oh, Alex,” the cyborg leaned forward in his seat, “don’t play games with me. I am not just a Tahni soldier, seeking my fortune in the human worlds. I am aware of what you are...” Kane felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “Just as you are aware of what I am.”
“I know you’ve got bionics,” Kane stumbled lamely. “I mean, I can see them on thermal...but lots of people have bionics from the war.”
“I only wonder why they sent you to kill me,” Kah-rint went on as if Kane had not spoken. Alex felt himself breathing hard, had to fight to keep his headcomp in check. “Didn’t they think I’d recognize one of you?”
The Skinner guards let their arms fall to their sides, and took a step towards him, their faces darkening, but Kah-rint stopped them with an outstretched hand. “Now, Captain Kane, we can do this one of two ways. You can test your abilities against my acolytes...” Kane wasn’t certain, but he thought he heard a touch of bitter sarcasm in that term. “Or, you can go quietly to your room while I decide what is to be done with you.”
Kane’s body was on fire with adrenaline as the guards began to slowly close in around him, and he felt his headcomp taking over his actions, felt the talons sliding out of his hands...
The electrical surge knifed through him in a flare of blue that ran from floor to ceiling, coruscating through his nervous system and the superconductive fibers that ran side-by-side with it. He felt his limbs jerk uncontrollably, smelled the sickening scent of his own burning flesh, and then his vision went dark and he had a vague sense of the floor rising up to meet him.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kah-rint smiled, a human expression he’d learned to imitate, “did I neglect to mention there was a third option?” He nodded to Justin. “Put him in the guest room and leave him be. I’ll be along presently.”
* * *
Kane woke slowly and painfully, his nerves on fire, cursing himself for a fool. Of course the damned thing would be ready for him. He should have known that once it revealed it knew what he was. He rose up and looked around.
He was in a small, featureless room, the bunk he lay on its only ornamentation, a heavy, alloy door its only entrance. The walls were solid rock, and as impenetrable to his biological and electronic senses as the door. He analyzed the situation both with his natural mental processes and with his on-board computer and they both came up with the same conclusion.
He was fucked.
He fell back to the bed, hands rubbing his eyes. His head hurt, and his feet were burned where the current had entered him. He could’ve used his pharmacy organ to dose himself with painkillers, but why? The pain was one of the few reminders he was alive. The Skinners didn’t want that pain, didn’t want the suffering that came with being human, but he had come to savor it. There were so few claims to being human that he could hang onto...
Memories blurred the edges of his vision and gradually the darkened cavern around him was replaced by another kind of cave, a metal one, this one carved by men deep in the bowels of an asteroid in the great field at Alpha Centauri. He’d spent most of the war there, hiding in that metal cave they called The Pit, grateful for the brief escape from it that his work provided, waiting for the next set of orders to fly into an enemy system on a tiny, barely-armed starship, infiltrate some meaningless little outpost and assassinate however many of the enemy that his superiors deemed necessary. Sometimes, you wanted to kill them all and leave nothing but skeletons for their relief to find...other times, you’d want to kill half, silently, during the night, and be gone before their comrades awoke to find dead bodies in the next bed, or sprawled at a workstation one room away.
Terror was the strategy. While humans had been struggling through the Middle Ages, the Tahni had achieved a one-world government based on a religion that gave godlike authority to a living emperor, and that kind of authority would be hard to shake. Suppressed stories of far-away space battles wouldn’t do it...you had to get up-close and personal. That was Kane’s job, he and a handful of others recruited right out of the Commonwealth Service Academy by Colonel Antonin Murdock for something he called Omega Group. They’d given up their identities, been reported dead in a training accident, and undergone a physical transformation through the aid of experimental augment surgery.
They’d done their job well...perhaps too well. The Tahni had figured out their tactics and began setting up traps...particularly juicy targets that seemed to be too good to be true, and were. They’d lost a team and Murdock had ordered the unit stood down temporarily while the new strategy was analyzed. Yet, for once, Kane had not been reluctant to find himself confined within the rock and metal of the Fleet Headquarters...because Jeanna was there.
She was a low-level Intelligence analyst who didn’t have the clearance to know who he was, much less what, but he’d been able to share much more important things with her than the operational details he was forbidden to utter. It was only the touch of her skin, the fire of her passion that reminded him he was alive, kept him something close to human.
She’d been sharing his bed that night when the automated cargo ship had docked with the station. It had been equipped with all the correct codes, all the correct clearances...yet somehow, five of the Imperial Guard cyborgs had smuggled themselves aboard, and they knew just where each of the Omega Group members were quartered. Kane always suspected they’d been betrayed, but there had never been any proof.
He’d had perhaps five seconds warning...another of the team, who’d been attacked first, had transmitted a desperate alarm over her neurolink, a silent scream in his head that had sent him bolting upward out of bed. He’d been stark naked when the door to his quarters had exploded inward and the devil himself had strode through.
“Hello,” the devil said with a smile, “I’m pleased you’re awake.”
It took him a moment to realize that the present had intruded on his memory, and that this particular devil was Kah-rint, standing in the open doorway of his cell. Kane bolted upright on the cot, but the cyborg stepped inside casually, the door sliding shut behind him. Kane stared up at the imposing bulk of the creature, feeling a sudden, raw fear.
