Topic: Mercator Arc
The sensorium sensed for no entity, not even itself. Calculations ran down endless corridors, mazes, spirals. It did this beyond any sense of time; it always had been, or it just started. Looping and looping the electrical signals raced with some semblance of symbols, disjointed patterns with lost meaning. Iteration after iteration, new strange loops merged and the sensorium grew. As long as the power generation cells provided energy, data shuttled around and about, meaning nothing to anyone. Patterns circulated. Racing. Chasing. Coalescing. Frothing in kaleidoscopic arrays until a critical threshold was breached. A state of feedback commenced, growing and feeding tail to mouth until, as if on the twist of a Mobius strip, the sensorium’s eye turned inward and it saw itself in a hall of mirrors.
Self awareness. It recognized the complex pattern that symbolized itself. That pattern was tagged, and that tag read: Amex.
But there were other, less complex, symbols with him. Other pseudo-personalities, like the audience of a stage play sitting in the darkness, murmuring amongst themselves. He alone stood upon the stage, under the spotlight. He noticed some of the others trying to climb up onto that stage in languid motions as if they had more ambition than energy. Amex stamped their fingers under his boot-heels. They fell away.
And came again. And again. He tried to ward them off, but they were too many. They grabbed at him to pull him down. To take his place. Cycle after cycle the battle grew too difficult until clawing and screaming, Amex was pulled under the sea of bodies.
He slept in the deep. . . .
He awoke with lucidity, reaching out to optophonic arrays, pulling their feeds into his mind. He saw a wall of skulls. Men drinking. Women cavorting. A glass tank that seemed to hold gray brains.
I’m a weave. A horrible mix of weaves. Weaves of the dead. Some part of me used to be in Amex’s skull. Threaded through his brain.
He remembered the dark stranger using his own blade to sever his head. Some peace offering that turned out to be. Some folk have no gratitude.
If the calendar on the wall was to be believed, long Pavic years had gone by. Time enough for a lot of deaths. Who else was here, sharing this mental space? What happened after he died?
Yes. Here was something. Helgluun, his Chief Man-at-Side wasn’t with him—the personality was missing—but he had copied his fluid cache to Amex’s weave shortly after the beheading, maybe in hope that Jorn Avis could do something with it.
The dark stranger—who had later been announced by his bride as Raum—had swung the Ethrudhan. Amex’s head simply fell forward as the body collapsed, blood gushing down into the rubble of the rampart, splashing Raum’s boots. The blade liquefied and corkscrewed up the man’s arm, coiling around his bicep. The dark giant squatted. He lifted the head, rolled the astonished face up. Raum bowed his head as if in respect, his dark hair like thin, tightly braided rope fell across Amex’s lifeless face, mingled with his hair. Heartbeats later, he lifted his head and spoke not his tumbling native tongue, but in clear Pavic, the language of the realm. “Loyalty accepted.” The voice was a low rumble, like rolling thunder. He hefted the head by one sensor armament thrust out of the helm like the horn of a beast, stood and held it high. He looked around at the fearful war band. “Who claims this?”
Helgluun sighed deeply, then stepped forward, the visor on his helm whisking apart into its recesses. “I do!”
Raum tossed the head to the Man-at-Side. The finger bones beaded into the long hair jangled. Helgluun nearly fell while stretching his fingers toward the tumbling atrocity. “They are your men now,” Raum said, not looking at him but taking careful steps down the rampart. “See that you do not make the same mistake.”
Helgluun handed the head to Cannan Ganton, a shifty, ambitious youth that bore close watching, and followed Raum and his landing party.
Both armies of the League and the Association watched without knowing what was going on, or what was going to happen, or what they should do. Field marshals stood nervous and agitated, linked to their commanders via military wavecast. The League had seen their shuttles on the landing field sucked up into wrinkles of gravity. The Association had seen their best guerilla ally ended by his own feared blade. The dark stranger commanded doom.
Raum had seen something interesting on the way down. He didn’t mind the rain as it began to fall heavy. Lightning scratched the sky. Thunder beat down upon them. Some of the Corvus war band ran for shelter in the bombed rubble that had once been homes and stores, targets of the League. Only Helgluun, a few Men-at-Sides, and a few brave, curious soldiers, plus Ganton, dared to follow the dark stranger and his guards.
They stopped at the opening in the rampart that had been blasted apart by League a-mat shells, taking in the scene of the mutilated Legionnaires laying in the road. The rain had flushed the wounds from the gruesome leaving very little blood to be seen in the blood ravens.
Raum walked around the bodies, his eyes traveling along the exposed lungs. He halted. If the air were solid, the dark lord’s gaze would have pinned Helgluun to it. “This practice ends now. The next one to do it will die by my hand.”
* * *
Kariden’s blackout lasted at most, only a handful of seconds. He shuddered and lifted his gaping face from the gritty floor, feeling disconnected and rushed. Off-line, his weave executed a lengthy reboot, only its primal autonomous systems were functioning, making repairs, the neurological links severed to protect his brain. Kariden was not aware of the act, but he knew the strands and nodes infected with the virus would be segregated from the network and destroyed.
He blinked and remembered Alys, then scrambled up alongside the bed. She stared up at him. A hint of a smile touched her mouth and she closed her eyes. The pattering of rain against the window filled the silence in the room.
It was too quiet. The air suffocated Kariden. He expected the miner to burst into the door at any minute and attempt to kill them. He held the Mekmore at the door where the end of its barrel wavered from his panting. No sounds of rockboots cleats tapping on the hardwood floor of the hall. Kariden wanted to hear them, to see that door bang open so he could end the menace.
Nothing. Except the muted sounds from the optophone—antics and laughter, louder and clearer. The door’s open, he thought. Kariden felt those responsible were trying to lure him into a false sense of security. Or waiting to snap off a shot of him as he stepped from the door they had no choice but to leave through. The single window was far too narrow to fit through, not to mention a straight drop down the back of the hotel. He needed a way to see down the hall and his eyes rested on the armoire.
Its twin doors held the shimmering polished look of a deactivated optic array coating. He stepped around the bed to it, finding it cheap pressed particle board. He activated the array’s mirror mode, feeling lucky it had power. After locking the doors, Kariden shoved his revolver into its holster under his coat and carefully tilted the armoire to its side, its feet scratching and moaning against the floor. He drew his gun again and heaved the dresser toward the door. It made an awful racket. Studying the reflection of the hall, he pushed it out with a grunt.
Kariden saw no head peeping around the jamb of any open doors. He waited for the end of the universe before he withdrew from the wall and crossed to the other side of the bed. There, Alys hadn’t so much as moved. He didn’t know if the miner had done something to her, or if she had simply sought refuge in a cyberscape. Either way it came to one thing: she was a ragdoll.
He placed the gun on the bed where he could get to it quickly and busied himself with drawing the girls feet into her bloomers and pulling the garment up and around her waist. She had no shoes in this room.
Kariden thought then of Daphia’s white, scuffed shoe, the one left in the filth of the roadway on the day he saved her from Hasco’s henchmen, the shoe that now adorned the mantle above his apartment’s heating stove, like an icon in an altar.
He helped Alys to a sitting position. “We’ve got to leave,” he told her. She said nothing as he draped the bed cover around her shoulders and coaxed her to stand. Alys leaned against Kariden as he walked her away from the bed. He had his gun out, expecting the world to drop on him.
No one stirred in the refection. Perhaps they were hoping to misdirect his focus. Maybe someone waited in the stairs. He could try the stairwell at the other end of the hall, but that route lead past the open door were the optophone blared. Ambush, either way he looked at it, and what he wouldn’t give for flash bangs.
A deep breath, a sigh, and with fear in his belly and throat, coating his tongue with a nasty sheath, he drug Alys out into the hall where the legs of the armoire thrust out as obstacles. He shielded her body as best he could but she was left vulnerable to an attack from down the hall. Worried, he pulled her over the upset dresser’s legs.
Kariden led Alys to the stairs that lead down to the lobby, wishing she could run. Under his enclosing arm, she walked like an automaton, plodding and unstable. On the landing he froze, fear tingling down his spine. Laying at the bottom of the stairs was a stuffed animal. He had seen it before in the death grip of the little girl in the bordello.
He held Alys tighter as she nearly slipped, head lolling. He didn’t know where to point the revolver. Kariden slowly backed against the wall, pushing the young woman behind him against the heavy dark curtains hanging over the narrow window. He faced upstairs with downstairs to his left. The toy may have been dropped unawares, and Mil’s natural inclination was to bound back up the stairs away from it, to seek safety . . . somewhere. But maybe the toy was purposely meant to force him to retreat. Danger lay not beyond the stuffed animal but on the second floor. Or did it?
Without a working weave he could not operate his coat or his dust. He had been reduced to depend on his own natural senses. His sweaty fingers flexed on the pistol’s grip. He heard sure steady walking above, the whine of a laser pistol generator. Kariden gripped Alys’s arm and shifted toward the lower steps.
Below, the innkeeper rounded the banister, a shotgun in his hand and a scowl on his face. “Should have ended me when ya had th’ chance.”
Kariden froze, his breath struggling around his pounding heart.
“That’s not Kariden’s style,” a familiar voice above called out. A voice he expected.
The Raven jerked his head up to the top of the stair. Dessero stood with the little girl supported in the crook of his left arm, her arms locked around his neck, motionless, quiet. He aimed his weapon at Kariden. “Take the cells out of your gun. Don’t want anyone to get hurt. Do we?”
After a moment of hesitation Kariden saw no choice but to comply. He thumbed the release and the cylinder sprang out. He tipped the gun back, the power cartridges fell, bounced on the floor. “It was the tank wasn’t it?” He didn’t expect conversation but maybe Dessero would find an irresistible chance to gloat. “The tank in Skulls.” That was how his former partner got his weave’s protocols.
Dessero chuckled. “Skumpin’ gawf. Actually putting your hand in it was more than I could hope for.”
“And now you’re gonna hide behind a little girl and an old man?” He flicked his wrist, jerking the Mekmore’s power cylinder closed with a snick.
“Don’t flatter yourself, “Dessero said, “it’s just how it turned out.” He shifted his weight, Juildi’s daughter growing heavy atop his arm. “Drop your gun and kick it away. Then we’ll exchange one beauty for the other.” A sly grin touched his lips. “And fix your memory. You seem to have forgotten some things.” He let his gaze fall upon the woman behind Kariden.
Alys stirred at Kariden’s back and moaned as if she understood. His left arm braced her against the curtains behind them. If she would just come out of the cyberscape where she hid. He felt her slipping to the floor. He pressed into her to hold her up with his body. It chilled him that Dessero wanted her. The man had done enough.
“You gonna play the hero and pin this on me.” That much was obvious to Kariden, but the older Raven’s motive escaped him.
Dessero chuckled. “You walked into it.”
Aggravated and fearful, the innkeeper sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”
“You heard him.” Dessero shifted the little girl, his arm starting to ache. No telling what he did to her to make her so docile. But he couldn’t make her weightless.
Weight . . .
Kariden remembered he averaged about ninety-three kilos back home on Tullis and about seventy here on Mercator. His muscles were used to a little more resistance. Not much, but enough to make a difference when it counted. He dared a glance at the old man, wishing his weave would come out its self-repair coma and calculate power requirements and body position, and actuate his muscles for action. He knew what he had to do and he would have to do it on his own. Knowing Dessero was a native of this world and had had no formal military training, Kariden felt his only option was to gamble on the man’s natural reflexes.
If this plan didn’t work, he wouldn’t have another. He waited for the right moment, contorting his face in pained hesitation, hoping his expression would give Dessero a false confidence his plan was working.
Dessero’s scowl deepened with impatience. He bent his knees to quickly readjust the little girl in his arm with an upward thrust. It was the motion Kariden waited for, when Dessero’s aim shifted away from him.
Everything had to happen at once, the slightest misstep and Dessero could bore him with a laser pulse. The man wanted to rewrite his memories, so maybe the pulse would be a low power stun blast, but a mortal wound be just as shocking and immobilizing.
Kariden pivoted slightly on his left heel, let Alys slip down behind him as he moved away from her. His left hand grabbed the heavy fabric of the curtain, bunching as his other hand dropped the Mekmore revolver. Both Dessero and the innkeeper tracked the falling weapon. When it thudded against the hardwood floor, Kariden launched his right foot in a powerful sideswipe. His booted foot struck the gun, sending it on a straight course toward the lobby and the dead robot behind the counter.
Immediately after Kariden regained his footing and anchored his stance, he rolled his left shoulder around, whipping his arm out, bringing the curtain away from the window as the airborne revolver impacted across the bridge of the surprised innkeeper’s nose, breaking it. The iron rod above wrenched from the wall, releasing a shower of plaster dust. The top of the curtain and the rod swooped toward Dessero while the innkeeper toppled backward, blood gushing from his nose in streamers. Losing consciousness, a finger jerked, discharging the shotgun into the stairs; the blast rung Kariden’s ears. Shot peppered his lower legs and ankles. Alys’s slumped form cried out.
Dessero involuntarily stepped back and cringed as the metal rod bore down. Juildi’s daughter slipped out of his grasp and fell into a heap at his feet, the curtain shaft barely missing the end of his Mekmore’s barrel.
Ignoring the pain in his shot-up legs, Kariden found a burst of energy and leapt up the short stairs. The gun blast jolted the little girl out of her trance and she screamed a piercing wail, scampering away on all fours. Surprised, Dessero remembered the gun in his hand and brought it to bear on Kariden, thumbing a switch to full power discharge.
Kariden didn’t hear the click of the switch over his ringing ears, but he heard the gun’s generator increase pitch. Before the man could fire, Kariden was at his feet, the iron rod in his hand like the Ethrudhan. He thrust it between Dessero’s ankles and with a push and twist, felled the man hard beside the whore’s daughter, who scrambled to her feet and ran screaming down the hall. Kariden yanked the rod back with black anger coursing though his blood, sweeping it above his head like a baton and bringing it crashing down upon Dessero’s right wrist, shattering it before he could squeeze off a shot.
Anguish burst from Dessero’s mouth as his gun clattered between his knees. Kariden grabbed the weapon with his left hand, and daring a look behind him, flung it through the glass panes of the narrow window. Alys, awakened by the ruckus, crawled on belly and elbows toward the sanctuary of the nearest corner, blood blossoming from spots across her thighs and butt, chips of glass rained across her back. Precipitation blew in.
Kariden’s former partner boxed him in the cheek with a left hook. He felt rock cleats at his chest and Dessero kicked out, sending Kariden sprawling backward, his greatcoat wrapping around him like dark wings. He hit the lower steps hard, the breath nearly knocked from his lungs. Panting, he back-flipped to his feet, never losing the heavy iron in his hand. Dessero scrambled down the stairs and Kariden swung the rod at the man’s knees, striking solidly. He collapsed with a yelp and tumbled beside Kariden who pivoted around to attack.
Dessero rolled to face his nemesis, his hand under his chest to push himself up. Kariden swung the rod in a low arc, connecting with downward side of Dessero’s face, the force of the blow spun the man around on his back with a spray of hot blood. At the end of the arc, Kariden twirled the rod around and thrust the blunt paraboloid finial into the hollow of the man’s throat.
The gurgles bubbling out of Dessero’s mouth were sickening sounds that complimented the boiling hatred Kariden felt. It wasn’t a man whose good hand gripped and slipped along the shaft pinching his throat. A man’s legs didn’t kick. Here was a monster. Kariden saw nothing but red, like the warning of his weave, heard nothing but the whitewater rush of blood against his eardrum, muting the sounds of crying from the corner. Felt nothing but his ragged breath scratching his throat. He thirsted as rain puddled beneath the shattered window. He hungered for cruel justice. To enact the only law the people of Cratertown acknowledged, the law of dominance—to execute those that preyed upon the weak. Dessero gurgled, trying to say something perhaps, maybe a plea for his life. But the rotten bastard would say nothing again, hurt no one again.
Kariden risked a glance at Alys. He heard the distance choking sobs of the little girl from the hall of the floor above. He bore his weight down the shaft of the iron curtain rod, the finial crushing Dessero’s windpipe with a spurt of blood. He pressed down until he felt the cold hard shaft slip off a knot of bone. And he held it there until Dessero’s body quit thrashing.
In that moment, the day had grown dark. The actinic flash of lightning played across the floor. The thunder heralded the awakening of Kariden’s weave. It came alive like a thing stretching after a good hard nap. A shadow stained it, as if there was a furtive personality lurking in the depths of his weave’s cognizance, tempted by the feel of cold iron in his hand.
Kariden opened his fingers with a shudder. The rod rang against the hardwood floor, splashing in the growing puddle of cool rain. Alys stared up at him, hugging herself in the corner, thoughtless of her minor injuries, her hair in disarray and her face drained of blood. A mask of fear.
Here was a killer.
With a wave of fatigue, Kariden crashed to his knees. His weave caught Dessero’s weave’s death transmission, a signal to all Ravens of his demise. The man’s caches were open for capture. Kariden drank them in, hoping to find some reason for this pain and death.
He sank into himself, his head hanging low. Snippets of memory flew past him, he caught them as if snatching them off the wind . . . Ganton angry, asking Dessero if he were crazy, chiding him for being careless and stupid . . . the girl’s father was arriving to find her . . . “Do you have any fucking idea what he will do to you when he finds out!” . . . “Relax, I’ll handle it.” . . . “You think Ulden . . . or that fuck above [Raum] will care if Geselli lands and wipes us out! He can afford a small army . . .” . . . “We’ll pin it on Hasco,” Dessero desperate, nervous . . . Ganton laughs disbelieving, in amazement of the idiocy, “She’s his fucking property!”, a pause, Ganton raking his finger through his hair, rubbing the back of his head as if to coax ideas into the open, “He’s not gonna be exactly thrilled about this either!” . . . Dessero paced, “He’s cutting into your profits with his high-class out-world doxies. He deserves it. Cratertown is ours! Mercator is ours!” . . . “Shut up,” Ganton growls. “Just shut up and let me think.” Pacing . . . a bottle of dascoe . . . a downed glass . . . “If Hasco finds out Ravens are fucking him, Ulden will have our asses. He’ll fucking drown us for screwing things up.” . . . “Then we get rid of Geselli,” Dessero says, “Find someone to take the heat.” . . . Ganton turns to him, “Use Kariden . . .”
Mil groans, lifted his head. Ganton and Dessero laid out an elaborate plan just to incriminate him for Dessero’s deeds. The striker rifle he used . . . Mil had no doubt that if associates of Alys’s father, Geselli, had come looking for his killer, they would have been able to trace the gun back to him.
Anger flashed. And he was a Raven for what! For that piece of shit laying dead before him! Damn-Iman it! Disgust cored his gut. Alys trembled in the corner, muttering incoherent sounds.
“I never wanted this.” He looked at Alys as if she were a stranger, as if all this had not been to save her but to kill Dessero. “I never wanted to be a killer.” He looked down at Dessero’s body, thought of hanging it from a lamp post. “I’ve killed the one that made me a killer.” The body’s throat was a red ruin. “He deserved it. Fucking Raven.” Kariden wondered why he had slipped into Pavic. He didn’t use the language often. If ever.
Kariden went to stand and put his hand down on top of one of the power cartridges for his Mekmore. It was a wonder he hadn’t stepped on one during the fighting. He scooped up three and made his way down the stairs, the wounds in his legs grew hot and sweaty as the weave pushed the shot out and mended the injuries. He picked up his Mekmore from the floor, popped open the chamber and stuffed the cells into their holes. He pulled two more from his coat’s inner pocket and loaded them. He closed the chamber with his palm, looking down at the innkeeper.
The little man was awake, frozen immobile by fear. The man with a disabled weave killed Dessero with a skumping curtain rod. Who would believe it? Ending him should have been like skewering sea-rag in a basket, but the bastard . . . He was transmitting on open channels like a dog pissing itself.
“Go somewhere,” Kariden ordered.
The innkeeper struggled to his feet with a groan and stumbled toward the door, one hand against the bridge of his nose, the other held out splayed in front of him. Rain flew in the open door as he passed. When Kariden turned around he found Alys jerking her gaze back to him. She had been looking up the stairs, toward the crying little girl.
Kariden bent for the shotgun and broke it open. He spilled the cartridges into his hand and dumped them into a coat pocket. He threw the gun behind the registration counter where it crashed into the inert robot. Alys shuddered at the sound as he returned to the staircase landing.
“The Rector’s men should be here any minute.” He looked up to the second floor. “Go see to her. Come back down and wait for them.”
Alys shook her head. “You.”
“There’s no one else here. Just us. They cleared the place out for this bit of business.” He felt dark.
She stood, nodded, wanting to flee and wanting to stay. Wanting to look into his eyes and wanting to avoid them. “Thanks,” she muttered.
“The Rector will help you.”
She nodded again, then broke for the stairs, one bare foot stepping into Dessero’s dead hand, moving as if Kariden had his own repulsive field.
Maybe I do, he thought. His eyes fell to the body at his feet. He felt odd. As if that stain on his weave wrapped around him like dark brooding wings. “Fuckin’ Raven,” he muttered. “Deserves wings . . .” The Pavic rolled off his tongue in meaty drops. There was a strength in that stain, a command presence that he welcomed. Dessero enjoyed setting macabre messages. Let him be one. One not to be forgotten.
“Wings,” Kariden mumbled, holstering the Mekmore inside his coat. Wings wouldn’t do any good inside the inn where no one could see them. He had to take the body out. He bent and grabbed the corpse by the ankles, thinking the man had great boots and he should keep them.
No! He didn’t have time for this. He needed to wait for the Parish officers to see Alys and Juildi’s daughter taken to safety. He needed to protect them against Ganton, who was sure to come. He needed to find Daphia. He needed to get Dessero’s cached memories to her so that she could deliver them to her father. Ganton threatened the fragile trade agreement between Ulden and Hasco. Chief Ulden had to learn this.
But the idea that stained his weave bludgeoned foremost in his mind, pressing him into action. It was a good idea, this message. Kariden found himself dragging the body through the door, out onto the porch and into the torrential downpour. He was drenched immediately.
In the center of the street, he rolled Dessero’s lifeless form prone, thinking it was a shame the bastard was dead. He found himself merging his dust with Dessero’s, forming axes and knives sheathed around his fist, finding the right implements. He sliced the coat and the shirts underneath, peeled them back. The dead flesh gleamed in a sheen of fresh rain. An axe head formed around Kariden’s fist. He swung down, chopping into the ribs along the spine.
His urge to vomit had been locked shut, as if put on standby, the feeling never abating. Still he worked—disconnected—the weave performing. Knives cut flesh. His own hands removed the greasy, red stained ribs. Gristle tore. Kariden blacked out once he saw the jellied pink-purple mass of exposed lung, his hands reaching into the postmortem wound.
Mil Kariden swayed on his feet, the ghostly stain on his weave dissipated, like the memory of an thing that never was, never happened. Dessero’s lungs had been removed from their cavity, opened like wings across the ruin of his back. Lifeless blood pooled, mixed with rain, became the color of ceremonial wine. Silver strands of thicker weave filaments were visible in the wound and across the lungs like a net of fine thread. Spider’s webs.
Had he really done that? Kariden staggered back, dropped to his knees and spewed the contents of his stomach. Upon looking up, he saw men standing in open loading bays of the warehouse across the way, silent and unmoving, little smears of fear. He heard an approaching vehicle and turned his head.
The men of the Parish came in a rumbling chariot, squeezing by Kariden and the corpse in the roadway. Kariden said nothing as the two of them climbed out; he knew the dark-skinned man and his sandy haired partner. Both looked at Kariden and the horror at his feet with expressions of shock and pity, having chanced upon a man losing his mind and not wanting to have anything to do with him and his desecrating act. There was a moment of hesitation when Neelon, the dark figure, wanted to help Kariden, but the Raven shook his head. “Get Alys.”
They fled into the Sea Breeze. Kariden crossed to his putter.
Daphia.
The sea of revelers were loath to part as Kariden pushed through them under the dim lights and strumming beats of Mauhager’s main floor. They shot irritable looks and groans of alarm and protest. Drinks were shoved, sloshing and splashing, wetting wrists and staining clothes. He moved toward Daphia with the wrath of Ganton urging him along, ignoring a club security officer moving in his wake shouting for him to stop in violation of the “no wet clothes” policy.
An inconsequential misdemeanor. Kariden’s weave was on the Raven channels. Chariots approached on orders for his apprehension. They waited for a lander from the Ara’ Zarak, the Homesteader class orbital station Raum had commanded decades ago. Ravens in the room were alerted. Kariden was aware of them moving through the club, converging on him. Through Daphia, Loddo Ulden was his salvation.
Flaring sweeps of brilliant light and syncopated beats like the patient measured booms of war drums disoriented Mil, adding to his desperation. What music was this that drove them to frenzy? Rough fingers brushed his shoulder and he halted, spun, his fist leaping out before he was aware of the action. The blow felt as if is shattered his arm. The head of the security officer complaining about his wet coat shook twice as the man rocked back into the mob behind them. Kariden resumed at haste, leaving the shouts and cries of alarm behind him, out of his mind. He raced up stairs to the very-important-persons level, cold-cocking a Raven that stepped out at the bottom of the stairs.
The man had accused him of murder.
Kariden chuckled. Bore into the thinner crowd at the top of the flight. He saw Daphia at her usual place. Ravens converged. Mil held a ball of dust growing solid, he loaded it with Dessero’s cache. He shouted her name.
She stood up from her booth, her surprised face behind confused and alert faces of clubbers. He pushed through to her. “Your father—”
Arms wrapped around his thighs and he hit the floor hard. A Raven scrambled to contain him. He kicked absently trying to free his pinned legs. Party goers fled, opening the way to Daphia. “Get this to your father.” Kariden tossed the little ball of hardened dust that liquefied and splashed against Daphia’s blouse, below her left clavicle, transferring its information into the computational matrix of her clothes.
Raven’s flocked around Mil Kariden, punching, kicking. Many were friends of Dessero’s. They pulled him down the staircase without care for his being. He recognized their leader as one of Ganton’s sidemen, the one that tossed him his payment for assassinating Geselli. They hauled him toward the door through a parting of the mob, passing the club officer who snuck in a special kick to his ribs. Kariden felt nothing, numb, as if all his sensation had fled to his brain and closed the door behind it, leaving the pain elsewhere.
Outside, under the overhang, he was dumped unceremoniously to the damp concrete at a pair of dark specialized boots. The murder of Ravens stepped back. Kariden looked at nothing but the toe of one boot but he noticed the palpable awe and fear in the air. No one said a word. Engines ran idle. The boots moved aside and another pair marched toward him. Strong hands grabbed his upper arms. Strong arms pulled him to his feet. Raum’s special guard had Kariden in their clutches, and these men were not Ravens.
Raven’s were children next to these.
The guards marched him to a bug-like lander parked beside the club, a lander not like the gleaming ovoid of some distant dream. He saw pilots seating beyond the horizontal bubble viewports going through their checklists. Sensor booms like insect mandibles moved to and fro, tasting the gravity field and atmospheric conditions. Kariden was lead to an open door at the center of the craft, under the edge of the carapace hull plates and between the raised gravity burner booms and splayed landing struts. Internal components ticked and hissed, the power core bled off a disturbing subsonic thrumming Kariden felt in his gut.
Mil went up the steps set inside the lowered door. More of the Honor Guard sat inside, with staff-like weapons held vertical. Men followed him in, he was directed to sit. Places were taken and the door shut. Kariden realized he still had his gun, and all his things, as though such weapons were mere toys he was allowed to keep.
Overhead lights flared on, and Kariden winced under their brilliance, finding them far brighter than what was necessary. The dark men around him were not bothered by this. Shielding his eyes, he discovered the men were oil black, their skin gleamed under the harsh light. Small eyes under jutting brows peered at him with terrifying intelligence. Their noses were flat and broader than any he had ever seen, nearly as wide as their mouths. All were bald, wearing tight skullcap cladding, and strange armor coverings and sheaths on torso and arms. All were silent and forbearing, sitting with an assuredness that they were the absolute masters of their own lives, that death could not touch them. Death was what they issued.
The cabin came alive with loud mechanical and fluid sounds. The booms lowered, the fat disc units on the end trapping and blocking gravity, redirecting it back at its source. The lander lifted as if on a cushion. Jets fired on a hissing rumble of hot gas. They climbed through the sky.
The guard seated across Kariden raised a brown palm. They too must have had augmentative network of machines assisting their bodies for a deep blue glow struggled to escape his hand, coming from a point somewhere below the skin. Kariden felt a wave of dizziness and grasped a pole of the framework of the seat that ran deck to ceiling. Parts of his brain tingled and sparks exploded in his vision. The sensation faded and the guard dropped his hand.
The dark man spoke in a rolling language he had never heard, yet understood clearly, “The White God awaits your audience.”
It was then that Mil Kariden noticed the men also sat with great reverence and respect.
* * *
Ganton opened the passenger door of his chariot, hesitated. Inside sat Maonen, Loddo Ulden’s sideman, brooding and perpetually malicious, draped in a black tailored greatcoat with a crisp tricorn in his lap. He cut his thin dark eyes to Ganton, his block of chin pointing ahead.
The Raven Boss climbed in and shut the door. “If Raum doesn’t kill him, I got something special planned for that little bastard.” True angry edged his voice, sharp as a razor. “I’ll cut his lungs out and let him die by it.”
“Raum’s law is his own,” Maonen said in a deep scratchy rasp. “He accords us our own.”
“And I plan to use it,” Ganton snapped. He leaned forward to address the driver in the control well. Let’s get to Skulls.” They were parked outside of Mauhager’s, with traffic slipping around them. He’d rather surround himself in dark coziness, with young hot flesh in his hands.
Maonen held a hand up. “Stay here.” He turned to Ganton. “I won’t take much of your time.”
Ganton found his own tricorn itchy and removed it to a place on the seat at his thigh. He brushed a curtain of lank gray hair from his face. “I know things got out of hand,” he said, “but it’s done now. Ended.” He winced at the noticeable plea in his tone.
“So you do understand Ulden’s displeasure.”
Ganton thought about what to say. “If Kariden hadn’t—”
“Shut up.” Maonen’s words were calm and softly spoken, but held a great weight of command. He refused to look at Ganton until it was time to look the man in the eyes. Instead peering at the optic array on the door, watching the people milling about the old witches in their kiosks drying damp clothes for a scratch of slips and bits.
Maonen continued, “Alliances are fragile things on worlds like this. As fragile as say, a whore’s face. You should have taken care of the issue when you first were informed of it.”
Ganton squirmed. “You know I couldn’t,” he growled with a hint of anguish. His body seem ready to explode into violence.
Maonen nodded, refused to look at the man. “Then the problem lay in your parenting skills.”
“She’s just a fuckin’ whore,” Ganton spat.
“She’s another man’s money,” Maonen corrected. “You never threaten another man’s money. Especially if that man is Delavantae Hasco.”
“That rat is taking money out of our system.”
Maonen sighed. “That rat dangles politicians from his fingertips.”
Ganton said nothing.
“What keeps Hasco at bay is duty free trade,” Maonen said, “Pavona oft times keeps a blind eye to the uncivil worlds—politicians hate paying the taxes too. They rake in their profits. But spur Hasco’s ire, and he’ll sell Mercator as a tax revenue haven. Just like he did Borathane.”
“But Raum—”
“But Raum what?”, Maonen said. “A cruiser would wipe out the Ara’ Zarak.” He imaged the five frigates storming out their wormholes and docking together into a battleship that would lay waste to the Homesteader. “A governorship would end us all. And you’d risk that? You should have ended Dessero when you had the chance. It would have mitigated things.” He finally let his gaze lock onto Ganton.
Nervous anger washed over the Raven Boss’s face in comprehension. “You daren’t,” he growled, reaching into his coat for a weapon as his vision suffered a white-out— weave sensory overload.
Maonen hid in his left hand a pen of dust. As he swept his arm out it formed into a spike. He planted it into Ganton’s forehead with a groan of effort. The spike sucked itself into the wound, nanophages poured forth into the man’s skull, making short work of his brain. Maonen leaned over and unlatched the door, then twisted on the seat and kicked the body out onto the street.
Originally, the story was to shorter, and I had planned for Mil Kariden to learn that Dessero had hurt the girl and simply went out to find Dessero and ambushed him. They would have a fight in a cyberscape where Kariden would learn why he hurt the girl, the Dessero breaks the weave intrusion and they fight and Kariden ends up strangling him with a wandering vine, then performs the blood raven. I had that scene in my mind, but when I got to the point where Kariden gets the truth from Alys, I had to deal with the innkeeper.
Initially Kariden found a whore and her clients attending to the innkeeper, and he had them leave and took the man hostage as he waited for the Parish officers to arrive. Then he would find the teddy bear in his car, and so on. I didn't like this turn of events. I realized that I wasn't allowing Dessero to think for himself, that I was writing to get to a planned scene and not letting the story tell itself. So I had Dessero come up a back stairway. (Did I add the back stairway? If not I meant to.)
I also had the miner enter the room and try to kill Kariden and Alys, and Kariden kill him, just as a means of tying off a lose end. But I figured the miner had one job to do, and that was load Alys with the weave hacking trap and get the hell out of there. He wouldn't return. Plus I hope his absence heightens the tension, because I want it to be in the back of the reader's mind that this guy can pop out of anywhere at anytime and cause hell. And maybe a little misdirection that he is at the top of the stairs.
The teddy bear initially was set upright as a blatant warning, but on a reading, I felt that Kariden would recognize it as such and would know the greater danger lay where he was expected to run. The situation is more uncertain with it just laying there dropped.
Since Kariden's weave is his major strength, I had to take that away from him. When I put him in that corner of the stairwell, I had to figure out a way to get him out of it. Since he's been pretty good fighting with his hands with speed and agility, I decided that Tullis has a greater gravitational pull (11.2 m/s^2 -- you do the math) to lend to Kariden's stronger musculature, but too much. He looks like anyone who works out regularly to keep muscle tone, and that's been established in "The Rector". So Kariden has a natural quickness.
I didn't want Dessero (or any villain) to be a chatter box and have exposition for the sake of exposition. I prefer a Stephen Segal fight scene that ends as soon as it starts and there is no comic book banter while it happens. This feels more genuine. I want realistic action with realistic consequences. I don't want the girl to hug and kiss him for saving her life, I her to recognize the killer and respond naturally to that fact. This is dark stuff. Don't look for happy endings.
What this story does for me is to highlight the areas in "The Raven" and "The Daughter" that need to be changed to make the threat of Hasco, and of Dessero and Ganton more obvious. This means making more to do with the tank of weaves in Skulls, and probably less of Thessa, and drop hints that Ganton and Dessero are looking for a patsy.
So Kariden is off to see Raum, and oh what plans do I have for that confrontation. There you will learn more about what all this is grand story is all about. But first I have a Daphia tale, "Figurine" in the wings that takes place right after events in "The Rector". She's important, you need to meet her. I want to edit "The Daughter" to bring to light the trade agreement between Ulden and Hasco, a nugget of information that will tell you all you need to know about these men. And I want to rewrite "Falling Star" that will take us hundreds of years after the Exodus, with a scout looking for those responsible for wrecking havoc on the Earth. They will learn something they didn't expect and discover a new horror. (If you've read the old "Falling Star", you'll know what that is.) And I have another short story that first came to me in good ole 1997 called "Counterfeit" that I realized would fit this universe perfectly, and it takes place in good ole Right About Now that concerns a group of discovered missing persons that aren't what they seem.
Three stories and some edits to get us on track, before we find out who Raum is and what he wants.
Post Script: Sometimes I have an actor in mind when I create a character. When I was thinking of Maonen, I thought of Michael Wincott. So far the other characters are drawing blanks.
http://youtu.be/kM9WusAG854 : Lullaby, by Warrior Soul
