The Foundation is done with Xiangyao, but won’t suffer traitors to hold it.
« Fathomless Panthalassic Avarice |
Meet Onru. Her spine is reinforced with steel and copper. Monofilament garrotte unspools from each of her false fingers.
Meet Irantu. His eyes are made of Corning glass and wired to target processing units in his frontal lobe that can place killshots on twenty people per second.
Meet Munru. Two mesh sacs snake through his torso in place of lungs, capable of oxygenating him for eight hours up to a mile below the surface.
Meet Nanku. A storage tank for napalm discharge runs through her entire left arm. If it happens to set her ablaze – her muscles are fireproofed.
Amortized over every lifetime, they cost two hundred million dollars to clone and construct. All the better to terrorize and murder on behalf of the Foundation. Not that anyone will know it; their identifying marks have been scrubbed and false ones applied to implicate the Pentagram, the Global Occult Coalition, and even other Insurgency cells.
The helicopter bay lights go green. The hatch opens to reveal the South China Sea, colored aluminum by the noonday sun. One after the other, they leap out the chopper, plunging bomblike into the eye of Xiangyao from half a kilometer in the air. Onto the deck of oil ship Pangara, command and control center for an Insurgent terrorist organization identified as the “Containment Foundation for Security”. The name is the most offensive part. The Foundation is done with Xiangyao, but won’t suffer traitors to hold it.
Pangara was built to sink slow. This is not to its advantage.
Once it was a long-haul tanker. Retrofits have stripped away the oil-ferrying piping and now the craft ferries men, stored in roughshod barracks. A stolen nanowormhole keeps the crew in touch with the wider Insurgency, and stapled-on sensory demons should warn of any incoming threats. Today, both are on the fritz. They're blind.
Waitely’s the last to see the sky, catching a slim crescent of pale blue through the bulkhead. Without warning it slams shut, locking. This should only be an inconvenience — there are three dozen onboard, and even if every door was sealed shut, it would take astronomical bad luck for nobody to be on deck when it happened.
The enemy makes their own luck. Nobody is on deck, lured beneath by carefully-chosen distractions. Each hatch leading out of the maze of interior corridors is sealed. Pangara is a tomb-in-waiting.
Four spectres rise from the water, like sea-mist, and climb up the keel. They take a moment to enjoy the view. One waves to the bridge.
Beneath, Waitely turns to call for a mechanic when there’s a dull rumbling crash, and the ship bucks under him. He lurches, flails to catch himself, and shatters his skull on an ill-placed valve.
He is the first to die onboard. He will not be the last.
The detonation shreds the engineers. Shrapnel minces a cumulative hundred years of experience, leaving the newbie Yathra covered in the paste of his colleagues. He pulls himself standing as the craft lurches sickeningly. Water, bile-dark, rushes through the shattered hull, muting the dying roar of the engine. Leaking oil gives it a prismatic sheen, and then it flares alight, the brilliant glow dissolving into oily smoke thick with obscure carcinogens.
But they were just here, thinks Yathra, and I didn’t see them die, and then the pain hits him. Rolling icepick agony where steel shrapnel embeds beneath the skin. He stumbles back, and the water has risen to his ankles already, warm tongues up his legs. Maybe drowning is painless. Then a cresting wave of smoke rolls over him, smelling like a bronchitic father, dappling his overall with droplets of soot.
He turns, coughing, and already the whole engine-room is thick with shadow. Idiot, idiot, why did you ever defect, he thinks. The Foundation paid better and expected less. Your moralising will get you killed someday. Darting firelight seems to expose false ways out, roiling sheets of dark hide the real exit — come on, he wants to scream, you know where you are, this is your home, you live here (lived here), get fucking moving.
There’s not enough space to get properly lost. Yathra limps out of the engine chamber. The superstructure tilts, and his injured hands grasp for leverage as he climbs out of the smoke. He forgets the old lesson: he looks back. Couldn’t someone have made it out? In the smoke, a shape moves.
He forgets it and runs, though surely it’s only pareidolia. Around him the steel skeleton creaks. Red fire gives way to crimson emergency lighting. At some point the siren kicks in, wailing grief. Does it know the ship is doomed?
At last he catches sight of armed allies, on the way out of the armoury. Now he has served his purpose, and dies.
Jun sweeps the narrow corridor with the kalashnikova, then directs his men forward. Emerging around the corner is — only the new engineer, two years in service, half his face hanging off. Poor motherfucker. The others should know better than to relax; they were all on the MTF track before they defected. But they do, an inch, which is their mistake.
A harpoon sails out of the smoke, catching the kid in the throat. Gore gushes, dark in the red light. Final exam: solve this fluid dynamics problem. He makes no noise but an infantile gurgling, birth and death symmetric, and then the harpoon's rope jerks him back around the corner.
“Fuck!” screams Lieutenant Bruno, nerveless little shit, and turns, fleeing back the other way, towards the bridge. Jun doesn’t have time for discipline, though. A low crunching issues from where the poor fucker’s body vanished, bass audible over the alarm. Then a single arm flies back out. The shoulder looks chewed.
The intended effect occurs: the men panic, and scatter. Jun screams at them to get the fuck back here, cocksuckers, or die alone, but the sight is too much. He has no choice but to follow them as they vanish. He winces at their retreating backs, and then something tears behind him, where the engineer’s arm still lies.
Whipping around, striding backward, he empties the magazine. The ceiling has split, stresses letting a sheet of water fall like a curtain. Each round punches a momentary divot. A crackling hiss, and sparks puff, lightning-yellow, on the other side of the opening. In their silhouette something stands, tall enough to scrape against the roof, hunched so that its blurred face is pressed against the mirror-sheet.
He doesn’t scream, but he does bite his tongue as he backpedals wildly, reeling but desperately not falling. The shape in the water doesn’t move. Finally he abandons his dignity and turns and runs, runs, runs. A blood-black darkness begins to spin in his head as he sprints after the group. They can’t have gone far; he’s lost. Smoke inhalation impedes thought. His advance is obstructed by — A knotted length of rope? It hangs from the ceiling, but it’s oddly ridged. Finally he gets close enough.
The ridges are vertebrae. It’s a spine. At its bottom hangs the head of Lt. Bruno Schachter.
Something taps him on the shoulder.
The bridge rolls lazily. The entire craft must be rotating as it sinks, thinks Captain Cleopatra. (She didn’t pick the pseudonym. If she had kept the old name, Site-19 scry-assassins would have boiled her in her bed.)
As the ship spins, the water within rolls too, and now it spills from what was the eastern door, which now hovers diagonally above her. She and her crew stand on the panelled glass that used to look out on the deck. It seems precarious, but can take their weight, and the pressure of the steadily darkening water outside. Very far beneath a pinprick of light must be the Xiangyao docks.
The consoles are wrecked. Some kind of hack sees them sputter and puff little ovals of whitish smoke and fire.
(In fact it is a galvanomorph, a living electrical fault, riding the field lines connecting each device onboard.)
But amid the haze, there are six crewmembers, sprouting armaments, and a man who takes the name Dismegistus, a war-wizard laden with Kybalic symbols. He is a gift from the wider Insurgency. If they can hold out, evacuation is plausible.
The Eastern doorway, the rising sun, is above her head, and flickers with scarlet emergency light. The Western door, where the day sinks into night, is beneath her, and the electricity has failed, leaving it a hadean pit.
Out of that pit explodes a scattering of pebbles, shotgunning into the empty space of the bridge. Everyone ducks beneath cover, but they’re inert, shining ivory. Wait.
They are ivory. Wisdom teeth. Two dozen sets, embedding into the metal of the hull.
She trains her own anti-tank rifle on the doorway, stashed for this kind of eventuality. It comes in handy disturbingly often.
The wall next to the doorway bursts, metal ballooning as a hulking figure climbs through. Her fire swings wide, and smaller arms ricochet uselessly, drawing only superficial blood. The ship continues to spin, so that now the glass they stood on is almost vertical, and she takes cover behind a sideways-turned console. The intruder barrels forward, tearing through it with a sweep of its hand, spraying electronics in a crescent across the room. Transistors shred her skin. It looks her in the eye.
Nothing injures it. This is no obstacle.
It has staggered into the centre of their group. They stand equidistant, in a seven-pointed circle, and Dismegistus raises his hand high, proclaiming triumphant: As above, so below! Abyssal sunlight sears the intruder's skin, and it hisses in pain. With a final snarl it flees, back through the hole it punched, having killed none of them. She smiles. If they can pull that off a few more times, she might live to see the sky again.
Something taps dully behind her. She turns. Outside, Security Chief Jun is spreadeagled. His eyesockets have collapsed under overpressure. The body is puppeteered by another figure, hovering, with no care for the depth. When their gazes meet, it drops the body, which floats away, and gives a little wave.
Then the figure strikes the glass with a sonically-charged fist, and every window in the bridge shatters. Eighty thousand tons of water rush in and drown them all.
The Pangara sinks faster than a ship its size ought to – testament to the efficacy of its killers. Nobody below realizes what’s happening until it punches through the nictitating membrane of Xiangyao’s eye. Gutspeaker is still searching for her contact when the bang nearly knocks her off her feet. She watches, frozen in place, as cargo, oil, and bodies plummet towards the shipyard.
Burning crude rains down. Containers burst open in midair, spraying metal ingots that crush heads and spines where they land. Amidst oil igniting, crates exploding, and people screaming, four black torpedoes plummet from the suspended tanker.
In the thirty seconds it takes them to fall a hundred meters, Onru and her siblings accrue as many kilojoules of energy. Upon meeting the ground, this excess is channeled from breakable bone to a chemical flywheel in the spleen. A little leakage shatters the concrete beneath their feet.
A two-meter tall machine of death craters into the ground fifty meters away from Gutspeaker and looks directly at her. She drops the pearl immediately and breaks into a dead run. Onru lets her go. Her metrics are already logged. Run all you want, little rabbit. We have our prey.
Instead of chasing, Onru stalks towards the orichalcum pearl and holds it up. She takes a moment to admire the Pangara’s burning reflection on its surface. Then she crushes it in her hand.
The single highest-throughput passage in the city is the tearduct that leads from the docks to the cranial interior. A man who has no name but Cavalier filter-feeds at its edges, straining psychic data from the waterfall of emotion. His purpose is to listen to the rhythm of the crowd, for the sake of his fellow Insurgents. He is native to Xiangyao, but the others are auxiliaries, not of the indigenous branch. They fear the city.
They are right to.
A new current sweeps the mass. His senses are not fine enough to pick out individual thoughts, but the wash of anxiety is clear enough. It curdles, becoming dread, and then panic. Yells rise, and then men begin to trample men.
Cavalier is wise. He has been taught wisdom. So he bows his head and cloaks himself in psionic witchery, diverting attention. No terror-struck labourer will strike at him. He casts his senses wide, wider, sifting for more information.
Something is wrong.
There is a hole at the edge of the net. The crowd is dense-packed, so he struggles not to be swept along in their motion, even stuck against the enamelled edge of the street. Not an inch of space is free, and yet there is a hole in the net. Then, as he watches, it fills. Did he imagine it?
Another hole appears, further down the crowd. Closer to him. He straightens, no longer leaning against the wall, and dusts off his shirt.
More. They dance like fireflies. It is almost as if he is being toyed with. Perhaps it is paranoia, but that is sufficient reason to leave.
He strolls away, making sure to appear unworried. Drawing attention weakens the psi-ward. The screams are intensifying. A few security sprint urgently the other way.
His sensory envelope wavers. He feels that he is surrounded by one, no, three, no, seven patches of emptiness. Now he’s out of the dockfront, he heads off down the street, randomising his turns. The voids follow him. One is at the end of his current path — he turns off abruptly into a crossway. Another appears on the roof overlooking him and he ducks into a textile workshop. He’s just being paranoid, right? This is absurd. They aren’t corralling him.
A few minutes pass. Panicked masses surge past, and thin out. No more empty patches appear in his psi-sense. He leaves the factory floor, where the workers continue heedless of the events outside. The street is deserted. He decides to add some randomness into his routing anyway, and turns into the third alleyway on his left.
Someone fills the entryway. He manages a single indrawn breath before the knife sinks into his belly. It snicks and opens the skin, allowing intestines to pour out.
He doesn’t even get a good look at his killer. Cavalier slumps to the pavement, psychic distress beacon rapidly dimming. His allies are too far to hear it. He might have more luck with a passerby, but for some reason, they just can’t pay him any attention.
The Communist Party of Xiangyao are headquartered in the back of a combination izakaya and jansou. Secretary Rat, first among equals, owns the building. Secretaries Ox and Tiger handle the betting and cash flow. Rabbit runs the izakaya, Goat runs the jansou. Dragon’s thugs provide security. Snake’s people have ears everywhere. Horse and Monkey manage the needs of the triads and constables alike. They all share in the profits. Some of it even fills the Party’s coffers. Pig, Dog, and Rooster convinced the rest of the Party to be happy with that arrangement – until the three of them got unhappy with it.
Rat dealt with them swiftly. He’d been prepared to label them counter-revolutionaries for years, and forged plenty of evidence for the occasion. The gambling crackdown was positioned specifically to get the traitors into the mines and out of the picture. But without Rooster’s silver tongue, Dog’s boundless loyalty, or Pig’s printing press… the Party’s electorate became uneasy.
The remaining Secretariat Insurgent now sit around a mahjong table, air choked with cigar smoke, struggling to solve a crisis of their own creation. Rat wonders which of them will be next to crack. Ox or Tiger, the money-hungry swines? Rabbit or Goat, more concerned with bread than politics? Dragon is a brute, and Snake’s title speaks for itself. Horse and Monkey are practically already in bed with the oppressors and class traitors. And to top it all off their ex-quartermaster has not only reappeared with the biggest chunk of orichalcum anyone’s ever seen but sold it without their approval. The Communist Party of Xiangyao can’t exist without the Secretariat. If word of Gutspeaker’s initiative gets out, the Party might finally realize it’s the other way around.
Rat’s cigar burns down to the roach and he reaches for another. Dragon gets to the cigar tin first.
“Hey!” Rat snaps. “Is that the last Cuban?”
“Dragon’s had three already, innit?” Ox says.
“Four!” Tiger says. “I’ve been counting!”
“And?” Dragon nods to the men standing guard around them. Officially the Communist Party Security Apparatus, but practically his personal army. His men tense up, moving their hands closer to their weapons. “What are you going to do about it?” he says.
Ox and Tiger sneer at him but lean back in deference, studying their Mahjong tiles carefully. Snake, scrolling through her cell phone, sits up, then plucks the cigar from Dragon’s hand. “I think I’ve more than earned the Cuban. Heard from my people that Gutspeaker was seen boarding the lift at Xiangyao’s Throat. We suspect she got help from Xiao Yazi.”
“Little Yazi? That traitor,” Horse snarls. “He knows we’re his biggest customer. He knows we don’t abide doing business with counter-revolutionaries.”
“So what are we gonna do about it?” Monkey asks.
“I’ll have the men retrieve her,” Dragon says. He looks around the room. “Unless the chair has another idea?”
Rat doesn’t bite. “Yes, thank you, my dear Dragon. Please have our men pick her up and bring her here. I’ll interrogate her personally. Make sure they bring back the orichalcum. I’m sure we can find some buyers.”
He looks around the table at the ten of them – at the ten of them?
“Who the hell are you?” Rat blurts out. The Secretariat Insurgent all register the intruder at once. It seems impossible they could have gone unnoticed – they’re easily half a meter taller than Dragon himself, skin gleaming gunmetal gray, face hidden by a helmet whose skull paint leers at them. How did they get in here?
Dragon’s men reach for their guns. Twin jets of flame leap from the cyborg’s arms and turn them all into screaming torches. Something in the back of Rat’s mind wails for him to get up – to do something – but he can’t. He can only watch as the cyborg grabs Dragon by the mouth and breaks his neck so thoroughly his head spins all the way around.
Ox rears up in terror. A dark stain spreads across Tiger’s trousers. Snake gets up – tries to run – drops bonelessly with a Mahjong tile embedded in the base of her skull. The killer scoops up six more tiles from the table. Six cracks ring out as six members of the Secretariat Insurgent fall backwards with neat rectangular holes in their temples.
Rat sits dumbfounded, staring up at the face of death. The last thing he sees is the helmet sliding up to reveal a pair of guileless, unbothered brown eyes. The last thing he hears as her hands close around his throat is, “This will make an excellent setpiece for my next story!”
The ceiling of Xiangyao is a throbbing web of translucent tissue, crisscrossed by mercury-silver bare nerves. Very few are the tenants willing to live close to it.
This building’s topmost level has been converted into a makeshift penthouse. Unsound interior walls have been demolished, and the makeshift tarp roof stripped, so that its residents may gaze upon Xiangyao bare. The nervous network can be hacked, to broadcast to Insurgents across the breadth of the city. For too long, disparate cells have squabbled.
They are a clade of psychics, steeped in witch-art. Their minds sing together in chorus, following the lead of the Engine, and they have been sent to teach every Insurgent in the city cooperation. But there is a disharmony, while they prepare — their watchman, Cavalier, is gone.
Brigadier watches the stairway up, lazily exchanging stolen memories of vacations in the Bahamas with Cataphract. What comes is not their fellow Cavalier, though it does carry his head.
Brigadier’s eyes widen before the attacker puts a round between them. A trickle of blood runs down the bridge of his nose, and he falls. Cataphract broadcasts his consuming grief in a torrent at the enemy. It tilts its head and sends a pulse of occult fire back up the emotional channel. His head bursts in a red shower.
Simultaneously, three windows shatter. Something has crawled up the exterior walls, and now mindspace fills with cries for help. One by one, they fall silent.
There are a few who escape. Captain is out on a trivial errand. Knight abandons her fellows, descending the same walls the enemy scaled. But nearly the entirety of their pseudo-family — bound by a psychotronic web — is here, penned in. Waiting to die.
Elder Colonel is the first of them, and the best. He directs them, silently, to hide themselves. A veil of normality falls over them. They become background objects in the eyes of the enemy.
His body is in the common room, crouched by a disrepaired table. Four others are with him, including the new recruit Corporal, who trembles at the sound of distant gunfire. There’s unhurried footfall outside, and an attacker lopes in through the nearest door. At this distance, he can see its face, skin bulging with unfamiliar implants. The blood running freely over its features begins to boil with waste heat. Sweat dampens his clothing.
Something probes at the cloaking ward, and he stiffens. The attackers have their own psionic sense. It isn’t enough to reveal them, but it pins the group down. If they draw even a shred of attention, it will break.
Another figure enters through the rear doorway, cutting off all exit. The two begin to circle around the room, probing. They tear at upholstery and punch holes through walls as he watches in horror. One is near Corporal, who bends minutely away. With a sudden motion it stomps on an outstretched foot. The concrete beneath cracks, hair thin. A bead of perspiration flows down Colonel’s face as he watches. The boy’s toes are mangled. As Colonel prays, staring him down, the newbie miraculously doesn’t react.
He breathes out, and checks if either of the exits are free.
The other figure sits silently, two inches from his face. Corpse-cold breath puffs from its lips.
Colonel flinches. He falls from his crouch and sprawls over the floor. The ward breaks, like ice.
The two hunters smile toothily.
Onru wipes blood from her teeth.
Strips of sinew are stuck near the gums.
Nanku tosses the last carcass off the tenement.
It crumples ten storeys down.
Irantu says, “There are more.”
In their eyes, the city teems with Insurgents.
Munru demurs: “We’re out of time.”
Exfiltration must follow over the next two hours.
The Foundation is done with Xiangyao. God help them all.
« Fathomless Panthalassic Avarice | HUB | BLIND THE ALL-SEEING EYE »
