Entromancy (2 page)

I pressed my back against the wall, mentally preparing myself for what was next.  I didn’t have time for a protracted battle, and the stakes had just become infinitely higher with the presence of innocent people.  Shaking my coat sleeve to drop a long dart from my forearm holster into my left palm, I drew my ceridium-powered stunner into my right.  Finesse would have to take precedence over firepower, or I’d have a building full of ragers on me in no time.

I took a short breath and looked at my time display.  21:16:34.

I turned the corner and unleashed chaos into the room. 

Spinning through the doorway, I allowed my shadow shroud to curl and coalesce around me, throwing the dart across my body towards the troll, who was just looking up from his digitab.  The hulk caught the projectile in the side of his neck, slumping instantaneously from the tranquilizer.  Simultaneously, I emptied the stunner’s two rounds at the aurics directly to my left.  One of them raised an arm reflexively and caught the electrified bolt in a brawny forearm, jittering and falling to the wood floor with a muted thump.  The other, a bit more unlucky, took the round in the face and fell backwards, hitting his head on the side of a chair.

The other two responded immediately, reaching for cobalt-glowing handguns within their heavy jackets.  I holstered the stunner and darted towards them, jumping and twisting while grabbing another ceridium capsule from my billowing coat.  I caught the closest one squarely in the jaw with a thrust from my boot, landing just as the other stood up from her chair and leveled her gun at my twirling form.  I came out of my spin and grabbed the auric’s wrist, twisting the weapon expertly from her hand and locking her arm against my body.  As she opened her mouth to shout, I spoke a word of power and crushed the capsule in my hand, tossing the blue dust into her face and rendering her instantly unconscious.

I let the auric’s body slip heavily back into the chair, and glanced at the time.  21:17:02.  Twenty-eight minutes.

“What are you trying to play, man?” a voice reverberated from the hallway.  “We said five hundred, not…”

The voice trailed off as I turned around back towards the door.  The pierced auric had returned, standing in the doorway with his eyes wide open and his mouth frozen in mid-sentence.  It must have been an impressive scene, with me standing like a cloak of death amid the carnage.  The man on the floor spasmed awkwardly, latent electricity charging through his body.

“The hell?” the auric said, bewildered.

I moved, and he saw me.  My lenses magnified his dilated pupils, and registered his slightly elevated pulse and shallow breaths.  The Oxidium would have enhanced his already superior vision, and improved his reflexes to a near super-human level.

I took a step towards him, which spurred him out of his daze, and he dashed out of the doorway towards the stairwell.  I raced after him, vaulting towards the door and grabbing the frame to swing around the corner.  The stairs switched back upon themselves, and the auric’s heightened speed had already taken him to the little landing in between the two floors.  I jumped lightly upon the railing that bisected the stairwell, and used my momentum to carry me over the switchback.

I landed upon the auric’s back like a cloud of smoke, snaking my arms around his neck and under his armpit like a vise.  He lost his footing under the added weight and we tumbled down the remaining stairs, crashing through a light wooden door and knocking into a small stack of empty cardboard boxes.  I rolled with the impact and held onto his neck and arm, clenching like a python as he tried to wriggle away from me.  The spikes on his leather jacket poked through my coat and tore at my arms, but I ignored the pain and locked a foot around the crook of his knee to try to arch my back for more leverage.

The auric threw his head backwards, catching me cleanly in the temple.  My grip loosened on him as stars exploded in my head, and I could feel him scrambling amidst the boxes as he tried to escape.  I reached out a hand reflexively and caught at his leg, managing to grab a handful of his trousers.  I pulled and twisted, knocking him off balance and back to the floor.

Instinctively, I rolled out of the way, and was rewarded by catching his high-top sneaker on my shoulder instead of my face.  I swatted at it with one hand and used the other to push myself into a crouch, shaking my vision clear and willing myself to stay conscious.  I sensed him getting to his feet and saw a flash in my peripheral vision.  I ducked underneath his kick and sprung up from the floor, driving the crown of my head into his chin.  His teeth came together with an audible crack, and he fell to the floor like a bag of groceries.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed meekly, clutching at his jaw.  “You broke my tongue!”

I ignored him, shaking my head again and surveying the chamber.  It was a little storage area that opened up into the storefront proper, which was essentially one large room with a long bar that ran from one end to the other.  A couple of digital registers sat on the otherwise unremarkable counter, and small cabinets marked with augmented reality-enabled writing lined the adjacent wall.  A soft light penetrated through the room’s windows from the street.

My head swam a little, and I looked at the time, dropping the shadow shroud.  21:21:52.

“Come on,” I said to the auric, who was still writhing on the ground.  I grabbed a handful of hair and dragged him into the empty room, irritated by the interruption to my mission and wary of any further complications.  The auric’s piercings jangled, his jacket spikes scratching at the wood floor.

Even without the lenses’ readout, it would have been easy to spot the bomb if one knew what they were looking for.  I noticed it immediately, nestled in between two chairs that were bolted into the wall on the far side of the room, out of sight from anyone who might happen to have access to the dispensary after hours.  I strode around the bar towards it, pulling the auric behind me.

“The hell, man!  I didn’t do anything!” he said, struggling weakly against me.  “Let me go!”

I squatted in between the chairs and put my knee on the auric’s throat to keep him from squirming.  He seemed to accept his situation and slumped in defeat.  I pulled my digitab out of my coat and set it against the bomb, tapping a few buttons to sync with the device.  It was a tiny thing, the size of a roach or VPen chip, but placed expertly at the base of a load-bearing wall.  When it blew, it would take the entire building with it.

The digitab finished syncing, displaying information about the bomb’s specifications and a defuse protocol.  It was Canadian made, and a newer model at that - no more than a year old.  The ticker on it read six minutes and forty-two seconds, a full thirteen minutes before it was supposed to go off.

I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my forehead, the dark room closing in oppressively around me.  My temple throbbed, and I could feel the adrenaline of combat slipping away from my body, leaving a hollow feeling of uncertainty in the pit of my stomach. I licked my lips nervously and clicked on the defuse protocol, which opened up a code prompt.  I quickly entered the combination provided to me during the mission briefing, which would stop the countdown and disable the bomb.

The digitab buzzed angrily, indicating that the combination I had entered was either incorrect or had been changed.  The ticker burped, knocking a minute off the timer and now reading four minutes and twenty-two seconds.

I fought to stay calm.  I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears, matching the drumming in my temple, and I kept forgetting to breathe.  I hedged, knowing that I could leave, taking the auric with me for questioning, but I wouldn’t have time to evacuate the people upstairs.  I wasn’t familiar with being unsure of my next course of action, and I didn’t care for the feeling.

I had neither the time to give the defuse protocol another try nor the skillset to hack into the device and do it the hard way.  I synced the timer with my digitab and saw the countdown appear in my lenses.  Pocketing the digitab, I released my knee from the auric’s throat and grabbed him by the collar.

“What’s the code?” I snarled at him.

“What?” he said thickly.  I could see blood staining his white teeth.

“Don’t play stupid with me,” I said, shaking him.  “What’s the code?”

“The hell, man?  What code?”

I could see that he had no idea what I was talking about.  I glanced back at the bomb and up at the time display.  21:27:24, three minutes and thirty-six seconds.

The auric craned his neck to follow my gaze, then looked at me.  I could see understanding register in his eyes.

“We’re dead?” he queried.

I nodded absently, reaching for another ceridium capsule.  Prying off a glove with my teeth, I reached out towards the device.

The auric’s hand shot up and grabbed weakly at my wrist.  “You’re going to kill us, man!” he protested.

“Probably!”  I looked back towards a side entrance next to the counter.  “Can you open that?”

He hesitated, then nodded slightly.

“Do it,” I said.  He got up slowly and trotted over to the door.

I returned my attention to the bomb, and delicately pried at it with my fingers.  It was stuck firmly to the wall with some kind of adhesive, but I picked at it with a fingernail gently, making sure not to damage the device itself.

“The
hell
, man,” I heard the auric behind me.  “You made me lose my keys!”

“Be creative!” I yelled back, and could hear movement upstairs.  Our little row must have woken up some of the ragers.  I didn’t have time to savor the irony of my attempt to save the lives of a group of people who would be happy to tear me apart at the slightest provocation.

I continued picking at the device, absently wiping my forehead with my free hand.  It came away bloody.  I ignored the pain in my temple and gave the bomb another flick, and it fell into my palm with a little resistance.

I hastily moved my other hand around the device in a circular motion, chanting softly under my breath and crushing the ceridium capsule.  A shadowy thread, almost invisible in the darkness, emanated from my fingers, building upon itself and wrapping around the bomb like a ball of black yarn.  I closed my fist over it and ran back towards the counter.

The time in my lens display read 21:30:28.  Thirty-two seconds.

Muttering to himself, the auric was working at the door’s physical locking mechanism with a pair of picks, having already disabled the digital keycode.  I shouldered him out of the way and drew my ceridium pistol, stepping back and firing a round into the deadbolt.  It blew a baseball-sized hole through the door with a loud
whoosh
and the lock went with it, leaving a smoking blue ring behind.

I ripped open the door and tossed the shadow-encrusted bomb into the street, aiming for a car across the asphalt.  I barely had enough time to see it crash through the sedan’s window, providing the neighborhood with the most meager of protection along with the shadow shield.  I slammed the door against the frame, turning towards the auric and pushing him underneath the counter, shielding him with my body.

21:31:00.

The world exploded.

A light brighter than the sun flashed outside of the dispensary, illuminating the room with a painful flash.  A dragon’s roar filled my ears as the building shook, glass and bits of wood and plaster raining down painfully on my coat as the windows and parts of the walls blew.  The ground rocked violently, threatening to tumble the entire dispensary down upon us.  I could hear the auric yelling in fear below me.

Then, as soon as they had begun, the light and noise vanished.  My ears rung in the silence, and I could taste blood in my mouth, having bitten my lip during the explosion.  I held my position for several heartbeats, feeling the dust continue to rain down on me and waiting for the building to collapse.

Nothing happened.  The whole neighborhood seemed to have fallen silent, as if waiting for someone to make the next move.  Even the ragers upstairs seemed to have been temporarily mollified.

I dared to look up from my crouch, shaking woodchips and glass from my hair.  The dispensary looked like it had been hit by a mortar, but it was still standing.  The side door had been torn completely off of its hinges, and the glass double doors at the front of the building had shattered along with the windows.  The wall closest to the side door had gaping holes where it had taken the brunt of the blast, but it held.  I tried not to think of what the outside neighborhood looked like.

A million different scenarios came to my mind, hazy explanations for how a relatively easy job could have gone south so quickly.  I pushed them out of my head, grateful for the moment just to be alive.  I slumped against the counter, putting a hand to my temple and letting a long breath out through my nose.  The auric crept up next to me, tentatively peering over the bar at the carnage.

“Jesus,” he said.

TWO

The city is home to all of us, and we are entrusted with its protection.  Nothing will sway us from that course
.

-William D. Karthax, NIGHT Inquisitor General

A
fter a couple of seconds making sure I was still alive, I dusted the pieces of building off of my coat and grabbed the auric by his tricep.

“Let’s go,” I growled, “Blues will be here any minute.”

As if on cue, distant sirens began to screech across the city.  I could hear footsteps begin to shuffle upstairs, along with a few grunts and groans.  SFPD would have a hell of a time containing an open building full of ragers, but it was no longer my problem.

Still in shock, the auric gave little protest as I pulled him out of the dispensary and into the night.  The city street looked like a warzone, with rubble and bits of car strewn about everywhere.  Half of the sedan I had aimed for was on its side, charred almost to ash and pressed up against the opposing building.  The other half was smoking on top of an adjacent truck, which wasn’t in much better shape.

I dragged the auric past the debris, feeling the street shiver like an aftershock as the surrounding buildings readjusted to their foundations.  The blast had undoubtedly drawn the attention of the few workers and street people in the alley, and the area would be buzzing with activity in no time.  I ducked into the cul-de-sac and entered a passcode on my digitab.  My cruiser came to life as we approached, and I pushed a button on its side compartment to release it and grab a few emergency supplies.

“Hold still,” I said to the auric, placing one hand on the back of his neck and driving a syringe into his jawbone.

“Mother pisser!” he cursed thickly, squirming out from my grip.  “The hell was that?”

“Oxadrenalthaline,” I said, pricking my forehead with a smaller needle.  A soothing warmth pulsed through the side of my face as the medicine took effect, masking the pain receptors in my temple.  “Temporary, but should negate the swelling.”

I threw the empty syringes back in the compartment and straddled the cruiser, nodding at the small passenger seat behind me.  “Get on.”

The auric looked at me incredulously, massaging his jaw.  In the stronger light of the street his angular features stood out more prominently, high cheekbones and a strong nose under slightly almond-shaped eyes.  He had an almost elvish look to him, with olive-tinted skin and ears that stuck out acutely under shaggy brown hair.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, poking at his tongue.  “You almost killed me. Why’d I go anywhere with you?”

I sighed, tapping a button on my digitab and allowing my lenses to synchronize with the auric’s features in the dim light.  Records from the NIGHT database began popping up in the display, replete with pictures of the auric at various ages and silent holovids of him from security footage.

“Tribe Achebe, born twenty-one November, twenty forty-three in Troy, Michigan,” I began, reading off the police reports.  “Two charges of robbery and one charge unauthorized Oxidium possession in Detroit by the age of fourteen, three days in the VPen.  Moved to San Francisco in twenty fifty-nine.  Since then, three charges of breaking-and-entering, two Oxidium charges, revolutionary affiliations, and it looks like you’re behind on your rent.”

The thief looked at me blankly, rubbing his face.

“Should I continue?” I said.

He shrugged, his ear and nose piercings jingling.  “Nothing the police don’t already know.”

“I also put a tracer on your neck, so there’s that.”

The auric reached a hand back to probe at the device I had placed while applying the syringe.  He squinted at me irritably.

“Try to remove it and it will stick you with a neurotoxin,” I continued.  “I’ll be happy to find a VPen for you when you wake up.”

He looked at me for another heartbeat, then shrugged again and got on the cruiser.  I wheeled it around and took it out of the cul-de-sac, charting a route out of the alleyway and towards the Columbus-Farrow storefronts, a figurative stone’s throw from the NIGHT headquarters.

When the aurics started multiplying and threatening local census percentages with their population numbers, public opinion quickly changed from what bordered on novelty and casual ignorance to fear and outrage.  The first generation, though of humans, was not human, but could be tolerated as a sort of guilty by-product of ceridium research.  The second generation, which began to gain some momentum as their numbers and support grew towards establishing their own communities, could not be afforded the same magnanimity.  By the time the third generation of the so-called “underraces,” or even more pejoratively, “nonhumans,” came of adulthood, they would have a full-scale civil war threatening to bloody their hands.

The governments of most nations responded to the rising populations and unrest in similar clichéd fashions.  Several European, African, and South American countries saw the opportunity for assimilation and immediately amended their legal codes to provide space for the new underrace communities.  A handful of smaller nations, unequipped to deal with the new generations of tusked, horned, or pointy-eared people in their midst tried to squash any type of resistance with military might, and were wholly unprepared for the result.  Laos, Moldova, and Côte d’Ivoire were now underrace territories.  Ecuador, Estonia, and the Dominican Republic belonged to the revolutionaries.  The underraces had claimed Iceland for themselves, and the majority of North America and western Europe had their hands full with trying to keep a lid on revolutionary dissent.  Thog’run II, their self-appointed king, built his Northern California capital on the backs of his enemies and gave the newer races a title and a purpose: aurics, a people who were meant to rule over others, and worthy of the gold of their namesake.

Most countries with the political and military might to support it quickly developed a security organization to deal with this new threat, or hired a third party to do it for them.  The United States spared neither expense nor time in creating the National Intelligence Guard of Human Technology, a paramilitary force built exclusively to identify and protect against the influx of people that the nation’s cities could not handle, and for which its fragile sense of ethnic identity could not make room.  The American public at large, exhausted from years at war abroad, was only too happy to focus its military paranoia within.

The Pacific South NIGHT headquarters were strategically located on the island of Alcatraz, a choice which I had begun to find more and more fitting.  It was stolen land from the Native Americans that had been turned into lighthouse, then prison, then tourist attraction, and now a bastion of humanity against a rising tide of underraces that humans had created but didn’t understand.  A new lighthouse of sorts that was only accessible by water or air, with a good deal of the country’s internal defense budget behind it.  The facility’s lower levels housed approximately two hundred NIGHT foot soldiers, officials, Daypaths, Nightpaths, and Inquisitors, with room for over fifty virtual penitentiary inhabitants.  It was rivaled in size only by the Atlantic North headquarters on the reclaimed Liberty Island in New York.

I sped through the side streets adjacent to Old Market, taking advantage of the quiet midnight roads.  I pulled up a number on my cruiser console and clicked it to connect.

“Nightpath,” Striker’s voice grated in my ear.  “What the hell just happened?”

“Patch me into Karthax, Striker,” I replied.

“Karthax is in Cuba,
hombre
,” he said, a bit too lazily for my liking.

“
Now
, Striker,” I yelled into the air in front of me.  The auric behind me shifted uncomfortably as we accelerated around a corner.

“Piss off, Nightpath,” Striker retorted, but the console clicked with a temporary display, asking me politely to hold.

“Yeah?” a sleepy voice spoke into my earpiece after a moment.

“Madge, is that you?” I said.  “We have a situation here-”

“Do you know what time it is here, Eskander?”

“Are you sleeping?!”

“Quarter to three.  AM. 
In the morning
.”  She sounded exhausted.  Doubling up as a Daypath and the Inquisitor General’s personal security would do that to you.

“Just put Karthax on, will you?” I asked as politely as I could muster.

“Alright,” she said with a yawn.

I turned another corner, crossing Old Market and heading north for the Columbus-Farrow storefronts.

The earpiece clicked again as Madge authorized my call.  After a few seconds, I could hear the muted sound of a conversation in the background.

“Karthax,” a gravelly voice said.

“Inquisitor General,” I acknowledged, launching into my report.  “Our intel on the rigged storefronts may be compromised.  Times and disarm code were both incorrect, and the location was full of ragers.  I suspect the same of North Beach, and am headed there now.”

There was a brief silence on the call, broken only by the distant din of voices.  I checked the upper level of traffic and engaged the cruiser’s boosters.

“That won’t be necessary,” Karthax’s voice came back on the line.  “Return to headquarters for debriefing.”

“Sir?” I asked incredulously.  “I’m five away from Columbus-Farrow, and if our intel on them is wrong as well-”

“Return to headquarters,” he said again, this time with authority.  “That will do, Nightpath.”  The console clicked.  I punched the cruiser’s handlebar in frustration.

“That guy sounds like an ass,” the auric remarked from behind me.

“You could hear him?” I asked.

“I didn’t need to,” he said.

The Inquisitor General’s words didn’t sit well with me.  Karthax, normally laconic by any standard, would still have more to say about a botched job.  That he didn’t have further  instructions for me or at least some vocal interest in my well-being made me a little nervous.

On a whim, I wheeled the cruiser off of the main road and down a one-way street to approach Columbus-Farrow from a less obvious direction.  Something akin to intuition snaked its way uncomfortably around my torso and settled in the pit of my stomach, and I was suddenly paranoid about coming into contact with any other NIGHTs heading to the North Beach storefronts.  I gunned the engine and flew through several intersections, buildings and floating streetlights blurring by me.

“Where are we going, man?” the auric complained.  “I told you, I didn’t do anything.”

“What do you know about the ragers at the Oxidium dispensary?” I asked him over my shoulder.

“Are you my lawyer?” he objected.  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“You’ve got one estranged sister in Queens who works as a security guard,” I said, reading off the police reports from the corner of my eye, “and two brothers who might as well be revolutionaries.  Your probation is up in four months, but any other incidents will put you straight back into the VPen, for two weeks this time.  Your most recent mailing address-”

“Alright, alright!” he relented.  “Nothing much.  It’s…it was just a safehouse.  The store was on the bottom, and a shelter on top.  The owners sold Ox to friends of the cause, and funneled it back behind the scenes to keep the ragers calm and fed.  Hiding in plain sight, you know how it is.”

“You’re a good Samaritan, then?”  I had a hard time believing the thief had a philanthropic streak, but people can surprise you.

“Something like that,” he said.  “People need those drugs, man.”

He wasn’t wrong.  The Oxidium, which was initially marketed as a prescription against the effects of ceridium exposure, turned out to be a double-edged weapon against its intended consumers.  For humans, it had the addictive tendencies of a narcotic with performance enhancers.  For those with the auric gene, it had the same qualities, but with the unintended benefit of combating the rage plague that had begun to appear in the second generation of underraces. 

Its addictive dependency had proven to outweigh its usefulness, however.  Over time, auric exposure to Oxidium usually still resulted in the user devolving into a particular kind of psychosis that could be set off by the slightest provocation, bolstered by Oxidium-induced strength and reflexes.  The rage plague’s root cause eluded even the most erudite of government scientists, and its symptoms could only be mitigated, albeit temporarily, by Oxidium.

“What do you know about these two buildings?” I asked the auric, pointing at the North Beach locations on the console.

He shifted to peer over my shoulder, reading the map as I slowed the cruiser and doubled back to circle the storefronts.

“Nothing, man.  Those aren’t ours,” Tribe said.  “They’re run by the auric king’s people.  You’ll have to ask him.”

“I’ll be sure to do that when I meet him,” I quipped.

As we turned on Columbus-Farrow, the lights and sounds increased exponentially, with augmented reality digital ads of local bars and strip clubs filling my vision like carnivalesque holograms.  Small, carefully manicured trees sat at intervals along the sidewalks, the only semblance of nature in the neon and concrete neighborhood.

We didn’t get very far.  Dozens of clubbers and pub crawlers milled about in the middle of the street, being ushered away from a hastily set up perimeter around one of the storefronts in question.  A thin line of yellow police tape cordoned off half of the block, and SFPD officers directed traffic and spoke with passersby.  Two NIGHT vehicles sat placidly on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the block behind the police tape, riderless.