The Black Garden: Chapter 14

Jak left me to my own devices in the demon-haunted house, where I turned my attention to my little hellspawn friends. I had big plans for them - and no intention of staying in the Confluence residence, as I did not enjoy being murdered in my sleep. Two of the parasite jars went into the quantum locker, to be forwarded to our science corps for analysis. The third I jerry-rigged to one of the cleaning robots that periodically patrolled the house.

“Look at you, Mister Robot! Fancy hat!” I cooed at it as it as I finished duct-taping the tadpole jar to the top of it. The parasite was now big enough to screech, which it did, a lot. It also kept trying to ineffectually drill through the glass, but its tail and teeth were made for flesh, not inorganic materials. “Now, on top of the patrol route I gave you, you must use remote charging only. Do not return to your port, okay?”

The robot flashed with a pretty series of pulsing, multicolored lights in the Palae’an photolexic language, cheerfully agreeing with the orders. I gave it a friendly pat, and it motored off with its irate passenger and bumped into one of the pillars before swiveling off toward the bedroom to assume its human-like pattern of movement around the house. The tadpole’s hellish shrieks of rage were muffled by the cocoon of bubblewrap and tape that sheathed the jar to prevent it breaking should it somehow detach itself.

Bone-weary, I changed my clothes, called a cab, and trudged outside with my luggage to wait. Eventually, a self-driving rustbucket pulled into the driveway with a soft electric whine. It smelled like old beer and cold fries, the sliding door of the trunk moving jerkily and uncertainly. But it was cheap and anonymous, and it was able to take me back to the city to an unremarkable business hotel on the fringes of downtown. Like the airport check-in, the place was curiously antiquated. There was an actual desk with a living concierge, a man who efficiently checked me in and handed me a keycard for my suite. I had to hang onto my bags so they weren't whisked away by a porter, hungry for tips. The room itself was straight out of a 1950s colonial hotel: a wooden armchair with green cushions, a velvet gold bedspread, a green carpet that didn’t match the furniture. The only way I knew I was still on an alien planet was the replicator on an inset counter on the wall, but even that was ancient, barely capable of synthesizing decent eggs. There was a small fridge that was – to my surprise – stocked with beer and small hip-flask sized bottles of whiskey, advocaat egg liquor, and brandy. None of it for free, of course.

"Fuck me. What a day." Once the scanner swarm was done vetting the room, I groaned and flopped onto the bed. And yet, there was still more to do. After five minutes or so, I hauled myself up with a sigh, pulled out the locker, and got in touch with COMMS. Gaius was on shift, and as he completed the secure relay, I saw Lilia join the channel as well.

"All settled in, Z?" Gaius's cheerful voice boomed between my ears.

"Undercaffeinated and overclocked, but sure." I stripped the homme fatale outfit off and let my hair down, working in my underwear while I began pulling items out of the locker.

“I am glad you are well,” Lilia said. “The insertion was not as smooth as I would have preferred.”

“Language, cappy.” Gaius chortled.

Lilia gave a testy sigh. “You know what I mean.”

"I do. But the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed,” I said. “Do you have any data on the little chirpers I sent over?"

“Yes. Those discoveries are why I am here. I was waiting for you to call,” our captain said.

“Ah. So it’s nanites.” Like all members of human Dead World Operations teams, Lilia was a ReMa. She was a Psionic, and specifically a Technopath – a Psion who specialized in controlling and interfacing with machine intelligence and AI. Her abilities were very technical and went way over my head whenever she tried to explain them, but she was how I was able to move around New Warder with multiple organically-generated I.Ds. The strength of her unusual ability was why the tag at the airport had been such a shock to all of us.

"Yeah, it’s pretty wild. Labs are still looking at it, but there’s some preliminary results,” Gaius said. “The big one is that your little buddies are not actually the vectors for a Y-class."

I had just started to unseal a vacuum-packed zerosuit, and paused. "… What the fuck are they for, then?"

"Well, according to the coats, they’re like little homunculi," Gaius said. "Their genetics are about twenty percent human – not yours – and the rest derive from a shark analogue called a gherani, which is native to-"

"-Khab," I finished grimly. "The Nu-suht home planet."

"Right. Now these things, they're completely artificial. Gengineered. Forensics thinks there's a good chance they’re a Nu-suht bioweapon. Scrying on it just leads to a black hole, which implies they’re Abyssal in origin. But what's more interesting is that the things are fucking packed with nanites. You want to take it from here, Lilia?"

Her name came into focus on the HUD. "This is not the first time we have seen vectorized nanites, Z, but this IS the first time we have seen them being used in this way. The moment we tried to analyze them, they self-destructed. But even so, based on their behaviors and the remnants, I was able to get a sense of their purpose. My early conclusion is that the parasite borne by the Violator husk was a very delicate, multi-stage espionage tool aimed at the Confluence."

"Go on."

"Essentially, the original parasite, the one the Violator husk infected you with, was intended to be caught. Once inserted, it rapidly laid its eggs in an obscure, difficult-to-image location, and then attached itself somewhere else as a decoy," Lilia said. "The eggs were dormant, but could be remotely activated by a handler via the nanite payload. They were entangled with a mirrored swarm. Whoever controlled that swarm - a Psionic ReMa, perhaps another Technopath - could passively monitor you from any time or place in the multiverse. And they could, at will, have activated the eggs and forced them to mature. The parasites were very close to major arteries and your liver. Death would be swift."

My bare skin prickled with gooseflesh as I listened. I shook out the limp zero-suit and stepped into it. As it connected with my wetwear, the bodysuit tightened up and contracted around my body, supporting and armoring me from my feet to the underside of my jawline. "Which begs a question. Why didn’t they just fucking kill me?"

"We believe the reason is that the controller somehow found it more valuable to keep you alive. The only reasonable conclusion is that you were providing them with data, and-or they felt they could control or influence you."

“Could they do that?”

“Absolutely. Even contained within the eggs, the nanites could be used to monitor you and make psionic suggestions. Can you think of any unusual activities or behaviors you engaged in on your journey? Any strange thoughts, dreams, compulsions…?”

I shuddered. "Now you mention it... when I was on board the branchship, I had this strong, sudden desire to go and find the Navigator, or to at least go and see the ship's bridge. I didn’t obey the urge, fortunately. I just kind of shrugged it off.”

“Yikes,” Gaius said. "The Nu-suht have been real keen to get their greedy little fingers on branchship tech."

“Yes, they have.” Lilia sounded unusually serious and intense, even for her. “The Commander’s anti-interference wards in your wetwear likely mitigated the strength of any compulsions they might have been attempting to push you toward. The swarm controller wouldn’t necessarily know the extent of those wards, or how to combat them. I am grateful you were able to purge them before they discovered a workaround."

“Can’t say I like this much,” Gaius said. “There’s a couple of Nu-suht long-distance FTL yachts in stationary orbit over New Warder. Corporate ships. The Taga Avaya found ‘em.”

“That isn’t TOO weird, given this is one of the few capitalistic outposts on Ideni,” I replied. “But it’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“It is. SPECTER is putting the odds of a straight-forward connection at about 35%.”

Not quite half, but still a significant number across such a vast time and distance. I mulled it over for a few minutes, glancing around the room to see if there were any smoke alarms. When I couldn’t find any, I lit a cigarette and sat forward, resting my elbows on my knees.

“So, here's a hypothetical situation,” I said. “Some Nu-suht faction has its eyes on the Confluence, thinking about war, profit, conquest, or all three. They know that as long as we have Branchship tech and interstitial travel and they don’t, they can't risk picking a fight with us a second time. So someone or something very smart comes up with an idea.”

“Go on,” Lilia said.

“Without Branchships, they can't travel to any Earth but Earth Prime, but there’s probably many Abyssal vectors among them we don’t know about,” I continued. “So… let’s say – hopefully hypothetically – that we have another Nihil.”

Gaius groaned. “We better not have another fucking Nihil.”

Nihil was one of the few Bohu-class demons to ever have entered realspace, a kind of Abyssal general. It had destroyed entire universes before finally being defeated. But thus far, in the collective experience of the Abyssal Response Fleet and its precursors – the corps that would eventually become the Taga Avaya – only Bohu-class had ever been variable enough to demonstrate this kind of flexible, multi-dimensional intelligence.

“Hypothetically,” I said. “Anyway, this thing has some powerful cultists, the same way Nihil did. Two of these cultist vectors are working together: a Chronomancer and a Technopath. These guys have a basic idea of our operating procedures, maybe from watching other hunts, hopefully not from a double agent. They summon a baby violator and seed it with a bunch of parasites and these entangled nanites. They send it to a random near-Prime Earth, which happens to be 33-b. Once the Technopath verifies it’s there, the Chronomancer creates a temporal acceleration bubble in that subway. Maybe some local agents bring it food and drop a bunch of people and dogs down that hole. The demon grows fast. Too fast, relative to the local passage of time. And that’s what fucked with SEER."

Gaius chuckled. "You should be our fucking predicative model, Z.”

“I dislike how plausible this scenario is.” Lilia sounded crabby, which I knew meant she was thinking. “The hypothetical Chronomancer would need to be in the same ReMa tier as our Commander. The Technopath wouldn’t need to be that sophisticated, but would still need to be stronger than I am.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Yeah. I’m positing the worst-case scenario here, but I can’t think of other ways they could have set this up. I’ll be interested to see what the chief has to say."

“Pretty sure it’ll be in Ukrainian or Yiddish and really rude,” Gaius said drily. “All we can do now is keep putting the facts together. Digger, uh, dug around before he closed shift, and learned that the Hellions PMC is the contracted security company for New Warder's mining transports, both on and off-world. They answer directly to someone in New Warder’s Economic Administration Council, which means they directly or indirectly answer to Vornn. There’s a reasonable chance the incident on Earth 33-b and what’s happening on Ideni isn’t connected, and you got flagged in the airport because someone wanted to intimidate IES over a local political issue.”

"Right." I frowned, pulling out weapons from the quantum locker. A long, twisted tri-blade knife. A pistol and ammo in cases. A small rack of grenades. Most of them were flashbangs; there were two anti-personnel frag grenades and three QFDs, Quantum Field Disruptors. I could guess those had been added to my armory because of the nanite revelation. "What about the evidence from the house? Any conclusions?"

"I am familiar with the technology that was used to phase through the floors," Lilia said. "Of course, many kinds of swarms can be used to disassemble and reassemble an environment in-situ. But the phenomenon you described, a swarm capable of allowing a living being to phase through walls or floors while simultaneously facilitating life support, is fairly uncommon. Three species have developed that technology that we know of. The first are the Nephilim of Earth 001-03-A, who utilized it very effectively in their war against the humans. The Vaktus use this kind of technology extensively for both military and mining purposes. And, you guessed it, the Nu-suht. The Varrathul Corporation is the main producer of gear for Khab’s Spaceborne Special Forces. They call them Wraithsuits.”

I sighed, checking over my pistol. “Look, I don’t want to be that guy, but there are an awful lot of Nu-suht connections turning up in this conversation.”

“It’s true. Though Nu-suht wraithsuits are especially designed for and used almost exclusively to board spacecraft in vacuum,” Lilia said. “To my knowledge, they are not well-suited to terrestrial environments due to sensory vulnerabilities. We added those QFDs into your kit just in case. They will destroy swarm cohesion and leave anyone in a wraithsuit naked and probably brain-fried. Just be aware that they will also temporarily cut you off from the Noosphere.”

“Good to know.” I mulled on that as I took a pinch of powdered carbon out of a kit box and used it to re-edge the tri-knife with a little magic. “Well, that’s a lot to think about. I need to get some rest… I report into the hospital at zero-seven hundred, and it’s already heading up on twenty-one hundred hours here.”

“Of course. Please rest well. I and the rest of the team will be infiltrating within three days. We are no longer using the Confluence residence as our base of operations. The Taga are loaning us one of their safehouses.”

“Wow. They really are holding out the olive branch.” Once I was sure my gear was in top condition, I began to pack the weapons back into their kits. “Next they’re going to be offering to make out with us.”

Lilia huffed. “In your dreams.”

“In my dreams,” Gaius said. “Imagine how well a Khem could-”

“Gaius.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I was still chuckling as I signed off.

“Here. Present for you.” I shot Gaius one final encrypted message as I extinguished my cigarette out on my tongue, then flicked it into the open quantum locker and snapped the lid closed. It wasn’t just me being a smartass – one of the protocols for a job like this was to leave no biotraces. I had bleached the glass and every other object I’d used at the other house, too. Someone could rip my DNA from a cigarette butt or a glass and use it for all kinds of shit.

When it was just me and the silence, I took a moment to just breathe. Then I went over to the fridge, and bought the flask of whiskey with the same fake I.D I’d used to sign for the room. What I really wanted was another long, hot shower, but after the parasite revelations, I also didn’t feel like getting naked. The zerosuit would clean me up and prevent biomatter from shedding on the furniture.

I pulled the wooden armchair over to the windows and threw open the blinds. There were only a few very tall buildings in New Warder, almost all of them Palae’an style arcologies. They were surrounded by a forest of short skyscrapers glittering on the horizon. From up here on the hill overlooking the central business district, the city sprawl was almost beautiful. But it reminded me of photos I’d seen of Pyongyang a long time ago, a half-built city both strangely monumental and eerily empty.

“Sorry we let you down, Sh’Chani. Boris.” I flopped into the chair and uncapped the bottle, gazing out at the gritty, aging skyline of a city in quiet distress. “But we’ll try and help the ones you left behind.”