Print This Post |  Email This Post

The following is an excerpt from a science fiction novelette that Shannon wrote in 2005. He intends to return to it once he’s finished the Heretics Quest storyline.

Anubis strode down the hall. Already a giant of a man, the boots, armored leather trench coat, and ebony jackal helmet expanded his two meter tall, barrel-chested frame to mythic proportions. The hallway leading to the crime scene had been darkened as part of the standard containment protocols. Despite the dark, his helmet’s low-light and thermographic sensors easily detected the civilians peeking through cracked doors. The helmet’s eyes lit with an ethereal, iridescent blue fire. Augmented by the helmet’s synthesizer, his voice contorted into a guttural, demonic hiss. “I am Anubis, Fifth Ruling Citizen of High Town, and this floor has been declared the scene of a shadow infraction. Please remain in your domiciles until further notice.”

Doors shut like dominos up and down the length of the hallway.

Houston stood fifty meters farther down, illuminated by the light that spilt out of the open domicile door. He was taller than Anubis, by a good six centimeters, and even broader across the shoulders. His neck was thicker than most people’s thighs, but Anubis figured the muscle was required to hold up the thick, impenetrable skull that hid behind his man’s tanned skin, square jaw and rugged good looks. Like Anubis, Houston wore black leather pants, matching leather trench coat, and T-shirt. As a personal touch, he sported dark cowboy boots and matching cowboy hat. His trench coat was pushed back behind the holsters on his belt. They held matching heavily modified .50 caliber automatic pistols.

Houston grinned as his leader walked up to him. “Damn, Fiver, I never get used to that spooky shit. You sure you didn’t miss your calling? I hear the circus is in town, and they need a boogey man.”

Anubis pushed the snout of his helmet up, revealing his face. He shot his second-in-command an annoyed look. “We’re among sheep, Houston. Keep it professional. What do we have?”

Houston held his cigarette to his mouth with one hand and motioned towards the open door with a sweep of his other hand. Holding the smoke in his lungs he rasped, “Of course, Citizen Five. We have a murder.”

Anubis walked into the room. “Call Scope and Source off of containment patrol and get the hall lights turned back on. Tell Source to round up someone who can interface the Tower diagnostics. Tell Scope to monitor the comms for Sentinel activity.”

As Houston relayed the orders to his fellow Shades, Anubis took in the scene. He lowered his helmet’s snout and activated the digital recorder. There was not much to see; it was a small place with very few furnishings.

The first room was a living area, and it was completely empty – no furniture, no comm, no vid screen, no wall decorations. The room to the right was the dine-in kitchen. It was also barren.

As he crossed into the living room again, Source came across the comm. “I have the maintenance guy here, Boss. He has his interface with him.”

Anubis radioed back, “Have him bring up the A/V feeds for the room, access logs, comm records if there are any, and find out who leases this space.”

He crossed into the next room from the living area. It was a bathroom complete with toilet, shower stall, a large sink and a wall-to-wall vanity mirror. A spider web of cracks blanketed the entire mirror surface. There were four concentrated hubs where the mirror had been struck repeatedly. Anubis looked closer and realized each point of impact held traces of blood and dark hair. He could tell the order of the impacts from the increasing amount of tissue and fluid that was caked on the glass shards. Blood splatters marred the otherwise impeccable counter top and sink.

Scope came up on the comm. “Boss, Sentinels are enroute. I count at least five.”

Anubis swore under his breath before issuing his orders. He had hoped to get in and out before the Sentinels arrived. They were much faster than usual.

“All right,” he said. “Scope, you and Houston collapse into the living area and stall them until I finish in the bedroom. Source, set up for a crossfire in the domicile across the hall. Find out which sheep called the tin cans and be ready to pull a double blind. If it comes to shooting, go for armor kills.” He twirled on his heel and ran to the last room.

The bedroom was a coffin. The bed was barely more than a fancy cot, made military-style. The wall adjacent to the door held drawers for personal belongings. One bare, glaring florescent light rod illuminated the small space with a ghastly pallor.

The room held only two things of interest: a collage and a dead body. Of the two, Anubis was drawn more to the collage. He’d seen many dead bodies, but the collage was something new.

It was made from scraps of magazine clippings glued to 30×40 cm piece of poster board. The glue was set, but still smelled fresh; some one had worked on it very recently. The images depicted women in all styles of attire: business, formal, casual, exercise, lingerie, nude. All of them seemed content or at peace. Many phrases were pasted between and over the images. One said, “Rain Blows, but It Makes Rain Bows!” Another stated, “There is a God, and She loves us.” The theme of the piece seemed to say, “Be happy. Everything is going to be all right.”

Anubis scanned it carefully with the recorder and optical zoom, ensuring he had good coverage of the collage. He was certain it was important. Some one had taken a great deal of time and care to make it. It was left behind for a reason.

Was the picture a threat? Or was it a warning? He could not decide. As he pondered its meaning, his thoughts returned to the broken mirror. It was a collage of sorts as well, with all its disjointed pieces, but it portrayed a less pleasant theme. It seemed to say, “Everything is NOT all right.” He wondered if it was also a threat or a warning. His gut told him the two collages were tied together some how.

The dead man laid face down, his feet pointed towards the door. His arms rested on either side, fists pointed away from the door. He was short with a slight build, and fully clothed in cheap High Town fashion. His hair matched the color of the hair stuck in the bathroom mirror. Dark, dry blood had pooled around his head, and he had a small round bullet hole in his back, centered between his shoulder blades.

Anubis grasped the body by the shoulder and turned it over. The forehead had been smashed in. Slivers of the mirror glittered in the congealed blood and matted hair. If the man had been a High Towner, the RFI chip in his forehead was most certainly smashed. Anubis scanned the victim’s forehead anyway, but the scanner picked up no reading.

Most of the man’s chest lay in chunks of bone and flesh on the floor where he’d been shot at point blank range. No blood pooled from the gun wound like there had been from the head wound. It seemed clear that he had died from the head wound and had been dead for some time before he was shot, but to what purpose?
Anubis sorted through the dead meat until he found the bullet embedded in the concrete floor. It was a .45 ACP hollow point, nothing special or difficult to attain, not even in High Town’s locked-down markets.

Anubis uncurled the fingers of one dead hand and scanned the finger prints. While he waited for the results, he searched the body for any other clues. The clothing held nothing. The mouth, chest cavity and rectum contained nothing out of the ordinary, but the other fist clenched a small note, hand-written in black ink. It read:

Two pictures – forged and shattered.
One glue and paper, the other glass and smoke.
Which is true? Which one matters?
One that is made, or the one that is broke?

Anubis placed the note and the poster board collage in a plastic evidence bag he pulled from a pocket in his coat. He thought about the riddle. It obviously referenced the collage and the mirror. He focused on the second line. “Glass and smoke” was the mirror, but there was no smoke in the domicile. The words danced around the idea of smoke and mirrors, suggested that all was not as it seemed, hinted at something hidden.

He hovered over the body, lost in thought, until the insight hit him like a brick. The riddle was a clue to another clue. He walked to the bathroom again, turned on the hot water in the shower, and closed the door. While the steam built up, he commed in and checked with his team. “What about the A/V feeds and access logs, Source?”

“It’s a clusterfuck, Boss. Someone hit the tower AI with a spider virus today. They killed it before the comm records were poisoned, but all A/V records and access logs for the entire floor are corrupted. We got nothing. No one has called in or out of that domicile in weeks. It’s between tenants.”

“I copy,” Anubis said. He opened the bathroom door and looked at the mirror. Just as he expected, another riddle lay on the glass, revealed by the steam from the shower. It read:

You won’t find me here, Five.
I was here, but now I ain’t.
If you want to remain alive,
Come to hell and find a Saint.

Anubis recorded the riddle, turned off the water, and wiped the writing from the glass. He shook the jitters that crept over his skin. “Hell” was probably a reference to Low Town. A “Saint” was a crook who stole from High Town and spread the wealth in Low Town. The clue was too vague. Why did the riddle address him directly? Too many questions, no answers. He returned to the bedroom to search the drawers.

Magazines filled them, mostly publications geared towards women. It was odd to find magazines so high where paper barely existed anymore. In High Town, almost every publication came across the Net to vids, handhelds or monocles. Paper print was a Low Town commodity.

Many pictures and letters had been cut out of the magazines, more than had been on the single collage. Anubis took the drawers out to the main room and dumped the magazines into the floor. He pointed to the pile and said to Houston, “Check through as much of that as you can. Loose pictures, business cards, data drives, anything.”

Houston rolled his eyes and grunted. “Hrrumph!”

Anubis ignored him and activated his comm. “Source? Have you found who called us in? Do you have a visual on the Sentinels?”

Source came back. “Boss, no one in this building has called any Sentinel station in six hours. No one here ratted us out. I don’t know how they knew, but they’re definitely coming for us. They’re coming up both lifts now, to this floor. I count five in each lift.”

“TEN? Godfuckingdammit.” A chill tangoed its way down his spine. Everything was wrong.

“Yeah,” Source said, the worry evident in his voice. “There’s ten, all in sixth gen armor.”

Anubis had his top three Shades with him, but ten sentinels were too many. It felt like a trap. He needed to spring it to see who had set it, but he didn’t want to risk his men in a situation that was intentionally arranged against them.

“Men,” he commed. “Sound off. What’re you packing?”

Houston keyed his comm without looking way from the gutted magazines. “Loaded with hollow points. One reload of the same. One load of armor piercing.”

Scope came in second. “Stun Balls in my .45. Street howitzer is loaded with phosphorous buck shot. Have one drum of EMP sabots.”

Source finished the round up. “I have hollow points or slugs all around, but I got two EMP grenades too.”

As Anubis considered the very real possibility that they had been set up, anger saturated his mind. It blasted away the doubts, questions and worries, leaving a calm cold in its wake where there was no emotion, nothing but the will to survive. In the freezer his mind had become, the situation became clear, the tactics obvious, and the plan crystallized into razor-edged perfection.

“Ok, boys,” he said, “They ain’t sending ten sentinels to chat over beer and pretzels. Something else is going on here. Something I can’t see yet. So no kills. Do you hear me? NO KILLS. We’re being set up, boys. We can’t give them what they want.

“Scope, switch to the sabots and haul your ass to the west end of the hall.

“Source, get your EMPs ready and change position to the east end. Get that techie ready to pull a double blind. Throw the switch when I say, then toss the EMPs.

“Scope, use the sabots to pick off any in the hall that the EMPs miss.

“Source, if Scope takes fire, bounce a few of those hollow points off their helmets and see if you can get them to turn around and spread out their fire power.

“I’ll handle the ones in the room. Houston, switch to AP and back me up. If there’s one in the doorway, he’s your first target. Take him out to block any of the others from coming in, but if you can’t guarantee an armor kill, do NOT take the shot. We can’t take the heat for killing any of these stupid fuckers. Everyone got it?”

Houston swapped clips out in his pistols. “Got it.”

Scope ran out into the hallway. “Roger.”

“In my new position. The techie is ready,” Source said.

Houston stood up and kicked the pile of magazines. “There ain’t anything in here, Fiver. Just a bunch of feminazi bullshit.”

When Anubis didn’t reply, Houston lit a cigarette and regarded his leader carefully as he drew on the cancer stick. “We’ve been set up before, survived worse odds that this before. But you’re spooked, I can tell.”

Anubis growled under his helmet. “I’m not spooked, Houston. Nothing scares me. You know that.”

Houston held up his hands and shrugged. “That’s true,” he said, “but something has you on edge. I can see it in the way you’re standing there. I heard it in your voice when you commed Source about A/V logs. We’ve been at this together too long. You can’t bullshit me.”

Anubis’s armored jackal helmet turned away from the Texan as the elevator dinged. They both heard the doors open. They heard the servos working the joints, the pneumatic pressure releases, the industrial, floor-shuddering clomping of the armored feet that labored down the hall towards them.

Houston lit a fresh cigarette, pocketed his lighter, and drew his hand cannons, clicking the safeties off as they cleared the brims of their holsters.

Without looking back at his second-in-command, Anubis said, “Tonight is the beginning of the end game.”

The dreadful robotic noise of the power armor drew nearer in the hall way. Houston threw a nervous look towards the door.

Anubis stood motionless, head lowered in thought. “If we get split up and I have to lay low, get as many of our Shades to the Low Town safe houses as you can. If you haven’t seen me or heard from me in a week’s time, take everyone you can muster to Boulder. If I don’t find you there, I’m dead.”

Houston drew on his cigarette and nodded. The noise of the approaching power armor filled the air. Houston used the muzzle of his pistol to push back the brim of his cowboy hat.

Anubis left his pistols in their holsters. He expected the Sentinels to cram as many of their number into the domicile as they could manage, in an attempt to dominate the situation with their sheer mass. Even with heavy ordinance, most people would have no chance against a single suit of power armor. Fighting the suits hand-to-hand was insanity, but Anubis had an edge. In fact, he had two.

Under his armored coat, strapped to each arm, the Shade Commander wore retracted Reaver blades. Designed and forged by the AI War Masters, each blade was made of an alloy that still defied the understanding of the world’s best human metallurgists. No one knew how the machines made the blades, but they were nearly unbreakable. When deployed, each looked like a curved, serrated lightning bolt, and both edges were augmented with monomolecular technology, a sharpening method that rendered a knife edge only one molecule thick, nearly infinitely sharp.

By themselves, they were the most lethal of weapons, capable of cutting flesh, bone, and even sheet steel with ease, but the machines had not been happy with simple metal blades. They coupled them with electro-magnetic field generators and plasma inducers, allowing the Reavers to sheathe their blades in a fine sheen of super heated plasma. With the plasma activated, a Reaver blade could cut through nearly anything. During the war, Reavers used them to carve through tank armor and vault doors. They were the stuff of nightmares, a technology designed to eradicate all human life on the entire planet.

The blades were not legal. They served as symbols of fear for every living being in New America. Years and years after the war, the collective social conscience still shuddered at the mere mention of a Reaver or their weaponry. Reaver tech was illegal for anyone outside of the military. Possession of Reaver tech usually earned life imprisonment. Use of Reaver tech earned a death sentence, with no exception.

Anubis had two Reaver blades. Each worth a King’s ransom, they were the only legacy he had of his father, who had salvaged them during the war. Few people knew he possessed them. He left few living witnesses. It bothered him to leave the Sentinels alive with knowledge of his prizes, but he saw no better option.
A man resided inside each hulking mass of armor, weapons, and robotics that comprised a Sentinel Power Suit, but the flesh and blood humanity was more like a flanged brain than a pilot. Anubis and his Shades would soon face sixth generation armor – not the most advanced or dangerous, but still a very real threat, made more so by his hesitation to kill the pilots. Disabling the armor was much harder than killing the life inside the box, but he couldn’t see all the angles, and dead Sentinels would not win him any favors in High Town. Fighting them was bad enough.

The Sentinels arrived. As the suits twisted and contorted to fit through the man-sized door way, Anubis saw the electric minigun each suit sported on its right arm was locked, cocked, and ready to rock. They crammed four suits into the little room, which was about two suits too many. Anubis felt a glimmer of hope.
The lead Sentinel offered the customary salute by clanging his metallic fist against his chest plate, just to the left of his suit number.

Assuming the dignified stature of the city’s ruling elite, Anubis stood stiffly at attention and returned the salute. “You have the privilege of addressing the Fifth Ruling Citizen, Sentinel. What can I do for you?”

“Citizen Five, by order of the Fourth Ruling Citizen, we are here to place you and your Shades under arrest.” The mechanical voice that emanated from the sealed helmet gave no indication that a man was the source of the words.

Citizen Five activated the helmet synthesizer and answered with his own inhuman hiss. “Citizen Four has no authority to arrest me or my Shades. Only the First Citizen or the Council has that power. Fuck off, canner.”

The glossy black eyes in his helmet blazed to life with blue fire. Citizen Five knew it wouldn’t frighten the Sentinels, but that was not his intention. It was a signal to Houston that it was almost time.

The minigun mounted to the lead Sentinel’s arm spun up to speed, ready to fire. The tin can shook its head. “Citizen, we can do this easy, or we can do this really easy. Don’t give us a reason.”

The threat fell on deaf ears. Citizen Five had fallen away, and all civilized pretenses had fallen with him. Only Anubis remained. The shift had been fast, too subtle for the Sentinels to notice, but Houston saw it – the change in stance, the tilt of the jackal head, the clenched fingers, the flare of light that erupted from the helmet’s eyes – it was time to go work.

Anubis whispered into his comm. “Now, Source.”

The lights went out. Total darkness fell on them all. Before he shut off his own low-light sensors, Anubis saw infrared beacons activate on the power armor, indicating their low-light systems had engaged, just as he had expected.

A split second later, power surged back into the tower lighting systems. Every bulb in the room erupted like a baby sun, glaring to life, brighter and hotter than the system could handle, searing the light condensers in the Sentinel helmets, blinding the human eyes inside the helmets. Below the sound of the exploding lights and yelling man-machines, Anubis heard the clanking of Source’s EMP grenades as they bounced down the hallway. They detonated without a sound. The tin cans in the hallway jerked and seized up as an intense electromagnetic wave saturated their electronic systems.

The emergency lights came on and lit the entire 75th floor with dim, sparse beams of yellow light. Anubis brought his helmet and other electronic systems back online.

The metal inside the walls took most of the bite out of the EMP pulse, enough to weaken it below the EMP hardening threshold of the sixth gen armor, and the Sentinels directly in front of Anubis and Houston were barely fazed. The lead Sentinel raised his cannon to fire at the Shades.

In the hall way, Sentinels barked orders and yelled for back-up while they tried to purge their armor of the sudden epileptic fits that plagued them. They staggered and jerked, knocked into each other, stumbled into the wall, and carried on like drunks. The boom of Scope’s street howitzer rumbled through the walls, and the Sentinel confusion increased as eight-gauge EMP sabots streaked down the hallway, spiraling rings of smoke in their wake as they cut into the armor and discharged massive surges of electricity. Mini guns whirred to life and returned fire down the hallway. Chunks of concrete fell from the wall in a shower of grit and powder. Source popped out and sent a deluge of lead into the back of the canners’ heads, distracting them from Scope’s position. His bullets zinged and wailed as they ricocheted off the hardened armor.

Inside the room, chaos reigned in full glory. With a chilling howl, Anubis launched himself at the lead Sentinel, trying to get inside his reach and away from the danger of the minigun. The cannon fired anyway, too late. The rounds sang through empty space where Anubis had been and punched through the domicile wall. The Reaver blades sprung from their casings and locked into place just beyond Anubis’s clenched fists. They glowed ghostly white as the plasma encased the metal.
“Reaver tech! –“ the lead Sentinel’s warning was cut short as Anubis sunk a blade into the power couplings that fed the helmet systems. He swung the other blade down in a powerful arc and sheared the mini gun from his enemy’s arm.

Armor piercing rounds hurtled past him, scarce centimeters from his jackal snout as Houston shot over him and around him to hit and cripple the Sentinel in the doorway. The 50 caliber automatics roared a fast and thunderous duet as the Texan’s rounds chewed through the power armor with surgical precision, hitting vital systems, stopping crucial power supplies, mangling servos and hydraulics, but missing human flesh. It took almost all of his ammo to cripple the suit, when only three, maybe four, rounds could have killed the pilot. He emptied his last few rounds into another tin can that jockeyed for position behind his boss. He dropped clips and reloaded with hollow points.

Anubis sliced the circuits and servos in the hips and shoulders of the lead Sentinel and turned to face the one that had maneuvered behind him. It jerked as Houston shot it, allowing Anubis to dive and roll out of the line of fire that erupted from the mini gun. He came up on his feet, growling deep in his throat, blades raised. The Sentinel swung a massive metal fist at him, but Anubis ducked low, allowing the fist to swoop uselessly past and crush a crater into the concrete wall. The man lunged between his adversary’s armored legs, rolled onto his haunches and twirled around. Blazing like lasers, the blades severed the load bearing servos in the armor’s ankles and knees. Anubis leapt onto the armored back, chopping at the circuitry in the neck and at the weaponry on its arm. Another mini gun fell away to the floor. Another helmet was rendered dark and powerless. As the armor slammed face-first into the ground, he cut functionality from the arms.

“Boss!” Houston yelled.

Anubis spun to see what had put so much stress in his man’s voice. Houston had his back to the wall. His face was obscured in shadow cast by the brim of his hat, but the angry red cherry of his cigarette illuminated a determined scowl of intense concentration. Arms stretched out before him, his automatics flashed like fiery strobe lights as they slung lead at the cause of his distress. The remaining Sentinel had him cornered and advanced slowly. Unable to penetrate the power armor with hollow points, Houston shot at his enemy’s head and gun arm to slow him down and make it impossible to bring the cannon to bear. The wall all around the Texan was riddled with near-misses. As Anubis turned and saw the situation, the slides on the automatics locked to the rear as they fired their last rounds. The Sentinel grabbed the Texan by his armored coat and pinned him to the wall. He brought the mini gun right up to the man’s face.

“BOSS!” Houston’s cigarette fell from the corner of his mouth as he yelled the second time.

The Reaver blade seared through the air, trailing a white-hot arc behind it. The cannon fell to the ground, along with human arm it was attached to. The Sentinel screamed and picked Houston off the ground. Anubis spun around the Sentinel’s back and came up on the other side. Plasma cleaved into the armor, and the other arm fell away, dumping Houston back to the ground. The Sentinel screamed again, but Anubis cut the power to his helmet, silencing the scream in mid-screech. In another second, the armor lay on the ground, its legs crippled, and it had two twitching, cauterized stumps where arms had been. Houston stood and brushed the cigarette ashes from his coat.

“Took you long enough” he said and then laughed with relief.

Anubis looked at the four sets of broken armor at his feet. Open electric conduits sparked and fizzled. Hydraulic fluid leaked all over the floor, dark as blood, but thicker and slicker. The air stank of gun powder and burnt electronics.

“I had my hands full, you ungrateful ass.”

Houston grinned and fumbled in his coat for a new cigarette. He let it dangle from his lip as he straightened his cowboy hat.

Anubis bent over one of the twitching suits of power armor. One Reaver blade faded as it cooled, its plasma inducer deactivated to conserve power. The remaining active blade cut the anchors that secured the Sentinel helmet. The ruined steel pot fell free and clanked on the concrete floor, revealing a human head soaked with sweat. Anubis looked to Houston as he cut away the remaining three helmets.

“We still have work to do, cowboy. Clear west until you reach Scope. Make sure all suits are disabled. Check Scope, and then sweep back, releasing the helmets. I don’t want anyone suffocating. I’ll clear east and check on Source, and then meet you back in the center.

Houston lit his coffin nail and nodded. Anubis activated his comm.

“Source, Scope, two men coming out. Cease fire and check in.”

“I’m hit at least once.” Source said. “The bastards slung AP rounds all the way. They were trying to kill us. I’m leaking, but I can’t get my armor off to see how bad. Shoulder is busted. The tech took two in the chest and one in the head. They blew right through the wall and took him out.”

Scope spoke up. “I took a couple hits on my outside leg. Damned AP rounds cut right through my gel packs. I got the bleeding stopped, but I think one round is lodged in my hip.”

Under his helmet, Anubis chewed his lip. Sentinels did not lock and load AP rounds except for special missions. They had been sent to kill him and his Shades. Two men wounded were better than he had hoped for, but still too much to forgive. Some one would answer for the injuries. Blood would be rendered for blood.

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
 Loading ... | 33 views | 3 comments

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•