James Osiris Baldwin
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Untitled Sci-Fantasy Thriller Opening Chapter
🕑 Added 2022-12-16 18:15:07 +0000 UTCI've been sick as a dog, and mostly cooped up in bed for the last month. I managed to get covid AND flu in Vegas. It has been a real bad time.
Anyway, I've had this sci-fi demon hunter/thriller idea banging around my head for the better part of two months now, and I had to get it out or it was going to eat my brain. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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The golden moon rose high over the ocean, while the violet one hung just on the horizon. It was Sergeant Jack Morton's favorite time of day, while the sweet winds were still warm, kicking up golden ripples across amethyst colored waters. But like all truly beautiful things, it was fleeting. Soon, Ideni's second moon would join her sister, and both would become smaller and darker against the rich velvet blue-black of an alien night sky.
Jack sipped at a glass of bourbon as he gazed upwards. The Earth liquor was a small comfort for him, a reward for a hard day's work shadowing the woman inside the house behind him. Sh'chani was in her office. She'd asked him to head out onto the balcony so she could take a work call after-hours. Like she did every Friday evening, at exactly 1800 hours. A detail Jack had logged with his handlers.
He decided to try an experiment. "Hey, Chani. Has the lab finally let you go, yet? You should come see this." Jack took a pull off his drink, eyes still rooted to the sky. The lights of New Eden winked to life in the hills below, blossoming as the emerald green jungle turned to black.
"Just a minute!" Chani called back in her musical, polyphonic voice.
Another minute, and the beautiful spectacle would be gone. Jack arched an eyebrow as he took another swallow of liquor, and resisted the urge to go in and bodily pull his new favorite workaholic out by the wrist. Chani worked day and night these days, but before she'd gotten obsessed with her current project, the two of them had been getting closer. Jack knew his Captain would flay him alive if he ever worked out just HOW close. The whole idea of pairing a human CEIDR Ranger with a Fleet biologist was to prevent them fucking on the job. But Palae'a and human hormonal profiles were pretty similar, and, well... life finds a way.
That closeness had turned a little awkward over the last couple weeks, he thought, though given his role in her Sh'chani's life, that was probably for the best. Jack turned his head slightly, and zoomed his vision in on the wedge of light coming out through Chani's office door. From outside, with the balcony door partly open as well, his enhanced hearing picked up the patter of her fingers across a keyboard, and then her hushed voice as she replied to someone in... something. A language his auto-translator didn't recognize.
"Huh." Jack grunted softly to himself, pressing two fingers to his temple. A holographic HUD appeared in front of him. He bypassed the common tasks, thought a password, and opened the CEIDR action center. With half an eye on the door, he logged a coded note in his intelligence notebook, then found the Alien Language Decryptor and set it to record. He gave one last lingering look at the dark ocean, and turned into the house so the decryptor could do its work.
Neither Chani or Jack saw the four dark figures making their way on foot toward the house. The light of the twin moons did not reflect off their matte body armor or sleek, lightless helmets. A cloud of unnatural silence followed them as they ran, masking any accidental sound. All four were the same height - six foot even - with the same wiry, slim, athletic builds. They all carried a duffel over one shoulder, a folded-down compact automatic rifle over the other, and a pair of long knives on their hips. When a car came purring up along the road, headlights blazing, the four melted into the surrounding jungle with the deadly, synchronized grace of sword dancers. Once the danger had passed, they reemerged, and continued on their way toward the gleaming glass-and-carbon building on the hill.
Inside, Jack took a seat in the living room. It was the kind of place only millionaires could have dreamed of on Earth: high beamed ceiling, big fireplace, everything clean and elegant in wood, cream, and polished steel. As he poured himself another shot of bourbon, he tuned back into Sh'chani's whispered conversation.
[Decrypting... 35%. 40%.] The ALD telepathically informed him of its progress as it took the sounds his ears picked up and decompiled them. Jack didn't know how it worked. He knew it was Angeltech, which meant it was some sort of mystical quantum woo-woo sprung from the brows of Voidtouched scientists, the ones they called 'Catalysts'. His concern, as a CEIDR intelligence operative, was that the Palae'a never learned anything about it.
[55%... 65%... Error. Please minimize background interference.]
"Shit." Jack cursed softly to himself, and grimaced as he glanced around the room. Reluctantly, he tweaked his hearing implants to screen out all other audio input save for the speech coming from the distant office.
[Processing. 66%... 70%...]
Beneath his feet, the team of four found their positions at the base of the house. Chani's home was raised on uneven columns that leveled it on the side of the hill without disturbing the surrounding old-growth rainforest. Ecotecture was standard on Ideni. Every building was planned, both in design and placement. As one, the squad crouched down, reviewing the blueprint one last time. When they were done, the leader signaled to his team with one hand.
Wordlessly, two of the others swung their bags around, laying them down among the ferns, and removed two squat cylindrical devices. They felt like bombs, the metal shells pregnant with the promise of violence. A spoken word of power and a twist, and they opened into what looked like lanterns. Their cores seethed with sparks of deep ruby-red energy that cast no light, and once revealed, a wordless cacophony of emotions swept over the team. Hatred. Rage. A deep, savage hunger that made their bellies clench. As the 'lanterns' were set on the ground, the plants around them withered. Ferns and grasses writhed as they shrunk, turning brown, then grey, then white as they ashed. The soil was next, sinking as it drained of color, life and moisture. The team did not have long before the devices would begin to leech from them, too.
The leader made another gesture, and they split into two fireteams. Each pair carried one of the lanterns, plus a bag. The breach had to be precise and sudden. The squad leader held their lantern ahead. Wherever it went, there was a fizzing black effervescence, like the writhing of millions of tiny gnats. The devices were consuming the local reality and stripping it of life, atom by atom.
[85%... 90%... Decryption complete. Language identified as: Unknown Cipher. Translating.]
"... just shadows of shadows right now, but I'll keep looking into it, Ma'am." Sh'chani's formerly unintelligible speech came into focus as Jack's implants translated it into his native tongue, American English. "But yes, if the datapoints come together, we might find ourselves involved in something very strange. Yes... yes, that's always a factor. I request permission to let me follow up the lead on the bats before you commit any resources to this."
Bats? Jack's lips quirked with amusement at the translation. There were no 'bats' on Ideni - it was the closest word in English for the critters that the local Idenites called hoi'pak, winged alien mammals the size of a human thumb. They looked like a cross between a big moth and a hummingbird. They were the main pollinators in this part of Ideni, like bees on Earth. A lot of people put up feeders for them, Jack included. After PT in the mornings - before Sh'chani was out of her sleeping tank - he often went outside to watch them hum around the feeder and flowers. What the hell was Chani going on about?
'Send any recorded speech and the translations to CENTCOMM, Classification Delta.' Jack closed his eyes, concentrating as he issued the orders to his task manager. He tapped the edge of his empty glass with a nail. 'Title it 'The Bats and the Bees'
[Understood. Do you wish to submit commentary?]
'Yeah, dictated notation. 'Sir, not sure why Sh'chani needed to talk about Hoi'pak in some kind of encrypted cipher-language, but here's what I was able to catch. First time we've been able to confirm coded communications between her and the Fleet in the last twenty-four days of service. Main points of interest: the Fleet may be committing 'resources' to investigating whatever she's talking about. Observation suggests she makes a call in the same window of time every Friday, which suggests to me she's reporting to an intelligence handler. I'll tune into whatever intel I can next week and report. Morton out.'
Inside her office, Sh'chani sighed as she disconnected from her commlink and leaned back in her chair. Her crest of hair-like tentacles coiled restlessly around her shoulders, pulsing orange and black. She lay her hands on the desk, let her eyelids flick over her big, liquid black eyes, and drew a deep breath through nose and gills. Slowly, the agitated colors of her skin began to settle and even out.
The lapse in skin-discipline, as the Palae'a called it, annoyed her. Chani lowered her chin, turning her head slightly toward the living room. She could smell Jack out there, the faint scent of cologne and bourbon and human musk. Chani's cheeks flushed with blue as she pushed herself up. Before Jack, her opinion of humankind had been low. Greedy, rapacious, hysterical, impulsive primates, with their dull skins that expressed no emotion, no colors other than shades of tan and brown. But then the Fleet had assigned a human to her security detail. At first, she'd been offended. The idea of a human protecting a Palaean was absurd to the extreme. They hadn't been able to defend their planet against the Voidsent. But after a week or so, she'd begun to pay attention to just how quick Jack was, mentally and physically. Gradually, she came to recognize the expressiveness found in his hands and eyes. They were as blue as the seas of her homeworld. Jack couldn't show how he felt through his skin, but those eyes could convey emotion in ways no Palaean's could. They were bright when he was happy, clouded and dark when he was upset... or angry.
Jack would be angry if he knew what she was looking into. And rightfully so.
'Get a hold of yourself, Chani. There's no evidence. Just rumors.' Chani hesitated before she left her desk, mastering the strange impulse to tell him what she'd heard. To spill everything, no matter how ridiculous and tenuous it seemed. It involved his species - an orphaned species, without a homeworld. Ideni had slowly but surely become humanity's second home. The first new generations of human children were being born here. But if she was right... what then? What would the Federation Council do? To Jack? To all his kind?
Behind her, a slim, dark form began to slide silently up through the floor, like oil.
Chani resolved to tell him what she could as she pushed the door open, only to see something that made no sense. Two humanoid figures were rising from the ground behind the sofa where Jack was sitting. They were as soundless as ghosts, and just as immaterial. It froze her in place for several seconds as her well-trained scientist's brain tried to make sense of what she was seeing, and failed.
Seconds were all they needed.
Jack's reflexes kicked in before he'd processed the stifled scream and the gurgle from behind his seat. He leaped off the sofa, pulling his pistol from its holster and whirling to see three silent figures. Between them, framed in a triangle, was Sh'chani. One carbon-black, nanofiliment-edged knife protruded through her throat. The tip of the other thrust out through the front of her chest. Her gills fluttered and clamped as her mouth moved, pale blue-green blood welling up behind her teeth. Huge black eyes stared at Jack in shock as she sunk bonelessly to her knees.
"CHANI!" Jack sprung away like a cricket, lightning-fast. But he couldn't hear himself. He couldn't hear anything as he mouthed curses into an impenetrable wall of silence. No crash, either, as the fourth assailant he hadn't seen waited for the moment that the Ranger landed - and gunned him down from fifteen feet away. The machine gun made a barely audible thumping sound as Jack's body spun and dropped.
Stunned, still fighting to get upright, Jack ignored the flashing warnings his HUD relayed to him. His nanite healswarm injected him with combat stims as it converged on the entry and exit wounds, plugging them so he didn't bleed out. He clawed himself up into a lop-sided, lurching crawl, shouting soundlessly, eyes twisting up to stare into a blank, visored face. The intruder grasped his head and pressed something to it. There was a soundless pop and a flash. Jack convulsed as the EMP tore his brain apart, and his blue, blue eyes turned glassy as he collapsed to the floor.
The squad leader gestured crisply to the assassin, talking with his hands. "Any transmission between his wetwear and CENTCOMM?"
"Negative," the other signed back.
"Ash 'em." The leader gave their team a thumbs' up. Smoothly, the lantern-bearers converged on each twitching corpse. The devices were set down on the bodies. As soon as they touched blood, they began to greedily feed on the vanishing lifeforce and the matter that sustained it. Within minutes, the corpses withered and shrank into mummy-like, desiccated husks. Brown, at first, until the very substance of their bodies began to break down.
While that took place, two intruders swept the house. Tiny flecks of blood were swiped away. A small vial of assembler nanites repaired stray bullet holes. A broken vase was swept up and bagged. When the living room was pristine, the leader of the squad strode back into Sh'chani's office. They pulled a wire jack from their bodysuit and plugged it into Chani's computer, then let the suit's hacking tool do its work. Within a minute, it had figured out the passwords and biometrics, emulated the latter, and was in the cloud downloading everything Chani had ever shared between this computer, her workplace's computers, and her handler.
While they waited, the leader looked back to survey the state of the corpses. Chani and Jack lay as they'd fallen, their bodies now nothing more than intricately detailed sculptures of white ash. Pinpoints of black nothingness crawled over and through them, like fleas.
'I've got the data. Sweep them up', the leader signed. They pulled the jack free and let it snap back into into their helmet. 'And cap those NullLights before they infect us.'
The others saluted and got to work. It took all three of them to return the lanterns into their containment configuration. The NullLights resisted being sealed, waves of malevolence, hatred and hunger radiating from them as they fought against the crowd of hands working to close them. But the devices were well-crafted, and after a short struggle, both of them were locked back into their containment. Only once the venomous relics were contained did the last items in the duffel bags come out. Portable vacumn cleaners.
Neatly, professionally, the assassins used them to suck the ashed corpses into collection chambers. Chani's body took five. Jack's took four. The human's frozen expression of horror was the last thing to vanish, hoovered away to leave nothing behind but a nebulous feeling of wrongness, and a sterile, soullessly clean floor.
