part0032

Strunk had led him back through Darkside’s arteries until they’d reached the barrio. The enforcer’s gait was limping but determined. Tallow candles, electric lights and oil lamps flickered in the multistoried tenement complex. The refuse pile of old Challenger Park was less pungent on the ground floor. The arching-X of the skyway crisscrossed above them.

“This way,” Strunk said, his voice muted and tinny. Like the threadbare clothes they wore, the filter mask covering the lower half of Ruben’s face was past its prime. It worked well to disguise his face from the recognition software analyzing the feed from the cameras they passed, but from the inside, it smelled like they’d strained human remains through Challenger Park.

Ignoring Darksiders like they ignored him, Strunk followed the circumference of the barrio at an unremarkable pace. Ruben had asked few questions after they’d witnessed Tony’s capture, and he kept silent now. Partly because it seemed difficult for Strunk to talk and partly to avoid drawing attention to them. Whatever had happened at Point Bravo, whatever miracle had saved Strunk’s life, it hadn’t been without a cost. Strunk’s breath now carried a low wheeze. He was paying a very personal price for their decision to have Brackin deactivate their implants to avoid being tracked. In the end, had that even really made a difference?

“Here,” Strunk said.

They’d reached a dull doorway not unlike all the other dull doorways they’d passed. It stood near the alley Ruben knew well, the one that led to the Fleshway.

Strunk rapped twice on the door, and the cliché of the moment would have amused Ruben, if not for their dire circumstances. Several locks moved in their tumblers from the other side.

“Prepare yourself,” Strunk said.

The door cracked, then opened wider, its hinges squealing. The grating sound shivered Ruben’s spine. Strunk ushered him through.

Far from the doorway, candles lit the far end of a wide, long room. Though there were no windows facing outward to the barrio, Strunk had taken the understandable precaution of keeping light around the door to a minimum. The enforcer followed Ruben in, and the hinges squealed again. Multiple tumblers re-secured the door.

Ruben took in their refuge. Long benches arranged more or less in equidistant rows stretched forward to the front of the room and the candles’ dancing light. Through the slap-dashed paint on the walls, the old UN emblem bled through. Randomly, it seemed, various examples of religious iconography hung on the walls.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” The voice came from behind him, in the shadows near the door. It was young and male and angry. “Used to be a church. Can you fucking believe that?”

Strunk shambled past him and Ruben’s eyes lit on a teenager, his face twisted with sarcasm. Ruben blinked once to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. If he’d made a list of people he’d least expect to see hiding in an abandoned church in Darkside, this kid would have made the top five.

The young man stepped forward. “Mr. Qinlao.”

Ruben took the proffered hand, which felt supple and smooth in his own. The unmarked, untried hand of the Syndicate Corporation’s next generation. When had he, Ruben wondered, gone from being part of that group to the one it would replace?

“I want to thank you for all you’ve done to protect my pop,” Tony Junior said. It sounded rehearsed. Without waiting for Ruben’s acknowledgment, Tony Taulke’s son turned away. “Hey, Strunk, turn up the feed.”

The enforcer upped the volume on the wallscreen.

“I…” Ruben raised his voice to be heard over The Real Story . He was still wrapping his head around the appearance of Anthony Taulke III. “How?”

The expression on Junior’s face twisted again, but his eyes never left the wallscreen.

“Bought my way here from Callisto on a gashauler carrying refugees. When they took my pop’s ship, I was on the station, uh, sampling the locals.” Tony Junior found a smile. “Saved my life.”

“What about your mother?” Ruben asked.

The smile faded, and now Junior did look at Ruben. “I dunno. I wanted to help, but…” The teenager seemed to be searching for the right words to say. Or maybe the right excuse? “They’d already taken the ship. I figured my pop would want me here.”

The words made sense, but they were spoken in a thin tone. Ruben wondered how many times Junior had repeated them to himself on the long trip from the outer system. Was the regret on his face for leaving his mother behind genuine or a façade of projected emotion? Tony Taulke had been excellent at effecting the proper reaction to a given situation. As he regarded Junior, Ruben wondered if the talent was genetic.

“I gotta piss,” Junior said. He disappeared deeper into the shadows of the church.

“Volume down,” Ruben said, approaching Strunk. The enforcer slumped on the bench he’d collapsed on. He really did seem a shell of his former self. “What happened?”

Strunk roused himself, sat up a little straighter. “The ’hauler dumped ’em all here in Darkside. Junior pinged me on the black star band and—”

“No,” Ruben interrupted, “I mean, with you. Back at Point Bravo. You look like shit.”

When Strunk inhaled, it sounded wet. “You should see … the other guys.”

The humor was there, but the bravado of Strunk’s attitude—the ballsy brawler Ruben had reined in when they’d first crash landed in the Roadrunner —that was gone. Ruben had wished then for a Strunk who was more compliant, more respectful. Now, seeing the big man so less than merely made him sad.

“How did you get out of there?” The question he’d wanted to ask since first seeing Strunk in the alleyway.

“I took a partial shot from a stunner,” Strunk said. “Lucky to still be here at all. But we’ve got more important things to discuss.”

“Volume up ,” Junior said, returning. “Jesus, look at that.”

The banner at the bottom of the screen read The Werewolf in Chains . Above it, footage ran of Tony Taulke being wheeled out of Brackin’s clinic. The doctor could be seen but not heard, protesting his own innocence as he too was hauled away in handcuffs. A commentator began to lecture over the images, praising Elissa Kisaan and Darkside’s Marshals Service for securing the most hated man in the solar system. The images rolling now beneath the commentator’s speech showed protestors around Darkside calling for Tony’s execution, their fists in the air punctuating their chants.

“Mute,” Strunk said. When the screen failed to comply, he said again louder and with effort, “Mute .”

“We gotta get him outta there,” Junior said immediately. “We gotta rescue Pop.”

Strunk started to speak, but Ruben saved him the trouble.

“We will. But we have to be smart about it.”

Junior advanced. “See, so here’s the thing,” he said, standing over Ruben. “Now that Pop’s a prisoner, I’m in charge of the Company.” The boy let that hang in the air a moment. “And what I say goes.”

Something inside Ruben settled from his chest into his stomach. It was like a wrestler finding his center of gravity as he prepared himself for the coming struggle. He stood, slowly. He felt Strunk’s eyes on the both of them.

“You are, it would seem, destined to succeed your father as the head of the Taulke Faction,” Ruben said.

“Head of the Company!”

Ruben made a noncommittal gesture. “Perhaps.” Before Junior could protest, Ruben held up a finger. “A few minutes ago, you thanked me for keeping your father alive. That took planning. And a lot of luck.”

“Luck is something we ain’t full of,” Strunk said.

Nodding, Ruben added, “And that makes planning that much more important.”

Junior’s eyes crawled over Ruben’s shoulder. “There she is.”

Ruben turned. Cassandra Kisaan sat in her chair atop the UN building in old New York. The camerabot projected a long view of her. Her hands draped the arms of her chair, and one leg stretched outward. She resembled Lincoln sitting in his underwater memorial in Washington. The almost unrecognizable slag of Elise Kisaan’s head on a pike in the foreground obliterated that association.

This could be it. Where she announced Tony Taulke’s destiny to the solar system. This could be where Ruben failed in his sister Ming’s request that he protect the man who’d founded the Company and done whatever it took to keep it unified. This could be the true beginning of the end of the Syndicate Corporation.

“Volume up,” Ruben said softly.

“…we are breaking your chains, one link at a time,” Cassandra said. The camera zoomed in, and the grotesque trophy of Cassandra’s ascension passed from the frame. “Anthony Taulke II, the lead tyrant of a nest of tyrants, is now in our custody. He will stand trial for his crimes, and his fate will be sealed by a simple vote of the citizens of this solar system. True democracy will mete out justice.”

Ruben breathed again. A trial would take time. A vote of nine billion people—that wasn’t something that could happen quickly either. Assuming all or any of that was true.

“However,” she continued, “we have one link of that chain, a very recognizable link, to face summary justice today.”

The image shifted. It took a moment, but Ruben recognized the luxurious board room aboard the Pax Corporatum . In the center of the room stood Helena Telemachus, her hands bound before her in gravity cuffs. Around her, SSR troopers stood at attention, rifles held at the ready across their chests. To Helena’s left, another of the deceased Elise Kisaan clones, Elinda, stood with her hands clasped behind her back. Ruben stared in disbelief—it was the woman who’d murdered Mai Pang. Wonder at how she’d escaped from custody on Mars drowned in the red haze of hatred he felt as he recognized her.

Helena appeared haggard, out of it. She had the look of a person who’d been isolated and tortured. Denied sleep, likely food and water as well. Ruben wondered if she even knew where she was. The green eyes she was famous for looked dull, like dusty emeralds. Her elfin ears, a bodymorph pretension from her youth, poked through her greasy, disheveled hair.

“We are cutting off the heads of the Syndicate Corporation,” Cassandra’s said. “And when you cut off the head, the mouth can no longer speak.”

Elinda’s right hand appeared, holding a stunner. She placed it against Helena’s temple.

“What are they doing?” Junior demanded. “They can’t do that!”

Strunk snorted. The sound of an older generation appalled at the younger’s ignorance of the way of things.

“Helena Telemachus: you have been judged by the Soldiers of the Solar Revolution,” Cassandra said. “You have told the Company’s lies for decades. You have deceived the people by pouring poison into their ears. Your lies stop here. Today.”

Here, at the end, awareness seemed to dawn in Helena’s eyes. Was that fear or relief or acceptance that Ruben saw in them? He could see the skin rippling over her cheeks, her jaw setting. He thought he could see a woman reviewing her life while she still could. Her eyes glistened. But she shed no tears.

“They can’t do this!” Junior screamed at the screen. He turned first to Ruben, then to Strunk, a child looking for adults to provide the answers.

“Judgment to be carried out immediately,” Cassandra said.

Elinda Kisaan pulled the trigger.

The stunner catalyzed the electromagnetic field surrounding Helena’s body, overloading her nervous system. She jerked upright once, as if dropped through the trapdoor of a hangman’s scaffold. Then her body folded to the deck.

Ruben stood, dazed, in the silent aftermath. He’d seen people die before. His own sister, Ming, from a long, wasting illness. Mai, his lover, eviscerated by this same assassin. But never had he seen someone executed outright. It was a chilling demonstration by the woman whose power over their solar system was growing by the day.

“Now is not the time for soft hearts,” Cassandra said. The camerabot floated backward, filling the screen with her seated image and her mother’s decomposing head. “We will break your chains, citizens of Sol. One link at a time.”

The commentator returned, as did the banner at the bottom of the screen. He used the words justice and long time coming .

“They can’t do this,” Junior said again, now in a disbelieving whisper.

“They just did,” Strunk said. Even he seemed rattled.

The image on the screen flickered. Interference or maybe sunspots. Then it coalesced into the face of Gregor Erkennen. He stood in what looked like a high-tech control center or laboratory. The hazy aqua-orange of Titan’s surface hung in the window behind him.

“Titan stands,” he said without prelude. “The rumors of mass genocide on Earth are true. Mars is rising up. The rebels are on the run.”

Erkennen’s last pronouncement was followed by footage of the Pax Corporatum fleeing from Masada Station, the tracer fire of corporate starships urging it on.

“Galatz is alive!” Ruben exclaimed.

“What does that—” Junior began.

“Quiet!” Ruben’s voice bit like a whipcrack.

Erkennen stepped aside, replaced by a black man with a sharp scar running along his jawline. Ruben recognized him. Jabari. The man Tony Taulke had branded the Hero of Mars.

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” Jabari said into the camera. “But I know Cassandra Kisaan is a liar. Like the snake from the Garden of—”

The screen fritzed again with SynCorp’s old broadcast pattern. Sometimes sunspots or subspace interference would disrupt the subspace signal. The network defaulted to projecting SynCorp’s corporate logo, the five-pointed star with each tip representing one of the ruling Five Factions, surrounded by a circle connecting all. Ruben suspected it was Cassandra or the SSR throwing up a test pattern while they attempted to regain control of the signal. By doing so, they’d inadvertently broadcast the symbol representing all they were fighting against.

The irony made Ruben smile. His implant pinged, and the blinking black star startled him. It’d been so long since he’d used his SCI for communicating. Answering it was risky—if the SSR was monitoring the frequency, it wouldn’t take long to track them down.