The Black Garden: Chapter 22

I passed out on the trip back, hanging onto Gaius and the flank of one of the big Khem, and woke up in a bed I didn’t recognize. An actual bed, not a stretcher or a sleeping pad in the back of a truck somewhere. I roused to the sound of terse conversation: Lilia and Taga Actual, the big Axuma matriarch, but unconsciousness dragged me under again before I could make out what they were discussing. 

When I next opened my eyes, it was to the view of a swirling earthen roof. I had been stripped down to the thin thermal wicking layer that went on under my z-suit, sprawled on top of a colorful tropical-weight quilt. My hand instinctively groped for the pistol I usually kept beside my pillow, but there was no gun, no other weapons. Nothing but cool sheets and a tube leading to an empty drip bag on a stand next to the bed.

“Urrgh.” I slowly leaned up onto my elbows, squinting at the rest of the room. The air was cool and clean, and smelled pleasantly of healthy soil and vegetation. Natural light spilled in through ten-foot windows at the other end of the room, filtered through the stand of plants on the other side of the glass. The air fluttering through the vents was cool, but lacked the industrial coldness of air conditioning. The floor was sea blue, cream, and pale brown mosaic tile, laid and styled so that it looked like the tide withdrawing from a pale sandbar, while the bed was a rounded platform sculpted into the wall and floor. I was in an Earthship, or something like one. A solar shelter built mostly of natural clay and earth.

Even as I wondered what the time was, my ATLAS display appeared and showed me. 0705. My relief that my neural wetwear was back in working order was immediately canceled by the fear that the Taga and my team had gone to raid a bunch of mercenaries, demons, and Nu-suht goons without me.

“Dammit.” I glanced down at the line in my elbow, then began to search for the field aid kit that was probably nearby. I found it in the top drawer in the nightstand beside the bed, and was halfway through disconnecting my own catheter when the doorway darkened. My head snapped up on instinct.

“Your Actual insists the catheter remain integral,” Hura intoned, his voice as deep as a temple bell.

“Where is she? Did I sleep through the op?” My fingers twitched over the catheter port, still sunk deep into my median cubital vein.

“Based on new intelligence, we elected to delay the operation.”  He loomed forward, his humanoid shape almost lazily condensing out of the amorphous, pillar-like mass. No fatigues in here. Instead, he mimicked an outfit that wouldn't have looked out of place in a fashionable part of Tokyo: A heavy bomber jacket with thick, plug-like studs in the shoulders, loose pants that ended in wraps down to the ankle, bare clawed feet. He was even wearing a jingasa: a hat, broad and flat, with a fringe of strung beads that concealed his skeletal, golem-like face. I usually thought of Hura as a small Khem, but inside of this sculpted adobe room, his head nearly brushed the ceiling.

“Nice fit.” I irritably left off trying to pull the catheter and sat back, grimacing at the deep bruised feeling in my arm and legs. The shrapnel in my ass was gone, the wounds packed with gel dressings I could remove to properly heal at my leisure. “Didn’t pick you as a fan of like, Harajuku streetwear.”

“It is a composition based on Japanese ‘techwear’ from Earth 88-388-X, an Earth which perished to the demon Nihil before the Harbinger arose and defeated it.” The cords of muscle in Hura’s neck flexed as he piped the words into the air. “A formative experience irrelevant to the current situation. We sensed you had awakened, and provided you are sufficiently recovered, we are obligated to inform you of the changes in the mission while the others rest and prepare.”

So I had fucked the op. I squashed down a pang of guilt, leaning back against the carved wall at the head of the bed. “I’m fine. Go on.”

“The armor and drone material you recovered is substantially more advanced than other ordnance used by the native New Warderns and the PMC personnel. We did not observe any Nu-suht during our monitoring period. Agency intelligence the enemy was going to great lengths to conceal their presence. Even at the expense of their own operatives.”  Hura’s voice was reluctant as he sunk smoothly into the lotus position, lacing his clawed fingers in his lap. “The encampment remained calm for over sixty minutes following loss of contact with their agents.”

“Damn,” I said. “So they’re expendable as fuck.”

“Yes. The enemy has a long threshold for loss of contact with their operatives. Our conclusion was that the enemy command expects them to periodically go off-line to conduct clandestine activities beyond network scrutiny. However, once it was obvious that their operatives had been lost, there was significant mobilization.”

“I bet they stirred up like ants.” Selfishly, I felt a touch of relief. My actions had cost Mert his life, but might have saved ours. You didn’t want to rush a place armed for bear, only to discover you were in fact dealing with giant mecha-bears with ReMa-enhanced railguns and orbital strike support.

“A sufficient analogy. The activity which gave us pause was the summoning of reinforcements from an unknown location.” Hura, sitting like some strange Shinto idol carved from deep indigo marble, was completely still as he continued. “A full platoon of Nu-suht Directorate marines, accompanied by another unit of the Vacuum Special Operations breachers identical to the ones you terminated. An analysis of the unit you terminated revealed that the agents were genetically-modified human clones. Your Actual was able to match the DNA to several crewmembers of a human ESO exploration ship which went missing some time ago. An unsolved mystery. Until now.”

“You’re shitting me.” I blinked. “The crew of the Ardent Venture?”

“Correct.”

I wrapped my arms around my stomach, suddenly queasy. That ship had vanished in rimspace nearly a decade ago. “Fuck. I might have known those people. I used to serve on that ship.”

Hura’s chin dipped slightly. “The Nu-suht reinforcements bore the arms of the Vaarathul, one of the Nu-suht’s ‘Eighty Great Innovator’ corporations and a member of the Directorate. They appeared to be in command of the humans at the encampment. The humans were dispersed into search teams, who deployed significant numbers of autonomous military units. Those, too, emerged like ants. We had not previously observed any of them.”

“How many is ‘significant?’”

“Fifty-two at last count. Combat models, driven by artificial intelligence on a local network seemingly unconnected to the New Warder infrastructure. The Nu-suht have their own ‘noosphere’ which operates only in this dimensional instance, but is otherwise comparable to our own hypernet. We suspect they have established a local node in New Warder and are using this to command the AMUs. Our drones were unable to observe where the reinforcements originated from, which implies an underground network of tunnels.”

“Have satellites picked up the tunnels?”

“Negative. If they exist, they are disguised against orbital observation. Our joint Nexus contacted that of Punawahu’s Planetary Defense Association. They keep New Warder under close scrutiny, yet have not observed any buildup of AMUs or Nu-suht presence over a decade. However. New Warder trades with allegedly-independent Nu-suht merchants unaffiliated with the Directorate. The yacht in stationary orbit at the moment is apparently one such ship.”

“Allegedly unaffiliated.”

“Correct. It is entirely possible that Directorate ordnance and troops have been installed in small numbers over a long period.”

“Yeah. If a seemingly-innocuous pattern is normalized for long enough, it slips through the net. And it isn’t hard to hide them here, either. There’s millions of square kilometers of jungle.” I sighed, tipping my head back. “Those ‘independent’ pleasure yachts could be coordinating all sorts of shit from the sky.”

“It is under observation.” Hura paused. “It is our consensus that there may be more encampments. Perhaps many more, hidden in the forests and mountains around New Warder. A mixture of mercenaries, local radical human elements, and Directorates. Specifically, Vaarathul.”

I struggled through the fog to think about it for a few minutes, resting my chin on the top of one fist. “Sh’Chani and Boris must have been following a trail that led to this. The hoi’pak. My brief mentioned that hoi’pak go to certain mountain valleys to reproduce. I assume those valleys have some kind of specific environmental conditions that are being disrupted. If those valleys are being undermined by black sites, that might explain the drop in population. Underground development, mining, cloaking, all of that would affect them.  I learned yesterday that Vornn had a group of local conservationists discreetly murdered when they began agitating over the hoi’pak, but they weren’t nulled. Guess he saw them as a pack of hippies with no leverage, but he still didn’t want the Confluence getting wind of it and investigating further.”

“And yet, we did.”

“Exactly. And Sh’chani got uncomfortably close to learning the truth. So they took her out. From their perspective, Boris was… just collateral.”

Hura was silent and still for several long seconds: digesting the information, or maybe relaying it to the rest of his team.

“It is the nature of all things Abyssal to be both diffuse and pernicious,” he rumbled, after a time. “Evil is rarely concentrated in individuals, but rather, in systems. The foundational system of New Warder is one of exploitation and aggression. It stands to reason that the corporate entity, inherently growth-oriented, wishes to expand. The Directorate would consider it their moral imperative to support Vornn to do so. Outwardly. But there are many benefits to them, whether he succeeds or fails.”

I thought back to the Commander’s warning, passed to him by his angel. ‘If we don’t intervene, there will be a voidout on Ideni’. “Exactly. A resettlement world falling into chaos in the center of Confluence space will cause the A.R.F to lose a lot of faith. But if these fucking chaebol bastards want a war, they’ll get one. They clearly forgot what happened the last time they tried it.”

Soon after first contact between the Confluence and the Nu-suht Directorate, one of the Eighty, the Kutarathuul Corporation, mistook kindness for softness and decided to make a move. They sent a massive fleet of ships to one of our frontier systems, intending to lay the planets, relay nodes, and space stations to siege. The Confluence responded by sending four assault-optimized branchships about a hundred years into the future, where they captured one of their automated capital ships by surprise. They brought the ship back about twenty years into the past, then reverse-engineered the advanced Nu-suht weaponry to conduct the now-infamous ‘Return to Sender’ pre-emptive operation against the invasion fleet before they could fire so much as a single shot. Katarathuul’s navy was not only destroyed, but utterly humiliated as we wasted Nu-suht ships with Nu-suht missiles they hadn’t even invented yet. The message was received loud and clear, and needless to say, the Directorate’s second approach to the Confluence had been more diplomatic.

“So it would seem,” Hura said.

He and I sat after that, still tense in each other’s presence, but somehow more comfortable after discovering our thoughts on the situation were aligned. He showed no inclination to leave, which was reassuring. In the end, personal differences aside, Hura and I were both Confluence. We wanted accord.

I was about to try and venture some more direct reconciliation when Lilia stuck her head into the room.

“I thought I heard you talking,” she said, looking between Hura on the floor, then me, still in bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Hunky-dory.” I gave her a thumb’s up. “Cells are all regenerated. I need food and a thirty-minute meditation, and I’ll be good to deploy.”

She looked me up and down, then shook her head in disbelief. “No matter how many times I see you recover like this, I am always astounded. I am a third your age, yet somehow, a hundred times less energetic.”

“Having direct operational control over my mitochondria helps a lot,” I said.

Lilia’s full mouth drew into a wry smile. “I suppose it does. Take the catheter out and join us for muster and ROC. Skyteam was able to ship our updated equipment and we have an updated assault map. We raid tonight.”