I couldn’t see what they were running from, but whatever it was they were desperate, terrified, slamming into each other and striking out to get away from it. Then there was what I at first thought was more static, but it persisted, and gradually I recognized it for what it was. I’d been near a tornado once, long ago on the plains of Hausos, and when a twister was passing by the air seemed to fill with swirling debris, moving so fast you couldn’t make out the individual bits. Something was catching bits of merchandise, clothing, building materials, and furniture and spinning it through the air at cyclonic speeds.
A tourist stumbled into the frame, a pudgy, ordinary-looking man with a bad haircut and a jowly face distorted in terror. He staggered toward a vendor kiosk, putting out a hand to steady himself as if against a heavy wind, but something was eating away at the hand, stripping the flesh from it, and he screamed, soundless in the video-only feed. White bone was visible from beneath bloody skin and muscle all the way to the wrist, and bile rose in my throat, along with the horrible thought that the man was about to be flayed alive before my eyes.
Instead, the tourist’s head imploded in a spray of red that was instantly added to the vortex. The rest of his body slumped to the ground, his clothes slowly but surely reduced to tatters by the storm.
Something walked into the frame deliberately, without a stagger or a stumble or a hint of panic. It might have been a man, once, or a woman, but whatever it had been was lost in a mass of shining metal. Bare, silvery bionics had replaced arms and legs and shoulders and hips, and more metal was melded in obscene conjunction with the skin on either side of the thing’s face, replacing ears with rounded amplification discs and eyes with glowing green oculars. Even the jaws were hinged metal, the teeth sharpened to points, fitting just past each other to make up a picket fence of gleaming silver. In the center of it all, a single hint of what had once been a handsome, human face was a straight, aquiline nose.
I knew what the thing was. This wasn’t some poor bastard who’d been badly injured and required bionics because they were cheaper than the cloned replacements not everyone could afford. No, this was quite obviously an Evolutionist. They were a religion, of a sort, men and women who wanted to take the “next step” beyond humanity, to replace themselves with machine parts that would eventually make them immortal. Most people called them Skingangers, after the criminal element that had risen from their midst. That might not have been fair, but it was close enough to the truth to be a stereotype, and I had no trouble imagining this particular Evolutionist being involved in something illegal.
The big metal thing paused in front of one of the larger vendor kiosks, staring at it with cold, inhuman eyes for long moments. The polymer frame of the kiosk vibrated, shaking faster and more violently until it shattered and sailed away with the rest of the particulate wind. Beneath it, a little girl cowered, her arms covering her face, her dark braids fluttering in the unnatural wind.
Her hands jerked away from her face, as if something had grabbed her by the wrists and forced them down, and her head tilted upward hesitantly, wide, dark eyes staring into the green oculars of the Skinganger. No more than ten or eleven, the little girl screamed, as silently as the tourist had, and began to float upward, her body stiff as a board, unable to move a muscle of her own volition.
“Turn it off,” Nance begged, his voice a low moan.
“Wait,” Joe insisted.
I wanted to look away but I couldn’t. The little girl stared hard at the Skinganger, and slowly the look on her face changed from terror to a hard, cold smile. The Skinganger raised off the ground a meter, arms thrown outward, jaws working helplessly as if seeking for something to rip and tear. Metal wrenched violently away from flesh in showers of sparks and fountains of blood and something unseen, something from inside the little girl, tore the massive creature into component pieces.
The girl glanced casually at the camera and cocked her head sideways. The picture went dark.
The air had been sucked out of the room, and all I could do was stare at the blankness where the video had been, the coffee mug hanging in my hand, forgotten. Finally, Nance broke the silence, speaking for all of us.
“Sweet Jesus.”
[ 6 ]
“Tell me that’s not real,” Nagarro pled, shaking her head in violent denial. “That had to be some kind of computer animation.”
Jim? I prompted.
It could be faked, of course, he replied, not sounding overly surprised at what we’d seen. But nothing about it is inconsistent with what we know. Given the population density in a station such as Belial…
Yeah, I got it.
“I can’t swear that it’s real,” Joe admitted, “but it was right after that video went public that things started to change.” His hands wrapped around his mug and he leaned back in his seat, eyes focusing on a memory. “Everything… fell apart quickly. Like within days. A full quarantine was put in place and we stopped getting the weekly shipments of food and supplies. Not just people and supplies that stopped moving either. The government put a complete lockdown on the net, on all communications. The only news coming our way was official announcements, and those stopped after a couple weeks.”
“It was scary as shit,” George added.
“Let’s watch our mouth, George,” Joe chided gently. “But yeah, I was thinkin’ we might be looking at the end. I was just about right too. We didn’t have no VTOLs here, just a couple hoppers, and those only have a range of a few hundred kilometers.” He snorted a laugh that was more rueful than humorous. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there ain’t a damn thing within a few hundred kilometers of here.”
“You were trapped,” Vicky declared, sympathy in her voice, her earlier hostile vigilance gone now. “No way to get to the cities even if you wanted to.”
“We tried calling for help,” George put in. He looked at the coffee mug in his hands and set it down on the table, apparently having lost the need for any more caffeine. “We tried over and over. Especially when Mom…” the kid rubbed at his eyes.
“My wife,” Joe said, a haunted note to his voice. “Felicia. She… she was riding and got thrown, got hurt too bad for the medical gear we had with us. She needed an auto-doc and we tried to get help out here, but the one military comm station we got ahold of told us there was no one to transport her.”
The younger kid—I still hadn’t gotten his name—sobbed, shoulders shuddering, eyes squeezed shut, and George put a comforting hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“She passed away a year and a half ago,” Joe told us. “Right up in the master bedroom. Ms. Damiani would have had a regular fit if she’d known, but she and her son lit out of here when things started to go bad. Well before the communications cut off. They were the smart ones. If I was smart, I would have asked them to take us with them when they left the planet.”
Well, that answered that question. I wondered if the rest of the Council bigwigs had made a run for it too.
“And that’s the last you heard from the outside?” Captain Nagarro asked. She’d recaptured her composure at least, though I saw in her eyes that she still hadn’t accepted the reality of it. She was hoping he’d say no so she could tell herself that things had worked out, that everything was okay.
“No. About nine months ago, we got a visit from a private freighter that had been flagged for something called the Commonwealth Provisional Government. They dropped us off fresh supplies and the pilot told us they’d be back about once every three months, that they’d be using this place as a base to rebuild things on Earth once they had the free manpower.”
“There’s someone out there then,” Nagarro sighed, leaning forward as if he’d justified her hope. “There is still a government.”
“According to the woman who brought us the supplies, and her pilot.” Joe shrugged. “I s’ppose they could have been lying, but at the time I was so happy to have someone bringing us resupply I wasn’t in the mood to be too nosy.”
“Did they say where they were based out of?” Nance asked. “We need to link up with them. If there’s a functional government, that ship out there could help.”
“They didn’t say.” Joe seemed to finally remember the coffee mug and took a long sip out of it. “Probably because it wouldn’t have done us any good. Not like we had a starship we could fly out there with. All I know is they were supposed to be back here two weeks ago with the next shipment.”
“Two weeks late?” Nance grunted. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed, then pushed myself out of the too-comfortable couch. It had been designed for high-level executives to plant their asses on and feel like they were getting a massage. To me, it felt too soft. I paced around the perimeter of the furniture, hands in the pockets of my jacket, because otherwise I wouldn’t have known what to do with them. “If what happened to the Commonwealth is the same thing that happened to the Predecessors, I don’t know how the hell they’d stop it. This provisional government could have already fallen to the infected.”
“The Changed,” George provided. “That’s what they started calling them before the communications blackout.”
“Fallen to the Changed then,” I corrected myself. “Either way, you don’t know where they were operating out of and they haven’t shown up.” Sighing, I turned to the others. “Inferno? Hermes?”
“If Inferno was still holding out,” Vicky told me, “then they would never have abandoned Earth. You know that. They would have come back and evacuated these people… anyone who was willing to leave. And they wouldn’t be flying a commercial freighter around either.”
She was right about that, though I didn’t want to admit it.
“Hermes, Eden, Inferno, Aphrodite,” Nagarro ticked them off on her fingers as she spoke, “they all have the same problem. The cities there are heavily populated. This thing spreads like a virus, right? Viruses spread fastest in places with higher population density, which is probably why the megacities here on Earth fell so quickly.”
