THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 12: Pain
“One who lies to herself cannot speak the truth.”
– Allonar Cavainna, Arcadian monarch (5,104 MA)
On any civilized world, it probably would have been called torture. The flight from Sipho to Prianus was weeks long and Coldhand couldn’t move during any of it. Not much, at least. Not enough. A combination of vitamins, nutrients and muscle stimulants kept his body from suffering the sort of withering that crippled and even killed early spacefarers.
But Logan’s mind wandered. A cocktail of sedatives could have stopped that and were popular among long-range fighter pilots. Coldhand never took them.
He stared out into the scattered rainbows of superluminal flight without seeing them. In the six years since he had become a bounty hunter, Logan had never gone home. He barely thought about Prianus. He wasn’t ashamed of his homeworld. He didn’t hate it. Prianus was just a planet, like any other.
But now Coldhand found himself… What? Reminiscing…? Or daydreaming? There were memories waiting for him on Prianus.
It was easier, somehow, to think of them as memories instead of people. Jess Ephrya, the woman he was going to marry. His mother, Lynn Centra, who struggled alone to raise her son on a grocery clerk’s meager paychip. Arctan Vorus, the old palaestrum master who taught a dirty-faced little boy how to be a man.
He didn’t care what they thought of him now, Coldhand reminded himself, of the traitor who turned tail and vanished. It only mattered that they might become problems if they learned that Logan Centra had returned to Prianus.
They were pointless concerns, Coldhand told himself firmly. He ran metal fingers through his hair, lank with sweat from too long in the Raptor. Prianus wasn’t the largest world of the Alliance, but even it had billions of citizens. There was no reason to believe that he would encounter anyone… anything that might cause a problem.
Still, he couldn’t stop thinking about them. Not for the first time since beginning the journey, Logan found himself clenching his cybernetic hand and tapping his feet restlessly against the Raptor’s deckplates.
All of this to hunt down the Nihilists. For a good chase.
For something… exciting.
This had better be worth it.
A warning beep from the navigational computer roused Coldhand from an uneasy half-doze. He had been dreaming… something about searching through a store full of caged birds for a white owl. The owl’s sharp, sad gray eyes were the only thing Logan could remember when he sat up, but even those faded quickly. The whole cockpit smelled of recycled sweat.
He was entering the Prian system. Coldhand checked over his astrogation charts. All mapped comets, asteroids and moons were clear of his vector. Coldhand waited until the countdown hit zero, then shut off the superluminal engines. The sounds of the Long Wings pod was sucked away into the emptiness of space, but the down-cycling engines made the Raptor shiver.
Stars and moons leapt into focus outside, floating in the deep black of space. Prianus’ far side faced the sun and the planet was a barely-visible crescent, a slender silver thread through the heavens. Satellites blinked in orbit like indecisive miniature stars.
Coldhand steered a wide course around the sensor stations on all three of Prianus’ moons. If they picked up his ship, it would end up in a database somewhere and Coldhand wanted no record of his visit. There were blind, hidden routes, used by the smugglers he had hunted in this very ship back when he had two good hands.
Logan pulled into low orbit and then dropped down into the atmosphere at a shallow, oblique angle. Storm clouds streamed past the wings and beaded into streaking droplets along the Raptor’s hull. A bolt of bright lightning lit the sky a sudden, blinding white and then the deafening crash of thunder buffeted the fighter. Logan banked with the tugging wind, letting gravity pull him down, and then he was free of the clouds.
He was flying over a dark tarn. The long, flat lake lay high in the mountains, flanked by steep shores covered in coarse white snow. Coldhand checked his instruments. He was closing in on his destination, the city of Blue Oak.
The Raptor crested a spine of sharp, glacier-carved stone. Blue Oak glowed through the heavy rain. The city stretched through the diamond-shaped valley and out into the nearby passes, looking by night like a huge, well-lit nerve cell.
Coldhand circled low over the city, alternately looking out the glassteel canopy and at his instruments. He found a small landing field outside Blue Oak, marked in the stormy night by a single bright yellow spotlight. The hunter called down, requesting clearance. A sleepy-sounding female voice told him to hold his damned vector while she waved another ship to the ground, then brought Coldhand around and set him down in a gravel-strewn lot. Not an illegal port, exactly, but one of many private, family-owned plots. It was unlikely that their computers were connected to the planetary control stations.
Logan heaved himself out of the Raptor and thumped heavily to the ground. Prian ground. He was actually back on Prianus. Ice-cold rainwater soaked his hair, seeping down the back of his neck.
An adolescent boy — probably the son of the woman he had just spoken to — jogged up to Coldhand, carrying a datadex in a protective sleeve and shielding his face from the driving rain.
“I need to get your signature and fees,” he said.
The boy wore a lightly armored vest and a gun tucked into his waistband. Coldhand took the datadex and had to press hard with the stylus to sign through the plastic cover. He signed his assumed name. The boy was looking at the fighter.
“Wow, is that a Raptor?” he asked, picking out the shape under the bulky Long Wings pod fitted over the hull. “Are you a cop?”
Coldhand thrust the datadex back at the boy, the wet plastic slipping in his cybernetic fingers.
“Yes.” He didn’t explain which question that was an answer to. “How much is parking?”
“Just eight cen a day.”
That was three times what Logan had paid six years ago. Unless this little field charged a lot more than their neighbors, inflation was on the rise again. The bounty hunter tossed a white twenty-cenmark chip onto the datadex.
“I’ll only be here a day, but I don’t carry any smaller colour.”
The boy’s eyes widened a little. “We can’t change this, sir.”
The child was lying, but Coldhand shrugged. So was he.
“Fine,” Logan said. “Have you got showers? I’ve been flying a long time.”
“Inside there,” the boy answered, pointing toward the shadowy shape of a small building squatting beside the spotlight. “Showers, latrines and a terminal connected out to the mainstream if you need to catch up. We can call you a car, if you like, but we don’t have any rooms.”
Coldhand wasn’t tired. “I don’t need one. I’ll call for anything else myself. Go back to bed.”
The boy hurried back the way he had come, eager to get out of the rain. Coldhand locked up his Raptor and splashed through the muddy puddles toward the showers. His legs felt like old rubber. The rain hissed off the slowly circling spotlight and filled the air with steam.
The showers were plain and far from private, but it was the middle of the night. The pilot of the ship grounded just before the Raptor briefly visited the bathrooms, but then left to pursue her own business. After Logan thoroughly scrubbed himself clean in the tepid shower, he dressed in a fresh pair of pants and a thick, long-sleeved shirt.
He went to the offered terminal and pushed the stool away with one bare foot. He had been sitting for weeks. The computer was a small machine, bolted into a thick plastic case on the wall of the little hospitality house. Coldhand made a quick search through the mainstream, but as expected, found nothing helpful. Gavriel was being subtle and quiet. There was nothing in the news but outdated reprints of the wire stories from Axis and Stray.
Where to begin…? In the morning, he would go into Blue Oak to ask around for anything that had not made it onto the mainstream, but Coldhand’s hopes were not high. Even if the Nihilists moved right into the middle of the city, chances were low that anyone would even notice. The cultists were sickly, murderous chem addicts, but that described half of Prianus.
There were two types of Prians: the noble and the desperate.
The desperate might not notice a man murdered right on their own doorstep — not unless he had something worth stealing — but the noble might. Watching closely over their cities, the Prian police would have some useful information, even if they didn’t know it. They had no particular reason to be looking for the Nihilists on their planet.
But getting information from the police would be tricky. Coldhand had no contacts on the force anymore, no one willing to speak to him. He briefly considered simply calling one of the stations and seeing what he could pry out of the desk officer. His E3 bounty hunter status would be more than enough to get him access to any records he requested, but the moment the police checked his CAID number, they would know who Logan was.
It was a frustratingly circular problem. The very identity that could give him what he needed would get him shot as a traitor.
Coldhand went back to the terminal, brought up a transit node and ordered a taxicab. Maybe he would just get lucky down in Blue Oak.
Not likely… He had flown across the galaxy on a wish. It was never like this when he was hunting Maeve.
A day spent questioning the citizens of Blue Oak proved as fruitless as Coldhand suspected. Most had no idea what the Cult of Nihil was, much less if they might be on Prianus. When he described the black robes or the red garb and stark intensity of the Emberguard, the Prians simply shook their heads. They knew nothing.
Questioning them instead about an influx of Arcadians, Coldhand received a few shrugs. The fairies were always flying back and forth between cities. They never seemed to stay in one place long enough for the Prians to count them very accurately.
Nothing useful.
Coldhand paid the cab driver and walked back up the hill to the landing field. The rain had given way to a fine sleet that dusted his shoulders in glittering ice. He kept his hands in his pockets. The ice would stick to the illonium of his left hand and make the joints stiff.
He couldn’t sort through every single city on Prianus. It would take a lifetime and there was no guarantee that he might happen upon the right people who had seen the right things. He was out of other options.
Logan went into the landing field’s little hospitality house and powered up the terminal again. He did another quick search, half hoping to find nothing, but the results came back quickly. Coldhand had his contact.
Highwind was on the other side of Prianus from Blue Oak, but it took only a few hours to make the flight and land. All too soon, Logan was walking along the cracked roads of his hometown.
I grew up here. I trained here. I served here. I died here.
He stood in front of a large window. The glass was chipped and dotted with taped-over holes. Inside, a group of small boys and girls took turns punching at sand-filled bags hanging from the sagging ceiling. A short, bald man limped between them, tapping shoulders and turning hips, refining their form.
Don’t just hit with your arm. Use your whole body. Turn. Make gravity your ally instead of your enemy. Coldhand knew it all by rote. Don’t pull back so far, don’t give your opponent any warning of what’s coming. Just a handspan. That’s all you need.
Coldhand went inside. The palaestrum students looked up, but their instructor whistled sharply, pulling their attention back.
“Eyes up here, nestlings.”
“Send them all home, Vorus,” Coldhand said. “I need to talk to you.”
Arctan Vorus furrowed his white brows at the hunter. “I’m in the middle of class. You can wait your turn.”
“I can’t stay in Highwind for long.”
“That’s your own fault, Logan. You’ll wait.”
The students looked curious, but knew better than to ask their stern old teacher about things that weren’t their business. Coldhand had little choice but to wait, standing on the edge of the patched practice mats.
The years had not been kind to Logan’s teacher. Vorus looked much older than the last time Coldhand had seen him. The last wisps of thin white hair around his ears were gone, leaving his scarred scalp bare. The lines at the corners of Vorus’ eyes were deeper, too, etched there by decades of hardship.
When their lessons were done, the children made respectful farewells to Vorus and filed past Coldhand, out into the unfriendly Highwind streets.
Vorus beckoned to Logan. “Now, we’ll talk.”
The bounty hunter strode out onto the mat. It was thin and he could feel the hard concrete of the floor even through the soles of his boots. Lessons in Arctan Vorus’ palaestrum were no kinder than those taught out in the back alleys of Prianus. But they taught much, much more. Honor, strength… Coldhand crossed his arms over his chest.
“I didn’t plan to come here, Vorus,” he said. “But I need some information.”
“Is that so?”
“I’m hunting the Cult of Nihil and I believe they’re on Prianus.”
“Hunting? I had heard that you flew off and became a bounty hunter,” Vorus said. “Looks like the gossip was right.”
“You’re not the first old cop to curl his claws at it. My last good mark had a Prian captain — a retired officer, just like you. He set his hawk on me.”
Vorus grunted and scratched his bulging belly, hard and round as a boulder. “And you want me to give you information. You can’t go get it from the station, so you think you can get it from me.”
“You still play cards with the city captains, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” Vorus said. He looked at Coldhand for a long, heavy moment. “Your mother moved back to New Empyrean after you left. She couldn’t bear it here anymore, not without you. Lynn died three years ago of trycho fever.”
Coldhand didn’t answer.
“Jess got married a little after that. She has a little boy now, eight months old. He’s a good kid.” Vorus took a step toward the bounty hunter. There was a storm brewing in his eyes. “She named him Logan. After you. Jess always thought you would come home. She never believed the things they said.”
Logan’s jaw clenched. “I don’t care. Tell me about the Nihilists.”
“You don’t care? Don’t you?” Vorus grabbed a handful of the younger man’s shirt in a gnarled fist. “You were my best. Thirty years I’ve taught kids in this palaestrum and I never had one like you. You burned, Logan. There was fire in you!”
Coldhand didn’t move, could not rise to Vorus’ anger.
“And you were a good teacher,” he said. “But that was a long time ago. Do you know about any cultists on Prianus? Large groups of new Arcadians?”
“What makes you think I won’t go tell the police that you’ve come back?” Vorus asked, ignoring Coldhand’s question. “There’s a whole generation of cops in Highwind who would just love some payback. They trusted you, Logan. You were the best of them!”
“I couldn’t stay, Vorus. I had to leave,” Coldhand said flatly. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. You won’t tell the cops I was here. You won’t sell me out because you’re an honorable man.”
“As I tried to teach you to be, for all the good it did!” Vorus was still holding Logan’s shirt tightly.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like then, little hawk?”
“I didn’t forget the things you taught me. That Emberguard cut them out. He cut it all away and they replaced it with metal…”
Logan closed his mouth with an effort. He didn’t need to justify himself to his old teacher. So why was he?
“You got hurt, and so you ran away? You never used to be afraid of pain,” Vorus snarled.
He shoved Logan back a step and then jabbed stiffened fingers into the bounty hunter’s chest, just beneath his breastbone. The breath suddenly whooshed out of Logan’s lungs and he folded over nearly double. He pulled swiftly back and straightened to find Vorus standing there, right in front of him, as though he had not retreated at all.
Vorus swung a scarred fist and Logan jerked back, but the old Prian kept coming. Coldhand parried another strike, but it turned him to one side and he didn’t see the next flat-handed blow. It connected hard against his neck. Coldhand’s blood pulsed hard and his vision went dim for a computerized heartbeat.
“Did that hurt?” Vorus asked.
Logan slid away again. He held up his illonium left hand and curled it into a fist. The high whine of servos was loud in the quiet palaestrum.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he answered. “Nothing hurts. This metal the doctors gave me only has twenty percent feeling, Vorus. That’s it. That’s all I get.”
The bald old cop came at him again, hands raised in the close guard stance of a Lowland boxer. Logan feinted one way and then dodged the other. But Vorus wasn’t so easily fooled. He cut the angle, jabbing and swinging. Logan threw himself back and rolled away across the mat.
Vorus grunted. “Just not as fast on my feet as I used to be, am I? But I make do with what I have. I’m scarred, not dead. Scars are lessons, little hawk. What did you learn from yours?”
Coldhand looked at the palaestrum door. He was faster than his old teacher. He could get away easily enough, but Vorus was his only lead, the only one who might give him information.
He couldn’t leave, not yet. Logan had nowhere else to go. He approached Vorus warily.
“Tell me what I need to know and I’ll go,” he said. “You never have to see me again.”
“You’re not listening, little hawk. Looks like I’ll have to give you a few more scars.”
Vorus shuffled forward and launched into a new attack. He had taught Lowland boxing to all of his students, including a younger Logan Centra. Coldhand knocked aside the flurry of punches. He brought his left hand up and slammed it into Vorus’ wrist. The old cop grunted and rubbed at his already bruising flesh.
“I’m not here to fight you, Vorus,” Coldhand said. “You’re not my mark.”
“No, I’m your teacher,” Vorus spat back. “I taught you how to live with honor. You’ve forgotten that. Have you forgotten how to fight, too? Stop dancing around and stand fast!”
Vorus pressed a hard, furious assault, but Logan was young and agile. He moved only at the last second to duck or block a punch, staying just out of Vorus’ reach and hoping to tire out his teacher. But the old man showed no more signs of tiring than making Logan a cup of tea. He was going to have to end this fight somehow, and quickly.
Logan circled Vorus, turning aside the old man’s attacks. Every other step, Vorus’ left foot dragged just a little. Long years ago, during his days on the police force, he had jumped onto the rear fender of a fleeing suspect’s car and been dragged nearly two blocks before climbing up over the cab, smashing through the window and taking control of the vehicle. He lost a great deal of flesh down his left leg. Without cloned replacements, Vorus had received grafts for the damaged ligaments and tendons, but he still bore a limp that Logan knew very well.
Coldhand aimed a low kick at the weak joint. Vorus crouched down onto his good leg to meet the kick and curled his fingers into claws like a scythe-bird’s, then stabbed them hard into the meat of Logan’s calf. The hunter’s nerves jolted. Before he could recover, Vorus jabbed those viciously hooked fingers into Logan’s thigh and then groin. Logan staggered back, jaw locked and limping on his own left leg.
“What’s the matter, little hawk? Does that hurt?” Vorus seized Logan’s illonium wrist and twisted against the joint. The machine whined loudly in protest as it resisted. “Now this? This doesn’t hurt. This is metal, and it doesn’t feel. Just twenty percent, right?”
Coldhand pulled, but could get no leverage to pull free.
“This?” Vorus chopped the edge of his hand down on the elbow joint just above the place where Logan’s living arm joined the illonium hand. “This is flesh, and it hurts like all the hells.”
Logan twisted out of the leverage and planted his elbow in the center of Vorus’ chest. He followed with another swift kick to the old man’s scarred leg.
“Got two steel pins in there, myself,” Vorus said. He lifted his knee with a groan and then jammed it into Logan’s inner thigh. “Aches when it rains. Does that make me a barometre?”
Logan willed his shaking legs not to buckle as he closed in more cautiously this time, throwing kicks only to gauge distance and keep his opponent at bay. When Vorus tried to strike at his knees, Logan slid forward and struck out with his metallic fist. Vorus fell to the mat with a loud thump.
The old man rolled to his feet with a grunt. “Low blow, little hawk. Are you angry? I sure hope so. Heart’s just a muscle, Logan, or just a computer-driven valve. Forget that poetic shit about them. Your soul isn’t hiding behind your ribs. No one can cut it out. A cybernetic heart can’t stop you feeling any more than a cybernetic hand can stop that leg from throbbing.”
“You’re wrong. I don’t feel. You don’t know what I went through, what happened to me,” Coldhand shouted.
The echoes bounced jarringly from the walls of the palaestrum. He advanced on Vorus again.
“I couldn’t play my guitar,” Coldhand said. “I couldn’t feel Jess’ hand when she held mine. It’s all gone! I can’t feel any of it!”
Logan jumped, kicking out in the air and punching even as he landed. Vorus’ teeth clenched as Logan’s fist found an old dueling wound in the hollow of his shoulder. But through the pain, Vorus’ lashed back, instinct honed by years of training.
He jabbed a pressure point in Coldhand’s arm and slammed his knee into the bounty hunter’s diaphragm, stomping on his booted instep. As Logan pulled back, Vorus seized him by the hair. He held Logan in place as he grabbed the younger man’s face in a clawed grip, fingers digging into nerves in his cheek and jaw.
It hurt. Coldhand cried out.
Vorus dropped Logan to the mat and stood over him. There was nothing broken, nothing even really damaged. Every one of Vorus’ blows was meant only to cause pain, but Logan curled up on the floor like a newborn.
Vorus turned his head and spat blood onto the mat.
“I don’t know anything about your Cult of Nihil, little hawk,” he said. “But Arcadians are going missing in Pylos, on the other side of the mountains. But somehow, there’s more fairies in Pylos than ever. These new Arcadians are a hard lot, not like the ones we’re used to. Might be worth looking into.”
Vorus turned and stalked away to his office in the back of the palaestrum. He closed and locked the door behind him.
Logan’s heart detected the lowered rate of exertion and reduced his pulse accordingly. The floor mat was rough and lumpy under his right palm and just a vague firm sensation under his left. Logan pushed himself slowly to his feet. The blazing pain was already fading.
He took one last look around the palaestrum, at Vorus’ closed door, and then left.
