THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 5: Prey
“A man who fears his past fears his future.”
– Devon LiMalle, Sunjarri consul (136 PA)
Logan Coldhand stood at the window for a long time, rhythmically drumming his fingers against the reinforced glass. The hotel room was expensive, huge and stylishly furnished. A single long window spanned the entire wall and looked out over the shining, glittering city skyline. Logan’s bare feet sank into the deep, soft carpet. Sipho’s pale blue dwarf sun was setting, filling the sky with silver fire. All across the sky, stars glittered like bubbles in a glass of wine.
Finally having made his decision, Logan went to the bedroom and dressed quickly. A black shirt over gray pants so dark that they were almost the same color. He considered the Talon-9, wrapped in its holster on the neat, unused bed, and buckled it around his waist.
Coldhand took an elevator down to the garage and climbed into his rented car. It was the fastest model available, procured in case Barnes decided to run. The sleek red car hummed on its null-field and raced out into the street. A freight truck honked thunderously as Coldhand cut them off.
The bounty hunter glanced down at the car’s computer. What he was looking for wouldn’t be marked there, but it would at least get him to the right part of town. Sipho had a good reputation as a staid, stately planet. It was peaceful, a jewel of the Alliance.
But Coldhand knew better. Every light cast a shadow.
He drove through the bright-lit, holographed commercial district, past restaurants and cafes, and then out through the quiet suburbs. Coldhand came at last to a darkened industrial zone, shut down for the evening. Factories loomed up on all sides, slumbering metal beasts that would wake when the sun rose once more.
But they were heavy sleepers. The shadowed street wasn’t silent. When Logan stopped the car and climbed out, he felt deep bass notes reverberating up through the soles of his boots and thumping against his ribs.
Coldhand found a close alleyway that smelled pungently of fuel and melted plastic. At the end stood a tiny concrete shed with a sloped roof and a closed, rusted gate. Coldhand yanked it open on creaking, flaking hinges and ducked inside.
He was at the top of a steep stairwell. The steps were worn and cracked by more than age. Logan had to keep his head down as he descended and water ran in rivulets from the arched ceiling, down the walls to pool at his feet.
Underground, the music was louder and Coldhand could hear a chorus of voices. After a few sharp turns, the stairs opened out into a circular concrete tunnel. Dark, mottled water spots stained the walls and a string of work lights glared along the ceiling, clamped to the support ribbing. The air beat with music, too, echoing and muffled to make out, but already filling the tunnel with a thrumming anticipation.
A huge Dailon lounged against the wall beside the stairwell. It was usually difficult to tell the muscular Dailons apart by gender, but this one wore shiny purple plastihide pants so tight that they left little question as to his masculinity.
He chatted animatedly with a pair of young human women. One of the girls was Mirran and had painted her stripes with dark makeup that matched her dress. She stopped in the middle of her sentence and stared at Coldhand, at the bared illonium below his scarred elbow and the gun on his hip. She whispered something to her friend and the two girls retreated down the tunnel. The Dailon sighed and turned to face Coldhand.
“Thanks for that, maasquat,” he growled and then crossed huge, tattooed blue arms over his chest. He thrust his chin out toward the Talon. “What’s the burner for? You a cop?”
“No,” Coldhand said. “Where’s a good place?”
The Dailon took in the hunter’s stark, utilitarian clothes and his metal hand.
“Try Prey,” he suggested. “Might be your kind of place. A Lyran named Vakk owns it. Take a right at the next cross-tunnel and go down two intersections. You can’t miss it.”
Coldhand followed the Dailon’s instructions, heading deeper into the Sipho underground. In the early days of the colony, before the cloud seeding took hold, these aqueducts carried water from the polar icecaps down to the habitable zones of the planet. Now they served a new purpose, arguably just as important to the people of Sipho.
Deeper into the tunnels, the dank, ashy scent of old concrete took on a new life. There was musky sweat and the electric smell of ozone. Coldhand tasted the tang of strong alcohol and the thick sourness of smoke. He could pick out individual strains of music, all loud and thumping and warring with one another for prominence.
Other lights lined the curved aqueduct wall, pirating electricity from the city lines. They were dimmer than the construction lights but far more colorful, bunched together in places like radioactive bouquets. Signs in bright lumapaint and holographics glowed all along the tunnel. These gave way to doors, thrown invitingly open to the sources of the booming, conflicting music. Strobes alternately silhouetted and flash-froze dancers in pulses of light.
There were other people now, too. Some dressed as modestly as Coldhand, but most wore no more than shreds of clinging, transparent cloth or a thin layer of body paint. It was too hot down here — in every sense — for much more.
Coldhand turned right at a cross-tunnel all hung with tangles of violet light ropes and found himself part of a thick crowd. The curved aqueduct floor forced everyone together, closer to Logan and each other than on the spacious walkways of the city above. The air down here was heavy and humid, pressing in on him from all sides.
Most of the underground Sipho bar and nightclub doors had been cut directly into their gray concrete walls. But the larger ones had smooth circular entrances framed in lights and advertisements, spouts that led into the huge cylindrical cisterns that used to hold the colony’s precious water reserves.
Prey, one of them advertised in angular red slashes meant to remind Coldhand of huge claw marks. The hunter separated himself from the throng and paid the ten cenmark cover charge to a black-furred Lyran woman covered in piercings. He went inside.
Prey was packed with people. Mostly other humans, but there were Lyrans and Dailons, as well. A bar ran the length of one curved wall, finished to look like rough-cut basalt and painted in glowing tribal patterns. But it was the dance floor that dominated Prey, full of leaping, writhing bodies. The low, flat ceiling emphasized the claustrophobic crowd of dancers. They were all young and beautiful, dressed and painted up for a long night of pleasures. Some had the look of predators searching out their next conquests. Others enjoyed their role as prey, sought after and fought for.
Perhaps sensing a true predator in their midst, the dancers did their best to get out of Coldhand’s way as he crossed the nightclub, but could make little room in the close confines. Logan felt warm, sweat-slicked skin against his. Even this anonymous, uninvited intimacy was… jarring.
He chose a table on the edge of the nightclub and sat. A holographic flame bobbed in the table’s center, moving in time with the loud music and twisting occasionally into the stylized shape of a prowling Lyran. The shiny black tabletop lit up at Coldhand’s touch and brought up a glowing drink list. He swiped through the menu.
Prey sold a much wider variety than the bars above ground — including narcohol, which was illegal on Sipho. Coldhand skipped over that part of the menu. He wanted something to wake his unresponsive body, not put him to sleep. The next screen’s offering came not in shot glasses, but in needles and sealed plastic bags. Frag was at the top, in green letters that arced with animated electricity. No, Coldhand decided. He had tried the popular stimulant a couple of times, but all it ever did was leave a raw, coppery taste in his mouth, like blood.
But none of the other chems sounded any more appealing. He waved his left hand over the display to turn it off, but the sensor beam bounced off the illonium and the confused computer returned a readout of the music throbbing through the club — mostly Lyran hunt metal, full of deep drums beating out an impossibly fast tempo.
A young human woman danced on the edge of the floor, close against her friends. Her lithe body moved sinuously beneath her filmy dress and dark brown hair flared as she spun, then slithered down around her shoulders. The girl licked her red-painted lips and sweat beaded on her smooth skin.
Coldhand’s cybernetic fingers scraped over the tabletop. The music drowned out the unpleasant sound and he could barely feel the hard plastic. Even here on a civilized world like Sipho, there had to be at least a few women willing to overlook his cybernetics. It was only a hand, after all, easily ignored in the dark. If no one was interested, there were always those willing to do it for money. The touch of metal was worth the feel of plastic cenmarks. But none of the girls dancing in Prey seemed worth the effort.
Logan stared at the dancer without seeing her. Twenty percent. That was all he had, all he felt. But twenty percent of nothing was still nothing.
Drugs, drink, sex… They were the end goals for most bounty hunters, but held no interest for Coldhand. The hunt for Barnes had been just as boring as some corporate desk job. At the first sign of an interested buyer, the self-important little thief practically threw himself into the trap.
The underground club suddenly reminded Coldhand of Stray, of the Nihilist catacombs under Gharib. That place was a true monument to death, dug beneath the graveyard of the black cathedral. The bloated dead hung from the crumbling walls and ceiling like grisly cocoons. Prey was only a pale imitation by comparison, the shadow of a hunting hawk while the real thing circled above, far out of reach. For all their funerary black and intricately inked skin, though they were deep underground, these dancers weren’t dead. They were alive. So vibrantly and gaudily alive.
It was all so cheap and tacky, but Logan was still jealous. They had no idea how easily it could all be ripped away, replaced by cold machines.
Except that would never happen here. Not in the deep core, where there were Ixthian hospitals in every city, with cloning tanks and redprints for every organ. Prey’s patrons thought themselves rebels, sharp-beaked criminals of the Sipho underground. They had no idea how nightmarish, how empty life could become.
Coldhand turned his attention away from the dancers and back to the tabletop display. He closed the menu and music screens, then called up general mainstream access. News of the Nihilists was easy to find. The Union of Light’s condemnation of rival religions was public and vocal. Though it wasn’t enough to rouse the Central World Alliance Armed Forces to action, the Nihilists’ many crimes — assault, abduction and murder — earned each and every one a CWA bounty.
There were some scattered and sporadically investigated stories of new converts told by the frightened families they left behind. Had Gavriel or Xartasia survived the attack on their cathedral? It was possible and Coldhand couldn’t imagine many other Nihilists convincing anyone to join in their twisted death worship.
He tapped his identification into a government node and pulled up the bounty information on the Cult of Nihil. The money for capture of the individual members was no more impressive now than it had been the night before, waiting in the blank white-walled collection center. Coldhand read through the rest of the posting. He wasn’t the only one who suspected that Gavriel and his guardian angel might still be alive. The CWA Lyceum was offering a much more impressive reward for anyone who could hunt down either Gavriel or Xartasia and bring them to face trial — five thousand cenmarks each.
It was good money. Not enough to retire on, but enough to keep Logan flying for a while.
But that wasn’t the point. Barnes had been good money, too.
What would it be like… feel like to face Gavriel’s Emberguard again? Logan touched his good hand to his chest, felt the thick knot of scar tissue there, even through his shirt. Did the Nihilists hate Coldhand?
Did he hate them?
If Gavriel had lived — the irony of a Nihilist fighting for his own survival might have made another man laugh aloud — then chances were good that Xartasia had, too. Would Maeve be searching for her cousin?
Coldhand cleared the table terminal and strode purposefully through the tight pack of Prey, back out into the aqueducts. At the stairs leading up, the Dailon bouncer waved and asked if he had enjoyed Prey. But Coldhand stalked past without a word, lost in his own thoughts.
