Silent Order: Axiom Hand Read online

  With his left hand, he grabbed one of Reimer’s metal legs and started dragging.

  Much as he hated what had been done to him, March had to admit that his cybernetic augmentations came in handy from time to time. Dragging Reimer with his left arm was much easier than it would have been with his arm of flesh.

  His phone clicked as someone picked up on the third ring. “March? That you?”

  “Whitefish? Yeah, it’s March.” March headed towards the front doors of the store as fast as he could. “I’m at the sporting goods store behind the Cruising Cruiser. Get here with the van as fast as you can. Reimer’s our perp, and he’s dead.”

  There was silence on the line for about three seconds, and then the man swore. “Reimer? Damn me, but that’s a surprise. That skinny little sad sack? I thought he was an informant or a collaborator for the Machinists. I didn’t think he had it in him to kill naval officers with his bare hands. I mean, those young fellows in the Navy can handle themselves in a fight, even when they’re drunk.”

  “Reimer had some upgrades,” said March.

  There was silence. March passed the cash registers, still dragging Reimer’s corpse.

  “Well. Shit,” said Whitefish at last.

  “That’s what I thought,” said March. “Also, I showed up on camera both at the Cruising Cruiser and the sporting goods store. Better get the video erased.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get my boys on it,” said Whitefish. “I’m too old for this nonsense.”

  “You said that the last time I was here.”

  “And I’m even older now,” said Whitefish with a sigh. “Meet me out front. I’ll be there in about two minutes.”

  “Thanks.” March ended the call and stuffed the phone back into his pocket. The greeter android paced back and forth before the customer service counter, the indecision of its pseudointelligence clear.

  “Honored sir,” said the android. “I must inform you that it is against store policy to allow any form of shoplifting, and shoplifters will be prosecuted to the fullest extent permitted by local and Kingdom law.”

  “Good policy,” said March.

  The android stared at him as he dragged Reimer over the shattered door.

  As March walked into the parking lot, a battered blue van came to a stop a few meters away, its engine giving off a tired whine. One of Whitefish’s local contractors drove the van, a grim-faced former mercenary, and a second man sat in the passenger’s seat, a fully automatic rifle with a hundred round magazine resting in his arms.

  The van’s back doors opened, and Whitefish leaned out.

  “Goddamn it,” said Whitefish. “What the hell is that thing?”

  The head of the local Silent Order branch was leaving late middle age and seemed to get fatter every time March saw him. He wore a loose shirt covered with tropical designs and a pair of ragged cargo pants. Nevertheless, there was still a great deal of muscle under all that fat, and there was nothing lax about the way he held his pistol pointed at Reimer’s corpse.

  “Reimer,” said March. “What’s left of him. Told you he had some upgrades.”

  “God.” Whitefish switched on his gun’s safety, stuffed it into a pocket, and jumped down from the van. “Things always seem to get wild when you turn up, Jack. Take his other side.”

  March nodded and took Reimer’s right side, while Whitefish took his left. Together they heaved the corpse into the back of the van. Whitefish climbed in, March followed suit, and they pulled the doors shut behind them.

  “Back to the club,” said Whitefish. The driver grunted and got the van rolling. “What next?”

  “The cleanup,” said March. “Reimer killed eight officers. We’ll need to have something to tell the local authorities. The Silent Order can deal with the Navy, but we’ll have to handle things on the ground.”

  Whitefish sighed. “You’re going to work me to my grave, Jack March.”

  But he lifted his phone and started making some calls.

  ###

  It took four days before March could leave the planet of Constantinople II with Philip Reimer’s corpse secured in the Tiger’s cargo hold.

  Getting rid of the security video proved the easiest part of the cleanup. Whitefish owned several beachside clubs and was chummy with the owners and managers of the competing establishments. A judicious bribe convinced the Cruising Cruiser’s manager to hand over his security footage. The servers of the sporting goods store were not terribly secure, and one of Whitefish’s employees hacked in and erased the video files.

  Dealing with the local authorities proved trickier. Constantinople II was technically a colony under the jurisdiction of the government and Grand Duke of Constantinople IV, the most populated planet in the Constantinople solar system. That meant a tangle of different legal authorities could claim jurisdiction for the murders. Constantinople II had an elected sheriff, who then appointed deputies and constables. The colonial governor could also take a hand in capital crimes, and for that matter, so could the Barons and the one Earl who had estates on the planet. Since all eight of the victims had been naval officers, the Calaskaran Royal Navy could also claim precedence in the investigation.

  The Silent Order didn’t like that.

  As the name implied, the Silent Order preferred to remain unnoticed and unseen. Whitefish had to make several calls to Censor, the mysterious head of the Silent Order and possibly one of the most well-informed men in the Kingdom of Calaskar or anywhere else. In the end, the Navy issued a statement that the eight murdered officers had been killed by a Machinist terrorist, a terrorist that the Navy had killed. All details about the killing were declared classified for the safety of the Kingdom of Calaskar.

  March spent the four days of the cleanup in an enforced vacation at Whitefish’s main club, a sprawling casino and nightclub called the Blue Wave. The Blue Wave offered a stupendous array of alcoholic beverages, games, musical performance, and even a discreet (and heavily licensed) brothel tucked away out of sight. March was never at ease while at leisure, so he spent the time alternating between exercising in the Blue Wave’s excellent (and infrequently used) gym and driving back to the spaceport to do maintenance and upgrades on the Tiger.

  “You should relax more, Jack,” said Whitefish one night.

  They sat at a booth in the corner in the Blue Wave’s vast dining room. Whitefish held court a few nights a week, handling business that required a personal touch and receiving visits from his informants. He wore a garish blue suit, and a truly ridiculous quantity of food covered the table in front of him, along with several bottles of expensive alcohol. A cigar smoldered in his right hand. March had declined the food and the alcohol, but he had taken one of the cigars. He didn’t smoke on a regular basis, but there were times when it suited a mood, and this was one of them.

  “I am relaxing,” said March.

  Whitefish snorted. “You spent the last four days doing deadlifts in my gym and recalibrating your ship’s ion thrusters. Very relaxing.”

  “No, I didn’t,” said March. “I spent the last four days doing deadlifts in your gym and overhauling the Tiger’s fusion drive. Completely different.”

  “You didn’t even visit the brothel,” said Whitefish.

  “As much as I would enjoy an android that has been used by a thousand men before me,” said March, “I have to decline. This cigar is excellent, though.”

  “Isn’t it?” said Whitefish, pleased. The man was a very good host. It was just as well he had cigars – he would have kept offering various luxuries to March until he felt his duty as host was satisfied. “I get them from the Stromboli Consortium. The best tobacco in the galaxy, in the opinion of myself and many other renowned authorities, comes from a little colony on the other side of the Gloom Nebula. Cost an arm and a leg, but worth it.” He blew out a cloud of smoke, and suddenly changed his mind to business. “You should be able to leave tomorrow.”

  March nodded. “Got things cleared up?”

  “Mostly,” said Whit
efish. “Censor fixed things with the local authorities, and the Navy is taking credit for killing Reimer. Censor sounded pretty pleased with you. Well, as much as the old ghost is ever pleased with anything. He must relax even less than you, Jack.” He leaned closer. “I sent him a DNA scan from Reimer’s carcass, yeah?” March nodded. “Don’t know what he’ll learn from it. Machinist DNA is always screwed to hell and back, no offense. But that DNA scan got Censor all excited. Tomorrow you’re supposed to proceed to Constantinople Station, but on the way, you’ll meet a Navy shuttle and hand over Reimer’s corpse. After that Censor will contact you for a new job once you get to the station.”

  March grunted. “Suppose I had better have a second cigar, then.”

  “Smart man.”

  The next day everything was arranged, and March left Constantinople II’s spaceport aboard the Tiger. His ship was a Mercator Foundry Yards Class 9 light freighter, heavily modified, upgraded, and armed. It was the kind of ship commonly called a blockade runner, a favorite of smugglers, independent operators, and privateers, which was just as well since March presented a public face to the world as a privateer. Technically March was a privateer since he held letters of marque from the Kingdom of Calaskar and he regularly ran cargoes to pay his bills. And he was actually carrying cargo for the Kingdom of Calaskar itself.

  Granted, that cargo was Philip Reimer’s corpse secured in a metal box in the hold, but still.

  March sat in the flight cabin at the pilot’s station, screens and holographic displays showing the status of the ship and the surrounding space. One screen showed data about Constantinople II. Its surface was over ninety percent ocean, with a single small continent and a few small islands, which explained why the planet’s main industries were tourism and a sideline in algae protein farming.

  After a few hours, March was five hundred thousand kilometers from the planet, and he docked with the waiting Royal Navy troop transport. Four grim-faced Royal Marines in blue power armor took Reimer’s impromptu coffin without a word, and then the transport undocked and vanished into hyperspace.

  Once the transport departed, March started his own hyperspace calculation. It was a short jump, and the calculation only took a few minutes, but he nonetheless performed all the preflight checks on the dark matter reactor, the hyperdrive itself, and the dark energy resonator. If either the dark matter reactor or the hyperdrive failed, at best the Tiger would fail to enter hyperspace. At worst, the ship would blow up.

  And if the dark energy resonator failed while traversing hyperspace, that would be worse. Without a functioning resonator, any ship in hyperspace would attract macrobes, dark energy-based lifeforms that could possess and mutate humans. March thought the remaining cybernetics and nanotech in his body, to say nothing of his damaged DNA, would render him immune to macrobe possession, but he didn’t want to test it.

  So, he performed all the checks, and once the systems showed green, March activated the hyperdrive and took the Tiger into hyperspace.

  The jump took seven minutes, and once the Tiger exited the terminus of its hyperspace tunnel, March found himself past the orbit of the Constantinople system’s first gas giant and its moons.

  Constantinople Station floated in the void a quarter of a million kilometers ahead.

  The station was huge, seven enormous habitat rings built within a central cylinder. Nearly a million people lived and worked on the station, and thousands of ships stopped there every month. Constantinople IV was one of the seven main worlds of the Kingdom of Calaskar, and one of the first colonies founded by the Calaskaran Crown in the Kingdom’s expansion after the civil war with the Renarchists. The station was centuries old and a hub for interstellar commerce, both within the systems of the Kingdom and with its neighbors. Of course, no major interstellar power permitted foreign spacecraft to approach its inhabited worlds, and Constantinople IV’s ground defenses and the firepower of the Royal Calaskaran Navy let the Kingdom enforce its will in that decision. All interstellar commerce headed for Constantinople IV docked at Constantinople Station, and Calaskaran shuttles carried the goods to the worlds, moons, and stations of the system.

  “Incoming transmission, Captain March,” said a female voice over the flight cabin’s speakers. The voice had a cool upper-class Calaskaran accent. “Constantinople Station control is hailing the Tiger.”

  “Thank you, Vigil,” said March. The pseudointelligence that controlled many of the Tiger’s systems was far more powerful and sophisticated than the simple pseudointelligence that managed the greeter androids in the sporting goods store. Nevertheless, Vigil was still not a true artificial intelligence and possessed no sapience. Every human experiment with artificial intelligence had ended in disaster, with the AI inevitably descending into homicidal madness. Alien experiments with artificial intelligence had only garnered a little more success.

  March had found that out the hard way.

  He answered the call and stated his business and transmitted his ID information to the earnest young ensign of the Royal Calaskaran Navy working in traffic control. March supposed the traffic controller officer was just like the young men who had been murdered on Constantinople II. After a few moments, the ensign assigned the Tiger to docking bay 9954 on Ring Six, and March guided to the Tiger to the appropriate spot.

  Once he had docked, he set the ship’s systems to standby and directed Vigil to begin diagnostics. After that, he spent some money to purchase supplies and reactor fuel from the station’s vendors. It cost more than he would have liked, especially since he had been forced to leave Constantinople II without a paying cargo, but March had enough financial reserves to weather the cost for now.

  Once that was completed, he left the ship and walked through the concourses of Constantinople Station.

  The station was old, and it was built in the classic High Calaskaran style, with lots of gleaming metal, the walls themselves adorned with massive screens showing videos about the history of the Kingdom or enormous murals commissioned from the Kingdom’s most prominent artists. Most of the murals showed scenes from the history of Calaskar. One showed the first King leading the colonists from the self-immolation of the Fifth Terran Empire and landing on Calaskar. March was reasonably sure that the first King of Calaskar had not been that muscular or broad-shouldered, but one had to account for artistic license. Others showed victorious Lord Admirals of the Navy’s past, and still another showed the first colonists landing on Constantinople IV. More murals showed religious themes from the Royal Calaskaran Church – Joshua leading the Israelites to the Promised Land (Joshua looked a lot like the first King of Calaskar), or Christ feeding the masses or driving the moneylenders from the temple.

  March gazed at the murals as he walked past them. He was cynical enough to see the propaganda value of such artwork, how the murals had been designed to reinforce the message that Calaskar was one nation beneath its King. They praised Calaskar’s history and culture, reminding the people of the lineage and heritage of their traditions.

  Yet he had to admit they were beautiful.

  And the Final Consciousness produced no art. The Machinists created nothing but blood and death and conquest, leaving ruined worlds filled with labor camps and graveyards in their wake. March supposed that summed up his feelings for his adopted nation. The Kingdom of Calaskar was not without its flaws…but it was far, far better than the inhuman tyranny of the Final Consciousness and the endless cruelty of the Machinists.

  A walk of about two kilometers brought March to his favorite restaurant on Constantinople Station. The different restaurants and taverns on the station catered to different groups of people. High-ranking Naval officers and visiting nobles went to their own clubs, and lower-ranking officers did the same. Enlisted men visited taverns where officers only rarely appeared. Freighter crewers and independent starship captains went to their own bars, and March followed suit. He came to a restaurant on the upper level of one of the station’s commercial concourses, five levels of shops and res
taurants and equipment workshops spreading away below him. The far wall of the concourse had been painted with an enormous mural showing the history of Calaskar, with Kings and Lord Admirals striding through the centuries while God watched from above. It was a famous mural, and March saw small clusters of tourists standing at the railings of the balconies, taking pictures with the huge painting in the background.

  He ignored the mural and took a booth at the restaurant, where he ordered his preferred breakfast meal from a waitress in a tight T-shirt and skirt. A few moments later he ate his breakfast of vat-grown eggs and bacon, accompanied by large quantities of black coffee. March supposed he was close enough to Constantinople IV that he could have ordered real bacon and eggs for merely twice the cost of their vat-grown counterparts, but he had always had a taste for artificially grown meat.

  The habits of a lifetime, he supposed.

  And much to his surprise, Censor did not call until March had finished his meal and was on his third cup of coffee.

  He looked at the display on his phone.

  The call had arrived at the Tiger, and Vigil had routed it to March’s phone. The display indicated that the call had arrived with the highest known level of quantum encryption, and its source was unknown. Censor was likely calling from Constantinople IV, though technically he could have been calling from any one of the seven worlds in the Kingdom of Calaskar that possessed tachyon-entanglement relay based communications.

  Though given how expensive tachyon relays were to build, likely the head of the Silent Order was calling from Constantinople IV. But that was not important.

  March accepted the call and lifted the phone to his ear. “Hello?”