Immortal: Chapter One

A sample of one on my current projects, a military science fiction thriller I’ve been working on for a while now. It’s sort of a back-burner project, one I work on when I have time in between Doomsday Recon.

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The heartbeat was only the faintest flutter, but it felt like the pounding of a kettle drum in her mind. She’d sensed it the moment it began to pulse only a few seconds ago.

“It’s not possible,” she whispered.

Her hands moved slowly to her lower belly and she followed the flow of her own blood into this new life inside her. It was a tiny, feeble thing, this impossible impossibility. This blasphemy she carried. She was a slave, and her race couldn’t reproduce with the children of god, let alone The Name himself. The offspring of such a pairing, even if it were possible, would be profane. The very thought was sacrilege.

She swore softly. It hadn’t been enough for her god to take her body; by some unholy miracle he’d left a part of himself behind.

“It’s not possible,” she repeated into the darkness of her cell, as if denying it could make it go away. To call these fourteen square meters encased in bare duracete an apartment would be too generous. She rose from the stained futon that once folded into a couch but was long since broken, and paced barefoot across peeling laminate flooring intended to look like exotic off-world hardwood. Resting her head and hands against the dingy window she watched vehicle traffic and crowds of pedestrians flowing in an erratic dance far below as fat, oily raindrops hit the large transparisteel pane, refracting a neon haze.

Taking a step back, she inspected her nails. They’d been crusted with blood as the house slaves washed her, murmuring comfort and humming soothingly. She’d sat naked in a small bath and shivered, though she wasn’t cold. Steam and the scent of jasmine had filled the room. There was another smell too. His smell. She didn’t think it could ever be washed off.

She’d scratched him, and he’d bled.

Can a god bleed?

[I do not know what to say,] a voice spoke in her mind. [I cannot calculate the odds of this pregnancy.]

She shook her head. “It’s impossible, Ash.”

[Clearly not,] her dispersed architecture bio-based AI replied. [This is a distraction, Sarah. You are a fugitive.]

“At least we know why I’m being hunted. Somehow The Name knows, and he ordered my termination.”

No one could learn of the perversion she carried and live, not even her, not even if she killed it now. And that had been her first impulse; to snuff out this part of him he’d put inside her. Stop its heart, as she’d stopped so many others. Yet somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was a part of her too. And she, an agent of death, a hand of The Name, one of his own destroying angels, had now created… life.

She was something now she’d been told she could never be.

She was a mother.

And it was her child.

Hers.

[A child will complicate things,] Asherah said. [Tremendously.]

“I know,” she sighed.

But it was hers.

She’d never had anything that was truly hers.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asked the heartbeat.

It continued to beat fiercely in answer, feeble as it was. Tiny as it was. No bigger than a seed.

She frowned. There was time to figure out what to do with this… complication. She was hungry, she realized, and she wanted something more substantial than the noodles and broth the ancient autoserver in this micro apartment had to offer.

After lacing up her boots she plucked her holdout blaster off the bed and tucked it behind her back, ensured her knife was securely sheathed on her forearm, and then slipped on an oversized coat with a deep hood.

[Going out in public is dangerous,] Asherah warned.

“And staying in this depressing cell will drive me crazy. Especially now.”

The door slid closed behind her as she moved into the hall. She didn’t bother making sure it was locked. The security features in tenements like this were laughable. She scanned the hall in both directions before making for the lift, passing by the doors to other flats and the sounds of shouting and loud music. Inside the lift she wrinkled her nose at the strong smell of urine and asked for the mezzanine street level; only the most suicidal went all the way down to the ground floor.

About halfway down, on the fifty-second floor, the lift stopped and the doors opened to admit two men and a woman. Asherah analyzed the trio and highlighted various probable concealed weapons on their bodies, updating Sarah’s HUD through a direct link to her visual cortex.

She moved into a corner and kept her head down, willing them to ignore her as she tasted their unsavory thoughts. They were scavengers looking for an easy score—or even just a little fun—but they were unaware of her presence. She could often make people forget she was there. It came in handy in her line of work. And it helped that she was small, even for a woman from Kortum.

The lift reached the mezzanine and she watched them off before exiting. The elevated thoroughfare here was twenty stories above ground level, a city built atop a city. Below were the poorest of the poor in the Khekha serf district, forgotten and untouchable. Above the buildings rose into the low grey clouds.

She needed to get off this planet, and for that she needed a lot more money than she was going to scrounge up picking pockets. She needed a plan and she needed to be able to pass herself off as a freeborn. She’d never get off-world—or even out of Khekha—if she couldn’t prove she wasn’t a serf.

But first she needed real food, and worked her way through the crowds of pedestrians and across the gridlocked traffic to a stand selling kmumkay kabobs—at least they claimed it was pigmy jungle bison. She’d had the real thing once, on Batilbasa IV. This was some printed protein reproduction, but it was seasoned well, and a far cry from stale noodles and broth. She perched on a stool and ordered a portion with a side of imitation rice.

“Always recognize a new face,” a large, dusky Kheylan man said, sitting down beside her. He signaled the old Stishatzi woman working the stand for some kmumkay and then leaned over to get a look under Sarah’s hood. “Wibuiti, eh? Not many of you in this district. Lovely complexion. Like copper. My clients pay a premium for Wibuiti girls.”

“So sorry,” she answered around a mouthful of food. “My family comes from Ishbitsan.”

“Well, we just won’t tell your clients that.” He laughed. “I can get you good work. Scions even.”

“So sorry, not looking for work.”

“Pretty thing like you? Sure you are. How old are you? Fourteen standard years? I bet you are. You’re a tiny one too. Fun-sized. Heh. Lots of work for a girl like you. Don’t tell me your family can’t use the money. Isn’t safe around here to go freelance. I protect my girls and boys. You might want to think about that.”

She rolled her eyes. Fourteen. He was off by a decade, but she got that a lot. She was small to begin with, and the symbiotic nanoculture flowing through her veins would keep her looking an amorphous age for decades. She probably wouldn’t appear to be a mature woman until she was over a hundred.

“So sorry, not looking for work,” she repeated, giving a mental push for emphasis. “Just trying to eat.”

But he was too stubborn to be manipulated easily by telepathic mind games.

“I’ve met girls like you before,” he said, picking at his food. “Think they’re too good. Think they’re something special.” He straightened on his stool and licked his fingers. “That it? You special?”

He took another bite and stared her down.

She didn’t need to read his thoughts to know where this was going, and she knew, because he knew, that he had a friend behind her. Abduction was common enough in places like this. There was a large market for flesh, willing or not. If he couldn’t entice her, he’d break her. Either way, she’d work for him.

That’s what he was thinking.

“Not special,” she said, placing a hand on his. He leered at her as he chewed. She followed the flow blood to his heart in her mind. “So sorry.”

He made a choking sound and his eyes bulged as the color drained from his face and then he flopped into his food on the counter.

She grabbed a half-eaten kabob and then flowed into the crowd. You don’t see me, she projected to the onlookers. I was never here.

She’d made it half a block when she felt a hand grip her shoulder and a barrel jam into the small of her back.

“What was that little trick, girl?” a deep voice hissed behind her. “Poison?”

She wasn’t entirely surprised. She often got premonitions of danger. Now that she had a voice to focus on she could taste his thoughts. She wasn’t good at probing deep into someone’s mind, not like some of the masters who’d trained her from childhood, but she could easily read surface thoughts, and his were not nearly as murderous as she expected; but they weren’t particularly friendly either.

“Turn around, let’s get a look at you. Stay casual. We’re just two friends bumping into one another on the street.”

She complied and he tore back her hood with his free hand. He wasn’t a particularly large man, olive-skinned and approaching middle age, but she wasn’t particularly large either. He had a good twenty-five kilos on her and at least the same in centimeters of height, plus a blaster shoved into her belly. She wasn’t concerned. Given her small size, most of her combatives training had focused on devastating strikes to the eyes and throat, and kicks designed to tear tendons and destroy knees and ankles. He was physically stronger, but she could use that against him, and besides, her strikes were augmented with telekinesis. The real trick would be disarming and killing him in a way that wouldn’t draw unwanted attention or raise suspicion.

“No tricks,” she said with a demure smile. She took a last bite and waved her kabob stick. “I think the poor man’s heart gave out.”

He squinted down at her. “Not likely. Who do you work for? You one of Kalev’s girls? I’ve never seen you before. You could’ve just told us. We don’t poach.”

[I am not familiar enough with Khekha’s underground to place the name,] Asherah told Sarah. [But it is not uncommon for criminal organizations to use young women as both prostitutes and assassins. Perhaps if you allowed me to uplink…]

“So sorry,” she said to the man, ignoring her AI and giving him a mental push. “Your friend had a heart attack I think.”

The man started to nod and then shook his head. She sighed. Compulsion wasn’t her best talent. Pedestrians were flowing around them, and there’d be a lot of witnesses if she killed him. She’d get away, but someone would take her picture on their comm and the gendarmerie would at least want her for questioning.

She could taste his thoughts vacillating between fear of reprisal if she were under a competitor’s protection, abducting her for his boss’s flesh houses, or just shooting her in an alley and leaving her for this world’s analog of rats after forcing some more information out of her. Vengeance for his colleague’s death didn’t really enter into it. He couldn’t care less.

And she didn’t want to let him live, not after getting such a good look at her. He’d talk to people, and they’d wonder who she was and who she worked for. Simple serf girls didn’t go around poisoning people in self defense. She didn’t want attention from the gendarmerie or the underground.

So the alley it was.

“I didn’t kill your friend,” she said. “I swear to The Name. Please just let me go.”

“I want to know who you work for.”

“Nobody, I swear. My family is bonded to the compeller factory. I’m a simple serf.”

“Carrying enough cardiac toxin to drop a man as big as Asēr? Not a chance. You’re from out-of-district. Come on, we’re going to have a private chat.”

He’d stopped vacillating and had decided to kill her after he found out what she was doing in Khekha. She pulled her hood up and let him lead her off the main street and into a secluded overpass between skyscrapers.

“Now,” he said, stepping back a pace and leveling his blaster at her. “You’re going to tell me who you are, why you’re in Khekha, and which cartel sent you.”

She flicked a finger and he glanced over his shoulder at the phantom sound of someone coming up behind him. His head whipped back to her, but she was already moving, knocking the blaster aside with one hand as she drove the kabob skewer deep through his eye and into his brain. A snap kick to his knee hastened his crash to the ground. She crouched down and checked his pulse. It was fading, and she helped it fade faster.

She waited until she sensed his heart give a last shuddering beat and then vanished into the shadows.

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