The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy) Read online

  He opened the door quietly and stepped through.

  ✽✽✽

  Rali's apartment was a very basic studio, but the sleeping area was around a corner, out of sight. The front area was unoccupied. Muffled conversation emanated from the back.

  There was a kitchen area built into the wall to his right. He crept to his left, found an empty can on the floor, and put his back against the far wall. He tossed the can at an empty spot on the kitchen counter. Then he waited for the noise to lure someone out from the bedroom.

  A gruff voice barked, “Go check that out.”

  His heart was hammering in his chest. It had been a while since Darius had really gotten in a fight. And he’d never fought people quite like this.

  A beefy goon emerged from the back. Nearly every inch of his skin was covered in vibrant and grotesque animated tattoos. Each one signified a particular act—murder, arson, armed robbery—and each gang had a unique set.

  Before the goon could get a lock on him, Darius thrust his shock baton into the man’s ribs. Unless you had military-grade cybernetic enhancements, that would put you out of commission for several minutes. Darius grabbed the scruff of the goon’s jacket as he fell, to muffle the impact of him falling to the floor. But his opponent was even heavier than he looked. It didn’t go well.

  The goon’s partner apparently heard the noise. He called out, “Yo, Razor...whatchu doin’, man?”

  The shock baton had one disadvantage—it needed to be fully recharged to work its magic again. However, even without a zap factor, it was an acceptable blunt weapon in a pinch.

  More footsteps approached from the back, then stopped. Judging by the pattern of that sound, Darius guessed that the next guy saw his partner laying on the ground. Darius could practically hear the goon calculating his next move. As those gears began to turn, Darius reared back with the shock baton. He readied himself to swing as soon a Goon #2 showed his face.

  The second goon leaped out into the middle of the room, probably anticipating that this would cause the first attack to miss. He was armed with a machete-like sword already raised above his head, ready to chop. As the goon turned to square up, Darius smacked the baton into the man’s ribs. But without the zap, the impact only pushed the man off-balance.

  He quickly recovered from Darius’s strike, and then the machete came down with enough force to chop a man in half. Darius raised his gloved hand to catch it. This was pretty much the only move he had left. It was one that the goon wouldn’t expect. Darius was counting on that. Who blocks the swing of a blade with their hand?

  They were now face-to-face. The goon’s cybernetic eyes were concentric rings of metal and silver—and they were clouded with confusion.

  “Hi,” said Darius mildly, before kneeing him in the groin as hard as he could.

  Thankfully, the goon had no protection down there, and he went down like a deflated balloon. Darius wanted to knock him out altogether, but he didn’t have the means. Punching someone until they lose consciousness doesn’t work like the vid shows make you think it does. People don’t conveniently nap for several minutes while you tie them up or make a getaway.

  When you light someone up like that, they’re really only out for five to ten seconds. You could give them a full-blown concussion to slow them down, but that’s also a way to inadvertently kill someone. Darius had never crossed that line. He wasn’t in a hurry to start, despite the stakes.

  A kind of exhaustion that was not entirely physical overtook him, and he leaned over to catch his breath. “Rali,” he said, “Get your ass out here.”

  “Darius? Holy hell! ...Are they...are they...”

  “They’re alive. We have to go. Grab whatever you need, and let’s get the hell out of here. Now.” The first goon was already beginning to stir. And there was still the lookout lurking somewhere outside.

  Rali emerged from the back, looking pretty bloodied.

  “You know, Ral, I still remember a time when a sight like this would have had me dragging you to a hospital.” Darius sighed. “Is anything broken?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so. Then that means you can move. Let’s go.”

  Rali glanced around the apartment. He had the sad look of a man who knew he would not be back for a while, perhaps not ever. He shouldered his backpack. “Lead the way,” he said quietly.

  “I have the van parked in an alley nearby,” Darius said as they made their way down the stairwell.

  “That won’t work, D. They...they made me swallow a tracker.”

  “Son of a bitch, Ral.”

  “Yeah, they can find me pretty much anywhere in the city.”

  Darius raised an eyebrow. “Pretty much?”

  “Well, there is one way we can go. The only way we can really block the signal.”

  “I’m guessing I’m not going to like where this is going...”

  “You won’t. But like I was saying, it’s the only reliable way. We...we take the sewers.”

  Darius stopped halfway down the stairs despite himself. “The sewers? I’ve never been down there. You’ve never been down there. How are we supposed to make our way?”

  Rali shrugged. “We’ll have to figure it out as we go.”

  “Gods damn it. Fine. Just take us to the nearest manhole cover, I guess...”

  “There’s actually one in the alleyway.”

  Darius shook his head. “It bothers me that you just know that kind of thing offhand.”

  “You know me, D, I have a good visual memory.”

  “You have a lot of talents that you’ve never put to good use. But that’s another story.”

  “Well, I’ve put some to use,” Rali said. “Just not in the interest of slaving behind that gift shop counter every day.”

  “...Let’s just table that discussion for now,” said Darius. “Here, have a baton. It’s not charged.”

  Rali caught it in midair. “Why not?”

  “Ask the guy I smacked it with just now.”

  “Hells, D, you could have killed him with that thing.”

  “Didn’t have much of a choice,” said Darius. “If I’d given that guy an opening, he probably would have sliced me into salad toppings.”

  They made their way down to the ground level in tense silence. The building was still quiet, but one could see the silhouettes of people peeking through their apartment windows. The exit to the alleyway was on their left...and the lookout was standing across from them. He was about ten meters away. Darius could feel him sizing them up.

  The two brothers kept walking. Maybe if they didn’t break their stride and just went straight for the side entrance...

  No such luck. Out of the corner of his eye, Darius could see the goon advancing toward them with purpose. In fact, he was close enough to the alleyway exit to cut them off, even if they broke into a run.

  “Ral, can you fight?”

  “I’ve got the adrenaline,” his brother muttered.

  They stopped walking. The goon stopped walking. The sound of the street faded in Darius’s ears.

  If the goons didn’t collect, they would have to answer to people even scarier than them. So they were dead-set on either getting the money or sending a message in the form of missing digits, or worse. The ability to instill fear was the true currency of this underworld, and most others. So although money ran through its veins, revenue collection was for these foot soldiers. And they enjoyed their work.

  The goon carried what looked like a chunk of concrete held together with rebar. It was a crude two-handed sledge, perhaps meant more to intimidate than to wield. But he silently raised it over his head with both hands, instead of yelling like a madman. To Darius, this meant that he’d done this before.

  This move left the goon’s midsection seemingly open. But Darius knew that someone experienced with two-handed weapons could bring them down with brutal effectiveness if an opponent telegraphed their opening strike. The sheer length of the weapon also gave the goo
n some range. It wasn’t a bad tool for handling two people at once.

  Darius’s lingering familiarity with street combat let a sort of cool detachment settle in. His own adrenaline was not so strong that it overwhelmed his mind with animal instinct. He could see the path clearly. The enemy would probably attack just so, and he could counter like this and that. The three of them operated somewhere in the space between ballet and ancient ritual. In either setting, you had to be thinking several moves ahead if you wanted to triumph.

  He pushed Rali back, in case his brother wasn’t picking up on the same pattern. Then he closed the distance. He feinted to the left, and just as the goon’s swing was about to come down, Darius pivoted to the right. The sledge whiffed, and he jabbed him in the ribs with his magnoglove as he swept past him. But with his sidestep, Darius couldn’t carry a lot of momentum forward into his first strike. He could only stagger his opponent.

  The goon was likely to make a wild swing with that concrete club next, to re-establish distance. He would be hoping to catch Darius before he’d repositioned himself. So Darius anticipated and ducked. But instead, the goon discarded his weapon. He unsheathed two knives in one smooth movement. Smart, actually. The club wasn’t effective once someone was right in your face like Darius was. Knives, however…

  Rali came in from Darius’s left with a hard swing. He was committing a lot, maybe too much. It was the kind of attack that could leave him vulnerable if it completely missed.

  The goon deflected the blow with the knife in his right hand like he’d done it a hundred times. Then he moved to stab Rali with the knife in his left. Darius grabbed it with his glove like he had in the apartment. This stopped the attack, but the goon’s strength was so great that he was able to fling Darius away. However, this effort momentarily turned the goon away from Rali. Rali took advantage of the opening to smack him in the back of the head with the baton, dazing him.

  Darius got back onto his feet and scrambled towards the goon. He hoped to finish him off with a flying magnoglove punch. But suddenly, there was a sharp pain in his side. He fell to his knees.

  “Darius!” his brother cried out.

  He looked up at the eastern stairwell. The two goons he’d handled in Rali’s apartment were shuffling painfully down.

  Darius was almost offended to realize that he had just been shot. In all the excitement, the possibility of an attack from above had slipped past him. The sensation in his side was even more painful than he imagined it could be. His brother lifted him up and half-carried him to the side exit. The lookout was still stumbling to his feet.

  The shock of the impact made Darius woozy. He waggled his left hand at Rali. “Take it...take the glove. You need it to...get the manhole cover off.”

  “I’m not gonna get that cover off in time, bro. Even with the glove. We have to take the van.”

  The two brothers burst through the side door and into the alleyway. It was still raining heavily.

  Darius felt blood dripping down his pant leg. “No,” he grunted. “Go to the manhole. I have an idea.”

  “Darius—”

  “Don’t argue,’ he groaned, “just do it!” There was no time for debate.

  It was now Rali’s turn to speak through gritted teeth. “Fine. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, we’re both dead.” The manhole was in a sort of alcove. It wasn’t directly in line of the sight of the goons, who were coming out of the side gate now.

  “Get it open,” Darius said. “I’ll take care of the goons. Just set me down here.” Rali glowered but wasted no time.

  The goons had spotted Darius lying on the ground. Snippets of their conversation carried as they closed in. They were bickering about the merits of stabbing and shooting people who owed you money.

  “Well, we slowed these little shits down, didn’t we?” said one. “Look at ‘im, he can’t even walk.”

  The goons were no longer in a hurry, now that it looked like their prey had nowhere to go. But their assumption of imminent victory bought Darius the extra seconds he needed. He tapped furiously on his wristpad. Maybe there was enough time.

  Behind the goons, the delivery van came to life. It had an electric motor, so there was no rumble of an engine to warn them. Under manual control, Darius could weaponize it. He activated the headlights, and they lit up the alleyway. The goons, naturally, turned to face this newcomer to the festivities. Darius flicked the highbeams on, blinding them temporarily.

  Darius accelerated the van to maximum speed. The goons began to scatter, but the disorientation of the highbeams sent two of them in the wrong direction. Then there was a series of dull thuds. Then only the sound of the rain⁠—and some distant sirens. The police were finally on their way.

  Rali looked over at Darius in shock. “What...what did you just do?”

  “Saved our lives, I think. For now, anyway. The rest depends on you...” Darius gestured at the manhole cover. His light-headedness was only getting worse. He couldn’t tell if it was adrenaline or blood loss. “If you don’t get that thing off in like the next minute, you’re gonna have to carry me down.”

  “Well, I’d ideally have one for each hand, but...” Rali bent down and grabbed the cover with both hands. It took every ounce of his strength to lift it, but he managed to heave the thing off. “That was heavier than I remember.”

  “You do this often, Ral?”

  “I did some exploring back in the day. We’re a family of relic hunters, after all.”

  “I feel like you’re not telling me the whole story, like usual. Now help me get down there before I bleed the hell out.”

  -2-

  Darius had had his brushes with danger on the streets of New Caledonia before, but never an actual brush with death. As he found himself drifting in and out of consciousness, he wondered if he had finally punched his ticket. He wondered if he had sacrificed his life for a star-crossed junkie.

  He could tell that they were still underground, in the sewers. When he could focus his eyes long enough to see, he made out the tell-tale arched ceiling that vaulted a good ten meters up into the shadows of the tunnels. Wall lamps gave off a warm orange-yellow glow, but they were not bright enough to pierce the darkness above. A person could see well enough to traverse the elevated walkway and to make out the directional signs.

  Things looked much like they did on the shows Darius liked to watch. But they had never quite conveyed the stench. It made his stomach flip.

  Rali apparently had enough experience down here to actually navigate, and it seemed like he had a particular destination in mind. Darius felt his brother’s sense of purpose, to the extent that he could sense anything. He faded in and out of dreams full of goons and drifting sirens.

  As Darius came to now, he was lying on the sewer concrete as his brother tested a door. There was an old sign on it, but Darius couldn’t make it out in the shadows, or in his semi-delirium. The entrance was apparently rusted shut. Rali threw his full weight at the door several times, and it barely budged. He dug the magnoglove out of Darius’s gear bag. But before Darius could see the scene play out, he drifted into blackness once more.

  When he awoke, he was laying on what appeared to be a gurney. But the cold damp indicated that they were still in the sewers. He smacked his lips. His mouth was dry.

  He could barely manage a whisper. “Wah...water?”

  Rali came into his vision, floating over him like a specter. “I can catch some rain coming down the storm drain, D. I’ll be right back.”

  Darius slept some more. When the world came back into focus, he was alone, but his head was a little clearer. It seemed that sepsis had not set in. He poked at his bandage and didn’t smell anything ominous wafting from it. He sat up to take a look around, though the pain in his side was still immense. It felt like days might have passed, or only hours. The missing time was a fog of images, smells, and sensations.

  He was still lying on a gurney, but in a dark room. The door was wide open, but only a dim glow came
in from the main sewer tunnel. It looked like he was in a disused office of some kind. There was a sturdy institutional desk and chair in one corner, a counter lining the wall, and cabinets littered with ambiguous objects. Most of them looked like they were once made of glass, now shattered.

  He couldn’t figure out the function of this room. So he decided to lay down and take another nap. At the least, it was far enough from the main tunnel for the smell to have mostly receded.

  Darius woke at some point to the feeling of wetness on his lips, He woke to find Rali pouring a trickle of water into his mouth from a bowl. It tasted a little like dirt and tire rubber, but it satisfied his thirst. Darius coughed a little.

  Rali held his brother’s head up with one hand. “Take it slow, D. The water isn’t going anywhere.”

  Darius took a few more sips and pushed the bowl away. He looked around. It was the same office-like space as before. “What is this place?”

  “This used to be one of the labs where they worked on editing our ancestors’ genes, in the early days of the colony. They made it easier for us to handle the conditions. I knew about some of these labs because I’ve broken into a couple before, looking for old tech to sell to collectors.”

  “So what is something like this doing down in the sewers?” asked Darius.

  “Well, it wasn’t always a sewer. These were originally just tunnels for the colonists to get around, before the empire did a little terraforming to complete the habitability plan. Didn’t they teach you this stuff in class?”

  “History was never my strong point. So you broke into these old vaults...why? To fund your habit?

  “Not always,” Rali said defensively. “Money doesn’t come as easy for me as it does for you. I don’t have your cushy job at the gift shop.”

  “We tried that, remember? Then chits started disappearing.” Darius sat up. “Look, I need to go to a hospital. Now that the coast is clear, I need to get patched up.”

  Rali shook his head. “We can’t do that without showing up on the gang’s radar.”