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

  The humidity had not let up in the night, and the heat had barely went down.

  Still, they could press on, thanks to the mushroom tea that they did not speak of. They did not require sleep or rest for now. They only needed water, and they had some in their canteens, but not as much as they wanted. At some point before dawn, they would have to find a water source and make a pit stop.

  Darius felt like there was a goon behind every tree and a tripwire across every path. He was more scared of them than of any monster the jungle could dream up. But as much as he wanted to stop and think, it was better to meet your enemy while moving, rather than being set upon. In the jungle, waiting was a good way to get surprised by whatever was stalking you.

  He split the difference and bent the group’s path southward as they made their way to the ruins still to the west. That way, if someone was sending a detachment to the camp, the trio might avoid them for now.

  He opened his canteen to take a drink, but there was only a trickle left. He asked his brother if he had some. There was one gulp left.

  “We need to stop for water,” said Darius.

  “My visor map doesn’t show any streams nearby,” said Nadira.

  Darius had explained to her earlier that streams were safer than ponds or rivers, because dangerous creatures couldn’t hide in them. You just had to watch out for herbivores. Because when they gathered to drink on the forest floor, carnivores usually weren’t far behind. It was one arc of the circle of life here.

  But that wasn’t the whole story. “That won’t be a problem,” he said. “When there’s no water on the ground, you can usually find it in the plants themselves. Just have to find the right ones.”

  After a few more minutes of walking, they came across a divula tree. The species wasn’t as important as the fact that it was the kind that had a lot of thick, low-hanging branches. This meant that there would be many vines within reach of the ground. Vines were often full of water, much of which had already been naturally purified by the plant itself. It certainly beat having to squeeze water out of mushrooms. That took time.

  Darius and Rali cut the vines open with their machetes and aimed them into the purifier. It wasn’t as much water as they would get from a stream or river, but it would do.

  Darius turned to Nadira. “Given that you’re an MoT agent,” he said, “do you have any idea how goons could get their hands on a bird like that?”

  “Unfortunately, she said, “your brother made the mistake of borrowing from one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the region. And by ‘region’ I mean multiple star systems. The Otravas are partnered with some people whom even I would cross the street to avoid.”

  “Otravas?” asked Darius. “I’ve heard of them. They own entire neighborhoods. Gods above, Ral.”

  “What can I say,” Rali said dryly. “I needed deep pockets, and they have deep pockets.”

  “So where did the money go?”

  “Not up my veins, if that’s what you’re asking. I was gonna buy a pallet of sarlee cubes from a guy I knew. Or thought I knew. The profit margin was gonna be enough to get me out of that rathole of an apartment and into something I could bring a girl home to. Even mom wouldn’t have criticized the place much.”

  “So what happened?” asked Darius.

  “Turns out that the merchandise was hot,” said Rali. “Shocking, I know. Cops showed up just as I was transferring the credits. I managed to escape, but the chits and cubes stayed behind. They’re stacked up somewhere in a police lockup now.”

  Darius wanted to know how much cash it was, but he also didn’t.

  “How do you suppose the gang tracked us here?” asked Nadira.

  “I don’t know,” said Darius. “They might have intercepted the message that you sent to the gift shop. Or maybe the note that I wrote to Mom fell into the wrong hands. Gods, I hope she’s okay...”

  “Looks like we’re full up on water now,” said Rali.

  “All right,” said Darius. “Let’s get back on the road.”

  After a few more hours of walking, the gloom of the forest began to recede, signaling the coming of dawn. By the time they reached the outskirts of the ruins, it was nearly sunrise.

  The ruins lay in the center of a valley that was about two kilometers across. The forest did not grow close to it, which made it a relatively easy location to defend. The further away the trees were, the more time you had to select your targets.

  Darius and Nadira climbed to the southern ridge to get a look while Rali gathered more vine water.

  The aircraft from earlier was nowhere in sight, but they spotted about a half dozen people milling around the ruins.

  Darius had picked up on a few military tactics from his father’s stories about the Prophet. And one was that, however many enemies you thought you saw, you should probably double that number, to be safe.

  But there was a bigger problem: These people looked nothing like gang members.

  For one, they wore military jumpsuits, but with no insignia or other forms of identification.

  “I can’t get any info on my visor,” said Nadira.

  “Me neither.”

  “Let me rephrase, Darius. I am a senior investigator for a cabinet-level ministry—and I’m not pulling up any info on this crew. Also, their weapons...some of them look kind of familiar, but I’m not getting any IDs on those either. It’s one thing for service members to mod their kit, but for the tags to come up as question marks is another.”

  “What’s your thinking?” asked Darius.

  “These guys must be spec ops. Or contractors working off the books.”

  “Well, considering that they’re not properly dressed for the jungle,” said Darius, “I’d say they’re not specialists. Probably just regular hired guns. Do you have any government contacts who might know something about this?”

  “I believe I do, but honestly, I’m not even sure if I want that kind of traffic going over the wire right now. This is very unusual. I’ve never seen this kind of thing at an archeological site.

  “Either way,” she continued, “we’ll never take them on open ground. Not with these sticks and fruit and shit. You see that rifle on the one closest to us? It looks like a Spinoza. You don’t even need to aim it directly at your target to turn it into chunks. The rounds do almost all of the targeting on their own, if you want them to. And the throwing blade on her buddy’s belt reminds me of a Calamity. If someone launches one of those things at you, and you’re not already dodging, it’ll slice you into salad toppings before your body hits the dirt.”

  Darius decided that he didn’t want to know how she knew all that. “So what do you propose?” he asked her.

  “I propose that we regroup and figure out what our next steps are. We might be in over our heads here. We might need to walk away from this. They have guns, and we have...sticks and fruits and shit.”

  “Oh, we’ve got more than that,” said Darius.

  “I’ve yet to see anything in our arsenal of smelly fruit and rocks that could take on a Spinoza, Darius.”

  “That’s not everything that the jungle can do for us,” he said. “Let me show you the rest.”

  -6-

  The trio gathered on the other side of the ridge to assess their options. It was high noon. Darius laid out what they had so far; there were the sapwood pods that could spread burning liquid, the gorble fruit with its pocket of poison gas, a pile of river canes, and a pile of rocks.

  Nadira shook her head. “I wish I could just call in an airstrike.”

  “Like I said, this is just for starters,” said Darius. “The most effective weapons will be the bows.”

  “Bows?” she asked.

  “Yes, we can make them. You just need a few dry staves about my height, a fire, a length of cord, and a blade to do some carving. And some time.”

  “But if we make a fire,” Nadira mused, “won’t they see the smoke?”

  “Not if we build it correctly—in a covered pit, and wi
th dry wood. Believe it or not, that kind of wood can be found even here.”

  “Fine. And what about arrows?”

  “Those we can make with the canes,” said Rali. “Wood is effective if the arrowhead is flame-hardened, and we can make fletchings from rappa leaves. The veins are full of a natural glue.”

  Darius nodded. “Since these mercs appear to be too cool for body armor, we don’t need anything fancy to put arrows in them.”

  “But are you ready to put arrows in people?” she asked. “You can still walk away from this, you know.”

  “Tell me about these mercs,” said Rali.

  Darius and Nadira filled him in.

  Rali regarded the jungle at his feet. “So it’s beginning already.”

  Nadira eyed him carefully. “You saw some things too. In the mushroom tea.”

  “Yes,” he said flatly. “Hard to explain. They seemed like...Fragments in time.”

  Darius nodded. “Same here. I went all the way back to when we were kids.”

  “I didn’t,” said Rali.

  “But you said you saw fragments of time,” said Nadira.

  “Yes. But I guess...I guess I went in the other direction.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Ral,” said Darius, “are you trying to say that you saw shit that was in the future?”

  “Well, I definitely saw things that hadn’t happened yet!” Rali said defensively. “And one of them was unfamiliar armed guards wandering around the ruins. I don’t know!” He sat down and put his head in his hands. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But they looked exactly like what you describe, right down to the weapons.” He pulled a piece of wood from his bag and began to carve it with a pocket knife.

  “Well,” Nadira said dryly, “that would be more likely than being able to see through time. But after what I saw myself, maybe it’s not entirely crazy.”

  “Okay,” said Darius with a sigh, “I guess it’s your turn, then.”

  Nadira swallowed. “For one, I saw a place where I used to live. But not as it was in the past. I saw it as it exists now.”

  “And how does it exist now?” asked Darius.

  “A pile of rust floating in space.”

  “...Oh.”

  She nodded. “We can talk about that another time. I also think I saw inside the ruins. There was a body. I found scraps of paper around it, covered in scribbles and drawings.”

  Darius looked at her for a long time.

  “What?” she asked.

  He steadied his voice and asked, “What were the drawings?”

  She shrugged. “Just...lots of circles. Circles and what looked like...a fork?”

  “...With three prongs,” he finished.

  She looked at him quizzically. “What are you saying?”

  “My father drew things like that. But this man couldn’t be my father. My uncle buried him here in the jungle.”

  “Why here? Why not bring him back to the city crematorium?”

  “Well,” said Darius, “my father was a devout Muslim, and they don’t cremate. The janazah, the funeral, also has to be performed within a few days. Unfortunately, Magnusson’s disease stays highly contagious for about a week after the victim has died. My uncle was lucky that he didn’t get it as well.”

  “Or,” said Nadira, “there was no Magnusson’s infection.”

  Darius shook his head. “My uncle Omar is many things, but a liar isn’t one of them.”

  Nadira tilted her head. “Well, I think your father did have a sickness. Perhaps the things that it did to him brought him here. Perhaps, when he drank the tea I gave him those many years ago, he still saw the same kinds of things that we saw, even though...” She looked away. “Even though I botched the recipe.”

  “If I hadn’t drunk the tea myself,” said Darius, “I would say the whole thing sounded crazy. Because what we’re proposing is that I saw the past, you saw the present, and Rali here saw the future. Because we drank some mushroom juice.”

  “Can you explain how I know about the papers and the drawings of circles?” she asked. “Can you explain how Rali knew about the mercs?”

  Without looking up from his carving, Rali said, “Regardless of what we saw or thought we saw, the hypothesis can be tested simply by exploring the ruins.”

  “But that requires doing something about the mercenaries, if that’s what they are,” said Darius. “We don’t know their allegiances.”

  “If I am right about what I saw in the tea,” said Rali, “then they are not affiliated with our empire at all.”

  “I’m sorry, Rali,” said Nadira, “but they definitely look like soldiers to me, or ex-military.”

  “And I think you’re right. But not our military.”

  “Rali,” she said, “if I’m going to take down a member of the armed forces, I need to know that they’re not one of my people. Thinking that I’m right isn’t good enough. And I could get in a world of shit if it turns out that I’m interfering with an imperial op.”

  He looked up at her. “Think about it. Your entire specialty is investigating ruins exactly like these. You already have a mission to investigate this very one. Yet you have been told nothing about this squad, and you haven’t received any orders to pull out.” He folded his pocket knife and put the carving in his bag. “Look at the situation. They are either completely unaffiliated, or they are completely unsanctioned.”

  “Either way,” said Darius, “there must be something truly important hiding inside those walls. Important enough for an extraordinary degree of plausible deniability.”

  She shook her head. “This is big. Bigger than anything I signed up for. I can’t remember the last time a mission blew up like this. I want to call this in, but...I don’t know who I can even trust right now.”

  Darius nodded. “I think we’re on our own. And I think that squad isn’t just guarding the place. I think they’re waiting for something. Or someone.”

  “I think they’re waiting for us,” said Rali. “When I was there in the tea dream, I overheard bits of conversation. It sounded like they were saying our names.”

  “Then if we don’t come to them,” said Nadira, “they’ll come looking for us.”

  “Then the only way out is through,” said Darius. “And I’d rather face them now, on our own terms, rather than having them find us in our sleep tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that.”

  “So,” said Nadira, “you’re ready to take these people out because your brother says he heard them saying our names when he was high on mushrooms?”

  “I’ll tell you what. Let’s prepare an area nearby where we can fight. Then we get their attention. If they come after us, then we’ll know what they’re about.”

  The trio set to work. Rali had to gather more canes, and they needed to weave a few nets and dig some holes. Thanks to the mushroom tea, they were able to push until sunrise. Then they sat down and ate the last of the food that they’d fled the campsite with. They ate in silence, and they stared into the pit where the bow-making fire had burned.

  Nadira got up and dusted herself off. “All right, gentlemen. Last chance to walk away...”

  Rali shook his head. “I think it would only delay the inevitable. And ever since I drank that tea, those ruins have been in the back of my mind. I can’t get them out. They feel like the key to everything.”

  Darius nodded.

  “I feel it too,” said Nadira. “All right, then. You know the strategy. You know the tactics. We see if they engage, and if they do, we defend ourselves.”

  “Watch your flank,” said Darius. “Keep to the high ground. Stay mobile.”

  “You got it,” said Nadira. “And be aware, the tea is still coursing through your veins. It may...it may be pushing you further than you would otherwise go.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Darius.

  “It can heighten aggression. I mean, look at us. We’re about to use bows and arrows to fight people armed
with assault rifles.”

  “If they’re here for us,” said Darius, “I don’t know what else to do.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. I guess—just try to stay in cover as much as you can.”

  They checked the straps on their rucksacks to make sure everything was snug. They each had a portion of things to lob, arrows to sling, and fear to contend with.

  It’s just a dance, thought Darius. Everything is just a dance.

  His bowstring was taut. His machete was honed. The sun was flirting with the horizon.

  Come what may, it was time to test some mettle.

  ✽✽✽

  It was Ishikawa who spotted the commotion on the southern ridge. It looked like someone was standing at the top of it and flagging them down.

  Vickers zoomed in with his visor scope. “Lieutenant, I have a confirmed ID on the individual. It’s Markosian.”

  “Copy that, Vick,” said Lieutenant Brighton. “All right, look alive, people. We have one target in the matrix, so the other two can’t be far away. Ishi, Matlin, head up the ridge and make contact. Remember our cover story, everyone. We’re a last-second squad sent by the resistance to escort these people back to safety. We’re just gonna reel them in, find out what they know, then eliminate them. SOP.”

  “Copy that,” said Ishikawa.

  “About time we got some action,” said Matlin. “I was beginning to think they wouldn’t show up.”

  Matlin fell in behind Ishikawa, but a stone wedged itself into the tread of her left boot. She paused to pry it out with a knife. When she resumed her path up the ridge, he was a good fifty meters ahead of her. By the time she was halfway up the ridge, he was out of sight altogether.

  “Ishi,” she said into her mic, “everyone appreciates your hustle, but you’re out of my line of sight.”

  Matlin reached the summit less than a minute later, and Ishikawa was nowhere to be seen.

  “Ishi,” she said into her implanted mic, “sound off, mate. You ain’t Captain Lazarus. This is still the jungle, so I need to have eyes on you, over. Ishi? Come back, mate.” She spat a string of curses. “LT, my visor is showing him several meters underground. Are you seeing any interference?”