The Justiceers - Part One: Chapter Six
the next chapter of my forthcoming novel
The Justiceers
By Daphne Garrido
Part One - Darkest Nights
1.6
Fires raged throughout Oliath. The streets were madness, citizens scrambling, every soul seeking haven for survival from these ever-evolving terrors befallen their city.
Miriam sent Octavia back to work with newfound purpose, and a lone objective she should’ve had the whole time; saving lives.
Within that makeshift interrogation on The Nebberath, Miriam confirmed what both source and Arthur’s gut were saying. There was systemic corruption emanating from far beyond the highest levels of Oliath General Authority. Somebody somewhere, or something had awareness beforehand of these events now unfolding — that much was clear to Octavia.
OGA had been receiving oddly specific demands from the High Court over the past cycles, which hadn’t made sense until this all began. Octavia had known with her own gut of some structural complicity to that first murder — strangest demands made — having been commanded to stand-down from her initial investigation as she’d only begun to find footing.
There’d even been a most unexpected request to produce barricades and repulsion-field barricade generators. Now, they were extremely helpful. But why a city of peace would need such things was not a question Octavia dared ask at the time, because it was clear; something here stunk nine ways to Evermore.
The High Court seemed an elusive entity. Yet, as with most organizational conglomerations within The Periphery, the governance of Oliath was to be dispersed communally. Here, unique to the planet’s ideals, was an added preference of anonymity. While it was not unheard of for systems to exist this way, the most accepted and well-established forms of effective government were built upon complete transparency.
With gratitude The Nebberath, in its farthest corner of the spaceport’s landing fields, hadn’t been near an emergence-site itself. Yet, unwilling to test her luck, Miriam sent Octavia off before returning it to orbit of Grammaton, waking Arthur’s oversleeping-ass with emphasis.
That drop-pod hadn’t been the smoothest ride back, but it did the trick, bringing Arthur and Miriam were back planetside.
Fully charged from its time hooked-in at the spaceport, the M9 was flying above the city, looking down upon its developing carnage. The reason for these newly struck pyres of flasme rising throughout Oliath was unknown. Cryptoids had ceased advancement, resolving to hold ground around each emergence.
All this new information set-off deepest grumblings in Arthur’s belly as the M9 curved around a beam of Grammaton’s shimmering heart-light. More was clearly to come.
If these fires were the next phase, or a product of some other dastardly plot, Arthur hadn’t known. Yet, this situation was revealing nuance which spoke to something even more complicated than what Grammaton’s apparent planetary evolution was providing its own.
Out of the information Miriam pulled from Octavia, there was one detail which had been of greatest interest to Arthur. His gut had decided what they’d do.
They were en route to face down the internal structures of this High Court so obviously infested with deceit. Its complex, consuming entire quadrants of surface area within the heart of Oliath, had been proving dense by more than physical means. Arthur was finding its security systems remotely impenetrable.
If this place was at all what gut had told of, it would burn with the rest of the city.
There wasn’t a soul to be found in their entire journey through the complex. With Miriam’s source telling of some central facility they’d need to seek out, Arthur was leading the way, cutting down its broadest hallway, hovering above the smooth marble-laminate in The Beast.
Scorcher was armed and ready for action.
By the time they’d reached what source and gut alike would confirm as the place, it had been most apparent they were alone. Arthur’s gut was speaking as they stared down that enormous entryway, its metallic doors so firmly shut with no clear control mechanisms.
Something was in there. Miriam could feel it too. She’d taken it upon herself to quiet her mind, and center on the light.
“We’re being watched,” is what source had spoken through her.
Arthur knew it true. Still, their purpose was unchanged. Answers were what they sought and this is where they’d find them.
He’d pulled up his AR display from The Beast, using its dampening fields to observe otherwise unseen electronic components. What he’d found was circuitry feeding through conduit down the hallway. Gut spoke of a control panel on its far end.
Arthur was not feeling patient.
He’d blown out the door with The Beast’s effector fields, an enormous slab of its steel sent into a devastatingly heavy ricochet off the far wall behind it, the thunderously wrought destruction leaving a biggest smile on Arthur’s face.
“That’ll do it,” he’d remarked.
Miriam was on the floor with her legs peeled back, pumping air with her belly in some strangest breathing technique. She hadn’t reacted. Releasing her rhythmic ritual and coming to stillness, eyes remaining closed, she’d asked him.
“Is it open?”
Beyond The Beast’s butchery laid an entrance hall with another locked doorway, a monstrosity. Arthur’s gut told to be gentler with this one.
Miriam found a terminal behind a reception desk opposite the nearly wall-length cargo door. She’d like to pretend herself good at these things. In truth, she would just press buttons until she figured it out. Eventually, she’d found a sub-menu which offered a nice big one labeled ‘Laboratory Door Controls’.
She glanced up to Arthur and winked. “No problemo,” Miriam glamoured before pressing the ‘open’ command.
The door hadn’t budged, its screen prompting for a security passkey.
“Shit,” Miriam murmured.
“Arthur, can you come look at this?”
There was intelligent code within The Beast just below those acceptable levels of consciousness Arthur would allow to be shackled within such a machine. A fine line, he’d find that to be, one even The Periphery overstepped by his estimation.
Still, this intelligence of code, which he’d not name for fear of personalizing a relationship, enhancing the guilt felt for using such a tool at all, was most useful. In no time it found a way to reverse engineer the solution, digging-up hidden memory banks which logged all screen presses, and decoding the password.
“Thanks, bitch,” Miriam yawped at the invisible intelligence within The Beast.
While actually sharing Arthur’s passion for the morality use of AI, she’d find herself loving to pick at this particular scab of his, somehow far less sensitive about it. He’d no-sold it completely, not reacting a bit, but that was Miriam’s favorite. It was when she’d known she got him.
The laboratory was a broad space of more depth than Miriam might’ve expected possible from a chamber in this portion, and at this heading, within that complex they’d descended upon from the sky. At its farthest end, beyond laboratory benches littered by screens and user interfaces, was a clearest focal point; one feature of compelling peculiarity.
It almost felt like it had been calling them forward.
Miriam ran her hand along its smoothest onyx coating as Arthur and The Beast came to stop a good fifteen-units back. It was a perfect cube, once and half as tall as Miriam. And she was a tall girl.
Arthur set the intelligence inside The Beast to work. ‘What is this?’ was the command he’d given. It was taking a lot longer than it usually did to process his request.
“This shit is weird,” Miriam declared, continuing along its side.
“You should come back here,” Arthur’s gut called out.
Her hand pulled free, and she’d stepped back to see the object before her anew. By the time she returned to his side, he’d a response from The Beast.
This cube was shielded in a carbon-locked polymer composite, the most indestructible material manufactured in this galaxy, a rarest sight to see with one’s own eyes. It took a few minutes for Arthur to digest it.
Eventually, his gut had cut to the point for Miriam.
“There is some intelligence manipulating this planet,” were the words, their implications profound. Most outlawed within The Periphery were artificial beings of this implied magnitude.
“Well shit,” Miriam affirmed as the conclusive determination.
Only seconds later — heard and felt in simultaneity, eruptions and shudderings of Grammaton were about the complex — devastation wrought so very nearby, all around them.
Arthur had been the one to say it.
“They’re here.”
‘These fucking ass-shits,’ was the best Miriam’s channel could come up with as she’d scorched the path down this ‘longest fucking hallway ever.’
Cryptoids were everywhere. Arthur had been exploding them in all three hundred and sixty degrees, keeping clear a fifty-unit radius. Miriam and Scorcher were melting-down corpses, along with the few living who’d make it beyond that barrier-line, The Beast’s effector fields to fling their charred remains from the path.
It had gone this way for some time, a focus found in them both. Never had Miriam seen action like this.
Arthur had been in battle, long ago, before he’d found himself beside her. Yet, the way they worked together through this frenzy, he’d find unique to them alone, never having felt such seamless cooperation manifest into fury this raw or powerful.
Clearing that longest hallways, finding themselves on that home-stretch, the masses of Cryptoids were lessening. It was a straight shot from here to the Monstrodomus, now visible past the main rotunda’s glass entryway.
As they’d cut a path into the lobby Miriam had seen them first; from the second level, more fiends were coming, scrambling over the glass parapets and down its support beams.
“How the fuck did they get up there?” her source wondered aloud.
Cruising on full Miriam-speed, herself sprinting just behind Arthur, they’d been halfway across the main rotunda, surging waves of Cryptoids were closing in on either side. They just needed to get to that speedship.
It had been right then, of all times, when Arthur would discover what it was; that unfound problem in The Beast which had plagued him. His AR display disappeared — momentum halted. They were in the very center of the lobby when it reached full-stop.
Miriam had Scorcher with her, but she’d known it not enough.
“I never thought we’d use this,” she’d shouted without hesitation, finding her body and voice driven, tearing open the storage compartment on the back panel of The Beast. They were closing fast all-around.
Miriam tossed the modified repulser cannon into Arthur’s lap before she’d know what she was doing. With her right shoulder pressed to The Beast’s back-side corner, she’d begun to push. The created momentum would cause it to revolve upon its still functioning gravity generators.
There was an earsplitting, rushing sound which enveloped the space as Arthur poured forth that cannon’s wrath. She heard the screeching cries of Cryptoids hidden beneath as she’d just kept pushing.
Round and round they’d gone, this spinning, some great dance of their soul taking part in this moment.
Arthur had the cannon set to its widest spray, blasting all comers with excruciating vibration; sound waves curdling and rupturing the innards of every poorest victim struck by its thunder.
Miriam could see as she went around, ‘they were getting fucked up.’ Though she could also see there were too many, with each rotation the hoard growing closer.
She still held Scorcher in her palm. Extending it with her left hand, she’d continued kept pushing, beginning to mirror Arthur’s sonic destruction with fire. Spinning in this brutal pirouette for a length of time neither would later be able to quantify, so lost to its rhythms, they’d felt free together.
“Miriam!” Arthur finally called-out.
“Miriam!”
At once she’d realized those terrible sounds had ceased, their dance was over, and all that remained had been the roar of her flame.
They were all dead.
Miriam would usually let Arthur kiss her. He’d sometimes call her over to him, and it made her feel special to have him want her that way. Not this time.
After loading Arthur and The Beast into the M9, closing its hatch with prayers of gratitude, and taking off in shortest order, she’d proceed to melt that complex from its roots with a drop-shot from orbit. Even knowing within its wreckage would remain the container of intelligence they’d discovered, their plan would remain unchained. At least, Miriam sure hoped when she set the firing solution.
The Nebberath would bury that indestructible cube under rubble, wiping the structure around it from the face of Grammaton, disabling whatever advantages this facility provided it.
After she’d called the shot, Miriam went straight to Arthur. She’d grabbed his chin with her forefingers, forcing his eyes onto hers, and she’d kissed him like it was the last time she ever would.
It had never tasted this sweet.
Source went quiet, her mind along with it. It was only him — now. A most bombastic explosion erupted behind their ship, then faded into the distance.
Arthur took her hand from his face and placed it upon his chest; his heart, causing her to pull back into a silent gasp, mouth agape. Her whole body shuddered as she saw beyond the man, into his soul, entire being to melting within his arms.
Then he’d kissed her back.
