The Black Garden: Prologue (Final)

**This chapter is finally at the point where I'm happy with it. As I've worked on the worldbuilding, this project has evolved a lot. I'll be posting the first chapter right after this one.

I hope to finish this novel by the end of December and start the new year focusing on Archemi #7 and BF #2. The Black Garden isn't long, but it is a lot of fun. Coincidentally how Min-joon would describe his... anyway, here's the story.

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Planet: Ideni (Arnab System)

City: New Warder, Kudonia

It was Boris Rybak’s favorite time of day. When the sun slipped behind the distant Bromo Range, the jagged mountain shadows flowed over New Warder like a drawn curtain. A sweeping wave of amber lights glittered to life across the city below, and from up here in the hills, the gritty sprawl was breathtakingly beautiful.

From up here.

Boris’s brow creased slightly as memories of Punawahu surfaced. He’d felt awkward in the colony a lot of the time; exposed, too rough around the edges, serving alongside people with perfect teeth and no respect for a man’s privacy. The return to New Warder had been a relief, at first. No one to get up in his business, or stop him from starting his. But in the weeks and months since he’d come back, the city had been wearing on him. There were no bums to step over in Punawahu. Everyone did drugs there, including him, but it wasn’t a problem. No cops. No Vornn. He’d only spent half a year in the Confluence, but ever since coming back, he had found himself feeling between. Maybe it was New Warder, grinding him down like the ore works. Maybe it was Chani – also with perfect teeth, but much less nosy about his thoughts and deeds – reminding him of that brilliant city on the sea.

Boris grimaced, tried to roll the tension out of his shoulders, and took a slow sip of jenever. The liquor helped to ground him, pull him back into the moment. The city was a dull orange blob now, shrouded in the wet mist that rolled down from the mountains every night. He impatiently looked over his shoulder into the house: to his surprise, a wedge of light spilled out from Chani’s office onto the polished floor. She had unlocked her door, but whatever she was doing in there, she wasn’t quite finished.

He had been ordered out to the balcony so Chani could take a work call after-hours. He was supposed to be guarding her, and she wasn’t letting him. For most of the four months he’d spent as her bodyguard, she’d let him do his job without complaint or comment. But recently, something had changed. Outside of the house, Chani still charmed New Warder’s elite at galas and exhibitions and press conferences, so intensely social that Boris sometimes found himself exhausted by her. At home, she morphed into a calm but determined workaholic. And recently, an intensely secretive workaholic.

‘Secrecy’ wasn’t a word Boris associated with the Confluence, despite his particularly secretive role in its politics. He turned back and frowned at the sky, taking another sip before lifting his voice. "Hey, Chani! The moons are out. You should come see this."

"Just a minute!" Chani trilled.

There was a strained note to her light, musical voice. Boris arched an eyebrow and closed his eyes. His enhanced hearing picked up the soft nervous patter of her fingers, and then her hushed voice as she replied to someone in... what was that? She was speaking a language his auto-translator didn't recognize.

"Huh." Boris grunted softly to himself, pressing two fingers to his temple. A holographic HUD appeared in front of him. He bypassed the common tasks, input a password, and opened a hidden action center. With half an eye on the door, he logged a coded note in his intelligence notebook, then found the Alien Language Decryptor and set it to record. He gave one last lingering look at the shrouded city, then headed inside so the decryptor could do its work.

***

Neither Sh'chani or Boris saw the five dark figures making their way on foot toward the house. The light of the twin moons did not reflect off their matte body armor or sleek, lightless helmets. A cloud of unnatural silence followed them as they ran, masking any accidental sound. All five were the same height - six foot even - with the same wiry, slim, athletic builds. They all carried a duffel over one shoulder, a folded-down automatic rifle over the other. When a car came purring up along the road, headlights blazing, each one of them melted into the surrounding rainforest with the deadly, synchronized grace of sword dancers. Once the danger had passed, they reemerged, and continued on their way toward the gleaming glass-and-carbon building on the hill.

***

Inside, Boris flopped down onto one of the sofas. Like everything Confluence-made, it was effortlessly luxurious, the kind of furniture only a company president or a high-ranking criminal could afford in New Warder. The house itself was like nothing he could afford. High beamed ceiling, big fireplace, everything clean and elegant in wood, cream, and polished steel. By Confluence standards, it was a typical habitat that belonged to everyone and no one, serving as a combination embassy and residence for the Environmental Services officers on rotation.

“Fuck. They got me, didn’t they?” Boris mused on the irony of that while he took a mouthful of liquor, ran a telemetric check of all the security cameras throughout the building, then curiously tuned back into Chani's distant whispered conversation.

[Decrypting... 10%. 15%.] The decryptor informed him of its progress as it took the sounds his ears picked up and decompiled them. Chani’s voice was a low, anxious murmur, and the ALD stumbled over the unfamiliar cadence. It wasn’t Palae’an, Axu’at, or any of the Confluence’s official languages. It sounded like some kind of… machine-language. Half of it was beeps and boops and clicks.

[55%... 65%... Error. To continue decryption, ambient audio interference must be dampened.]

The glass froze halfway to his lips.

“Damn it,” Boris muttered under his breath. He hated cutting off his hearing. It made him feel blind, vulnerable, but his handlers needed to know about this. One hand came to rest on the compact pulse rifle slung around his chest. He throttled his hearing implants, focusing on the speech coming from the crack in the office door.

[Resuming processing. 66%... 70%...]

***

Beneath his feet, the team found their positions in the crawlspace underneath the house. As one, the squad crouched down and networked with one another, reviewing the safehouse's blueprint one last time. When they were done, the leader signaled to his team with one hand. Wordlessly, two of the others swung their bags around, laying them down among the ferns, and removed a pair of squat cylindrical devices. They handled them delicately, sensing the promise of violence inside the taut metal shells. With a twist, the devices opened into what looked like lanterns with cores that seethed with sparks of malevolent ruby-red energy. They cast no light, and once revealed, a wordless cacophony of emotions swept over the team. Hatred. Rage. A deep, savage hunger that made their bellies clench. As they set them on the ground, the plants around them withered. Ferns and grasses writhed as they shrunk, turning brown, then gray, then white. The soil was next, sinking half an inch around each lantern as it drained of color, life and moisture. The team did not have long before the devices would begin to leech from them, too.

The leader made another gesture, and the squad split into two fireteams. They took their time getting into position. The breach had to be precise and sudden.

***

[85%... 90%... Decryption complete. Language identified as: Unknown. Translating.]

"... just shadows of shadows right now, really, but I'll keep looking into it." Chani's formerly unintelligible speech came into focus as Boris's implants translated it into his native tongue. "Yes... yes, if the datapoints come together, we might find ourselves involved in something very strange- Oh, absolutely. The, uh, 'company' is always a factor. I would like to negotiate some time to finish following up the lead on the bats before submitting the findings, if that's alright?"

Bats? Boris's lips quirked with amusement at the translation. There were no 'bats' on Ideni - it was the closest New Wardern word for the critters that the locals called hoi'pak, winged alien mammals the size of a human thumb. They looked like a cross between a big moth and a hummingbird. They were the main pollinators in this part of Ideni, like bees on Earth. A lot of people put up feeders for them, Boris included. After PT in the mornings, before Chani was awake, he often went outside to watch the hoi’pak hum around the feeder and flowers.

'Send any recorded speech and the translations to CEIDR Nexus 01, Classification Xelphion.' Boris closed his eyes, concentrating as he issued the orders to his task manager. He tapped the edge of his half-full glass with a nail. 'Title it… uhh… 'The Bats and the Bees'

[Understood. Do you wish to submit commentary?]

'Yes, BCI-dictated notation.’ He paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. 'Chief: I’m not sure why Chani needed to talk about hoi'pak in some kind of encrypted cipher-language, but here's what I was able to catch. First time I've been able to confirm coded communications between her and Environmental Services in the last twenty-four days of observation. Main points of interest: E.S may be committing 'resources' to investigating whatever she’s talking about, which suggests there's some concerns. I overheard something about the hoi’pak, but that could be a codeword? Observation suggests she makes a call in the same window of time every Friday, so she may be reporting to some sort of handler. I'll tune into whatever intel I can next week and report… doesn’t seem like anything too out-there though. Rybak out.'

***

Inside her office, Gi Sh'chani sighed as she disconnected from her commlink and leaned back with a soft sigh. She splayed her hands on the desk and drew a deep breath through her nose. After all these years testing, then piloting the human clone-shell, she still sometimes forgot to breathe consistently when she was stressed. Over twenty seconds or so, the agitated swirl of hormones and adrenaline in the shell began to settle and even out, but the lapse of discipline annoyed her.

Sh'chani lowered her face, turning slightly toward the living room. She knew Boris was out there, waiting, and the knowledge caused a pang of guilt to flutter through her nerves. At first, she'd been mildly offended and amused when Environmental Services had assigned Boris as her ‘protection’. The idea of a human protecting a Taga Avaya agent was absurd to the extreme. But she was not here as Taga Avaya; she was here as Chani, the human Environmental Services Officer. And gradually, despite her dislike of the humans of New Warder, she had come to like Boris. His eyes were as blue as the seas of Mareka. They were bright when he was happy, clouded and dark when he was upset... or angry.

Boris would be angry if he knew what she was looking into. Perhaps rightfully so. Despite his professed sympathies for the Confluence, he was a New Wardern by upbringing. Sh'chani hesitated before she left her desk, mastering the strange impulse to tell him what she'd learned. To spill everything, no matter how ridiculous and tenuous it seemed. She had made her report, and it would filter through Taga Avaya Intelligence to the Abyssal Response Fleet Strategic Nexus. And what would they do? There was a good chance they would simply tell the truth, or a slightly exaggerated form of it, and then do what they did best. They would head off the threat by dispatching agents, skillfully inciting a revolution, or convincing the communities that surrounded New Warder that they no longer needed to tolerate their Abyss-tainted neighbors. Given that resentment was already high, it wouldn’t take much. And what would happen then?

The Palae’an instinct was to simply tell him the truth, ask his opinion, and collaborate. She steepled her hands in front of her nose as she considered the consequences, lingering in indecision. Behind her, a slim, dark form began to slide silently up through the floor, like oil.

Sh’chani resolved to brief him on what she could as she stood and turned, only to halt in confusion as the figure’s slender arm extruded into a hooked claw the length and width of a saber appeared in her chest, punching up through her sternum, the underside of her jaw, between her eyes. With the other hand, it slammed something into the side of her temple.

Boris's reflexes kicked in before he'd processed the stifled scream and the gurgle from the office. He leaped off the sofa, gun already in his hands. Behind him, two fluidic figures had been about to strike, looming. Behind them, he saw another lift Chani from the floor. Her mouth moved soundlessly, as if warning him.

"CHANI!" Boris sprung away like a cricket, lightning-fast. But even with his hearing dialed back to full volume, he was deaf. The other two opened fire in perfect silence.

Snarling soundlessly, Boris threw a hand out ahead of him as he dove. A kinetic shield flashed, deflecting the rounds against a thin barrier of pure force. He carried the shield into an offensive shove, picking up and throwing the trio of killers into the wall of the office behind them. They slammed into the synthetic wood and thick drywall and fell writhing to the floor, while Boris hit the ground rolling, twisting to mow the trio down - and collapsed under a silent burst of semi-auto fire from behind.

Stunned, still fighting to get upright, Boris clawed himself up into a lop-sided, lurching crawl, twisting up to stare into a blank visored face. The intruder grasped his head and pressed a gun to it, emptying the magazine with muffled clicks. Boris convulsed as the rounds tore his brain apart, and his blue, blue eyes turned glassy as he collapsed to the floor.

The squad leader went over to the one who had been slammed against the wall, and briskly helped them up to their feet. Then they gestured crisply to the assassin who had taken out the human, speaking with their hands and patterns displayed across the front of their helmet. "Did either of them accomplish any transmissions?"

"Negative," the other signed back. He was headed for Chani. The shell was still writhing minutely on the ground, the virtual pilot trapped inside the dying shell. The assassin uncapped his lantern and set it down ahead of her face. Chani’s expression convulsed as the greedlight’s field washed over her.

The leader nodded curtly and cut the silencer. Sound flooded back into the house.

Smoothly, the other lantern-bearer converged on the fallen. As soon as the devices touched blood, they began to greedily feed on the vanishing lifeforce and the matter that sustained it. Sh’chani, terrified but paralyzed, could only burble blood and chalky biofluid onto the floor as she struggled to flee back into the Noosphere and found herself unable to. Within minutes, she was gone. The bodies – organic and synthesized – withered and shrank into mummy-like, desiccated husks.

While that took place, two intruders swept the building. Tiny flecks of blood were swiped away. A small cloud of assembler nanites repaired broken wood and stray bullet holes, recycling the protein from Sh'chani and Boris's corpses. A broken vase was swept up and bagged. Once the living room was pristine, the leader of the squad strode back into Sh'chani's office. They pulled a wire jack from their bodysuit and plugged it into her computer, then let the suit's hacking tool do its work. Within a minute, the tool had figured out the passwords and biometrics, emulated the latter, and was in the cloud downloading everything she had ever stored there. Another of the squad did the same thing with her implants, the metallic wetwear left untouched by the greedlights.

While they waited, the leader looked back to survey the state of their targets. Sh’chani and Boris lay as they'd fallen, their bodies now nothing more than intricately detailed sculptures of white ash and tumbled wetwear. Pinpoints of black nothingness crawled over and through the remains, like fleas.

'I have the data. Sweep them up', the leader signed. They pulled the jack free and let it snap back into their helmet. 'And cap those greedlights.'

The others saluted and got to work. It took all four of them to return the lanterns into their containment configuration. The greedlights resisted being sealed, radiating waves of malevolence, hatred and hunger. Only once the venomous relics were contained did the last items in the assassin's tool bags come out. Portable vacuum cleaners. Neatly, professionally, they used them to suck the ashed corpses into collection chambers. Sh'chani's body took two. Boris's took four. The Palae’an's frozen expression of horror was the last thing to vanish, hoovered away to leave nothing behind but a nebulous feeling of wrongness, and a sterile, soullessly clean floor.

NEXT CHAPTER: https://www.patreon.com/posts/black-garden-ch-118180975