Tiran…
The first man to fire walks over to my brother’s body and rakes the corpse with the plasma weapon. Then he looks up at me, the acid-green fire illuminating a face like a demon’s. It’s not a man. It’s a Red woman with terrible scars covering half of her face.
“Justice to Gamma!” Synced to the speakers on both of the ships behind her, her voice bellows out into the night. “Death to the collaborators! Justice to Gamma!”
I YAWN IN THE HUMID DARK, craving a burner because the vapor inhaler I’m sucking on is about as satisfying as fucking through a tarpaulin sheet. My left foot is numb and sweating through the sock in its rubber shoe, and my right arm is bent so awkwardly into the stone that my knockoff Valenti chronometer is drilling into the bone of my wrist with every. Arterial. Pulse.
The only thing that has kept me sane over the past nine hours has been the holocontacts I bought off the rack from that lemur-looking bastard, Kobachi, on 198th, 56th, and 17th in Old Town. But the contacts shorted out, and now I’ve got a corneal abrasion and worse, plenty of time to kill. Perfect.
I try in vain to stretch. The stone box doesn’t give me much room to wriggle my 1.75-meter frame. My main grudge against ancient Egyptians isn’t that they pioneered the institution of mass slavery for public works, it’s that they were all so damn tiny. Still smells like the old raisin we dragged out of it late last night before the delivery.
I check my watch. It was a gift from my late fiancé. One of the cheap silvery types cobbled together by half-blind immigrant lowColors in sweatshops deep in the armpits of Luna. Probably Tycho City. Maybe Endymion or the Mass. Somewhere half a world away from the beating heart of Hyperion—where I am currently entombed. He didn’t know it was a knockoff, so he paid nearly sixty percent market value, half his quarterly pay. His face glowed when he gave it to me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he could have bought it for the price of a decent bottle of vodka. Poor kid.
Check the watch again. Almost time.
Two minutes to midnight, only several hours left of dusk before Hyperion is plunged into the last dark month of summer. Dark or light, a day in Hyperion never truly ends. The caretakers of the day just lock their doors and hand the reins of the town over to the nocturnal creatures. Under Gold it wasn’t exactly a Pink’s paradise. But now, it’s the law of the jungle when the lights go out. Outside the museum, the hot city will be stretching and crooning in the sweaty dusk, readying to make some trouble. On the lamplit Promenade, decent citizens will skitter to their private housing complexes, fleeing the yapping of young music and the roar of hoverbike gangs echoing up from Lost City.
Hyperion. Jewel of Luna. The Eternal City. She’s a beautiful wartime mess. So much to look at, you can only afford to see what you want to see. If you plan on staying sane, that is.
But here, in the Hyperion Museum of Antiquities, behind thick walls of marble is a world with a different set of rules. During day hours, packs of drooling lowColor schoolchildren and Martian and Terran immigrants waddle their way through the marble corridors, rubbing snotty noses against glass containment boxes. At night, though, the museum is a fortress crypt. Impenetrable from the outside, occupied only by a contingent of pale night guards and the dead residents of crypts, statues, and paintings. The only way in was to become a resident. So we bribed a docker and snuck aboard a freighter from Earth as it landed at Atlas Interplanetary. A freighter that happened to hold numerous relics liberated from the private stash of some exiled Gold overlord dead or fled to Venus. Probably old Scorpio. Whole slew of goodies. Fourteen paintings from neoclassical Europe, a crate of Phoenician urns, twenty-five crates of Roman scrolls, and four sarcophagi.
What was yesterday filled with mummified Egyptians is tonight filled with freelancers.
By now the janitorial technicians will be herding up their robot charges and moving to the east wing. A team of security guards occupies a headquarters in the basement.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
I’m sick of waiting. Sick of the carousel of thoughts in my brain. I stare at the watch, willing the hands forward on their cheap gears that lose seconds every day. Can’t think of anything but a ghost and how each tick, each tock, takes me farther from him. Farther from the ridiculous slicked-back hair he wore because he thought it made him look like a holostar I liked, or the knockoff Duverchi jackets he’d wear thinking it hid the farmboy underneath. That was his problem—always trying to be something he wasn’t. Always trying to be more. Ate him up in the end and spat him out.
I pull my zoladone dispenser from my pack. I thumb the silver cylinder and it dispenses a black pill the size of a rat’s pupil into my hand. Particularly wicked new designer drug. Absurdly illegal. Jacks up your dopamine and suppresses activity in the bit of gray matter responsible for empathy. Spec ops teams ate Zs like candy during the Battle of Luna. If you have to melt a city block, it’s better to save the tears till you’re back in your bunk.
I keep the dose low. One milligram worth of emotion-numbing molecules lances through my blood. The thoughts of my fiancé lose their dimensionality, becoming nothing but flat, monochrome pictures in a faded memory.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Beep.
Shine time. I click my com once. Three more clicks echo.
Then there’s a grating sound from the stone. It begins to move on its own. Blue light from the warehouse overheads seeps through the cracks as the lid of the sarcophagus levitates. A dark mass stands above me, holding the stone lid in the air as if it were made of neoPlast.
“Evening, Volga,” I mouth in gratitude to the giant woman. I sit up and feel a series of satisfying pops as my spinal cord stretches. Half my age, my Obsidian accomplice smiles with a mouth mangled by second-rate dental work. Unlike ice Obsidians, her face is absent the dense wind calluses that usually hide the sloping of cheekbones. Volga’s small for an Obsidian, lean and a stunted six and a half feet. It makes her look less threatening than the average crow. It’s not what her makers intended. She was born in a lab, courtesy of a Society breeding program. Poor kid didn’t measure up with the rest of the crop and was tossed down to Earth for slave labor.