Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Read online

  Tyrone dribbled a few bubbles out from his lips, hoping that he would be able to keep the water out, and then he saw lights appearing in the water above them. The Ayleeans twisted upward and kicked with powerful strokes and suddenly the three of them burst from the surface of a wide, limpid pool into an underground cavern.

  Tyrone gasped for air, felt it hit his lungs cool and clean as the water plummeted off his face in thick, fast falling drops. The two Ayleeans dragged him from the water and hauled him onto the rocky shore as he got his first good look at the hidden cavern.

  Candles and torches glowed in their thousands, lodged into crevices in the rocks, and their flickering lights revealed the vast walls of the cavity. Tyrone blinked in amazement as he realized that the walls of the cavern were covered in artwork, paintings of some kind that depicted hunting scenes and dancing figures, as though they were the relics of some prehistoric past that he knew had not existed for the Ayleeans on this world. Their species, as divergent as it seemed, had arrived here just two hundred years previously.

  Shylo strode from the lake, water streaming down his body like rivulets of flaming embers as they reflected the lights. From the depths of the cave system Tyrone saw countless eyes watching them, reflecting the candles and torches in their shining cornea. Many were short, perhaps four feet tall, furtive creatures hiding behind rocks and whispering to each other. Children, Tyrone recognized, hundreds of them.

  ‘This way,’ Shylo ordered.

  Tyrone was marched up the rocky shore and onto a path that had not been hewn through the rocks by tools but worn down by the passing of countless feet over centuries. Tyrone watched as adult Ayleean warriors stepped forth from the darkness, heavy spears and swords in their hands and anger in their gruesome faces. The dim, flickering lights and the angry, half shadowed faces gave Tyrone the impression he was being marched through Hades. The Ayleean children leaped with primate–like agility from one rock to another, keeping their distance but with growing curiosity as Tyrone was led toward the back of the cavern, where resided a knot of elderly looking Ayleeans, their graying locks the only betrayal of their advanced years.

  Shylo slowed as he reached them, and then he got down onto one knee before the group and bowed his head. The eldest of the senior Ayleeans stepped forward.

  ‘Again, you have come through for us, Shylo. Stand, old friend.’

  Shylo got to his feet and the elder rested one gnarled, leathery hand on the warrior’s shoulder.

  ‘Were you tracked?’

  ‘No,’ Shylo assured him, ‘but we encountered a flock of drones we had to destroy, so it can’t be long before they find us.’ Shylo looked over his shoulder. ‘The human is called Tyrone, and he answered a distress call.’

  The elder nodded and then Shylo stepped aside as the old Ayleean moved to confront Tyrone. Tyrone was shoved down onto his knees by his companions before they too bowed down. Tyrone winced as his knees hit the rocks, the elder moving to tower over him, yellowing eyes glowing like discs of fire in the candlelight.

  ‘My people go hungry,’ he growled down at Tyrone. ‘Our cities burn, our farms gone, our people missing. Give me a reason not to let the children gorge themselves on your remains.’

  Tyrone looked up into the old Ayleean’s eyes.

  ‘We’re all dead anyway, from what I hear. One more meal won’t make a difference.’

  The Ayleean leaned forward, peering down at him. ‘Tell that to starving children.’

  Tyrone looked left and right and realized that even the youngest of the group wore blades in their armor, some of them now stroking the tips of the weapons in anticipation.

  ‘The jungles out there,’ Tyrone said, ‘there was food, I saw it. Lots of it.’

  The elder stood up and gestured to the walls of the caverns around them.

  ‘Our people lived like this when we first came here,’ he announced grandly, ‘after we had been forcibly ejected from earth and Ayleea became our home.’

  ‘Nobody was forced out,’ Tyrone corrected him. ‘Werner Ayleea led the colonies of the damned here by choice.’

  The elder tilted his head in acquiescence despite the growls of anger echoing around the cave. The Colonies of the Damned, as they had been known, were the derogatory names given to those who carried still the hideous deformities that scarred humanity in the wake of The Falling.

  ‘After we had lived like rats in the wastelands of earth for a century after The Falling had been cured, our disfigured forefathers felt very much as though they were being forced out,’ he replied. ‘Here on Ayleea we had our own world, a home of our own, but it is a dangerous world and we were forced to survive as primitive hunter gatherers as we learned to adapt to Ayleea’s jungles. Now, we cannot use our plasma rifles for the enemy can detect the energy they produce when fired. Yes there was life and food here, but in two days it has almost all gone.’

  Now, Tyrone’s voice was no longer defiant.

  ‘What happened here? What did they do?’

  The elder looked back down at Tyrone and his voice filled the cavern.

  ‘We are cattle,’ he replied simply. ‘All life on this world, all life on earth, everything is seen by them as a source of food, and their time for harvest has come.’

  ***

  XXV

  New Washington

  Nathan hurried off the shuttle from Polaris Station onto the busy spaceport deck with Kaylin Foxx, Allen and Vasquez and was immediately confronted by a pair of squad vehicles manned by two anxious looking officers.

  ‘What gives?’ Foxx asked as they approached.

  ‘You need to come with us,’ one of the officers, a sergeant, told her in a hushed whisper. ‘It’s talking.’

  The voice that answered was not Foxx’s.

  ‘What’s talking?’

  Nathan turned and saw news anchor Tamarin Solly hurrying toward them, her team following and with one of them carrying a sonic amplifier.

  ‘A suspect in a murder case,’ Vasquez replied, ‘and we don’t have anything to say yet so if you’ll be on your way we can…’

  ‘What of the reports that the police are hunting not one but several serial killers both here on New Washington and across the planet?’

  Nathan managed to keep a straight face and not reveal anything but Lieutenant Allen stared at Solly in amazement. ‘How the hell did you know about other victims in..?’

  ‘It’s my job to know,’ Solly glowed with delight as she realized she’d hit the jackpot with the cameras running. ‘How many victims are there? Should people be double locking their doors at night? How can the two killers be working together both up here and down there, and how are the victims being found?’

  ‘Captain Forrester will make a statement as soon as we have sufficient information,’ Foxx replied coolly as she climbed into the squad vehicle.

  ‘Captain Forrester is refusing to talk to us.’

  ‘Wonder why,’ Nathan murmured as he climbed into the vehicle alongside Foxx.

  ‘And you four have just flown in from Polaris Station. Why does the CSS have an interest in this, and is it connected to the fleet’s amassing in orbit around Saturn? And what’s talking at your precinct station? The public has a right to know if…’

  The door hissed closed and the squad vehicle hummed into life and lifted off the platform, forcing Solly to back up.

  ‘Damn it, this is getting out of hand,’ Foxx said as the vehicle turned and soared through the port toward one of the station’s arms, wherein a brightly illuminated tunnel allowed shuttles and Mag Rail services into and out of the spaceport. ‘They’re following everything we do and it’s only a matter of time before they figure this out.’

  Nathan watched as the squad car pulled up and climbed vertically up and away from the spaceport, although Nathan began to feel the effect of the station’s centrifugal gravity pull him toward their destination as though they were diving rather than climbing.

  ‘I’ve seen people like Solly before and they’
re like a dog with a bone,’ he said. ‘They won’t let go until they’ve got everything they can out of it. Only way we can shut her down is to either tell her the truth in return for the first scoop on the story when the time comes, or we deliver false information to her to send her off the trail.’

  Foxx shook her head.

  ‘I just want her off our case.’

  ‘You could arrest her.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Foxx uttered. ‘On what charge?’

  ‘For being an amazing pain in the a…’

  ‘Are we suggesting that we silence a free press?’ Foxx cut him off.

  ‘No,’ Nathan replied in measured tones. ‘Just curbing their excesses, for the benefit of one and all.’

  Foxx ruminated on the idea as the squad car slowed and pulled out of what was now a vertical dive down the tunnel toward North Four. It moved smoothly into the flow of traffic above the city streets, descending in a gentle turn for the roof of their precinct building.

  As soon as they had landed Foxx and Nathan hurried to the interrogation room to find Schmidt already in place, one hand supporting the elbow of his other arm, the hand of which was thoughtfully stroking his chin.

  ‘Give us the lowdown doc’,’ Foxx said as they walked in.

  Schmidt looked at them sideways and raised an eyebrow. ‘Behold, it speaks.’

  Nathan looked at the figure in the hard light cubicle, still imitating Chance Macy, watching them and precisely mirroring Schmidt’s thoughtful pose.

  ‘What’s it said?’ he asked Schmidt.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Macy asked.

  Nathan noted that the entity’s voice was not that of Macy, but of somebody else.

  ‘It doesn’t have enough information on Macy to replicate him entirely,’ Schmidt said by way of an explanation. ‘So it relies on what it does have. The voice you’re hearing is probably that of Samuel Freck, its last victim.’

  ‘Freck,’ the figure echoed.

  Instantly, the form’s color vanished like a rainbow fading away and for a moment it was partially opaque. Nathan watched in fascination as the shape changed, became slimmer as it adopted a slightly awkward stance and then the color reappeared once more and he was looking at a perfect replication of Samuel Freck.

  Foxx walked closer to the cubicle. ‘It’s learning,’ she said.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Freck replied directly to her.

  Nathan saw Foxx recoil from the cubicle as Schmidt spoke.

  ‘The entity as you all know is built from intelligent smaller components, like cells. It’s overall intelligence however is a sum of its parts. Alone, the cells are nothing, rather in the same way that a lone termite is nothing. Bring sufficient numbers of them together, however, and they can coordinate their actions and achieve remarkable things.’

  ‘Like homicide,’ Foxx murmured cynically.

  ‘That thing’s a freak,’ Vasquez uttered as he walked in with Allen, regarding the being with disgust.

  Freck’s face dissolved into rage. ‘I ain’t no freak man!’

  The expression, the movement, the fist slamming against the wall of the cubicle was so perfectly performed that had Freck’s friends not known he was already dead, Nathan reckoned that they would have been completely fooled.

  ‘How the hell are we ever going to detect these things?’ Foxx uttered. ‘There’s no way to tell them apart, it’s perfect.’

  Nathan thought for a moment as he looked at Freck and then a sudden realization hit him, hard. He turned to Foxx.

  ‘Can you shut off the sound to that thing to it can’t hear us?’

  Foxx nodded, but it was Schmidt who answered. ‘Yes, we can eliminate all electromagnetic interference from all points outside of the cubicle by creating a sonic wave interference patter…’

  ‘Just do it, Einstein.’

  Schmidt inclined his head. ‘It is done.’

  Nathan pointed at the being inside the cubicle.

  ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘Freck died on the surface but Erin Sanders died here on New Washington.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Vasquez said, ‘So what?’

  ‘So how the hell does Erin’s killer know what Samuel Freck looks like?’

  Doctor Schmidt looked at the captured being in surprise and then back at Nathan.

  ‘A most astute observation, Detective Ironside. Are you feeling all right? Dizzy spells, fever, headaches?’

  ‘He’s right,’ Allen said as he consulted his ocular implant’s data stream. ‘Erin Sander’s ID implant never left New Washington and Samuel Freck hasn’t been in orbit for months. Neither show any sign of being within a thousand miles of each other in their lives.’

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Foxx uttered, ‘they must be communicating.’

  Doctor Schmidt nodded and appeared to access his internal files before he spoke.

  ‘When we captured one of these entities on Titan, they were taken sufficiently far away from their own kind that they were unable to communicate effectively. They ended up using internal heat fluctuations to send a warning sign.’

  ‘Like a sort of Morse Code,’ Nathan said.

  ‘A what code?’ Allen asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ Schmidt cut in as he studied Freck Seavers’ mimic in the cubicle. ‘All that matters is that these entities communicate, and if they communicate…’

  ‘They can be tracked,’ Nathan finished the sentence for him, ‘and they can be found.’

  ‘Trouble is,’ Vasquez pointed out, ‘we don’t have any idea of how they do it so we don’t know what we’re looking for. And if they’re communicating then how come this thing didn’t know Chance Macy’s voice?’

  ‘Because Chance Macy is still alive,’ Doctor Schmidt replied, ‘so we must assume that the entity that killed Freck only saw Chance but did not have the opportunity to hear his voice and thus replicate it.’

  ‘Then how did it know where to find him?’ Nathan wondered out loud. ‘Did it target Freck specifically, or did it simply pick up the first person it could find as a vehicle to get into the city for some other purpose?’

  Schmidt pondered that for a moment. ‘Logic suggests the second assumption,’ he said finally. ‘Freck was a random target and the entity was in fact driven by a different, ulterior motive.’

  Nathan looked at Samuel Freck’s mimic inside the cubicle and had a thought.

  ‘Schmidt, can you get Captain Forrester to use the police signals corps to scan for a wide spectrum of signals emitting from this building, maybe even track any responses that come in?’

  ‘Yes,’ Schmidt replied. ‘But why would you want to do that now? This entity is not going to just signal its companions and do the job for us.’

  ‘Says who?’ Nathan replied as an idea formed in his mind. ‘Let’s not go hunting for these signals, let’s get Freck’s killer here to do it for us.’

  ‘How the hell you gonna get it to tell us that?’ Vasquez asked. ‘It can’t even talk much, plus we’re in North Four and the black holes in communication around here won’t let them broadcast anything so easily.’

  Nathan froze as he considered that for a moment.

  ‘The black holes,’ he echoed thoughtfully. ‘I bet we don’t have any evidence of these things operating in areas of limited communication either.’

  Doctor Schmidt scanned the data banks of the currently known victim locations and smiled ruefully.

  ‘You must visit the sickbay soon, detective. You’re in danger of becoming intelligent.’

  ‘They stay in contact because, like you said doc’, they’re limited in intelligence as individual operatives,’ Nathan went on. ‘They can’t operate efficiently without each other’s knowledge, without sharing information and data, and that might even mean they have a central controller, someone in overall charge of them.’

  ‘If we can identify such a controller,’ Foxx said, ‘we could hijack the signal and prevent the invasion attempt, or at least give CSS a fighting chance.

  ‘R
einstate the sound to the cubicle,’ Nathan said.

  Schmidt activated the sound once more and Nathan spoke clearly.

  ‘Okay, if this thing can’t tell us what we need to know then the solution is simple. We just use the victim’s ID chips to locate them and we shoot them on sight, and we can detect those not yet reported missing using your new scanner, Doctor Schmidt.’ Schmidt appeared mystified but said nothing as Nathan went on. ‘We have enough police and military here and on the surface to kill them all. Sure we may catch some collateral along the way but, y’know, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and all that. When the invasion begins we’ll have the advantage of surprise over whoever is controlling these things because they’ll be out of action but their overlords won’t know it. As soon as the enemy fleet arrives we hit them hard with all four of our concealed ultra quantum interstellar plasma hadron overdrive cannons and wham!!’ Nathan punched his right fist into his cupped left hand. ‘One enemy fleet totally annihilated.’

  To Nathan’s amazement Freck’s eyes widened in what appeared to be embarrassment and suddenly his figure returned to the shape and form of Erin Sanders. Sanders’ mimic stood rigidly upright and its eyes closed. In an instant, Nathan saw that it began pulsing with a strange light.

  ‘That’s it!’ he snapped. ‘Get everything we have tracking for a response signal!’

  Foxx, Allen and Vasquez stared in mystified wonder as Schmidt opened up the scanners and began collating the data.

  ‘What ultra quantum interstellar plasma hadron overdrive cannons?’ Foxx asked in a whisper.

  Nathan shrugged but said nothing as the being before them pulsed with energy. Nathan noted the temperature inside the cubicle rising as Erin’s form turned a dull red.

  ‘High frequency sub space modulating signal detected,’ Schmidt said suddenly, ‘emitting on all available…’ Schmidt stopped talking suddenly as his eyes opened and he looked at Foxx. ‘On all available military channels.’

  Foxx and Nathan exchanged a glance and before they could speak Allen cut across them.

  ‘Maybe the victims planet side all have close relatives or friends inside the CSS and military networks?’