Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

Genres: Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

A compelling novel of humanity fighting back against telepathically linked killers in a postapocalyptic world…

A quarter of a millennium ago, before the nuclear apocalypse forced the inhabitants of earth to flee their home planet, few humans could have imagined the course their path would take. Now, the orbital colonies are the final sanctuary of humanity and life is more dangerous than ever before. The colonists fear the return of their dreaded enemies, the Paratwa – ferocious warriors who are genetically engineered to exist in two bodies which remain telepathically connected. 

The new generation of Paratwa is far deadlier than the old, forming a powerful caste of fighter known as the Ash Ock. A mysterious virus infecting the humans database signals the return of their most feared enemies…

File Under: Science Fiction [ GMO Murderer | Post-Earth | Defrosted | Orbital Incident ]

Release date: October 26, 2021

Publisher: Angry Robot

Print pages: 320

Sample

ONE

Ghandi stood with the captain on the flight deck, their hands gripping the sway bars, their bodies rocking back and forth. Outside the shuttle, the fierce Colorado region winds screamed across the hull, blasting wads of snow against the narrow band of windows, buffeting the craft as if it were a freefall toy in the hands of a child. The pilot, strapped tightly in his seat in front of them, kept his eyes riveted to the instruments. Sight navigation was useless in such a storm.

“Well?” the captain demanded.

The pilot, maintaining his vigil on the control board, shook his head. “Gone again. It’s a weak signal.”

“I don’t care what kind of signal it is,” the captain growled. “I’m not spending the whole day flying through this crap. If you can’t lock on in sixty seconds, get us the hell out of here.”

A particularly violent updraft banked the craft thirty degrees. Ghandi lost his balance. He lunged sideways, mashed his face into the captain’s shoulder, and inhaled the stench of a freshly spirited odorant bag. The smell alone almost knocked him back in the opposite direction.

The captain glared. “If you can’t stand a bit of turbulence, Ghandi, then strap yourself in!”

He exhaled slowly, turning away to hide his anger. This captain had a nasty temper, but corresponding displays from his crew weren’t tolerated. Even a mild grimace could gyrate the man into a full-blown tantrum. And he had a smell that would frighten children.

Ghandi wore an odorant bag, too. Most pirates kept a hybrid of foul scents looped around their belts – a symbol of their particular clan, a badge of the true Costeau. Still, Ghandi removed his odorant bag once in a while…

“It’s back!” the pilot yelled. “I’ve got a fix.”

The captain grunted.

“About fifteen kilometers, southwest.”

“One of our ships?”

“No.”

“E-Tech?”

The pilot hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a beacon like this before. A sporadically pulsed cardioid pattern. Extremely low power. I doubt whether anyone beyond a thirty-kilometer radius could even pick it up. I’m pretty sure it’s a distress signal, but whether or not it’s E-Tech, couldn’t say.”

“What could you say?” grilled the captain.

The pilot shrugged.

The captain’s eyes drifted shut, a retreat into thoughts. Ghandi knew what his concerns were.

If it’s an E-Tech ship, it could be a trap. Sucker us down to the surface with a phony distress signal, then arrest us for illegal trespass. We’re on a dirty flight – unlisted with E-Tech’s orbital control – and we’re in restricted airspace to boot.

Lately, the bastards were getting tougher, with penalties for such intrusions harsher than when Ghandi was a kid. Whatever moral qualms E-Tech once had regarding entrapment were gone. Pirate captains, caught on the surface without permission, were being levied heavy fines. Some Costeaus had even been stripped of their vessels.

Good reasons for not responding to distress calls.

But maybe the ship wasn’t E-Tech. It could be other treasure hunters, just as dirty down here as they were. Maybe they had engine failure and couldn’t lift off.

An E-Tech outpost existed in Texas, seven hundred miles to the southeast. But if the captain of this shuttle was on a dirty flight, he wouldn’t risk contacting that base, at least not until things got desperate. A short-range, low-powered distress beacon offered a fair shot of reaching one of the numerous Costeau flights that constantly scavenged the planet. And pirates, whether down here legally or otherwise, provided the best chance for getting rescued and staying out of trouble with the colonial authorities. Boost the power of your signal – shout help over a ten-state area – and E-Tech Security patrols would be crawling all over you within the hour.

The captain opened his eyes. “I think it’s a dirty flight.”

The pilot nodded. “Engine trouble maybe.”

The captain’s mouth twisted into the vaguest hint of a smile. “They might need our help.”

In the proper circumstances, help could be a very expensive commodity.

“Let’s take her down.”

Ghandi smiled, too. This asshole captain did have his good points.

Ten minutes later, the five of them stood silently in full spacesuits, in half a meter of fresh snow on the western edge of Denver. They were on the undulating terrain of a suburb of the Mile High City beside the imposing front range of the Rocky Mountains.

Nine million people had lived in this region once, had breathed this air, had made it into one of the great metropolitan centers of the twenty-first century. Now it was dead, no different from the other Earth cities, lifeless for almost a quarter of a millennium. The air was still saturated with organic poisons, practically unbreathable. Just another icon of planet Earth: another of humanity’s junkyards, decimated by the nuclear-biological Apocalypse of 2099, two hundred and thirty-nine years ago.

The storm had subsided a bit, or else the mass of Denver’s distant skyscrapers somehow limited wind intensity at ground level. Even so, a fair amount of fresh snow swirled through the air, blowing down from the western peaks. Ghandi touched a sensor on his control belt, notched up his faceplate wiper.

“What do you make of it?” the pilot wondered.

“Hell if I know,” a crewman replied.

In front of them, an overgrown four-lane highway bisected the suburban development, dividing the multi-story condos with shattered windows and collapsing facades into separate arenas. On an exit ramp to a dilapidated refueling station rested the strange shuttle. Its interior lights were on and the main airlock stairway down. There was no sign of life.

Their own shuttle squatted behind them on the entrance ramp, its stubby wings angling upward, blackened heat shields testifying to frequent atmospheric incursions. The ice and snow beneath it had been melted by the intense heat from their vertical landing jets and plumes of gray smoke drifted from the sextet of exhaust tubes.

“Let’s go,” the captain ordered, stomping through the snow toward the unknown vessel.

“Shouldn’t we leave a guard behind?” the pilot asked.

“You scared?” the captain retorted.

Ghandi stayed silent. The asshole should leave someone behind, just in case they ran into problems. No backup… that was begging for trouble.

Their target was roughly the same size and shape as their own shuttle, about fifty meters long with a stubby body. There were no large markings but that was not unusual. Anyone on a dirty flight ran the risk of being visually sighted by an E-Tech ground unit. Without markings, there was no way for E-Tech to ID the craft externally and bring charges against the crew upon their return to the Colonies.

The captain turned to the crewman with a small device strapped to the front of his spacesuit. It was a rhythm detector – standard hunt-and-search gear for ground expeditions.

“Picking up anything?”

The crewman checked the readout, shook his head.

“Nothing, captain. No movement within three hundred meters. Either they’re out of the neighborhood or still inside the shuttle.”

Not necessarily, Ghandi thought. They could be shielded. It wasn’t extraordinarily difficult to block the scanning waves of a rhythm detector. The surrounding condos might have walls thick enough to inhibit the device’s sensors. Moov scramblers could also foul a rhythm detector, though Ghandi acknowledged the remoteness of that possibility, since they remained on E-Tech’s restricted technology list. And black market models, if you could even find one, were costly.

He said nothing, however, knowing it would be a wasted effort to broach any of his concerns. This was only Ghandi’s third flight with this captain and crew, but already their weaknesses were obvious. They were too clan-confident, relying on their reputations as Costeaus rather than applying sound logic and judgment to potentially dangerous situations. Macho idiots usually died young. Ghandi thought it miraculous that this bunch – the captain in particular – had survived for so long.

The five of them stepped carefully over a section of crushed guardrail and trudged across the highway. Ghandi noted that the craft had a thick covering of snow around it and that the stairway had no footprints. Beneath the vessel, long icicles hung from the end cones of the vertical landing jets. Whoever they were, they’d been here for a while. Several days at least, maybe longer.

“Could be dead,” the pilot suggested.

Ghandi hoped so. That was certainly the best possible scenario. A dead crew meant that the shuttle was theirs to plunder. If they were still alive… well, that opened up several options.

The standard arrangement for helping a downed crew – other than fellow pirates from their own clan – called for an assist fee. In advance. But if the captain saw evidence they’d plundered valuable antiques or other treasures from the surface, then a more lucrative partnership arrangement might be demanded. And whatever was demanded would be granted. This captain might lack qualities as a tactician, but he was a Costeau.

Of course, those possibilities assumed that this crew was willing to bargain. But maybe this bunch wouldn’t want to cut any deals.

Ghandi dropped a palm to his belt and fingered the butt of his thruster. All five of them had the powerful handguns. And the pilot carried a deadlier version, a modified – and illegal for civilians – thruster rifle. At close range, its blast had enough pulsed energy to blow a hole through an average spacesuit.

He hoped things wouldn’t degenerate into violence. Ghandi had killed before – a clan fight in his youth, a sandram cracked against the head of an opponent with too much force. Watching the other boy crumple into death hadn’t been an entirely unpleasant experience. But wiping out a shuttle crew down here on the surface could lead to serious consequences. Up in the Colonies, E-Tech might start asking questions. And these days, E-Tech was not the only potential source of trouble. It was entirely possible that other Costeaus would bring them grief.

There was a growing movement over the past few decades to mainstream the Costeau population, an effort originating thirty-one years ago, in 2307, the year of Ghandi’s birth. That was when a rival clan, the Alexanders, helped rid the Colonies of two Paratwa: Codrus, the Ash Ock mastermind, and his servant, the liege-killer. Since then, more clans had begun to cooperate openly with E-Tech and the Irryan Council. However traitorous and despicable Ghandi might perceive such collaboration, the overall effects couldn’t be denied. Being hunted for murder by E-Tech would be a serious problem. But being hunted by other Costeaus… well, that was something else entirely.

They were five meters from the craft when Ghandi realized there were no markings whatsoever on the faded white paint, not even the standard warning emblems clustered around the heat shields, engines and airlocks. Someone had taken the time to blot out even the slightest hint of identification. That was overkill. Long-range E-Tech video tracking gear wasn’t that good. Small markings would surely escape detection.

The lack of markings made Ghandi nervous. He was about to chance the captain’s wrath by mentioning the anomaly when a voice cut into their suit circuits.

“Thank you for coming.”

The voice was young and husky, but decidedly feminine.

“I’ve had a major engine shutdown,” she continued. “The main cooling system, I think.”

They froze as a spacesuited figure strode out onto the airlock ramp. The pilot raised his rifle. The woman stared down at them, her face mostly hidden by the helmet visor. Ghandi could just make out pale skin and a mass of curly blonde hair.

“I need a ride,” she said. “I’ll be glad to pay.”

The captain moved to the bottom of the stairway. “Where’s your crew?”

“I have no crew.”

The pilot kept his rifle trained on her.

“This is my own shuttle,” she explained. “I’m down here on a research project. I’m preparing a paper on the psychosomatic ailments of pre-Apocalyptic condominium dwellers.”

One of the men chuckled. The woman smiled.

“You know how it is. Everyone is fascinated by pre-Apocalyptic lifestyles.”

The captain mounted the snow-covered steps. The other crew members followed. Ghandi hesitated at the bottom of the ramp.

Something’s wrong. A rich colonial princess with her own shuttle, down here on the surface all by her lonesome didn’t fit. She’d obviously been here for days. But even if she was exploring the numerous condos for her research, why mess around with a short-range distress beacon when facing a major engine failure? Why not simply blast a help signal across the spectrum?

“You must be having serious power problems as well,” Ghandi challenged. “Your beacon was very weak. Of course, I see that you still have enough electricity to run internal lighting.”

She hesitated. “I didn’t want to attract any major attention. Come inside. I’ll explain.”

Ghandi kept a hand on his thruster as he followed the others up the ramp.

The six of them squeezed into the airlock, waited silently for pressurization. The inner seal opened and they followed her into the shuttle’s main corridor.

Bright walls.

That was the first thing Ghandi noticed. The corridor had been painted with an incredibly gaudy mixture of colors. Fiery red stripes crisscrossed a deep violet background, with the whole mess splotched with random patches of green and gold. The arrangement lacked any sort of harmony. The colors were so intense that at spots they seemed to be pulsing.

She led them along the corridor and through an open air-seal into the shuttle’s midcompartment. The central space boasted chairs, tables, and zero-G hammocks. Ghandi was relieved that the obnoxious color scheme hadn’t been repeated in here. Soft, eye-pleasing pastels were highlighted by the dim light from a ceiling grid.

The woman unsealed her helmet and laid it on a table. She removed her spacesuit.

Ghandi had been with his share of women: pirates, smugglers’ wives, barely legal colonial girls tantalized with the idea of romping with bad-boy Costeaus. Once he’d blown his entire profit from a two-week artifact hunt on a single extended visit to a silky palace in Velvet-on-the-Green. Still, for the most part, he prided himself on a modicum of self-control.

When the woman stepped out of her spacesuit, Ghandi felt himself stiffen.

There was nothing blatantly erotic about her. And it hadn’t been that long since he’d last been with a woman. Yet there was no denying her effect on him.

It wasn’t her clothing. It was plain and decidedly unsexy, a faded blue vest tucked into loose white trousers. Bare arms were lightly tanned and displayed well-defined biceps. She was tall for a woman, and looked to be in prime physical condition. She couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five.

“Up your lookers,” she chided, smiling gently.

Ghandi, realizing his eyes were doing a full body scan, returned his attention to her face.

“Like what you see?”

The voice was soft, sexy, straining at invisible leashes. The face was a perfect oval framed by that mass of golden curls. Pale cheeks were rouged with tiny dimples. Aquamarine eyes danced, drawing him closer, into a throbbing sea of tender waves, lapping, caressing…

His throat went dry. Without turning away from her face, he toggled his control belt, felt the suit’s water hose extend itself from the underside of his helmet, sensors probing for his mouth.

His lips closed on the nipple and he suckled, drawing the stream through his mouth, across his tongue, letting it flow to the top of his throat, not swallowing, but allowing the cool liquid to trickle effortlessly down. He imagined that the nipple was one of her breasts.

“Look around you,” he heard her say, her voice somehow distant and close at the same time. “Do any of you like what you see?”

The captain answered. “Yes. We like what we see.”

Ghandi tore his eyes away from her, unsure what was happening but troubled by it. He turned to a blank wall of the midcompartment. But immediately, he began to get a headache.

“Sit down,” she instructed him. “You look ill.”

With his tongue, he pushed the water hose away from his mouth. “My head hurts.”

She smiled and laid her palm on his shoulder. Even through the thick padding of his suit, her touch felt electric. His pulse quickened.

“If you get out of that clumsy spacesuit, you’ll be more comfortable.”

Undress. Yes, that made sense. They certainly couldn’t make love with Ghandi wearing this armor. And his groin was starting to bother him. Spacesuit crotch plates weren’t designed for such expansion.

“I’ll be right back,” she whispered. “I’m going to give your friends some chores.”

Ghandi nodded. That was a good idea. It would keep them occupied.

A while later – at least he thought it was a while later, he couldn’t be sure – he realized that the rumpled mass of bendable plastic at the foot of his chair was his spacesuit. He sat alone in the midcompartment, mostly staring at the floor because whenever he tried to look at the walls his headache worsened.

He was trying desperately to remember something. Something important. A facet of pre-Apocalyptic history. But the idea of making love to the woman kept interfering with his thought processes. He simply couldn’t concentrate.

I need her.

That was important.

I need her. Yes!

The conscious acknowledgment brought him back.

He roared to his feet, grabbed the thruster from the suit belt and ran to the nearest window. He kept his eyes focused directly ahead, away from the pastel walls.

I need her, all right. Son of a bitch! I need her like I need a second asshole.

She’d caught them, drawn them in like bees to honey. She was using an almost mythical device of pre-Apocalyptic origin – a needbreeder – state-of-the-art technology from over two centuries ago, when Earth science had reached undreamed-of heights.

He recalled what he’d read about the device, about the invisible beams that tracked eye movements and insinuated their mollifying patterns, skirting the brain’s cerebral judgment centers to overwhelm the less rational safeguards of the emotion-oriented limbic system. The hypnotic effects of the needbreeder enabled the user – in this case the woman, who was probably using special contact lenses to shield herself – to emotionally manipulate victims. Needbreeder trances could last anywhere from hours to days.

Ghandi assumed that the midcompartment’s pastel walls housed the needbreeder’s actual hardware – the tiny subliminal projectors, flooding the room with their hypnotic emissions. That made sense, and accounted for the extraordinarily vibrant walls in the corridor. The optic assault of those walls had prepped Ghandi and his crew for entering the needbreeder compartment. Simple psychology. Their eyes had been automatically drawn to the soothing pastel walls, finding relief from the spectral madness outside. Subconsciously, they’d been indoctrinated into looking more intensely at the hidden needbreeder.

“I’m impressed,” the woman said.

Ghandi whirled. She stood in the open airseal that led forward. Her hands were on her hips. She was smiling.

He aimed the thruster at her chest. “Don’t move!”

“I won’t.” She didn’t appear upset by his action.

“I could kill you for what you’ve done.”

“Yes. But you won’t.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You’re not a talker, Corelli-Paul Ghandi. Talkers never resist – let alone escape – my needbreeder. You’re a doer. If you intended to kill me, you would have done it by now.”

“Pretty sure of yourself.”

“Yes.”

Anger surged through him. “Who the fuck are you? How the hell do you know my name?”

“Don’t be weak,” she chided. “Getting mad can be effective in many situations, but not in this one. Anger’s a tool. Use it well or don’t use it at all.”

“Answer my question, bitch.”

The aquamarine eyes seemed to study him for a long moment. Then:

“My name is Colette. And I know your name because I scanned your shuttle’s network when it was still two hundred kilometers from Denver.”

Ghandi frowned. “That’s not possible. We have shielding.”

She looked down at his crotch and smiled. “You’ve lost your erection. That’s too bad.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I haven’t.”

Ghandi felt his pulse beginning to quicken. “Where’s my crew?”

“Outside.”

Keeping his thruster pointed at her, he gazed out the window. The glass bore a light dusting of snow, but Ghandi could see through it well enough to make out his own vessel on the exit ramp. The main loading hatch was down. The captain and the pilot were using the portable winch to lift a two-meter-long ivory cocoon into the cargo bay.

It was a stasis capsule, surrounding and protecting someone being held in suspended animation.

And in the middle of the highway, Ghandi spotted a second capsule. This one was fastened to a small power sled being guided toward their shuttle by his other two crewmates.

“Do you know why you escaped the needbreeder?” the woman asked.

“Shut up! Who the hell are you? Where did you come from? Who’s in those stasis capsules? And why the fuck are they being transferred onto my ship?”

“You escaped,” she continued calmly, “because you’re smarter than your mates. You should be the captain, Corelli-Paul Ghandi. You’re thirty-one years old. Why continue wasting your time serving lesser men?”

Anger surged. “Don’t push your luck, bitch!”

She sighed. “Stop being dense. Stupidity doesn’t become you. You escaped from the needbreeder because you have a certain inner control, a quality that few humans possess. And I need someone with such an attribute. I have plans… and you are the man who may be able to help me carry them out.

“I could have killed you, Ghandi, as you sat here helplessly for these past hours, fighting the needbreeder. But you overcame. You’ve proven your worth.

“I need your help. I wish to emigrate to the Colonies. I wish to learn about colonial life, and you could become my teacher, my guide. I also need someone with intelligence to function as my business partner, someone who understands the basic dynamics of intercolonial commerce, someone who understands the value of marketing certain products… technological items that are officially prohibited.” She grinned. “The needbreeder is merely a sample of what I have to offer.

“And so, Corelli-Paul Ghandi, I hereby offer this proposition. Assist me and I will make you wealthy and powerful beyond your dreams.” She peeled open the blue vest and let it fall to the floor. She wore nothing underneath.

Her breasts were perfect. Ghandi felt his heartbeat accelerating. His palm grew sweaty. The gun wavered.

Laughing, she unsnapped her white pants and let them slither down her legs. “I don’t like underwear.”

His erection returned. His throat went dry again. “Who are you?” he whispered.

Dancing eyes, speckled with joy… amusement. “I told you, my name is Colette. But I have a secret name. Come closer, and I will whisper it to you.”

Ghandi heard a sharp clanging noise. He looked down. He’d dropped the thruster.

Either she moved to him or he moved to her – he couldn’t be sure which. But abruptly they were together. Arms encircled him. Hot breath tickled his ear.

“I am a human needbreeder,” she whispered. “And my secret name is…

“Sappho.”

Sappho. A famous name out of history. There’d been two of them. One had been a renowned poet of ancient Greece. And the other…

A binary, a Paratwa of the Royal Caste. An Ash Ock.

Two of them.

Ghandi understood. For one timeless moment, he considered trying to tear himself away from her embrace.

“I want you, Ghandi.”

And then it was too late.

 

TWO

To Susan Quint, the thirty-kilometer-long space community of Honshu was less than remarkable. She was ohsoglad to be leaving it.

Like most of the two hundred and seventeen floating cylinders comprising the Irryan Colonies, Honshu orbited a stable gravitational point roughly equidistant from the Earth and the moon. Like most, the cylinder’s inner surface was divided into six lengthwise strips – alternating land and sun sectors – with the latter composed of slabs of cosmishield glass. Honshu’s five million citizens lived on the interior land sectors under a gravitational pull of 1G induced by the cylinder’s rotation rate, and its population density fit the normal curve. In almost every respect, it was average.

Ohsodull!

Susan took one last look at the triple image of the noonday sun, reflected through the glass strips by rows of mirrors, and entered the Yamaguchi shuttle terminal.