Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (27 page)

The battle quickly wanes but I can’t let them surrender as much as they beg for it.  I drag my blade down one chyld who has dropped to her knees and cut her outstretched arm down the middle to the shoulder; three fingers on one side, two on the other.  Bullworth doesn’t stop either, searching about the blood soaked alley for those I had left to bleed and ending their existences with a decisive chop or three.

A second fire engine soon arrives and after some reassurance from the first crew, they all begin to contain the fire.  We let them to do their work, then drive to a nearby carwash and hose down the vehicles and Bullworth before patrolling for the rest of the night.  There are a few more kills and a chase, but no major fires or large engagements.  We can only hope this remains the trend.

Just before dawn, as the city is once again filled with smoke from extinguished flames, we return home.  I think back to yesterday and how I felt when I first looked at the smoke
along the streets and the scars of change.  I think about who I was yesterday – the merit of all my actions up until that morning – and who I am today, and I smile.    

“
T
hings are not going well, Ez.  How about you?  Taking some aspirin for your headaches?  I know how taxing meditation can be,” I sneer into the phone.

“Delano, I’m trying to help.”

“Well, stop.  I have fires starting all over central and from what Corbin tells me, Sogot isn’t far away.”

“I know.”

“So what do you want?”

“To tell you that this is a war of kharma.”

“I’m well aware – being one of the people brave enough to risk his own.” 

“Listen, we will all be required to fight, but this conflict cannot be won by fighting alone.  It’s more important now that you help Corbin.”

I pull the receiver away from my ear and look at it disbelievingly, then hang up as he continues talking.

I run my hands through my hair and sigh so deep I have to take a seat.  Val sits across the kitchen table.  He’s got several cases of ammunition in front of him and is using a spring-depressor to quickly load magazines. 

“Anything new?” Sabetha asks, coming in through the front door with Bullworth.  It’s getting close to his bite phase, and him being able to transform into a millitus is about the only good news I can think of.

“Corbin and Roger have made their way through West and now South Gothica.  They called earlier to confirm that everything is going to shit, and – no surprise – there’s no single source.”

“What about his calculations?  Anything enlightening?”  She asks.

“The data he’s collected has a larger margin of error than anyone would like, but yes, we have gleaned a few things from his statistics.  As it turns out, this is a lot less like the Blood Wars than we had anticipated.”

“In what way?”  She takes off her coat and hangs it in the closet. 

“Well that dissenting opinion we were hoping for in Lezar is rampant,” I reply.  “But in
everyone
.  Chyldrin want to kill gazers and vice versa, and of course the ilk are fighting to survive, but it’s not a strictly biological split.  Chyldrin also want to kill other chyldrin, gazers, gazers, and so on.  Far from the Blood Wars’ unifying effect on the species, there’s complete division.  No one sees this as a war of two armies; one winning necessitating the other’s destruction.”

Val chimes in.  “Well that’s good though, isn’t it?”

“Hardly.  With the Blood Wars, you had a few main leaders to convince or kill to end things.  The way it looks
now
, each person, each family or at most, neighborhood feels like the rest of the world is against them.  This has become an entirely different battle and if I had to guess it’s in large part because the entire ilk population is involved.  They are by far the most populous and their fear translates into a lot of kharma.”

“How does this affect our plans?” Sabetha wants to know.

“You will keep up with patrols.”

She squints at me. “While you do what, exactly?”

“Go investigate the biggest influence on the ilk population.”

“The media?
” Val says, shocked.

I shake my head no, then point upwards.

Sabetha blurts it out. “Cynthecorp?  Delano please, getting rid of Cynthecorp isn’t going to do anything.”

“I’m flattered, but I don’t think I can topple Cynthecorp by myself – not in a day at least.  This is strictly recon.  We need to know what they’re up to since the attack on Pantheon.”

“Delano,” Sabetha persists.  “You know how they are.  They’re not going to risk anything for Gothicans.”

“I know.  That’s what I’m afraid of.  I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

F
inally, a task at which I am guaranteed to be successful: reconnaissance.  With pockets full of money I take to the street.  I hold up at gun point the first car to pass me, discreetly hand the owner a stack of bills and confiscate his car.  In a few hours I’m back in Neo Gothica and shortly afterwards, I’m outside one of the old safe houses.  It’s been sectioned off with crime scene tape and a few PIPERs are patrolling the upstairs.  I grab some equipment from under their noses and then head to the basement. 

Trying to sneak in through a checkpoint along the emerald rim briefly crosses my mind, but I can’t risk getting rejected, captured, or killed.  All the top agents are combing surrounding areas so I’ll bet they have
Hoplite
patrolling the fence.  And I’m not going to fuck with even
one
of those guys alone. 

No, instead, I decided back during the car ride that my answer would lay underground.  The safe houses don’t have secret passage ways leading into Neo Square or anything, but what they do have is a sewage hookup.  Anything going under the fence, big enough to walk through, is as guarded as the topside – in fact more so in case of tunnel dweller attacks, but all I need is enough room to
crawl
through… slither even.

After sloshing around the sewers outside the edge of Neo Square for a couple hours, I find a suitable pipe and judge it to head towards what’s left of Pantheon Theatre.  I cut the elbow joint off the pipe with a torch, secure the torch to my chest with duct tape and then slip inside.

I’m not claustrophobic, but after about three hundred feet in, unable to touch my knees to my chest, wiggle my arms forward or backwards from my shoulders, or to lift my nostrils more than a few inches above the sewage, and I’m starting to get a little… uncomfortable.  After cutting through a few metal grates, with great difficulty, I might add, I gladly reach the end.  I was lucky.  I could have hit a sharp turn and had to slither backwards to get out, but by the grace of the consciousness I find myself in an overflow tank.  Many more, smaller pipes lead out of the tank in all directions.

My feet touch down on the soft things that settle at the bottom of sewers and I stand up, waist deep.  Above me is a passage leading to a manhole cover and, with a little more exertion, I find myself peeking down a busy avenue of Neo Square from under a big, round, metal cover.  Unable to emerge from the middle of the street without attracting a whole lot of attention, I wait there till morning when traffic starts to back up.  When a box truck stops over me, I pull myself under it and then, a few blocks later roll out into the back alley behind a row of restaurants.  The smell of dumpsters will mask me till I can clean myself off. 

By mid-morning I’m in a new suit with a stolen ID and just outside Cynthecorp Tower.  Unfortunately,
Hoplite
, the most elite squadron of Cyncurity is guarding the complex – not the emerald rim like I had originally thought.  I won’t be able to get in.  At least not through the lobby…

T
he following morning, I buy a limo ride back to the apartment and spend the interim going over the files I’ve collected.  Though the majority of them are downright boring when looked at individually, they reveal a rather disturbing trend when read together; disturbing enough for me to use the car phone to call Ezra. 

I get back to the apartment by ten AM and considering that I haven’t slept much more than a few hours since the reckoning, I down a handful of sleeping pills with a whiskey bottle chaser and pass out.  My metabolism requires nothing less.  Sabetha impatiently wakes me just after sunset.  “So?” she says, tapping her foot.

I wipe my eyes and sit up in bed.  Val is in the doorway polishing a pistol while Sabetha waits by my dresser.  She looks pissed.

“All right, gimme a minute,” I grumble.

In the kitchen, over a bowl of my favorite cereal, I tell them my findings.  “Cynthecorp has no idea what’s going on or what to do about it.  They’ve fallen back on the Theta Contingency.”

“
Oh shit
,” Val says, his face going dead.  He used to work for cyncurity, so he knows what this means.

“What is the Theta Contingency?” Bullworth asks.

Val answers quickly.  “It puts all agents on independent standby.  They’re to act as if there’s been a violent coup of the government and every channel has been compromised.  All agents are to use guerilla warfare to disrupt any attempts by supernaturals to establish any form of control while other aspects of the corporation re-establish power.”

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” I say, to Val’s stammering shock.

“Whuh-how?”

“
While that is indeed what Theta means for agents, for Cynthecorp it means that Mr. Manuel and his top advisers go underground while everyone below them works to kill off all supernaturals in whatever way possible.  Lots of rallying the humans and such.  What only the top authorities – and now us – know, is that when Mr. Manuel and company go into their bunker, they flip a switch that shuts down all of the city’s systems.”

“What?  Why?”  Val asks. 

“Isn’t that counterproductive to their goal?”  Sabetha adds.

“Not at all.  Their goal is to thin out as many supernaturals a possible before humans are inevitably defeated through assimilation.  Then they wait for the remaining population of supernaturals to die out, either through hunger or warfare
while they wait in stasis.  The big wigs come out of hiding when the coast is clear.” 

“That’s pretty cold,” Val scoffs with a newly found appreciation of Mr. Manuel’s ruthlessness.

“It’s a paranoid doomsday plan of last resort. I don’t think it was ever looked at realistically.”

Bull frowns.  “Why didn’t the Blood Wars bring Theta about?”

“Cynthecorp was actively
involved
in the Wars – betting on them even.  They were trying to get the two species to kill each other off.  Besides that, there’s a whole host of protocols and plans before they get to Theta Contingency.  During the Blood Wars they still thought they could make a profit.”

“How far along are they?” Sabetha asks urgently.

“Not that far.”

“What if it goes further?” Bull asks before I can say anything more.

“That’s the kicker,” I explain.  “They don’t have control over half the systems in the city they think they do.  They tested a rolling black out but when they flipped the switch, nothing happened.”

Val stops me with a hand gesture.  “That one you’re gonna have to explain.” 

“I spoke with Ezra.”  And he told me what I would have known had I not hung up on him earlier.  “A long time sentiner theory, though one we always marginalized as too extreme, remains the only possible answer.”

“And?” Sabetha presses, hating when I pause between thoughts.

“We always knew that Cycle did more than just kill revolutionaries.  It was also the mysterious engine that made the city work.  It scheduled subway trains, kept light bulbs from blowing out, churches from falling apart, and allowed the ilk to rationalize away our presence.”

“And?”

“And… it does a hell of a lot
more
.  Before Pantheon Theatre fell, Cycle was so powerful, it was actually producing Gothica’s food and water.”

“What?” Val groans skeptically.

I continue.  “It provided our resources and had a crucial hand in running
all
of the city’s utilities.”

But Val isn’t buying it. “That’s impossible.  What about the utility companies?  The farms or… or
factories
?  Do they make
imaginary
stuff?”

“No.  And yes.  Look, this is the kind of stuff that if you try to track, seems clean.  You can follow a product from resource gathering to consumption.  There are pipes that lead from the water treatment plants to your sink, and occasionally some of them are replaced.  But it’s impossible that people are in complete control of the systems.  On a grand scale, the numbers Cynthecorp has don’t add up – what we consume and what we produce, what we spend and what we earn, how fast things fall apart and how seldom we fix them – none of it.  It’s cycle.  It has to be.  There’s no other possible explanation.”

“And their numbers couldn’t be wrong?” Sabetha asks.

“Not on this scale and not on purpose.  The info I got was a recent study they conducted.”