Flawed Fracture Read online

  "But there have been no demands so far?" Karolus asked.

  "No. If there had been we would know what they want with us."

  "And the third possibility?"

  "The final possibility is a little bit more complicated. You see, our company has backing from a number of other groups- foremost amongst these groups is a certain religious order, an extremely powerful and wealthy religious order with some very long-reaching influence. Groups like that tend to create a lot of enemies for themselves, and it's quite possible that we are being targeted for this very reason; because of our ties with this order.

  "This, of course, is the least preferable option. If we are being targeted for religious reasons, then it is quite likely that these attacks will not stop; that they will, if anything, do nothing but increase in frequency and violence. This is the situation we most need to avoid. A prolonged war will be extremely bad for business, and so we need to do everything possible to prevent it. Religious zealots are completely fanatical and are not subject to reason like normal people, so there will be no bargaining with them. They will continue to fight us until their organisation has been ripped to shreds, or every last one of them is dead. My superior has wisely opted to assume the worst, and so I was tasked with finding some fitting individuals for the task at hand.

  "Make no mistake- you are not here because you are the best- you aren't worthy to clean the boots of the best." A few of them looked about to reply to him, but none of them made the mistake of doing so. "You are not invaluable. You are not indispensable. You are only here because we wanted to prove to these terrorists just how weak they really are- to smash them to pieces with nothing more than a small group of second-rate mercenaries." He looked around to see whether any of them were going to argue with him, but again no-one did.

  "Do not make the mistake of thinking yourselves secure in your positions. There are many more like you. If you prove too uncontrollable, we will replace you. If you prove too incompetent, we will replace you. If you get yourselves killed, we will replace you. Just because you were offered this job, it doesn't mean that you'll get to keep it. Bear that in mind if you feel like testing our boundaries. Your task, therefore, will be the destruction or neutralisation of the Darkfang."

  There was a pause while everyone digested this, and then Sora spoke. To Grayson's surprise as much as anyone else's, it wasn't so that she could start swearing at the Boss. "Are you telling me that you want just the six of us to take down an organisation of that size?"

  "I'm telling you I want that threat neutralised."

  "How are the six of supposed to do that all by ourselves?"

  "However you choose. Use your imagination. I never said that you have to wipe out every single terrorist. Kill their leader, scare them into submission, force them into a truce; I don't care. All you need to do is make sure that they no longer trouble us. Of course, we'll pay you much more to destroy them than to make nice with them, but at the end of the day it's your choice. We're leaving the execution in your hands.

  "I'm not just here today to tell you about your overall mission, though- I have your first task to hand you." The anger and outrage seemed to fade, at least in part, from the group, replaced by a sense of excited anticipation: this was the reason they were here.

  "We have received information suggesting that there will be a Darkfang convoy moving through this fragment in two days' time. The convoy will be following the Minor North Road, heading from rift seventeen to rift fifty-six. I'm not a geographer; you can find those places yourselves. Now there's a reason we don't know all that much about the terrorists- for such a small group, they have some very professional precautions in place. Very few people know where they're actually based: most of their soldiers are just hired guns and they know nearly nothing about who they're working for.

  "The convoy should be different. They aren't transporting anything particularly important, so that won't be a factor in this operation, but for some reason the person leading it is pretty high up in the command chain. If anyone will know how to find them, it will be him."

  Suddenly Grayson was interested. "If there's nothing important about the convoy, why would they have someone important leading it?"

  The man shrugged. "We don't know. Figure it out yourself if you care that much about it, but it isn't important. What is important is that they've slipped up at long last, and we need to pounce on that mistake. Hold up the convoy. Interrogate the commander. Find out where their organisation is based, and then we'll proceed from there. I'll have the convoy's route downloaded to Karolus' communicator. Don't come back here until you have that information." The man turned to leave, before making one last parting comment. "Don't forget how easily replaced you are- because I certainly won't."

  Grayson called him back before he had the chance to leave. "Wait."

  The man turned back to face him, clearly irritated at the command. "What now?"

  "You said that we're disposable, that we're easily replaced."

  "It's true."

  "Then why was I asked for personally?"

  "You weren't."

  "They were looking specifically for the lumin, Grayson Hunter. That would be me."

  "We needed a lumin- you were probably just the closest feasible candidate."

  "No. For something like that you'd put up advertisements for the job. You wouldn't ask for a specific person."

  The man frowned. "You know nothing about our organisation-"

  "No, but I know how it would work."

  The Boss's glared at him as though he was trying to will him to stone. "No; you don't. And don't think that we aren't willing to get rid of you if you keep displaying this kind of arrogance. You are nothing special, none of you are- and I have nothing left to say to you." The blue screen blinked once, then vanished from existence.

  "Well…" Thief muttered after a long pause, burying a thrown knife in the space the screen had occupied, "he was a dick."

  "Yeah," Grayson mused, "he was. It looks like we've got an interesting time ahead of us."

  To Kill Time

  "What's a nightwalker?"

  With another fight liable to break out at any moment, the group had made the executive decision to go their separate ways, meeting back at the hall the next day. Thief had asked whether anybody felt like having a look around the city with him and, with no better alternatives revealing themselves, Grayson had decided to go along. While still getting a few stares, they weren't attracting quite as much attention as he had expected- presumably in a hub city like this people were used to unusual individuals, and Thief's appearance might not be as original as he clearly seemed to believe.

  Grayson came to a sudden halt, and Thief kept walking for a few more paces before realising he had left his companion behind. "What do you mean, 'what's a nightwalker'?"

  Thief shrugged. "Pretty much what I said. Is it some kind of nocturnal predator, or some species that only comes out at night? Are they kind of like assassins? I've never fought an assassin before."

  "No," Grayson sighed, "They have absolutely nothing to do with assassins. But that wasn't what I meant. I want to know why you're asking me a question like that."

  "Because… that hologram asshole said that we should ask 'the lumin' about nightwalkers. It does make a lot of sense, asking the native about what kind of enemies we might come across while we're here."

  "No," Grayson frowned, "it doesn't. What makes sense is finding out about the place you'll be working at before you actually go there. Only a moron or somebody with a death wish would take on a contract in a place they know nothing of. What would you have done if you found yourself hopelessly out of your league?"

  "That wouldn't happen. It would be a waste of time to hire a mercenary if they were just going to die. That kind of research isn't really necessary unless you're planning on self-employment."

  As much as Grayson hated to admit it, there was a certain kind of twisted logic to what Thief was saying. He had expected a boy of this age, who
went around looking like some kind of poor man's rock star, to be arrogant and self-assured; but so far Thief had done nothing but exceed his expectations. "Fine, then." He started walking again. "Before I tell you what a nightwalker is, I should probably ask you exactly how much you know about this place."

  The boy shrugged again. "It's a piece of what used to be Luminacht. Now it's Luminacht secondary, the second largest remaining planet fragment. Not one of the big twelve in the Alliance, so it probably gets overlooked a lot. Its technology obviously varies a lot due to the whole 'aliens' thing, but it's predominantly…" he struggled with his mind for a moment before giving up, "old fashioned, I guess. You did say that you use sundials."

  Grayson held his head in his hands. "You really didn't bother to find out about it, did you?"

  "I like to take things as they come."

  "Okay, then. It looks like you've left me with the job of giving you the lesson you really should already have had. Is there anywhere specific you need to go?"

  "I have to pick up some of my stuff and my bike; they're being held a short way from here. Aside from that, I was just planning to explore a little."

  "Good, because this is going to take a while. Try to keep up, because I really don't want to be repeating any of it. It goes something like this…"

  "Luminacht is a planet of opposites. Light and dark, night and day, good and evil, chaos and order. On the one hand you have the lumin. They're a highly pious race with an inclination towards agriculture and healing, physical and spiritual. The lumin have, as far as we can tell, always existed here. Under normal circumstances they would be happy to live as they do, working the land, worshipping their gods, and generally keeping to themselves. It's this kind of tendency which created such a slow evolution in their technology- they never felt the need to improve what they already appreciated."

  "You talk about them like you aren't one."

  Now it was Grayson's turn to shrug. "I've never felt like one. I don't believe in Gods, peace and harmony bore me, and I've never shown any major indications of being able to use their magic. I've basically spent most of my life away from them anyway. So, as I was saying, they would have happily been church-going farmers until the end of time, except that the decision was made for them.

  "A few thousand years ago they started appearing. Wulves, leeches, dead men, remnants, casters, deathbringers: the scions of the dark. Nobody knows why they suddenly appeared, or when exactly it happened, but from the moment they turned up the lumin were forced to fight. We didn't really have any way to properly classify them, and so they were grouped under the blanket term of nightwalkers."

  "But what actually are they?"

  "How much do you want to know?"

  "How much," Thief countered, "do I need to know?"

  "There's a lot to say, so I'll just give you the basics of each. With the exception of casters and deathbringers, which are closely related anyway, they all reproduce by turning other living beings into their kind. Leeches, remnants, and obviously dead men are all dead."

  Thief stopped. "What?"

  "They're dead."

  "Isn't that impossible?"

  "This from the man with a scorpion tail? I think that the Alignment basically took our preconceptions as to what are and aren't possible and then scattered them on the wind. You really shouldn't be surprised by this stage."

  "I guess so…" Thief didn't sound convinced, but at the very least he started walking again.

  "In reality, the only species seriously affected by day or night is the remnants. The term nightwalker is symbolic more than anything else, and while it covers dozens of different subspecies all you really need to know about right now are the main six."

  "First you have the wulves. A wulf is an altered version of a different race- you could become one just as easily as I could. They can reproduce naturally, but they also pass on their condition through a bite, so as with leeches and dead men you need to exercise a lot of caution around them- you don't need to die in battle, make one wrong move and you'll become one of them."

  "What actually is the condition, and is there a way to cure it?"

  "As of now, no cures have been discovered. Apparently attempts at one have ranged from no affect at all to the rapid death of the subject. The condition is essentially the introduction of foreign DNA into the infected person's genetics. They become feral, bloodthirsty, and they also begin in part to take on the shape of a direwolf."

  "Direwolf?"

  "It's what my cloak's made from." He gestured affectionately at it. "Like wolves, only they're closer in size to bears. Normally, a wulf will not appear all that different from who they were to start with- their teeth will be more like fangs, their hair will be shaggier, and they will develop enhanced hearing and smell, but you could still mistake them for something else. The major result of the condition, however, is that they gain the ability to change forms between their original one and their form as a wulf. Basically they can take on the shape of some kind of biped wolf-like creature. It makes them very, very, dangerous."

  "So… it's kind of like the way in which some silvans can change into animals?"

  "Yes and no- silvan shapechangers don't lose who they are in the process. With wulves, they don't lose their personality or intellect or anything like that, but every shred of humanity is drained away. They become little more than sentient beasts, monsters with an uncontrollable urge to kill. They become stronger, faster, more ferocious, but at the same time they no longer have any morals or ethics to hold them in check. They become carnivorous, and the easiest prey can be found in settlements and villages."

  "They eat people?" He sounded not shocked so much as disgusted.

  "There's a reason we class them as servants of the dark. It's why lumin are willing to kill any friends, relatives, or comrades who have been bitten- it's seen as an act of mercy, putting them down before their souls can be damned.

  "After the wulves, we have the leeches. They reproduce through bites in the same way as wulves, but unlike the them they're technically dead; hence normal reproduction is impossible. In some ways leeches are similar to wulves, but in some ways they are very different. Their teeth, again, grow into fangs, and not just their smell and hearing but all of their senses are vastly improved.

  "There is, however, no transformation. Instead, everything about their physical bodies is enhanced. They become faster, stronger, smarter; superior in almost every way to what they were beforehand. They do not become carnivorous, but are instead forced to rely upon drinking the blood of others to survive."

  "But… they're dead. Why would that be necessary?"

  "Who knows? They lose their humanity in the same way as wulves, but they aren't driven by the same uncontrollable urge to kill. If anything, this makes them even more deadly. They think things through. Where a wulf would charge you and rip you limb from limb, a leech will wait until you let your guard down to walk up behind you and slit your throat. They also use weapons, unlike wulves. If you ever find yourself face to face with a leech, you're in a lot of trouble."

  "But then why would they attack people? A lack of humanity doesn't change the fact that attacking a lumin would bring about retribution. Surely they'd be smarter than that."

  "Apparently not. As far as we can tell the taste of animal blood disgusts them. They view us as nothing more than prey, so if there's any armed response they often view it simply as more food. They'll split a group up, isolate its members, and then slaughter them one by one. It isn't pretty.

  "After leeches and wulves, we come to remnants. A remnant is essentially a wandering spirit. They reproduce by sucking your soul from out of your body, and by separating the two they can isolate your spirit from the person it belonged to. Your body dies on the spot, and your soul is turned into a predator without purpose- not just your humanity is lost, but your memories and personality too. The person you once were is gone forever, and your soul is reduced to an unlife of hunting and turning others."

&nbs
p; "And there's nothing at all else they can do?"

  "They lose their ability to think. All they have left is the will to kill, and so that's what they do; never questioning why, never wondering what exactly it achieves. It's actually rather sad when you think about it.

  "You might, therefore, assume that a remnant, with no capacity to strategize or reason, is not a threat- you would be horrifically wrong to think so. A remnant has no physical body. It can pass calmly through objects, and objects can pass harmlessly through it: if, for example, you tried to shoot or stab it, you would be doing nothing more than wasting energy and ammunition."