Osiris Was Slain on This Icy Shore
An AcidPunk + Immortality SF story by JosephArmstead
"Beware the wrath of a patient adversary."
-- John C. Calhoun
"There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals."
-- Herman Melville
"It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air -- there's the rub, the task."
-- Virgil
"The universe is an intelligence test."
-- Timothy Leary
The Man was, in every way, an inelegant impossibility. He was dressed in tattered layers that floated off his gaunt, battered body, the form of a human scarecrow given frightful animation, that appeared to be the remnants of a Virtua-Synk Augmentor exo-suit. The Augmentor exo-suit was badly ripped and the torn, the ribbons of its outermost skin presenting a writhing, serpentine corona resembling the many tentacles of a mythical hydra. His flesh, which was laid bare and exposed to the harsh atmospheric elements, was the pallid hue of ancient stone.
The world was the color of an old cemetery headstone and everything was enwrapped in a rime of graphite-hued frost. More, the ebony sky draped the horizon of a rugged landscape so polar-cold it was nearly crystalline in its iciness. The thin and wispy atmosphere, so insubstantial it barely qualified as such, was bitterly glacial and left across everything it touched a sloughy, poisonous coating of triple-bonded cyanides.
Nothing made of flesh could live there.
He stumbled uphill, mouth gaping open and hands clawing the open air as if reaching for some variety of physical purchase through which he could pull himself along, towards the topmost ridge of the crater's inner wall. He moved with a dogged persistence that dramatically accentuated his disjointed awkwardness, as though he were again becoming acquainted with gravity after a long period wherein he'd been divorced from it.
And the glowing stars that were his widened eyes burned like volcanic coals...
He shouldn't have been there. There was no sane way he could have existed at all where they'd found him. And there certainly wasn't any way that he could have still been alive... even though he hadn't remained so for very long after the Infrastructure Assets Works-crew had chanced upon him. They risked exiting their Sno-Cat variant, tank-treaded, arctic-transport vehicle to rescue him when they saw him. Encased in protective, locomotion-articulated anthropomorphic climate suits, they ventured out into the hostile climate on a mission of mercy... only to belatedly realize they'd exposed themselves to a danger of the likes they'd never before seen or heard. When they reached him, he managed to painfully croak out a handful of words, actual human speech, past a ravaged throat that shouldn't have been able to produce audible sound of any variety -- after all, the landscape through which he'd been shuffling was on the airless surface of an ice-bound, four-hundred-kilometer-wide, heavily cratered, irregular polyhedronal moon that flew around the planet Neptune, eighth planet out from the star "Sol", the sun of planet Earth. That moon, with the astronomical provisional designation of "S/1989 N 1" and later scientifically classified as "Neptune VIII", was more popularly referred to as "Proteus". Proteus was the second largest of Neptune's fourteen moons and it orbited the planet in a nearly equatorial path.
The team from Infrastructure Assets, bewildered and astonished to find a human being wandering the surface of Proteus without environmental bio-support equipment, did their level best to assist The Man. They were experienced Spacers, civilian astronaut colonists, and they skillfully applied every bit of emergency knowledge they had in their attempt to keep The Man alive until they could get him back inside the colonial bio-dome, but he was too far gone. His extreme radiation poisoning and the epidermal mutations, and mutilations, he'd undergone were far too severe. In the end, he laboriously rasped his cryptic message and then died in their custody.
"Among the eigenvectors of the Transactional Desert did the Tsar-Imperator grasp the flaming sword of the Night-Sultan. Woe betide the Children of Solaris, the Relativistic Undersymmetry shall shelter them no more. Such is the disharmony of the Hypercosm."
With that, he was gone. But the glowing stars that were his widened eyes still burned. It appeared that, even in death, he remained caught in the agony of a nightmare without end.
Shaken to their core, the team from Infrastructure Assets reported the grim event to their supervisors. Those supervisors, in turn, passed along the mystery to their executive management and from there, the macabre tale was passed up the chain of colonial command. It finally reached the Protectorate Administration of Proteus' capitol city of New Rhodes, a human colony which occupied the westernmost slice of the great crater Pharos, located near the lunar south pole...
And no one, not any agency for public safety or of law enforcement, not even the Terran Federated Union Military's Division for Galactic Hazards Intervention, wanted anything to do with the ominous conundrum. But, since there had been mention of "the Tsar-Imperator", "the Transactional Desert" and "the Hypercosm" by a heretofore unidentified, unauthorized sentient human, it was obvious that, whatever it was that had happened to The Man, it had been quite dire and very portentous. So it was decided that the enigmatic episode warranted a call in to The Ennead Group's infamous Ministry of Anomalies.
That, requesting the involvement of The Ennead Group, represented a significant and consequential deviation from Terran Federated Union policy -- no one really liked having to resort to involving Heliopolite agents in affairs of the military or of law enforcement. Generally, that was because none of the august personages in the upper stratus of the Union felt they could really trust the operatives of The Ennead Group. They were rumored to be highly unusual people working for a private agency that didn't maintain a strict allegiance to the goals and mission statement of the Union. They were suspected of having a greater over-arching agenda of their own. They had a reputation for following orders only when it suited their purposes, purposes they rarely shared with anyone outside their highly selective organization.
This was thought to be because those who were members of The Ennead Group were rumored to be Heliopolites. "Homo Regenitem Infinitii". Those human persons also known as "Immortals".
They were an impossibility. They weren't supposed to exist. Even amid a motley population that embraced technological cyborgs called Appliancers and bio-evolutionary genetically-enhanced humans known as Le Perfectionne , the idea of a deathless biological human was both controversial and anathematic. And yet, they, those humans identified as possessing an "anti-agathic, non-decompositional physiology" were part of New Rhodes' carefully regulated and carefully ordered society. Their existence presented the Terran Federated Union with an opportunity to look into and deal with hazardous situations having the potential of being too hazardous for normal human beings.
And that was how Detective-Inspector Ashe Rollison and the Widow-Duchess Blaise Palfrey, both operatives of The Ennead Group, ran afoul of the murderous plans of Dr. Riggs Fane-Gideon and the Legion of Immolation.
PART ONE
*** To the untrained eyes of a casual observer, they didn't look like soldiers, but that was what they were. Soldiers. Comrades-in-Arms tasked with the protection of a great and powerful secret. Loyal only to one another, trusting only in those who shared their fellowship, they kept their discipline and trusted their actions to the carefully constructed strategies devised by their commanders. This was serious work, important work, a rousing, blood-pumping undertaking that required courage and commitment.
They infiltrated the ranks of passersby in the streets, they lingered at newsstands and food kiosks and strolled in and out of nearby stores as they kept watch on their Objective. They acted the part of protestors as they merged into the unruly and disobedient crowd that amassed in the Government Square near the Metrolunar Police District headquarters. They made certain they were aware of the scanning sweep of the ever-watchful closed circuit television cameras that surveilled the open areas of the square and kept their faces averted so that they would be invisible and immune to police and military recognition software...
They were soldiers. They were on-mission. They were the Weapons of Idunn, the goddess-child of Infinity who protected the secrets of Time.
They were here for Osiris. ***
"There's something very, very wrong here... We haven't been able to isolate the source of the insignia we found on his exo-suit," the Medical Examiner said. "And although we recognize the technology used in the suit itself, we cannot trace the serial numbers on any of the components to verify that it was manufactured by authority of the Terran Union or any of its military divisions. Truth to tell, we can't really determine the age of the components with any degree of confidence. There appears to be something unusual, aberrant even, about the molecular lattices, an alternate vibratory frequency for lack of a better term, that indicates this suit and its accessories may have been made somewhere other than on Earth -- Or on any other colonized planet in our solar system."
The M.E. paused and took a deep breath before he reluctantly said, "It's as though this man was an illicit replication, a bootlegged artificially-created duplicate, of whomever was the original person. But that's not possible."
Widow-Duchess Blaise Palfrey grimly noticed an increase of the number of drawers set into the wide rear wall within Mortem Medicinal Holding of what the New Rhodes Metrolunar Police, in an expression of their typically dry and night-black sense of humor, called the "Resurrection Barn". Mortem Medicinal Holding was a euphemism for "morgue" and the Resurrection Barn was that part of the facility where victims of violent death, such as those demises through urban terrorism, suspected organized crime and general homicide, were housed in cold locker refrigerated drawers. The Barn was where she and D.I. Ashe Rollison met with Doctor Giahn Reebuhs, the police's Chief Medical Examiner.
Blaise Palfrey, a tall, blonde woman with cool emerald green eyes, finely-sculpted patrician features and a lithe, athletic build, was a former soldier, an oddity among the aristocratic Terran-British nobility from which she was descended. An astronautical flight technologies engineer by trade, she was the sole survivor of a disastrous Triton flyby mission nearly six years previously in which she, her husband, Brigadier-Major and exiled Duke of Moorcroft Shepherd Palfrey of the Terran Federated Union's Astroplanetary Discovery Force, and six other mission specialists ran afoul of a severe navigational error while crossing between Neptune's five visually faint and compositionally dusty arcs, those narrow arcs being rings with the named designations Galle, Le Verrier, Lassell, Arago, and Adams. It was the Adams arc, closest to the planet and named for a 19th century British mathematician and astronomer, that had been their lethal undoing. Blaise Palfrey, having used her extravehicular environmental exo-suit to magnetically anchor herself to one of the larger fragments remaining of their devastated space craft, had been rescued by a remote-robotics retrieval ship. It was upon medical examination after that where it was belatedly discovered, where it had not been so before, that she was one of Le Perfectionne: a genetically unique, molecularly and physiologically exemplary mutant human.
And, too, it was after that horrible incident that she forever hated having to spend any time anywhere in the vicinity of morgues.
"Duchess Palfrey? Madam? Are you still listening?" Doctor Reebuhs' heavily-accented Welsh baritone wrested her away from her gloomy musings to again bring her attention to the information displayed on the multi-touch interactive computer display table positioned between them. "I was saying that the autopsy revealed the stranger, the man they brought in from the para-equatorial Adelaide glacial territory, was nesting military-grade Generation S6 autonomous subdural nanites along his ascending spinal pathway..."
Dr. Reebuhs, a slim, auburn-haired man slightly over medium height, but with the bullish top-heavy build of a professional boxer, was standing next to the computer console-end of a forensic pathologist's smart-table, where the arching, tree-branch arm of a mobile surgical equipment tray sat positioned over the midpoint of the table. Behind him, suspended in the air, was a brilliantly-lit vertical holo-display showing images from multiple graphs recording the results of his last post mortem examination.
The images were of a man. Him. The Man, the stranger who had braved the deadly polar environs outside the protective bio-dome.
His burning eyes had closed at last, the raging light in them finally going dark.
"I heard you. So this man is a human being, and yet NOT an actual human being -- a simulacrum, a reproduction of some kind. Plus 'nanites', you say? Well, I suppose we can safely assume he was at least partially enhanced...," she said.
"No, no, no, ma'am, you're not getting it. Military-grade Gen S6 nanites are never used on human beings, never. They can't be. Besides being made from material that has been proven to be toxic to humans, they're autonomous, NOT symbiotic, so they wouldn't be supportive of any Host life-form into which they were introduced. Once in the body, the damn things would kill a person in a matter of days...," Reebuhs brusquely explained. "So HOW was this man ever alive to make the journey to appear here?"
"How was he alive to make the journey here? You might want to slow down a bit. I think this is a case of us putting the cart before the horse... So far as I know, you haven't yet given us the C.O.D., Doctor. WHAT was the man's Cause of Death?"
"This is going to sound excessively strange, so please bear with me," Reebuhs said. "But there is so much that is wrong here, so much unusual trauma has been perpetrated on this man's body and internal systems, that it's really impossible to isolate any of those traumas as being the single cause of death. So what I have been forced to consider is the likelihood that he succumbed to the injuries sustained from being torn from one dimensional plane to be forcibly shoved into another. He's alien, truly alien in that, human or not, he wasn't born in this universe. He shouldn't be here. But something powerful forced him to be here. And the effects of that killed him."
"That's not possible."
"I see that steel trap of a mind is working overtime... An outstanding deduction, Duchess," Reebuhs remarked acidly.
"Thank you, Reebuhs. You know how I treasure your opinions. Still, it might be nice to listen to a different voice for a minute or two..., I don't suppose you'd care to offer an opinion about any of this?" she asked of the man in the ankle-length, charcoal-colored leather trench coat who appeared to prefer staying in the darker, less camera-exposed corners of the exam-lab's interior.
The man turned away from his perusal and analysis of the array of liter and half-liter sized Sigma-Teknik laboratory specimen jars on the shelf next to his shoulders and favored the Duchess with a cool, somewhat sardonic grin. The roguish twinkle in his pale, silvery-gray eyes was antithetical to his somber, dispassionate facial expression.
Of the three of them, he looked most like someone who'd be comfortable in the presence of the dead.
"I think I'm going to reserve voicing my opinion until after Dr. Reebuhs explains whether or not there was any solid biological trace evidence to which he could attribute any real evidence of his hypothesis. There are other sources of origin for the multitude of anomalies found during the examination of our unfortunate departed visitor," the man said. "We are, after all, a space colony on one of the moons of Neptune, and very, very far away from planet Earth. Lots of opportunity for exposure to assorted types of cosmic radiation and other energies..."
His name was Ashton Craig Rollison and he was a licensed, duly-deputized Detective-Inspector in the Anomalous Crimes Branch of The Ennead Group's Interactive Departments Liaison Bureau. He carried himself with the bearing of someone who was accustomed to being in command... and regretted being so. Considered physically handsome -- in a darksome way -- by any standards, his appearance was nonetheless a trifle disturbing due to his acerbic and ironic speech and mannerisms. He exuded an air of educated intelligence and of mannered etiquette, but always looked like he was in the process of enjoying some unspoken, unshared, scathingly mordent joke and the joke was probably at the observer's expense.
Where Blaise Palfrey projected a cheery, if cutting, wit, gentile breeding and an adventurous spirit, Ashe Rollison projected an aura of mystery and suppressed danger. Even on first meeting, a person got the impression that Rollison had done more than a few bad things in his life.
But that, that unsettling perception of greater, darker depths, kind of came with the territory when one was burdened with the responsibilities of being Homo Regenitem Infinitii. Rollison was an Immortal. It was something he didn't like to acknowledge even when among people he trusted, it was much less a subject which he cared to discuss when in polite company.
Luckily, his job in the Anomalous Crimes Branch didn't often place him in polite company.
"A full fluidic bio-molecular work-up and gene-analysis? I don't know..., we're likely talking about another three to five hours for that," Reebuhs said. "Just so you two know, I've been made aware that Metrolunar P.D. has some external pressure pushing for a quick and quiet resolution to the incident --- Police Commisioner McFord Mannering and Clarke Dalziel, New Rhodes' illustrious Mayor, are hot for this to get wrapped up and filed away with an emphasis on this being nothing more than an industrial accident."
"I wonder..., you don't think Mannering and Mayor Dalziel's strings are being pulled by our local master puppeteer, Riggs Fane-Gideon, do you? Fane-Gideon's rather potent political and economic influence extends throughout the Rim's-Edge colonies of the Terran Federated Union," Rollison mused, allowing a trace of bitterness to color his words.
"I'd say that scenario has a very high probability," Duchess Palfrey remarked. "And Fane-Gideon is definitely not a fan of The Ennead Group and its operatives. But I'm also thinking that he's a bit personally peeved about the rather high-profile street protests going on outside courtesy of the Idunna Irregulus."
The Chief Medical Examiner shrugged. It was apparent he had no interest in actively involving himself in affairs of political intrigue that might intersect with his post-mortem examination. He was more focused on the science --- and the unanswered mysteries that science encountered.
Rollison spoke following Reebuhs' silence. "Giahn, old friend, could you talk a bit more about the weird, alternate vibratory frequency of the victim's aberrant molecular lattices? Your usage of the term 'alternate' caught my attention. Alternate to what exactly?"
Dr. Reebuhs' face wrinkled in displeasure as he replied. "Well, that's a bit of news – when did we become friends? Did I miss the note? Anyway, what I was attempting to say without making a painful effort to distill detailed technical jargon into something more suitable for a non-technical audience, was that, at an elemental atomic level, our deceased anonymous foreigner is chronologically out-of-sync with our local celestial province. I'm not talking about standard spatial time dilation. I'm talking about what may likely be dimensional time distortion. And I admit to being unsure of how to proceed from this juncture..."
The Widow-Duchess threw up her gloved hands in mock-dramatic fashion and voiced a pronounced groan of distress.
"Really? Damn it, Doctor, you're going to make him do that thing, aren't you?" she said.
Reebuhs looked offended. "That thing? Whatever do you mean? I may have very shallowly alluded through my statement that it is unlikely standard forensic examination techniques could provide more information. Information we presently do not have due to inherent limitations with human medicine's current ability to cross certain cosmic thresholds..."
"You're blaming this on technology? Seriously? God, yes, you're going to make him do it. You know how much I detest that thing he does, but you're going to make him do it anyway. Giahn Reebuhs, why do you always have to make things so ... unseemly ... whenever you get involved in our cases?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Duchess," Reebuhs said, raising an unkempt eyebrow and as his voice held a smidgeon of offended petulance.
"Would you two please stop?" Rollison said quietly. "Just stop. I don't think there's much doubt that Reebuhs is on the right track here. We need to exercise unconventional investigative tools in this situation, Duchess. But, for the record, I'm also going to agree with you in that I really have reservations about accessing non-standard options so early in this investigation."
"Euphemisms, 'non-standard options'... I expected better from you. You, Ashton, just don't like me needing to call on the services of Tennysun Morse," the Chief Medical Examiner said.
There, it had been hiding behind Dr. Reebuhs' presentation, but there it was, that name -- and all the uncomfortable and complicated things that name represented ... finally. Tennysun Morse. Rollison and Palfrey briefly exchanged worried glances. They knew from past experience that if they involved Morse, then the situation was guaranteed to get messy. Morse didn't follow protocol. Morse didn't give so much as a single thought about diplomacy. Morse didn't care about the rules or the chain of command. All that mattered to him was digging out the truth and exposing secrets, let the Devil deal with the consequences. And despite their reservations, that attitude was what the two Ennead Group investigators admired about Morse.
After all, it had been Tennysun Morse who had first discovered and then proven the existence of immortal humans passing as regular people in New Rhodes. And then, later, it had been Morse who had then outed the fabled Ennead Group as the administrative regulatory commission and law enforcement organization that advocated for the Immortals.
On a more personal level, it had also been Tennysun Morse who'd uncovered the fact that Ashton Rollison was secretly that rare entity referred to as a Nekkrojyshian -- a human born with the ability to talk directly to the lingering cognitive energy engrams of the recently dead. Even among Immortals, Nekkrojyshians were incredibly rare. And they were, for the most part, dreaded and unwelcome.
The both of them being outcasts, Rollison and Palfrey, the Immortal Nekkrojyshian and the biologically exemplary woman who was one of Le Perfectionne, were drawn to one another as colleagues and then, ultimately, as close friends while serving human society out at the leading edges of the Kuiper asteroid belt.
One would have thought that in an extraplanetary city with the variety of technological and bio-genetic marvels as New Rhodes possessed, life for those born different would have become easier and more accepting.
One would have thought...
"I admit it. I don't like it," Rollison said. "Morse and the Anomalous Crimes Branch of The Ennead Group have a rocky, somewhat adversarial history --- if I may phrase that somewhat delicately."
"Oh, it's not the Anomalous Crimes Branch," Duchess Palfrey said. "Don't try hiding it behind a veneer of professionalism. It's personal. You mean, YOU and Morse have a rocky history."
Sighing, Rollison shrugged. He struggled not to appear annoyed. "Go ahead. Call him," he said.
"Um, ah, I already did," Dr. Reebuhs said guiltily. "And it was Police Commissioner Mannering who suggested Morse's involvement, not me. You know that Mannering isn't a particular fan of The Ennead Group's involvement in Metrolunar P.D. active cases. So the Commish decided that you and yours might need watching, in case the investigation takes an unusual, unanticipated bent, and Morse was the officially-sanctioned investigative operative familiar with extrahuman affairs who was most readily available. Anyway, he's waiting in the next room."
Rollison's lips curled into a silent snarl as he closed his eyes and counted to ten. Simultaneously, a pained expression crossed Blaise Palfrey's enchanting face. This time it wasn't merely for dramatic effect.
* * *
*** They were ready, in position. There were eleven of them. The mission-commander was the twelfth. They wore trauma armor under their casual clothing, carried ion-blasters as their sidearms. The effort they'd made to blend in had been successful. They'd raised no alarms. They hadn't been identified. They'd isolated and identified the likely opposition, taking stock of their numbers and their weaponry. They remained patient and took the opportunity that a brief lapse in activity afforded them to mentally review their respective roles in the plan they intended to enact. When the time came for them to attack, they would move quickly, ruthlessly, with surgical precision –
They would acquire the Objective.
They waited for the command to engage the enemy.
They were soldiers. They were here for a reason, in the service of their Cause. They were the sword of the goddess, Idunn, the daughter of Time who was the Shepherd of Immortality.
They were here for Osiris. ***
Being a police Sergeant in the Terran Federated Union was definitely not an easy job. Being a police Sergeant in the Union's Extraplanetary Affairs Criminal Division was an even harder job. It required a class of dedicated law enforcement officer far and away more thoughtful, more technologically savvy and more politically astute than anyone dared to guess. It was the kind of all-consuming job that insatiably ate away at a person's time, patience, energy, and psychological well-being. It was the kind of a profession where a person saw and learned terrible things on a regular basis, the kind of things that made a person lose their faith in the good in humanity. It was the kind of a profession wherein a person sometimes had to do bad things, ugly things, in the name of the 'Greater Good'. It wasn't the kind of job where the incumbent was forced to deal with having to make good and bad choices. Often it was a matter of deciding between bad and worse choices and seeing who could best handle the outcomes. It was the kind of a job that often left scars on one's soul. And at the moment, Sergeant Clare-Elise Lewis was definitely feeling its effects. She was not happy.
The plan had been that she was going to take some time off after the last case she had worked, but then this thing with the nameless stranger had happened...
The awful mechanized iceball that was Proteus was the last damn place in the solar system she wanted to remain assigned to on last minute's notice. But, like it or not, here she was and, naturally, she was partnered once again with Homicide's Lieutenant-Inspector Tennysun Morse. On his best days, Morse could be coldly detached, unsympathetic, uncharitable and slightly menacing. On his worst days he was a cunning and ruthless, insensitive, combative, single-minded bastard. Mostly, the deciding factor dictating his character and moodiness depended on the case. Sometimes it depended on the company he was forced to keep. And then there were those occasions where it was a little bit of both. It wasn't that Morse was a bad person. It was just that when he was assigned a job, his concentration and focus were such that he allowed for nothing else to take precedence in his life. There was only the case. Sergeant Clara Lewis was not at all like that --- and she harbored no interest in being like that. She had a personal life (but not much of one), she had friends and family (though she didn't stay in contact with them nearly as often as she'd have liked), and her soul needed periodic reprieve from the darkness she was often made to confront. Morse didn't appear to harbor such needs. Or, if he did, he chose to neglect them. The differences in their two ways of working occasionally created conflict. So, in general, things weren't at all looking good when they'd found out they were being assigned a newly breaking case in New Rhodes when actually they were supposed to be having some time off... but it got a lot worse when they'd found out that they were expected to work with a pair of parahuman investigators from The Ennead Group.
Lieutenant-Inspector Morse didn't like Immortals. Their existence morally offended him. Which was odd, considering that Lieutenant-Inspector Morse himself wasn't a true human being.
Tennysun Morse was an Independent Bio-Synthetic Neo-human Sentience, a digitized human intelligence bonded to a manufactured artificial body. There was a word for that which people were no longer allowed to use in polite conversation. The word was considered socially unenlightened, morally belittling and inflammatory, and species-bigoted. It was a way to pigeon-hole and denigrate one of humankind's latest, most recent, not to mention miraculous, societal offshoots.
The word was Android.
"Did you see them out there, on the streets, when we arrived? The third day. This was the third day of protests," Morse said, addressing Sergeant Lewis and virtually ignoring only other person in the room, Lieutenant Perrywill Monke, the Metrolunar Police Special Operations Bureau Liaison. "Nearly one hundred and fifty of them. They're not going away. They've practically shut down the City Center's main thoroughfare to and from Kastermarre Spaceport and public opinion is slowly shifting to their side. The Terran Federated Union is going to have to deal with them sooner as opposed to later."
Perrywill Monke sighed. "Yes, the Idunna Irregulus, Reverend K. J. Marric's motley horde of artists, disgruntled drop-outs, anarchists and rebellious ne'er-do-wells... They're literally going to blow a gasket if they find out that members of The Ennead Group are here working with the Metrolunar P.D.."
"We have reason to believe the Idunna Irregulus are a lot more than a loose collective of rebellious free-thinkers and casual narcotics users," Clare-Elise Lewis said tersely. "We think they're an active, deadly efficient criminal organization, a paramilitary group with access to weapons, black market military equipment and combat training. Do NOT underestimate them or their weird, quasi-religious, anti-colonialist Jihadist philosophy."
Lieutenant Monke, Sergeant Lewis and the Bio-Synthetic Neo-human consulting detective were in a long rectangular room adjacent to Dr. Reebuhs' offices and the Resurrection Barn, a.k.a. Mortem Medicinal Holding. A pair of wall-mounted computer application server-racks and their assigned Uninterruptible Power Supply battery units sat at each furthest end of the rectangle, with the racks predominantly holding Storage Area Network hardware appliances for virtualized server systems. The room was split-leveled, bisected at its center by an oval, lower-deck sunken amphitheater. The small arena housed work tables supporting medical laboratory equipment, like automated DNA sequencers, assorted microscopes, electrophoresis analyzers, gas chromatography autosamplers and Time Correlated Single Photon Counting optical spectrofluorometers. This was the Medical Examiner's Forensics Chemical Analysis & Bio-Materials Matrices Pathology lab.
"Oh," Monke said as he weighed Sergeant Lewis' admonishment. "You've obviously been in contact with the NullSpace's TransActional Desert's Adjudicator-Sheriffs Division... Out there on the frontier, pretty much cut off from everyone here at New Rhodes, they can be a little over-cautious regarding the activities of the self-exiled free-tribes roaming the glacial bluffs. We kind of think of it as professional paranoia..."
"Sheriff Aristotle Kilby isn't paranoid and neither are his deputies," Lewis argued. "The Nullspace territories are a rough, unforgiving jurisdiction. It requires a level head and a lot of attention to detail to survive out there, especially since the so-called 'Exiles' are really just mech-scavenging crime-gangs running a protection racket against the few remaining scientific explorer outposts there."
"Well, speaking unofficially and off the record, the general opinion here at Metrolunar P.D. is that Adjudicator-Sheriff Aristotle Kilby is a trigger-happy, conspiracy theorist and a colonialist species-bigot...," Perrywill Monke said. "He's a throwback to another time. We don't put a lot of stock in his wild suppositions."
"I told your so-called Superiors that they never should have released the news that they'd discovered those ancient, interconnected cave-tunnels among the glacier icefields of the NullSpace TransActional Desert, near where the Stranger was found. I told them...," Morse said dolefully. "The Union said that the NullSpace TransActional Desert was a dead zone, a long petrified archaeological site locked in the ice. A reminder of a failed prior, primitivistic attempt at human colonization by some unknown nation of Old Earth. Nothing to worry about, right? I warned them how the public, already paranoid about being alone out here past Jupiter Prime's Transit Hub, might react to such news..."
"Yes, sir, you did indeed. In fact, you were quite emphatic about them keeping the whole thing secret," Sgt. Lewis said. "You said it was too much-too soon for the public to handle, following the leakage of the story to news media about proof of the existence of the Immortals."
"And now it looks like we may have our first alien visitor from a different dimension...," Morse said huffily. "No doubt a visitor who made use of those tunnels to traverse the Undersymmetry. The Idunna Irregulus will fan the fires of xenophobia into a flaming inferno with this information."
"Yes, the situation is becoming more untenable, tense even, but let's not get ahead of ourselves," Monke cautioned.
That was when Ashe Rollison and Blaise Palfrey stepped through the doorway to enter the fluorescent-lit room. The duo from The Ennead Group projected the firm impression they were all business as they wordlessly passed by Perrywill Monke. It was obvious they considered his presence and participation to be of little value.
Tennysun Morse sighed and fixed his steely gaze on Rollison, who returned the stare with a ghost of a smile, the expression tainted by a coldly antagonistic arrogance.
Rollison couldn't help it. Overly righteous people like Morse brought out the worst in him. The Ethically Irreproachable and the holier-than-thou Morally Upright were, to his mind, the biggest hypocrites of all.
For her part, Widow-Duchess Palfrey simply didn't like the man. He always seemed a bit of a bully to her, regardless his political or social beliefs. She had no fondness for Clare-Elise Lewis, either. She thought that the Sergeant was, in her way, just as bad as Morse, only the android was more honest about his views towards Immortals.
But, simultaneously, there was a sense of relief that the investigation was definitely going to charge full-speed ahead because Morse was involved. They knew there would be no chance of bureaucracy or inter-agency jealousies throwing things off track. Besides, the bio-synthetic consulting detective was a virtual encyclopedia of multidisciplinary scientific knowledge.
"Ahhh, so here we are, together, the deathless Nekkrojyshian and the genetically-perfect Adventurer, operatives of a clandestine quasi-legal agency, pairing with the police in pursuit of a mystery held inside the mind of a dead man who may or may not be of alien origin," Morse commented, his disapproval clearly articulated in his disparaging tone. "And yet themselves determined not to let anyone penetrate the mystery of their own parahuman, possibly otherworldly, origins."
"What do you say we try to stay professional with this? Don't start something you have no chance of successfully finishing," Rollison warned.
Morse smiled humorlessly and nodded in a graceless mockery of agreement.
"Gods above, this is going to be a funfest," Sergeant Lewis muttered under her breath.
There was more to be said, but that was the moment when the world erupted into roaring thunder and white-hot flame... Alarm klaxons went off noisily, alerting everyone that a major crisis event was in-progress. Some savage force was violently breaching the security of the Metrolunar P.D. Mortem Medicinal Holding building. Multiple voices raised in surprise and in anger vied with the sounds of several someone's rapidly barking orders at internal security personnel and fellow officers... Then they heard the unmistakable sounds of small arms fire. People were shooting at one another.
The Resurrection Barn was being invaded.
PART TWO
It had taken seven years to erect the orbital Mass Ring had been erected to become an equatorial halo encircling Proteus, providing the moon with artificial gravity through gyroscopic means as it spun counter-clockwise to Proteus' natural rotation. A colossal 4.5-kilometer-high, 579.4-km Neodymium-laced Titanium hoop girdling the partially Terraformed ice moon, spinning at just over 3600 kilometers an hour, the Mass Ring increased the moon's native surface gravity of 0.07 m/s2 to 93% of that of planet Earth's and helped provide the celestial rock with a modest magnetosphere through which it held its fragile, artificially-generated atmosphere in place. That atmosphere was the product of the combined effort of five equidistantly-placed Oxygen/Organics Suffusion-Generators that were each the size of a Terran sport's stadium. Now, thirty-six years later, looking at the Mass Ring from his vantage point at the glacier field south of the crater Pharos, in which New Rhodes was built, Riggs Fane-Gideon took a rare moment to acknowledge the miracle that the Neptunian outpost metropolis truly was. 28,760 people populated New Rhodes, making it the third largest human off-planet habitation in the solar system after Earth's lunar Moonbase Tycho and Jupiter's sprawling Ganymede Complex.
Humankind and technology, technology and humankind..., techno-industrial humanology. Over the decades the two terms, and the concepts they represented, had become intertwined, interlinked and interdependent. But on Neptune VIII, some 117,600 kilometers above the dead surface of Neptune, in the city of New Rhodes, a new brand of recently discovered technical applied science threatened to forever change humankind and it's very understanding of the term "technology"...
The radical, ecclesiastical followers of the outlaw-metaphysics spouting Reverend, Krystianne J. Marric, a cyborg Appliancer, had discovered the existence of The Undersymmetry. The Idunna Irregulus had officially made claim to the future of humanity's cosmic genesis.
They could claim whatever they liked. Without substantial fiduciary power and political influence, the Idunna Irregulus were not going to dictate the course of Destiny in New Rhodes. Reclusive, multi-billionaire industrialist Riggs Fane-Gideon wasn't going to let a narcotics-addled band of nonsecular mystics and nonconformist dissenters control how The Undersymmetry would be used in service to the human race --- or in service to Fane-Gideon himself.
The field technicians of the Infrastructure Assets Works-crew who had found The Man were employees of Fane-Gideon's public works contractor empire. They were responsible for the construction, alteration, demolition, installation, or repair upkeep performed on most the large-scale tech-assets on Proteus, like the massive Oxygen/Organics Suffusion-Generators. So finding this man, this stranger whom the rabble of the Idunna Irregulus had named "Osiris", was, to Fane-Gideon akin to a directive of Fate Itself --- if Fane-Gideon had believed in such allegorical esotericism where an anthropomorphic 'Fate' was deified. He didn't actually subscribe to any particular religious belief system. He'd seen no evidence during his life that had convinced him to believe the destiny of humankind was watched or guided by direction of or by intercession of all-powerful sentient beings from some greater Reality. Truth be known, he didn't believe in much of anything at all.
But Riggs Fane-Gideon did believe that there were powers, energies, abroad the cosmos that dwarfed human understanding and defied human control.
He was alone inside his executive offices on the fifth floor in the southeastern tower of his polar floodplain's Deep Drift Circulation & Reprocessing Quarry, in the sectional division of the building where chemical analysis of ice vein microenvironments was performed. The DDCR Quarry was, for the most part, automated, run by a proprietary Artificial Intelligence, but a rotating work staff of nine technical engineers, and seven utility workers/fabricators, populated the Quarry, along with Fane-Gideon's personal team of six bodyguards. Presently, Fane-Gideon was staring out at the Nullspace TransActional Desert. This was the area of Proteus that sat atop the tunnels to the Undersymmetry.
A pair of aerial devices from the fleet of networked magneti-glide mini-drones he'd sent scouring the nearby terrain reported back to him that they'd located the hidden sanctuary of the Idunna Irregulus tactical envoy. Apparently Reverend Marric and a band of her more fiercely aggressive followers had decided to secretly make camp inside one of his company's abandoned supply-hangars. They thought he'd never search for them nor expect to find them on his own property. As usual, they underestimated him.
Fane-Gideon dispatched a heavily-armed quartet from his personal security cadre with orders authorizing lethal force.
The TransActional Desert was a sloping 2600-square-acre glacial zone with a snowy surface that was constantly assaulted by katabatic winds, winds carrying high-density air down the slope of a higher elevation under the force of gravity. The winds originated from radiational cooling of air currents, produced by the emission of infrared radiation from the moon's surface, which would move down from atop a hill, a dune, a mountain or a glacier. The density of that moving mass of air was inversely proportional to its temperature, so the air flowed downwards, where it then would warm without gain or loss of its own innate heat as it traveled. On Proteus, those winds could travel at a speed of twenty-four knots, which was about forty-four kilometers an hour, or more. Additionally, those katabatic winds created a tidal field of static electricity that veritably adhered to the glacial zone topology, creating a 'nullspace' where audiosonic radio, Bluetooth-based radio technologies and microwave communications did not work.
Riggs Fane-Gideon had sent a patrol comprised of seven mobile robotic land-probes, all bristling with ion-powered weaponry and linked by a laser-diode networked intelligent-response system, down into the tunnels...
If either God, the Devil, Odin or Surtur, Ra or Isis, or Seth, Horus or Anubis was dwelling deep within the labyrinthine, subterranean corridors of the Undersymmetry, he would soon know it. With that knowledge would come power. Power was something in which Riggs Fane-Gideon passionately believed.
And power was a thing he believed was his birthright to possess. In great quantity. Exclusively.
* * *
"You can't trust him. You can't. And negotiation is senseless. He will pursue his goals with resolute and indefatigable devotion. He is a Thanatopsian," she said, "A Hell-bringer. He isn't anything like a Nihilist. Nihilism is too passive for his kind. He has beliefs, strong ones, and to him Chaos and Conflict is more natural to human nature than Order and Harmony. If he sees something he wants, he takes it. If blood has to be spilled, then so much the better. To him and others like him, total and complete victory is the only option."
Rollison sighed through clenched teeth, his eyes scrunched shut in an expression dramatizing his frustration, and said, "And the day really started out so well..., yet here I am now, surrounded by people who hate my very existence, with my hands shackled behind me, listening to a messianic megalomaniac warn me about the dark intentions of a psychotic sociopath. How true it is that some days challenge men's souls..."
"This might be one of those occasions when your natural pessimism might be less welcome than at others, my friend," Blaise Palfrey pointedly said, speaking softly.
Rollison smirked like an underfed wolf noticing it was in a roomful of fat sheep. He winked at the Duchess. She returned the wink with a small, crooked smile.
Tennysun Morse, his fists also bound, glowered wordlessly at their exchange from his position seated cross-legged next to a stack of scarred and pitted plastic moving palettes.
The group from the Metrolunar P.D. Mortem Medicinal Holding facility had been abducted from the building in a flurry of violent action that had stunned the police and security staff stationed there. The hostile invading force of Idunna Irregulus member-kin hadn't hesitated to murder Lieutenant Perrywill Monke in a hail of laser-flechette gun fire. Rollison, Palfrey, Reebuhs, Morse, and Lewis had all been subjected to focused sonic bombardment and then chemically tranqed where they were physically weakened and docile enough to be quickly herded from out of the morgue and into waiting tank-treaded polar excursion vehicles. And into one of the vehicles with them, of course, went the hard-shell morgue specimen-container holding the inanimate body of the man they called Osiris. They were then escorted out of the bio-dome, leaving New Rhodes behind as their captors completed a pre-planned rendezvous with other members of their infiltration and retrieval squad. And then they all made the trek to an area on the outskirts of the Nullspace TransActional Desert.
It was an area belonging to the action arm of the Idunna Irregulus, where they met up with their leader and prophet, the enigmatic and mesmerizing Krystianna Jewelessa Marric. It was she who had addressed the bound and shackled group from her position next to a stairwell landing on the lower mezzanine ring of an underground warehouse-hangar. The voluminous, equipment-littered space was where the arctic tundra carriers were presently parked and where a baker's dozen contingent of rough-looking, unkempt guns-for-hire worked assembling and cleaning their weaponry, and re-rucking their hiking kits and backpacks, over hastily-erected folding metal tables.
"Despite your political affiliations, I had entertained high hopes that you lot would be more amenable to open conscientious discourse about recent events," K.J. Marric said. "But I can see your deeply ingrained law enforcement training and rather didactic socially-programmed pragmatism have left you unable to step outside your roles as tools of the Terran Federated Union. And that's a shame, really it is, because each one of you is so unique in your skills, talents, and viewpoints that I'm sure you can see beyond how this set of affairs will likely be portrayed to the public in the news media..."
"I can't imagine it would be portrayed any worse than the scenes of screaming and cursing Irregularians with crude hand-made signs in the streets tossing buckets of garbage on random passersby, kicking in the doors to businesses and restaurants, attacking peace officers with Molotov cocktails and flipping over random vehicles and gutting their undercarriages," Morse countered in cutting tones. "But that image was just a cover, wasn't it? An act. Up until now, you and yours had a reputation for being counter-culture, quasi-Luddite, doper-burnouts --- annoying, but ultimately rather harmless... what happened, Reverend? It appears to me you've been seriously radicalized and that somewhere along the way you've become quite educated in covert paramilitary guerilla tactics. Which begs a further question: where'd you get all those guns?"
K.J. Marric stood with her hands clasped behind her back and stared at Tennysun Morse with a sorrowful, though still highly annoyed, expression across her handsome, just short of fashion model-pretty, features. A matronly, short-haired, brunette woman of average height, Krystianna Marric possessed a lush, curvaceous figure that hid a bio-hybrid fiber-alloy musculature over an organic-metal skeletal frame. She was very strong, at least four times as strong as the average Olympic decathlete, and twice as fast. Closer examination of her carnation pink-tinted epidermal flesh-sheathe would reveal that her skin was a netting-envelope of interconnected octagonal cells capable of repelling knife-blades, heavy blunt trauma and resistant to medium heat and corrosive exposure. Had she ever been officially registered in the database of machine-tech or cybernetically-enhanced humans in the colony, she would have been classified as a Level IV Appliancer --- and the scale only went up to Level V.
"Mister Morse, you and Detective-Inspector Rollison are both losing the forest for the trees," Reverend Marric said. "You're not in the middle of some simple police assignment. You're in the middle of the birth of a revolution. Out here on the edges of human-occupied space, here on Neptune's moon of Proteus, normal Terran society has begun to break down. New Rhodes is the capitol for Outlaw Spacers who've never felt Earth's gravity, autonomous non-networked Appliancers who've never linked with the Union's Transhumanist Behavioral Telemetries A.I., Geneti-Clonal Synthezoids who've liberated themselves from their gene-base matrix-owners, unidentified paragons of human evolution called Le Perfectionne who catalyze into development only when faced with catastrophic danger, and now, incredibly, the Secret Society of Heliopolites, a human sub-species designated as Homo Regenitem Infinitii --- Immortals. The Terran Union doesn't know what to do with us. They don't recognize us as 'real humans'. Their laws are not inclusive of us. We frighten them. So they seek to categorize, isolate and control us, maybe even exclude and exile us, anything to keep their power-base Status Quo. And, to effect that end, they've provided us a shared enemy: a wealthy industrialist xenophobe gone rogue, one Riggs Fane-Gideon, the Thanatopsian..."
"...says the dissident puppet-master who kidnapped us at gunpoint and then locked us all up in chains," Duchess Palfrey interjected.
"Smoke and mirrors, Reverend. This is all about our mystery man, isn't it, it's all about 'Osiris'," Rollison stated. "You and Fane-Gideon are battling over who gets control of The Undersymmetry and what lies beyond, which I assume is an interdimensional domain called 'The Hypercosm'. The Terran Union Physics community has been postulating the existence of such a place for years. Is it another Plane of Reality? A sub-division of the Multiverse? A pocket universe? Whatever..., all that matters is that he or she who can control it becomes the so-called 'Tsar-Imperator' mentioned in the man's cryptic message. So, somehow, someway, poor, dead Osiris is the key."
Reverend Marric's face blossomed into a mask of seraphic rapture. "You cannot begin to imagine what lies beyond the door we're on the verge of opening."
"Hmmmn, yes... How much of New Rhodes will opening this door destroy?" Morse asked bluntly. "Because everything in Creation is, at minimum, a two-sided equation. Up pairs with Down, right with left, hot with cold, Light pairs with Dark, and so on. It's even Newtonian, isn't it: 'For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'... You follow the Undersymmetry to the gates of the Hypercosm where you crash open the door and something either goes through There or comes through Here --- and this moon or the city of New Rhodes, maybe both, are colossally impacted, catastrophically so. That how it works?"
"Always so empirical, aren't you, Morse? Everything is either black or white. But what happens if something is both black AND white? Yes, as you say, the equation is indeed two-sided. For something amazing to happen, often something bad has to happen. Evolution always involves sacrifice on some level," Marric said. "But on a world like ours, some are far better suited, better evolved, to survive the sacrifice than others. Some will not die. And the Idunna Irregulus is mostly composed of those who have the greatest chances for survival."
Wide-eyed, Giahn Reebuhs, speaking for the first time since being taken captive, croaked past a dry mouth, "My God, you're absolutely insane."
"No," K.J. Marric said patiently, "I am destined to wield the sword of the Night-Sultan. I'm the Tsar-Imperator."
It was about that time wherein Riggs Fane-Gideon's murderous four man assault team stormed the previously abandoned warehouse-hangar facility. They had the element of surprise. Sizzling ion-particle pulse-bursts screeched through the air, striking an unsuspecting pair of Marric's force dead center in their upper torso and knocking them off their feet...
* * *
*** The Dead Man wasn't completely gone. Yes, in many ways, in those ways most typically considered when human beings confront the deaths of other human beings, his body was little more than a husk, a slowly decaying envelope of cold, unresponsive meat.
But that wasn't entirely true, it was the most shallow and superficial conceptualization of the conditions affecting a sentient host that was no longer recognized as animated.
Below the subatomic level, at the microcosmic, where things become paraphysical, where atomic matter, living consciousness, sentient identity, spatial reference and chronological Time intersect, and even sometimes blend, the Dead Man, he who was referred to as "Osiris", named after the Egyptian Lord of the Underworld and Judge of the Dead, was very much an active part of the Universe. Almost alive...
The paradoxes that plagued the Higher Cosmos, meaning the Universe-We-Know, plague the Microcosm, too. Space and Time were still relative. A 'quantum' was still a discrete packet of energy or matter representing the minimum value of a physical property involved in an interaction. And Time, as a construct, was still a quantum variable with a discrete spectrum, nevertheless consistent with special relativity where it was not continuous.
Everything intersected as part of everything else: things were, for want of a better phrase, "entangled". Entanglement was still a predominantly physical phenomenon occurring when pairs or groups of particles were generated, interacted, or were forced to share their spatial proximity in ways wherein the quantum state of each of those particles couldn't be defined independently of the state of the others with which they interacted.
In the matters of the flesh, it was a case of being Here but not Here, Alive yet not Alive... it presented a situation where one need consider the conundrum of scientist Erwin Schrödinger's infamous cat.
Osiris wasn't dead. He was in torpor. Hibernating. He was in an expectant state of quantum animation waiting for the Key to bring him to his next life.
Enter the Nekkrojyshian...
While Reverend K.J. Marric spoke, ruminating before her captive audience upon the nature of the violent conflict of which she was a conspiratorial architect, Detective-Inspector Ashe Rollison activated a normally dormant extrasensory cognitive faculty in his mind. He reached out beyond the limits of his own tactile senses, probing, locating a web of interconnected energy lattices that he rapidly explored, descending down towards the web's denser, more articulated nexus.
The threads of the web were each a filament from a vast Moebius Strip. Rollison, the Nekkrojyshian, ran the outer edges of those strips until Outer became Inner, until Obverse became Inverse --- and he could see in his mind's own eye, the fading light belonging to a sentience that was exiting one Phase of Existence to travel to another.
Move, hurry. Catch up!
It hurt. The human mind, no matter how evolved or mutated, wasn't truly designed to perform such a multi-interpretive and complex task as it isolated each new articulation of its sleeping target. The Nekkrojyshian's probing remote consciousness was stretched and stressed in ways that threatened its coherency. That act produced a physical strain and a sense of psychic feedback that slowly grew in volume, like moving closer to the center of a loudly tolling bell... Ignore it. Keep moving. Run pell-mell across the fragile strands of the spider's web. Reach the center.
Osiris. I can see you. Ashe Rollison focused his Id, took a long, deep breath, and executed a Summoning, mentally exhaling an outpouring of all the sequential events he'd experienced while investigating Osiris' death and uploading that information into the Dead Man's mind as an anchor to the so-called 'Real World'...
Schrödinger's Cat was backed into a corner and forced to make a decision about what state it now needed to occupy.
Contact. A undefinable Microcosmic, quantum ... Something ... sparked and re-ignited.
Suddenly, while a fanatically deranged woman in the larger Universe upstream spoke, a very familiar fire flared and burned hotly behind the Dead Man's closed eyes.***
* * *
Morse had stalled for time, playing to Reverend Marric's ego and to her fervid devotion, conversationally confronting and challenging her, forcing her to concentrate more on her impassioned tirade against the Powers-That-Be than to notice the dull, unfocused look in Ashe Rollison's eyes as his consciousness bifurcated, activating his Nekkrojyshian talents. Morse and Rollison had worked before on a handful of cases where the Bio-Synthetic Neo-human had reluctantly acted as a party to Rollison's crafty stratagems. The plan back at the Metrolunar P.D. Resurrection Barn had been for Rollison to try to connect with Osiris if the man was still capable of being reached in this Plane of Reality, but the invasive assault of the Irregularian insertion team had thrown their master blueprint for the investigation out the window. Now, as prisoners, they were forced to try to make contact with the Dead Man under duress --- and at great risk. Rollison was physically defenseless while he was in a state of Nekkrojystic fugue. Morse took up the slack: he made himself the focus of Marric's attention, make himself the potential target of her ire if things went south. The prospects were hazardous, but, physically bound as they were, little could be done otherwise. It wasn't how he generally operated. He hadn't liked taking the risk, but he was, as had been pointed out, a very pragmatic individual.
Besides, this way Rollison would seriously owe him. The thought that he'd be holding a debtor's marker for the arrogant Immortal made him feel warm inside. Morse suppressed the smile that wanted to unveil itself across his lips.
Tapping. He heard a soft repetitive tapping...
It was Sergeant Lewis. She was signaling him. She fixed him with a controlled, stoic stare and nodded her head ever-so-slightly to one side, her look letting Morse know that the attention of their captors was no longer focused on him or the other captives as K. J. Marric began issuing directions to her Irregularian strike force.
Morse blinked once in an exaggeratedly fashion, indicating he understood. Now was the time for them to make their move...
One of the distinct advantages to being an autonomous Bio-Synthetic Neo-human lay within the realm of the physical. Androids were far stronger than their human counterparts.
With as little effort as it took for a normal person to rip a sheet of moderately thick cardboard, Morse, with a twist of his wrists, tore through the restraints shackling his hands together. He reached back behind himself and yanked, pulling at the length of molybdenum mesh lashed to a metal support beam next to the short mezzanine stairwell. He was free...
Then, from the shadows, the shooting started as Fane-Gideon's killsquad abruptly besieged Reverend Marric's tactical rebel unit.
* * *
Getting out from their restraints was easy. They were professionals. Razor-sharp ceramic cutter-blades were hidden inside the cuffs of their coat sleeves. Part of standard utility equipment and operating procedure for Ennead Group operatives. Staying alive while the Idunna Irregulus and Riggs Fane-Gideon's mercenary killers fired white-hot beams of irradiated coherent light at one another was quite a different matter.
Ashe Rollison and Blaise Palfrey had freed themselves courtesy of their utility-cutters when everything inside the old, debris-strewn hangar facility was suddenly bathed in an eerie, and ominous, violet brilliance. The retina-scarring light emanated from the open air above the ruptured metal capsule that had once been the morgue specimen-container holding the body of the nameless Dead Man who'd come to be referred to as Osiris.
In the midst of that brilliance was a rolling, twisting, undulating, inky-black cloud and at the central bulk of that cloud was a glowing human silhouette... it didn't take a master detective to deduce that they were looking at Osiris --- unbound.
And with that realization, the world lurched and up-ended itself, exploding soundlessly...
* * *
When the External-Environs Rescue & Recovery Squad from New Rhodes' Metrolunar P.D. found them, the team of Rollison, Palfrey, Reebuhs, Morse and Lewis were staggering uphill along a series of pewter-tinted snow drifts ringing an irregularly-shaped, blackened crater. The police Recovery Squad isolated survivors of the strange catastrophe and secured the area perimeter, poking through the wreckage for some evidence that would make sense of what had happened. A pillar of steam was still rising from deeper inside the crater as they stood in the shadow of the charred remains of the skeleton of a large, collapsed building. Fragmented rubble littered the ground in every direction...
And there were many small mounds made of a mix of cooling, leathery ash and tattered, partly incinerated cloth lying about, buffeted by the wintry breezes.
The squad's team captain came up to Rollison and Morse, who were quietly standing side-by-side, and announced in a low voice, "We just came from Riggs Fane-Gideon's Deep Drift Circulation & Reprocessing Quarry... We found his body, charred, burnt, flesh ruptured from the inside. Looks like he might have been hit by some kind of massive rogue electrical charge, but we'll need Doctor Reebuhs' post-mortem exam to be clear on that."
Within the interior of the passengers' cabin of the R&R Squad's six-wheeled, armored, electric All-Terrain truck, on the way back to the bio-domed city, no one spoke further until Sergeant Clare-Elise Lewis hesitantly asked a question she was reluctant to hear answered.
"Do you think he's still around, that he's somewhere out there?"
It was a long and uncomfortable moment before Rollison replied, "Yes, he is. And I don't think he's done with us."
"The Lunar Meteorological Bureau say that spring might arrive early this year," Widow-Duchess Palfrey said softly, speaking to no one in particular while her eyes stayed focused on the vehicle's cabin floor. "But they expect it to be a ferociously stormy season."
After that, there wasn't much else to say. It was an uncomfortable ride back to the city.