Birthright by Rick Partlow Chapter One TCN News Instell Report, Dateline: 12 November, 2,215, Commonwealth Standard. Reports continue to trickle in from the Aphrodite colony of an armed uprising by the so-called Predecessor Cultists, who profess to be preparing humanity for the return of the Predecessors, or Ancients: the mysterious race whom many believe is responsible for the construction of the Martian Face and whose relics have been found at sites on a handful of worlds throughout the Cluster. Speculation on the nature of the Ancients has continued since the discovery in the early Twenty-First Century of the map of the wormhole jumplinks carved into the side of the Edge Mountain on Hermes, which spurred the initial phase of interstellar colonization. Though no physical remains or pictorial representations of the Predecessors have been discovered, these cults insist that they were humanoids who were responsible for genetically engineering and"seeding" the races of our cluster, who created the jumplinks for our use as a kind of birthright and who will someday return from their self-imposed exile to judge the progress of us, their "children." Cultists on Aphrodite have reportedly armed themselves with military weapons and attempted to take over communication facilities, just the latest in a chain of violence which has included riots on Earth in Capital City and New Bombay. On dozens of Commonwealth colonies, however, and on Earth itself, the Predecessor Cults continue to grow in popularity, particularly among young adults and disaffected veterans of the War with the Tahni. Though Commonwealth sources refuse to comment, it is rumored that the Criminal Investigations Division of the Patrol Service is working in conjunction with planetary constabularies to crack down on the cultists... "The Ancients shall return! Repent your arrogance, oh humanity, and seek their wisdom!" I saw the spittle fly from the woman's lips as she yelled her message out at the passers-by on Harristown's main street. She wore the polychromatic robes of a priestess in the Predecessor Cult, and, from the amplification of her voice, she either had surgically augmented her vocal chords or was wearing some kind of concealed public-address hardware. Her acolytes---a pair of heavily-altered males, their muscles augmented with cloned tissue almost to the point of absurdity---stood naked behind her, arms raised toward the sky. They were chanting some kind of mantra, but I couldn't quite make out the words. I didn't particularly care except that they'd interrupted the newsfeed I'd been auditing over my neurolink. I brushed past them, only noticing them at all to be sure they didn't notice me. Today it was my job to not be noticed, which was not too hard in Harristown at Night---not anymore. I remember back when I was a kid, back before the war, when Canaan was nothing more than a quiet, religious agrocolony. Back then, you could walk down Penn Avenue and not see one person you didn't know, or any buildings more than two stories tall. Now...now it was built up so high you couldn't see the stars, and the population in the city had swollen to nearly a million. It wasn't home anymore; not to me. I shook my head. No time for that now. I had a job to do. There was a cold rain falling, and I fastened up the front of my jacket to keep it from dripping down my collar. The weather was always bad this time of year, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Canaan has a rotation period of 125 Standard Days, and the temperature differential that slow turn created used to make the Night a hellish period of huge storms and cold, hurricane-force winds. But the Corporate Council changed all that with the reflectors they put in orbit after the war. Now the Long Night was a series of little nights, interspersed with twelve-hour periods of unnatural neon "days." It made things run more efficiently at the new iridium mines, and most of the influx of postwar colonists liked it. Of course, it was slowly killing the planet's native ecology, but what did that matter to Corporate executives twenty light-years away The imported, genetically-engineered flora and fauna were doing fine. Stop it! I snarled at myself. You get distracted, you could wind up as extinct as any of those native plants, Mitchell. The tiny, prewar sector of Harristown quickly gave way before me, replaced by the boxy multistory Corporate Housing Projects, where the mineworkers and those who preyed on them lived. The prefab structures had started out as shiny and new as any other metal toy, but had gone downhill about an hour after the migrants moved into them. Now they were shitholes, infested with drug dealers and drug users, ViR addicts, skingangers, rippergangs, and various other manifestations of human refuse. Wise places to avoid if you had a choice, but I'd made mine a few years ago. Finally, there was the place I wanted. It looked much like any other project building, but for the Skinners lounging on the front steps, flaunting the bionic streetware that gave the gangs their name. It wasn't bad enough that the sick, soulless bastards actually had their own limbs amputated and sold them to the underground organ banks. No, they financed their little rebellion against organic life by Ripjacking?_?kidnaping transients and migrants, slicing them into their most valuable pieces and selling them off. It didn't matter that cloning technology had made organ banks obsolete---not everyone could afford to have a replacement limb or organ assembled from cloned tissue. So the market was there and these were the suppliers. None of them carried any obvious weapons, but that meant nothing with all the cybernetics crammed into their bodies. I started up the steps but, predictably, one of them rose to block my way. He wasn't particularly big, and I was sure he was an Offworlder---the 1.65 Gravities on Canaan tends to produce big people---but that didn't make him less dangerous. His arms were bare metal bionics, not even concealed with synthskin, and his head was shaven, revealing the input jacks set behind each ear and at the base of his skull. The sockets had become de rigueur for most technical work in the last few decades, but most of the skingangers used them to feed their addiction to black market Virtual Reality programs, or to illegally penetrate central data systems---or just to look tough. "Wrong place, Norm," the Skinner scowled, the ruby oculars of his eye replacements gleaming with menace. Norm...short for Normal Human. It had recently become an insult. "I want to see Cutter," I told him quietly. Act too timid and he'll waste my time taunting me. Act too cocky and I'll waste my time killing him. "Maybe Cutter not want see, Norm," he cackled in the abbreviated idiom popular with the Skinners. "Maybe Cutter want see this." I pulled a credit spike from my sleeve pocket, tossing it at the jackhead. Snatching the spike out of the air, he plugged it into the socket behind his right ear. His natural eye widened at the five K in corporate scrip the plastic-encased crystal lattice represented. He slowly pulled the spike out and began tossing it up and down appreciatively in his palm. "Dangerous carrying here, Norm," he warned me. "Man get killed." I snatched the spike from the air above his hand, and, while he was still blinking in disbelief, I stepped past him up the stairs to the door. He grabbed my right wrist in a bone-crushing, servo-assisted grip, and must have been very surprised when it didn't break. Enough of this. I spun into a back kick that caught him in the solar plexus, throwing him off the stairs a good five meters out into the street. He tumbled head over heels, finally coming to a stop on his back, wheezing. The other Skinners gaped at me, the ones equipped with thermal vision scanning me for bionics, but not finding any. I turned and stepped through the door, rubbing at the red marks on my wrist. The inside of the project was no improvement on its exterior. Canaan wasn't a very urban colony, not like Eden or Aphrodite; but this place was at least a century out of date, and it looked like it hadn't been cleaned since it was built. The hallways were littered with trash, splattered with urine and feces, and crowded with jackheads high on Kick---synthetic endorphines---and hooked into ViR streetware that directly stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain. I was as out of place there as I would have been in a Corporate Council board meeting, but no one tried to stop me. I knew where I was going, and that's usually half of not being questioned. Down the main hallway, right turn into a narrower side corridor, down a short set of stairs to a heavy, reinforced door. I thumbed the doorbell, and a scanner lowered from the ceiling to look me over. I half-expected a trapdoor to fall open beneath my feet and swallow me up, but instead the heavy portal unlatched with an audible "click," silently swinging open. It revealed another short, dark passage which led into a large, dimly-lit room, filled with operating tables, surgical equipment, diagnostic computers and various medical scanners. Standing in the middle of it all was a tall, thin...well, I guess you could still call him human. His cranium had been expanded to handle the cloned brain tissue implants, and the superchargers that provided that extra tissue with the needed oxygen protruded from the sides of his neck. One of his eyes was cybernetic, built for microsurgery, and its housing extended to the bionic ear on that side: a flat, metal amplification disc. There was the standard trio of input jacks, plus one on each wrist...and then there were his hands. They were such a combination of flesh and c...
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