I Am Not Junco Omnibus: Books Four - Six (78 page)

Polar Friendly

The landing pad for Polar Friendly visitors is just a massive, flat slab of granite. It’s night, it’s September, and it’s high altitude. So it’s cold as fuck right now. The wind whips my hair around as I wait. They have sensors in there to see anyone who enters the pad, so they know I’m here, but they are under no obligation to allow me to enter. I count the seconds in my head and when I get to four minutes I begin to walk towards the door.

They are within their rights to shoot me for advancing, but that won’t kill me, so I take my chances.

I get to within about twenty feet of the door when it opens. Subjack exits and walks towards me. “What can I do for you, Ashur?” he says, his words dragging along a ribbon of chilled air.

“I’d like to go inside, if that’s OK.”

“Tier was already here. We have no meeting with you.”

“I want to know where you got the genetics for the Siblings. I could care less if you answer in there or out here. But I’m not leaving until I get an answer.”

“If it was your business to know that, you would’ve been in the meeting this evening when Tier came by.”

“Right.” I fling him down on the ground, sit on his chest, and drag a razor across his throat, opening up the skin just enough to let the warm blood trickle down his neck. “I don’t think you heard me the first time, Johann. I said, where the fuck—”

“Let him up, alien!” Dozens of soldiers pour out of the sanctuary and point their plasma rifles at me.

I look up and grin, then drag Junco’s father through the port with me and open back up on a nearby mountain ledge. Just far enough away that the plasma rifles from down below can’t reach, but close enough for everyone to helplessly watch.

“I don’t think you know me well enough,” I growl, “to really understand what’s happening here. I’m not the good brother. I’m the nasty one. When I’m under orders, I do follow them. But our team has dissolved, friend. So do not make the mistake of assuming I won’t cut your head off if you refuse my request. You are nothing to me. I doubt Junco would even care if I murdered you. So I’m going to ask you one more time. Where the fuck did those genetics come from to make the other six Siblings?”

His expression is defiant, angry, frightened, and disgusted all at once. “Tier knows. Why not ask him?”

“Because he’s not here and you are. So I’m asking you.”

“I get that Junco is real. It’s obvious. That’s not something Lucan would get wrong, but those Siblings we have are not part of the Prophecy, Subjack. I saw how Junco was subdued in the Stag. I saw the cage, I know about the labs. So she is the Seven. But what doesn’t add up here is where the pure genetics came from to save our race.”

His defiance falters and in its place comes confusion.

“Yes, you saved us. We have repaired the damage done to the DNA Lucan caused thousands of years ago. We have been renewed. We have hundreds of clutches of children to prove it. So where are the other six demons? I might not know most of these Siblings well, but I know Esta. And she is not a demon.”

Subjack stares up at me from his submissive position on the ground and then averts his eyes. “Let me up and I’ll show you. But I wasn’t lying when I said Tier was here. He already knows, Ashur.”

“Now it’s time for me to know, Subjack.” I let him up and step back. He fingers the blood on his neck. “It’s hardly a trickle, old man, don’t go getting dramatic. And when we port back down there”—I wave to the small army that has now gathered far below near the entrance—“you’ll tell them this was your idea.”

He straightens his shirt and grunts a little. “Port us then.”

I do, right to the fucking door. We are so close we almost end up molecularly fused to it. He palms the door before anyone can ask questions and we move through quickly. The small army outside is matched with a bigger one inside and Subjack orders them to stand down. I follow him through the tunnels, noticing how hot it’s getting as we descend, and a few minutes later we end up at the entrance to a lift.

He waves me through, closes the gate, and throws a switch that beings our descent.

It reminds me of Inanna when she went into the Underworld to make demands for Eresh to submit her realm, but Eresh tricked her into being stuck down there and took her place in the world above.

Why that myth comes to me, I have no idea. I haven’t thought about it in years.

The heat intensifies, getting almost unbearable in my armor. Subjack is sweating profusely when I look over at him, but he says nothing, doesn’t wipe the dripping, just stares off into space.

I’m getting a very bad feeling about this.

When we get to the bottom I wait for Subjack to open the gated door and walk through. I follow and the heat is so bad, I almost want to lean over and retch.

“It’s very hot now, but when we came down a few hours ago—” He stops and looks me in the eye. “It was almost cold. The generators have stopped working. We’ve evacuated. Even the dog is gone, so we can’t stay long. They might be melted already.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about but it does not sound good. We enter a control room with a blacked-out window and Subjack sits down at one of the stations and busies himself with the panel. A few seconds later a beep makes me look up and the black on the window fades.

Little by little it inches up, allowing the light from our room to filter past and illuminate the dark room beyond. Subjack sucks in a breath and I mimic him as I duck my head a little to try to catch that first glimpse.

Inside are six…
things
. They are writhing on the ground and as soon as the light hits them, they scream.

I know this scream. I’ve heard this scream before.

It’s the war cry of Angels.

“The Punishments,” I say in a low whisper. “What are all those little pinpricks of light on the back wall?”

“We have no idea. We’ve never been past this control room.”

“What? How did you build this place then?”

“We didn’t. It was always like this. All this”—he motions down to the instrument panel and then to the room beyond—“was here when we dug it up.”

“Who made it then?”

He shrugs. “I thought you guys would know. We sure don’t.”

“Inanna?”

“She’s never come down here as far as I know.”

“But you worked for her?”

“
Did
work for her. When I was still in the RR. All that early training stuff, all the cloning—that was all Inanna. But I work for no one but me now. It’s been this way for years now. I’m just trying to find the truth.”

Lies, lies, lies.
That’s all I have for what I see here. All of this is lies. I’m not sure the PF were supposed to find this place. In fact, I’m pretty fucking positive they were absolutely not supposed to find this place.

“If it helps,” Subjack offers, “those pinpricks of light have a DNA signature. We did some infrared analysis through the glass, just some point-and-shoot stuff. But it’s not hard to identify the signature of a nucleic acid. And that’s what we got from the light. DNA. Every dot is made up of DNA.”

“What kind of DNA?” I’m imagining an entire army of fucking demons programmed into that back wall and I almost have a panic attack.

“Every kind. Anything you can think of. Plants, bugs, mammals…” He stops for a second. “Humans. It’s like a… like a
seed stock
. Like the frozen straws of semen I kept for breeding the mares each year on the farm. That’s what this place reminds me of. We don’t keep our DNA in pinpricks of light, but we catalog them, right? According to traits and such. This”—he waves his hand at the wall behind the still-screaming demons—“looks like a catalog.”

I just stare at his mouth. Seed stock. For breeding. “It’s a lab? This is where they made them?” I look around as Subjack gives me a noncommittal answer. Who the fuck made this lab? “And Inanna was never down here?”

“No, it was buried a mile deep, Ashur. The PF found it when they were drilling for a source of geothermal energy. There was a huge…
vacuole
in the mountain. Just empty space from the mapping data. So they opened it up and, well, this was what they found.”

“How long ago?”

“Six years or so. Right before I left the RR. We found this, the plans started to unravel. I knew about the cloning, I knew they had dozens of copies of Junco, so why not me too? I started asking questions, not satisfied with the answers they were giving me. And I saw what was coming. I couldn’t take Junco with me. Me they didn’t care about. But her? She was everything. They’d never let her go.”

“Where’s the Seventh Demon? There are only six here.”

“Junco is the Seventh. I didn’t know any of this when she was brought it to us. I’ve been piecing this puzzle together all these years as well, Ashur. I’m not the mastermind of this plan.”

“How old was Junco when you got her?”

“Just a newborn baby.”

“Who gave her to you?”

“Inanna.”

“Where did the other Siblings come from? If these are the other six demons, then what are the other six Siblings inside the Pillars right now?”

Subjack just shrugs. “I have no idea. Inanna came with seven children, not one. I have no idea who made them, how they were made, or anything else. We were told to keep the demon child and the six human-like ones were farmed out all over the Republics. Esta in the East, Soli and Moju to the MR, Tukker and Sariel in the West, and Irin with Inanna.”

The demons on the other side of the glass are trying to stand now. They push themselves up against the walls, screaming their war calls, baring fangs, razors and talons extended, eyes blazing red.

“Carolinia and I were given Junco to raise as a daughter. It took about a year and a half to get her to settle into her human form and then we took her home to the RR.” He looks up at me with very sad eyes. “She’s not like these monsters, Ashur. She’s not.”

I scrub my face with my hands. “Subjack, whether you want to admit it or not, Junco absolutely is one of these demons. OK? You need to accept that. She’s done well, she might even pull through for us, but you should never, ever forget what she really is. She’s dangerous, she’s a born killer, she’s out of control eighty percent of the time.”

“She’s not a demon,” he says, refusing to see the reality here. “She’s a girl. She might not be a human girl, but she was raised as one. Culturally, she is a girl.”

“Yeah? Did you know she chopped off the head of her best friend back in Fledge?”

“She said it was an order.”

“Yeah, but seriously, Subjack, come on! If Lucan ordered me to chop off Tier’s head do you really think I would?”

“He’d chop off yours.”

“He’s different.”

“And so is Junco. She follows orders. As does Tier.”

“No.” I shake my head. “Tier follows orders, yeah, but Junco does whatever the fuck Junco wants. She’s not following her training when she does as she’s told, she’s… she’s making a choice. She makes choices, Subjack. What she does is not automatic. She calculates and then decides. And it’s never predictable.”

The demons slam against the glass, cracking it slightly.

“Fuck, we better get out of here. You should evacuate your tunnel.”

He presses some more controls on the panel and the blackout fades back in to block out the light. We leave as soon as the demons are out of sight and make out way back up in silence.

And just when we’re close enough to the top to hear the bustle of workers, the entire mountain… shakes, shudders, dims, flickers.

“It’s starting. Junco is on her way out of the Pillar.” The cage docks and I flip the lever to open the door to allow us to leave and exit the lift.

“Wait!” Subjack grabs my arm and pulls me back. “We need to get Carolinia, you need to take me to the Stag.”

“I need to find Caleb. I’m not your chauffeur!”

“She has his coordinates, she will give them to you if I ask her to. But you need to get us to the Stag or you can find Caleb on your own. And I might not know the details of how all that shit works, but my guess is that Caleb can only be found when he wants to. Otherwise Tier would not have come here asking for his location.”

He’s right. Caleb can’t be found, only located. With exact coordinates. It’s a precaution He put in place so we didn’t interfere with Caleb’s collection duties. “Fine—”

The mountain shudders again, only this time it comes with a massive groan, like the gods in Heaven are in pain. Rocks start crumbling from the walls and people begin to panic. “Hurry! We need to get her and get outside so we can port!”

Subjack runs, leading us farther and farther into the mountain. Farther and farther away from the safety of outside, and closer and closer to the final showdown with evil.

Chapter Twenty-Three—JUNCO