Chapter 28 #2
Gebre shoved open a door into a wider, greyer space – a hall without windows but lit from above with still-burning white lights, each one picking out a statue of the great, the good and the merely potent of Adjumiri history.
Dragged the door shut behind us, fumbled at controls, for locks and overrides that would not keep us safe.
I heard bolts slide across, then te was pulling me along, through passages laid out between the faces of the glorious dead.
Illuminated boxes of text flashed up at the feet of each figure we passed, explaining – this person here, they were a great scientist, one of the first to categorise the post-terraforming evolutionary development of greater and lesser fauna in the northern seas.
And this one – they were a pioneering explorer who helped establish the first colony on nearby Hadda, but who in later life it was discovered had been stealing from the Assembly and exploited vulnerable people with cruel barbarities.
Too late, by then – the statue had been cast, the crystal lattice grown, and the Adjumiris were always opposed to smashing their history, however ugly it might be.
Perhaps even then the astronomers had been whispering: All this, it will burn. It will all burn, even the shame.
Soft music played from one, rising a little as we approached – a composer’s final tune, written on the island where they went to die.
A snatch of a voice captured from another, a thousand years old, the only recording still in existence of the peacemaker who helped end the Vega War, declaring: “We went to war to fight for what is ours, and in the process we destroyed each other and ourselves. Our cause was just, but justice was the first to die.”
Gebre strode ahead, a little more confident now – or perhaps no, perhaps ter fear had reached that place where there was no point scuttling, no point darting from statue to statue, because what difference would it make?
A stranger with a gun, half seen, would come or they would not; Gebre could not control this outcome, so why care?
I struggled along breathless behind, my exoskeleton hissing with the sudden drain on its miniature power supply as it tried to keep my back from buckling with this sudden excursion.
Gebre was already at the door on the far side of the room, the one that led back out to public spaces, waiting for me to catch up, when the first statue erupted in a shower of marble-grown crystal and bio-resin.
I dived for cover behind its still-smoking plinth, covering my head and eyes as a detritus of shattered mineral rained down around us, the stink of burning polymer acrid in the ringing echo of the blast. Gebre lunged behind another plinth to my right, the door open at ter back, and as the world twinkled and jingled with gleaming shards and a voice proclaimed the history of the now-blasted figure whose smoking feet were all that remained of their legacy, I peered out.
This time, I could see more – much more – of our pursuer, caught in a cone of light.
His hair was silver-white, his face almost boyish, whether from actual youth or bio-enhancements, I couldn’t tell.
He wore a dark grey combat suit beneath his military-grade exoskeleton, hints of the body-tight fabric peeking through the medley of arm braces, neck braces, back braces that carried his weight.
A tube ran to his nose, pumping gas at the right ratio for his lungs, plus, I suspected, a few other chemicals besides.
A pistol was strapped to one gleaming hip, a knife to the other, and he held a squat-nosed hand cannon whose end was still glowing from the heat of its most recent discharge.
He didn’t run, though the suit that supported him was more than capable of a burst of speed; simply walked, weapon-first, down the corridor, in no rush, without fear, and he was Shine Corpsec, of my world, of my people, come all this way just to kill us all.
The door he’d entered through was a liquid pool of rapidly resolidifying metal and mineral, the air above it shimmering with heat.
Behind us: a way out, another door, Gebre on one side, me on the other.
Our attacker had a clear line of fire towards it; the moment we moved, he would pull the trigger.
I pressed my back against the plinth, listened to the thump-thump-thump of his mech-supported boots as he approached, looked across at Gebre, touched the place on my chest where te still held the white box, the box that contained something that gave ter meaning, and before te could object, I broke left, running as fast as my heavy body could away from the door.
The soldier fired. I felt something bite into my shoulder, knock against my chest as another statue ruptured, this one raining crispy black clay and eye-stinging dust as it exploded above my head, but I kept on scurrying, away from Gebre, away from the interface, not daring to look back.
“I designed the first elevator, connecting earth to heaven…” declared a digital voice above my head, only to be silenced a moment later by another boom that sent crystal and stone spinning across the room.
I ran bent almost double, hands over my head, and made it to a corner, turned, made it another two or three plinths further, before my pursuer, having grown bored of blasting holes in the memories of the great of this world, sighted just ahead of my mad dash and fired once more.
This time, the force of shattering stone was near enough to my face to knock me back, the shock spinning me sideways and down as shards of white sliced through cloth and skin.
Chunks of flying rock like fists knocked into my chest, my legs, my gut, my arms where they curled around my head.
Perhaps if the gravity had been weaker, I might have shrugged it off; this unlikely thought rang in my singing ears as I stumbled, tumbled to the ground, trying at once to get back up on my hands and knees and slipping immediately in a sea of hot snowy dust.
I gasped for air, lips coated in powder, heard footsteps approaching, crawled a few steps, crawled a few more, and was met for my troubles with a mechanically supported boot to my belly.
What air I had left in me vanished.
The displacement field, designed to knock projectiles aside, didn’t enclose the boot of this man – that would have made walking impossible.
But it began at his ankle and rose upwards, the uneasy disruption of all things around it making my eyes ache, my ears hiss with the otherness of it, the distorted rupture of twisted space, twisted senses.
There was no dignity in how I collapsed, no spark of defiance.
It was Tu-mdo again, eyes down, hands covering, cowering, calling out but please, but please, I didn’t do nothing wrong.
Astonishing how quickly the urge to meekness returned; remarkable how, after all this time, I was still tiny before the Shine.
The boot kicked again, then the hot muzzle of the gun rolled me over, pushed me up against the wall, weapon pressed into my chest. The face of the man who was going to kill me swam down closer, one eye of pale blue, one eye of bio-enhanced black, the pupil widening and contracting as it read me, picking through a dozen signs and data points invisible to a mere organic eye.
“Where’s the interface?” he asked, speaking Mdo-sa.
A little box on his hip translated the sounds into a cheap mockery of Adjumiri, so flat as to be almost unrecognisable to any native speaker, the grammar of a child.
I nearly laughed to hear it, and laughing hurt, but everything hurt so I might as well hurt while laughing.
Laughter did not amuse the off-worlder, this stranger with a gun. He pressed it harder into my chest, the heat starting to burn against my skin, leaned in so close I could hear the soft hiss of the apparatus running into his nose, snarled: “Where’s the interface?”
“Gone,” I replied in Mdo-sa, and saw at once the flicker of surprise to hear his own language spoken back at him.
“Already off-world. The quanmechs are picking it up apart as we speak; they’re inside your communications, they’re listening to every word.
They’ll have the location of every Shine blackship within a month, your fleet will be shot out of the black, and then they’ll come for you.
Every Unionist and rebel, every Accord world, they’ll come and they’ll take the Shine down. ”
He didn’t believe me, of course; he had been trained not to imagine, not to conceive of such things, and so he could not. But my voice – the accent of my world, local and precise – held him for a moment in place. “Who are you?” he asked, as the Adjumiri translator at his hip mangled the sounds.
“I am a monster,” I replied. “When you shoot me, you had better watch my corpse. If you take your eyes off it, if you blink, it’ll be too late.
You’ll need to check and keep on checking – you’ll need to believe with all your heart that I’m gone, because if you doubt for even a moment, I’ll be back.
The ghost of Hasha-to will come to get you, he’ll crawl out of the dark, slither through the walls to pluck out your heart, so you be sure – you be absolutely certain – that when you shoot me, you believe that I’m dead, and you’d better keep on believing until the day you are ready to die. ”
He’d heard of Hasha-to.
That was a surprise, mingled with as much disappointment as relief. Remarkable that the Shine hadn’t kept word of it down. Disappointing to think that if there were ever a statue raised to me, the plaque would read “Here is the ghost of Hasha-to; you must believe that he is dead.”
His surprise – the flicker even of his fear – was not going to stop him shooting me, of course. He was too well trained in killing to let a little doubt get in the way.
I tried to close my eyes, and couldn’t, hypnotised by the determination settling in his face.
I thought about thirty-three years. That was how long it would take for the neutrino blast to arrive, that final burst of matter that would shatter the remnants of this world into its atomic parts.
Before then radiation would kill it. The atmosphere would burn away, the seas would boil, and if my body was still intact on the surface of this planet, perhaps it would rise and fall, rise and fall, an endless gasping, heaving, suffocating death for thirty-three years, until at last the final remnants of the Lovers blew me away.
The thought was curious; not curious enough to drown out the terror.
A gunshot.
It was not the explosive, chest-cracking, heart-searing roar of the Shine’s weapons.
Instead, an electrostatic snap-hiss, barely loud enough to scratch a statue, let alone shatter it into dust. The disruption field rippled with the impact, the force a smothering bag of sand slamming into my face as his systems absorbed the shot.
It took a second blast to overload his primary generator; the third was enough to finally sear flesh.
They came only moments apart, which meant I had a full view of the man’s journey towards death, from surprise at the first shot, fear at the second, pain at the third, and the final turning-out, shutting-down, ending-of-it-all on the last, which was not an electrostatic blast at all, but a needled dart of poisonous russet that thwipped silently into the back of his neck.
I was staring into his eyes as he died, and I knew it, recognised it, saw the way the pupils of one blue eye – his organic eye – widened, and then stayed wide, even as his weight sagged forward, falling on top of me.
His other eye opened and closed a few times more, internal algorithms still seeking data and command – but his brain stem was mulch and pale fluid slithered from his left ear as he collapsed, crushing me beneath a mix of muscle and military-grade gear.
So much for Shine armour-tech. I grunted beneath the weight of the body, too weak to yelp, tried to worm my way free, look to my rescuer, heard a soft padding and smelled burned hair.
Rencki and Nineteen, the former’s fur still marred black from burning, the latter bobbing by qis side, the painted eye not even facing towards me, all pretence of anthropomorphic nicety discarded.
I heard myself gasp, a sound somewhere between life-sustaining relief and bone-crushing breaking as Rencki trotted forward, tails still raised and quivering, and then Gebre was there too, hauling the body of the fallen soldier off me as if he were not wearing mu-blasted steel, as if a man were not dead at ter feet.
“Maw! Are you hurt?”
This thing in ter voice – it is not love.
Te refuses to love, and that is all there is to say. Te cannot bear it.
I tried to click my reply, easier than words. “Can you walk?” Rencki barked, and qis speaker system had been damaged, the soft, soothingly organic tones of qis voice popping at the edges as qe spoke. “Maw – can you walk?”
“Yes,” I mumbled, as Gebre pulled me to my feet. “I can walk.”
“Good. There are four more assailants in this building. Most of the inhabitants are already dead. We need to go.”
“The truck…” I stumbled, as Rencki bounded towards the door.
“The truck is gone,” qe barked. “The first thing the Shine did was burn it and everything inside.”
“Then…”
“There is a garage one floor below,” Nineteen declared, voice a narrow band of sound transmitted from I couldn’t tell where on qis flat body. “And a speeder.”
“Two speeders,” Gebre interjected. “Short-range, but fast. If we—”
Another snap of thunder bellowed through the hall, and it was not of the storm.
I wondered who was dying elsewhere. I wondered if Ngurta was fighting back, if there had been time to put up a defence, or if Corpsec had walked up, smiling, hands raised as if they were friends, and shot em as ey turned to help.
“We must hurry,” Rencki snapped, and Gebre clicked ter tongue in agreement, caught me as I staggered, half carrying me along, down and away.