The Exalting

by Dan Allen

  It hurt too much to think about.

  “Do I look much different?” Dana said, giving up on the painful conversation.

  “You mean beside your hair?”

  My eyes—that’s what’s changed.

  “You’ll probably fool people, but the question is for how long. People can recognize folks they know from a block away just by how they walk.”

  Dana knew it was true. “We just have to hope we don’t run into anyone we know before I can get out of the city.”

  And there was always the threat of the Vetas-kazen. Were they already in Norr in disguise and looking for her?

  In an uncomfortable silence, Dana dressed in Brista’s clothes, putting the bloodstone in a velvet pouch and stringing it around her neck. Wearing something of Brista’s was a bittersweet comfort—something to remember her by.

  Dana filled the few available pockets with her usual essentials: a small folding knife, flint, a ball of twine, needle, and a hook. Brista thumbed through books to pass the time, and Dana napped until the chapel below filled with the sounds of gathering Norrians. Brista’s room was tucked at the back of the chapel, over the speaker’s pulpit. The rest of the chapel went all the way to the roof rafters.

  Once the voice of Cleric Warv rose over the din of the gathered Norrians, Brista pushed open her roof window. Dana brought over the dressing stool, and Brista stepped up and climbed out first onto the steeply sloped slate roof. Dana followed, pulling herself up. Her arms didn’t seem to be quite as tired as her legs.

  Brista slid to the bottom of the roof where a façade rose up. The two crawled behind the façade until they reached the back corner of the building.

  Brista leaned over the edge. “All clear.” She took a deep breath, climbed over the edge, and slid down a water collection pipe. Dana followed, her muscles protesting.

  Once she was on the high street, Dana felt exactly like a small animal avoiding predators. Her eyes followed every flapping shutter. She jumped at the sound of any door opening.

  Dana forced herself to relax. Acting suspicious and afraid would only draw attention.

  Dana shivered as her new blond hair fluttered in a passing breeze. Even after a day in Brista’s stuffy attic room, Dana still felt cold.

  As they walked toward Forz’s workshop, Dana turned her eyes down and kept her hands in her pockets.

  It took all her will not to look up when three pairs of boots she knew passed on the same sidewalk headed toward the chapel.

  “Hello, Brista.”

  Mother.

  “Skipping chapel service?” Her brother called with a snicker.

  “Hosting a visitor,” Brista thumbed at Dana.

  Outsiders were neither welcome at chapel service nor permitted by their own codes of respect for their supremes.

  Her family continued on. When Dana and Brista turned the next corner, Dana let out the breath she had been holding. That was too close.

  She looked at Brista, “Hosting a visitor? That was brilliant.”

  Brista shrugged. “It’s sort of true.”

  What am I going to do without her?

  “I just hope your parents don’t try to talk to my dad about my ‘visitor.’”

  “Let’s get off the street,” Dana said, turning in Kernic Alley.

  If anyone could build a mechanodron to keep her alive in the exalting chamber, it was Forz.

  Chapter 25

  Jet was in his second hour of playing a video game he’d found, on a tablet intended for walkthrough inspections and logging cleaning reports.

  The game was an old Earth sport where a heavy ball was tossed at some pins. The more pins you knocked over the more points you got.

  “Trivial,” Yaris hissed over his shoulder. “And primitive.”

  “Strike!”

  Decker poked his head around the corner. “Strike what? ASP? You know we have practically no weapons on this ship, don’t you?”

  An idea hit Jet like a bullet to the side of his helmet.

  “Hold on.” Jet’s grip on the tablet went slack, and it crashed to the floor in the double deceleration gravity before he could catch it. They did have weapons—bowling balls. Lots of them.

  Decker stared at him. “I don’t like that look on your face.”

  “No, this is a seriously good idea.”

  “No. Corporal, I order you to go back to wasting your time.”

  “No, Captain. You’re going to like this.”

  Decker folded his arms. “If I don’t, I’m taking that tablet you just busted out of your paycheck—in the form of dessert rations.”

  Jet paused to consider the threat. “I’ll take the risk.”

  Decker nodded. “Okay then.”

  “So, we are going to have a big ASP frigate waiting for us, right?”

  “Obviously,” Decker said.

  “And we have no long-range weapons.”

  “Need I say it again?”

  “Did you ever try bowling?”

  The captain shook his head slowly. “Does it involve a toilet?”

  “No. It’s a game. You throw a big ball and try to hit pins.”

  “Black space, Naman! That’s brilliant.”

  “Only we can’t throw out the big ball,” Jet said. “Big Bertha has all our fuel.”

  “But we have extra shuttles,” Decker said.

  “Exactly. So we change the game a bit. Their ship is the bowling ball. We throw the pins.” Jet pulled up the fuel map. “By the time we reach Xahna we’ll only need a few of the shuttles, so long as we run our remaining shuttles at max thrust—”

  “And we can transfer just enough fuel to make the kamikaze shuttles self-guiding.” Decker rubbed his hand together. “But they’re all going to arrive at different times, unless we launch them all at once. In that case, the odds they’ll be picked up by the frigate’s telescope are a lot higher.”

  “Not if we sling them around the other side of the sun. They won’t be looking in that direction.”

  Jet pushed a button on the console that pulled up a menu and toggled Angel. The AI was already running fleet sims and gave a respectful ready chirp instantly, since the captain was present. “Angel, I want to shoot down a frigate in orbit on Xahna using our spare shuttles as self-guided bullets. I need to drop one spare shuttle every couple of hours and have them arrive at the same time from different directions on target. Can you plot trajectories to sling them around the sun the opposite direction as us?”

  “Okay, done.”

  Decker slapped his forehead. “Holy smokes!”

  “That’s why you bring a sniper to a long-range shooting contest.”

  * * *

  Forz opened the door to the workshop. “Come in, quick.”

  Dana and Brista rushed in. Forz locked the door behind them. He was dressed in his work smock, gloves on, eye loupe in place.

  The workshop was teaming with overhead rigging for holding mechanodrons upright while they trained to stand, piles of raw materials, and dozens of half-finished mechanodrons used for scrap.

  Forz rubbed his hands together. “So, you need a mechanodron that keeps you at the melting point of sayathenite and then gradually cools you down to let the matrix recrystallize out of the blood stream.”

  Brista raised a questioning finger. “How’s it going to do that if it’s run by sayathenite? The crystals that run the mechanodron will melt.”

  Dana’s brain clunked. She hadn’t thought of that.

  “I think I’ve got that covered.” Forz picked up a pencil. “How long does it have to last? How big is the thing it has to cool? Any size and weight limits?”

  Brista interrupted. “More importantly, what’s the punishment for consuming the bloodstone without permission?”

  “Actually,” Dana said, “shouldn’t you go to the chapel to make sure my parents don’t talk to Warv and then come to find us?”

  Brista rolled her eyes and folded her arms.

  “Please?” If her parents saw Brista, she w
ould inevitably have to make up another lie about why she came back to the chapel. She hated that.

  “Fine.” With a glare that would cook a cold redroot, Brista left.

  Forz barely noticed. His sketch was already taking shape.

  “First thing to do is teach a mechanodron to drop ammonium nitrate into a bucket of water to cool itself—I’ll need some copper pipes to conduct the heat. Then we train its arm to do the same thing for the object it’s cooling.”

  “That would be my head, I’m guessing,” Dana said.

  “Okay. Not very thermally conductive. Can we fit you with a copper band on your head?”

  “Not sure that’s a good idea. The bloodstone may try to reform there.”

  “Fine. We’ll just use a pan of water then.”

  Dana shrugged. “Okay, you’re the expert.”

  “I’ve got a small bellows that I use for kitchen mechanodrons that baste meat on a spit. That should work for recirculating liquid. Now for the cooling salts—” Forz set Dana to milling the ammonium nitrate crystals small enough to be dispensed by a tiny screw-like auger. Then he fired up a torch and brazed the heat pipes to a copper kettle for the reservoir of the mechanodron.

  While he fastened the screw coupling, Forz explained his theory. “As the cooling crystal level drops, the screw resistance goes down and it speeds up slightly, which increases the cooling. Very simple. Very elegant.”

  Dana nodded. “It’s amazing.”

  Forz took a deep breath and then set his hands to work on the benchtop contraption. After a few minutes he finally spoke again. “I’m not doing it for the city, Dana. I’m not even sure it’s right. I’m just doing it for you.”

  Forz liked her. Perhaps not as a girlfriend. But they were close. She had talked to him on occasion about leaving Norr together and finding a blood-bound city to join. But now he was apparently dating Brista. If it wasn’t for that, he could join her in Shoul Falls.

  The question came out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Are you going to marry Brista . . . and stay in Norr forever?”

  Forz dropped a wrench that bounced off the edge of the table and landed on his toe. He winced as he looked at Dana with a baffled expression.

  Dana laughed.

  “Quiet,” he said, looking around. “You aren’t supposed to be in here, remember?” He retrieved the wrench and went back to tightening an axle nut.

  Dana tossed her hair over her shoulder and reached her arms out, placing her hands on his, stopping his work.

  “Don’t you deserve better than a place that doesn’t hate you only because they don’t know what you really are? Don’t you want to come with me?”

  Forz pulled his hands free and twisted a tie wire. “Of course I do. But I can’t think about that right now. I can’t decide my whole future while I’m trying to put together a machine to do something that I’ve been warned against my entire life. Do you want me to finish this or not?”

  So that was it. She could either have his heart or his services. Dana bit her lip. “Let’s finish it.”

  Dana drew her hands back as Forz turned to a drawer and took out a cotter pin, which he fixed on a gear that connected to a spring with a cloth shroud wound over it.

  Dana couldn’t imagine what use the spring had until Forz opened a large tub of water, releasing a rancid odor. From the vat, he selected a short segment of rhynoid vine and expertly wove it around the spring, securing the ends with gantham paste.

  “It’s just like the piston on a steam-wagon engine,” Dana realized. The vine would squeeze and release the spring, so it would shrink and expand and rotate the cam on the gear, like the drive wheel on a steam-wagon.

  Forz coaxed the vine’s feeler tentacles to wrap around the spring’s binding points.

  Dana marveled at how easily the boy could slip back into his work, completely partitioning his feelings, like drawers of hardware. Did he just pull them out again when he needed them?

  “You can just cut them off?” Dana said, exasperatedly.

  “Sure,” Forz said, rubbing his forehead with his glove. “Rhynoids can live months without water. The coastal jungle has a dry season after all. It just goes dormant. But look,” He lifted the end of the vine, showing where small roots grew into a glass vial. “When I fill this up with fermented sap, it wakes up.”

  “I was talking about feelings,” Dana huffed.

  “Feelings?” Forz’s expression shifted. He opened another potent-smelling bucket and ladled the bubbling fermented sap into the fuel jar.

  “I think you answered my question.”

  “Hold on. This part’s tricky.” Forz took a set of smaller tendrils branching off the vine and looped them around a crystal of sayathenite fixed in a resonator, some of the tendrils on top and some at the bottom, ostensibly to pick up both polarities. Then he picked up the compact mechanodron and set it into a wooden bucket, which he filled with water. He connected a small spiral auger to a smaller bucket of cooling crystals. As the rhynoid stirred with popping sounds of crackling static, Forz pumped the lever, driving the piston and turning a cogged wheel that drove the auger around. Tiny cooling crystals slowly made their way up out of their box. Following the revolving inclined plane, the crystals slowly spilled into the water, cooling it quickly.

  Satisfied his hastily assembled mechanics were working, Forz removed the sayathenite nodule and held it over the fire with wooden tongs. He leaned close, staring at the surface. “That’s soft enough.”

  When he withdrew the sayathenite nodule, its outer surface appeared shiny, like molten glass, or honey glaze. He placed the heat-softened crystal, ready for training, in the resonator and then kicked away most of the logs and hung the “mechanodron in a bucket” from the cooking pot hook in the fireplace, several feet above the coals.

  He placed an alcohol thermometer in the water and began slowly turning the wheel to spill cooling crystals into the water, playing a tedious game of “keep the water the right temperature.”

  It took almost thirty minutes to complete the first training session.

  “That was the most boring thing I’ve ever seen,” Dana said. “How do you do this day-in and day-out?”

  “Trade secret,” Forz said with a grin. “If it gets too boring, I train a mechanodron to train other mechanodrons.”

  “That’s cheating! I mean, it’s really clever.” Dana never would have thought of it. Forz was a genius. Master Tidwell did almost nothing except collect the pay for Forz’s brilliant work.

  “But this is a one-off job,” Forz said. “A few more training runs should do it. This time, I’ll use a little less heat, so the details set. It will only use the major acoustoelectric resonances. The beat frequencies will set the pulse timing, just like in the sayathi pools.”

  He softened the sayathenite again, this time slightly less, then repeated the training exercise with the fading coals. “Once the mechanodron learns to control its temperature, I can add the second arm to control the temperature of the test pan. Now, the test bucket will hold your head. I hope that’s enough to keep your core temperature from getting too high.”

  Dana fell asleep. She was only vaguely aware of time passing and Forz moving her to pile of empty carry sacks where she slept even more deeply, the fatigue of her exhausting journey once again catching up with her.

  There were other things catching up as well. The kazen pursuing her would eventually come, perhaps pretending to be rangers from Shoul Falls. Once the chancellor knew she was here, the civic guard would search the city.

  As she lay resting, Dana could only hope that Forz would finish training the mechanodron in time for her to escape the city undetected.

  A knock sounded. Dana opened her eyes. As she lifted her face away from a burlap sack, she felt at the lines pressed into her skin from the course weave. She pushed back a blanket. “What did you say?”

  “Quiet.” Forz ducked down beside the workbench. “Someone is at the door.”

  “Open this door rig
ht now. We know you’re in there,” bellowed a voice from outside.

  Dana’s heart jolted. She squatted down next to Forz. “What do we do?”

  The muffled voice from outside the workroom barked, “Open it.” The sound of jangling keys immediately brought to mind the civic guard’s master key set.

  Dana’s throat clenched as panic seized her. “Forz, I have to get out of here.”

  Forz quickly stuffed the basket-sized mechanodron into a shoulder sack. “Back door, it’s the only other way out.”

  “I know.”

  The key turned in the lock.

  “Thank you, Forz.” As the front door opened, Dana lifted the carry sack holding the mechanodron. She crept behind the workbench. From under the table she saw the boots of several civic guard officers step into the entrance. But they would not see her until their eyes adjusted to the dark workshop.

  Forz moved quickly toward the side wall of the workshop. From among the heaping piles of work materials, he grabbed a wooden pole and slid it between the wall and a support strut for his overhead mechanodron rigging system.

  It looked like he was going to collapse the entire system on top of her pursuers.

  Dana had ten feet to go. She had to cross an open space to reach the back door. She stuck her head out from behind the sap barrel.

  “There she is.” One of the men pointed to Dana, and the three men moved forward.

  Forz threw his weight into his lever. The support strut slid out from under the rigging. Poles and counterweight bags of heavy sand collapsed together. Dana looked up to see two more levels of supports fall in succession, dropping with bone-crunching force as they fell.

  Chapter 26

  Two civic guards shouted in cries of agony. Another dropped to the floor in the dust and chaos of the collapsing rigging.

  Dana turned to flee but looked back to see Forz on the floor, wide-eyed and shaking. Dana ran to him and tried to lift the large pole that had pinned his leg to the ground. He screamed in pain.

  His upper leg was bent at an unnatural angle. His femur was broken.

  “Oh, Forz . . .”

  Dana grabbed another pole from the wood pile and levered the heavy wooden beam off his leg. With a cry of pain Forz dragged his shattered leg out from under the rubble.