by J D Cortese
A solitary counter, unnervingly purple with white numbers, told him the why he knew already:
12:35:081
“Faith,” he yelled to the machine overhead, “we have to go.”
Body in pain or not, he was transported again. He was at Faith’s controls but wouldn't have much to do. Faith knew to take him straight to the main Tower complex, where it all had started: his trip, the fights, and the learning about the dark plans of the Watchers. It was fitting that all should end there.
Even his own life.
“Faith, are you sure that you can take me there?”
...As sure as we can be of this presently.
“Your voice—it's softer.”
...I'm learning.
There was something eerie in the humanness of the machine's voice: he imagined a beautiful, mature woman, speaking in a husky tone. “I'm glad,” he said, “but sorry it might be too late for us.”
...It's never too late for learning.
And just at that moment, the circuitous path Faith was taking to avoid detection became futile when two patrolling AVMs shifted gears to intercept them.
The fast movements Faith made were too many to count, and its turns dizzying enough for Agdinar to close his eyes. He knew that if they failed, the city would become a sinking pile of rubble. It would never see the sunrise.
He wanted the sun to come up again over New York, the beautiful city he'd been watching all his life.
His city.
When he opened his eyes, one of the AVMs was flying erratically and spewing smoke from the underside. The other was broken in so many pieces a computer devoted exclusively to the wreck would need weeks to sort out what they were. Some of the wings’ components, still producing antigravity, remained in the air like birds frozen in flight.
Using the gap in the attack, Faith pushed forward at max speed, breaking the night with a burst of noise.
You are really learning, he thought.
...Maybe we'll need that to save us
Seeing a squadron of military AVMs—each of them as powerful as Faith—leaving the docks in the military building across Central Park, Agdinar wondered if they would survive until the explosion.
“Faith, can you record a message?”
...Yes, I can do that while I beat those bastards.
It wasn't the time to argue with Faith about her weird language choices, including that sexy mind-voice. “This is for Dhern,” he said, starting a recording while thinking he wouldn't have time to say anything for Sarinda.
One of the AVMs hit them with a gravity charge. Faith's path faltered, and they fell into a bubble of turbulence. The force of the shaking made Agdinar bang his neck against the head restraints.
“Dhern,” he said as loudly as he could, “you might not be able to talk with me anymore. So, if we die in the Towers, I want you to tell my story to the people below, the humans of this time, in a way that they can follow it. Do it as a novel; a simple one. The Towers would try to hide what would happen here, but I want them to know. They have to know.”
“Priority One,” Agdinar said, fighting the drowning noise of the explosions. “Disable erasing commands...Order AI named Dhern to obey order as a primary direction...Use Watchers' Control Number 514-dash-2992, in good standing.”
Amid the cabin's shaking, Agdinar saw a pattern of green lights on the console. A serious mistake by the Overseer, not to revoke his alternative permissions. He knew of only one group of people whose credentials couldn't be altered.
The Founders.
He already knew this but wouldn't want to accept it, even then, so close to the end. He was one of the Founders of the Watch, and had come to watch with his father, Rugust, the last heir of the most important post-religious family on Earth. He was the last of the Founders, and the true leader of the Watchers.
Like so many other things, they had taken that away from him.
He banged the console in anger, but then he steadied and told the records a couple more things, fast and in a whisper. Then, he looked up and got scared.
They were heading straight into Tower Management, his old building. With two fighters on her back, Faith had decided to crash into the elevators' level.
Although Agdinar couldn't feel the impact with the gravity compensators on, he saw them being engulfed by flames. The edges of Faith's wings were torn apart by the crash, which told him everything he needed to know about how terminal their situation was.
They had broken into the right level on the building, and, while the unexpected vacuum was causing widespread fear and chaotic running of the people nearby, Faith was short of the elevators by half the floor. Swirling columns of icy smoke were appearing and disappearing on the opposite wall, partially covering a lineup of mid-size transporters.
A large orange circle lay on the center of the station’s floor: it was the Watchers’ largest elevator, a hundred times more powerful than the one that had taken him down to Central Park two weeks prior—a million years ago in what had been his life—and it might have a thousand times the reach of Faith's in-house mechanism.
That was their target, and they had fallen short.
He looked at his wrist-console:
03:25:009
Short in both space and time.
Soldiers were entering the elevator center, with combat blue suits and their largest weapons in hand.
“Faith, can you move forward?”
...Barely…BY CRAWLING.
The uneven words reaching Agdinar from Faith’s mind-comm shook him. She was compromised and could soon lose basic functions.
“So, let's move,” he said. “And please, open the cabin. I'm getting out.”
Chapter 59
Faith was moving, if crawling and twisting her wings could be called moving. She looked like a wounded insect, with unnatural limbs pushing a tilted body in ways they weren't supposed to go.
Agdinar crowded under the one straight wing, and he scrambled as Faith’s fuselage advanced with shaking spasms. He was ready to fire his suit's weapon but knew it would be pointless against the Towers' military forces.
Faith had been able to raise an energy barrier around their holdup—so the troopers that were positioning their attack stations around the room wouldn't have an early success; still, there were a million guns pointed at them. Their armed opponents could just wait for the damaged ship to run out of energy and capture its lone young pilot.
It was also clear to Agdinar that time was running out:
2:45:028
The two troopers who were closer to Faith's barrier, positioned across from the spot where Agdinar was crouching, were trying to release a small robot, a wheeled thing that appeared to have a thousand years of disuse. It had several knife-like spikes set in a vertical turret; they started to turn bright and rotate faster and faster. The wheel of fire reminded Agdinar of an Earth air-vehicle’s propeller. But these knives had a plasma core, and they would hit their protective energy barrier with an immense burst of heat Faith would have to control.
His inner readers told Agdinar that the plasma breach would drain half the power of the barrier in a minute. Looking at the paltry efforts Faith was making to crawl the last few steps to the elevator, a minute might have been a gross overestimation.
2:18:036
Agdinar tried to think, but it was hard under so much pressure. And, even if he were to calm down and do it, there weren’t any easy solutions for their standoff. He kept at it, counting the seconds, knowing that he didn't have to—or need to—consider the risks involved. It wasn't about him anymore.
He touched the floor, feeling emotion rise inside and cloud his sight. It was an enormous sadness about his city, prompted to disappear in two minutes.
Activate the main transporter, he thought.
...This close, it could kill you.
Do it, he insisted, frowning as he focused his thoughts.
The ridiculous attack machine the military had unleased on them, bright and shifting lik
e fireworks, sunk its wheel of blazing rods into the energy barrier. A shockwave of yellow light crisscrossed it, and the green faltered for a second.
Two large laser cannons now targeted Faith's front section.
Do it, Faith, he insisted.
...We won't be able to recheck our atomic check-sum...we might lose...
I don't care, he thought. And he didn't.
There was a blast of orange light, as the transporter started to atomize Faith and her pilot. It was a charge large enough to elicit a small tornado within the room, which washed away some of the troopers; one of them hit the wall and might have been killed by the impact. The unluckiest one hopelessly fell through the huge hole Faith had created upon penetrating the building's core.
Agdinar had lost consciousness for a moment, and then found himself in the driver's seat of something that probably shouldn't be called an airship, as it was certainly unable to fly.
“You know what I want to do,” he said. “Activate the elevator, with a target on the surface.”
...That, I can do.
“And then, before it triggers the space-time shift, activate your elevator to take us back here. That's what will amplify the elevator transfer—a thousand times.”
...I cannot do that, Agdinar.
“You have to, Faith.”
...That will destroy you...and me.
“It doesn't matter. We need to affect everything below, including the nukes. Like we did with the one we found.”
...You don't have to convince me.
...It's just that I cannot do it.
“Because you will kill me.”
...Yes. I'm not allowed to harm someone, even one that I know...
“But you will harm all these people down-world,” Agdinar said, loud enough to overpower his hearing of Faith’s weakened mind-speak. “And we can’t allow that either.” Agdinar pounded the console and Faith stopped her mind-comm.
Outside, a dozen troopers were carrying the one laser cannon that hadn't been overturned, this time not willing to miss their chance for revenge and to finally destroy the mad ship and its occupant.
“Give me the controls,” he said.
A large red button, just an outline, appeared on the middle of the main console.
...Press it, before you lose consciousness.
...Wait for as long as you can.
Agdinar looked at the other open viewers—one minute and fifteen seconds left—and asked his ship friend why.
...There's a small chance that you can survive if we are closer to the surface when I activate the reverse.
“All right, Faith,” he said, unable to think on what she'd just said. “Activate the elevator.”
The cabin’s screens changed drastically, shifting into a world of illegible information about the elevator's inner workings.
“And, Faith, thank you for everything.”
...It was a pleasure to be your friend.
Agdinar wondered whether that had been a preprogrammed answer from a machine or a true expression of friendship.
The cabin was flooded by white light, which turned intensely orange as it coated everything Agdinar could see. He kept the palm of his hand close to the console's panel, focusing all his will on pressing it against the red circle. He felt his body starting to go away, his fainting a final fusion into space.
It was the last task of his life, but also the most important, and he was going to get it right.
* * *
He'd never stayed conscious so long into the dematerialization process. He could feel a thrumming, a vibration that ran all over his body, hitting nerves and sending painful alerts to his brain.
The hand remained close to the surface, and he started to see—a sight only partially passing through his eyes—beyond the console and into the cockpit's wall. And his sight could now reach the lower levels of the suspended building and the skies underneath.
He pushed, but the hand didn't move.
The wind howled as it entered the building, so strong that it toppled the cannon, throwing one of the troopers straight into an arched wall; another one grabbed the cannon's tube, hugging it with all his strength.
Agdinar kept trying to activate the panel but only saw a frozen image of his right arm.
He wouldn't give up, even as the world—all of it—was vanishing in front of him.
The orange glare shifted, reddened, and then intensified into a deeply purple cast. Even in his state of fading consciousness, Agdinar knew, without words or thoughts, what was happening.
The Great Eye.
It was the Eye of the Watchers as much as their God.
The God of Time, their Chronos had arrived.
Agdinar felt—and as he did, strenuously wondered how he could—an enormous sense of vertigo.
He was hanging in the air, between Heaven and Earth. But he was also in Faith's cabin. He was in neither of those places, or in both at once.
The hand of Chronos was holding the mechanism, quenching the flow of time.
Agdinar could see his arm, suspended near the console. Just his arm.
It was as if his atoms were in a foreland, sitting on a ledge of space-time.
The impossibility of being and not being could not be comprehended by any mind, and it wasn't by what was left of his.
The Great Eye had given him a last moment of life, in between the beats of two instants.
Only one thing could have warranted that gift.
His arm was disappearing, deconstructed into a myriad of sparks, butterflies of light dissolving into the night of time.
But, as his hand finally caught the cold fire and started to dissolve into other worlds, it moved, and its palm contacted the console.
The night turned into the surface of a red sun.
Chapter 60
“We need to keep looking.”
Sarinda was moving ahead of the wavy shadow of Dhern, her sights set in the distance. There were no clocks to measure their moves, not even the ones on the periphery of the suit wearer's vision.
The city was dark and almost dead. Its heart was barely beating.
...We have been trying to find him for three hours.
“They must be somewhere.”
...It is hard to look for them without instruments.
Dhern had been trying to convince Sarinda that, with the Towers damaged by the space-time disturbances, it would be like blind people trying to search the entire city.
“I saw the light, like a column, hitting somewhere near midtown,” Sarinda said, trying and failing to show confidence.
Tysa came back to them on the next corner; she had been exploring the lateral streets. They were now walking north on 6th Avenue, but it might have been a wide street in any other town. Or a city on a sunless planet. The only light was coming from the stars—and their suits’ lights.
At least they didn't have the specter of those grotesque constructions covering the sky. The Watchtowers had returned to the other side of the mirror.
Tysa was standing silent and with her head down, like a diver directing his headlights at the bottom of the sea. “This is pointless,” she said. “The city is empty, like a mausoleum.”
“We will find him,” Sarinda said, “when the sun comes up. When would be that, Dhern?”
...I don't know.
“How can that be?” Tysa said, with anger in each word. “How can you not know the time?”
...There was a shift in time when they blew up...when they activated the elevator.
...I've never seen anything like that...so powerful...we may have...
“May have what?” Tysa said, her questioning mode engaged again. Her face, disfigured by the harsh lighting, had enormous black eyes.
...May have traveled in time...the whole planet.
...Can't explain it better than that.
“We will keep searching,” Sarinda said, “and soon the sun will come up and help us.”
...Perhaps.
“Great,” Tysa said,
“we got the philosopher's model of the talking computer.”
...I'm just trying to stay positive...It is my way.
“I am just teasing you,” Tysa said. “So, stay positive.”
And she was again walking, leaving Sarinda to look at her back.
* * *
They kept their search while the night also kept moving along, sprinkling a powder of light above them. It wasn't clear how much time had passed, or if it was passing; reality seemed to be moving forward with clumsy steps.
“I can see something on my viewer,” Tysa said, as usual walking ahead of Sarinda and her shadow companion.
...I have been trying to tap into the humans' networks...finally got somewhere.
“I don't like when you call us humans,” Sarinda said, just for Dhern.
...I have my reasons.
“It is all right, Sarin,” Tysa said. “He's trying. We need help; and we need to find Agdinar before people come back to the city. They might blame him for all of this; I can't imagine what they'll do to him if he's captured.”
“You're right,” said Sarinda. “But the city is immense; he could be anywhere.”
...Well, maybe not anywhere.
“What do you mean?” Sarinda turned to where the shadow moved, still trying to talk as if to a real person.
...They might not have had time to set a location for transport.
Sarinda was clearly losing patience with Dhern, and she yelled at the ghost, “So, what’s your point?”
...This is just a maybe, but, if the elevator read Agdinar's mind to select the landing spot...
“Yes, the park,” Tysa said, and Sarinda turned to face her. Even the shadow containing Dhern shifted sharply, his version of a double take.
...Yes, he may be in Central...he used to land there all the time.
Sarinda ignored Dhern’s weird sadness and, walking briskly, she moved past Tysa and headed straight north to Central Park.
* * *
It took another hour, but they found him—or rather found what was left of Faith, which might contain what was left of their friend. Sarinda started to sob as soon as she saw the wreckage.