Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 118

by Neil Clarke

  The ship is patient with him for as long as the mission will allow, but when she still doesn’t show, it insists they carry on.

  Crestfallen, Rokri powers up the thrusters, and the flier convulses around him, and carries him up to the Leviathan.

  Just before ejection, he looks down at the city, and wonders briefly what it feels like to die.

  She’s missed him.

  She had reached the back of the crowd just in time to see the little flier shoot upwards, carrying her brother away from her forever, and she collapsed onto the dusty desert floor in sobs, and when she Enlinks in a final plea to say goodbye, she cannot feel him anymore.

  Almost a year later, the Vierendelen receives an encrypted communication from the Leviathan. Nobody can decipher it. Nobody can access it. But, for some reason Sephine cannot fathom, the Vierendelen is convinced it is from Rokri.

  CHAPTER 4/6: GROUNDED

  Several hours pass in peaks and troughs, phantasmagoric. Sephine folds through layers of suffering as the hooks of her wings dissolve one by one, each more painful than the last, each plunging her into paroxysms of agony. Whenever the pain fades it comes back stronger, and she seethes and arches her back and shakes all over, foamed saliva dried into a thick, white crust around her mouth. When the last hooks dissolve Sephine thinks she’s being fooled, cruelly lulled into security before the pain returns.

  But it’s over. She sits up, very slowly, conscious of the dull throb up and down her back. At last, she can focus.

  She is just a few feet from the Leviathan’s encircling edge-wall. She’s tall enough to peer over it, but she’s not sure she has the guts to.

  She chances communicating with the Vierendelen. No response. She half expected this, but all the same is struck by a stark and singular loneliness. She can feel a very faint connection with the ship, but it is nothing more than background noise, static. She wonders if it can hear her, but can’t get through the Leviathan’s comms-blocking signal. It feels alien to have had a voice in her head her whole life, and now have nothing but silence. Her thoughts feel naked somehow.

  And all around her is nothing but silence too—silence, bar a faint wind that brings with it a sharp chill. Her clothes flutter, allowing the wind to creep in through the tears in the fabric to claw at her skin. She doses up on a little adrenaline to keep warm.

  She turns from the edge-wall and looks up at what lies atop the Leviathan.

  Closest to her are two identical structures: square, black towers, perhaps thirty feet high, and both featureless. Though unsure as to why, she remembers some song she heard a long time ago (“Careful what you’re looking at; it might be looking back.”).

  And beyond these towers, there are hundreds more. The entire surface resembles a chaotic military installation, its instruments and structures organized in no discernible system whatsoever—but for some reason, she is reminded more of a city than a military outpost.

  (Her memories of Leseum Blue are vague because she was just six when her parents were called to arms against the Fractured, but she remembers spires of pure white and glass and steel, and immense trees spilling water from their leaves, spuming down an escarpment into the ocean in torrential, elegant rapids, and she remembers the smell of meats and herbs and bakeries from the market towns on the coast, and the blue of the sea, and she remembers riding finned juliprae over the surf with her brother and her father.)

  This city is no city. This city is cold and featureless and black. It smells of nothing. There is no water. Her father is dead; her brother may not be. Sephine holds that thought close as she steps into the city that is no city.

  She pads softly over the cold floor, past structures and buildings and instruments whose function she cannot fathom.

  Enlinking is just possible—but not to the Vierendelen. Instead her neuroweb builds a composite 3D map of the area which she can Enlink to, to better gauge her surroundings. She cannot see under the surface, even in X-ray. She can only imagine as to what is inside, below her.

  The structures on the surface are varied and esoteric. She stands in the shadows of giant spinnakers, pentagonal dishes; walks past pens over whose walls she cannot see; chaotic things that must be machines but are completely dead; black, solid blocks, like the towers she first encountered. She notes that this is a common structure: black-body blocks, all varying in height and thickness. Some touch the clouds above, narrow as flagpoles—others are so broad and so stout she could walk over them. She doesn’t, fearing a trap, and so sticks to the unmarked, likely unintentional roads between the technological miscellany.

  Her neuroweb, scanning these black structures, tells her that all of them are hollow. At one point she walks through an alley between two of the structures, separated by mere feet, and she is sure she can hear a scuttling noise inside them, a buzzing. She thinks of insects.

  Dusk comes with a cold, inexorable hand, and with it moisture to the air. The clouds have sunk in a patch of low pressure, and Sephine’s visibility is reduced to about fifty meters or so. The gaps between the structures become ghostly and animated with the quick mist.

  The silence has become thicker, broken only by the faint ring of tinnitus—probably caused by the noise inside the q-cannon.

  There is only one thought at the forefront of her mind: Where is Rokri? On the surface? Under it? Is he inside one of the black structures?

  Is he alive?

  The nature of her commitment strikes her then. A year. If she’s lucky. A year before she passes over New Leseum again.

  She clears her mind, relaxes herself with a touch of serotonin. And she begins to hum tunelessly. The sound of her humming is dull; there is no echo, no reverb. The clouds absorb it, like they absorb everything else, and suddenly she is reminded of the horror screens she used to watch with her brother on the Vierendelen, before the crash.

  She scares herself and stops humming. And at that moment she is sure she sees something flit between two towers to her right. She stops dead.

  She focuses on the narrow slit between the towers. Her heartbeat is the only thing she can hear. Nothing but mist creeps along beyond the gap.

  You’re being hypersensitive, she tells herself. The mist is playing tricks on you.

  That had to be it: clouds making movements in the gloom.

  She can’t see more than twenty feet now. Structures more distant are just faint, towering ghosts. The feeling of being watched washes over her. Hastily she Enlinks, and confirms there are no life-forms nearby—no biological life-forms, at any rate.

  She cannot combat the sinking feeling in her heart at what that implies: Rokri may not be here after all. Before the fingers of despair begin to throttle her, she presses on, hoping to reach the edge-wall and make camp for the night.

  Night falls swifter than expected. In the dark, she fingers the souped-up stunner clipped to her utility belt. At range it will administer a powerful shock—at point blank the weapon is deadly. She also checks her shelter is still where it’s supposed to be: a hyper-durable tent vacuum-sealed in a tiny, ceramic ball, swinging about her hip from the belt.

  She decides to camp at the edge-wall. Walking in any direction across the Leviathan will bring her to the edge soon enough, and for some reason that seems safer, though she is not sure why. Perhaps if this is all some sort of trap, she can jump before she is killed. Better to go on her own terms than something else’s.

  In the dark, she can’t see any more shapes slip through the gaps. But there is a ghostly glare about the place, a phosphorescence in the mist, and it takes her minute to figure out why.

  The black structures—their edges are glowing. A neon filigree traces bright emerald lines through the mist, conjuring ghostly shapes waltzing in the breeze.

  But there is something else about the towers now. Something she couldn’t see in daylight, but in the dark they stand out proud and frightening.

  Now they have doors.

  Sephine stops her aimless wandering, and stands, biting her nails,
at the foot of the nearest tower.

  The towers must lead downwards. Into the belly of the Leviathan. The glowing outline of the door is both enticing and terrifying at once. Sephine looks at her feet, trying to sum up the courage to enter the tower, and spots something on the ground.

  It’s a crude etching, scratched into the surface. An arrow, a gun. She looks back up at the door.

  “Del?” Hopeless. “Del, please speak to me.”

  She takes a deep, quivering breath, and thumbs the stunner off the safety.

  “Okay,” she whispers. “You can do this.”

  And she reaches out to touch the door.

  There is the oddest sensation in her brain, like inverted goose bumps. The panel makes a snicking noise, and withdraws with a loud hiss. Sephine jumps and takes a step back. A whirring starts beneath her feet. Slowly, the panel sinks into the floor, revealing a room beyond.

  The room is dimly lit and warm. Lining the walls, neatly organized along racks, are row upon row of weapons. There must be over a hundred, all lethal and black and beastly beautiful. There are gaps—perhaps fifteen or so weapons are missing.

  Excited by the prospect of extra protection, she commands her neuroweb to check the weapons’ software—it’s up and running. All the guns are functional. She Enlinks to them, finds their operating manuals.

  These are Fractured weapons; the manuals are in Vavaral, but are easily translated. She downloads them quickly and takes two guns: a plaspistol and a splinter-rifle. Both are light, elegant, easy to fire.

  It occurs to her that it must have been Rokri that scratched the gun and the arrow at the foot of the tower. It’s a legend, a map icon signifying an armory. She’d been too preoccupied watching out for danger to bother scanning her surroundings more carefully.

  The towers must all have different functions. If this tower isn’t a way under the surface, then another must be. And now it should be easy to identify—as long as Rokri was thorough with his mapmaking. Maybe she could find shelter inside. The thought of avoiding camping in the cold, no matter how insulating her tent is, is comforting. And perhaps there’s a control room. A map room. She could learn to control the Leviathan itself, guide it back—

  She’s getting ahead of herself.

  It appears her theory was correct: the Leviathan is a military installation. A surveillance outpost. Obviously a weapon in and of itself, too. But why? What are the Fractured protecting here? And where is the crew? Is it totally unmanned? It is unquestionably a Fractured-built machine—the weapons manuals in Vavaral, the fleets of bladeships and scavenger craft scouting the surface unfettered by the Leviathan confirm it—but what is its true function?

  With a glimmer of hope, Sephine wonders if it is abandoned.

  She hoists the rifle over her shoulder and slots the pistol into her belt, a little positivity growing within her, an impetus. She turns and looks determinedly into the mist, and sees—something. Something floating a little way off. Something like a grainy signal, static and fuzzy. It appears to be growing larger, becoming defined and more clear in the thick fog, and she thinks that it’s something she recognizes, and she feels the color drain from her cheeks when she realizes the ghost floating just feet from her is a face.

  Her face, writhing and warping and gunmental-gray and ill-proportioned but she is looking at herself in the mist and a scream rises like bile in her throat—and the face screams back, its lips peel back and its empty mouth opens to nothing but the mist beyond and the sound is high and keening and thin but loud and those eyes are not eyes but the face is all eyes.

  It’s a swarm, a hive-minded Fractured swarm of tiny drones, each no larger than a knuckle, gathered into a crude, twisted facsimile of her—just her face, floating and dotted with livid-red optical sensors.

  When her scream—and its—dies, Sephine fumbles frantically at her belt, searching for a weapon and praying it’s the plaspistol, and it’s up and pointed at the encroaching swarm in an instant. It’s the stunner. She groans and thumbs it to splash, and as the face opens its terrible mouth and advances even more quickly she fires.

  A wispy blue wave erupts from the muzzle of the stunner, and she watches her face quiver and disintegrate, melting away into a chaotic cloud of tumbling titanium marbles. The swarm collapses. The drones drum the floor like rain.

  Sephine stares at the puddle of machines for a few moments, unable to control her breathing. The stunner is hot in her hand.

  She’s slipping the stunner back onto her belt when one of the drones twitches. Then another.

  Soon the puddle of drones ripples like sheets in the wind, blinking red, and she runs.

  She darts between towers and squeezes through tight alleys, swings around spires and jumps over low black blocks, and every time she looks back the swarm is in pursuit, no matter how many changes of direction, no matter how clever she thought her feints to be. With each corner the swarm disperses, and as it straightens out it consolidates back into that terrifying form, her image in the mist.

  Suddenly Sephine breaks out into an open space, an avenue between dead machines and towering spinnakers. She careens down the avenue. She can hear the swarm buzz close behind her, like a cloud of iron wasps whose hive she has disturbed.

  She takes a sharp, sudden left, completely blind, and hopes she’s lost the swarm, but—

  — Sephine, get down!

  “Wha—”

  —she collides with some dark object, snapping her neck back, and she crumples to the floor with a sickened “Oomph!”.

  She will barely remember later, but just before everything went black, there was a bright blue flash, and a figure appeared, standing over her. She had just one thought, and it seemed to mean nothing, but it went round and round her mind like flies to carrion: How do they know what I look like?

  And above and beyond the figure, she could have sworn she saw a bird, perched on a high tower.

  CHAPTER 5/6: OTHERS

  Awareness, or a glimmer of it. Just noise. Sephine doesn’t know what the noise is, but for some reason the word “bustling” comes to mind, and this scares her because it means she’s not alone, and she tries to open her eyes but they won’t respond so she slips back into—

  Awareness. Real. Sudden. Senses: verdant smell; metallic taste; head throbbing. Wherever she is, it’s warm. This time her eyes work. She feels their lids flutter, sticky with sleep, and she manages to rend them apart. When they open, everything is blurred.

  She blinks a few times, flexes her wrists, stretches her back. She can feel two slender grazes down either side of her spine, and when she stretches they wrinkle, irritating the skin.

  She’s lying on something soft. There’s a pillow under her head.

  She sits up but she’s overcome by dizziness, a headrush so powerful the edges of her vision turn indigo. She lies back again, massaging her temples.

  What happened? The image of her face in the mist comes back to her, the apparition defining itself as it approached, little red optical sensors winking and blinking and threatening. And the scream; that keening, supersonic scream.

  She had run. And she had been stopped. Someone had told her to . . . someone had told her to do something, but it was in her head, her neuroweb, but that’s impossible because she’s so far from the Vierendelen.

  But how far? Where am I?

  She seeps a little adrenaline from her ‘web. Her heart rate increases. It’s safe to sit up again.

  She’s in a room, walled in dull rust-colored metal and lit softly by a handful of little globes that float like bubbles, bobbing gently against one another. There is a single door. She’s lying on a thin mattress in the opposite corner. Sephine looks down at herself and finds her clothes have been changed. That makes her feel embarrassed and scared.

  Her weapons are propped against the wall next to her. Her utility belt lies neatly on the floor.

  There’s a terminal screen on the wall across from her. At first glance it looks switched off, but there’s a lit
tle flashing cursor in the top corner awaiting input.

  The vegetable smell is coming from a pot near her bed. An incandescent circle built into the floor is cooking some kind of broth. Sephine’s mouth waters so fast her jaw aches.

  She tries Enlinking to her map, but it feels just out of reach, like punching in a dream. There’s a murmuring, a dull thrum all around her.

  She doesn’t feel alone.

  At that thought the door groans open. Sephine scrambles back against the wall. Her hand goes to the grip on the stunner, and it’s up and in front of her in one swift movement, switched to beam.

  A man enters and closes the door, and turns to face her. His hands go up.

  The moment she recognizes him, she scrambles to her feet and flings her arms around her brother, sobbing into his shoulder.

  Rokri has aged. His eyes are tired. He’s unshaven. But he’s bigger than she remembers, with powerful arms and shoulders, his chest defined and visible through the open collar of a baggy shirt.

  Once she calms down, she asks him how he survived.

  “The construct’s uninhabited, except for Fractured,” he says distractedly. “Most are pretty easy to destroy.”

  Construct?

  “I . . . ” she hesitates, wondering where to begin. She has so many questions. “For so long I thought you were dead.”

  He’s sat at the terminal screen. Pinpoint beams from the wall project a keyboard onto the surface of the narrow desk underneath. His fingers thud rapidly against it. The keyboard is in Vavaral.

  “Rokri?” She goes to the screen and tries to get him to look at her, but he’s immersed in . . . whatever he’s doing. “Rokri, what’s the matter?”

  He just keeps typing.

  “Rokri, look at me. Listen to me!”

  He slams his fist onto the desk and roars, sweeping a half-filled bowl from the desk that shatters against the door. Sephine jumps and stands back as Rokri rises from his seat, breathing hard.

  “No!” he shouts. “No, no, no! Ruined! Everything ruined!” He puts his head in his hands.

  “Rokri, what . . . what’s happened? What’s ruined?” Sephine speaks softer this time, sympathetic.