Andrea Cort 03: War of the Marionettes

by Castro, Adam-Troy

  CHAPTER 13

  Taken

  Skyee Porrinyard was on fire it burned at

  her center and it burned down her wounded legs and it burned in the amputated places where she should have felt should have been her friend and lover and self Ocean not knowing where he was not knowing what he was doing hurt her more than this sudden return of all sensation to a body that had been for all intents and purposes so close to death that the actual moment of passage might as well have been behind her instead of ahead she did not think Ocean was dead because she could still call on the memories he had brought to their union could still feel them as her own not as stories told by another she could still remember standing to piss the singlet he’d been when he was falling in love with the singlet who had not yet become Skye even what it had been to experience their lovemaking only from the perspective of the one contributing the penis Ocean as he’d been as a singlet and as half of the porn yard Gestalt was still an open book to her but Ocean as he was now a state that included his whereabouts and his health and safety was hidden from her he had not been severed but he was gone she could not see where she was either she heard all over not just in her wounded places but in the connective tissue between them fire ravaged her veins tiny teeth chewed on her muscles tunneled through her bones she wanted to scream but her mouth was full of something fuzzy something that buzzed and arrived and tore bloody gouges and her tongue as it explored the limits of her cage don’t be afraid it was an AI source voice but not the voice the Porrinyard s knew the one that sometimes spoke to them through their internal link Skye blinked struggle to focus and saw its source a black ovoid hovering over her studded with what looked like thousands of needle-like projections that narrowed to invisibility as they approached and she presumed entered her stomach the skin of her torso had all been peeled back and she could see her bloody diaphragm pulsing black dots like insects marching in and out of the wound flaring like fire it hurts we know your enhancement offers you many advantages but tolerance for this particular medical procedure is not among them stop the alternative is to allow you to die since you need to be awake for the procedure you will just have to bear with us and accept the pain while we reboot your damaged - nervous system take comfort in the knowledge that we have shielded your other half from this sensation otherwise this would be much worse feeling the special kind of frustration that is only possible in interactions with creatures who know everything and can do anything but who steadfastly refused to help Skyee grimaced and moaned and focused past the darkness and for the first time registered her surroundings an underground dimly lit place lined with figures who seemed to be in as much pain as she was some lay on flat metallic surfaces and others seemed to hang unsupported from the walls and a few floated in fuzzy black clouds their skin peeled back their insides knitting and recombining even asked I watched many were being attended by more a I source surgeons one was the Thar see writhing Beneatha whirring something that seemed to be all knives slicing into her to speed even Skyee’s enhanced eyes were not Swift enough to follow she also spotted a few

  unhurt sentient of different species among them both human and reorg all wandering the empty spaces between the wounded speaking a few soft words to each before moving on to the next one turned toward her met her eyes and then looked away it was ambassador her puff Skye forced out a question what is this place it is a repair shop one of many we have established at various strategic locations around Valon she grimaced what kind of repair shop you did follow the councillors deduction that the Villani ballet is our project and that the dance pilgrims are ours as well yes then you appreciate that although the dance pilgrims are identified recruited and given their various surgeries elsewhere it would be most irresponsible and inhumane for us to then just send them here and then abandon them to their fates without offering anything in the way of support services a number of our families have unfortunately been attacked and destroyed by the opposing forces over the last day or so but many more are well guarded and are still as you would say open for business this one is more prepared to deal with your own injuries Skyee found no comfort in the purple blanched blackness she found when she closed her eyes so she opened them again and this time focused on her puffs who had been regarding her again it was of course impossible to read him reaaargh all don’t have facial expressions capable of communicating concern or fear or defiance but she thought she detected an apology of sorts in the way he dipped his head the pain flared again she went insane for a little while especially when her link flickered and she caught a momentary sense impression of Ocean struggling in the grip of lonnie whips that had seized his wrists and ankles then that went away and she gasped and fought her way back to rationality and managed a wand I don’t understand you call this place secret the term is relative of course these facilities would not be of much use if they were unknown to their intended clients I get that Skyey gasped the words hurting her so much that she retreated back to the relative ease of sub vocalized speech but I also saw her path why is he here what does he know about this place were it possible for an ancient software intelligence to pluck the AI source avatar speaking to her right now might of as it was Skye detected sorrow pity and even a little amusement at her own naivete she realized that the thing considered her ignorant of the facts of life here downright cute he’s always known Skye the rear gone government has known of our involvement since the beginning meanwhile the day cooled down the residual warmth cut by a breeze cold enough to establish that the temperature would dip pretty far at night the minty scent in the air was strong enough to make my nostrils tingle I looked around an automatic measure against any Villani that might be lurking nearby but the trees were so thick outside the perimeter of the feign encampment that everything more than a couple of hundred meters away merged into a flat back drop of brown and orange and green there might have been thousands of hostels just outside the range of visibility waiting for the right moment to swarm us on mass I could only hope there were none I crawled out from under the counter slapped my hands together to clear away the grime and picked up the prosthetic whip again turning it over and over in my hands as if in search of the one angle that would bring it into perfect focus pavel Ania watched her expression troubled as a fundamental inconsistency nagged at her then the words burst from her in a single explosive breath it’s clean correct I said isn’t it interesting that it hasn’t picked up its own thick coating of organic crap like everything else in sight is this really an authentic relic or is it a prop here to guide us Pavel Ania followed the thought to the only place it could have gone who would have the time to play such games I grimaced welcome to my life I turned my attention to the mound of wreckage of the collapsed ceiling i know’d it with a toe to test its ability to support my weight it shifted even under that light touch but it was all there was so I stepped up wrote out a queasy crunching moment and stabilized leaning over to peer at the l-shaped rooms one intact wing there was nothing there that merited additional investigation just more bare countertops and looted cabinetry the doors hanging open to reveal shelves that now bore nothing but history and empty space with the windows sealed behind sliding shutters this half of the lab felt even more like a sealed coffin than the half that the roof collapse had left exposed to the elements with the light outside failing this would soon be the first part of the building to know true darkness but I took a deep breath and vaulted over anyway

  raising a cloud of Filth and dust as I landed on the no doubt once pristine flooring Andrea it was Ocean what do you think you’re doing stay where you are I’m checking something out I knelt beside the mound and lowered my head as close to the floor as I could there was a deeper blackness beneath it shadowed by an overhanging formed by two sections of roof braced by a section of metal piping I looked around found a fist-sized piece of debris and slid it into the hole the sound it made as it disappeared into the dark changed a fraction of a second before the clunk of its collision against the back of the dark place change from the sound of somethi
ng sliding across tile to something sliding across metal there’s something here ten minutes of heavy lifting later we’d cleared away the debris dumped it outside or against the walls and now stood looking down at a silvery metal plate inlaid into the flooring centered beneath the gaping hole in the roof it was a perfect square 2 meters across on the diagonal there were no obvious hinges or sliding tracks no indication that it was what I’d hoped it would be namely a hatch opening into some hidden revelatory shaft or cellar it’s only features were three thin shallow slits arranged at what would have been the three vertices of an equilateral triangle we stood there in silence surrounded by the gathering darkness not feeling at all enlightened by the discovery of this secret object that seemed to reveal nothing then Ocean said it’s a base what it looks like the thanes reinforced this section of flooring in order to accommodate this plate as the foundation for some large object those three indentations you’re looking at would be the anchor points of a tripod intended to support whatever it was a convenient distance off the floor while maximizing its structural stability from what you see would you suppose it part of the original flooring or something that was built later later I think had the thanes needed a plate like this from day one they’d have designed the entire building around it this looks like they had tile in place and cut it away at some later date so late in fact that the floor plan of their lab was already well-established and they had to do some pretty serious retrofitting just to accommodate it uh-huh I clasped my arms over my breasts and brought up the right to scratch my chin as I circled the plate searching for the magical angle that would explain everything any theories something heavy something large and unwieldy or he shrugged something that needed to be held in place or all three I said possibly pocket Alinea nudged the plate with her foot then withdrew as if afraid of receiving an electric shock if she ever dared to stand on it why are we even assuming that it’s something we need to care about I remained on my knees rubbing the metal in a circle as if willing it to tell me more than it was saying the answer felt frustratingly close as familiar and as elusive as the name behind the face of a friend long forgotten but the metal itself would not provide it so I looked at the filthy walls the litter strewn floors at the purpling Skye sprouting its first stars behind the hole in the cratered ceiling I closed my eyes shutting out my companions my concern over the one now lost to us the approaching night and the much deeper darkness that I’d been told loomed for all human civilizations I put aside everything but the minor problem at hand eliminated all the false starts of the last few minutes and secreted myself in the one place where I had always been at my best inside my own head after a moment I said what if we attack this from a different angle not what it was but where it was meaning well look around us why don’t you instead of being tucked away in a corner our unknown object occupied a spot at the intersection of this building’s two wings in a space equidistant from its walls its very location in this room and in this compound testified that it needed to be here in the middle of everything

  in close proximity to all their tools and instruments add that to the clear evidence of our eyes that it was directly underneath the spot where the roof decided it had to collapse and I can feel pretty confident in concluding that this was something we very much do need to care about because it was not just something that helped them with their research but something central to their research maybe even once it was here the main focus of their research three sets of eyes stared down at me each uncomprehending at a different measure Ocean didn’t get it but knew me well enough to understand that I did his look on a face more wan than any I’d ever seen on him was half pride in me for putting it together and half resignation over the arrogance I didn’t seem able to turn off Fox was as much a blank slate as ever but the cold serenity of her appraisal had taken on a fresh aspect one that now seemed to measure me as potential enemy and then there was pavel Ania angry frustrated aware of the stakes but just as upset over not knowing sometimes it’s hard not to feel frustrated with other people and their failure to understand come on remember who these people were and what they were on vlad to do this didn’t hold a piece of equipment it held their patient it was the very nature of chitta park’s great crime sentient beings are not specimens you don’t deprive them of their freedom just because you want to study them you don’t steal them from their families their tribes their social groups or their civilizations you don’t take them into your scientific facilities and you don’t perform experiments on them you just don’t now granted not every sentient race had always been finicky on this one moral point humanity had been not even on the homeworld not knowing any better or at least not letting ourselves know any better we’ve made property of our kind and zoo animals of both the sentience and near sentience who had for a time shared that doomed sphere with us a number of other races including the Kison Halton in the rear gone themselves had similar transgressions in their own history the AI source were widely known to have recently committed the sin themselves by the simple expedient of creating their own sentience aboard the habitat known as one one one there was even some evidence from our past distant and unpersuasive and still little more than a nun confirmed conspiracy theory that somebody had once made a regular habit of visiting a pre diaspora humanity and abducting random people of no particular importance before returning them with confused memories and sore rectums and stories that the other humans of the time would have had to be total idiots to believe but the rear goal had decided at one point that they were going to draw the line they wanted a reputation for good behavior among the other races they wanted to be the ones who set the example and so they put the law on their books thou shalt not take unauthorized possession of members of any other sentient species as laws went it was not entirely without loopholes once all possible due diligence was taken into account nobody was ever going to be punished for an honest tragic mistake no rear Gong was ever going to be executed for choosing one real-life embarrassing example at random harvesting some kind of malodorous alien moss and using it to ferment a popular beverage until somebody reexamined the old data and discovered that the stuff had been equipped with higher intelligence and a chemical language that it had been using to tell its exploiters how deeply it resented the process but that didn’t happen to the rear goe that happened to us it was one of the many sins of the baitul hein munitions corporation and it’s a longer story than I have patient to tell the rear goal were also after all the people known for adopting and raising orphaned human beings but that was considered different they didn’t steal human children they took in human children who came to them through legal channels children like Tupac and Pavel Ania and one I’d met a year ago named park boy that was an act of compassion and mercy it was a far cry from ever taking a human child by force or deciding that they had the right to overrule what its own species had in mind for that child and a far cry from what Tupac had done when acting out of what I imagined to have been nothing but well-meaning concern for the life of an innocent she brought the thanes an egg that the Villani had marked for destruction her motives were simple admirable even especially if she had realized upon doing it that it would make her a pariah among the people who had raised her Ocean is that what we’re looking at kneeling over the plate measuring it with his eyes he said I think so

  how it would be easy he figured out the practical challenges as he went along using his hands to point to the various features of the hypothetical unseen artifact the three legs rooted here here and here would have had to converge on a circular brace of some kind something capable of holding a large spherical object motionless at a convenient height there wouldn’t be a bowl or any other basket because the whole point would be to maximize the accessible surface area a simple ring narrower than the spheres full diameter would have sufficed a few rollers on the interior and they would even be able to spin their patient like a globe depending on what parts they wanted to work on depending on how much of the process was automated and how much needed to supervise any machines
they had the sphere shape of their patient would have allowed them to perform a number of different operations at the same time entering its body from different angles without any one procedure interfering with the others taking place at what I suppose we could call other latitudes and longitudes Pavel Ania had turned her back on us strode to the nearest wall and stood there staring at it her shoulders shaking you said several procedures at once theoretically potion said I don’t know what they would entail she curled one hand into a fist and made a show of pounding the wall each impact resonating like a slap but not yet powerful enough to qualify as a punch it was coming though the rage courting her muscles the anger she seemed to be fighting as much as she fought the implications that caused it was as much a presence in the room as the rest of us we are talking about unauthorized medical procedures on a Vani child I blinked yes a child she repeated almost spitting the word that they had no means to communicate with that couldn’t tell them when it was hurting or when it needed them to stop a child with a neurological system they didn’t understand with pain management problems they could only guess at that’s what it looks like and should to puck this is the child she brought them Pavel Ania held her furious stare for several heartbeats then drew back and punched the wall with her bare fists not once not twice but half a dozen times by the third punch she left bloodstains I manured to horror having experienced so much of it in my short life but even I found myself so paralyzed by the sight but I could only remain kneeling where I was my own hands rising to my mouth in reflexive denial but Ocean saw an Ocean acted he crossed the room in four steps and seized pocketful Ania by the wrists arresting herself punishment with an ease that would have astonished anyone who did not know how strong he was she struggled for a second or two then seemed to realize it was useless and went limp weeping curses and some rear gaunt tongue the ferocity of her sense of personal betrayal of revulsion that somebody she’d known and cared for could have been capable of such a thing stunned me it was as alien to me as the Villani as beyond me as the AI source in every friendship I’d ever had a narrow field that included the Porrinyards and maybe one or two others I’d always been the one who had done something horrible I’d been the one with the blood on her hands the one who was still capable of vile behavior the one whose cold and calculating nature was still capable of stunning those who knew her best I’d never had my faith shattered because I’d always been so slow to for many that it was next to unheard of for anybody to earn enough for its betrayal to mean anything no all I’d ever felt when I found out that someone I knew had lived down to my worst expectations was a grim sense of personal vindication Pawel Aeneas horror which included palpable disgust at herself for failing to see what now seemed obvious was something entirely new to me something that gave me a flash of what dealing with me must have been like I was still dealing with that slack-jawed from the sheer vertigo of it unable to come up with anything as useful to the moment as Ocean’s strong arms or murmured assurances to Pavel Ania that she could not have known when Tara Fox the void at the center of this emotional Maelstrom said look out she was looking up at the time her profile a placid Crescent catching the last of the daylight filtering through the hole in the ceiling I followed her gaze upward and for one ridiculous disorienting moment thought I saw an orrery one of those solar system models which feature planets circling their Suns on orbits constructed of wire there were a number of planets up there all looming close all glowing red like fire all bobbing in a tangle of loops that testified to orbital paths turned chaotic and insane it took half a second which was far too much to realize that the planets I saw were a half-dozen Villani heads in close proximity to one another and that their red color was the sunset captured in reflective chiton there was not enough time left to wonder whether these were the ones who had helped us against El Divi or hostel’s who had invaded their territory then their whips came down like a thicket of snakes