Andrea Cort 03: War of the Marionettes

by Castro, Adam-Troy

  Ricard and Liezel fain would have to consider this basic equipment but why not in their lab why this far underground in such absolute darkness even if with every second I could see that this wasn’t absolute darkness at all my eyes had begun to adjust to whatever passed for light here I could make out an almost imperceptible green tint a raised platform of some kind a short distance away a tangle of strange serpentine objects on top of it things some of them Villani passing by on arcane errands it was more the impression of sight than actual sight but it was something and I supposed that I should be grateful that there wasn’t more after all those hours of pitch blackness lit chamber would have been blinding I could only hope that more light was coming and that this was meant to acclimate me I needed to see something anything my injuries aside I was suffering a case of sensory deprivation as bad as any I’d ever known outside of holding cells then somebody just in front of me said Andrea the voice was human the character alien product of a throat unaccustomed to human speech I had just enough time to recoil when a pair of whips warmer and more like human flesh than what I’d felt from Vani brushed my arms I slept I’m out of reflex and they pulled back the voice returned so close that I could feel its owners breath on my face Andrea the next touch I felt was a human hand groping my breast through the bloodied fabric of my shirt with everything else that was happening in this place I didn’t need a grubby little Mullis station on top of everything else I was in no fucking mood for it I lashed out and punched what felt like a very human jaw taking excessive satisfaction in the grunt of pain when I pulled back my knuckles were wet not with blood but with what I supposed to be a generous coating of saliva great on top of everything else we now shared these accommodations with a drooling idiot who thought we’d been provided to him as gifts Fox yes watch out there’s some kind of cave dweller in here with us a horny one a pause noted there were advantages and being trapped with a woman whose emotions had been severed I didn’t have to deal with her panic or have it feed mine another touch of those feathery limbs Andrea great he was back that’s me all right who the hell are you what followed had the character of a throat clearing I don’t understand saliva spray tickled my cheeks it sounded like a series of unconnected sounds but there was a desperation to it the unmistakable impression of an intended meaning II II I don’t know where my sudden burst of clarity came from but I remembered a name I’d heard recently the name of an individual I’d supposed dead Cory Cory Thane a little breathless sigh followed by another touch of those whips I could now make out his head cocked in response to the sound of his own name it was an elongated oval topped with a thatch of uncombed and likely matted hair he touched my breast again giving it a painful squeeze but the contact was fleeting and was not repeated the idle curiosity of a boy gone feral who might not have known I remembered what was considered polite and what was not he made a sound that was half gaggle half sob and scrambled off this was not encouraging news about how long we might expect to stay if we were still here a few years from now crawling through darkness and eating only whatever we could find or whatever the Villani chose to feed us I’d probably have trouble saying my own name too except that I didn’t believe it that didn’t explain the industrial floor or those feathery whips or the drilling noises or the green light still rising still investing the vague shapes around us with form or character I whirled too fast desperate for any detail capable of filling in the last puzzle piece and almost toppled from dizziness another voice older smoother male the egg bubbling spod mmm Cory

  Andrea chip puck her shapes Murr these were more stabs at sense I recognise Kakori and Andrea and was willing to venture chip Pok as a probable attempt at should puck but I sensed no unifying thought it was much different from the impression I’d received listening to those partial translations of Lani dance there was meaning there even if it was a meaning I could only put together as nonsensical shards these sounds felt more like the degraded remnants floating in a sea of what was otherwise gibberish distorted by madness still if an adult male was present and I’d already met Cory I could lay even odds that I knew his identity Ricard Ricard Thane damnit am I talking to Ricard feign laughter lunatic laughter followed by a bubbly mocking thing this was enough to make me long for the clarity of conversation with Avalon II I heard a clicking sound realized it was the chattering of my own teeth and forced my jaws shut with a savagery that almost ground them to powder

  to hell with panic I was too weak for my body to process panic if I wasn’t going to get answers by asking questions I’d have to find another way the green light had become bright enough to lend a certain clarity to our surroundings if not to the speech of our fellow inmates I crawled toward the raised shapes groping toward them with one blind hand as I used the other to pull myself forward my head throbbed the floor continued to blow cold air at me chilling my legs right through the fabric of my suit my cheeks were slick with sweat but my throat felt clogged with sand more than once I found myself frozen in mid-step having greyed out from the effort of movement I cursed my condition took a deep breath and did the only thing I could which was try again the increasingly intense green light helped by the time I was within an arm’s length of the object in front of me I’d been able to recognize it as a work surface of some kind stretching far to my left and right the tangle of serpentine objects atop it were the coils of prosthetic whips I used the table to pull myself to a standing position Fox how are your eyes she must have obeyed my command to stay in place do you want me to come to you please something passed by on the other side of the work station a shape that resembled a human being from the neck up but was just too bewildering assortment of abstracts below this was not the compromise between the human and Villani forms that defined the dance pilgrims I had seen most of those followed the same general outline of a human being with certain alterations to their proportions and to the number and arrangement and length of limbs this one hurt my eyes the bald head sat on something that was not a torso that glistened and folded in on itself and moved by reinventing itself into new shapes green light shone through where its torso should be it said Andrea and this time the voice was the voice of a woman if I’d already MetroCard and Corre that left the remaining member of the family Liesl Liesl Fane is that Liesl Fane but she had moved beyond my reach I heard another of those meaningless screams another interval of drilling and the sudden sharp retort of a solid object being driven into a hard surface had bit back an acid taste in the back of my throat closed my eyes against the terrible images my mind insisted on conjuring

  and almost left out of my skin when a hand is cold as the grave touched the back of my neck it’s me Fox said cold as the grave my ass crawling along the floor my hands were ice too don’t you fucking dare to that again she did not apologize what do you need your objectivity the shape I’d spotted before moved by on the other side of the platform once again occluding the green light from behind it except for the head which I now saw in profile and which had the delicate nose and lips of the young wife and mother Lisl fain had been nothing about it looked even close to human parts of the tangled mess beneath its neck glistened like open wounds other parts reflected the light like Vani chitin there was nothing but empty space below what correspondent to its ribcage it was being swung around on a metallic boom of some kind suspended from some unseen ceiling high above us as it passed by the head turned toward us its face caught the growing light and I saw right through the dilated pupil and the glowing vitreous fluid to the emptiness of the back of the eye Andreea fact court it said and was gone Fox didn’t waste breath on the observation that these people knew me she was too busy examining the tangle of whips on the platform before us these are prosthetics are they building Vani Fulani parts maybe maybe if we move farther down the line we can see what’s happening there was no particular reason to choose going right over going left or vice versa since Fox stood to my right and I could need her help at any time we moved in that direction stopping only to listen when the intermittent industrial noises around us gave way
to another scream or bursts of incomprehensible gibberish ten paces down we found a set of metallic Halsey’s each as flexible as paper ten paces beyond that a stack of silvery disks ten paces beyond that an array of what looked like wands all triangular in cross-section and also sharp at their vertices that a mere touch drew blood from my fingertip I could not figure out how to pick one up without cutting the crap out of myself and could not figure out why I’d want to this was no good a trained Excel lingua prosthetist might be able to make sense of what we were seeing

  but it’s laymen without expertise we were in the dark in more ways than one the Lisl thing drifted by again the abstract shapes beneath its neck glittering with a reflected green light this time the shifting Emerald patterns afforded us a better look at her features she had high cheekbones a button nose in full lips all is unmoved by emotion as a porcelain dolls her coiled arms extended dropped a pair of glistening rods among the assortment of tools and seized another before the mechanism that bore her swept her into the distance from somewhere off in that direction came the sound of a weak bubbling sob after her I said Fox hesitated is that wise I don’t have the slightest clue but staying here isn’t helpful

  another hesitation yes tracking the Lisl thing required us to scramble over the work surface a maneuver that would have been ridiculously easy at any other time but which took a lot out of me now Terra had to climb over first creating an ear jangling cacophony as her passage spilled several dozen spare parts to the floor then she reached over and assisted me the operation took almost two minutes and left me covered with fresh sweat twice during it I forgot who she was and called her Skye by the time I’d cleared the platform I was exhausted and had to take a rest so my head would stop spinning we crawled on hands and knees to avoid the uncertainty of standing the industrial noise is growing closer with every shuffle forward goosebumps rising on my flesh from the cool breeze coming through the floor the light continued to improve I could make out movement all around us the Skye took on the character of a boiling see highlighted in shards of green light it was only because my first glimpse of the pact Villani amphitheater had also reminded me of an Ocean that I was able to identify the site as hundreds or maybe thousands of Lani clinging to some cave sealing their whips undulating in what might have been their equivalent of furious conversation our view of it was eclipsed by long black lines arranged in a grid pattern with regular intersections at 90-degree angles I didn’t know what that was until the Lisl thing zipped by us at high speed and I tracked the boom that carried her to its anchor point along one of the tracks we stopped long enough to determine the Lisl things trajectory when it came sipping past us again this time carrying one of the helix shapes in its own serpentine limbs the grid above us made it easier to proceed in a straight line without requiring the Lisl things passages for regular course corrections we crawled speaking only when we had to resorting to whispers that struck me as ludicrous since the things that shared this place with us already knew where we were by the time we traveled another 50 meters we could make out another platform fussed over by a distorted once human form dangling from another boom the light was all behind it and so we didn’t make out the array of limbless Villani young until we were almost upon them there were dozens of them all smooth in outline as the eggs they resembled all cradled by braces that connected to silver rings around their midsections a few had prosthetic limbs too small to permit location embedded in their chitin exoskeletons those whips undulated nonstop waving in what may have been anything from a friendly hello to an angry warning to stay away there was no sense of coordinated activity like I’d seen in my all too brief glimpse of the ballet these were closer to frenzies than the

  dances normal Villani communication I wondered if they made sense by vani standards or if the sounds they made were is broken and has divorced from their kinds version of communication that’s what I’d heard from the three wants human figures I believed to be the feigns the Villani eggs were spaced wide apart with more than enough space between them for the two of us to pass them if we wanted to their prosthetic whips were so short that there was no possibility of any of them grabbing me and it wasn’t worth worrying about in any event since there was no place in this entire chamber where I’d be safe from that if the Villani who had brought us here decided to take us lisl’s distorted voice said Chuck followed by some outright gibberish somewhere up ahead of us beside me Fox said the boy is following us I’d almost forgotten about him I looked back and saw a vague green outline brighter than a darkness around it that resembled the shape of an unaltered human boy as much as an abstract sculpture of a man resembles the physiology of the anatomy books are you sure yes despite his demonstrated grab eNOS I had nothing but instinct behind the suspicion that the boy might not be any more dangerous than anything else in this mad place but I didn’t like the idea of anything following us in the dark keep an eye out for him yes tracked by

  the boy we crawled through the space between the black shapes me leading and Fox bringing up the rear the whips waggled at us dancing volumes in a language neither of us could understand I got more out of it than I should have a sense of loss of despair even if anger at our intrusion the sounds of drilling and nonsensical babbling and Villani whips scratching against rock continued I tasted acid swallowed it and moved on then we approached one egg with no prosthetic whips that instead sported a prominent silver ROM affixed to its chiton with bolts and it showed us by vivid demonstration that it was the source of the inhuman screaming it’s shriek was a prolonged high-pitched wail female in tone but inhuman and character this close it was like a spike driven into my ears what followed stunned me afresh by being so controlled it was almost urbane or as close as hamsa mercantile can come to being urbane hello Andrea my own thought process was so sludgy that it took me a second to realize that the voice had come from the egg you can talk yes it said and then screamed again a piercing wail that made my ears pop and my eyes a blurry protest of Tears then it explained itself in a more conversational tone new voice Andrea testing I can hear that testing it repeated new voice human voice not danced mute crippled heretic but gift voice speech I’d already had an experience that approached conversation with of Loni when that one I’d met on the first day waggled it slims at me and hammer Smith’s harness provided its own fragmentary translation but this was something else these sounds came from the Villani itself emerging from its own mouth or at least implanted synthesizer and proceeding directly to sense without any obvious intermediary whatever else the thanes had done out of malice or misguided ideals their accomplishment here could only be described as revolutionary I had other things to worry about and I wasn’t one of the many sentient who spent years living and breathing the problem of communication with this species but even I found myself trembling at the implications so they really did it it astonished me further by releasing three exhalation sounds one after another in a cadence that matched uncontrollable laughter there was no mirth in it just mimicry imitation of a human behavior it seemed to understand but not persuasively share not alone then it screamed again not out of pain or fear but out of seeming exuberance of the sound not alone it said afterward what do you mean that they didn’t do it alone or that you aren’t the only one they’ve done it to both it said and then it screamed again I had once known a toddler a child of an unpleasant dip core functionary who had brought a little bastard to the office who had also shown this kind of enthusiasm at his own annoyance value and I’d only thought that if the kid could not be civilized his parents could only be praised for selling him on the open market as Kison Houghton food this noise was cutting my skull in half I swayed looked around for Fox and discovered that she’d crawled a little bit farther on passed yet another collection of lonny eggs she had frozen at the sight of something beyond them irritated at her from leaving me behind when I needed her I shuffled across the cold smooth floor none of the other Vlade young screamed at me but all had had more radical work done on them some had large sections of chitin missing expos
ing the soft moist meats underneath some had silver memory disks embedded in their chitin a few were limbless only because the whips that had started to sprout from their heads had been broken off or amputated visible now only as cauterized stumps there was too much to process so the details just washed over me for the moment I had eyes for nothing but Fox the only familiar thing in a place where the rules seemed to change with every step I didn’t see what she had found until I was almost upon her and by then the light had improved enough for us to see the look on Addison and by then the light had improved enough for us see the look on a dismembered woman’s face she lay flat on her back in the centre of a raised platform that would have accommodated the span of extended arms and legs had her limbs been left to her she was no mere quadruple amputee as even her torso was foreshortened her midriff sealed above what would have been her pelvis her remaining half was sealed with a black plate that resembled Villani chitin bonded to her recognizable human flesh in a jagged sawtooth pattern that made the cap look a little bit like a terrible mouth devouring her whole her shoulders ended it’s similar Black Caps rounding off anything that might have resembled the stump of an amputated arm as her genitals were among her missing parts only her tiny breasts and tiny frame made her look more female than surgical neuter that and what would have been a cute face with round cheeks button nose and high forehead her hair and eyebrows were missing which added to the inhuman quality of her altered appearance as did a pair of strange marks on her cheeks I first took them to be shadows but then realized they were red chevron tattoos like the ones I’d seen on Pavel Ania her eyes were red from crying the tracks of a recent sobbing jag listening in the chambers minimal reserves of light - I know you she asked in a voice hoarse from what might have been too many hours spent screaming the boom carrying the thing that had been Lisl feign glided by about ten paces away while another carrying the thing that had been Ricard fain moved by in a perpendicular direction