Andrea Cort 03: War of the Marionettes

by Castro, Adam-Troy

  when I’m done with them Skye was lost I don’t know how to prove this to you sir and I can’t imagine why you’d even want to listen to me after what I’ve done but you need to tell the Bombers to pull back to the outer system and stay neutral no matter what happens here fuck you I’m protecting children she overrode him with the simple truth you’re protecting your hatred sir I don’t know if you came by it on your own or picked it up secondhand but nothing good will come of allowing this strike you need to let it go but his distrust allowed for no possible point of connection in the instant before he turned away and began heading back toward his skimmer she weighed that look and knew that no argument no persuasion no evidence of his own eyes would have stopped him anything forgiving in him had withered and died years ago two shadowed by the anger that ruled him to survive the drought in his cold and inhospitable heart maybe if this hadn’t already come to a head maybe if he’d been confronted and reasoned with before the ballet went wrong and before flan became a charnel-house that would already be linked forever with his administration maybe if he hadn’t spent years living on a world he hated knowing of the fleet he could call in at any time

  maybe all tragedies in the making come down to maybe her paw was a diplomat himself so he gave it one last try striding past Skye on his Tripoli segmented legs and cutting off Croix before he could reach his skimmer get out of my way Kreutz said there’s a proven test for sanity sir it involves being willing to reconsider your position when everybody around you tells you it’s mad I said you don’t have to agree but you do have to listen your predecessor indeed you did what you are about to do he ignored all the advice he was given it didn’t help him that I’d impune his character and called him an idiot but he earned the name I’d given him and more by doing everything he could to make a bad situation worse thirty of his people died because he pursued a policy everybody told him would lead to disaster the danger that you’ll make this tragedy greater than it has to be Dwarfs his by multiple orders of magnitude I promise you whatever anybody says now whatever the provocation you believe you’ve endured an open attack on the sentience of this planet will turn all the other species against yours and endanger all of humanity Croy glared at his rear gaunt counterpart his tiny eyes blinking in fury their bugs for Judas sake bugs who just killed your people as well as mine sentient creatures her path countered respected as such by every race that has ever encountered them even held in a certain degree of all sentient creatures who appear to be deranged for some reason not within their power a clear and present danger to those people down there a danger her path said that the representatives of those people have just accepted in front of witnesses call in a military strike and I promise you that the retribution will come it will mean the end of you ultimately all of you for a heartbeat Freud seemed to weigh the case that had been placed before him was that a threat Skye said it’s a warning sir you have to step back and let this play out Croy glared at her his eyes bulging his cheeks gleaming with sweat and then for just one moment a moment Skye could isolate he weakened it was one of those moments too rare in life when a fanatics iron veneer cracks and reveals the tormented form of the soul underneath a soul that she could tell had been broken on its own rack many years earlier by torment she could only guess at Freud was afraid he’d always been afraid and for just this second he was considering the possibility that he might be wrong then something else peered out through the crack something so shadowy and so fleeting that Skye might have imagined it something so buried that even cried himself might not have known it was there

  darkness crawling to the future it wanted I’m sorry he said I’m ordering them into position sir I’ve heard what you had to say and I’m taking it into account I’m ordering a force of inner atmosphere bombers to fly a circular surveillance pattern over the city they won’t start firing unless the Villani charged but if the fight starts I’ll have to give them full authority to finish it that’s not good enough

  Skye implored him you commit an unforgivable breach the second you order military forces into this atmosphere cried Lord his head shutting out all further attempts at persuasion as he placed his hand on her paws chest and gently assured the rear goal aside her path surprised Skye by letting him go offering nothing but an impotent shake of his head as his human counterpart walked away from him a shaken Clifford Dunbar who seemed to have taken their warnings more seriously than Kroy could offered her paw at Skye an apologetic shrug the kind that comes from underlings who know that their leaders are mad but who consider themselves pledged to follow off the edge of then he turned to follow the ambassador Petra who seemed even more dazed but just as reluctant to defy her superior followed behind a second later as did the others only Hammersmith lingered as if wanting to say something else Skyee said yes he spread his hands I believe you Skyee I even agree with you then stop him Skyee said don’t let him order those bombers down how by killing him with my bare hands why don’t you I haven’t known you for all that long but I get the idea that you could if you wanted to Skyee did know about 23 separate ways she could leave croix to cooling corpse in less time than it would take his forebrain to register her first sudden movement alongside Ocean she’d suffered no qualms over using those skills when the lives of people under their protection were in immediate danger she knew she should feel no qualms about using them against Kroy now but cried hadn’t committed his fatal sin yet and stopping him before he did meant crossing the line from bodyguard to assassin from soldier in my personal war to cold-blooded killer hammer Smith’s gaze became distant I can’t watch thousands of human beings get slaughtered to the last man and do nothing because of something worse that might happen it’s too much Skyee god help me I believe you and it’s still too much he surprised her with the hug he’d held back earlier then looked away and began his stride toward the skimmer the three dance pilgrims suddenly seemed to realize the finality of the moment and rushed the vehicle at once perhaps to enact the solution of last resort that Hammersmith had proposed to Skyee being what they were with faux whips as potentially deadly as volantes they might have been able to drag croix de skimmer and him into pieces but they acted too late even as they reach the spot where the ambassadora vehicle had been it was already a black speck high above banking as it headed toward the line of Lonnie massing on the horizon Skye could almost credit the bastard with restraint human beings were already dead a little more blood lust in his heart and he might have already considered himself sufficiently provoked to call down the machinery of death but if he was headed for an aerial view of the Vlade forces he might be more inclined to wait until that black line started to advance then noir EF would be an imminent danger and he could excuse everything he did as a desperate measure meant to save lives it wouldn’t work though it would still reveal that the dip core kept a fleet of bombers deployed outside the Villani system it would still demonstrate the Confederacy’s willingness to wage war against indigenous peoples it would still mark the last worst decision anybody in the human race had ever made Cray reg rubbed his hands I don’t know about you Herr puff but I believe it’s time we all got back in our respective vehicles and gained some higher elevation we’ll need a clear view of everything about to happen for the report we’ll have to bring back to our respective peoples her path made a noise this guy had never heard from any real Gaul a low-pitched Rumble with a musical hiccup at the center of it trilling was laughter but what was that sobbing it’s bad form to take satisfaction in this speaker it’s a historical moment reg said the biggest mistake ever made by the human race we are obliged to witness it with our own eyes and the pleasure you take in it her path told him is a fine illustration of the reason I’ve always preferred the company of it’s kind mad as they are to your own Skye mist whatever rague said in reply before he hopped back into his skimmer it was no doubt something sardonic and self-satisfied something that took deep pleasure in the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecies rague would soon be among the loudest of the many voices condemning humanity for what ha
ppened here today he might or might not know what extremes that would lead to but he could not be held responsible any more than Kroy could they were just the first pebbles tumbling downhill in what would soon be an avalanche the gathering dispersed the representatives of the Confederacy flew off and became black specks in a gray Skye the burst Eenie

  and the silent cousin Houghton departed as well the three dance pilgrims headed down the ridge and toward their imperiled City where they would face their fates with the equanimity of true believers alone with the two rear goal feeling death gathering all around her Skye could only remember what Hammersmith had said about the dance pilgrims before this nightmare began something about envying them their certainty she sympathized speaking for herself she was sure of nothing not her own inaction not her own capacity to come up with any preferable alternatives not even the point of remaining alive at all if she could not prevent the inevitable her path placed a hand on her shoulder I don’t think it will be safe here if the Villani charge this position can be overrun in minutes we’ll be better off watching whatever happens from the air all right Skye said her voice tasting like ashes in her throat please Andrea wherever you are

  do something you’re running out of time

  CHAPTER 18

  Paving Stones on the Road to Hell

  Meanwhile should puck might have

  wept herself dry but the use of her name opened the floodgates again she closed her eyes and hot burning tears streamed down both cheeks accentuating her powerlessness and demonstrating just how thoroughly the once rebellious once strong-willed ambassador’s daughter had been broken in the few days since leaving her home in the so called human teeth I slapped her across the face striking a woman who just lost as much as this woman had might have been the single cruelest thing I’d done since childhood but I don’t have time for empathy control yourself I can’t deal with both your own personal shit and the fuckin worldwide crisis you’ve put us in help us now and I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for you later or say you can’t and we’ll crawl off to go looking for answers elsewhere she gulped squeezed out more acidic tears and managed a trembling I’m sorry before the breath spasms paralyzed her chest if you came here to stop what’s happening on the surface it only stands to reason that you already knew what was happening down here am i right Chad Epoque managed a furious nod as powered by denial as it was by confirmation another atonal scream followed by an attempt at breathy laughter came roiling out of the darkness I heard more babbling from Richard vain another long drawn-out Andrea from a voice I recognized his quarry I forced myself to focus how long have you been coming and going since the beginning why didn’t they change you before now there was no point I didn’t have the technical background they had there was nothing useful I could do for them but they needed somebody on the outside to bring in anything they needed raw material tools other abandoned eggs I Oh God I never wanted any of this to happen

  this started with an errand of mercy didn’t it she swallowed so convulsively that she might have been choking on her own Gorge yes god yes where did you find it shit Pok in the desert they leave eggs like it outside to die it was starving I thought I could help

  but everything’s piled out of your control early on didn’t it she trembled and convulsed but managed a bereft nod she was criminal angel and victim all at once the creature who had tried to do the right thing and in so doing had shoved two species over the edge of an abyss I wanted to blame her for our troubles and couldn’t wanted to hate her and couldn’t she was the most pitiful of all creatures a crusader whose conscience had led her to hell this had been her shameful little secret she knew she’d unleashed something terrible but she’d already lost her adoptive father the culture that had raised her and her place in the community of nations she didn’t muster the courage it would have taken to face her judges again and tell them what her well-meaning act had led to and so she’d watched the destruction of her friends the feigns and kept lying to herself that there was still time still some secret way to reverse the damage I lowered my lips to her ear and whispered I can’t forgive you just debauch it’s not up to me but I can’t condemn you either I know what it’s like to be stuck in the middle of phenomena bigger than myself so I am offering you a chance to make things better by telling us the way out of here she shook her head again you’ve been

  coming and going all this time you must know it yes then help us it took her three attempts totaling more than one minute to come up with the question but how could I hope to lead you the way I am my murmured a promise to come back if I could and speed crawled away not wanting to torment her with any further recitation of her mistakes we left the array of Lonnie eggs far behind paused as a number of full-grown Villani crossed our path onto some errand mysterious to us their heads passing by high above the grid as their whips stepped through the empty spaces to plant themselves on the floor I didn’t think I was wrong to impart some arrogance to their stride the impression these gave with every twitch was entirely different than what I’d sensed from the benevolent one who’d picked me up and chatted with me soon after my arrival on vaughan nor were they mad like the ones in the amphitheater these exude another quality one inimical to us one that would not have mourned our annihilation if they didn’t kill us now it was because we were beneath their notice or spare parts ripe for change as chitta puck had been changed counsellor Fox said it was nice to know that even she could be capable of impatience I almost let her stew less because of malice than because our time had to be drawing short but I needed her to know how fucked we were it wasn’t a birth defect what there were no words for how tired I felt both physically and emotionally but though my body felt like it wanted to shut down my damnable brain had roared to life achieving a clarity I found I did not want it’s the stupid word egg we keep thinking of it as a baby or a child but we were wrong I don’t understand look the one universal thing we can say about the young of any species is that they’re always smaller at least to start with than the adults who bear them nothing gives birth to a baby larger than itself right yes well I don’t know how big a newborn Fulani egg is since I’ve never seen one but let’s extrapolate from the one meter diameter of a typical adults head and assume for the sake of argument that an infant one would be about the size of a clenched fist I Ellis trated with my own hand maybe a little bigger maybe a little smaller either way I can’t be too far off now ask yourself why was that reinforced plate we found in the fain lab built to support something much larger and heavier why would’ve Lonni need the services of prosthetist ist’s if it merely hadn’t grown its limbs yet what if the main reason it’s kind abandoned it to starve was that it was full-grown and wasn’t going to grow limbs at all ever fox needed several seconds to absorb that and this was not a birth defect no something much worse we crawled onward toward the source of the green glow noting after a few seconds that the floor was beginning to curve downward I slipped slid several meters and came to a stop only with extreme difficulty I didn’t want to advance any further as we were already in deep shit and we could only be moving closer to whatever threatened us but the pull of understanding has always been stronger in me than the instinct for self-preservation and then all of a sudden we reached the abyss it was another amphitheater far underground and far smaller than the intended site of the Villani ballet but close enough to it in general shape the echoes resonated powerful lamps strung on monofilament so delicate that the lights seemed to float without support hung over the activity below casting everything in the eerie green glow that carried throughout the entire cavern the Villani arrayed on the slopes and around the creature at the center all reflected that glow some seeming to add a little of their own it was not hard to see them as worshipers praying to a thing they considered a god that was of Lonnie egg lying at the amphitheaters lowest point preaching to its congregation either the thanes had not managed to provide their first patient with full mobility or they’d abandoned the effort in favor of concentrating all their attention on its abilit
y to communicate it sat in a circular brace like the one Ocean had postulated back at the lab the dozens of artificial whips grafted onto its chitin all waved in the air above its head pulsing as one with the same blasphemous sermon there shouldn’t have been any way to know what it was saying but I found myself catching more than I wanted to something about the ballet being polluted about its very purpose being corrupt about human beings being a dead end in the function it had always been intended to serve there were other concepts too alien concepts concepts too big for my head concepts that made my mind try to twist into a shape it had never been meant to assume I felt the sudden terror we all feel in the middle of the night when we wake from unremembered dreams Fox look away Fox held her head in both hands as if trying to rip out the unwanted thoughts I almost understood that so did I human beings must have been sensitive to the dance to start with that’s why so many of us considered it beautiful but the thanes had been taking advantage of their treatment to improve the noise to signal ratio I think this all started when the thanes got a little too close to their patient and ended up converted to what to what we all would have been protected from if it had died I imagined should Park in the feigns all acting with the unique species of arrogance that can only be found in idealists the arrogance that went along with thinking that they better than those they presume to help drilling into this egg mapping its brain giving it the voice it had never been meant to have they would have been overjoyed when its body accepted the implanted limbs exultant when it began to communicate and totally unprepared for the impact of understanding what it had to say cheetah Pok wouldn’t have been as