A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  Valkyrie Rock. Of course. The asteroid itself must have had a hidden broadcast antenna, left over from its days as a mining operation, strong enough to penetrate the nebula; locked on board, the Cyn must have . . . reckoned with Charon, somehow, and gained access. We’d come to Jalia Preserve to send a message; the Cyn had sent one of his own.

  And received an answer.

  “Last warning,” Mo said again, flipping open the cap on the rifle scope. He knelt behind his weapon—railings meant for Reetha were about hip height on a Mahren—and took aim. He tapped under his jaw again, and said to Jane and me, without the voice amplification: “The same for you two. Go. Now.”

  Our comms crackled to life. “Give them to me.” It was all the Cyn said, in response to Mo’s warning; it was all he needed to say. Sho and I—gifted, both—were his targets. “Give them to me, now, and the fires will take you . . . quickly. That is what the goddess desires.”

  “We’ll come back for you,” Jane told her ex-partner, ignoring the psychopath being psychotic into our comms. “Just . . . keep him busy, Mo. Don’t take him head on. I’ll let you know when we’ve reached Schaz; you can hide in the villa then. Get him lost in that maze; buy yourself time. We’ll pick you up from the other side.”

  “I don’t think there will be any hiding. Not from a devil like this.” The Cyn was still stalking down the beach, picking up speed, his metal talons scraping through the wet sand and the surf, his metal armor gleaming under the azure sun. Mo adjusted his aim, tracking the approaching figure, then said once more: “Go.”

  Jane nodded reluctantly, put her hand on my shoulder. I reached out for Mo, then let my hand drop. There was nothing I could do. We made our way back toward the door—we’d do what Jane had suggested, exit the villa from the back then break for the jungle, where the Cyn wouldn’t be able to see us—and I’d almost followed Jane inside when I stopped, and turned.

  If the worst happened, I couldn’t let my last words to Mohammed be me delivering an ultimatum he hadn’t deserved. “Mo,” I asked him. “Do you believe today?”

  He smiled slightly, his face still pressed into the rifle. “Look at what lies before me, little one,” he said. “Not just the villain stalking toward us—a villain I get to delay, a villain I will thwart, in order to protect my friends—but all the wonder and the beauty of this planet, a world returned to a state nature never could have created it in, yet still, in the acts of unbelievers and the callous powerful, it remains a testament to the glory of Allah.” Beyond him, the chains of the planet’s rings rose up out of the sea like majestic towers, sweeping above us through the heavens even as the fire from the fallen satellites faded into the lavender glow of the sky. The shimmering sun glittered on the water of the ocean, and the breeze was out of the jungle, carrying the smell of sun-warmed vegetation and morning dew and life.

  And down the beach toward us came the Cyn, running now, his wings beginning to spread out again—he was getting ready to launch himself into the air.

  “Yes, Esa,” Mo said, pulling back the bolt on his rifle that would energize the powerful magnets within. “Today I believe. Now go.” The Cyn’s wings snapped into a locked position, and he ducked low, preparing to take flight.

  Mo fired before he could.

  The thing about a gauss rifle that size—firing rounds that size—was that eventually, the bullets became less “projectiles” than “explosives.” The projectile wouldn’t tear through the Cyn so much as rip everything around its impact zone apart in a massive detonation of force, like being at the center of a tornado. And even if the zealot out of ancient fairy tales could absorb or deflect ballistic energy on a scale like that: he wasn’t going to see this shot coming.

  Jane and I still didn’t wait around to see how he survived it. We knew he would. He always did.

  We made for the jungle.

  CHAPTER 16

  We made it out of the villa and in among the trees without looking back. We just ran. Mo would hold the Cyn as best he could—keep him pinned down with rifle fire until we could reach Schaz, get aloft, then swing around and pick him up. All we could do was move faster, to use the window of time Mo was buying us.

  We pushed our way through the underbrush, looking for the path back to the overhang where the ship waited; ordinarily, we could have just called Schaz to our position, but the thick canopy of tree cover would prevent her approach.

  We ran.

  It was shortly after we found the trail back to the clearing that the comms came to life again: Mo and the Cyn, taunting each other across the open ground of the beach. “The rulers of this world vanished into history, my friend, and this place is all they left behind.” Mo’s tone was almost conversational, polite, even as he presumably reloaded his rifle and tracked his target through the scope. “Whatever you’re trying to achieve, you might ask yourself if it’s worth all of this violence. Ultimately, you will meet the same fate.”

  The Cyn ignored the larger question Mo was asking—ignored it, or couldn’t even comprehend it. “I know they are here,” he replied, his voice whispering in my ear, and now that I knew what he was, what he was made of, it was impossible not to hear a crackling undercurrent of energy in the words, as though they were spoken by fire itself. “You will tell me where they are hiding.”

  “If you wish to ask me something, by all means—leave your cover behind. Come and ask. I will have an answer ready for you. But I suggest that you prepare yourself: you might not like the form that answer takes.”

  “If you test yourself against me, you will be found wanting—I can promise you that. You still do not understand. Mahren. Humanity. Wulf. Tyll. There is no difference. All any of you are is a virus. Contaminating us, corrupting us. Interfering with what we always should have been. You should have worshipped us. Instead you infected us. So we withdrew, to quarantine. Let you infect each other instead.”

  “Several thousand years of the exchange of ideas between species; several thousand years of knowledge, of art, of hope, passed from person to person across the galaxy, and that’s all you can see? An infection?” I could almost see Mo shake his head, even as I leapt over a twisting tree root and clambered my way up a hill. “No wonder you have no compunction against taking innocent lives. You do not understand what is lost—from those you kill, or from yourself—every time you do.”

  “What is lost is always secondary to what is gained; there is always a price to be paid for the exercise of will, and I pay it gladly. My will belongs to her, and I will become whatever it is she needs of me.”

  “Blind loyalty. Always a fearsome trait. One that destroys both, eventually.”

  “Destruction is what I am. She has made me the vessel of her wrath, and that wrath now falls upon you. Submit to her will.”

  “I submit only to the will of Allah and to his prophets, peace be unto them. And I very much doubt you are one of those. The cruel imitation of an angelic form you wear notwithstanding, I have very rarely met a being I was so sure stood so very distant from God.”

  “There are no gods; no prophets. No mercies. There is only—”

  Another rifle shot crashed through the comms, loud enough that I could hear it through the jungle as well. I guess their conversation was over. Or at least, shifting its nature to something more base, more aggressive. The instinctual reversion to violence. A hundred years searching for God, and Mo would still answer an assault with an assault. He’d been a soldier much longer than a pilgrim.

  Jane was just a little ways ahead of me; she hauled herself up a rocky outcropping, turned, and gave me a hand to scrabble up as well. “Keep moving,” was all she said, but there was something in her eyes—having to listen to Mo taunt and delay the thing that had come to kill us: it was taking its toll. Grief was written on her face, but the thing behind her irises wasn’t pain—it was fury.

  We would get Mo out of this, the trap he’d sprung that had been laid for us. And if we couldn’t, there would be hell to pay. Whatever goddess the Cyn ke
pt going on about wouldn’t be enough to save him from us.

  We ran on, among the massive trunks of the great trees, the day suddenly growing brighter as the sun finally passed beyond the twisting rings that looped the planet, and we came out of the shadow of their chains.

  Ahead of us, the roar of an engine—a ship, starting up. We could make out Shell, rising above the canopy, hell-bent on the stars. The Preacher and Sho had gotten out. At least they were safe. The whole point of all of this, where it had all started, had been to get Sho to Sanctum. We’d achieved that now. All the rest was just fallout and survival. I said a brief prayer that they’d make it home—I don’t know who or what I prayed to, but I did it anyway.

  Sho deserved better than this endless hunt Jane and I were locked into, first chasing, then fleeing, from the Cyn—whatever the creature’s “crusade” was, ultimately, Mo was right: it would end badly. I just hoped we could survive it.

  We kept moving, the ground rising steadily under our feet—the overhang was in the foothills of the mountain range that lay just beyond the sea. It was almost funny: all I’d seen of this world, Mo’s stretch of pristine beach and the azure forests, and it was such a little part of it, just this one stretch of jungle between the mountains and the oceans, and what lay on the other side of the peaks was something entirely different, some different forest, some wildly shifted biome. Yet whenever I thought of this place, I’d see cerulean canopies, tranquil turquoise seas. That had been what this world was to me.

  The place where I’d met Mo, Jane’s former partner, and perhaps her oldest friend. God, I hoped it wasn’t also the place where Mo died for us. We were going to save him. We were going to.

  We reached the clearing where Schaz had returned after finishing her soak and dropping off the Preacher; she was already warmed up, ready for flight, ready for us to board. We pelted up the loading ramp, heading right for the cockpit, Jane sliding into the pilot’s chair, me behind the gunnery controls. “Take us up, Schaz,” Jane said, flipping the switches above her head, “we’re going right back to that beach, we’re going to punch a hole through that thing, and we’re going to get Mo off of this rock. He can look for God somewhere else.”

  “Jane, we shouldn’t—”

  “Don’t argue, Scheherazade, just do it. We—”

  “You need to listen, Jane. Mo sent me this.” She began playing an audio packet, one Mo had transmitted privately to her. I was watching Jane’s face as it played. I saw it crumble and come apart as she realized—from the first few words—what he was going to say.

  “Red.” In the background of the message, we could hear the whisper of rain; he’d recorded these words the night before—before we’d even known the Cyn would arrive. “If you’re listening to this, it means your enemy has appeared, has escaped your trap, and I’ve chosen to engage him while you and Esa escape. In order to get you to do so, I probably would have told you to come back for me. But you can’t. My time in this universe is up. It has been, I think, for quite a while.

  “Part of the reason I began my search was that I knew I should have died, back with the others, when we set off the pulse. I survived because of you. Because I knew I had to, to keep you alive, and because you made me. You never were one to surrender. But sometimes, Red—sometimes surrender is the only way you can win.

  “To reach us here, your enemy will have to have carved a path through the war satellites; however many remain will respond to such an assault by gathering directly above any threat that has entered the atmosphere. And then they will open fire. A quicker ending than, perhaps, I deserve—and hopefully an ending for your nemesis, as well.

  “This is the last thing I’ll be able to do for you, Red; the last gift I can give you. Now you need to take everything you learned from me, and you need to forget it. Move beyond it. Don’t pass all our violence, all our sins, along to that little girl sitting at your side. I made you better than me. You might not see it; I do. Now you have to make her better than you. That’s how this works. People, I mean. It’s the only way it works. It’s the only way we can achieve anything. We hold back our failings, and pass on what righteousness, what little grace we’ve managed to grasp.

  “Red—Jane—I love you like a daughter. That is where my grace has always lain. I’m sorry I used you the way I did, when we first met. I always wanted to say that; now I have, and I can go in peace. Or, hopefully, not in peace at all. My search for God not withstanding, I always knew I wouldn’t die in my bed. From the day I set down on this world, I always knew this place would be my Aeliadh Hill. There are worse worlds upon which to die.

  “Run, Jane. I’ll hold him here. Run, and let the ancient hate of the Jaliad take us both down. That seems . . . a fitting end. Alaykumu as-salām, my child. I will see you again.”

  There were a few more seconds to the message—just the fall of rain, echoing in the background, filling Schaz’s interior—and then the recording cut off, and the ship was silent around us.

  For a moment, Jane simply sat in her chair, hunched over, a look of pure anguish on her face, a kind of pain I’d never known a human face could project. She didn’t breathe for a moment, the loss was so intense.

  Then she took a gasping breath in, and she grasped Scheherazade’s controls. Said nothing. Just lifted us off, out of the forest, flying toward the mountains, away from the stretch of the ocean and the curve of the shoreline, even as above us the firmament turned to flame, the long-silent weapons systems on the Jaliad’s satellites of death coming online.

  We barely cleared the firing solution, the sun and the rings and the ocean and eventually the entirety of the sky obscured by the descent of arcing laser fire. Beneath us, the heat—the pure force—of that rain of ruin would be tearing apart the villa, blasting the sand of the beach to glass, setting the forests aflame, boiling the oceans. Killing all the fish and the deer and the animals Mo had lived on, had lived with. Killing everything that lay beneath the satellites’ distant orbit.

  And somewhere in all of that fire, somewhere in all of that screaming torrent of glowing, burning light, there was the Cyn, and there was Mo.

  Jane took us up into the atmosphere, the rings passing nearly close enough to touch, the satellites still pouring flame down onto the surface of the world, ancient weapons from a long-dead reign, brought back to life by an even older hate. A hate I could not understand, a hate that meant nothing at all as far as I knew, yet had apparently started with me.

  Wherever this fucker had come from, we knew where he’d been. And we were going to find out why. It had cost Mo’s life to escape the Cyn’s trap—there had to be a reckoning for that. And as for the Cyn himself—maybe a being made of energy could survive a rain of that much fire. Maybe not. I sure as hell didn’t know. But if he did—if he came after us again—I knew this much: I was done running.

  I’d rip him apart with my bare hands. I’d rip him apart with my bare mind. Jane, the Preacher, Mo—they all kept talking like it was my responsibility not to carry on down the bleak, cruel paths they’d all three walked. But as far as I was concerned, the one thing all of them had proved to me was that walking roads like those: that was just part of being alive.

  Maybe it hadn’t been, once. It was now. Those paths were the only ones left, to any of us. And if the Cyn was to be mine, I’d show him what I was capable of, now that he’d forced me into hate. Because I did hate him now. He’d earned that.

  And when I met him again, he’d reap the rewards.

  ACT

  FOUR

  CHAPTER 1

  We saw Shell vanish into hyperspace just as we hit the upper atmosphere; a blink, and then the Preacher and Sho were gone, fading into the stars. Mutely, Jane put us on another vector, set our course. We sailed past the twisting rings of Jalia Preserve V, the satellites still firing downward, the light of their blazing rain reflected in the shards of ice trapped within the glittering circlet, making a whole curve of the band of debris seem to glow, as if the rings themselves were ali
ght with some cosmic inner fire.

  We leapt into hyperspace as soon as the engines had cooled and we were clear of the world’s gravity well.

  For a time, Jane and I said nothing. Just sat in the cockpit, unmoving, neither one of us even willing to take the few staggering steps back to the living quarters. Scheherazade didn’t even try to break the silence. For a moment that seemed strange—her first instinct in situations like this was always to try and cheer us up, to focus our thoughts elsewhere—until I remembered that she’d known Mohammed as well, that he’d been around when Jane had “raised” her. Schaz, too, was mourning her friend.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said the words when I finally stopped crying, said them to Jane, who wasn’t crying at all, just staring out the view-screen at the stars pouring past, her face lit by the glow of the instrument panels, something truly frightening there—not hate, just an emptiness, a kind of desolation of all feeling. Like she was shutting herself down.

  She shook it off at the question. “Go ahead,” she said, the words flat, hollow, like she didn’t much care about speaking them, one way or another.

  “Why did he call you ‘Red’?” I asked.

  She actually smiled at that, just a little bit, an almost autonomic response, disconnected from how she truly felt. “I’d almost forgotten,” she said, so softly I didn’t think she was talking to me at all.

  “Jane?” I prompted her again.

  “Way back when, when I first joined the Justified—when Mo first inducted me—it was . . . a whole new world to me. Maybe not quite as different as it was to you; this was before the pulse, so at least I wasn’t dealing with new technologies, just new . . . ideology, new approaches, a new way of thinking about how life was meant to be led, what the . . . purpose of all of it was. All I knew was the strict dogma of the sect I was raised in, and even if I’d rejected those concepts—long before Mo recruited me—they were still how I viewed the world, because they were the only lens I’d ever had.