by Essa Hansen
En’s smile was a shiver of white tendon. “Help the others,” he croaked. With the nanogenerator replaced, his strung-together bones tightened and plumped with a lather of protective material.
Caiden hurried into the circular corridor, steeling himself. These were the visions Çydanza had used to wreck him— and would use again.
In the next cell, Taitn lay in the middle, convulsing gently with each exhale. He was younger by years, with the sallow, gaunt look of desenescence performed without correction. His eyes fluttered open, lashes wet, dark-blue gaze unfocused. “What did those bastards do to you?”
The sobs Caiden had bundled in his chest burst out. He gathered Taitn up in an embrace weakly returned. Taitn’s body was sunken around pronounced musculature. Purple rimmed anemic eyes. His dark hair waved to his shoulders and his beard was a mess of patchy lengths.
Taitn sighed and stood up with Caiden’s help. “Panca.” His shoulders crumpled and a teardrop hit the floor. “She was never brought back here.”
“What? Oh, crimes …” She was still in the Servicer. “I have to hurry. Can you walk? En needs help.”
Taitn nodded. Caiden strode on, past Panca’s empty cell. He kept his feet moving and his anger condensing. He would need anger. He would fix this.
Behind, he heard Taitn shuffle to En’s cell, followed by a string of curses.
Ksiñe sat in the next cell, unclothed, staring into void. In his pale, emotionless skin, every one of his old scars had been reopened. Shreds of muscle twitched. Tendons glistened around bone. Pigmentation sputtered bruises.
Caiden scraped the tears off his chin.
Çydanza would die for this.
Caiden, crumpling down beside Ksiñe, shed his armor and whisked the morphcoat off and around Ksiñe’s bare shoulders. It pillowed into feather down.
“Ksiñe, hey.” No response. Caiden scooped the whipkin out of his shirt, curling her warm body in the Andalvian’s lap. He lifted Ksiñe’s limp wrists and laid his hands on the whipkin’s fur, rising and falling with her breaths. “Painkiller. Remember? Please.”
Ksiñe blinked, reflective pupils dilating as he focused at last. His face blanched even more. “Little one …” He had the soft, scratchy voice of someone who had screamed their throat raw.
“She’s safe. She’s yours. I wouldn’t let anything happen.”
The whipkin mewed and uncurled, sniffing Ksiñe’s wounds. He stroked her in a daze. She chittered and wiggled as she climbed carefully up his torso and curled her long body around his neck. Ksiñe pressed his cheek to her fur.
Caiden wrapped one of Ksiñe’s arms around his neck and attempted to hoist him up one-armed. The Andalvian was light, even as dead weight. “Please help me move you … Panca is missing.”
Ksiñe winced at that, and put weight on his feet, trembling but shuffling enough for Caiden to help him along.
They circled to the entrance just as Taitn rounded the opposite curve, awkwardly carrying En. He cradled her tenderly, frowning at her face, and lowered her onto Laythan’s lap.
Laythan’s blind hands explored En’s wreckage. “We’re all in the same shape, then? Winn, too, in his own way.”
En chuckled, a half choke. “I’ve been hurt this bad many times, just … not everywhere at once. I think you got off pretty easy, old man.”
Caiden lowered Ksiñe beside them. “The Azura’s in bad shape, too, and I need Panca’s help. I’ll come back for you all.”
Pounding feet. Caiden swiveled to the prison entrance and whipped up a glave. It was Silye, racing up the steps with a glave of her own, one as tall as she. Infirmary, she signed. I will take them. Surveillance cut for six ephemeris hours. Distraction next.
“Thanks, Sil.”
She nodded.
Caiden broke into a run, summoning up fire.
CHAPTER 42
ARMORLESS
Panca!” Caiden raced through N-Sector’s warren of halls. His voice bounced off the walls of containers and the ceiling sixty meters overhead. The darkness and din ate up his calls. Every whimper he thought he heard in response was drowned by the whining hums or the heartbeat of his dread.
He stopped, mouth dry. She would never hear his voice, but in her sense-sea she might pick up his intention, the desperation of his search.
“Panca!” He froze and listened through the echoes. Nothing.
He hurried, cursing the loudness of his footfalls ricocheting through the space. Dissonant hums crashed in the air like ocean surf, throwing out a crackling electricity that made Caiden’s hairs stand on end.
Everywhere looked the same. He ran aimlessly, flinching at every errant sound, feeling like that little boy lost in the desert of death where everything was sand, sand, sand.
Every footfall brought him closer to finding Panca dead— or never at all.
Sense-sea. He stopped and fell to his knees, sat back on his heels, eyes closed. He emptied his mind to nothingness as she’d taught him, and gathered up his intention as if to make a Graven order, drumming up not a verbal call but an energy, a spiritual plea that might reach Panca through whatever dimensions lay beyond the Servicer’s chaos.
Panca, sister, please … where are you?
A tiny wail weaved through the din. Left.
Caiden lurched to his feet, razing the darkness for a sign.
The thinnest of sobbing screams wavered past him like a golden thread in the roar of the machines. He sprinted down the entire aisle, twisted, down another. There was a container jutting from the stacks.
He hooked his right arm through a handle and pulled, leaning sideways with all his weight since his strong aug arm was deactivated. The container inched out, moaning against the shelf rails. With a slam it fell the last few inches to the floor.
Caiden shouldered the lid open. This container had no photonic liquid or nano-organisms like the one he’d incubated in. It had been gutted, and a short crimson coffin shoved inside. Threads rolled off it like waterfalls and linked into the Servicer through the floor. Caiden clawed around the seams and opened up its folding segments. Panca lay curled inside.
His vision blurred with tears. Panca’s body was spotted in gleaming electromagnetic nodes beneath her skin. Hair-thin photonic threads dug into her body like silver vines. She shivered, eyes half-lidded, sobs leaking from her. The core in her forehead was a dull matte gray.
He muttered Panca’s name like a mantra as he gingerly lifted her out. She winced at each spidery node he scratched off and the threads he had to pull out one by one. Sickeningly long, they slid under her skin, out of organs, from places deep in her body. Too entwined to have been inserted there, they must have grown, and were so numerous she might have been more wire than flesh.
Caiden wept tears and apologies and curses. With Panca finally severed from the machine, he cradled her as best he could with one arm. The grief was too heavy for his worn legs. Her body was suffused by vibrations and convulsions, crashing like waves in too tight a bay.
Have to hurry. Azura next. Once Panca calmed, breathing smooth and without whimpers, Caiden maneuvered her over his working shoulder.
He relied on hearing and extended proprioception to navigate the darkness and the bellowing of the Servicer and the deceptive rhythms of breath and feet and ache that told him to lie and let it all go, fall apart, be done. But he made it out of N-Sector into the outer hall’s insulting brightness.
Caiden groped until his hand reached a solid surface, followed it, blinking, to a dimmer atrium.
He slipped his Casthen mask back on and piped an overlay map of the facility into the glassy laminate of the interior. The hangar Threi had said the Azura was kept in lay halfway across the world. There wasn’t time, and every moment in the halls— even as emptied as they were— was another chance of conflict that could slow him.
Think smarter. He looked around; the overlay labeled the rooms and universes of the local megastructure.
“There.” The Enforcer’s hangar. It wasn’t far, and th
e map indicated Threi’s Glasliq perched on a platform. A ship would get him to the machinist facility fast, and there would be a medical kit inside for Panca.
One arm. Threi had flown the Azura one-handed … How hard could it be?
Nausea sloshed up, down, and sideways. Caiden clamped his throat closed. His right hand fixed a claw shape in the Glasliq’s light guides, the only way he could maintain control of the thing with one hand. It was like flying a gyroscopic bird. Directionality mattered little and gravity interacted strangely. Sweat drenched his hair and all his clothes.
But the machinist facility lay just below. Caiden stalled his speed, the Glasliq’s wings re-formed, and he lowered through an open ceiling. The gigantic arena was cluttered with parts, machines, and lifters, but nothing that looked remotely like the Azura.
Caiden shoved that worry away and set the ship down, shed the rest of his armor, and dug out a medical kit to do his best for Panca. The ship was military outfitted, with a plethora of temporary-fix meds: wound sealants, antibiotics, chems, mild stimulants.
He scooped up Panca’s slender saisn frame and strode out of the Glasliq’s bay. Mechanics gathered, expecting Threi. They startled when Caiden emerged. Swiftly, he summoned Graven charm and called, “I need you all to help me. Where’s the Azura?”
The little group parted. Behind them, on a dais in the middle of the arena, a crystalline mass rested. Translucent, white, and fire-blue, with glossy lightseep inclusions, the spine of Caiden’s ship lay nakedly dissected from everything else he knew of her. There was no other “ship” to speak of.
He clutched Panca and stood staring.
This place, this Casthen void. It shatters everything good.
The Azura had been opened up like a gruesome flower. Pieces of her shucked carapace hung in mag-suspension all around, glossy black with pale connective tissues. Inner parts were dismantled and levitated out in layers, resembling an anatomical drawing, a ripped-open insect. The engine block was mostly intact, hovering above the crystal spine; silvery cords connected the two, nerves and veins peeled out. The armor plates and wings and internal walls were dismantled but intact. The hybrid organic components— the parts that were easier to grow than to print and install— were melted, shredded, or dangling. These were also the hardest to restore, because growth took time that Caiden didn’t have.
He carried Panca to the crystal-and-lightseep mass and laid her across it. “Please wake. I need you to help me. No one understands glossy engines like you. You’ll know what to do. Please, Pan.”
He lay with her, resting his head. There was a gentle vibration of energy in the crystalline mass. Tones braided along inner channels, weaving through dimensions. He’d missed this song. Only a whisper of the disintegrated neural link remained, but he swore the surface warmed against his cheek.
Panca sighed, finally rousing. Her eyes slitted open, bright limbal rings flicking in the black. She cuddled against the crystal and the crook of Caiden’s shoulder. Relieved and absolved, he wrapped his good arm tighter around her.
“Winn …” Her velvety face creased. “She’s … in so much pain.”
Caiden’s heart cracked. “Help me fix her? I don’t know what to do.”
Panca straightened, unable to walk, and looked all around the arena. Wilted by the sight, she shook her head. “Half of the Azura’s components’re biological, she’s not a puzzle we can slot back together. The shell’s complicated. The resonance shields need to biomineralize. Seams take time to seal.”
Caiden’s brain fired at dizzying speed. “Threi can’t hold down suspicion for long. Can we get the florescer working fast?”
Panca gave him a sad look and wrapped her arms around him for a brief, tight hug, and said, “See what the machinists learned, what materials they’ve got to work with.”
Caiden lurched up and marched for the display array while shouting, “All of you, come!”
Some of the mechanics scurried over because they were susceptible enough to his loyalty-inducing effect, while others appeared confused, or recognized him as Threi’s probationer but hadn’t caught wind of the other drama. Whyever they helped, he was grateful not to have to crack more skulls.
He fanned through the research. The Casthen machinist team had done quite a lot of study on the Azura already: all the tests that Taitn and Panca had talked about doing. Caiden scrolled through and listened to explanations, both fascinated and sick to his stomach.
The ship’s own stored data was intact.
A blip caught Caiden’s eye. Unread messages. The crew had sent him communication after he’d abandoned them in Emporia, and he hadn’t been strong enough to read them at the time.
Hey, kid. En’s voice. We know where you went. I just hope you decided it yourself. The others are mad, but I trust your heart. And I hope we taught you something you can use. Don’t sink, please.
Caiden covered his mouth with a hand, eyes misting.
Taitn’s voice next, a choked-up rasp of a sound that cut off: Winn … you don’t get to choose to throw yourself away.
If he had listened to this earlier, he might have changed his mind and turned around.
No— it would have softened him up and he’d have been crushed in the Casthen machine.
Ksiñe: I said before— over-sharpened blade becomes brittle, easy to break. Move fast, don’t waver.
The nightmares had sharpened him to a breaking point, but it wasn’t too late for the last part of Ksiñe’s advice. Caiden turned back to the repairs.
Basics first; they arranged the ship in a general order, the hardware and plates in place. Caiden commandeered the big lifter mechs one-handed. Panca directed while she lay, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Dead organics were cleaned off metal and crystal, but the skeletal frame of the ship seemed even less likely to fly anytime soon.
“Panca …” Caiden wiped sweat from his neck. “This will take days. It’s too complex.”
Çydanza had ensured that the ship— the only weapon that could smite her— was impossible to repair. Caiden’s family was safe and they could leave the Harvest together, but Çydanza would remain alive to keep exploiting the multiverse and sell the core of the Azura to the Dynast.
The white rings of Panca’s irises danced over him and their work, then fixed in a stare over his shoulder. “Winn.”
He cocked his head at her for a long moment, then followed her eye line behind him.
The Glasliq.
He swiveled back to her, excitement humming. “Use it for parts … how?”
She craned her neck up to the half-assembled skeleton of the Azura. “Magnetizing a liqui-solid’d be a quick exoshell on a minimalist frame— easier than assembling all her fuselage and plates.”
“Tell me what to do,” Caiden said. Sorry, Threi. You owe me anyway.
He flew the Glasliq up closer, then barked orders to the machinists to help with lifter-mechs, mag-levitators, and custom scalar gravity fields to position the Azura’s remains midair and borrow some of the Glasliq’s articulated vanes and ribs. Caiden was reinvigorated by work familiar to his hands and mind, and he threw all of himself into it as he started to see a ship coming together around the Azura’s Graven spine.
This would actually work.
The machinist control desk was basically a cockpit, where Caiden both mapped out and actively piloted the arena’s complex resonator system. It phase-changed the Glasliq’s morphic crystalline matter into liquid so he could maneuver that wroth mass of sparkling fluid around the Azura’s new black skeleton. She looked like a twiggy insect caught in blue amber or a water drop. While Caiden shaped the levitating Glasliq matter, it filled with tetchy vibrations, spitting out spikes and angular ruffles like an angry sun. Careful phase changes bonded the material solidly to the Azura’s frame so it wouldn’t dribble away once released, and could change phases later while remaining adhered to the frame.
Caiden held his breath as he deactivated all the fields holding the ship in
place.
It stayed solid and gorgeous.
He released a shaky breath, heart full as he assessed their work. Metal ribbing and flexible bones scaffolded the liquid glass. The transparent body— in solid state now— encapsulated the ship’s luminous crystalline spine, which spread an opal glow. The ship was more muscular and compact, the big thrusters clustered with mobile ones stolen from the Glasliq. The inner frame was folded up, looking like gills and ribs, capable of unfolding into any manner of wings for atmospheric flight.
Caiden carried weary Panca to a soft seat then entered the ship alone. The layout was much the same as before, and he draped himself in the salvaged pilot’s seat.
“Last test. This is the part that matters.” Caiden reached up to graze the florescer with his fingertips. Energy built up in the spine, stuttering around all the wounds they hadn’t yet patched— but it finally bloomed out, the universe bubbling around the entirety of the ship. The rind’s creamy, rippling iridescence absorbed into the Glasliq translucence, making the ship even more like a star condensed. From dark insect to brilliant bird.
Caiden sighed away all his heartbreak. “Let’s go kill Çydanza.”
CHAPTER 43
IF YOU LOVE ME
The glass Azura looked magnificent, but it was obvious from her drunken, listless handling that they hadn’t tuned it and Caiden wasn’t used to her new bones and muscles. At the same time, the ship’s movements were sensitive, delicate, sharp as a bird of prey.
Panca curled up in the engine room, asleep and healing. Caiden was out of time to do any handling tweaks. He gritted his teeth and did the best he could one-armed, pushing through cramps to keep elegance in his motions— this new machine didn’t respond well to inelegance.
He headed back across the planet to where Threi was managing the rest of the plan— he hoped. And where his crew was safe in an infirmary, he hoped, where Silye had guided them to wait until Caiden put an end to all this.