The Will to Battle--Book 3 of Terra Ignota

by Ada Palmer

  Kill or kidnap, that was the real question. I would not be the first to reach him. If whoever beat me to him just wanted to make the world safe, then a quick snap of the neck might have ended things already. But, while all the Powers on Earth were racing to seize Cato, the first to reach him would be nurses, doctors, orderlies, and guards. The power is theirs. Imagine them as the news breaks, night shifters laughing in the snack room, guiding restocking robots, checking beds, when the news crosses their lenses and death’s hush falls. Breath catches, eyes avoid each other, muscles tense. Suddenly it matters which staff members wear boots and which a wrap, who cheered at Prospero’s acquittal and who cursed, and on whose breast the bull’s-eye sits. They know the first of them to act will … what? Will win? Will save the world? Will live? Each guesses what the others might try: Kill Cato? Guard him? Offer him to one side? Which side? Those far from Cato’s cell might think of the hospital’s other inmates first, protect (against) them by jamming doors and locking down what can be locked down. Others will go for the prize. Barricades will rise, to trap enemy colleagues in a break room, in the staff wing, in their beds. A trail of brawls will trace a path to him, unconscious doctors, others grappling, screaming, forcing doors. I do not know which cell holds Cato, but they know inside, every one of them, and, when I see them, tension and guilty glances will tell me which door they fear. Their fear will be my map.

  We landed at the southwest edge of the complex, where a group of twenty had built a fort of upturned benches and safety foam. Our volley of stun fire sent most of them to Hypnos’s kind kingdom before I recognized the uniforms of forest rangers. This was Greenpeace Mitsubishi land, and its defenders were well prepared for a wolf’s rush or a cougar’s stealth, but not for us. Achilles took most of our force north to make himself master of the crowds outside, while Martin with eight Masonic guards and Delian Huxley followed me up tree trunks, then a quick rope’s swing to the nearest layer of roof. I did not look back. Those who could keep up would guard my back. Those who could not would fade.

  The first high window offered reading couches and a clump of wide-eyed figures silhouetted against a full-wall screen on which howling pundits alternated with the smoking rubble Utopia had made of so many seats of science. Haste could not tempt me to enter here. I would choose my entrance as an epicure chooses the fig whose navel, just starting to part and leak a drop of sweetness, proves the flesh within will be crimson and perfect. I climbed the outside of the hospital, level to level, freezing whenever the curve of a turret or a security bot came into view, waiting for a shot from one of Martin’s Masons to make them still. Rooms with closed doors were nothing to me, whether empty or full of staring faces. I sought damage, and found it, a door smashed open, and the carcass of a table whose sharp steel legs had been harvested for a more primal purpose than standing.

  The security glass sang as we cut through it, and a smell of cleanliness and chemistry welcomed us to the first room in our maze. I snatched a shard of window, since I had not had time to kit myself with a periscope. The ghost of the hallway reflected in the glass showed upturned carts and stillness, and, beyond, the branching hallways which the blueprints told me led, one to the recreation wing, the other to the hospital’s secure heart. I charged. Quiet hallway, turn, quiet hallway, turn. That must be Martin panting behind me, not quite equal to this speed. And what is this, a sense of fullness flanking me, like the barely perceived caress of an air vent but a breath too warm? Delian Huxley and the lion, one on either side of me, invisible—such was their synchrony and softness that I could not tell which was which.

  A stock-still startled stare was the first face I found, a skinny figure in pajamas standing in a hallway opposite a door which was jammed shut with boxes and hastily angled chairs. She spun and aimed an apparatus at me, a chemical extinguisher perhaps or safety foam, but the tautness in her shoulders promised defense, not offense, and the swirl of her leg as she turned spoke of habituation to a Cousin’s wrap. “We’re extraction, not a hit squad,” I barked at once, as gently as my racing breath would let me. “Is there anyone in Security HQ?”

  Her neck straightened with the sudden realization that she held power. “Who sent you?”

  “Romanova,” I half lied.

  She looked us over, but we wore nothing recognizable, not here. “There were noises from that way recently,” she said. “I didn’t look.”

  I nodded thanks, moving forward until I could see through the window in the door she guarded, and spot the enemies she held caged, hard to identify by pajamas and physique alone. I did not care who they were—I only wished her to believe I cared. “Backup is close. Do you think you can hold things here for … twelve minutes or so?” Encouraging tone, make her feel brave, make her feel coequal.

  A timid nod grew firmer. “Things have been quiet up here.”

  “Good. It’ll be over soon. Once we get Cato safely out it’ll all calm.”

  She flinched again, glancing left, head tilted slightly upward, thinking of the left fork and the ramp beyond: Cato was up that way, then, but not too close, southwest …

  I smile. “Cell 605, right?”

  She bites her lip, draws back, aims the apparatus at me, tucks in her right elbow, thinking of her tracker. I’ve made a mistake. I’ll get nothing more here. I charge ahead, left turn, up the ramp, aware of some last words of calm spoken to the Cousin by panting Martin. I summon the blueprints before me: only six cells on that end of each floor, numbered #02 to #07. Was Cato on the seventh floor, not sixth? No, the Cousin’s stiffness spoke of some more glaring error. Something I should have known. Was he not in a normal cell, then?

  A barricade at the top of the ramp: tables and sofas and a sideways exercise grid with defenders cowering behind. I fly. I grasp the chair leg brandished at me as I soar over their heads, and now it is a weapon in my hand as well as theirs, and my hand is the stronger. A foe’s yelp spurs me as an arm crumples, a bulky arm, well trained, but only against weights and robots that do not strike back. I land among my adversaries, five, four Humanists and a Greenpeace Mitsubishi. I kick one in the temple, and block a chair leg with the one I carry, the aluminum rods singing like swords, but chair legs have no crosspiece to guard clenched knuckles. I slam my opponent’s knuckles and the weapon falls, the throat forgets language and syllable as it gurgles in pain. I leave that one for Saladin to finish off and body-rush another, half burying my face in the salty, soap-scented looseness of shirt. I can feel, with my embracing grip, how the ribs jolt inward like a closing turtle as I slam this body against the floor and banish breath. An ally’s tap on my hip reminds me I should use the stun gun Martin gave me. I draw it, test the grip, and now feel something at my back, the dumpster’s corrugated coldness as I count the breaths before I charge out onto this first battlefield with Saladin beside me. Will I kill you, Apollo? Will I stop your war? No, this is not a dumpster at my back. It is a coat of storm.

  “Mycroft Canner!” One recognizes me, the least winded of these fallen partners of my exercise. Good Humanist. He will not answer questions, not without pain, and pain takes time, but he might answer with his eyes. I throw him to the floor, loom over him. His teeth are chattering. I loom left: no greater terror. Right, then, the hallway toward the northern wing. No change in his face. What is he staring at? Not me. Over my shoulder. Huxley? I press Huxley back. Not Huxley. The lion? Yes, the black lion, which shows itself now, sitting on another prisoner, its soft weight removing the painful duty to attempt escape. He fears the sight of a U-beast? Of course. I whisper: “Room 600, Ráðsviðr’s cell.” My foe’s eyes tell me I have hit the mark. Never let me think myself clever, reader, when it took me so long to realize. This is Klamath Marsh. This place will have the right to call itself a Prince of Prisons to the world’s end, for here, in our hour of horror, mankind confined Ráðsviðr, “Plan-wise,” the first and only A.I. U-beast that used the intelligence we gifted it to plan murder. Utopia stopped it in time, and delivered the beast at once to Romanova�
�s Minors’ Law, which had been prepared for this in theory for half a century, and had precedents among high primates. The judge’s call was easy. It was a separate challenge designing a cell that could humanely confine an amphibious arctic shapeshifter which could disassemble into hundreds of swimming shards. Since parts of Ráðsviðr were biological enough for age to claim it, its cell has been repurposed since its death: storage, sauna, swimming pool; but the design remains, armored still against technology and genius. Where better to imprison Cato Weeksbooth, a fake mad scientist but a true murder adept, who must know as well as I do how to exploit door locks, ventilation grilles, and slivers of sharp toenail?

  “Mycroft, look at this.” Martin pointed to a dark spot on the carpet near the wall. Poor, panting Martin, slowed by his vocation which left less time for exercise than we have who train each day for MASON’s safety, or, in my case, for my coming battle with Apollo rouser-of-armies. I crouched. A tremor through my fingers told me that I smelled blood before I registered the salt scent. I crouched over it, a spatter on the floor, no more than a broken nose might dribble in a fist fight. Then Martin shot me in the back.

  “August eighteenth,” he dictated to his tracker as he leaned over my paralyzed form. “Eighteenth trap. Incapacitated Mycroft in Klamath Marsh Secure Hospital while many forces, including Sniper’s, are in progress infiltrating in search of Cato Weeksbooth. Arranging plausible defeat scenario.” He turned my head to let me see him and the hallway, then nodded to the Masonic guards around him, who slumped to the ground in feigned stunned postures. Next he adjusted his tracker. “Achilles? Weeksbooth is in cell six hundred … Yes … I have Mycroft in position now. Can you confirm Sniper’s forces are inside?… Good.” Another shift of tracker. “Guildbreaker in position … Target is in cell six hundred. Are you ready to reactivate the surveillance system?… Thirty seconds is enough.”

  Martin leaned over me, and I heard the subtle shift of Griffincloth, then one more shot, and Martin slumped across me, the stiffness of true incapacitation adding verisimilitude to his sprawl. In a fitter state my trained eyes might have spotted Huxley Mohave hiding away the stun gun that had added this last bait to Martin’s trap. Someone invisible threw something over me and Martin, stuffy, clinging like a blanket, invisible but buzzing with electric life. I heard Huxley casting similar invisible blanket-shields over the faking Masons, but Martin’s stun blast had been a strong one, and my thoughts quickly decayed into the fragmentation of half dream. My tasks. What was today? Tuesday. Must check the trash-mine bots for clogs tomorrow, and have my session with Julia. What else? My chronicle, I skipped some weeks, must go back, tell how Achilles’s Myrmidons saw their first action. And Bridger, yes, Bridger has homework due to Cato’s Junior Scientist Club tomorrow. What’s this week’s topic? Hadrons? Hubble? Hobbes?

  The whoosh of something fast as a whirlwind made me feel the terror of paralysis, as my mind woke keenly but my flesh would not obey. Something had plunged across me, shrieking down the hallway. It halted at the end to consider its next turn, left or right, and at my angle I could just make out the profile of a motorbike, and, on its seat, a Typer twin. A rush of bodies followed the rider, clambering over the barricade and us too hurriedly to check what bodies these were that they stepped between. I could see only their backs as they advanced past us: assorted jackets, some Olympic patterns, Humanist Blue Team, Green Team, Black, others all six colors. One vigorous, petite figure might have been Lesley Saneer. Their Spanish was too soft and hasty for me to parse, their passage swift, around the corner, silence.

  Twenty seconds, thirty seconds.

  Then a blast, as someone peeked back around the corner where the enemy had just passed, and fired off a scatter pattern. Silent and dim, the blast struck the invisible net across myself and Martin, the faking Masons, and the original unconscious makers of the barricade. Whatever lay across us drank up the blast, but its crackle made my ears ring and my pacemaker bleep.

  The single figure approached us, quiet, neither fast nor slow, a dark athletic jacket with the hood up taut. The size was right: not short, not tall, a little heavy; my second stabber? They braced their scattergun and fired a second shot, a third, a fourth—wise caution. A Mason lying near us faked a twitch at the first blast, a slighter twitch at the second, and after that leaked drool. The stranger drew close, and my eyes could just focus enough to see them sheathe the scattergun and draw another gun, dark and heavy, with a thick, round barrel as in olden days, whose black mouth promised lead. They aimed at me.

  “I want to watch.” It was the tiniest of voices, too soft to be the enemy’s—a tracker call?

  The figure crouched and pressed the barrel to my head.

  “I want to watch!” the voice repeated. “You know how long I’ve been waiting.”

  The enemy gave a cough of hushed contempt as their free hand reached into a pocket and drew out a tiny man. I could not make out the face beneath the army helmet, or the ugly, ugly smile upon it, but I did not have to. Private Croucher. Coward, traitor, deserter, Croucher.

  “Ooh! Guildbreaker, too!” the deserter crooned, his head and slouching shoulders peeking between the enemy’s fingers. “Do Guildbreaker first. Let him watch. Let him know.”

  The other did not argue, too practical, too aware that one shot takes less time than one objection.

  Croucher’s tiny figure leaned as close to me as he dared. “Martin first, then you—and Achilles will be next.” His words were thick and bitter. “You think the world wants this to be your war? You selfish coward heroes? Your MASON bawling over Alexandria getting scratched up, and you and Achilles fawning over him like smitten girls. And you’re what we’re supposed to die for?”

  “Gloat later,” the gunman whispered. It was a man. The invisible tarp across us crinkled as he pressed the barrel to Martin’s temple.

  Lions really roar. Did you know that reader? And a lion’s real roar, inches from his head, makes the calmest killer wet himself. Warm heaviness leapt over me, but, in that shadowed hallway, not even an owl’s eye could have tracked the charge of a half-invisible black lion. Blood happened, and a shot, a second shot, almost inaudible over the roar. Huxley leapt in too, a living wall between us and the fray, and I heard and saw the flash of weapons unknown to me, for all my studies of Apollo’s coat. The lion slumped, bleeding, sizzling, beeping softly as its internal systems improvised, but the Masons were on their feet now, holding well-trained guns. The attacker stagger-ran desperate retreat.

  “We have your blood now.” Huxley Mojave’s words could not be called a shout, just clear and planned command. “We’ll have your identity in minutes. Tell us what happened to Sniper and we won’t expose you to the rest of O.S.”

  My pacemaker bleeped satisfaction as I calmed. This too, then, was good Martin’s plan. Why pull this thorn from the heart of O.S. when he could leave it in place, and use it?

  The enemy halted, just out of fire-range around the corner. “I don’t hop when strings are pulled.” It was a mature voice, low. “Tell them if you like. They won’t believe you. When you run that DNA, you won’t believe you.”

  “You’ve betrayed O.S. If you tell us what you want we—”

  “Threats to bribes in six seconds? You are desperate.”

  Huxley rushed forward, fluid motion like the flapping of a swan, but a spray of scatterfire from the corner forced retreat. “Tell me what happened to Sniper or—”

  “Thirty-three million.”

  “What?”

  “I was paid thirty-three million for delivering Sniper. Black market auction, anonymous at every stage. Even I couldn’t track the buyer if I tried. Things got heated toward the end, I understand, two very determined final bidders. Either that or I fed Sniper through a meat grinder and fed the slop to my piranhas. Which do you believe?”

  “Wha—”

  Heat and force and poison wind, like rot and vinegar, blasted us back. It was half explosion, half hiss, like the bursting of champagne, and in less tha
n a second the end of the hall was a wall of pinkish foam. I could hear the gunman’s limping retreat on the far side, coupled with shouts for help to the O.S. comrades who could not be far ahead.

  “Circle around!” Half the Masons raced at once back down the ramp, while the others stayed, guarding Martin and myself as one knelt to administer a revitalizer. Huxley returned and knelt over the slowly breathing lion, stroking its muzzle and checking its wounds: reparable.

  “Can you I.D. them?” Martin gasped as soon as he was strong enough to speak.

  Digital eyes were wide.

  “You have the blood. Can you run it?” Martin rose carefully.

  “I’ve run it, but … I saw their face just now, I’m sure I’ve never seen that face before.”

  “Who is it?”

  “According to this sample, genetically, that’s Casimir Perry.”

  A wait for reinforcements let me think. Could Perry have survived? The man had changed his face before, the quick and promising young German M.P. Merion Kraye shedding his skin when Madame exiled him from politics and boudoir, to become the industrious Polish bulldog Casimir Perry. He had planned the Brussels attack so carefully, arranged that every stray member of Parliament and Cabinet be hunted down, no matter how estranged. Had he arranged a trapdoor under the podium too, so he could fake his death? Flee laughing into Brussels’s underbelly as the flames rose high? It seemed mad, but he was a madman, and it did make sense of how dispassionate the hand had been that had plunged the second knife into my wound. The man who burned the world down to avenge himself upon Madame and Andō, the man whose love for Danaë turned poison, who did not care one jot about Carlyle even upon discovering she was his real child, such a man does not have hate left over for Mycroft Canner. To all the Earth I am a horror, but to him I am an asset of his enemy, to be extinguished, nothing more. And he did love sausages. But if Perry-Kraye wanted revenge, his work was done. Madame’s had been destroyed, O.S. exposed, Ganymede and Andō shamed and arrested. I remembered feeling done when I had finished my two weeks. Death was all I wanted. Perry-Kraye was as haunted and monstrous and tired a thing as I had been, so why choose life? And why infiltrate O.S.? Was he not done, then? Were there more steps to his revenge? This maniac commanded a vast, world-snaring network of Madame’s exiles and bitter enemies, a force which had no side in this war, no sigil, only hate for her and hers. Another power hiding in the dark. I felt like I had spent months planning an assault on some grim but well-studied fortress, only to be told mid-battle that the castle had an underground.