Context

by John Meaney

Coincidence?

  Could it be some cruel joke of arbitrary Destiny that the woman he and Jay had betrayed, had sent into a compromised network and almost certain capture, had been transferred from distant Revandi into the realm where Tom was undercover? And on this particular day.

  She could certainly identify him.

  And maybe, by now, that would give her a fierce joy, a satisfaction that her tortured pain might be shared by those who had wished it upon her.

  ‘Wait a minute…’

  In the kitchen, a disturbance.

  ‘Quick! They’re here ...’

  They came along the dark tunnel: Velsivith limping, Tyentro with his tunic dark-stained and torn.

  ‘We gave them the slip, my—’

  At that moment the spit of graser fire sounded from the corridor outside, and Tyentro’s face paled. Everyone in the kitchen froze in place.

  We’re blown to Chaos.

  It was a prime tenet: not to keep a rendezvous with local control unless the locale was clear. Tyentro had broken a basic rule, but that was not his main concern.

  ‘Rilka,’ he whispered.

  It was obvious that she was dead or captured. And that Tyentro had feelings for her which Tom had not known about.

  Perdition...

  She was not supposed to be part of Stilvan’s cover team, and a bitter curse rose to Tom’s lips. But he stilled it: if they survived, guilt would be Tyentro’s punishment.

  ‘Quick.’ One of the waiters gestured towards the access panel. ‘Inside.’

  There were three ways out: to the corridor, where graser fire spat and hissed once more; to the narrow maint-shaft which looked like a trap to Tom; and the membrane which led back out into the dining area.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This way.’

  And, with a bitter smile:

  ‘Is anybody hungry?’

  Velsivith and Tyentro sat down with Tom at his table. They had no choice: the exit-membrane was flanked now by armed troops. Their dress uniform—of scarlet and silver, with white capes and gauntlets, polished sabres at their hips, absurdly plumed helms—failed to conceal the functional grasers or their steady predators’ gazes as they scanned the diners.

  The whole place is a trap.

  Down below, on the broadway beneath the balcony, a gentle gavotte was playing, and commonfolk were dancing its steps with none of the intricate irony-laden choreography of Lords and Ladies, but with a more robust enjoyment. One pretty girl glanced upwards—copper curls beneath a scarlet scarf—then whirled away, caught in the dance.

  Am I going to die here?

  ‘There’s a substance,’ murmured Velsivith, ‘on which the Seer’s power depended. It was part of—’

  But one soldier’s gaze had lingered on Tyentro a half-second too long, and now his lips were moving silently. Communicating with an officer.

  The trap slammed shut.

  ‘We’ve had it.’ Velsivith had seen it too. He rose from the table in one smooth movement, a graser pistol in each hand. ‘Tom, get away!’

  And fired.

  Chaos!

  There was a tiny moment when it was possible to see what was happening: Velsivith’s aim swept across the officers’ table, ravening beam cutting through torsos and necks, while his other hand fired towards the soldiers near the door.

  Then Tom was ducking as webs of graser fire cracked and spat, burning the air.

  Yells and screams accompanied his elbow-and-knees crawl across the floor.

  “Here...’ Tyentro tossed a crystal in Tom’s direction, then pulled his tunic open to withdraw ... something.

  Blue glow.

  A strange peacefulness in the midst of chaos and death. It shone, sapphire then electric-blue, and Tyentro’s face was demonic in the shadows it cast.

  Sapphire blue ...

  The sphere was small, palm-sized, and Tyentro rolled it across the floor to Tom. He grabbed it. The small globe was neither warm nor cold, yet its touch both burned and numbed Tom’s hand.

  A sudden vision racked him—of once-bloody gobbets in their containers, inert upon filter pads, while electric fluid slowly dripped through to the collectors—and he shook his head to clear it.

  ‘The Seer’s body?’ Tom mouthed the question, but Tyentro understood.

  He nodded, thin-lipped. Whatever he had hoped to find in the mausoleum, that had not been it.

  Extracted from the Seer’s corpse?

  Time was moving slowly. The music, from below the balcony, was only now beginning to die away as the revellers realized that something was happening.

  Slowly...

  Then Tyentro rose, spinning, and his graser was out, beam cutting a wide swathe, and soldiers fell before lancing light impaled Tyentro and he dropped, inert, splayed across the tabletop.

  Dead.

  Tom clutched the glowing sphere and held it to his chest, wondering if it was worth the cost of blood.

  When it seemed that all graser fire had ceased, the diners—most of them frozen in place, hunched forward on their chairs—slowly, shakily, returned to movement. They stood, staggered, trying not to look at Tyentro’s or Velsivith’s ripped bodies whose glistening intestines had spilled forth, or the dead soldiers’ blasted remains, or the wounded man who softly mewled, clutching his torso, his leg graser-torn, blackened, twisted half off.

  In the confusion, Tom pulled his cloak around himself, concealing the small glowing sphere. He began to make his way among the panicking, sobbing diners, towards the exit.

  ‘That one.’

  Officer’s voice.

  For a moment Tom thought he might make it, but then three of the soldiers in dress uniform—helm-plumes gone awry, sabres missing and tunics torn, but grasers in their hands—blocked the exit and one of them looked straight at Tom, hand rising—

  ‘Yes, him.’

  They’ve got me.

  Peripheral vision, as Tom spun behind a knot of stumbling civilians, showed him more soldiers coming from the kitchens, and he knew that every exit was blocked.

  It glowed, eerie and wondrous, blue and strange.

  Tom judged the throw carefully: as it arced high, the soldiers’ gazes tracked its trajectory while Tom was already moving fast. There was a table in his way but one of the chairs was empty and he used it as a springboard -jump—then two sprinting paces across the tabletop—careful—and a leap over a rotund man’s shoulder, and then the acceleration.

  Graser fire.

  Emerald beam splitting the air.

  Balustrade, and Tom’s palm hit just right, and then he was over.

  The Academy called it situational gymnastics, and they learned to do it without rehearsal. The sheer drop would have broken his legs—ultimately fatal, in this place—but Tom used the balcony’s external carvings, its baroque stone swelling fruit and heraldic symbols, as the pivot points for a series of swings and vaults, and then the final drop and roll.

  Suicide. The soldiers are everywhere.

  The crowd was a swirling mass of confused revellers, and most people would not have seen him as he hit the flagstones, rolling. He was almost to his feet when sapphire-blue shone at his vision’s edge and he threw himself forwards to make the catch.

  But there were too many people and something, someone, tripped him and his fingertips made contact but he was already falling.

  No!

  He tried to hug the sphere to himself but it was too late and there was a pointless crack as it smashed beneath him, and momentary despair flooded inside. Knowing that he had failed those who had died.

  Whatever the secret of the Seer’s power—more than he had expected them to acquire: the infocrystal was surely the scanlog which had been Tyentro’s objective—Tom had just broken it beyond retrieval in a moment’s clumsiness the Academy instructors would have deplored.

  Did they die for this?

  But he would be joining them soon—

  A wordless agony.

  It burns.

  Crawling, trying to move.
r />   And then he stopped, as his body turned to ice.

  What’s happening to me?

  Shivering...

  He was freezing now.

  There was a crackling in the air, a shaking in the ground. Yet the half-seen crowd just stood there, staring at him. Cold flames flickered blue, were gone.

  Concussion?

  Come on.

  Then he was on his feet again.

  Get moving.

  Stumbling...

  People, tunics and surcoats—dark and pastel, plain and fantastically patterned—and a blur of faces. A glance back.

  Broken shards upon the flagstones, obscured now by the shifting crowd.

  Scarlet banners, hanging.

  Distant martial music: a parade, and the promise of a thousand troops and militia, the impossibility of escape. An advance guard, perhaps a hundred soldiers, at the crowd’s edge, already scanning, calling the officers above, and searching for the figure which had dropped from the balcony and into the crowd.

  But in that glance ...

  Shards on the flagstones, yet nothing more. Not a single drop which might have glowed electric blue.

  It’s in me.

  Extracted with care, over a period perhaps of two Standard Years. Distilled with exquisite delicacy from the Seer’s decomposing corpse. That sapphire fluid, once subsumed within the Seer’s entire being, was gone, absorbed.

  Inside me...

  A shudder of revulsion passed through Tom.

  Mother...

  He remembered the day she died, having briefly come back to life, in her crystal sarcophagus in the Oracle’s home. Blue fluid, fluorescing with internal light, had spilled from her mouth and ears, pooled inside the sarcophagus as she...

  What’s it doing to me?

  The memory faded, but all around him the world blurred, growing double.

  Soldiers. Getaway.

  He stumbled through the crowd, aware of half-glimpsed uniforms, the glint of weapons.

  Hurry...

  But something strange was happening.

  This was the theory:

  In the context against which time flowed—a motion in metatime—a strange splitting might occur. The interaction between any cause and effect is bidirectional in time, like a handshaking protocol of reinforcing waves.

  And any wave can be refracted.

  When Tom had changed the Oracle’s perceived future, it had been (it seemed) a programming trick. It took mu-space processors to generate an imagined reality, and make that the future which the Oracle perceived.

  A swap-over: everything the Oracle had predicted, had seen in his personal future beyond a certain moment in time, was an illusion of Tom’s creation. The Oracle’s real future was very different in length and in quality: short and brutal, ending on the point of Tom’s blade.

  And yet...

  An unexpected blue fire, a barrier igniting the air, had tried to prevent the process—as though reality itself resisted the incursion. And then, that hallucinatory episode ...

  Exiting the Oracle’s terraformer floating high in Nulapeiron’s sky, Tom seemed to see himself, leaping suicidally to his death.

  It was hard to say when the split occurred.

  There was the pushing and shoving—get out of here -forcing a way through the crowd, and suddenly the empty coolness of a dank tunnel. Momentary respite: but a hundred soldiers were in immediate pursuit, and there were thousands more behind them; already they would be closing in from all directions, from above and below.

  But in the ephemeral peace of the moment, he turned to his left to face ...

  He turned to his right and saw ...

  Not alone.

  It was Fate, and it was beyond surprise: the features which were so familiar and yet so startling, seen every day in a mirrorfield. Yet neither was surprised: it was an implacable phenomenon, so unexpected it struck beyond their capacity to absorb shock.

  There was Tom Corcorigan —

  Brother...

  — and there was Tom Corcorigan.

  And the shared recognition in their eyes, that death was almost upon them. Each soldier would want to be the first to drop the escaped terrorist; there would be no mercy, no taking of prisoners.

  Does sapphire blood run in my veins? In ours?

  Prisoner, singular. They were looking for one person.

  Laughter, conjoined, identical in pitch, dying fast.

  ‘You should go.’

  A pause, a shake of the head: ‘I’m nearest to the door. You go on ahead.’

  For a moment, each Tom Corcorigan regarded the other: the more-than-twin, sharing not love but mutual self-knowledge.

  ‘I’m not suicidal, so neither are you.’

  ‘It’s random chance’—with an ironic smile which brought forth its reflection on the other Tom—‘that you’re closer, by one pace, to escape. Divergence, my brother.’

  ‘The blue stuff—’

  ‘Needs investigation, by Avernon.’

  ‘We can both—’

  A shake of the familiar head. ‘No, we can’t.’

  They clasped forearms, then he made the hardest decision of all and turned to run, while he knelt and faced the door.

  He ran.

  He stayed.

  He stretched lightly, loosened limbs, controlled his breathing. Regarded the stone tunnel, dank and unlovely—and saw a tiny golden spider apparently in mid-air. Its web, invisible, suspended it near a splotch of pale, grey-green colour on the wall: a patch of lichen. It was life, spreading everywhere, even in these surroundings.

  And it was somehow fitting, somehow appropriate, that the end should come in such a place.

  Elva. I would have liked to see you again.

  But in a sense, he would.

  He was sure of that.

  Running, with the tears unnoticed upon his cheeks, shutting down his thoughts by act of will, focused now on sheer survival.

  Take them with you.

  The Enemy’s forces would be upon him soon.

  Take them, my brother.

  Thighs pumping as he ran.

  Take out as many as you can.

  ~ * ~

  53

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  It is there: the untouched potential for every long-term fighter to transcend, to achieve that graceful state beyond the immediate, messy, bloody business of combat, to reach a place where the flow and the spirit are all that matter.

  He fought.

  As they spilled into the corridor, Tom leaped from a hiding place halfway up the wall, knocking a graser rifle aside with a descending crescent kick as his elbow hooked into the soldier’s neck, pinpointing the carotid, and even as the man fell Tom used him as a stepping stone, knee to throat and fingertips to eyes, taking out two more before they even realized he was upon them.

  It was ferocious and it was unexpected, and they could not deal with him at this range.

  He kicked, used a palm-strike—aiming for a chin, missed, using a knee and whipping the hand back as a hammer fist and this time he got it but pain exploded in the back of his head.

  Then he let loose his animal spirit, the ravening predator inside us all, and blood-lust curtained his vision as he kicked, swept a man’s legs from under him, grabbed a weapon-bearing hand and twisted, breaking fingers—moving, always moving, confusing his enemies—and stamped upon the fallen soldier, a sharp crack audible even amid the Chaos.

  Faster.

  Smoother...

  Graser beam, and it scorched his shoulder but the pain was nothing and he took his revenge, kicking another man into the weapon’s path—shocked features, drained of blood: the soldier killing his own comrade-in-arms—but there was no chance to follow up as others were upon him.

  Untrained men would have fallen back but they were used to working as a team, to strive for their comrades’ welfare above their own, and Tom used that to his advantage, taking out those closest to him where they could not bring weapons to bear.