Jav advanced no further. He and Raus were both curious to see if Kohanic would simply fall over dead and inert, or if they would continue their interaction with ghosts. For a moment, Kohanic blurred before their eyes, as if there were several of him aligning to make him real. He came back into focus, gained sturdy footing, and put his head back where it was supposed to go, adjusting it so that it sat as best as it could, though it listed to his right, unable to sit properly upon the spine. Blood sputtered messily from Kohanic’s lips before he could form proper words again.
“That was impolite,” Kohanic said, the words gurgling wetly and creating thin red bubbles at his throat where the ripped folds of skin overlapped.
Jav regarded Raus who had nothing to offer in the way of explanation. As Jav turned back to face Kohanic, he became aware of a white shape passing him. Kohanic raised his hand and seemed to rob the ghost of its unnatural life, causing it to disappear. Behind Kohanic, from the steps emerged five more Sarsans dressed and armed just as he was. Two of them were women, all of them looked angry. Kohanic looked at Jav with strangely hollow, colorless eyes. He opened his mouth, but instead of words, an unintelligible sound poured out from between blood-sticky lips.
For a moment, Jav merely stared, wondering what the action might signify. He had an answer—of sorts—almost immediately.
The sound in his head exploded with physical violence. Beyond deafening, beyond merely painful, it was a sense and sanity shattering onslaught that dropped him to his knees. He clutched at his head with both hands, but just as quickly as it came on, it ceased, leaving him panting and—for the first time in a long time—afraid.
A voice inside his head was echoing over and over again Anis Lausden, and he was stricken with the sudden fear that he would never see her again. Anis. It was Anis he’d been trying to remember since before he and Raus left the Palace, but as the thought crystallized, it turned to mist, the way most dreams do on waking. Laughter seemed to tinkle inside his head from various corners of his brain. Some part of him, strangely cold and detached, knew the truth, that he was forgetting Anis, just as he had forgotten Jennifer. Would he also forget Mai? Black rage began to seep into Jav then. It was the start of a process that would continue for years to come. He was aware of losing something vital to him, but he could not get his head around exactly what it was.
“You know yourself as Holson now?” Kohanic was saying. “So many people are disappointed in you. Allow me to explain our case against the Kaplers, and then, by all means, let us get to the business you’ve come here for.”
A spectral machine was rising from the ground just before Kohanic. Seven bulbous nodules, like vague caricatures of human torsos were fixed to a central pylon, overlapping each other like thick leaves, pointing upwards, with the seventh forming a gently twisting, pointed spire. Kohanic still held something from the departed ghost in his right hand and began working it into one of the nodules.
Raus touched the newly made scar that decorated his cheek. “Blood,” he whispered unconsciously.
“This desolate rock isn’t Sarsa, Mr. Kapler. Oh, and I see that you are in fact the Jorston Kapler’s son. The stronger bioelectric field will always overwrite the seed’s natural imprint. All the better. In any case, I suppose it doesn’t matter what you call this place. We have made it into and kept it a paradise, in spite of what your father did.”
“What did my father do? And who or what are you? Thars Kohanic is a name that shows up in my father’s records dating back. . .” Raus paused.
“Yes?” Kohanic said. “Dating back how far? Mr. Kapler, your father would have had you believe that all our forays into the south were raids, that we sought to conquer.”
“Weren’t they? Didn’t you?”
Kohanic shook his head, which shifted distractingly on his neck, one slippery end against the other.
“No. We have everything that we need here. Beneath this valley, hidden within the hearts of these mountain ranges and preserved by the cold are vast caverns lined with crystals, natural batteries which we’ve used to house the bioelectric fields of the dead. Within this network of crystals, the real Sarsa—a paradise—has been reproduced and none are turned away from its warm, sun-bright meadows. We live on in death, free to pursue anything our imaginations allow, fettered only by the limits we impose upon ourselves.
“The crash took much from us, perhaps more even than the loss of our beloved home world. This was never our intended destination, but I have done my best in the captain’s place—and with ample help—to see that we did not perish as a race.
“Of the original crew, seven of us—officers—were subjected to a process co-developed by Acston Mosario and your father. Our bioelectric fields were enhanced, made independent and immortal, able to pass to and fro between the network of the crystals and the world above, able to occupy those of our own descent to help guide and direct the generations as they came and went so that we might thrive as a people once again. We are called the Bright Ones. We have modeled our rule after that of our ancient king, Heiliger Samms, who, with his bare hands and holy light, brought peace and order to the five continents of Sarsa. His greatness was really in his selflessness, though. Once all opposition was subdued, he relinquished his right to kingship, allowing the people to govern themselves, remaining to offer counsel, to protect the people, and enforce their decisions or to occasionally step in to resume control temporarily if such was necessary. We were able to emulate his model for a time with little resistance and great success.
“But Jorston Kapler wasn’t satisfied with being a mere counselor. He felt that we seven had the right to true, direct, permanent leadership in both realms and that we were fools not to exercise that right. He used deception to create a rift between us. He set brother against brother and we nearly butchered ourselves to extinction. He fled the north with his host and established his own reign far to the south. Your father was a criminal on a scale that was as yet unknown to us as a people. He continued to conduct his experiments, using up his own progeny like disposable suits of clothing, casting out or destroying their bioelectric fields in the process.”
“And you’re so different? These people are like sheep. They appear to have no minds of their own. They’re empty vessels meant only to serve you, aren’t they?”
Kohanic shook his head, making it slide disturbingly upon his red-slicked neck once again. “No. It’s true they await our orders, but they have their own lives, as simple and pastoral as those lives may have become. Rosun Kohanic, like the others, recedes when I take possession of his body, but he retains his will, his identity, his life, resuming control when I exit. But Jav Holson has killed him. Rosun Kohanic has gone on to the sun-bright meadows now. Only the strength of my bioelectric field holds what’s left of him together.
“Your father sought to create the perfect vessel. One that he would never need to replace, one that was strong, durable, permanent. You should consider yourself lucky that you were deemed a failure or a work in progress when your father died. He is dead, is he not?”
“He is.”
“Justice comes to all Sarsans, Mr. Kapler, though it may take generations. As I told you, we are a people who cannot forget. And we cannot abide an untreated stain. We made a vow, Mr. Kapler. After the fighting had stopped and peace returned to us, we swore to never take up arms against each other again. The people living in this valley, and those living in death below it are are all descendants of the seven officers, the Bright Ones. We had an obligation to rebuild and we all did our parts. We are all brothers here, Mr. Kapler, but your father’s crimes remained in stark defiance to our vow. We could not tolerate those crimes being committed a second time. Our forays into the south were to bring your father to justice and bring true, everlasting peace to Sarsans here in the cold north and in the sun-bright meadows below.
“Simply apprehending your father would not suffice, we intended to make our vow real and binding. After generations of failed attempts to subdue your father
, we have finally obtained what was required from you, the closest genetic match to Jorston Kapler in existence. This machine now contains the blood of the seven genetic forebears of all Sarsans on this planet and our oath can be made physical.”
Kohanic worked the nodule on the machine, twisted it slightly and locked it into place.
“I can appreciate justice,” Jav said, eliciting a sluggish raised eyebrow from Kohanic. “But the circumstances have changed. This planet no longer belongs to you. Do you really think that machine is going to stop us from wiping you out?”
“I believe it’s going to prevent you from doing what you intended to do, at least the way you intended. And frankly, Jav Holson, you are playing host to a hundred who are in agreement with me and currently in defiance of you. Perhaps you can hear them.”
Jav’s face contorted into a sneer, the hint of truth in Kohanic’s words honing his anger to a fine point. “How is it these days that people who don’t even know me know more about me than I do?”
Kohanic stared at him indifferently and made a final adjustment to the apparatus before him. The spectral machine flashed, sending out an expanding ripple of glitter light that passed through Jav and Raus and beyond, racing across the plain.
Jav watched the ripple’s frontier continue on in every direction and knew that it wouldn’t stop, but it was his anger at Kohanic’s secret knowledge that motivated him now; the machine and its light had done nothing and could be ignored.
8. ALL & NOTHING
(10,689.158)
On lifeless Zahl, Icsain was content—at least until the sun came up. Before the rising of the sun each day, he would walk long and far, and there may have been some magic in his stride since he was able to keep the light at his back, the sun never quite breaking from the horizon behind him. At the end of his daily trek, once he’d finally outdistanced the sun, he would find a place to sit. From this temporary throne, he would watch the wind draw its pictures, conduct its symphonies, and he would try to find satisfaction reliving his past life in his perfect memories. But his memory was perfect and he had little capacity for imagination, which meant that, for years uncounted, he’d starved for something new.
Icsain was bored, bored, bored. And angry. Only occasionally, though. More and more frequently, to be sure, but he could still reign in his temper. Railing would bring him nothing, and nothing was something he already had in abundance. In excess, really.
When he did get angry, though, he found that, in going back through those perfect memories, he separated himself from the humanity in which he’d once tried so hard to lose himself. Events would not unfold differently, but his opinions of the players had changed. Genuine acts of kindness no longer made any sense to him. He thought he used to understand kindness, but that was when there were people still left on Zahl. Now logic won out as the only acceptable criteria for determining value. He was, after all, a creature a logic. His memory was infallible. His ability to process probable outcomes had been called divination—magic—much to his amusement. Back then he could laugh right along with them and understand why, but now the concept seemed alien to him, a defect even, symptomatic of an inferior mind. Trivialities were wasteful and distracting, unnecessary. He thought the same of anger, of course, but anger came unbidden, and seemed a welcome friend at times. Certainly, in ages past, it had served him as source of motivation and resolve.
He needed a change. There were scenarios he had run through which would amount to a kind of salvation, but all of them depended on variables not local to Zahl, which in turn reduced their probability of coming to pass.
There was another solution. He could allow the sun, which had not always acted as poison, to catch up with him and simply suffer its withering rays until his immaculate body of polished wood turned to dust. Joining the countless whorls that capered across the surface of Zahl had a kind of sick appeal, like the punchline of a cosmic joke, which he could still appreciate intellectually.
It had taken centuries, but he had become known all over Zahl, and by that time the population had reached its exponential peak. Everyone knew of him. Governments sought him out for his wisdom, which he offered freely. He was unflinchingly honest, though, and he soon confirmed, without any room for doubt, another human failure: the inability to accept an unwanted truth.
He often wondered if his own presence had facilitated the ultimate decline of all life on Zahl, but he couldn’t clearly determine or distinguish probabilities where he himself was a key—or perhaps the key—variable. It didn’t matter, either. He learned quickly to tell enough truth to earn acceptance in various circles, but eventually, he couldn’t escape blame for whatever affliction happened to come along, whether it was war, or blight, or sudden and catastrophic climatic change. Though he never sought more than to belong, he became the scapegoat for any and all crises. In the end, he outlived the civilization and a part of him—a part of him which he could not and would not acknowledge consciously—took great satisfaction in that. He was, after all, superior to any life housed in mere flesh.
That unconscious pinprick high would come and go with the knowledge that his superiority to all life he had ever known meant nothing as long as he was trapped on a dead planet with no one left to outshine.
9. THE GHOST KILLER
10,689.158
Jav attempted to move forward, to rush Kohanic again, this time finishing the Sarsan, but something held him fast. He felt like he was sealed in an invisible die mold, so perfect was his confinement. He struggled against the hold, but had the intuition that a percentage of his own strength was being used against him. Kohanic started towards Jav now, unsheathing the thick, square-tipped blade from where it hung at his hip, but Jav hardly noticed. He pushed against his prison, testing its strength with what was left to him, and finding that insufficient, he incorporated AI. In seeking a reference point to anchor the calculation, Jav saw Kohanic raise the square sword and bring it down. Frustration escalated to rage. Rage became power. In an explosive burst, Jav yanked his arms up, crossing them above his head to meet the bite of Kohanic’s blade. Pain, sharp and deep and localized in his forearms was swallowed by the ravening electric current that coursed through his body, threatening to burst out through his vibrating eyeballs.
Jav leapt back from Kohanic, suddenly aware that he was free of whatever had been restraining him, that his arms were wet with his own blood, steaming in the freezing air, but mostly he was aware of the cold itself and how the Kaiser Bones were absent, no longer covering him in their various protections. He searched the place in his mind where he kept them always at the ready, but they either weren’t there or they weren’t responding. His link to the skeletons was gone. Nor could he sense bone anywhere, buried under the ground or within flesh living or dead. There was no question: the Kaiser Bones were gone.
Jav’s confusion and the resulting preoccupation brought back his rage. His eyes still tickling, he quickly eyed the Sarsans around him. Kohanic was coming for him again, but the remaining Bright Ones contented themselves with Raus for the time being.
From their inaction, and though they yet stood upright, Jav was pretty sure that the corpses were not obeying Raus’s commands. Isn’t that want Kohanic had said? That the oath was now physical, that brothers would not fight brothers, not even after death? It didn’t seem to stop Raus or the Bright Ones from fighting each other, however. Founders’ privilege, Jav guessed. All right, he thought, if I have no army, I’ll be the army.
Jav sprung at Kohanic, his passage through the snow-decorated air fanning small ember lights all over his tattered and smoldering leather jacket, and landed his foot upon the giant’s right knee, turning and splintering it. Kohanic spun, unable to support his own weight, but Jav caught him, left hand sinking fingers of steel into Kohanic’s right shoulder, right hand likewise finding purchase amongst Kohanic’s ribs. Jav exerted mightily, incorporating AI, and tore Kohanic into two uneven halves. Blood, now thick and stale, erupted in sticky globs as Kohanic’s entrai
ls slid quietly out his middle and down his broken leg. Jav sent Kohanic’s already-loosened head flying with a back-handed claw, then kicked the destroyed body away from him.
“Is that the justice you wanted?” Jav shouted at the inert body. “I’ve got more. Why don’t you get up and tell me again how this isn’t going to go the way we expected? Because in the end, this is what I expected: you and the lot of you dead.”
The look on Raus’s face plainly showed his shock, but he had no time to dwell on the monster Jav Holson had become. He was surrounded now, and regardless of the method, he hoped Jav would prove as unstoppable as he now appeared—for both their sakes. Lightning rained down around Raus, electrocuting groups of ten and twenty at a time, but though he made new corpses, they only remained potential soldiers in his army—he could control none of them. Nor did they attempt to assail him—yet, anyway—for which he was grateful.
Jav’s rage had begun a red spiral, somehow independent of him. He tore through bodies, through meat and bone, with claw hand techniques he’d never used on flesh and blood opponents before. It occurred to him then that though his body and his fingers were well-conditioned to execute these techniques, it was his first time using them consciously, that he had in the past, in spite of the power he could put behind them, opted for techniques that were more humane and less bloody. He shrugged off the thought and proceeded, tearing through Sarsans who, at least for a time, stood idle like the sheep to which they’d been compared, doing nothing but screaming out horribly and pitifully as they died. Those screams touched a part of him, down deep and inaccessible now, arousing the bud of compassion, but more than that, their inaction and their cries incensed him and drove him to further fury. Who would save them if not they themselves?
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 13