Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  She had never thought of herself as dependent on that voice. But there was a deeply buried, deeply suffering part of her that wanted nothing more than to allow it to continue leading her.

  We were always on the same side.

  She tried to shake that part of it off.

  For a whole week of their travel, the horizon glowed aflame with wildfire. The wind chapped her skin, turned her hair dry and dusty. On the nights when her inner voice didn’t visit her, she could hardly sleep for dreams of choking on smoke. Long after they left the fire, the sky hazed red and brown, like one of the alien worlds her inner voice showed her.

  The farther they traveled from Italy, the less the locals knew what to make of them. They did not retreat to castles and walls, just stopped and stared. They were wary, sure. They knew war. But they had not had fresh experience. Even with only ninety men, she and Antonov could have taken a swath of land. It would not have been worth the bother. As poor as the worst-ravaged parts of Italy were, this was poorer still.

  Fia had not seen so much empty land, with so little between. She thought Antonov had been exaggerating when he’d talked about boiling grass. Antonov insisted that the local herders were rich in their own rights, but Fia saw little worth taking.

  Plans have changed. We have another role in mind for you.

  She listened to what it had to say. She promised nothing.

  They found towns only on occasion. She and Caterina visited, with escorts, when they could. The locals would trade away plenty for gold. More than she could have bought in Italy.

  An hour after Fia returned from such a tour, she invited herself into Antonov’s lunch. Speaking around her salt pork, Fia told him, “There’s work for us. What passes for the lord of the area is hunting a fugitive running north. He’s placed a good bounty.”

  Caterina glanced at her. She had been with Fia the entire trip. She knew there’d been no such meeting.

  Antonov didn’t notice. Not many people noticed Caterina. He said, “I’m not interested in work for hire.”

  “We might as well look for this fugitive. We’re headed where she was going.”

  That caught his attention. He stopped chewing. “‘She?’”

  “She,” Fia said.

  Fia’s inner voice had not told her, specifically, where it wanted her to go. It did not need to. Sometimes it could communicate on a different level. She knew exactly where it wanted her to be, and when.

  She was not averse to keeping her options open, she told herself.

  Her inner voice’s dreams wove through her memories. When she woke, she was not sure how much she had actually experienced, and how much her memory lied that she remembered. She lived halfway in its world, but less than half in hers. She did not know where the rest of her had gone.

  Her inner voice’s enemy, the dark shape in the stars, had come alone. But it was not friendless. Like a fallen angel, it had once been part of a greater community.

  We aim to put all of us back together.

  Fia had been doing plenty of dreaming, but when the first snow of the season came, it came from another nightmare. This snow was far too early. It was a light snow, a dusting, but it redrew the map of the land. The grass vanished. The rutted trade road turned slick.

  After night fell and the clouds cleared away, moonlight reflected sharply off the snow. A wall of pale light ringed the horizon. They were encircled by a halo.

  Judging from the shadows under Antonov’s eyes, he had been away so long that he had forgotten what early winter had felt like.

  He did not countermand her when she sent six riders ahead, and off the road. “There were tracks across our path,” she said. “Our bounty.”

  He raised an eyebrow. This was a quiet land, a poor land, but it was not empty. Tracks in the snow did not make a positive identification. He was too tired, too cold, to care.

  He stared into the pavilion’s firepit. He might well have been wondering why she had not gone herself. She didn’t know either.

  The knowledge that she shouldn’t had arrived deep in the pit of her stomach. It was sure as knowledge that she was hungry, or that she was cold. Her inner voice was asking her to place her faith in it.

  She had faith aplenty. But what she did not have was trust.

  But she did not understand what future she had if she did not listen.

  22

  Osia had started to think, based on the insidiousness of the last attack, that the next would come with some subtlety.

  Her memory glitched. The next thing she remembered, she was sprawled across the dirt, her legs nonfunctional, her head on fire.

  Her vision flashed red and white. An agony of alarms screamed under her ears. This body was not supposed to have pain receptors. The fact that she felt it now could only mean a complete systemic malfunction, a misfiring of signals that had overwhelmed her ability to react.

  She had never encountered anything like this before. She had not even known it was possible.

  Her thoughts sluiced through her like tree sap. She hardly remembered where she was. She had been walking amongst the trees, searching for concealment among the ruts and shadows. She was no longer receiving sensory information from her legs. Those few sensors that remained functional told her the outside world had become a boiling froth of electromagnetic activity. Jamming. It had disrupted half her nerves.

  It would even have an effect on flesh and blood humans, but it was more perfectly calibrated to disrupt demiorganics.

  It would have taken an incredible and finely tuned level of technology to manage something like this. Not to mention an intimate awareness of the ways in which demiorganics functioned.

  It was only due to her designers’ careful foresight that she was even able to think at all. They had believed her hardened against most EM attacks, but they hadn’t let self-assurance be their final answer. She was adaptable, redundant. Gradually, her nervous system amplified its signals, routed around inoperable pathways, learned to filter noise.

  The fire in her head subsided. The disruption seethed in the background, a virtual red fog at the edge of her vision. She would never regain control of her legs like this. The radio signals could not cut through the interference.

  With effort, she curled her fingers. She clawed her way to the base of a tangle-trunked beech tree. She levered herself to a slump against it.

  She still seemed to be alone. Her internal clock had been disrupted too, but from the movement of the stars she guessed she had been insensate for no more than five minutes. Aside from the patter of snow where she’d fallen, nothing around her had been disturbed.

  Of course. Last she’d been aware, to the best her passive sensors allowed, nothing had been around her for miles. Anything clever enough to have beaten her sensors, or fast enough to have closed the distance so quickly, would have to be electronic or demiorganic itself. They would have been disrupted by the jamming just as she’d been.

  The jamming was meant to hold her in place. Something was coming. Coming for her.

  She grasped the bark of the tree. She tried to pull herself up. Her knees buckled. She slid back down, hard. Her back knocked against an exposed root. She only just kept herself from tilting into the snow.

  She had never felt so limp and useless. She could hardly see past the trees and shadows. The jamming disrupted perception. Hallucinations danced at the corners of her senses – flashes of movement, light, sounds like voices.

  She grappled along the trunk again, feeling for anything. The tree had no branches at this height. Nothing she could snap off as a weapon.

  She had just enough sense left to know how scared she needed to be.

  She had not felt anything like this since the day she had left her first body behind. She had felt alone, isolated from the world, underneath the onionskin layers of data. Her body refused to allow her the physiological symptoms of terror. No rapid breathing. No racing heart. No shivering, adrenaline. No tears. It a
ll had to stay trapped in her thoughts, where she had no idea what to do with it.

  She battened herself down one thought at a time. Somehow, she pieced together a semblance of herself.

  The snowfall accumulated. It frosted her legs and shoulders. She stayed still. Silent. Dead in the snow.

  There were people out there now. Strangers. Human. She struggled to filter the flashes of infrared from the hallucinations.

  There were four of them. No – three. Five. Six. Their heat shadows blurred somewhere between her eyes and her imagination. Two of them walked with the bowed legs of lifetime riders, but none of them had mounts. The disruption that was jamming her nerves would have also made horses skittish, unmanageable.

  These natives were frightened too. They did not take steps like people who wanted to be here. They moved tense and coiled, their muscles tight. They walked separately, twenty or more paces apart. Searching.

  Her tracks were not old enough to have been snowed over. The trails she’d made would lead them right to her.

  Their heads were uniformly hotter than the rest of their bodies. Their body heat was trapped underneath helmets. Soldiers. Even in this cold, they were sweating. All of them had weapons. The infrared shadow of a steel blade cut a dark line across the nearest man’s chest. They had come to kill her. They were mostly men. One woman.

  She felt about. A palm-sized rock lay buried under the snow. With effort, she gripped it.

  Even with her combat programs offline, she could still calculate a good trajectory. The problem was that she couldn’t trust her arm to throw it, or her fingers to let go.

  One of the soldiers entered her clearing.

  A moment later, and another of the figures tackled him. Their heat shadows tangled together.

  Osia’s thoughts moved sluggishly under the interference. Not until the strangers hit the ground did she understand what was happening. Not all of the soldiers were on the same side.

  The one who’d tackled the soldier, the woman, had been stepping lighter than the others. She’d been stalking them.

  She kept her hand curled around the rock, but remained still. Attacking could only have drawn attention to herself.

  Thirty years of boiling rage crystallized, hardened in the center of her chest. It was a dense weight, and sharp-edged. It felt like the stone she held in her hand.

  At least she could finally do something with it.

  She would have to choose her victim well. Once she downed one, she was probably not going to survive long enough to get the second.

  23

  Weeks of traveling had worn Meloku down, dulled her senses. When something finally happened, Meloku almost wasn’t ready for it.

  The remnants of the Company of the Star moved at military speed, breakneck. They were headed, so far as she could tell, nowhere in particular. The camp followers she traveled with were used to it. They kept their distance from her. That was for the best. It meant they really were treating her as one of them. She had infiltrated them weeks ago, and nearly failed. What remained of her costume had been too rich, and her Neapolitan coinage out of place. Her skills as a laundress had been laughable. But the Company of the Star could not afford to turn away help who could keep up. Too many servants, laborers, and prostitutes had left. Too few had joined.

  Gradually, hatefully, she’d learned to live among them. The skin on her hands felt like bark. She could still hear the cackling of the other women when she’d returned from collecting water and found her tent turned inside out, her blankets missing.

  Meloku’s demiorganics muted the muscle ache, the shin splints, the cold, and the itch of her wool, but they could not give her energy that she didn’t have. The camp followers’ food was awful, half-poison, infested. Her step sagged. Her vision turned a little grayer every day.

  If she hadn’t been looking in the right direction, she would have missed the six armored horsemen riding into the night.

  This was what she had been waiting for. Throughout the weeks she’d spent among the camp followers, there’d been false alarms. More travelers joining the camp. Condottieri departing. Messengers fanning ahead. Nothing had come from them. Meloku knew at once that this was different. A leader like Fiametta of Treviso wouldn’t dispatch a half-dozen heavy cavalry – of which she did not have many remaining – so suddenly. No scouts or messengers had lately returned with any news. Infrared revealed nothing on the horizon worth so heavy a hammer blow.

  She was fully awake at once. Her demiorganics rapidly, efficiently, distributed what energy she had left, flash-manufacturing ATP and priming her muscles. She charged out of the camp followers’ ragged formation, taking long and loping strides through the snow. The others didn’t even look at her go. In the dark, they might not have even seen her.

  Infrared revealed no demiorganic bodies, either. She had not seen Dahn since she’d infiltrated the company’s loose brigade of camp followers. He would never have been able to disguise himself among them. He could move faster without Meloku. He had gone, instead, to contact Ways and Means’ crew in Avignon. He should have reached them by now.

  There had been no hint of him, no transmission.

  The natives weren’t the only threat to worry about here, either. She hadn’t detected any pulse scans. She had avoided sending any since she’d arrived. She’d stayed away from the war camp. Fiametta of Treviso’s camp was infested with listening devices.

  She’d overheard the Company of the Star was on the hunt for a bounty. There was nothing around these wastes to be worth it for soldiers who, however much poorer they might have been than a year ago, still carried a good amount of war booty.

  She pushed through the snow, kicking up clouds. The riders got farther ahead with every step. She could no longer distinguish horse from rider. They were all infrared blurs, at risk of vanishing under the haze of falling snow.

  On her next step, the world dropped out from under her.

  She felt like she kept tumbling. There was no more ground. Her sense of direction, of up and down, vanished.

  She had felt this once before, years ago.

  Then the pain screamed through her, a slice up her spine to the crown of her head. Her stomach roiled, unmoored from her gut. She must have blacked out. When she returned, she was retching bile into effluvia that had once been her lamb supper.

  It took a moment to clock what had happened. Her demiorganics had been ripped away from her. They had been damaged, or shut down. Just like the last time this had happened to her, the rest of her was in neurological shock. A significant fraction of her nervous system had overloaded.

  She was left with what she had been born with. And not really that, either – her mind had adapted itself to her demiorganics, wrapped around them, like a tree growing around a fence post.

  She forced herself up, to dive back into the night. Long ago, that had been the first lesson she’d learned of crises like this. Keep moving. Otherwise the inertia would be too much to overcome. Inertia could be her ally as much as her enemy. It could keep her moving forward.

  She had survived this once before. This time was different. Flashes of infrared leaked across her vision. Red-gray blurs of heat. That told her something. So she hadn’t lost her demiorganics, not entirely. Her augmented vision struggled to function. It was not burnt out, but suppressed.

  She doubted she’d fallen victim to a virus. She had not received any signals. She had more likely stumbled into a disruption field – or some kind of area-blanketing bomb had gone off. This was a magnitude beyond the electromagnetic pulse she’d had the shuttle make. Like it, this would have an effect even on normal human functioning.

  A riderless horse bolted by thirty meters away, in full flight. It was a blood-hot red blur, half lost under the snow.

  All of her ached. The snow had hardly cushioned her fall. She staggered on to the forest’s edge. Her retinal infrared was intermittent, flashing. The snow was getting heavier. The trees clustered thick around her. The forest�
��s naked branches coiled around the sky. Their roots knotted the ground.

  Flickers of heat shone through the trees. Men, dehorsed. They would feel the disruption too. It would be a buzzing in their bones, a fire up and down their arms. Electric tension, like wires in their muscles were about to snap. Their horses had felt it, and bolted. They must have thought the forest haunted.

  Whatever force had disabled her demiorganics was a blunt instrument, a clumsy hammer blow. She doubted it had been meant for her. These men were hunting something.

  There it was, a hundred meters ahead, glimpsed in flashes when her retinal infrared cared to function. An ember-shade of heat curled under a blanket of snow. Too cold to be a living human. Meloku almost thought it a cooling corpse – then it shifted, minutely.

  One of the soldiers was near it.

  Meloku’s feet pounded through the snow. If she stopped, she would fall. She let inertia push her, turned it into momentum.

  Meloku had not stopped to think about how she was going to beat these men. When she’d left the camp, the answer had been easy. With her combat programs, she could match any of them hand to hand. She had darts and tranquilizers. Now her wrist launchers were dead weight, nestled against her bones. She was just a person, no better than them.

  She had only a ghost of a plan.

  She howled mad nonsense as she slammed into him. Loud enough, she hoped, to make her sound like a banshee. She crashed into him, and brought him down into the brush.

  Dry, leafless twigs snapped at her skin. The scent of the soldier’s sweat-caked beard and sour breath dizzied her. His sword, which she hadn’t realized until now that he’d had out, crashed into a tree trunk.

  Somehow she retained enough of her balance to roll, bring him atop her. She hooked her elbow under his neck. She didn’t squeeze, but tightened her grip enough to make it clear that she could crush his windpipe – if she wanted.

  “Scream,” she ordered.

  He screamed.

  The terror in his voice was genuine. Like the horse who’d bolted, he’d seen enough.