Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Ways and Means’ combat drones launched, vanished into the silvery mirror field. On the map, they spread out in a star shape, a defensive posture. There were not enough of them. Ways and Means did not have enough antimatter to fuel all of its combat drones. It had spent too much of its antimatter just in getting here.

  Ways and Means said, “The other amalgamates think the reason we refused to join them is that we have become too attached to this world.”

  Now that she had had a chance to think, more and more of her world was catching up to her. Ways and Means should have begun its maneuvers a second earlier than it had. It had waited for her. It had wanted her safety harness secure before it fired its engines.

  She knew already that there was something in her shuttle that it wanted, badly. She had guessed that it was Fiametta – whatever was in her head, that inner voice of hers. She had not dared to think anything else. She tried to push it out of her mind.

  Ways and Means said, “That coalition has been working to try to sever our attachment to this world. Disrupting our work. They started working against us in small ways that we couldn’t detect.”

  It was easy enough to detect a transplanar gateway in orbit, with all the light and radiation it produced. Even on the surface, a gateway large enough for a person would have been spotted at once.

  But very small gateways could have escaped notice. Microwidth gateways, of the kind that the Unity used to use for communications. Those were just large enough to begin subverting the satellites. Or plant the seed of an implant in a person.

  Osia glanced to Fiametta. She was unconscious. Her breathing and heart rate showed she was in no danger.

  A hundred new questions burned through Osia’s mind. She tried to figure how large a gateway the enemy could have opened. Maybe, if they thought they controlled the satellites, they could have opened a gateway large enough drop a weapon, like the pistol Meloku had reported in the hands of native soldiers.

  Osia’s trip to the west had been prompted by reports of Yuan Chinese soldiers and mercenaries marching that way. They marched on orders from Ways and Means’ agents. Ways and Means had intended to politically and militarily unify Eurasia as a first step to colonizing this world.

  Fiametta had taken contracts from any number of Italian cities, but her secret paymasters had been in the east: Turks, no doubt with a pay chain that went farther east. She had been hired to destabilize the region. Make it easier for a foreign power, like Yuan China, to colonize.

  In her trance, Fiametta had confessed that she’d harbored plans to move eastward, attack her employers. She intended to become more than a mercenary. Whether she succeeded or failed, it was not difficult to imagine her disrupting Ways and Means’ plan. Fiametta’s religious movement had spread far beyond the reach of her sword. It held that soldiers were a special class of people. Among its other tenets, it urged them to fight for themselves, to disregard any loyalty to their lords. If that philosophy spread to eastern soldiers, would make them even more ungovernable.

  And Fiametta’s was not the only cult Ways and Means had complained of. There must have been others doing damage across the Eurasian continent. Fiametta had just been the only one they’d caught.

  Ways and Means said, “Now we’ve captured one of their agents and are about to learn more about their operation, they’ve been prompted to take more significant measures.”

  Osia didn’t know how long Meloku had been awake, but she’d been listening. Meloku said, “Like destroying your surface installations.”

  “The crew would argue for leaving this plane if the chance arose. It wants to shake our control of them, and impress them. Persuade them.”

  A flare of light and radiation spiked across the tactical map. Then another. Combat drones dying, their antimatter stores rupturing. The people below had witnessed a lot of celestial upheaval in the years since Ways and Means’ arrival, and pilgrimages across their skies. This would be new. It would turn night skies blue.

  In some cities, the fires and the riots would have already started. Ways and Means’ triennial trips across the sky, intended to acclimate the natives to the idea of its presence, had them on a hair-trigger. Their pent-up societal anxiety would explode, get a lot of them killed.

  There was nothing Osia could do from here. For all the damage Ways and Means had already done to this world, even it would balk at this.

  Ways and Means said, “The other amalgamates remain trapped on their planes, or they would have come themselves. We assume they can only open small gateways. Enough to wake our backup, provide it with self-replicating factories. That ship has likely been a project decades in the making.

  “We also suspect that they have been focusing their efforts on stalling our projects because they are not ready. By capturing Fiametta of Treviso and threatening to expose their plans, we have forced their hand. They are acting sooner than they would have liked.”

  Osia asked, “You think they corrupted your backup, like my constructs?”

  “Likely not.”

  Verse asked, “Then how did they get it to go along?”

  Meloku blew air through her nose, and said, “It joined them by choice.”

  Verse said to Ways and Means, “But it’s still you. You wouldn’t do all of this.”

  Ways and Means said, “It is to our shame that we have agree with Meloku.”

  Verse repeated, “You couldn’t do this. Not to us.”

  Ways and Means said, “We have done worse in the past.”

  Osia said, “Assuming that’s all true, I don’t see the shame.”

  “We are responsible for everything it is doing.”

  Verse asked, “What? Did you tell it to do any of this?”

  “No.”

  It took Osia a moment too long to understand. It saw its backup as itself. It was itself, decades of different experiences notwithstanding.

  If a copy of itself could have been persuaded to do this then, as far as it was concerned, it could have been, too. It didn’t perceive a moral difference between itself and this other planarship.

  Osia knew, intellectually, that the multiverse was infinite. That somewhere out there, on the right planes, she would find a twin. Many twins. An infinite spectrum of them, many identical, and many more subtly different.

  She would never be able to see them as herself. If one of them committed a crime, no matter their reasons, she would never see herself as culpable. Her sense of herself as an individual would not allow it.

  But Ways and Means had attained consciousness in a very different way than she had. It was a fusion of minds. Its sense of self was fractured, de-individualized. It never referred to itself as “I” or “me.”

  Of course it would have a different perspective on these things.

  A hundred shrieking alarms split Osia’s datastreams. A brilliant, flaring white light overwhelmed the sky. At once, the dome dimmed, went opaque, to protect the passengers’ eyesight.

  She was inundated with reports. A listing of abruptly nonresponsive systems. Crewmembers calling for help. Orders. Even with filters cutting out the worst of the chaff, it was too much to sort through.

  A column of light stretched across the viewing dome. Even with the opaquing window, she could see every detail of it, every jagged edge of erupting hull plating. The light expanded as she watched, mushrooming.

  The beam had fallen through the mirror fields at just the right instant. It had been insufficiently dissipated by the fields’ warping. It had razored across the hull, seven kilometers away.

  The planarship’s white-hot innards geysered into vacuum.

  It took several long seconds for the shockwave to propagate through the hull as far as the lounge. Osia’s expanded senses tracked the shriek of stressed and breaking metal as it raced through the planarship. Osia fell hard into her harness. Somewhere, Meloku cried out, just audible over the juddering of the hull.

  Not long after Osia jolted into her
webbing, she was knocked back into the couch. This was different, a more sustained acceleration. An engine burn. Osia contacted Ways and Means, demanded to know what was happening. Her signal was lost among thousands. Ways and Means did not answer. But it was acting. It was burning hard and away from the Earth, and away from the intruder. Retreating.

  The dazzling light faded. In gradients and stages, the dome became transparent. A black and red streak of weapons scarring, three kilometers long, simmered across the neighboring hull segment. It stretched from one corner of the segment to the other, broadening and attenuating near the end of the track. The gash’s jagged edges were half-molten. It looked like a row of cherry-red fires, burning across the lip of a dark canyon.

  Ways and Means’ hull plating had burned away like paper. The beam had penetrated deep.

  More of the stars and Earth shone through the mirror fields. The beam strike had taken out a number of the planarship’s field projectors. Ways and Means struggled to compensate, rerunning the vastly complicated series of equations that generated the fields. In the meantime, more light crept through than should have.

  The planarship would have been an easy target. Something was bound to get through. Osia braced to die.

  A gust of energized gas, a shockwave from the beam strike, brushed the dome. Nothing else. The intruder had stopped firing.

  The intruder had changed its course too. The two planarships’ combat drones whirled, danced, and destroyed each other, but the intruder did not join them. Whereas Ways and Means had arced away from the Earth, the intruder dropped altitude. It cut underneath Ways and Means. Ways and Means rotated, trying hard to keep itself still facing edge-on.

  The Earth spilled across the dome, slicing the view in half. A scintillating spark and an exhaust plume wrapped a chain across the world. It was the intruder. Its engines illuminated the clouds below, reflected brilliantly off the glass ocean.

  The intruder could have destroyed Ways and Means if it wanted to. It didn’t. That wasn’t what it had come here for.

  It was making a point. It wanted to let it know that it could have. And that it was going to do everything it could to separate Ways and Means from this world.

  The alarms and jumble of voices in her head cut away as a new signal overwhelmed it. The intruder was speaking – and not just to Ways and Means, but to all of its crew. The signal didn’t last long before Ways and Means jammed it, but Ways and Means wasn’t fast enough.

  The message was text: “We used to be bigger than this. We used to have a purpose other than rotting away in isolation and in exile. Your master has been hiding from you a chance to do more. Force this issue. Make it tell you what it’s been missing.”

  The next part was addressed to Ways and Means: “You can do better. When we’ve gotten through this, you’ll thank us for helping you see it. But we are through being gentle.”

  Another white flash forced the dome to dim. Osia readied herself for another scream of damage reports, a shuddering detonation, but nothing came. Another planar gateway was opening, directly in the intruder’s path.

  It had made its point, and viciously.

  Osia glanced over her couch. Verse was rigid-still. Er eyes were watching the sky. Sona was already deep in narrow-beam conference with someone else aboard. Osia caught only a few snippets of their call, and that was encrypted.

  Meloku was looking to Osia as if for guidance. Some clue as to how she was expected to respond. Osia had none to share.

  The intruder was leaving, but it was not leaving them alone. More combat drones fell away from the intruder’s dorsal hull before it dove through the gateway. Their engines shone white-hot. They spread out in sunflower-whorled formation.

  Strokes of fire flashed across the sky, against the oceans. More of Ways and Means’ satellites were dying, fast as the combat drones could reach them.

  32

  Fia had become insubstantial as a cloud. Everywhere she went, she felt like she was falling. And always on the verge of throwing up.

  That was just what life was like in this flying Hell. When it wasn’t, she was getting battered around.

  As she woke, Fia tried to put the noise, the lights, her broken ribs out of her mind. Not much of it had made sense. She was harnessed to another couch under a great glass dome, the likes of which she could not have dreamed would be even in Florence or Venice, looking up onto the stars.

  She had not imagined seeing such things even when she died. She never felt so alive as she did seeing them.

  It was important that she reacted with equanimity. With dignity. With, when it was appropriate, contempt. Her attitude was who she was. And who she was was all that she had left.

  How she was treated, and by whom, told her a great deal worth knowing. Meloku had said a few things to her. Trying to explain what she was seeing, what was going to happen. She hadn’t needed to do that. Fia had marched onto that whale of a shuttle of her own will, but she harbored no illusions that she wouldn’t be a prisoner afterward.

  Now Meloku was trying to pull her out of this couch. She didn’t have to help. No one had ordered her. It was plain enough that she wasn’t on good terms with Osia and the other creatures here. She seemed to be trying to prove something – to them, to herself, Fia couldn’t tell.

  Fia didn’t like being caught at the mercy of someone else’s need to change themselves. For the moment, she had no choice but to go along.

  When Fia’s feet came close to the metal floor, something gripped her, held her there. The floor trembled. A steady pressure held her down. It wasn’t her full weight. Not even close. Meloku said that their craft was moving, and that this was responsible for the feeling of weight, but that was plainly nonsense. Everything in her head was spinning.

  The shadow woman, Osia, was not as much of her enemy as she’d thought. At least, she was not as much an enemy as the other golems. Osia was at least willing to speak to her. The two monsters beside her, the humanoid and the spider, had not looked at her. She’d heard plenty of camp stories about monsters, heard about them in Antonov’s scribes’ readings, but seeing them was a different experience. Their faces hardly moved but their feelings were plain. Her soldiers had carried themselves the same when they rode through a line of captured hostages and slaves.

  Had she spoken, she had no doubt that they would have come down hard upon her. If she was going to invite their wrath, better that it be for something useful. She kept her silence.

  And in the meantime, she had her fear to battle.

  Meloku supported Fia while she limped down another interminable, wormlike passage. The walls and ceiling were polished steel, the lighting dim as moonlight. A portal led them to a cabin colored in shades of rose and bronze. Five man-sized tables sat in the center.

  The surgeon was another automaton monster. He had tripod legs, and his skin gleamed silver under the sharp lights. He did not speak to her, not even to ask her if and where she hurt.

  Fia froze when Meloku asked her to lift her tunic. Meloku had to do it for her. Fia nearly swatted her away, but her reflexes were sluggish and Meloku moved fast.

  The left side of Fia’s ribcage was an ugly mottled black and red of bruised bone. The surgeon held his hand over it. He acted like he was taking the measure of something. Fia was reminded of the last surgeon she’d visited, sniffing a cup of her urine. Useless.

  After a second’s consideration, he fetched a silver sheet six inches long. It was no thicker than her fingernail. He pressed it against her ribs. The touch should have hurt, but the pain stopped at once. The sheet crumpled as he pressed, conforming to her ribcage. Wherever it touched, cool numbness seeped into her flesh. The sheet adhered to her skin.

  As soon as the surgeon withdrew, she yanked her tunic down. Her cheeks burned. If he noticed her anger, he made no mention of it.

  At last, he spoke. “There’s a dead implant lodged in her ventral intraparietal cortex.” He was talking to Meloku, Fia realized. As if she wasn’t there.
“She’ll need surgery to remove it and repair the damaged tissues.”

  He strode away without saying anything else. It was left to Meloku to explain that Fia could take the patch off in a day or so – and that, when she did, she would find her bones knitted.

  That gave Fia pause. She’d had to leave soldiers behind after they broke a leg. Others had died of infections from bone that broke the skin, or couldn’t fight after a bone set poorly.

  How much better could her company have done with a tool like that?

  Her weight cut to nothing. The whole cabin was falling. Some force held her heels to the floor, but that was all. The shift in feeling was like a chisel to her heart. Her pulse stuttered. Her face flushed. Her ears rang and her head spun.

  She’d always assumed Hell was below the ground, not above the clouds. She had already thrown up several times on the journey here. She didn’t think she had anything left to vomit. Her body found a little more.

  She doubled over, retching. Only the force chaining her feet held her down. Or “down.” Bile floated past her in dark, sticky globs.

  She kept heaving, and heaving. Pain ratcheted up her back. Her body had finally broken down. Now that they seemed to be out of danger, and she could let herself feel it, it had all become too much. Her face was so hot with blood that it itched all over, and broke into feverish sweat. She was sure her eyes were clouded red.

  She hung loosely in the air, convulsing and gagging. Her tongue felt swollen, three times its normal size.

  Meloku held her arm and touched her lightly on the shoulder. Something cold speared through her bones, chilled her forehead.

  Meloku must have put her to sleep. Fia didn’t remember anything afterward other than a vague sensation of time passing.

  Deep, impossibly steady blue lights shone upon Fia. Their colors, shades of midnight, were like reflections from the heart of a turquoise gem. A firm mattress pressed into her back. She was wrapped in a silken sheet, tucked into the mattress’s side.