When I objected to this unfriendly treatment, I was informed that during incursions, the entire Principate was considered to be in combat, and anyone taking advantage of the general distraction for the perpetration of mischief was in fact aiding the enemy and should be treated accordingly. At that point, it’s possible I might have claimed my so-called mischief was actually part of a plan to save the world, and on that count I was doing a whole lot more than a couple of potbellied gendarmes like the ones carrying me down to Shelter Block East. Needless to say, things did not improve. Names were called, accusations leveled, and, in the end, I was deposited in a locked cell3 to wait out the remainder of the incursion.
It was an awful night, not so much because of the cell itself—which was small but generally not so bad—as my increasing certainty that the world was about to end. Vinneas was right about the impending Valentine invasion, I was sure of it, and if Rae was going to reveal the truth, I knew she had to do it soon. The more time passed, the surer I became she was dead, and we were all going to die, too.
But then, sometime around 0630, I heard shouting from the direction of the room where my captors had retired to their all-important duty of drinking and telling dirty jokes, and Rae appeared, frog-marching the gendarmes to my cell, her accent, usually easy enough to understand, rendered incomprehensible by her rage. I learned afterward that she had come with orders for my release from Princept Azemon himself, but at the time, she appeared to have freed me with pure righteous fury.
No sooner had the door to my cell opened than Rae threw herself at me, encircling me in her long arms and practically lifting me off the ground. “It worked,” she said, releasing me and clasping my hands.
Finding myself on the verge of tears, I took a moment to clear my throat to avoid any sort of emotional lacrimation. “They closed Lunar Veil?”
She nodded hesitantly. “Some of the Valentines got through. The fighting is still going on, but the Curator and Princept Azemon say the worst of it is over. We’re all right for now.”
“What about Snuggles?”
Rae’s expression took on an aggrieved twist. “Oh, Kizabel,” she said. “I don’t know. He was in bad shape by the time we got back. I had them take him to your workshop.” She smiled weakly. “The Curator says you can have your workshop back, by the way. They’ll even fix the ceiling. Do you want to go see him?”
What I really needed was sleep. I’d dozed off once or twice during my captivity but had been too worried and terrified overall to get any useful REM. But at the present moment, I was more interested in how Rae and Snuggles had fared in the battle. The two gendarmes, who had been listening in frowning befuddlement to our conversation, moved aside at a contemptuous glance from Rae, and we joined the columns of cadets and citizens just then being allowed to leave the shelters.
As we walked, Rae narrated the battle. Snuggles had performed even better than I’d hoped, allowing Rae to puddle-jump to the head of our formations and wing past a skirmish already in progress, all with only minor damage as far as I could tell. Rae was somewhat less informative on the subject of Snuggles’s injuries,4 but by the time we reached my workshop, I was beginning to think they weren’t as bad as she imagined.
Lady Jane was waiting for us, a blur in the brushed metal of my workshop door. “You did it!” she squealed. In the background, I heard loopy CE jazz music, one of the songs she played in celebratory moments. “We’re not all dead!”
“We might all still die,” I felt compelled to point out.
“With that attitude, you can just stay outside, thank you very much,” Lady answered.
I didn’t feel like arguing, and to be honest, I was pretty proud of myself, and of Rae, and of Lady, who had played her own part in our continued existence, overpowering the instarus that had been posted to keep me out of my workshop. In the spirit of the occasion, I offered her the sincerest “Yippee” I could muster.
“Good enough, I suppose.” Lady sighed, pulling back the door for us. The scenery behind her mirrors showed the aftermath of a wild party, a landscape of collapsed chairs, smashed glasses, balloons drifting among overturned bottles of champagne.5 My workshop was in a similar state of disarray, as was to be expected following the hastily arranged launch of an experimental and still-somewhat-unpolished equus.
The wall to Testing Floor Sixteen was open, and there Snuggles knelt, looking just like the statue of an ancient armored knight carved in white marble, luminous in the new daylight shining through the hole in my workshop ceiling. The cracks and erosions scarring his armor only added to his antiqued appearance, though if you looked closely, you could see a few spots of exposed thurgo-muscle glinting like shards of metal in white sand.
“I think I broke him,” Rae said miserably. “By the time we got back, I couldn’t get him to fly anymore. He could hardly walk. Imway and his people had to carry us most of the way,” she added.
“What?” Imway still occupied the number one spot on my shit list, and hearing his name in the context of our present victory6 made no sense at all. I whirled on her, not sure I’d heard right, but the disgusted look on her face told me I had.
“He and his people were the ones who pulled me out of the fight,” she said, then smiled. “He thought he was rescuing you, because of Snuggles.”
Recently, my feelings toward Imway had rested largely along the resentful/homicidal end of the emotional spectrum, but hearing this caused an unexpected blip. If Rae was telling the truth, Imway had dived into an ongoing battle to rescue me—or a person he thought was me. Maybe our childhood friendship still counted for something after all.
Once Snuggles was escorted back to Ninth City and his rider’s identity revealed, no one could quite decide what to do, except for Rae, who was so exhausted she could barely stand and promptly collapsed in a heap. It was solidly six hours before she was either conscious or coherent enough to explain what had happened. I decided I couldn’t begrudge her the nice night’s sleep she’d had while I was cooped up in a four-and-a-half-square-meter cell worrying myself to death, given that she’d made it a priority to track me down as soon as she had regained the ability to form complete sentences—but mostly because of the disconsolate way she was now looking at Snuggles, like he was some adorable but pitifully injured woodland creature.
“He’ll be fine,” I told her. And he would. Snuggles might have been almost inoperable at the moment, but he’d be an easy fix. The symptoms Rae described—the lag in responsiveness, her own debilitating exhaustion—were textbook gwayd loss. It was obvious he’d sustained a number of small injuries, and without any active sealing or cauterizing artifices—among the many finishing touches I’d left out during his hurried launch—he’d leaked gwayd at an absurd rate. I was impressed Rae had been able to keep him moving as long as she had; the strain must have been enormous.
“Really?” Rae asked, as if she didn’t dare hope.
“Oh, sure. Flesh wounds only. I’ve done worse just testing him out here. We’ll have him back on his feet in no time—maybe even a few hours, if you’re up to try an activation later.”
“I thought we were celebrating!” Lady shouted indignantly.
I was already feeling better, bubbling with the energy I get whenever there’s real, interesting work to be done. “This is how I celebrate,” I said, already searching for my tools amid the debris of the workshop.
I had erected the still-slightly-mangled egg crate and was stripping Snuggles from his armor, Rae playing tinker’s assistant, running for riggings and materials and answering questions regarding the Project’s function during his first long flight—already I’d begun to imagine a few tweaks and improvements—when from the direction of my workshop door I heard Lady say, “Well, look who’s decided to show his face!”
My first guess, based on Lady’s saucy tone, was that it had to be Imway—I gathered from Rae’s incipient scowl that she thought the same—but
the rejoining voice belonged to Vinneas. “Lady! It’s been ages. So lovely to see you again. Having a party?”
“All by myself,” she answered, slurring7 somewhat, “because everyone else is being tedious.”
“Unconscionable,” Vinneas answered, then paused. I had climbed down from the scaffolding around Snuggles, and when Vinneas saw me, he crossed the room in five long strides and clasped me to him. “Great work, Kiz,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t know what I’d have done if anything had happened to you out there.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I said. It was my second very-tall-person hug of the day, and I was quite overcome. So nice to know your friends care. “I was actually pretty safe, down in the shelter holding cells. Rae did most of the dangerous stuff.”
Rae had been standing quietly a few steps back. Vinneas actually looked confused to find her there—a rare moment when he seemed unsure of himself. “Hello, Vinneas,” Rae said.
After the enthusiastic squeezing I’d received from both of them, I expected Vinneas and Rae would have some similar greeting for each other, but all that passed between them was a tentative smile, followed by several seconds of silence and hesitant shifts in posture—awkwardness, I realized with an insightful jolt, that resulted from as-yet-unexpressed romantic sentiments. An excited sound almost like a chirp escaped me before I could stop it, and I had to pretend a sudden tussive fit to avoid suspicion. This was big news. Imway, as one would expect from a gorgeous macho jerk, was quite the ladies’ man, but I’d never known Vinneas to show any interest in females as such. Lady had obviously reached a similar conclusion: She was giving me the bawdy eyebrow waggle she used to denote steamy drama afoot.
“Rae,” Vinneas said, overcoming his uncertainty by an obvious outlay of effort. “You took on half the Legion and an entire Valentine army for us. Thank you. I hear you fly like a shooting star.”
Rae rewarded him with a sparkling grin. “Don’t forget Lady.”
“Yeah!” agreed Lady. “You know what those assholes wanted to do to me, Vinn? They were going to archive me, bottle me up in some snow globe and file me away as an example of an interesting but volatile and ultimately failed artifice.”
“Ingrates and cretins, all of them,” Vinneas affirmed, “and, unfortunately, it looks like they’ll need your help again.”
When Curator Ellmore learned a mysterious equus had appeared beneath Lunar Veil to miraculously unmask a shocking Valentine offensive, she immediately recognized Vinneas’s work and arranged to have him brought by velo from the harvester where he’d been stranded when the battle began. While I was stewing in prison, and Rae was in an insensible vegetative state, Vinneas had been privy to the worldwide chaos of the battle and the feverish scrambling as our leaders attempted to figure out what to do next.
The situation was bad. Earth’s Legions had been reduced to a fraction of their former strength, yes, but that was nothing compared to the news from the Front. Rae and Snuggles weren’t the only exotic objects Ninth City’s defense force recovered during the battle. They’d also brought back Fontana Malandeera of the Twenty-Second Legion, sent to us on orders from our commanders at the Front. Our former commanders at the former Front, that is. From the sound of things, we were all pretty well and truly screwed. Vinneas had spent the night listening to officials in cities across the world frantically deliberating over a list of dwindling and increasingly unattractive options.
“They want to abandon Earth,” he told us now. “All the Princepts agree. The Consulate is meeting here tomorrow, and they’ll make it official then.”
Rae and I were gaping at him, speechless; the only sound was Lady’s light snoring. “We can’t leave!” Rae shouted. “There has to be something we can do!”
“I’ve listened to the analysis,” Vinneas said. “It seems like the only way to save humanity.”
“But you have a plan,” I said, finishing his thought for him. He had that look he gets when he’s holding on to an idea, something elaborate and enormous and crazily grand, and even before he said it, I knew I’d do everything I could to help.
“There’s a chance.” He met my eyes, grinning. “Do you still have your copy of Associative Architecture?”
FORTY-SEVEN
KIZABEL
And so here I am, nearly two full sleepless day-and-night cycles later, with plans for a prodigious and fearsome world-saving weapon crammed into half a dozen folders, plus all the data sets and proofs and engineering summaries and architectural details I thought I’d need to make my case, piled into a mountainous mess of papers I have to keep straightening and adjusting to prevent the whole thing from spilling humiliatingly onto the floor in front of the Consulate and a good portion of the remaining leadership of the Twelve Principates. Curator Ellmore has finished her speech, and as she returns to her seat, Vinneas rises and walks, with that unerringly confident manner of his, to lay out our plan before the Consulate.
The argument he makes is simple. For what little we know about our enemy, there are a few certainties. We know their military strength outstrips ours. Until recently, we had reason to consider our forces evenly matched—the Front had been at a stalemate for centuries—but no longer. Compared to the Valentine Host presently on its way to Earth, our remaining defenses are so minuscule as to be insignificant. We know, too, that the Valentines possess an understanding of thelemity, and of the Realms, far greater than our own. For all our efforts to discover the secret behind their regular incursions into Hestia, how they are able to bypass our lines at the Front—and perhaps the Realms themselves—to appear without warning over Earth, their method remains a mystery. This is only a single example, but it is telling evidence that the Valentines may possess capabilities we haven’t yet imagined. In fact, Vinneas says, there is only one advantage we can claim with any confidence over our enemy: time.
Of all the Realms we have seen in centuries of exploration, Hestia, our home, stands out in one crucial regard: Time here moves faster than anywhere else. There is no way to know for certain how unique Hestia is in this respect. If the Realms are truly infinite, as we suspect, then there must be some other Realm careening across time at an even greater velocity. But we have never encountered such a place. Indeed, we have yet to find a Realm where time moves more than a tenth as quickly as it does in Hestia. Moreover, there appears to be a trend in the speeds at which different Realms travel through time: The farther you proceed into the Lattice, the slower—on average—time flows. All available evidence indicates that no Realm the Valentines presently occupy can keep pace with time in Hestia. And this asset, time, outweighs everything the Valentines have in their favor. In matters of war, time trumps all.
Given enough time, we can close the distance between ourselves and our enemy—build a stronger Legion, advance our mastery of thelemity—and perhaps one day surpass them. With time on our side, Vinneas argues, we do not merely have a chance of defeating the Valentines. Victory is all but inevitable. And if we surrender time to our enemy, defeat is just as certain.
“Very eloquent, Censor Vinneas,” Consul Seppora says, once Vinneas has finished. “You make an excellent case, and I doubt anyone in this room would disagree with your central premise. But, unfortunately, time in this instance is not on our side. We are facing the imminent arrival of an enemy we cannot hope to defeat.”
“Cannot hope to defeat yet,” Vinneas replies.
I suffer an involuntary cringe at his presumption in correcting the leader of the Consulate, almost expecting her to lean down and crunch his skull for an afternoon snack. Instead, Seppora’s thin, saurian mouth stretches into something like a smile. “Explain, please.”
“As Fontana Malandeera described in her report,” Vinneas says, “when our forces realized they were about to be overrun, they closed off the passageways leading between the Realms along the Front, leaving a significant portion of the Valentine Host without any clear path to Earth
. The Valentines will have to wait for those passages to reopen—perhaps only a matter of days from their perspective, but for us, it will mean a reprieve of months or even years. If we could close off other Realms along their route to Earth, we would delay the Valentine Host even more—possibly long enough to mount a convincing defense.”
Muted discussion has begun pattering through the crowd behind me, but Consul Seppora remains unmoved. “I do hope you have more for this Consulate than possibly, Censor.”
“Small Valentine raiding parties may be capable of reaching Hestia by some unknown alternate course,” Vinneas continued, “but the main body of the Valentine Host will have to advance through the Realms the same way we do. If that were not the case, they would be here already. Once the Valentine Host enters the Ten World Corridor, it will have only one path to Hestia. I propose that we send as much of our remaining Legion as we can spare into the Realms to close off the Corridor before the Valentine Host arrives.”
The ambient chatter has become too noisy to ignore, rising as more and more people begin to understand what Vinneas intends. Consul Seppora raises a hand for silence. “And you believe such a mission would serve a useful purpose?”
“Yes. If we are able to seal the first four Realms leading away from Hestia, we will delay the Valentine Host an additional fourteen years, as viewed from our perspective on Earth. If we can close five, that total will rise to twenty-four years, allowing us more than twenty-six years in all to prepare for the earliest estimated arrival of the Valentine Host. Given the enemy positions outlined in Fontana Malandeera’s report, an excursion of the sort I’m proposing should be able to secure at least five Realms—and with them, twenty-six years—before encountering any serious opposition.”
Consul Seppora examines Vinneas closely, while on either side members of the Consulate whisper to one another. “And when they do encounter opposition, Censor Vinneas?” Her implication is clear: Will this be a suicide mission? From the discussion I hear rising once again around the room, most people consider the question a nonissue; sacrificing a few legionaries to salvage the entire war sounds like a steal of a deal.
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