Ninth City Burning

by J. Patrick Black

  “The expedition would have no immediate way back,” Vinneas admits, “but it could easily escape the oncoming Valentine Host by simply exiting the Corridor. As you know, every Realm, including those along the Corridor, branches outward into a potentially infinite number of other Realms. The expedition has merely to choose one such passageway to remove itself from the Valentine Host’s path. The Host itself will be unable to follow without further delaying its advance on Hestia. If, as we all hope is the case, our renewed Legion is able to repel the Valentine attack and retake the Corridor, we will be able to retrieve the expedition then. From the expedition’s perspective, it may be only a few years’ wait.”

  The despair, so palpable here only a short while ago, has begun to recede, to reshape into something like hope. But not everyone is convinced. Nearby, someone signals for Consul Seppora’s attention. When he stands, I recognize the gaunt face and beady eyes of Imperator Feeroy.

  “Consul Seppora,” he says, “if I may address the Consulate. I am familiar with Vinneas and know him to be a very intelligent young man, but he has little experience in the practice of war, and I believe he has ignored one very crucial detail.”

  “What detail would that be, Imperator?” the Consul asks.

  “The Valentine Host is not some distant threat to be countered by long-term strategy, a problem we have years to solve,” Feeroy says. “The first wave is here, right now, waiting to invade. There will be no delaying the attack. In twenty-eight days, the Moon will be aligned to reopen Lunar Veil, and Romeo will have a clear path to Earth. Tell me,” he says, turning to Vinneas, “how does that fit into your proposal?”

  “In order for the expedition to succeed in its mission, we will first have to defeat the Valentine vanguard,” Vinneas says, like a man checking items off a to-do list. “With proper planning and preparation, I believe we can win a decisive victory over the enemy forces stationed in Dis.”

  “A decisive victory?” Feeroy repeats with an incredulous chuckle. “How exactly do you imagine such a thing is possible, Censor? The Legion is scattered and crippled, our defenses and infrastructure in complete disarray. Three of our cities have been destroyed, and it will be years before those remaining return to their full strength. There is still fighting in progress all over the planet. From what I have been told, there is a rogue source—probably activated accidentally during the battle—that has yet to be brought under control and may very well cause further destruction. Enough of our tetra fortresses and gunships have been damaged or destroyed that we would be hard-pressed to mount an effective defense at Lunar Veil, let alone launch an expedition into the Corridor afterward. And even if we could muster the necessary strength, how would you manage to move a force sufficient to fend off the remnants of the Valentine van? Most of our long-distance transports were at the Front. I doubt those left on Earth would carry half the legionaries required, let alone enough food and supplies for all the years you plan on waiting for rescue.”

  Vinneas had expected precisely this argument and told me to be ready once it came up because I’d be getting my turn with the Consulate very soon. “Our cities can provide all the resources we need,” Vinneas says.

  “Our cities?” Feeroy scoffs. “What good will our cities be to us at Lunar Veil, or out in the Realms? It isn’t as if we can take them with us.”

  Finally, Vinneas allows himself a smile. He turns toward Consul Seppora, “If you please, Consul, I’d like to introduce my colleague, Officer Aspirant Kizabel, to explain the logistics of our proposal.”

  That’s my cue. Feeling thoroughly light-headed, I descend to face the Consulate. Once again, I have visions of being devoured alive, only now the imagery is far more real and splattery, with lots of animals-savaging-one-another-in-the-wild gore.

  Imperator Feeroy is so offended by my presence that he momentarily forgets his manners. “Officer Aspirant? You brought a schoolgirl to lecture the Consulate on strategy?”

  “Kizabel is eminently qualified to speak on the matter at hand,” Vinneas answers coolly. “She is an accomplished faber and artifex, who contributes regularly to studies at Ninth City’s School of Philosophy and to repairs at Ninth City’s Fabrica. I can provide further references for her work, but I am certain her competence will be readily apparent once she is given a chance to speak.”

  “She is a student, Censor,” insists Feeroy.

  “As was I, until about two months ago, and you, Imperator, sometime before. In fact, I would venture to guess every member of the Consulate has had some experience with our Academies at one point or another.”

  “I should think Censor Vinneas has earned the benefit of the doubt,” Princept Azemon says from Seppora’s side. The implicit reference to Vinneas’s warnings about the coming Valentine attack delivers a visible sting to Feeroy.

  “At this point, we must be prepared to judge ideas on their own merit, whatever the source,” Seppora agrees. She turns her small, glinting eyes on me. “Please, proceed.”

  “Right, great,” I say, fumbling through my folders for the plans I need. “Well”—I stammer a few fractured syllables, cough into my hand—“as Censor Vinneas said, with the exception of fontani, our cities are the planet’s best weapons. They’re a lot like the fortified positions we build at the Front: self-sustaining, with everything required to conduct ongoing operations. They can maintain battle spires—which launch troops and assault platforms more effectively than tetra fortresses—and heavy artillery far more powerful than our gunships. I’m talking 160, 208-soul guns. All of which requires a great deal of supporting structure, not to mention an operational framework too large and complex to easily or efficiently carry into battle. That’s why our cities are arranged as they are, laid out to jointly defend the planet. But what if it were possible to create a city that moves?”

  Carefully, I lay my plans across the floor and stand back. From my pocket, I produce a cantivel1 containing a projection artifice. At a flick of my thumb, my scribbled and amended and appended designs rise luminously into the air over my head, giving the Consulate and everyone else in the room a good, clear view. “This is IMEC-1,” I say, very conscious of the vast volume of attention now focusing on me. “As you can see, it possesses all the attributes of a fully functioning city, including living and working areas, sustainable supplies of food and water, and facilities from which to launch military sorties. It differs from other thelemically powered cities in only one significant way: mobility. By rendering the offensive and defensive capabilities of a fortified city portable, IMEC-1 would make the ideal base of operations for an expeditionary force. Even considering the Legion’s losses thus far, it could be fully staffed while leaving ample support behind for the continued defense of Earth.”

  As I transition into a description of the IMEC’s basic design and function, making sure to linger on the theory that makes the whole gorgeous contraption possible,2 my blueprints multiply and metamorphose, depicting the city from numerous angles and levels of detail, diagramming everything from the layout of the streets to the internal plumbing to the prevailing weather patterns. What we have, now parading before the assembled bigwigs of the Incorporated Peoples of Earth, is nothing less than a fully fledged flying city. Or, as Rae so enthusiastically put it, “A real live Laputa,3 you goddamned loony beauty!”

  The overall effect is at once disarmingly simple and deliciously complex, a complete—and, I hope, believable—picture of a city capable of surviving anything either the Valentines or the Realms can deal out. We started with EASSaC-2, that brilliantly impractical, fanciful spree from Associative Architecture, pillaging the work we’d already done on establishing habitable environments under conditions not traditionally ideal for an air-breathing, terrestrial, human community and applying it by strenuous mental acrobatics to the various horrific scenarios to be found beyond Lunar Veil, including but not limited to: the vacuum of outer space, toxic and corrosive atmospheres, deadly high
-energy radiation, extreme gravitational forces, temperatures exceeding 1.9 x 107 K and approaching absolute zero, and swarms of alien insects carrying flesh-eating alien microorganisms. Getting the whole thing into the air was simple when compared to building what is effectively a mini-ecosystem not only capable of supporting the population of a major city but able to survive travel at interplanetary speeds. The same innovations that go into Personal Gravity can be used, with a little elbow grease and the help of associative architecture–type applications of large-system dynamics, to put a city in the sky.

  But it’s obvious what’s got this auditorium of eyeballs so fixated isn’t the equations for shockingly authentic artificial sunlight or the thelemic schematics for circadian stabilizers. It’s the dramatic (if conceptual) views from the IMEC’s towers, the pristine fields and sparkling waterways suspended in the midst of space. I’ve given these people the next best thing to walking around inside the place, and in a few moments, they’re going to have that experience, too. Here I’ll admit to an unprofessionally egotistical thrill, since those spectacular high-rez designs are all me. Vinneas’s skills lay mainly in theory, not producing pinup-quality renderings of drop-dead-sexy engineering. You could frame this presentation and hang it in a gallery, and if you did, the smugly stylistic signature at the bottom would say, Yours truly, Kizabel. Also, Up yours, Academy review board.

  But not everyone is as impressed with myself as I am. The esteemed Imperator Feeroy can hardly wait for me to finish my presentation so he can get up and say something condescending. “Clearly you have put a great deal of energy into this invention of yours, and I assure you it is very impressive,” he says, sounding less impressed than annoyed. “But perhaps you have forgotten that we have only twenty-eight days until Romeo is free to continue his invasion. How much time do you estimate will be required to launch this—what did you call it?”

  It’s written right there, at the bottom of the main diagram, but I don’t point that out. “IMEC-1,” I say. “Ingenically Mobilized Expeditionary City. One.”

  Everyone is watching me now, anxious to see how this squabble will play out. The fate of Earth could depend on whether or not I know what I’m talking about. Only Vinneas is smiling, looking like he’s thoroughly enjoying the show. This must be how he keeps so calm all the time—he plans everything out in advance. Even people like Imperator Feeroy aren’t so scary when you already know what they’re going to say.

  “Yes, of course.” Feeroy chuckles nastily. “How long do you think it would be before your IMEC is prepared for battle?”

  “Twenty-three days,” I answer without hesitating.

  Feeroy’s sneer drops away, and for a second I see it isn’t me he dislikes. He doesn’t care about me at all—except that, as far as he’s concerned, I’m wasting time that could be put to better use securing the survival of humanity. “You must be mistaken,” he says, startled. He gestures to an aerial view of IMEC-1. “It would take years to erect that artillery array alone. How do you expect to build an entire city in twenty-three days?”

  “I don’t. Twenty-three days is how long it would take to assemble the underlying thelemic architecture and initialize the systems necessary to get the IMEC airborne, habitable, and combat-ready once the basic physical structure is complete.”

  He lets loose an exasperated laugh. “And what good is it to know we can make a city fly if we don’t have time to build a city?”

  “We don’t need to build a city,” I answer. “That part of IMEC-1 is already finished. You’re standing in it.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  TORRO

  It isn’t like I thought building a floating city would be easy. Not even building it, really, since we’re using good old Ninth City, but even with the thing already there, no one expected getting it into the air was going to be like a simple process. At Limit Camp, they teach you about thelemity a little, how in some ways it works the same as a sort of machine, only you can’t see all the gears and levers and engines and whatnot because they’re made out of this invisible force. So I knew there’d be more to it than just waving your hands around a little and the whole thing taking off. First we had to put together all the little working parts—what the Prips call “artifices”—that make up this invisible machine that’s supposed to keep a whole island in the air. I don’t really know how I thought we’d do it. Maybe I was picturing some glowing crystals or something. But I definitely didn’t think it would be like this.

  For the past week or so, we’ve been building houses in the middle of nowhere. No kidding. I mean, I suppose it isn’t really nowhere. We’re out in the valley around Ninth City, not too far from our old Limit Camp, in fact, but it feels a lot like hellion territory, with all the empty fields and forests and no roads or fences or factories anywhere. Just the sort of place where there might be hellions waiting to skin you alive and eat your eyeballs and whatnot. It makes me kind of nervous, even though all I have to do is find a hill or climb a tree, and I’ll be able to see Ninth City. At least I’m not the only one here. We’ve got three whole squads, and, of course, the place doesn’t look totally devoid of like human habitation because we’re building these houses, but somehow that only makes everything seem creepier because no one’s ever going to live in them.

  The reason I know the houses aren’t for anyone in particular, or really anyone at all, is because as soon as we’re done building them, we burn them down. Like, we’ll spend days putting up these cozy little cottages, arranging them all in rows, and we’ll make the beds and set the tables for like a nice meal, with actual food and everything, then once the Immunes have come through to make sure everything is done right, we just set it all on fire. And that isn’t even the strangest thing we’ve done. Not even close.

  We’ve been at it for a little over two weeks now, building good old IMEC-1, that is. It all started with the attack, naturally. We spent the whole thing down in the shelters at Limit Camp, and even though no one told us what was happening outside, we knew something was wrong. It wasn’t our first trip to the shelters or anything, but they’d never kept us down there more than a few hours, and this was going on a full day. But then the alert ended, and it was like everything went back to normal, the same drills and PT and lectures on how to stop yourself bleeding to death from a severed arm and so forth, until a couple days later, when Optio Sorril called the whole camp together, just like she did that first day, when she told us all about the war and the Realms and the Valentines and so forth. I’d thought that was all bad enough. This was even worse.

  What old Sorril had to tell us was that we’d basically just lost the war. She didn’t say it that way, of course, but it was pretty obvious what was going on. While all of us recruits had been down in the shelters, there’d been this huge battle going on all over the world. It wasn’t just some little atmospheric incursion the Legion could clean up in a couple of hours, either. This time old Romeo’d sent a whole army, the biggest Earth had ever seen, and the reason he could drop this like big horde right on top of us was that he’d already killed off everyone at the Front.

  What made it even worse, for me anyway, was that the whole thing, the Front getting overrun and everything, had all happened months ago, before any of us had even been recruited. It had just taken the Valentines that long to get here because of how much slower time moves in the Realms. So everything that had happened, getting drafted and dragged out here and puking in my helmet and whatnot, none of that mattered. I could have been back at Granite Shore with Camareen this whole time for all the difference it would have made.

  Everyone was real upset, you could tell. Poor old Mersh was actually crying, and if you looked around, you could see other people were, too. I mostly just wanted to hit something, but I didn’t. No one moved or made a sound—unless they were already blubbering and couldn’t help it—because Sorril was still talking. The people in charge had come up with a plan to get us out of this mess, and we were suppos
ed to help. We were going to build a fortress, an actual like flying island, that we could send into the Realms to hold the Valentines off. If it worked, everyone back on Earth would have something like thirty years to get ready before Romeo’s big army, what Sorril called “the Valentine Host,” finally got here. Long enough that we’d stand a good chance of fighting Romeo off. If the plan was going to work, though, we had to have the whole flying fortress ready to go in twenty-five days.

  We were supposed to have another two months or so at Limit Camp before we officially joined the Legion, but there wasn’t time for that anymore. As of that moment, old Sorril said, we were all part of the Ninth Legion, Third Cohort, Twelfth Century. If we’d made it the whole way through training, we’d have all been assigned to different parts of the Legion, but the way things were, they’d decided to just make us our own new century.

  Sorril had to pick a few of us to be squad leaders, too, and good old Mersh was right at the top of her list, thanks to how well his squad had done in combat exercises. Kiddo went from recruit to Decurio in two seconds flat. I think he was kind of disappointed it happened so quickly. He’d been excited about the ceremony they do when you finally graduate into the Legion. But he got to choose his own squad, and he made sure to get me and Hexi and Spammers, so we could all stick together.

  We started work right away. Optio Sorril brought in these two guys from a part of the Legion called the Immunes, basically legionaries like us but specially trained to build big complicated things like flying islands. The Immunes were here to supervise our work on the fortress, which they were calling IMEC-1. They called up the Decurio from each squad and told everyone else to get into our D-87s and report back and bring our trenchers along.