Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Elyria watched the complex interplay of emotions over Joshua’s face and nodded inwardly. Joshua loved Master Faye; the older man had plucked him from obscurity and given him power, but he’d also cursed him with health problems he’d never known he had. Still, opposing him – or even just leaving him – felt like a betrayal. And on Darius, that was far more serious than it would ever be in the Confederation.

  “I understand,” he said, finally.

  He was rather subdued as they walked back to the shuttle, which had been checked and refuelled by the AI drones. Elyria felt herself worrying about him; he was young, really too young to be making such life-changing decisions for himself. She’d been in her fifties when she’d finally started to look for a career, rather than simply enjoying herself. And yet, all of human history indicated that pre-singularity societies forced their young to grow up very quickly. Joshua was old enough, in some societies, to be married and raising children.

  She reached over and placed a hand on his shoulder. “If this makes you uncomfortable,” she said, “just tell us and we’ll stop. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  Joshua’s lips twitched. “I got in enough trouble for doing what I did want to do,” he said, dryly. “There are times when I feel I don’t understand your society at all.”

  “That’s a common reaction,” Elyria admitted. “We have so much freedom that it is hard to understand where the lines are drawn.”

  She smiled. The Confederation’s laws, such as they were, allowed total freedom, provided that no unwilling people were harmed or threatened with harm. Given the vast number of different sexual tastes in the human race, there was no reason why a man who liked the thought of raping a woman couldn’t find a woman who wanted to be raped. Even some of the weirder perversions could find people willing to try them, or they could be indulged inside a private perceptual reality if they were truly horrifying.

  Darius had no such freedom. There were laws, some understandably concerned with reducing the risk of incest, some more confusingly intended to ensure that a given woman’s child had been sired by her husband or fiancée. Once engaged, a woman was expected to live in the man’s house – or his parent’s house, depending – and never to leave until she became pregnant, whereupon they could get married. Leaving the house without an escort – a parent or the male partner – constituted breaking the engagement. But men weren’t held under such tight restrictions. The snoops had confirmed that several dozen married men in Warlock’s Bane made regular use of whores.

  “Here we go,” Joshua said. He leaned forward avidly as the shuttle dived towards the planet, which was cloaked in darkness. Hardly any lights broke the darkness. What few lights there were on the darkened planet weren’t bright enough to be seen from orbit. “Can I learn to fly one of these?”

  “It would be easy to learn,” Elyria said. The AIs were controlling the shuttle, but she knew how to fly and she could take over if they lost the radio link. “You could start with the micro aircraft people fly in the Rings, and then graduate to something more substantial.”

  Joshua smiled. “People use magic to fly,” he said, looking down at the planet. “And you have it all without magic.”

  “A simple antigravity ring would allow you to fly on your own,” Elyria said. “There’s a group of people who use multicoloured rings to generate solid-light constructions. They actually fly in space without starships.”

  “There are legends of flight rings,” Joshua said. “Master Faye used to say that they didn’t really exist. In fact...”

  He broke off, glancing up sharply. “What?”

  A moment later, something struck the shuttle with a terrific blow. The craft span to one side and then started to fall out of the sky.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Joshua sensed the sudden rise in magic, just before the entire shuttle rocked violently.

  “Hang on!” Elyria snapped at him, as she yanked at the controls. “We’re going down!”

  The shuttle started to spin; Joshua felt a wave of force pushing him back into the seat, just before his stomach seemed to drop out of his chest. He caught sight of the stars spinning above him as a dull clunk ran through the entire shuttle, just before the spin seemed to halt for a long second. And then the shuttle plummeted again.

  “Something hit us,” Elyria said. She sounded alarmed; Joshua felt absolute terror as the shuttle continued to fall. “The wings are badly damaged. I can’t keep us in the air.”

  Blue-green fire flashed over the viewport, threatening to crack the transparent shield and break into the shuttle itself. Joshua had a moment to recognise one of the more deadly wrecking spells Master Faye had used from time to time, before the shuttle gave another lurch and flipped over. The world seemed to spin madly for a long second, just before there was a thunderous roar and the fall started to slow. A second later, there was a terrific crash as the shuttle hit the ground. Joshua hung on for dear life as something crashed into the shuttle, time and time again, before an eerie silence fell. They were alive, if barely.

  Elyria unstrapped herself and staggered to her feet. Blood was leaking from a nasty gash on her forehead, dripping down to splash against her clothing and on to the metal floor. Joshua readied a healing spell, but as he watched the damage healed rapidly, the bruise fading away into her dark skin. None of his bruises would heal so quickly. Elyria looked a little stunned as she helped him to his feet, but she seemed to be holding herself together. In the distance, he could hear the sound of fire.

  “Most of the shuttle’s systems are gone,” Elyria said, flatly. Joshua recognised the tone of someone who was trying to keep themselves under control and shivered. “I can’t call the ship for help. All of the communications systems are down.”

  She walked over to the hatch and pushed at it. The heavy sheet of metal refused to budge. “And we may be trapped,” she added. “These hatches are designed to be tough.”

  Joshua looked around. The shuttle had fallen out of the sky, but the interior compartment was largely intact, ensuring that they couldn’t break out. And yet he could definitely hear fire... carefully, he pushed his hand against the hatch and muttered a spell Master Faye had taught him. There was a shimmer of magic and the hatch fell into dust. Outside, the landscape seemed to be on fire. Trees were burning brightly, illuminating their arrival to the entire world. If someone had attacked the shuttle, and Joshua was certain that there was no other possibility, they’d have no difficulty finding the remains of the crashed ship.

  “We’ve set the forest on fire,” Elyria said. She sounded a little dazed, probably through shock. “We can’t...”

  “We have to get out of here,” Joshua said. He’d read stories of people caught up in forest fires, often caused by Scions with a particularly sadistic sense of humour. The fires advanced so rapidly that the only way to escape was to run like the wind, or to dive into a lake and hope the water wouldn’t boil. “Come on!”

  Elyria picked up a bag from the shuttle and followed him outside, muttering words under her breath as she looked at the crash site. They’d hit the ground hard and bounced, crashing along and smashing down trees by the sheer force of their impact, leaving a fiery trail in their wake. It wouldn’t be long before the fire spread further; Joshua coughed as he inhaled the smoke and then started to pull her away from the wreck, heading upwind. If they were lucky, the wind would blow the fires away from them.

  “You hit your head,” he said to her, as soon as they were several metres from the crashed shuttle. The flames seemed to be licking around the metal shape, although it looked as though they couldn’t do anything worse than scorch its hull. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I should be,” Elyria said. She sounded more stable now, although Joshua knew that head injuries were tricky things. Even the most complex healing spells couldn’t guarantee a perfect repair – if they ever had. The AIs dispassionate explanation of just how badly he’d been injuring himself
when he tried to improve his body had shaken his confidence in his magic. “Anything that isn’t fatal... I should be able to survive anything that isn’t fatal.”

  “Lucky you,” Joshua muttered. He looked up into the dark sky, wondering if one of the stars was the Confederation space station. “They will know what happened to us, won’t they?”

  “I think so,” Elyria said. “They would have followed us with optical sensors as well as everything else, sensors that magic doesn’t seem to interfere with so badly. But I don’t know if they could dispatch a rescue mission.”

  Joshua looked over at her, sharply. He knew the world was big, yes, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to him just how far the shuttle could have travelled in bare minutes. They could be hundreds of miles from Warlock’s Bane, stranded in the midst of the badlands. He looked up at the stars again, wishing that he’d trained as a navigator. At least he might have been able to locate their current position and start plotting a course back home.

  He hesitated, and put his feelings into words. “Do you know where we are?”

  “We were about fifty kilometres from the buried shuttle when we were hit,” Elyria said. She scowled down towards the fire. “We might well have been thrown some distance off course by whatever hit us the first time.”

  “It’s a spell designed to kill magicians on carpets,” Joshua said, grimly. Master Faye had never taught him how to use it. “It feeds on magic” – no, Master Faye had been more precise – “it feeds on spells. The magician on the carpet can’t keep it in the air while trying to prevent the spell from shredding the magic holding it up. Eventually, it just falls out of the sky. It should have killed us instantly.”

  “But we weren’t using magic,” Elyria pointed out. “Clearly, the effects are more wide-ranging than you suggest.” She looked at him for a long moment. “Can you call Master Faye?”

  Joshua could have kicked himself. He should have thought of that at once. Master, he thought, using his mental voice, can you hear me?

  There was no response. Joshua shivered, despite the warmth from the fire. Mental communications, once mastered, should have allowed him to talk to his master from the other side of the world. And Master Faye wouldn’t have refused to answer, even if he’d been asleep. The only possible reason there was no response was that someone had set up wards to block mental transmissions. And that meant... trouble.

  “No response,” he said, after he’d tried for a second time. “I couldn’t even get a sense of his presence.”

  He grimaced. “There has to be a Scion, perhaps more than one, hunting us right now,” he added. “That’s the only reason I can think of why I can’t reach Master Faye.”

  “And all of my communications equipment is useless right now,” Elyria said. Joshua nodded. The experiments that Dacron had performed had confirmed that magic could prevent technology from working properly, even if the magicians casting the spells didn’t even begin to comprehend how technology worked or what it could do. “And anyone who sees the fire will know where to start looking for us.”

  “Yes,” Joshua agreed, feeling a chill running down his spine. A Scion, someone whose magic had been honed by isolation and madness, would be much more powerful than himself. Dacron had mastered magic in an astonishingly short space of time, but Dacron was a long way away. “I think we need to move away from the crash site.”

  Elyria didn’t argue. “Do you know where to go?”

  Joshua hesitated. Very few people would ever travel at night, certainly not in the badlands – unless they were already incredibly powerful magicians. Master Faye had once pointed out that between the bandits and the Scions, travel at night outside the cities was suicidal for any Minor – and Elyria was effectively a Minor. Joshua didn’t have the power to cover her, even if he had the power to protect himself. No Scion who had survived years in the badlands would be weak in magic.

  “We head down,” he said, finally. The roads never went up the mountains, but around them. It was possible that they would encounter a small settlement, or even a clearing where travellers were resting, protected by ward spells and ancient conventions. “They’ll expect that, but heading upwards is suicide.”

  “I can imagine,” Elyria said. She took one final glance up towards the stars and then followed him away from the shuttle, heading down the hillside. “I’ll keep trying my implants. Maybe we’ll walk out of the spell’s effects.”

  “I hope so,” Joshua said. He’d keep trying mental communication too. “Will they dispatch a rescue party if we manage to call them?”

  “I’m not sure,” Elyria admitted. Joshua gave her a sharp look. “They won’t know precisely what happened, even if they do know that we survived. Unless the spells are disrupting that too...”

  Joshua stopped and stared at her. “How could they know that we were still alive?”

  “Those orbital sensors are very sharp,” Elyria said. She grinned at him in the darkness. “They can watch a mouse scurrying across a field, let alone people the size of humans. But even if they’re following us, they won’t be able to contact me and they won’t be able to dispatch a shuttle to pick us up...”

  “For fear of it being attacked too,” Joshua guessed. “You must find your sheer level of power frustrating at times.”

  “Yeah,” Elyria admitted. “There are times when we have so many options that we find it hard to choose a single one.”

  Joshua sucked his lips as they headed further down, into a ravine forged by running water from higher up in the mountains. There was no way to tell just how close the hunters were; they might well have underestimated how far the shuttle could travel, even if it had been badly damaged. But that implied that they knew what the shuttle actually was... maybe they’d unwittingly flown over a Scion’s lair, or perhaps it was something more sinister. Before they’d discovered the Confederation’s spies, Master Faye had worried about a Scion scouting out Warlock’s Bane with the intention of moving in to challenge the city’s ruler. Maybe there had been a Scion watching them, someone who now knew about the Confederation and was determined to make use of the boundless opportunity for themselves. Or maybe another Pillar had realised that Master Faye was about to become dominant and acted first.

  The stars stated to fade out as clouds spread rapidly, coming from the west. Joshua scowled as the first drops of rain fell on them, seconds before a brilliant flash of lighting illuminated the forest, and the long path down to the foot of the mountain. Behind them, the fire seemed to have faded slightly, as if the rain had already quenched it. He would have liked to believe that, but he doubted that it was the truth. It was far more likely that a Scion had put out the fire before checking to see if they were anywhere near the crash site. And then he would start hunting for the two survivors.

  “We need some running water,” he muttered to Elyria, as the rain started to fall harder. It would obscure their path, but it wouldn’t break it. The Scion wouldn’t have any real difficulty in following them. “Keep an eye out for a stream.”

  Elyria nodded, her lips moving soundlessly. It took him a moment to realise that she was pitching her voice too low for him to hear, let alone anyone else. “I can hear someone in the distance,” she said, seconds later. “He’s coming after us.”

  Joshua shivered. “Then we have to move faster,” he muttered back. “Hurry.”

  They scrambled down the ravine and finally emerged at the bottom, in a valley that ran further down the mountainside. Joshua tried to remember the maps Master Faye had owned, before realising that it was futile without any reference points. Another flash of lightning illuminated a hook-nosed mountain in the distance, but he didn’t recognise it. Maybe it was familiar, just seen from a different angle. Or maybe they’d been blown further than he had thought. He took another look at Elyria and smiled. She was drenched, her clothes sticking uncomfortably to her skin, yet she was having no trouble keeping up with him. Joshua suspected she could actually have given the Scion the slip, if she’d had magi
c and she’d been willing to leave him behind.

  There was a sudden flurry of motion beneath his feet and he almost panicked, before seeing a swarm of tiny animals fleeing for their lives. The rainfall would be leaking into their hunting grounds by now, he realised, weakening the soil they dug into to make their burrows. Master Faye had remarked that the little creatures bred so rapidly because they died so quickly; they didn’t seem to learn from experience and just kept repeating the same mistakes time and time again. And they were good eating. A flash of lightning brought him to a halt as he saw a cloaked figure standing further down the valley, one hand raised and pointed at them. Joshua yanked Elyria to one side as a flash of brilliant red light darted past them and exploded somewhere in the distance.

  “Get back,” Joshua snapped. He summoned a fireball and threw it at the Scion, only to see it harmlessly deflected into the forest. Of course; a Scion wouldn’t be beaten by a mere fireball. He threw two more in quick succession, hoping to see one of them hit its target, but they were both knocked aside. An instant later, a wave of force sent him flying backwards, straight into a tree. He yelped in pain as he collapsed on the ground.

  The Scion advanced on Elyria, his face hidden inside the cloak. Joshua tried to stagger to his feet, despite the shock, knowing that it was futile. He couldn’t beat a Scion in open combat... he struggled, trying to think of a tactic that might work, but nothing came to mind. The Scion reached for Elyria... and she sprayed something in his face. He stumbled backwards, coughing, and collapsed to the ground. A moment later, Elyria turned and helped Joshua to his feet.

  It was hard to ask the question, but he needed to know. “What... what did you do to him?”

  “He still needed to breathe,” Elyria said, and winked at him. A flash of lightning revealed the Scion on the ground, sleeping like a baby. “I hit him with knock-out gas. Don’t go too close or it might get you too.”

  Joshua had to laugh. He’d known that magic didn’t save a person from needing to breathe, but he’d never considered the implications. What if someone removed all the air from around a magician? He’d suffocate to death before he could use a spell to fix the problem, assuming he realised what was happening. His chuckles died away as he looked at the Scion. The man was harmless now, but how long would it be before he woke up?