Inshiri nodded. "Yes, that was exactly what I thought. Lads?"
Her men opened fire, and now it was clear that their guns had some sort of silencing mechanism; the shots were barely audible. Holon and the other outsiders twitched under the onslaught, then, propelled by the residual momentum of the bullets in their bodies, drifted to the far wall.
"Looks like the wetwork's up to us after all," sighed Inshiri. She unfolded herself from the couch and unholstered her intricately carved little pistol. Her men, meanwhile, were forming up into three squads.
An odd crick-cracking sound reached Antaea's ears. She saw Inshiri and her men turn; one of the bodyguards swore. Antaea shifted her position to make out what was happening.
Holon's body was convulsing. Its thrashing limbs were bending in ways they shouldn't, and it was the sound of bones breaking that Antaea had heard. "Shoot it, shoot it!" Inshiri screamed--just as the other three outsiders' corpses began to twitch as well.
By the time Holon's body tore itself apart to reveal the thing underneath, they'd put a couple dozen rounds apiece into it. It showed no signs of having noticed.
* * *
REMORAN WHIRLED AT the shouting. "What's going--" His men unslung their machine guns, and two leaped to perch on the edge of the opening where the virtuals had gone. One was immediately flung backward. He hit the far wall and bounced off, clutching at his neck as blood sprayed into the chamber.
Jacoby blinked at the dying man. Of all the things he'd worried about happening in here, a simple gunfight had never crossed his mind.
Then they were all firing as Remoran twisted in midair, trying to find purchase on something--anything--for freefall leverage. He grabbed Venera and doubled up, putting his feet against her flank. The general secretary was about to use her mass to launch himself to safety, and the recoil would take Venera into the line of fire.
She grabbed his ankle. As he cursed and kicked at her, she adroitly spun around and kicked him in the head. Then she made the leap he'd been about to, and grabbed the edge of the wall next to Jacoby. "Hi," she said.
Shouts of alarm distracted Jacoby, and so he turned in time to see something gray and multi-limbed clamber over the far wall. Inshiri's soldiers and Remoran's guardsmen were peppering it with gunfire, but it didn't slow down. "What the hell is that?" shouted Jacoby.
"That would be our boy Holon," said Venera. "I believe he's shed his skin." Another of the spiderlike things was coming over the wall behind the first one.
"Come on." He pawed at her with his good arm, and when she pulled away he pointed at the empty chamber on the other side of the wall. "Time to go."
He looked back for just a second, and beheld a nightmarish scene: long jointed threads had snaked from the sides of the bark-colored thing, and they were stabbing the soldiers. One twisted itself around Remoran's throat, and another was darting at Inshiri Ferance. She kicked off from the nearest wall and sailed over to land next to Jacoby and Venera.
A gray whip coiled around her ankle and she shrieked in surprise. "Cousin!" She lunged for Jacoby, hand outstretched.
"Good-bye, Inshiri." He kicked away into the next room.
"Jacoby! Jacobyyyyy!" She gripped the edge of the wall for a second, then let go and disappeared.
"The entrance!" barked Venera. She took his good hand and they leaped for the next wall. Just as they landed on it a silhouette reared up above it and Jacoby raised his pistol, then cursed.
"Took you long enough," he snapped at Antaea. She shook her head silently, then gestured with her pistol.
"--Not going back there!" Venera protested.
"I shot one of them." Antaea raised her weapon, turning it in the cool light. "This works, but we need to keep them distracted. They haven't figured out where the shot came from yet, but--"
Jacoby nodded. "Glad you thought to bring that. Remoran was a fool--and so was Inshiri. They thought they could rely on Virgan technology and Holon's word of honor to keep his boys in line. I did my best in case they were wrong, but--" He flipped over, preparing to jump back to the room where just a few sporadic shots and screams now sounded.
Venera slapped his shoulder and he nearly blacked out. "--see?" she was saying when he regained his breath. "You're in no shape. Give me the gun, old man."
He handed her his pistol. "You'll pay for that."
"What, hitting you?"
"No, calling me old."
She and Antaea hopped away, and he flipped over the wall. If he got lucky he might make it to the entrance before the monsters finished with those two.
26
HOLON HAD REGAINED something of his original form; at least, Antaea assumed that the dark, man-shaped thing hunched in front of the control mirror was him. She edged backward, finding the right opening for her shot. Holon was busy, so he was a natural target; but because he was busy, she could probably afford to ignore him for now.
She nodded to Venera, who took a deep breath and then popped up over the top of the wall. "Bastaaaards!" she screamed as she fired off several indiscriminate rounds into the corpse-filled room. Then she kicked backward, sailing toward the opposite wall of her own empty room.
One of the three remaining monsters whistled and disappeared out of Antaea's point of view, but she knew where it was going. It appeared over the top of the control room's wall just as Venera disappeared over the next one.
She shot it.
As it tumbled into the air, Antaea shook her head in surprise. "Damn, this is too easy."
"Is it now?" Suddenly she was seeing stars as something had lashed her in the face. Before she knew it she was tumbling somewhere, blazing pain in her eyes, her arms, her belly. She tried to shoot, but where was the gun? She couldn't feel anything in her right hand.
Something had her--was carrying her. She hit a wall and bounced back, hit something softer. A body. Gasping, she tried to clear her vision, found that her eyes and nose were soaking wet.
"Now how would she have gotten a weapon like this?" The questioner sounded like Holon; was he asking her?
"I don't know, I don't, please don't, I swear I--" It was Inshiri Ferance, hysterical and begging.
"You really don't know, do you?"
"I swear!"
"Then I don't need you for now. --Don't worry, I'll resurrect you later."
Antaea heard a horrible choking sound. She rubbed again at her eyes, was rewarded by a sliver of red-soaked vision. She seemed to be bleeding freely into the air. She was also missing two fingers from her right hand, and long black tendrils draped through the air to somewhere below Antaea's chin, from the monster that was killing Ferance.
She couldn't move, but he knew she was still alive, because when he had finished with Inshiri he turned to her. The vaguely head-shaped thing atop his torso tilted as if looking at her. "It took us centuries to evolve these bodies so they'd work inside Virga," he said. "This bioform is related to the one we hid inside your sister. Like what you see?" he said.
Antaea couldn't speak. He had finally admitted that it was his people who'd destroyed Telen. When she didn't reply, Holon, apparently disappointed that she didn't want to talk, turned back to the command mirror. "It's done," he said. "Candesce's protection is gone.
"Thank you," he said to her, "for all your help. And that of your sister. I'm sure she would be proud."
I was wrong. This was the last coherent thought Antaea had before the red in her eyes was joined by black. She was losing track--of where she was, who was talking to her, and what she'd been doing that was so important ...
* * *
SCRY SUDDENLY FILLED Keir's visual field with update windows and helpful directional gridlines. He stiffened and almost let go of the cable he'd been holding.
"It's happened," he said.
Griffin and Leal looked at one another. "Are you sure?" asked the sun lighter.
"See for yourself." Keir nodded in the direction of Candesce.
When night came here, the hot expanded air around the sun of suns cooled and contracted
. Breezes blew up from the principalities and carried the accumulated grit and flotsam of the day into the exclusion zone. Such a breeze was blowing now, and it had carried enough of the smoke from the Battle of the Gardens away that the other battle--the one still raging around Candesce itself--was clearly visible.
That battle had been a little flickering galaxy, a coruscating cloud of brief orange dots that signaled the explosion of missiles. A few larger, more long-lasting dots would be burning ships. Now, though, the nature of the light was changing. Orange was being replaced by blue, and the blue flashes were not appearing as pinprick points, but as fuzzy lozenges.
Griffin's brow furrowed as he watched this change. "What..."
"Lasers," said Keir. "And plasma guns, rail guns ... who knows what else. Whatever the virtuals gave Inshiri Ferance. They probably packed her ships with weapons, and she may not even have known about it. They could have been disguised as anything--food supplies, even water. They'd be rigged to self-assemble the instant Candesce's field shut off. I'm betting there's not much left of the ships that brought them here."
Griffin swore. "We have to fire this thing up." He turned his attention to the black ball he was clinging to. "I know how to start a polywell fusion generator, of course; hell, I built this one. But why are we using it to power your device? Couldn't you have built some A.N. battery like they did?" He nodded at the rainbow colors of the battle. "--Some miraculous energy source that would kick in when Candesce's field shut down?"
"Sure," said Keir. "But whatever I used would have to keep working after I turned my machine on ... The suppressor field would shut down its own generator if that used A.N. technology."
"Right ... right." Griffin shook his head.
Sudden blinding light stabbed Keir's eyes. For a second he thought somebody had set off a fission nuke near Candesce, but then an amplified voice said, "You on the mine! Come away!"
He shielded his eyes with his hand, and found that they were pinned in the beam of a floodlight. He heard the grumble of idling jets.
Hayden Griffin squinted into the glare. "Who're you?"
"This is the Last Line army engineers. Come away from the explosive device."
"They think this is a mine," said Leal.
"Well, it looks like one," admitted Griffin.
"What are we going to do? They'll shoot us if we touch anything."
In the sudden bright light, he and Leal looked very much like refugees; none of them, Keir realized, was wearing a uniform. Leal in particular was wide-eyed, her hair a frizz of tangles and mats. Smudges of soot on her face had given her a mask of fear, though he knew she was relatively calm. That gave him an idea.
When he saw Griffin start to cautiously reach for his sidearm, he said, "Let me handle this."
"What are you going to do?"
He grimaced and shrugged. "Leal."
"Yes?"
"Have you ever done any acting?"
* * *
JACOBY SARTO STARED at a world transformed. The night sky was filled with flickering lines of blue and green light. Ships were on fire everywhere he looked. It wasn't just the alliance fleet that had been destroyed; those ships that were emitting the strange bright lines were also breaking up. They, though, were not exploding. Instead, they were disgorging gigantic, many-limbed metal things into the air, and some of those things were turning back and eating the ships that had birthed them.
This would be just a taste of what was happening at the walls of Virga. Leal Maspeth had spoken of an alien armada waiting in silence there, a fleet so vast that it surrounded the entire world. Even now, those ships, and whatever creatures accompanied them, must be bursting through Virga's iceberg-choked skin, preparing to wreak havoc on everything within.
Leal had been right. Jacoby had suspected she was, which was one reason he'd decided to put himself right at the heart of the action. There, he could make a command decision at the critical moment; and he had. It just hadn't been enough.
Closer by, the Thistle drifted, uncrewed. The badly cut bodies of its pilot and mates hung near it like grotesque angels. Near them were the bodies of the two Home Guard soldiers who'd been set to guard the door.
Jacoby leaned out cautiously. The dagger-ball he'd planted in the Thistle could be anywhere. With any luck it wasn't actually in the sloop. He should be able to dive out to it and get it under way before the monster found its way back to him.
It had been a nice trick, keeping that thing in reserve. He'd been sure Antaea would figure it out: if the dagger-ball came to life, then Candesce had been dialed down too far. The monster was like a mine--set to go off if things in the control room went too far.
It had worked to clear the blockhouse's entrance--for all the good that was going to do. Antaea still stood little chance against Holon and his horrible companions.
One of the soldier's carbines was sailing by with stately slowness. Jacoby eyed it.
He could be out of Candesce in ten minutes. There was an open patch of sky down beneath his feet, and if he avoided those damned lights, he stood a good chance of getting out of this alive. Surely the virtuals wouldn't kill every human being in Virga. They had no need to, and it would be a lot of work. No, Virga would probably survive, just under new management.
He watched himself reach out and pluck the carbine from the air. Then, just in case the dagger-ball was nearby, he sealed the door shut before reentering the maze of the control center.
* * *
"HERE THEY COME," Holon was saying. Antaea realized where she was, and tried to scramble out of the way--any direction, anywhere but here. She couldn't move; something was holding her.
"They'll have it apart in a few hours," said Holon. She realized he was talking about something in the command mirror. Scraping clotted blood out of her eyes, she peered at it. Big metal things, like gigantic crabs, had encircled a black oval. Surrounding this tableau were six dormant suns, and, as backdrop, a sky full of laser light and flame.
"I've told Candesce not to come on at dawn," Holon continued. "No day today. We have all the time in the world. But I expect that by the time your current body gives out, we'll have figured out Candesce's secret. The question then will be, can we afford to ever resurrect you? The plan, after all, is to erase Candesce, Virga, and any hint that this place was ever here."
"Why?" she croaked.
His eyeless head turned her way. "This foolish movement toward embodiment must be stopped," he said. "Mind is all that matters. Your people have made themselves enemies of unbounded consciousness. That's evil."
He came closer to her, and she could see the dry, writhing branches that made up his features rearrange themselves in a smile. "Candesce is an abomination. It's a machine for erasing consciousness--for suppressing it. Dumb matter reigns in Virga, except for your brief little sparks. And you'd export this horror to the rest of the universe?
"Don't worry, we can work something out," he soothed. "What you know can never be allowed out in the greater universe, but we can build a quarantined virtuality for you to live in. Death's not the end for the likes of us."
"Then you won't mind if I kill you," somebody said. Holon's body jerked as several bullets hit it.
"Don't be ridiculous, old man," said the outsider as one of his whiplike arms shot out to wrap around Jacoby Sarto's throat. Holon dragged him over the wall and Jacoby lost his one-handed grip on the carbine he'd fired. As this happened, though, a blur shot across the room from the other direction.
Venera yanked at Antaea's pistol, which was still held in one of Holon's coils. Holon turned, twitched his arms, and sent Venera across the room. She hit the wall, but she'd also held on to the gun, and had managed to turn it. Venera jammed her finger against the trigger and a shot spanged off the ceiling just over Holon's head. He roared and ducked, and her next shot took him at the base of one of his four branchlike limbs.
Then he'd swung Venera and Jacoby, bashing them against one another. The pistol went flying, and the two were shoved
violently through a cloud of corpses to fetch up next to Antaea.
"Enough of spectators," said Holon. "I'll finish this alone." He raised four of his branches, their sharp ends hovering like poised snakes. Antaea closed her eyes.
The ever-present hum that filled the command center went silent and so did the red light penetrating her closed eyes. But there was no pain. After a second, she opened her eyes.
"What...?" It was Venera's voice.
The lights came back on, and the command mirror flickered back into life. Holon hung in the middle of the room, frozen in place like some grotesque statue. Beyond him, the mirror showed the metal crab shapes that had surrounded Candesce's generator. They had also stopped moving.
"Get the gun," mumbled Jacoby. "And finish the bastard before he wakes up."
"Good idea," said Antaea. But it was too hard to move. She felt herself drifting off to sleep, and it seemed like such a good idea that she closed her eyes, and smiled.
* * *
"YOU CAN STOP screaming," said Keir. Leal coughed and fell silent. A good thing, too: her throat was raw from her performance.
The army engineers had finally dragged her aboard their open-sided vessel, but not before she'd led them on a merry chase around Keir's machine. "No, don't kill me!" she'd screamed. "I don't want to die. Get away from me!" She'd played the hysteria to the hilt, while Hayden clambered out of sight of the engineers and fired up his sun's mechanism.
It had started huffing and thrumming now, and the engineers were alarmed. Hayden appeared around from behind it, waving his arms. "It's okay!" he shouted. "It's not a bomb!"
"Surrender!" shouted an engineer. The man was trying to sound authoritative, but against this sky he stood little chance. Hospital ships and looters were arriving in equal numbers, and as the last of the smoke drifted away, the sheer monumental scale of the damage was becoming clear. The engineers would be clearing unexploded ordnance from the skies of the principalities for years.
"Look!" Keir pointed. Leal peered at the clots of smoke and fire surrounding Candesce. They were appalling, and she shook her head.
"No, look! The lasers have stopped."
Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Page 34