by Ashanti Luke
Tanner watched the others as they passed through darkness across the barren, featureless plain. The chill of the Miasma pierced to the marrow. It wasn’t just cold, it was something more sinister, more venomous—and he was all too acquainted with it. It was the same desolation he felt in the awkward years before Laureateship. The time in his life when he had rebelled against his ailing mother before he had begun practicing kung fu, before he had accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior. Part of it was the Eos. Being separated from the light with no reprieve in sight made him shiver, but deep down, he knew his anxiety was only the tip of the laser bit before him.
As Jang announced the approach of the Echelon ship they were tracking, he had expected at least a little chest-beating and sword-biting, but everyone was solemn, as if they processed in a funeral, and their austerity was calming. They were walking into the laser-mesh of a grove-harvester. They were well-trained and had seen some combat, but only Uzziah had seen anything like what was about to actualize before them. Tanner himself had been in some rough spots, especially before the Arcology, but even he was unprepared for what the Miasma held for them.
He breathed in and then out again, focusing his qi and steeling himself. As the cold breath was purged from his lungs, he noticed the others were doing the same. Paeryl stood at the windshield of the lev, stalwart in the face of the darkness that had completely consumed them more than an hour before. There was something about Paeryl that reminded Tanner of Cyrus. Apart from a little loud, he had never seen Paeryl be anything but calm, and yet there was something in his eyes, something about the way the corners of them creased when he smiled, that indicated to Tanner that Paeryl truly was not to be crossed—that was how he had gained the deference of the hearty Apostates, even the high-strung Six. Perhaps he too had a bear shirt in his closet.
Paeryl’s shoulders were tensed, his form statuesque, but if he did possess a bear shirt, he had not yet put it on. That was an excellent sign. If Paeryl could keep it together, everyone would. But Tanner had a deep suspicion, one that no lev drive could stop from sinking, that before this day ended, they might all need a bear shirt of their own.
“You picked a hell of a day to come up here and rouse the rabble,” Winberg said, keeping his face toward the glass. He cast his oily smile at Cyrus as he turned his head, but there was an odd sincerity to it Cyrus had not noticed before.
“What makes you say that?” Cyrus asked, trying to keep the puzzlement from expressing itself on his face: Winberg was stalling, but for what? Cyrus ran all the modes of ambush he could think of in his head as a check against his own plan of attack, but he was left only with bewilderment—it seemed as if his plan so far could cover any anticipated ave-blocks, but he couldn’t help feeling like he missed something.
“We are anticipating a rash of stellar flares today, and they tend to wreak havoc on low level communication devices,” Winberg added, scratching his chest with his right hand. Cyrus watched Winberg’s hand without averting his eyes to it and he noticed him slip a few fingers inside his shirt as he scratched. Cyrus began to tense, but he rolled his shoulders back to try to hide his reaction.
“You fanned up quite a stench with your theatrics Mr. Knight of Wands,” Winberg smiled again, a little more uncomfortably this time, but he continued to look at the starscape beyond the edge of the planet. Before Cyrus could respond, Winberg continued, “They figured out what really happened shortly after you escaped,” his tone and inflection were different now, as if he were now having a different conversation. “However, they were intrigued as to how you organized the escape with the Apostates—especially after they discovered the Knight of Swords was your son.”
Cyrus looked directly at Winberg, making no attempt to hide his gaze this time, “How did you rise in the ranks so quickly?”
“Actually,” he paused to smile at Cyrus, and again it was the awkwardly honest smile, as if his face could not quite figure out how to communicate candor, “my acceptance and promotion was primarily due to your antics on the Advent. After they found the truth and combed the Paracelsus, they found everything that I had told them on the Advent to be true. They kept me around as a control of sorts, but they were forced to promote me to Hexad because I knew too much.” He began scratching again as he turned back to the stars, but this time, his fingertips crossed beneath his lapel much more forcefully.
“So why would they send you to meet me here?” Cyrus said. Winberg was up to something, but the sincerity in his eyes led Cyrus to believe that his trickery was not targeted at him. Winberg was several types of abhorrent to Cyrus, but bold-faced lies and dubiety did not seem in keeping with his repertoire.
“Because the increasing attacks of your new friends and your direct challenge on the Torus himself have cast suspicion upon me,” the smile came again, but he continued to face the window and scratched his chest. “I don’t blame you for that. I’ve seen enough of you to know that, though our approaches are different, we are more alike than either of us would be comfortable admitting.” He coughed and patted his chest firmly—in the exact spot he had been scratching. “They were going to close the louvers on you and the others and release the hounds. I convinced them it would not work. It didn’t save you, but it bought you time. Now I need you to return the favor.” He cleared his throat and rubbed his chest again, but spoke before Cyrus could answer, “The bier ship should be at the space lift in five minutes.” His tone was completely different.
“Tell your men to stay away from it and me when the ship arrives to avoid any trouble,” Cyrus’s voice resonated off the window.
“Are you threatening us Dr. Chamberlain?” he asked in the same haughty tone that came between chest rubs.
“You may not know me well, but you know me well enough to know I don’t bluff,” Cyrus met Winberg’s gaze again. Something was going on, but for once, it did not seem like Winberg was his enemy, so Cyrus played along.
Winberg scratched his chest again beneath the lapel and turned to the orange glow of Set resting just on the edge of Asha. He waited a beat before speaking and when he did speak, it was mumbled and guttural, but Cyrus heard it anyway, “In about thirty minutes, all hell is going to break lose. When it does, I need a favor from you.” He coughed again, and then looked back at Cyrus. Winberg’s tone was full of hubris again, “Mark me when I speak, cross the Torus again, and you and your monkey friends are finished, complete.”
Hexad Scoffield Trageue monitored the eardot that had been secretly placed into Hexad Winberg’s vertex badge. Eardots were normally active devices used to communicate on the earwig network, but they could be rendered passive and used for surveillance when anyone with higher vertex clearance entered the individual code. Torus Denali had wanted the Hexad monitored continuously throughout this entire operation involving the capture of the Knight of Wands. Trageue himself had had a vertex added to his own badge just for this six-vertex sensitive mission, and it would stay, pending the outcome. But the earwig network had not been cooperating. There had been a rash of stellar flares for the last two day cycles, but today had been the worst by far. He was monitoring and recording The Knight of Wands and Hexad Winberg as he simultaneously watched the approach of the bier ship from Eurydice on a holomonitor. The signal from the tracking satellite had a much stranger signal, but the eardot, especially so close to the window of the Orbital, was fritzing sporadically, cutting out half of what the Hexad was saying. And then, just after Hexad Winberg warned the Knight of Wands that he would be, “…finished, complete,” what must have been the largest electromagnetic surge in the last three day cycles caused the bier ship to momentarily disappear from the holoscan, and faded the Hexad’s voice into nonexistence under a bevy of static.
The Eurydician vacuum suit was stifling. Not only did it seem bulky, but it covered most of Fenrir’s skin. He could feel the perspiration building beneath it even as he had pulled it on, and now the vapors that filled the space between his body and the suit immersed him in a colloidal mix
ture of his own excretions—an unwelcome sensation the Eos normally eliminated. Steeping in his own fluids was an unnerving thought, but so was not arriving on time. What made things even more unnerving is that he and Chandra of Swords were carrying more Valois Squibs than he had ever seen in all 165 gyres of his life. He recessed the assault rifle into the hermetic enclosure on the right sleeve of his suit and pushed his morbid cargo into the lift on the lev-gurney as the other four in his van, concealed in their own vac suits, followed in behind him. As the door closed behind them, and they took their positions on the four corners of the gurney, Fenrir could not help wondering when he would feel the warmth of the sun on his skin again.
It had taken two and a half hours to reach the Orbital, and the ride to the top had been unnerving. It was a special torture to see the sun this close, but not be able to feel the deep caress of its rays. To Chandra, it seemed harder to breathe even though the suit had an air filter for hospitable atmospheric conditions and only switched to hermetic mode when those conditions became inhospitable. Even some conditions inhospitable to normal humans would afford a certain level of survivability to Apostates, and yet, it still felt as if the suit itself made just the simple act of breathing a conscious chore.
When they had reached the half-way mark, Taewook of Cups’s earwigged to them, “The Devil’s in the house of the rising sun,” which, however cryptic in original meaning, meant the fly-eyes in the lift had been spoofed and that it was time to set the Valois Squibs and the ubiquity charge that would set them all off simultaneously.
Chandra worked quickly with Fenrir, setting the Valois in the corners and roof of the lift as Aerik had instructed them. She seemed at ease, but these harmless looking silver devices made her uncomfortable—especially since she had seen an Echelon soldier’s arm and a chunk of his torso vaporized by one that Six had caught and tossed back to him during the attack on Avalon. She had been a young girl then—only seventy-three gyres in life—but she remembered it as clearly as if it had happened only a few moments ago. The event itself had saved her life and the lives of her father and mother, and yet the thing that stuck most in her mind was the quiet yet absolute destruction that had paved the ave of their escape. Even as she placed the Valois, she could not help thinking the same thought that crossed her mind on occasional sleep cycles. And even here, as the benevolent face of Set rose above the edge of the horizon, she saw herself, not the Echelon soldier, maimed beyond hope, body collapsing into a pile of its own bowels as blood spurted in a stream from a heart that lay exposed in the cavity created by the device she now held in her hand.
But the thought bought efficiency to her movements, precision to her placements, and ensured she followed her training to the letter. She placed the last Squib and stood, almost ashamed of herself, as she hoped that the destruction these devices brought would, for the rest of their gyres on Asha, leave a macabre image, in every lurid hue, etched in the minds of those who had sought to destroy her and her clan so many gyres hence.
Cyrus watched on the holomonitor that had appeared in the center of the meeting room as the crew of the bier ship and their cargo came to a comfortable stop inside the Orbital. Here, next to Winberg, Cyrus’s heart began to whip itself into a mounting frenzy as the looming promise he had made only moments earlier began to solidify in his mind—and it flustered his very core.
Torus Denali watched as Hexad Winberg and this trumped up dexter, the self-styled Knight of Wands, met the crew of the bier ship with their macabre cargo. Either these menacing Apostates had some semblance of honor or this was a dupe. Either way, the vermin snare had been set, and this time, Dr. Chamberlain, or the Knight of Wands, or whatever he wanted to call himself, was walking right into it.
The bier floated to the center of the room and remained hovering as Chamberlain walked over to inspect the body. He leaned over the bier to open the bag near the head and lowered his face to get a clearer look.
That was when Denali ordered his men to spring the trap.
Cyrus leaned forward to inspect the contents of the body bag, trying to look as if he did not already know what was there. As soon as he leaned over, the two doors that led to a hallway on either side of the chamber opened, and Denali’s men flooded in from both sides. But not one of the eight men who flooded into the room expected Cyrus to stand up with a gun.
Pentangle Dezmon Djarre had rushed into the room expecting an easy overwhelm and capture. The target was supposed to be surrounded on all sides, surprised, and weaponless, but when Dezmon rounded the corner behind the rest of his phalanx, he saw the mark was not surprised, and he was not weaponless. After that, the louvers allowing light from outside closed and the lights of the hall all shut down, and for a moment, Djarre saw nothing at all.
In the second it took his goggles to adjust to darkvision, reality as Pentangle Djarre understood it had been drastically altered. The corpse that had been delivered by the bier crew leapt from lev-gurney firing two automatic handguns. The corpse kicked the gurney, flipping it, and deftly looped his arms into the straps that had held the body bag. He turned to face the opposite hall using the gurney as a shield. Others in the phalanx had been quicker to fire their weapons, but Djarre saw that now, even they were being cut down by the bier crew itself. As one of the bier crew turned toward him, Djarre dove backward, and shells sparked off the floor around him. The filters that transferred sound into his ears through his helmet muffled the sound, but even the diminished noise of the hail of bullets was too much.
Without looking up, Djarre began crawling away from the maelstrom that tore into the floor behind him. He had dropped his gun in his dive, but there was one just in front of him. He turned to see the bier shielding the Knight of Wands and the animated corpse as they retreated to the opposite side of the hall and the four members of the spurious bier crew back-pedaling into one of the lifts.
As Six retreated, using the gurney as a rucksack, he could feel the pull of it trying to right itself. Six angled behind Cyrus to shield him from the shower of projectiles. There was a strange whirring sound as the projectiles seemed to strike everywhere except the back of the gurney. Six fired in the direction he was moving and two of the men who had come in through that door went down. He could feel the wind from the projectiles that whizzed past him, apparently curved around the bier by the grav-drive that was still engaged. Cyrus fired the gun he had taken from Six and grabbed the officer next to him by the throat. He dragged the officer toward the men, using him as a shield. As they advanced, the men at the door hesitated, unwilling to take a shot at Cyrus and his hostage. Instead, the two men left standing moved to cover inside the hallway and focused their aim on Six.
Six was in the middle of his next step when he hopped and twisted in the air, allowing the gurney to pull him up and back as it righted itself parallel to the ground. The first of the barrage of projectiles slammed into the edge of the bier. Most of the rounds were pushed into the floor as the gurney turned and leveled off with Six on his back. The bier moved toward the doorway with Six on top headfirst. For a moment, his heart seemed to have forgotten to beat as he was sure the next barrage would find its mark in his flesh. But he had time to raise his hands above his head and look forward with the world turned upside down as he prepared to fire.
Cyrus had snatched Winberg by his neck with his left hand and was forcing him toward the gunfire, keeping him in the firing line between himself and the two men Six had not taken out. Out of the corner of his eye, Cyrus saw Six spin and fall as if he had been hit as the two men fired on him. Cyrus fired and caught one of the men in his arm, knocking him against the wall. Then, suddenly, Six was parallel to the floor, his back still against the bier, firing his guns toward the hallway as the bier carried him toward the entrance. Cyrus had distracted the men long enough for Six’s volley to find their intended targets. The men fell, and Six fanned his arms at the edges of the doorway as the bier passed through it. There was a pop where the door controls should have been and Cyrus knew wha
t would happen next. Cyrus kicked, extending his foot into Winberg’s back. Winberg fell into the sparking entranceway, arms flailing as the doors began closing. Cyrus turned on his own heels, firing his own weapon to make sure anyone on the other side of the room kept his head down. Cyrus back-pedaled and barreled into Winberg, forcing him to the ground. Cyrus continued his suppression fire as he saw the last of the bier crew step into the lift, but one persistent solider in a pile of bodies managed to squeeze off a volley as the doors to the lift slammed shut.
Pentangle Djarre had steadied the assault rifle handle on the floor and the barrel on the shoulder of Pentangle Thames’s bleeding body. Just as the bulkhead doors to the lift had closed, he had held the rifle as steady as he could with his off-hand, and he had squeezed the trigger, hoping the recoil would not send the gun backward into his own face.
As the doors to the lift closed, Fenrir stood in the opening, firing off the final volleys of suppression fire. He turned to make sure Chandra and the others were okay, but before his head could turn back inside the visor, he found himself off-balance, and as he moved his legs to regain his footing, he found the ground was further away than he had expected. Sharp spikes of pain pierced through his lower ribs and back, and he almost forgot the vac-suits were made of Comptex. Then, as the side of the lift came to meet his head in this awkward position, the ability of his clothing to resist gunfire became irrelevant. His head snapped back as his shoulder collided with the wall. His body stopped abruptly and he felt the entire universe tilt on one axis. It felt as if his entire consciousness kept moving even after his body stopped, and then, as his vision filled with a perfunctory gray fog, it didn’t feel like anything at all.
Winberg slid across the ground on his chest, sheltering his face from the carpet. Spittle erupted from his mouth as his lungs involuntarily evacuated. He gasped for air but none came as the lapel of his shirt restricted his windpipe and he was snatched to his knees by his collar. The lights had gone down when the fighting had started, and a man had come out of the body bag that should have levied Dr. Villichez, and apparently he had come out with the gun that had appeared in Cyrus’s hand. The firefight seemed to be less advantageous than Denali had planned, and all sorts of panicked chatter filled Winberg’s earwig as Cyrus forced him down the hallway using him as a shield.