The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  Suddenly, he felt confused again, as if the gray fog of the deep valleys found shelter under his skull. Am I handsome with two spines or what? The other Antyrans have the same? Gill couldn’t remember for sure. He was so tired and dizzy… In the next moment, he forgot the problem and moved his eyes from the icicle, obeying Ugo’s conditioning.

  Far away, hidden in the morbid fog, he could see something—a large glacier. In the bizarre world sunk in the brown-gray atmosphere, the ice tongue had borrowed the same decomposed hues—which made it barely visible. Gill had no clue why he was staring at it or what was supposed to happen, but he knew he wouldn’t have to wait for long.

  Then, he heard some strange reverberations coming from a great distance, behind the peaks surrounding the glacial trough. Search sonars! Their pitched ringing echoed endlessly through the horrid valleys of the world of the damned. They were searching for them! The oasis of clarity that appeared in his thoughts allowed him to recognize the familiar presence of the Sigian, the god of the bracelet.

  His companions from the other rescue module hid their vessel in a large crevasse in the glacier’s tongue, priming the antimatter canister. After they finished, they spread out in the glacier grooves, prepared to detonate it near the enemies to allow the other shuttle to escape—hopefully unnoticed—from the planet. The Sigians on the glacier didn’t have much of a chance to escape, but each of them knew they weren’t allowed to get caught alive. Kirk’an didn’t tell them anything, convinced that it wasn’t necessary to do so, knowing all too well that everyone would do his duty to the bitter end.

  A laser salvo lit up the glacier. The deadly dance had begun!

  Several gray light-assault shuttles were hunting the Sigian fighters, believing they had cornered them on the unstable ice. Their flashes shredded the brown mist, concentrating around the crevasses where the landing craft was hidden.

  The pursuers reached the crevasse, their laser lenses digging shiny grooves and raising clouds of hot steam in their wake, when the powerful explosion of the antimatter canister briefly lit the world of shadows, lighting every little detail of its surface. Taking advantage that the sensors of the enemies were blinded by the electromagnetic pulse, the Sigian-Gill turned to run to the other vessel camouflaged nearby to escape from the planet. But a huge surprise awaited him: instead of the access hatch, he stumbled on the door leading to his prison room in Ropolis…

  After a brief moment of confusion, he understood that he had lived a piece of memory stored in the bracelet that he didn’t have time to see in Alala’s dome—a part of the Sigians’ odyssey on Antyra! Yet the sky wasn’t Antyran; it was the sinister mist from the realm of the dead. He was trapped in a mixed vision, an amalgam between Uralia and the memories of the Sigian god… which meant they were interacting. There was a link between them… How is that possible? The revelation cleared his kyi like a fog reductor: Ugo! Ugo not only stole his secrets, but he was playing with the bracelet, using his kyi as a bridge!

  His revolt didn’t last long, though, for in a few seconds, he forgot the problem, bewitched by the outside vista and by Ugo’s amnesic smog.

  The brown whirls began to squirm vigorously; the glacier disappeared, and he could see how the world of shadows was falling apart at the horizon. After all the torture he had been through, the prospect of dying actually felt better than that of rotting forever in a dead world. He was hopeful that when the decay reached him, everything would be over. His kyi, left without support, would burn like Beramis’s wall of fire…

  But then he realized that it wasn’t going to be that easy. The reality didn’t simply decompose; it folded in intricate patterns while the sinister screams of the vortex burst with even greater intensity. The purpose of the folds could only be one: to get inside his kyi!

  Neither his Guk training nor the bravery of the Sigians could prepare him for what was coming for him. Paralyzed by terror, he wondered what kind of abject entities were crawling in the folds and what they were going to do once they got inside his skull. In the next instant, he felt the shreds of reality hitting him with unimaginable power. He screamed in pain, his voice drowned in the noise of the storm.

  Gill closed his eyes tightly, deciding not to see the turmoil around him. Instead, he began to live fast flashes recorded by the bracelet, some known, others new. When he opened his eyes, he saw something incredible: wherever the shreds of reality were breaking off, others were growing in their place. It seemed, however, that the vortex was gaining ground due to its monstrous appetite, swallowing the world faster than it could regenerate. After some time, the reality almost wiped out, he sank in a sea of colors resembling the columns of the official air-jets, fast and noisy. This is how Uralia’s unseen face looks, the face-from-the-inside?

  A warm voice called him softly… Sandara’s voice?

  “Gill, you have to resist! The exit is close!”

  The pain in his head became unbearable; he felt he could no longer keep his thoughts from becoming one with the madness. Then, he fainted again.

  He woke up at the contact of his head spikes with a cold metal, and the feeling of sickness overran him instantly. I’m still alive! he realized, dismayed. After the disappointing thought, he remembered who he was. Gillabrian, echoed the familiar name in his alveoli. That’s my name.

  The awful pain was coming from a nasty fog in his kyi, although it didn’t seem to be a simple mist. His tattered memory was littered with holes, as if he was lobotomized.

  After a while, his eyes cleared enough to notice a gray spot moving in front of him.

  “Kaya naga te cuik?” the creature growled.

  He couldn’t be mistaken… he had heard the strange language before… the language of the gray gods!

  “Cuik, cuik,” Gill mocked him, convinced that it was another memory of the bracelet, dug out by Ugo’s curiosity. “Ugo, how long are you going to torture me?” he shouted. “Make him disappear!”

  “I don’t think anyone can make him disappear,” answered a hologram materialized in the room.

  He recognized Baila’s squeaky voice, and his spikes wrinkled at the mere possibility that it wasn’t a hallucination but the sinister reality. “The temples want you,” Forbat had told him. And now, Baila was there—with a god. The apparition had the effect of an electric shock, convincing him he wasn’t dreaming.

  He felt broken. Broken and betrayed by the whole Antyran world, by Colhan and the other ancient gods, for the first time truly convinced that his whole un-Antyran struggle was in vain. The bracelet! He desperately tried to look at it, but he was tied up tightly in a vertical device placed in a wall niche. A metallic wire mesh was fastened on his head.

  “My son, I have extraordinary news for you: the gods have returned!” exclaimed Baila, opening his arms in a ritual gesture. “The true gods are back, and this time, they will get what they waited a thousand years for!”

  Gill didn’t bother to say anything, beginning to realize where he was. A brown, moist room that appeared to be made of flesh, warped walls, curved to the inside toward the ceiling… one of the godly ships! There’s something on my head. A neural probe, maybe? he realized, frightened by the prospect. He remembered the terror of the Sigian god at the mere reference to the deadly device.

  “Looking for the bracelet?” Baila said, grinning. “It’s in a safe place, far from you. I don’t want to chase you like last time. Gill, Gill, you scared me good.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “I thought we lost you. I thought we lost the bracelet.”

  An uneven diaphragm door opened in a wall, and a stocky Antyran dressed in ritual red garb entered the room, pushing a floating table of alien origin, on which Gill could see the Sigian bracelet!

  Although the podgy character should have been on the front line, he was again in Baila’s favor because he was allowed to witness such an important event.

  “I finished scanning it, Your Greatness. It’s—”

  “Harut, I thought of something. You activate it.”
r />   “A-activate it?” the Antyran babbled. Obviously, the prospect of touching Arghail’s tool filled him with panic.

  So that’s how it ends, thought Gill. He had one more battle ahead, to give them a bad code and convince them it was the right one. They were all going to die in the blast, and the prospect of dying didn’t scare him at all. Sigia would die today, on his terms. He had failed, but he didn’t betray them.

  “Yes, I want to see it working. I’m sure the rebels tortured the right codes off him, but I trust my own ways more,” Baila grinned with the smile of a predator. “If something unexpected happens, I’d rather have him in the scanner. You set it on five dhirmi?” he asked the gray god.

  “Tak’k.”

  “It’d be such a pity if the field burns his puny nerves and spares him from my punishment. I don’t want any mistakes—you have to move fast!”

  “Tak’k,” the god said, nodding.

  Harut watched the Sigian artifact, hypnotized, unable to touch it.

  “Harut, finish the job before the junction with the transporter. You’ll take Gillabrian—if he’s still alive—and bring him to me. Lek will take the bracelet and go to Grammia to analyze it.”

  “Tak’k.”

  “Only Lek or Durta can touch it, remember! Don’t get too close if you want to live,” he told the gelatinous creature. “You know what the rebels told us! The bracelet self-destructs if the closest being is a ‘god,’” he said with a snort, loading the last word with all the tonalities of heavy ridicule.

  The Grammian in the room made no sign that he noticed the irony.

  “And hurry up! We don’t want to arouse the suspicion of our ‘guests’ at the system’s outskirts!”

  Grammia! That was the terrible name behind the gray world-killers, Gill realized. Although he had barely a few minutes to live, and the information was completely useless now, at least he wouldn’t die without knowing the name of Sigia’s murderers.

  Slowly, hesitating, Harut stretched his hand and took the bracelet off the table.

  “Harut!” shouted Baila.

  “Yes, Your Greatness?” he muttered.

  “Come to your senses, will you?”

  Harut took a deep breath and, seemingly more confident, pulled the bracelet on his arm. Nothing bad happened… He dared to raise his eyes.

  Gill had no doubts anymore: Baila was giving orders to the gods, like he had seen in Alala’s holotheater. Again, the unknown implications confounded him.

  Harut pressed the four symbols on the bracelet’s keypad. Gill was hoping to hear the liberating buzz, but it didn’t start.

  “Ugo, you monster,” Gill murmured, defeated. “Why did you do that?”

  “Ha-ha, they plucked your little secrets!” Baila exclaimed jovially, throwing away the mask of indifference he had worn until then, unable to hide the pleasure of having Gill tied up in the straps of a neural probe. “You should have accepted my offer,” he said in a fake sympathetic voice.

  “Never! One of us will get you sooner or later!”

  “Us? What ‘us’? You’re alone, Gill. And I’m sorry to say, but soon you’ll be gone, too.”

  Considering the effort Baila had put into branding him as the bearer of all the sins of their species, Gill could only imagine what humiliations were in store for him.

  “I’m not afraid of you! Do your worst!” Gill shouted defiantly.

  “My dearest son, no matter how much I enjoy your company, I don’t have time for chatter. Maybe later,” Baila exclaimed mockingly. “Harut, you can take the bracelet off now.”

  Suddenly, Harut fell on his knees, his hands pressing his temples, while large droplets of moisture oozed through his fingers.

  “Aaaaargh!” he groaned in pain.

  “Harut! What happened? Is it going to explode?” Baila asked, agitated, already regretting he had enjoyed his victory prematurely.

  Harut didn’t answer, rolling on the floor in agony.

  “Turn on the probe!” the prophet shouted to the alien. “Wait! Call the two Antyrans, and run from the room! If Harut dies and you get too close to the bracelet, it will explode!”

  The Grammian muttered something to the Corbelian sphere in front of him before scrambling out.

  Two Antyrans burst inside. One of them leaned over Harut and rolled him onto his back.

  “Is he breathing?” asked Baila.

  “Yes.”

  “Pordena, turn on the probe. It has a switch on the right. I’ll ask the questions!”

  The Antyran approached hurriedly toward Gill, but he didn’t make it to the switch. With jerky moves, Harut grabbed the laser lens from the belt of the Antyran leaned over him and fired a beam into his belly. Next, he turned on the initiate near the scanner and mowed him down from behind. The room filled with smoke and the acrid smell of burned flesh. Harut dropped the lens on the floor, staring wildly at his hands, unable to grasp what he just did.

  “Harut!” shouted Baila. “What are you doing, you fool?”

  Without a word, Harut got slowly to his feet and walked, wobbling, to Gill like a broken machine. He gazed at his straps with the look of a mad Antyran and pressed his finger on the black plate nearby.

  Immediately, Gill felt the device releasing him. The head net eased its grip, and the straps holding his arms retracted inside the machine. Free at last! Freed by… the bracelet? He had noticed that the artifact augmented his senses and that he could move faster when it was activated, but he had no idea it could do such a thing—that the artifact had an intelligence able to make decisions of such complexity, to take over the kyis of the ones wearing it.

  Harut collapsed on his belly like a wonkc thrown ashore by a storm. He jerked his hand to grab the fallen weapon.

  “No, no, no, no, no!”

  A terrible battle was taking place inside his head. He slowly turned the lens on his own mug, hesitating.

  “Oh, no, Zhan, help!” he cried, and fired a beam at his head spikes, which started to smoke.

  The pain apparently galvanized his muscles; he threw the lens on the floor, leaped to his feet, and rushed to the diaphragm door like a fugitive fleeing from prison. With a loud bang, he hit the wall near the opening and fell on his tail. He got slowly to his disobeying feet, which promptly carried him back to the middle of the room, despite his desperate screams of protest.

  “Harut, Harut!” Baila yelled madly, although failing to get his attention. “Gill, what is happening?” the prophet turned toward him. “You must help him! I’m willing to forget everything between us and give you my forgiveness!”

  “I’m sorry, Your Greatness, but no matter how much I enjoy your company, I don’t have time for chatter. Maybe later,” replied Gill, grinning broadly.

  Harut raised the lens from the floor—his face decomposed by madness—and fired at the Corbelian sphere floating near the ceiling. Baila’s hologram disappeared in a sea of colorful sparks.

  “No, no, no, no, no!” A second salvo grazed Harut’s spikes. “Save me, Your Greatness,” he whined, failing to notice that his master had no way of hearing him.

  With every passing moment, Harut was becoming weaker and weaker. Then, he saw Gill’s compassionate eyes.

  “Why is it doing this?” he moaned, looking at the bracelet.

  It was a fateful gesture; the armed hand won the invisible fight, and the next salvo landed in the middle of Harut’s forehead. He fell dead at Gill’s feet.

  The Grammians could appear at any moment. Gill hurried to pull the bracelet from Harut’s arm. He activated it in one breath, and the green distortion grid appeared instantly. He breathed easily, realizing that everything was all right.

  “Did you miss me?” a voice echoed in his head. It took him several long seconds to recognize it, not because it wasn’t familiar but because he didn’t want to accept that he had heard it for real. It was the voice of the abomination!

  Ugo’s avatar had moved inside the bracelet and found a way of controlling it! Ugo—not the Sigian
artifact—forced Harut to kill the two initiates, then decorate his own skull with another hole!

  “Ugo! What are you doing in my bracelet?” he exclaimed, horrified, realizing that the avatar had an open path to his kyi and could parasitize him as he wished.

  “Let your ganglions be in my control. Don’t fight like that fool.” He obviously referred to Harut, who was still smoldering on the floor. “I don’t have time for explanations if you want to get rid of the Grammians.”

  Sighing heavily, Gill realized the obnoxious monster was right. If they could get rid of the aliens, he would have more than enough time to learn how the jure got into the bracelet and what he wanted from him—in other words, the conditions of his slavery to the new god. Because he had to admit it: even without expansion, Ugo had managed to morph into one…

  His body began to move involuntarily. A hand rose into the air, fell back, then the other, and then the feet moved. Some control movements—they were becoming faster, more and more alien to his own will, which had taken refuge in a pit of darkness in a corner of his kyi, from where it was watching, abashed, how the abomination was using the body of which, until then, it thought it was the master.

  “Fine, it works now. Are you ready?”

  “Go ahead,” Gill said with a nod, resigned to his fate. For how many times he had abandoned himself in the claws of madness in the last few days?

  “All right! Here we go!”

  Gill started to run, Ugo controlling all his moves. In one leap, he grabbed the laser lenses of the dead Antyrans, one in each hand, and jumped through the diaphragm door. It was like watching a holoflux compressed to an insane frequency. Gill felt his head cracking because Ugo was moving much faster than his connections could have made it themselves.

  He saw the green rectangles pulling the surrounding space with prodigious speed. The continuum divided by the grid lost its discrete attributes, turning into water in front of his amazed eyes—a whirling river whose currents were flowing on the paths channeled by Ugo’s whims.

  Then came the blinding laser flashes, followed by the heavy stench of the burned bodies falling to the floor. He was slipping so quickly through the rooms that the Grammian gods and their Antyran allies had no time to see what was killing them. The unforgiving salvos were hitting them from unexpected directions—the ceiling, the floor—seemingly fired from several places at once. Nothing had prepared them to face such an enemy! In less than a minute, no one but Ugo-Gill was alive on the ship.