“Let me do this,” he said grasping the holographic controls. The vehicle pumped the sensation of resistance into Nero’s mind, and then he was wrestling with the control sticks, fighting the winds whipping around them.
He sent them left and right again, but their invisible assailant continued to pound away at the car’s hull with inhuman strength. He tried rolling and a series of rapid banks, but Qismat still hammered away just behind the cockpit.
Ahead of them, high above the black forest, lightning flashed.
“I have an idea. Head up for the clouds,” Sorina said. She closed her eyes, and the serene look that he knew meant she was fully accessing her interface implants descended onto her face.
He aimed their nose upward into a near-vertical climb, increasing the throttle to maximum acceleration. A pink nimbus enshrouded the car as its dark-energy projectors were pushed to their limits.
The controls blinked off for a moment, Nero’s fists abruptly closed on air, then they came back on glowing bright red. Alarms sounded in his ears.
“Was that you?” he shouted over the engine’s roar. It had taken on a distinctively bad pitch.
“No,” Sorina said dreamily. “She’s tearing into the car’s control systems.”
“Oh hell.”
“Keep climbing.” Khepria looked like she was napping, but her voice was filled with tension.
The car began to shake, but whether it was from the turbulence of the gathering storm or the damage Qismat was inflicting on the machinery, he could not say. Alarms continued to scream in his ears, and system indicators began to blink and fade.
“Son of a bitch! I like this car,” he shouted.
The controls blinked out completely for a moment, then came back again just as the blade of the vehicle’s nose pierced the blackness of the clouds.
“Buckle in.” Sorina’s eyes flew open, and she started fussing with the straps of her restrains as quickly as possible.
He did the same. “What did you do?”
“Shield your eyes.” Hers shifted to silver.
The controls blinked off, and a sound like fabric tearing filled Nero’s ears. A second later the canopy exploded in blue-white light.
Although Prospero activated the polarizing implants in his eyes, he still had spots dancing in his vision when the light faded. He blinked through them and glanced backward
Fist-sized craters and exposed wires hung from tears in the vehicle’s flesh where Qismat had torn into its guts. However, no more damage appeared in the several seconds he spent looking. It seemed that whatever Khepria had done, it worked.
Although that was a relief, it was counter-weighted by the sensation of all of his innards pressing upwards towards his head.
“We’re falling,” he said.
“I’m trying to get the engine restarted, but I think I overdid it,” she responded.
“What did you do?”
She sent out a pulse of resonant energy and caused the clouds to strike the car with lightning. I believe the ploy could have overloaded Qismat’s systems, though I doubt it would have destroyed it.
“Dammit, can’t anything kill that thing?”
Yes, but nothing you have with you. The fall is in excess of two kilometers, so she will suffer considerable structural damage. It will take Qismat a long time to repair itself. However, we face the same fate if Agent Khepria and I cannot get this air-car’s engines running.
“Are you saying we can survive the fall?” he asked.
No. By similar fate I meant we will fall. Although the gravity here is relatively low, the fall will be considerably damaging to biological systems. I cannot say for certain you or Agent Khepria will survive. I was trying to leave that part out of my analysis, I did not want to depress you.
“Thanks,” he said.
Unable to do anything else, Nero stared out into the darkness through the cracked polyglass. The sound of the wind rushing around them was all he could hear. He wasn’t sure how fast they were plummeting, but he knew that the more time that passed without hearing the car’s engines come on, the more they were screwed.
I can calculate our rate of fall given the mass of the craft and the local gravity field if you like.
“No, thank you.” He growled.
Several more seconds passed before a sputter sounded deep within the car’s engine. It was silenced when something clinked, then came roaring back a moment later.
“Oh yeah!” Nero shouted.
The nose of the craft slammed into something, and the sound of splintering wood and exploding ceramic-polymer filled his ears.
He awoke slowly. The first thing he was aware of was that he was still breathing. Knowledge that he was alive, mostly numb, and badly injured followed in small steps. It felt like the world was spinning about him, and before he could contemplate why, he found himself retching into the darkness. It took a long time for the spasms to stop, but eventually they did. Only afterwards did he attempt to open his eyes.
Only the right one obeyed.
He was laying in a clearing made by the trees parting before the onslaught of his crashing air-car. Their broken remains splayed out around him like the nest of some giant bird. Several were burning slowly beside the twisted pieces of machinery that was once his favorite vehicle. The fire, at least, provided enough light to see by without Prospero having to enhance his vision. Distantly, he thought it might be a problem later, but the alien wood seemed to burn poorly and the hissing fires made slow work of them.
He was still in his seat, though it rested on the ground independent of the car from which it came. His uniform was in tatters, burned in some places and shredded in others. Torn flesh and oozing, incarnadine fluid were visible nearly everywhere he looked.
The air was chilly and damp. A light mist fell from the darkness above. The trees, he noted, were taller up close than they had looked from the spaceport pad. He estimated they had to be at least fifteen meters high from root flare to the black canopy. It was hard to tell in the darkness.
“Sorina?” he shouted as loud as he could. His voice came out as a hoarse shade of its former self.
When no answer came, he shouted again and again after that. A cold fist clamped shut around his stomach, spurring him to move. He leaned forward, but instead of rising to his feet as he had intended, he found himself falling down into the pool of fluids he had only moments before ejected. It was several long minutes before the world stopped spinning about him.
Then he heard a groan from off to his left side.
“Sorina?”
“I’m here,” she responded. Her voice was as weak as his.
“Are you alright?” he croaked.
“I think my legs are broken. I can’t feel them.”
“I’m coming,” he said. “Prospero, damage report. Prospero?” The silence that greeted his summons chilled him deeper than his inability to function properly. Prospero had always been there for as long as he could remember. It was unthinkable for Prospero to be offline.
It was a problem he would have to puzzle out later. Sorina needed him now.
Summoning his will, he unfastened what remained of his restraints. He grasped the earth with both hands, twisted himself around, and heaved his body up onto all fours. He had to fight the spinning again, but it soon faded enough that he could crawl along towards where he’d heard Sorina. Through his one good eye he watched dark fluid splatter to the ground from the other side of his face with every swaying step. Briefly, he had the thought that he might be dying. Without Prospero to direct his healing nanomachines, his wounds could prove fatal. He filed that away in his mind as yet another problem to face after he found Sorina.
She was propped up against a fallen log. One leg was out straight before her, while the other was canted at an angle that indicated it was indeed broken. Char marks marred her uniform, and the right side of her face was swollen and a dark reddish color. She half-smiled at his approach. She’d lost several teeth in addition to her other in
juries.
“You look like a cerberai,” she said. The smile faded as he got closer, however. “Gods of the Void, Nero, you’re hurt.”
“It’s not that bad,” he said.
“Half your face is torn off,” she responded.
He stopped his crawl and touched the left side of his face. He felt shredded skin and the rough surface of his carbon-reinforced bone beneath.
“I wasn’t pretty to begin with, this won’t affect my looks much.”
She laughed at that, but the spasm ended in a splatter of blood across her chest.
He finished crawling the rest of the way to her and propped himself up at her side using the same trunk. “I hate to tell you this, but your legs are definitely broken. Do you feel cold?”
“A little,” she said. “There’s no network out here. I tried to signal for help.”
“I didn’t expect it. Frontier worlds are like that. Prospero’s offline, too. I didn’t think that could happen.”
“You should be dead,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“No, I mean I didn’t think Abyssians could live without their symbiotic computers.”
“I never thought about it. I guess we can,” he shrugged and looked about the clearing as best he could. “I should try to find the car’s first aid kit. If it survived the crash, it’ll have injectable medic nanomachines in it.”
“You can barely move.”
“But I can move.” He smiled, feeling only half his face respond, and started to push himself over into the crawling position again.
“Don’t.” She put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there.
He looked at her. Her amber eyes seemed to glow in the firelight. “Alright, I’ll stay. It’s a lovely night anyway.”
She smiled.
His head pounded, and a fiery pain began to kindle on the left side of his face, but he smiled back.
They sat there for a time, shoulders touching as the cool mist gently soaked them. Far off in the darkness, thunder rolled. The mist coalesced into light rain.
“Lovely night,” she said.
“Yeah.” He felt light, like he was bobbing in the waves of an invisible sea. There was a strange ringing in his ears that seemed to get louder the more he relaxed. It seemed odd to him that, aside from a mild burning sensation and the noise in his ears, his body refused to acknowledge the amount of pain he knew he must be in.
A sound in the dark brought them both back to alertness. He grit his teeth. If Prospero had been wrong again, if Qismat had been able to repair itself and find them, then it was over. He’d lost his gun in the crash, and his knife would do little when he could barely even stand. Sorina’s broken limbs made her an easy target as well.
“Fuck it.” He reached down, fought the urge to retch again, and drew his knife from his belt.
It came to life, purring against the skin of his hand.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Queen Gaia, Matre’s Glory System
41:2:9 CST (J2400:3132)
Cylus awoke with a shout as he had the last fifty-eight days. They were still in-transit across the void between the capital and the mysterious Cephalon Sphere that Zalor was taking them all to see. Sophi, disturbed by his cries, roused and propped herself up on a pale arm.
Each night she’d come to him “for a last taste” as she had on the first. He wondered if it would stop before the end of their voyage or keep on going until the final night. He hoped for the latter. He was in no hurry to have his bed bereft of her company.
“The same dream again?” she asked after a yawn.
“Yes. I stumble down a corridor, chasing or being chased by something, and I hear something I know is important but I can’t remember what it is. Then the ring of sparks burns itself into my brain and I wake up.” The litany had become part of his morning routine.
She sighed. She’d quit asking him questions about it after the first five mornings. Now, she only looked sad for a moment before reaching out her hand and stroking tip of his nose with her narrow, white finger. Her hand moved down over his beard, and settled on his chest.
“I wish I knew what it meant,” he said.
“Dreams mean nothing. They’re just things your mind makes up to pass the time.” Her voice was softer than he’d heard it in many divisions.
He shook his head. “I think this one does mean something. I just wish I knew what it was.”
She nodded, appearing to think on what he’d said for a moment before she rolled her pale blue eyes and sat up. The sheets fell away from her milky breasts and he found himself reaching for them.
“Not this morning. Father wants us all at breakfast on the observation deck.” She smacked his hands away.
“Oh, right.” He forgot that today was the day they were supposed to reach their destination and ‘change the Confederation forever,’ if Zalor was to be believed.
He dragged himself out of bed and summoned Ben. The artificial was now used to the routine as well. He greeted Sophi, then helped both of them get dressed. The only difference today was that the clothes were a bit fancier than normal for the grand breakfast.
“Master, Heiress Olivaar is waiting for you in the suite’s sitting room,” Ben said as he helped him into a brown coat with the seven pointed star over a breast pocket.
“What?” His eyes darted over to Sophi.
She smiled, making some final adjustments to the purple and red strapless dress she’d brought with her the night before.
He frowned. “You expected her?”
“I received a transmission from my assistant yesterday. One I’ve been waiting for a long time,” Sophi said.
“Your assistant?”
“The one I hired to manage things at Elthroa while I was on this cruise. Emnu is really working out, so I think I’ll keep her,” Sophi mused.
Cylus had forgotten she could do things like that now that she was a baroness in her own right. “Emnu? Is that her name? Wait, you didn’t use an artificial?”
“Emnu is the Isinari gender-neutral pronoun. Her name is Clearach’Kul’Tearae—and for your information, many of my new clients prefer a more personal touch. The message is one I think you’ll be interested in, too, actually.”
“Oh?” He started following Ben towards the door leading out of his stateroom and into the rest of the suite.
“I found Brudah’s daughter.” Sophi’s smile was wicked.
Cylus almost tripped on himself. “The one that helped Hephestia’s agent? Who is it? We should talk to her. She may have secrets, information, proof of—”
“You already know she didn’t get any solid proof. If she had, Yoji would have hung father out to dry long ago. However, you are right, she may have more information that may be useful to us now. It’s a good thing I know where she is.”
“Where?”
“We have a breakfast to attend,” she said and pushed at his back.
He knew it was useless to pursue the matter. Sophi would reveal the information to him in her own time and not a moment before. “Fine.”
He followed Ben out into the suite’s sitting room where Pasqualina was waiting for him on the chamber’s plush leather sofa. At his entrance she stood up and assumed a pleasing smile. Her hair was drawn back with a wide clip fashioned to look like the seven-pointed star of Keltan Securities. She styled it so that coiled wisps of her hair hung artfully behind her ears. Her dress was nearly identical to Sophi’s, strapless and low cut, save that the colors were blue and silver instead of purple and red. The style left the black hammer and star tattooed on her shoulder in plain view.
“Baron Keltan.” She rose and curtseyed for him.
Cylus halted his advance, forcing Sophi to step out from behind him. “Baron Keltan? You’re not usually so formal with me.”
“I figured this was what you wanted,” she said with a glance at Sophi. “Since you haven’t invited your betrothed over to spend the night since we set out.”
His mouth hung in the air
for several seconds. “I, ah, we’re not married yet and—”
“You’re hardly the celibate type.” She glanced at Sophi again.
Cylus felt heat rising on his cheeks. “Pasqualina, I—”
“Heiress Olivaar,” Pasqualina corrected.
He swallowed hard. She hadn’t given him any indication she’d been displeased with their nightly separation at any of the functions they’d had to attend together. Since she never tried to follow him at the end of each night he assumed she was about as interested in spending the night with him as he was with her. He never imagined she’d been waiting for him to make the first move. He didn’t want to, of course, especially not with Sophi’s nightly visits. His heart raced as he gazed at the cold anger in Pasqualina’s emerald eyes. He truly had no idea what he should say now.
Ben came to his rescue. “Pardon me, but I believe Baron Revenant will be waiting for you all.”
Pasqualina’s nostrils flared. She turned on her heel and faced the door to the suite with her arm held out. Cylus gave Sophi a quick look, and finding no solace there, moved forward and took his fiancée’s arm. Together they walked to the lift with Sophi in tow. Ben, much to Cylus’ dismay, stayed behind in the suite. Servants were not invited today.
The entire trip in the lift was silent. Though Cylus swore he caught several meaningful looks exchanged between Sophi and Pasqualina, and none of them looked hostile. It seemed her ire was directed solely at him for a mistake he didn’t even know he was making. He decided to join in, quietly fuming at Pasqualina’s frustrating lack of communication both now and over the last fifty-eight days.
The observation deck was decorated with fringed-white cloth on the pylon walls and now had hundreds of small tables crowding its circular expanse. The digital telescopes and podiums were missing. Dim glow spheres floated over each table making the whole place look like a restaurant with a view of the stars.
Zalor stood beside his so-called-miracle scientist, Doctor Rega, up on the platform that ran the outer circumference of the chamber. He was dressed as he had at his first appearance, all in white with gold trim, so that he appeared like some kind of emperor or despot. Cylus supposed the look was to get his fellow barons used to thinking of him that way. It certainly seemed to be what he was aiming at with his plans.
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