Angels and Exiles

by Angels

  It seems I can hear the echoes of a faraway cry, but it is only the wind.

  NAUSICAÄ

  Lise walked along the shore; toward her came an endless procession of waves crested with bloody foam. Offshore, the cargo ship neared death; its screams had become no more than dulled moans, so low-pitched they resonated in her bones. Gulls fought over scraps of the ship’s flesh; the stolen morsels often as not ended up falling into the sea.

  Lise had not heard the battle take place; and yet she had known of it, one way or another. An intuition of death had come to her, like a scent carried by the breeze. She had exited the castle, taken the way to the shore. Standing on a grassy dune, she had seen the ship drifting slowly toward her, alone on the waves, its blood spilling into the sea.

  The cargo ship had beached itself on a spit of sand separated from the shore by a hundred metres of shallow water. The Princess of New Avalon seated herself on the damp sand, staining her bare feet and the hem of her dress with carmine. She waited. What else could she have done? The sun was setting. The two halves of the broken moon spun lazily in the sky.

  Behind her, to the west, the south, the north, spread her kingdom. An empty kingdom; its fields fallow these past five years, its forests returning to their millennial disorder, its houses thrown down, its people rotting under the earth. Only Lise was left; Lise and the one whose coming she had foreseen, for whom she waited patiently, shivering in the cool evening wind.

  He arrived at nightfall. Encased in a seeker-tadpole whose flagellum thrashed the water with an abnormal frenzy. The emergency craft convulsed once it had reached the beach, attempted to climb as far from the water as it could; but the tiny legs could not find enough purchase in the sand.

  Lise approached it, laid her hands on its head. Already the black eyes were losing their glitter, the body grew cold: the tadpole was dying. It must have been damaged in the attack; Lise would have to open it herself. She located the expulsion slit and tried to open it by pulling on the lips, but it remained sealed. Then the Princess of New Avalon found a piece of seashell and sliced the flesh; this time, the entire head of the craft opened, and the protective fluids spilled onto the sand.

  The soldier had only partially escaped the bone-smashers: his left arm had been pulped from the elbow down, his left hip shattered, his femur cleanly snapped. He was covered in blood: his own, his companions’, the cargo ship’s? Now that his lungs were drained of the oxygenating liquid, he breathed with difficulty: every inspiration was a wail.

  Lise eased him out of the survival pouch, detached the now-useless umbilicus; the dead tadpole could no longer help him in any way. The air would soon turn chill; she must shelter the soldier in her house.

  She had difficulty carrying him; he was terribly heavy in her arms, and every false step she took tore another cry from him. She finally reached the castle, managed to open the door, laid the man on her bed.

  When she made light, he opened his eyes; his nictitating lids beat asynchronously. Lise moved the candle away, leaned over the soldier to soothe him. The man’s intact arm suddenly reached out; he seized Lise’s throat. In a very clear voice, he said “My pelta,” then let his arm fall back and closed his eyes.

  She undressed him, clumsily. None of his fractures were open, and he seemed not to have taken any other wounds than those from the bone-smashers. The left arm was already cold; when she removed the vest, Lise noticed a dark line circling the shoulder, a sign of imminent amputation. She went to fetch water at the well, heated it, cleaned the blood and mucus, dried the man, covered him.

  She was afraid to leave him; afraid that he would no longer be there when she came back, like the wounded rainbow-winged bird she had found one evening on the beach and which had vanished the next morning. Slowly, she wrapped herself in a coat of old plastic. Then she went out. What else could she have done?

  The wind had already become chill. Clouds to the south and west reverberated the light of the false-suns making up the static defensive line emplaced by the Alliance at the frontier of her kingdom. Far away, above the sea, a dozen red dots blinked lazily. The running lights of a fleet of lancer-owls, perhaps. Was it their bone-smashers that had killed the ship? Had it been the victim of a pack of killer-sharks, of a bombard-whale?

  She found the corpse of the seeker-tadpole, a shapeless black mass in the orange light. She buried her arms to the elbow in the survival pouch, probing among fluids turned cold and viscous. Her fingers closed on a metallic disk no larger than her palm. She extracted it from the carcass, went to wash it in the sea. Then she put it in a pocket of her coat; she could feel its chill through the plastic when the coat beat against her thigh.

  There was a meteor shower. A whole quadrant of the sky filled with pale dashes of light: a broken orbital tower returning to Earth. Lise crossed the village which had been the capital of New Avalon. The ruins were overrun by sand and weeds. Only the castle was left standing, a two-storey stone house whose entrance still bore a frayed oriflamme in the kingdom’s colours. Blue, a deep blue, the blue of a blood-freezer’s beam. White, the white of the bones of all those who lay in the mass grave dug behind the castle. Red . . .

  The soldier had thrown back the coverlet in his sleep. The fragments of his hip crawled slowly under the skin. Lise covered him up again, returned to the living room, examined the pelta in the light of an oil lamp. A convex disk with a dark red crystal in its centre. A handle on the inner side, several swellings along the edge. Triggers? Impossible to be sure, but best to be prudent and avoid touching them. She returned to her room, laid the shield next to the soldier.

  She could not have said why she felt like crying. The soldier had pale skin, light brown hair, a straight and rather long nose, a thin-lipped mouth, wide cheekbones. His augmentations were not visible, apart from the breastbone jutting out from the middle of his chest, the better to anchor the muscles of his arms. His uniform bore no identifications save for the Greenland ear of wheat.

  His right hand was soft: no calluses at the joints, no scars, no traces of implants. A hand that was not in the habit of handling a gland-burner or a heart-breaker. Lise was scared to touch it. Her throat still hurt where the hand had grasped it, as if the man had maintained his grip at a distance all this time, through the power of his hate.

  But she was not his enemy. She was neutral. New Avalon had always been neutral. It had been born from the confusion of nations that followed the Years of Flame, an eye of tranquillity on the margins of the continental chaos, a blot on the maps, at the limit of the ancient boreal forests. All through the beginning of its life it had been able to pretend that the War was a thing of the outside. That within New Avalon’s borders, among a few hundred dreamers, the War had begun to end.

  Lise was fifteen. A princess of New Avalon, a princess of spume and sea-wrack, a princess who still found beauty in the false dawns engendered by the rape of the magnetosphere, in the distant rolls of bombardments.

  It was she who had first welcomed the soldiers of the Alliance. With a curtsy and a trembling smile, because she could smell the death that surrounded them.

  It was perhaps more because of this curtsy than because she was a king’s daughter that she had been chosen to survive.

  They had all been put in a row along the wall of a barn: barons, duchesses, free citizens. One by one they had collapsed, along the trajectory of the heart-breakers’ beams. In the distance, a trio of mercy-vultures patrolled above the kingdom’s fields and woods. Their blood-freezers fired with precision; after each shot, the vultures would dive and climb back with another paralyzed victim in their talons.

  Her father had been honoured with a formal execution: a telechiral had seized his throat and crushed his larynx. The King of New Avalon had not looked at his daughter before dying. His eyes had remained fixed on his executioner, on the hand that clenched, ten metres away from him, and pulped his throat.

  The amazon commanding the tactical squad had
gravely bowed to Lise. “Highness . . .” Four holomedals glittered on the skintight uniform, as if to draw attention to her mutilated chest.

  Lise had been left to rule over this bit of land. New Avalon still existed on the maps. The Alliance’s hands were clean.

  She woke up still sitting at the soldier’s bedside. It was long past daybreak; summer nights were short at this latitude. He had again thrown back the covers in his sleep. His hip was of a single piece now, and his leg was straight.

  The Princess of New Avalon went to the kitchen, heated some soup and brought back a plate. When she touched the man, he opened his eyes. His irises were too dark to be natural; a network of fine silver threads radiated from the pupil.

  The man sat up with effort, stared at her a long while; Lise brought the spoon close to his lips, and after a few seconds he deigned to open his mouth.

  When he had finished the plate, he asked in a monotone: “Status?”

  “Neutral,” she answered, and in response to his suspicious frown she added: “You are in the Kingdom of New Avalon, exsanguinated by the Alliance five years ago.”

  “Remaining population?”

  “One.” Lise’s voice shook, but she controlled herself. “Who are you?”

  After a pause, he gave his name and number.

  “You don’t have to treat me as an enemy,” the Princess of New Avalon said, and her voice shook again.

  “You’re not an ally.” Like a formal charge. “I have no right of requisition.”

  “I won’t refuse you the necessities.”

  The soldier rose unsteadily, got to his feet. He took a deep breath, bit through his lip until he had burst a subdermal ampule of muscle-warmer. He sucked meticulously on the wound.

  After a moment he was shaken by a violent shiver, then his movements became smooth and controlled. Lise averted her eyes; suddenly she was ashamed to see him naked. The man grunted in amusement and picked up his pants one-handed; silently, Lise helped him to put on the rest of his stained uniform.

  He found the kitchen, took some bread in a bag and hung a flask of water on his belt. He came back to the bedroom for his pelta. It seemed he no longer saw Lise, as if she’d stopped existing. The bed kept his memory, a partial silhouette in crimson on the sheets.

  She watched him go out and walk toward the beached ship.

  A half-hour passed, an hour. The Princess of New Avalon put on her best clothes, went out. She came to the beach. The tide was low. The water rose no higher than her knees when she went to the ship.

  What else could she have done?

  The keel had ground into the sand; the ship was halfway lying on its port side. The starboard side had been torn open by the bone-smashers, to below the water line. A network of cicatricial ropes had partially sealed the breach, whose edges were crusted with dried blood.

  The gulls fled at her approach, letting a few scraps of flesh fall to the sand. A rope ladder tied to the gunwale paralleled the wound and reached further down to the ground. Lise climbed it clumsily, shutting her eyes at intervals to avoid vertigo. Bone shards protruded here and there from the lips of the wound. On the tilted deck, the shattered muzzles of missile launchers stood against the dark blue of the sky.

  She went inside. She was in a corridor walled by flesh, drowned in the red glare of the emergency lights. She wanted to call to the soldier, but realized she had already forgotten his name.

  She followed the corridor toward the prow. The floor was some gray matter, its surface ridged like an old man’s nails. Lise had to walk leaning to her right to compensate for the ship’s slope.

  The corridor ended in a circular wall of muscles. Lise touched the sphincter, struck it with her fist, in vain. The flesh was warm and rigid under her touch.

  Lise hesitated. The dampness of the corridor was getting difficult to bear. The emergency lighting seemed to have dyed her skin. She was on the verge of turning back when the door dilated. Behind it stood the soldier.

  “Well, if you’re here, then come in,” he said.

  She crossed the threshold. What else could she have done? The soldier manipulated a growth on the wall and made the door close. He had severed his dead arm and everted the left sleeve of his uniform inside his vest. His pelta hung on his belt.

  She followed him through several corridors; at long intervals, other doors opened in the bulkheads; over the doorways letters and numbers had been tattooed into the flesh. Sometimes the ground shook under Lise’s feet, as if it echoed the beatings of a gigantic heart.

  The last door opened onto the bridge. Daylight entered through unpolarized portholes and painted ellipses on the horn floor. Metal panels full of screens and indicator lights were set in the walls. Over one half of the room, the flesh was swollen, blackened, peeling in long strips.

  Two uniformed corpses were crumpled in a corner. One a true man, without visible augmentation; the other a silver-haired elf, retractable claws at her fingertips and spurs at her ankles. Whatever had charred the flesh of the room had left them faceless; their limbs were broken in many places.

  “Don’t touch them,” ordered the soldier. “We’ll bury them tonight, with full honours. You’ll find me an appropriate spot.”

  “Are there any others?” she whispered.

  “The others are at the bottom of the sea. But officers need a burial in due form. Now be quiet and stay where you are.”

  The soldier went to a neural access point, extracted the nerve webs slowly from their sheath, laid them on his temples, smoothed them gently with his fingertips until they penetrated his epidermis and linked up with his cortical receptors.

  He stayed immobile and silent for several minutes. Lise leaned against a bulkhead to avoid losing her balance. One after the other, the few indicators that were still lit were going out.

  She could almost see how things had gone. The attackers—sentinel-medusas, assassin-eagles, torpedo-belugas?—swept the convoy with blood-freezers, then switched to bone-smashers, flesh-gnawers. The transport ship, its rudder damaged, broke formation, drifted away from the others. The enemy, knowing that the ship was finished, concentrated their assault on the other, less-damaged vessels, whose missile-throwers still vomited death.

  On the bridge, all were dead. The few soldiers who had been elsewhere on the ship had not been spared—except for one, half of whose body had been crushed, but who still lived.

  He returned to consciousness, dragged himself to the railing, tried to awake a seeker-tadpole; but the animal was dead. The soldier opened a hatch, went to the lower levels, in the scarlet light of the emergency lamps. He reached a still-functional escape hatch, crawled into the tadpole.

  The ship had long since beached itself. The craft, expelled from its belly, dove into the sea, swam to the shore where the Princess of New Avalon awaited. And then . . .

  No, then the story had not proceeded as it was supposed to. There should have been something else, a smile on the man’s lips, a light in his eyes, a warmth in their bodies . . .

  The soldier shook himself and withdrew the webs. He turned to Lise.

  “There’s a lot of work to do. I’ve shut down the electronics, but biologics have to be worked by hand. Got to kill the entire starboard side and draw all the blood to port; and all that will yield hardly enough reserves to finish the work. Come on.”

  He led them first to a storeroom, where he got a coil of rope and a lamp, which he forced Lise to carry. Then he opened a door coded to his palmprints; it led to an armoury.

  He equipped himself with a heavy cleaver and a nerve-dazzler. Seeing that Lise had followed him inside, he pushed her back out, closed the door behind him. He took the lead again, and as she followed him, she held tight to the heart-breaker she’d hidden in the coil of rope.

  They descended to the lower deck. In places, the sphincters that sealed the passageways refused to open; the soldier would carve them to pieces with the cleaver
. The energy blade’s glare, even at half power, hurt the eyes. When the emergency lighting failed, Lise had to turn on the lamp and hold it high.

  In one precise spot of the corridor, indicated by letters graven in the flesh of the bulkheads, they stopped. The soldier cut into the flesh, revealed a metal panel blazoned with a danger symbol. He unlocked the panel, slid it aside. A nerve node emerged from the flesh at that point. He anchored the thin muzzle of the nerve-dazzler into the node, depressed the trigger.

  The ship’s muscles convulsed. Lise was thrown violently against the port wall, again and again. The ship’s scream of pain filled her ears. After a few seconds, she got up, bruised. The corridor had ceased to tremble. All the emergency lights were dead. She activated her lamp, lit the soldier’s face, which showed the ghost of a smile. “Five more left,” he stated and ripped the nerve-dazzler from the charred fibres.

  They advanced silently toward the stern. The soldier opened a door beyond which spread a wide low-ceilinged room, its walls covered in plush-soft fur. There was a series of alcoves along the walls; in the centre of each alcove, a pale swelling tipped with a dark projection.

  The soldier hesitated a moment in the centre of the room, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “I may need this one. We’ll isolate it.” He opened another panel, severed some nerves and spared the others, closed the panel. He dragged Lise behind him out through the door, and not far from the exit, he killed another section.

  They went through the crew quarters. The soldier made a perfunctory check of the cabins, found nothing to keep his attention.

  At the end of the row of cabins, a door was left ajar. A curious smell seemed to emanate from the opening, a smell which made Lise’s heart thud, though she couldn’t say why.

  She opened the door wider, lit her lamp to see better. It was warm inside the room. The floor was soft and resilient. At the far end of the room, the bulkhead took on a half-human shape: the lower half of a trunk, the hint of wide-open legs. Between the thighs, a woman’s sex with disproportionate labia, bright red and dripping. The smell made Lise shiver to the bones.