She pulled the Vertel up into a figure-eight reverse. As it banked at the top of the zoom, Maki leaned hard against his restraints to see the roof out of the side window.
“All clear!” he shouted.
“Still no fucking place to land.”
Maki stabbed at the instrument panel with fingers on both hands. “His soft-suit’s got a flight layer. No, wait; it’s down—systems failure!”
“Whatever’s not burning’s gonna be crawling with Provies real soon now.”
“He’s giving me control! I can jack him up for one last run. The dope and the suit’ll give us a good jump, but that’s all he’s got!”
The nose of the Vertel was falling through, back toward the roof. Kali aimed to the side. She’d have to pull up slow and slide to the edge in a hover. Even a blind Provie could shoot them in the cockpit through the open door, and if Hades didn’t make the jump, he’d do the thirty second fall to the plaza below.
A stream of green shot by the window and the Vertel bucked as a burst of shrapnel whammed off its side. The gunners on the ground were getting the idea and zeroing in from below. The Vertel’s active-camo didn’t extend to the fan blades in the corner ducts, and they would be visible as shimmering circles in the gunsights.
Kali leveled the Vertel and side-slipped toward the rooftop. The Vertel bobbed in the air as she over-controlled—there was no telling what her heart rate was and her motor control was going to hell. The fire-resistant glove on her stick-hand was soaked in sweat. Hades had one shot out of here and this was it.
She snapped the side door open. “Now!”
Maki tapped the instrument panel.
Slowly, Hades rose on one leg, then the other, drew himself to full height, and pushed his chest out. One listless foot reached out in front of him and then the other. He loped awkwardly into a full stride, one arm swinging rhythmically and the other hanging useless.
Flack hits clanged on the underside of the Vertel and it teetered in the air away from the edge of the roof. Kali shoved the stick over. The nose of the Vertel shuddered as one of the forward fans vibrated with a hit.
Hades soared across the impossible eight meter gap from the roof to the Vertel, his combat suit and stim-jacked muscles throwing him off the edge in a leap that would have roused the crowd from their seats at the Athenian games.
His feet barely touched the deck of the Vertel as he spun and slammed into the opposite wall. He howled in pain and anger with a sound like the roar of a gored lion.
Maki hammered the quick-release on his restraints and jumped into the cabin. Kali snapped the door shut and pushed the nose of the Vertel forward.
“He’s fucked up!” Maki shouted. He held up a hand soaked in bright red—too red and glossy to be blood. “What’s this shit? It’s coming from his suit.”
“Deal with it. Where’s Chon?”
“His ears are blown out—he’s bleeding. He can’t hear us.”
“Write it down. Where the fuck’s Chon? I can take him out!”
Flutes of the Spiral careened by the window as the Vertel lost altitude in a turn. The Vertel shook with a stomach-churning hit from below—the flack had their number. Kali dropped the nose and mashed the throttle for speed, then rolled and pulled to get out of the gunsights. Hades groaned as the G-force ratcheted up.
“He’s crashing! The suit’s shutting him down!” Maki shouted. “I need a field hospital; I can’t do this here. His arm’s shredded and his chest has a hole in it—I need to get a load of a-blood into him.”
“Work it! I got other problems!”
Half the caution and warning lights on the console were lit. The Vertel skimmed the roofs of the slums of Bruno as Kali cycled through the diagnostics. Left-forward fan vibration warning, forward cross-drive shaft severed, three of four redundant data-lines cut. Several fractal-battery cells leaking out, a rear attitude controller down, and the cannon jammed—more DU embedded in its chain-drive than loaded in its magazine. The Vertel wasn’t holding altitude but she couldn’t dump the AGMs into the homes below, armed or not. Cinder-block hovels and trashed filled alleys with running children and snarling dogs flew by underneath.
“ICE, I’m out. Direct to home,” she transmitted.
“Understood,” Setona replied.
Kali turned to look over her shoulder and Hades stared back at her. His face was stained with soot and sweat, and his blue eyes stared at her blankly, pupils dilated. His soft-suit had lost all trace of invisibility and reverted to a light-eating black, and she could see the blood smeared across his chest.
“Strap him down, we’ve got trouble!” she shouted to Maki
The Vertel yawed as the right-front fan C&W lit. Land as soon as possible—that’s what the manual said. The vehicle could fly with as few as two diagonally opposed fans, but not if two fans on one side failed. If both front fans stopped, the Vertel would nose over and fall out of the sky.
Kali kept the vehicle pointed up the slope between the twin mountains; the Saddle was the road out of here to the base and the field hospital on the other side. The Vertel approached the snow-line, passing over a tributary road leading up to the shacks and turbines of a wind farm, their graceful rotors still milling the air in the middle of the war. She could feel the aircraft vibrating under her. It no longer had the thrust to climb out of ground effect and was skimming meters above the snow, blasting up a tail of ice crystals. There was a gap between the rotors of the wind farm, and Kali aimed for it.
The left front fan gave up and spun down, stopping just short of disintegration. Its C&W light blinked red. The right fan blades pitched to a coarser angle to compensate and almost immediately separated. Shattered pieces of diacom spat out of the bottom of the duct, and the nose started to drop. Kali snapped the throttle back to idle as the Vertel fired its emergency parachute.
The chute didn’t have time to deploy before the Vertel plowed into the hillside. Kali’s seat rammed into its shock absorbers as she was swallowed by a storm of pure, white snow.
Part III — Keto: The Last Machine
Spirits
Year 5314
Mission Time: Day Two, 11:00
Ai folded her shirt with the image of the fire-breathing creature showing on top, laid it on the pile of clothes resting on her boots, and stood naked by the pool.
The air felt warm on her skin and the wind tugged gently on the strands of hair framing her face. She stared down at her reflection on the surface of the pool. She knew others sometimes thought her beautiful in an exotic way, but what she saw in her reflected image always disappointed her. Now it looked more pale, thin, and shapeless than ever before, her hair falling flat over her shoulders and her body lacking muscles and curves. She sighed. One day she would Change and make everything different, but it would be decades before she was ready.
She closed her eyes and let the breeze flow over her. I shouldn’t be standing here, she thought, but that’s why I am.
She tried to take a step forward, but the stones were sharp and almost cut her feet. There was a flat spot just short of the water that looked safe; she circled to it and studied the way ahead. The rock under the water was jagged, as if the pool was lined with obsidian blades, and she was afraid to walk into it. But she knew the pool was deep enough—she’d tested it with the sampling pole.
Facing the pool, she raised her arms over her head, leaned forward, and pushed off. The water swallowed her with a chilly shock and bubbles swirled around her like little silver knives. She kicked her legs and swam for the other side.
The chill of entry gave way to a sensation of warmth as the water rinsed away the sweat from the day before. She swam under the surface to the shallows on the other side, touched the rock gently with her fingers, then rolled on her back and paddled slowly to the center again.
She floated with her eyes closed and her face just out of the water, the yellow disc of the sun shining through her eyelids, warming her cheeks and forehead. The sun on Athena was a harsh, bright b
lue point, but Keto’s sun was different—a G-class star like Earth’s, one of the closest analogues in a hundred light-years. The light on her skin was like the light that had shone on the first cells of life on Earth.
Drifting in the pool, Ai remembered floating weightless in the drive-head of The Child, in the arrow-tip of the ship, deep in interstellar space. The drive-head was the heart of the system that made the ship move between the stars. She’d been in it several times—first on a tour, then to sample it to find out who’d been in it before, and after that just to get away from the hab ring and be alone. She’d dived into the service tunnels and floated in the artificial light, her eyes closed and her body relaxed, her clothes suspended around her and the air currents slowly pulling her along.
She remembered lying in the garden of her parent’s house in Lyell wearing her school jumpsuit, brushing the soft blades of grass with her outstretched arms while her mother’s gene-designed pet, Chichie, ran circles around her. She remembered the deep blue sky with the bright point in it you couldn’t look at, even for an instant, and her father’s curt warnings from the open door of the house. She remembered ignoring him, closing her eyes, and wondering what it would be like to float in the farthest reaches of space.
Now she knew.
The water closed over her as she held her breath and sank into it. The seconds passed and she felt the urge to breathe again building up, but she controlled it. Nothing would happen, she told herself. Blood would flow, cells would respire; nothing bad would happen for minutes.
She opened her eyes. The surface of the water was a layer of ripples blurring the sky and its patches of white cloud. Her hair floated around her face as she sank deeper.
There was motion on one side—a dark patch obscured by the ripples. Startled, she raised her head out of the pool and blinked the water out of her eyes.
Alon stood at the edge of the pool, his jacket hanging open and his backpack slung over his shoulder. He looked at her, neither smiling nor frowning.
Ai kicked the water and swam to the opposite bank. She stood up and faced him, her arms crossed and her hands gripping her inner arms. She couldn’t run; the old lava would cut her feet.
“I didn’t expect you…” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Alon replied. “I came down another way.”
He circled the pool and stopped at arm’s length. She stared back at him, holding her arms tightly. His eyes narrowed, the folds at the edge of them wrinkling, but his expression was one of amusement or curiosity.
“Let me help you,” he said, holding his hand out.
Ai reached out to him and his hand closed around her wrist. Then, with a sick feeling in her stomach, she realized what she’d done. Alon pulled her wrist toward himself, throwing her off balance enough she had to reach out her other hand and let him take it. She stood facing him, unprotected, her cheeks burning with shame.
As Alon studied her, Ai knew he wasn’t looking at her face or her breasts. He was looking at the line of scars running down her right arm, from her shoulder to her elbow, and the other line running from her left elbow back to her shoulder. Each scar was a few centimeters long, cut and re-cut with the serrated edge of a metal knife as she knelt on the mosaic of the Medusa in the bathroom of her mother’s house. Each one was a reminder of a time she’d survived the pain in her head by cutting her skin and treating it with warm blood and endorphins. She thought of the lines on her arms as the ladder to hell and the ladder to heaven. Only the final step on her left shoulder was uncut.
Ai felt tears coming to her eyes. Alon let her hands go. His gaze was cool and unreadable; she waited for him to say something, but he was silent.
“I need to dry off,” she said. “I didn’t bring anything….” She held her hands out, palms to the sun.
He nodded. “I’ll be on top.”
She watched him leave. He glanced back only once on the way to the helicopter.
What would he think of her? Now the secret was out and whatever would come of it couldn’t be stopped. But she didn’t feel any relief.
Would Alon tell Kali? Kali would bully her mercilessly until the crew lost confidence in her and Setona pulled her assignments. The flight would be over for Ai and she would spend years in the prison of the hab ring; she might as well never have left home.
She had to stop that.
∞
Toran held his hands out to touch the wraith. It hung in the air, rising up from the valley floor, spinning about itself and reaching for him with tendrils of mist. It was like a long-lost spirit become visible in the afternoon twilight to dance with him, and when he touched it, he could feel its warmth. And then it blew away in a brief gust of wind.
Fadia, he thought.
The air had cooled as he and Kali followed the new valley inland from the sentinel pillars, a rolling bank of cloud shutting out the sun with a deep gray ceiling. Toran had felt raindrops on his shoulders and heard them tapping on the fabric of his pack; the mist that came in with the clouds drained the valley of the last of its color. Then the rainwater, seeping into the ground and finding some deep reservoir of heat, had brought out the wraiths. They grew from cracks rimmed with yellow-white sulfur, and accumulated in the air in front of him for as long as it was still.
Spirit Valley—that’s what he’d told Kali to write on the map.
A few meters away, Kali rested on one knee holding the long-range radio to her ear, talking quietly but insistently. She’d raised The Child for the afternoon comm pass, and now she was talking Setona down to a lower state of anger. Toran couldn’t make out the words, but he could sense the tone of the conversation.
He watched Kali as she talked. How similar and how different they were, he thought. The long, dark waves of hair, the earthy brown of Kali’s raised hand and face—Fadia had been like that too, but she’d been very different in other ways. Kali sprawled and swung her arms, projecting strength and confidence, but Fadia had been slight, almost gracile, her manner hesitant and closed in. Their voices were different too—Kali’s loud with the rhythm and banter of her jokes and arguments, Fadia’s nearly silent. Fadia had said almost nothing in public, and very little to her parents, brothers, and sisters. But she’d talked to him, struggling to get her mouth around the words as if her own language was alien. He’d listened to her until he understood, however long that took, because it mattered.
Fadia had been so imperfect, but she had been Fadia.
He squatted to brush off the ground a couple meters from Kali and sat. Kali switched the radio off and looked up, a one-sided smile on her face, her teeth and eyes shining in the dark circle of her face.
“We’re squared away,” she said. “Setona’s not happy, but it doesn’t matter. Galia has a bug up her ass about Alpha getting closer, but we're not going to be here that long.”
“You have a little Sentan in you, I think.”
“Fuck you, too,” Kali replied, with a mocking grin, and stood. "We should keep moving."
“What do you think of those rocks over there?” he asked, pointing down the valley beyond the wraiths.
Kali looked over her shoulder. “I think they’re rocks.”
Toran stood and walked toward the pile. Kali shook her head and followed reluctantly.
“This doesn’t look different to you?” he asked. The pile was a loose collection of angular rocks heaped on top of each other in the center and spread out around the edges. All the rocks were randomly coated with patches of gray-green lichens. “What does it look like?”
“What do you want it to look like?”
The Universe is not what we want to see, it is what we see, Toran remembered a teacher saying.
“That doesn’t matter,” he replied.
“What do you think, then?”
“A cairn.”
Kali snorted and turned away. “You could see anything in these old rocks.”
“A pile of nice, hand-sized rocks, stacked on top of each other?”
“Eruption
s—lava bombs. Then frost and earthquakes break them up.”
“Frost? Here?”
“Obliquity variation.”
“Really?”
“It’ll turn over. Sooner or later, they all do.”
Obliquity variation is the plague of terrestrials—without a moon, retrograde rotation, or tide-lock to a larger planet or star, the axial tilt of a terrestrial is unstable and periodically tumbles toward its orbital plane. When that happens, the world’s climate goes out of control, its poles alternately freeze and burn, and its equator is exposed to the kind of long twilight that would otherwise happen at the poles.
“I’m not seeing it,” he said. These valleys were V’s, not U’s—he knew that much. There were no glaciers here; Keto’s inclination had been low since the island was created. “You’re reaching.”
“The ghosts, then?” she said, tossing her head towards the wraiths. “They built it?”
A lava bomb from an eruption would have landed as a single piece or shattered across a wider distance. Someone selected those stones, Toran thought. Was it the First?
They walked on into the valley in silence, everything beyond a few hundred meters hidden behind a colorless veil. The rocks scraped and cracked under Toran’s boots. Fadia wouldn’t have liked this place; it would have frightened her.
“Have you ever wondered if there is an afterlife?” he asked.
“Fuck, I hope not,” Kali said. “It can’t be good.”
The Northern Syncretists, as a group, had never adopted the Principle of the Afterlife. Syncretist meeting houses had a pair of lecterns instead of a pulpit. In place of a sermon, there was a weekly debate, two members arguing opposing sides and a mediator directing challenges from the audience. It was popular to debate for and against the existence of an afterlife, but the Principle had never been adopted because it would have split the organization.
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