ChuckThatsBadDontNameMeThatThoughtWeWereTheDreamTeamBeingNamedIsntSoBadChuckItIs
The AEB Tzacol climbed. At this distance, it looked like a playful god simply plucked their favorite toy from its platform and carried it into the sky. All sense of scale and scope were gone. The light was beautiful, almost blinding, despite the solar shades. The ship vanished within the engine’s shifting corona. Cerulean, azul, ultramarine, cyan, and a thousand shades of blue she had never seen burst from the ball of light. The light was powerful but somehow not harsh as it pulsed its cosmic luster. A faint light trail glowed from the launch pad to the thrusters despite the cloudless noon sky.
How bright it must be out there. How good he must feel. He was leaving them all behind. Whatever problems he found would be novel, at least. He could find his peace in the solitude of the solar system or truly die trying. He was leaving her behind.
Was this how Helena felt? She hardly thought of her old mentor now. They were too much alike for Eliza to stay angry. If Helena had been pulled into this weird world that was somehow more real than the one she grew up in, how could she have resisted? She was out there, somewhere, doing work for the Grupo in her own way or resting after a long effort. They had time. Eliza knew she would find her. They could even work together again.
There was no other choice for her. What else could feed her ravenous curiosity? Tim would stay, too. He told her one morning over breakfast, between bites of his omelet, as if committing his young life to this place, this work, to her was as casual as picking the morning’s breakfast. She started to argue before physically biting her tongue. She wanted him here. He saw what she had taken too long to see and what the Grupo de Pachakuti seemed to know for almost a century. They glimpsed the future. Rachana would train him as a researcher as long as she was able.
Eliza slipped her free hand into his. He looked at their joined hands and then to her. He was blushing.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No. He’s gone.” She squeezed his hand.
“For now, yeah. But I’ve been all over the specs. The ship is really well built. This could actually work. He could live up there for a while until he wanted to come home, or if we wanted to go get him…”
She squeezed his hand again and held on.
“Tim, it really doesn’t matter what happens next. Charlie’s gone. Even if he came back, I mean the physical person… he’s changed. You didn’t see him that night. He’s… whatever might have come next, Charlie died when he boarded the Tzacol. Maybe before.”
He mouthed a protest but stopped. The windows rattled. They turned to see. The noiseless flight continued. Analysts chirped data to each other. She strained to understand their bizarre technical creole. They sounded panicked but no one yelled. The ship must be approaching some kind of milestone in its progress. She leaned over and saw a bright blue pinprick that humbled the open sky. It cast a streak of light into the waiting atmosphere.
Another light surged. Another. The pinprick approached that place where blue fades to black and the atmosphere ends. She gripped the vegvisir and Tim’s hand, grateful for both.
A klaxon screamed as a red light whirled around the room. Another sounded. Another. Neither of them bothered to look as the room erupted in sound and fury. So many lines of light arced like lightning from the ship’s drive that they couldn’t see the actual vessel anymore.
A fireball replaced the lightning and then a thousand arms of oily smoke rocketed across the face of the whole earth. Eliza absentmindedly wondered how long the debris would take to reach the ground. Charlie was not among it because he was gone. He died when he stepped onto the Tzacol, didn’t he? No, he died the night Shariyu asked for his damned promise. Now the body was gone, too.
Eliza heard the technicians arguing all around them. The alarms were crying. People were running. Michael ghosted past as Rachana collapsed onto the floor. None of it mattered. He was gone.
Eliza and Tim held each other’s hands as they watched their friend finally die.
CHAPTER 28 - SUZERAIN BENEATH THE SKY
Long Ang did not sleep. The hardened outpost’s sprawling sensor network continuously streamed new data to the three teams of six analysts assigned to monitor an array of screens. Hardened data lines ran in pipes from the computing core at the bottom of the silo out to sensors buried kilometers away. Those sensors rarely malfunctioned. It was the security team’s chief complaint, because Long Ang’s Zhongzhi governor insisted a team run full diagnostics in triplicate for every alarm. Curious badgers meant many false alarms.
Long Ang was not a desirable assignment, though it did bring a certain kind of honor to one’s family if the analyst returned home without demerit. That meant all went well on the northern frontier. Serving on the frontier was well enough, each operator supposed as they received their lottery assignment, kissed their families goodbye, and traded their comfortable subterranean life for several hard days above the world.
By the time they reached Long Ang, they had even given up wondering how random the lottery actually was. Some kinds of people couldn’t take the stress of a few days outside the citadels. They hungered for the safety of the outpost. That meant starting their assignment as soon as possible.
But the sensors never showed anything. A wandering rattlesnake, an obscured lens after a particularly muddy rain, or the occasional Hordling wandering too far south provided the only distractions. The Hordlings offered amusement. A Zhongzhi operator would key their mysterious code into the terminal of the analyst who spotted the intruder. No one knew what happened when the code was entered. The Zhongzhi had their private ways. Every analyst knew not to ask.
This morning was much the same. Terminal 3L displayed its typical homogenous view, LONG ANG (45.52, 114.23) T3L ABG blinking green on the screen, and Lassa Achen felt her attention slip to the electronic tablet in her lap. She was running out of Mahjongg levels much faster than she planned. She had at least three months to go. No analyst was released from duty before serving 18 months. Even those who suffered nervous breakdowns while at the blank screens 12 hours a day simply worked other duties for the duration. Each dragon must protect the citadels.
Her fingers started their daily tasks without much thought. She had to run the required sensor evaluations, catalog another day of expected performance from sensors Alpha, Bravo, and Gamma on each of the five monitors she supported, measure power surges within tolerance, and wait several stressful minutes, like she did at the beginning of each of three four-hour shifts she would work that day, for the insulation sensors to first evaluate themselves, then each other, and finally the pipes that shielded the sensor wires from the outside world. Just remembering the extensive task list exhausted her. She tried to figure how many times she executed this same routine during her interminable assignment. It had to be at least 800, maybe 900.
She chewed her lip. It was foolish to wish something would happen. The terminal chimed. She keyed the results and sent them to whichever silent sentry waited. The Zhongzhi had no names she ever heard. They lived apart from Long Ang’s civilian staff. But then, all Zhongzhi everywhere lived apart from all citizens of the Forty Dragons. It was better this way. The Zhongzhi could do, well, whatever it was they did. The citizens could go about their lives in happy ignorance of the abuses that kept them safe.
An unfamiliar face settled in beside her. She put the tablet away. This would make the morning more interesting. She would sneak sidelong glances at the new team member in an attempt to guess the person’s family, background, and preferred dialect. Lassa was right more often than wrong.
The new girl was quite pretty. Lassa didn’t favor Native girls, she thought, before shaking away the stupid idea. Her family had probably been in Xuanlong longer than this girl’s. The girl had that westerly look about her. Probably a provincial Sichuan. Lassa’s thoughts drifted from her new neighbor to hot pots to wondering when the Silk Tunnel would be finished. Rumors circulated that it already was. She felt the familiar surge
of national pride. China had been prepared when all the world failed.
Lassa would be gone before this girl’s rotation ended, anyways. The Zhongzhi forbid chatter just in case a muskrat decided to inspect its reflection in a camera lens. The level of security was wasteful. She thought the same thing every day because every day was the same. They all stared at screens in search of some danger that did not exist. They guarded this installation with as much discipline as any of the major citadels, and of course the farms. She understood Long Ang was used for defensive technology development. Still, the installation’s flawless security record stood inked in digital red on the SUMMARY board above the team’s heads.
DAYS SECURE: 11680
SHIFT: 2
TIME: 0542
She scanned the English text. No one spoke that language here, or anywhere at all, despite her grandfather’s insistence that she learn, but its use in technology persisted because it just worked better in a digital format than her own Mandarin. Her grandfather had emigrated from the Netherlands such a long time ago that it didn’t matter. Lassa was as Chinese, by her judgement, as anyone could be. The English speakers were all dead along with the western hemisphere, or migrated to the Forty Dragons where they learned Citadel Mandarin per the law.
Bravo camera’s view flickered. Her eyes caught the movement. She leaned into the screen. There was the sun. The slowly evaporating morning dew could do that sometimes. Terminal 3L Bravo was in the dead pool and Lassa had several hundred renminbi staked on it. Maybe today was the day.
She didn’t want Bravo to fail, despite what she might win. It was the most entertaining because it was built into a low rocky outcropping that she guessed sat three meters feet above the grasses. The outcropping provided a panoramic view of a sprawling basin. Swaying grasses mostly obscured the other cameras. The Zhongzhi would take weeks to plan an expedition topside to replace it, assuming it was only a hardware issue with the camera itself and not some more fundamental issue that might take the camera offline indefinitely.
One camera, for reasons no analyst had guessed, stared at the sky. More lightning sensors floated across the Taipingyang and in the atmosphere high above Eguo than were buried in all the fields on the whole continent. A single camera pointed at the clouds offered no useful data.
The screen flickered again. Her hands did the work her mind resisted as they keyed up a diagnostic. The Zhongzhi on duty would be alerted already. Lassa recalled the camera’s survey while the diagnostic ran.
LONG ANG (45.52, 114.23) T3L B NNW 180 DEG FULL FOV VIZ: MIN 1K MAX 20K AVG 12.23K CURRENT…
The screen flickered a third time as the test completed. Lassa’s hand rocketed into the air.
The Zhongzhi materialized beside her. Even when summoned, they snuck up on you. She scrambled back from the terminal. The sentry began typing. The SUMMARY board shifted as the core computer stitched images from every camera sharing a partial field of view with T3L Bravo into a single image. The analyst team gasped as they understood what they saw.
People filled the basin. Beyond them stood the already sweltering desert. Those people filled every degree of T3L Bravo’s broad vision. The sentry’s fingers danced across the terminal’s keyboard as he made the sensors calculate how many people had somehow snuck up on their northern frontier. It quickly errored, blinking red and reporting ESTIMATE: 1 with the cool arrogance of machinery. This was many, many more than one. This was all of them. This was the Horde.
“To bunkers!”
No one moved at the Zhongzhi’s command except the new girl. Her fear of the abandoned surface world under the harsh light of a sun she had never seen was still fresh. The Zhongzhi shouted again, sirens flared to electric life, and the analysts scrambled to their bunkers.
◆◆◆
Topside in the harsh light of a sun they had seen every day of their lives, the Suzerain marched. Fen Veles Who Slew the Lightning walked ahead of the advancing army. He had not led them here. They followed to punish the cowards who hid beneath the free earth. Such could be the only way of things now.
They crossed into view of the outpost. Sirens sounded. Fen sprinted. He realized as he ran on hands and feet that he did not know what weapons these monsters might wield against the tribes. He no longer cared. These demons flung the lightning at the peaceful Ten Finger Duma. They were Hollow Folk. They proved so many times that they would do whatever they wanted until someone stopped them. The world has so few laws yet these monsters destroyed even those. They could not leave the Suzerain in peace.
Their messengers had fled south from the Duma for almost a day before they reached their horses. They rode through the night across the withering gobi. Only their brief, sloppy camps to feed the horses let Fen follow them. He knew there must be others who helped deploy the ring of weapons around the unsuspecting Duma. There would be violence enough for them all.
The fleeing messengers reached the true Forbidden Lands, this basin, and slipped into a portal as he watched from afar. He did not care. The Dragons would bolt from their burrows before long. These were cowards. They did not have the grit to wait.
He had waited, waited for the Suzerain and the Dragons to broker a lasting peace, waited for Sadanandan to wield the hammer and protect all peoples, waited for Camdzic to return, waited for any trace of her as the survivors swept through the Ashes of Ulanbatar for any evidence of their families, waited to learn where the fifth messenger had gone. He had waited all his life for folk to let other folk live free. He would wait no more.
The hillock rose in the distance. Lassa Achen did not know that T3L Bravo’s beloved view existed because Long Ang needed a frontier-facing entrance. She knew nothing about the entrances. Long Ang was a Class III Yincang Long silo. It should not have any direct entrances.
Fen scrambled atop the hill like a ravenous wolf taking an elk to ground. He tore at the soil with his hands and feet and the ragged bone that covered his skin. Whole chunks of earth flew away. The Suzerain joined him, stripping away the false hill with their own hands until a metal box stood exposed to the world.
Fen whistled. One of Sadanandan’s daughters shuffled through. She dragged the Duma’s ruined Berian tree behind her. She took the great tree in both hands and swung it around in a wide arc. Thunder rumbled when the root ball collided with the hardened entrance. She bellowed as the scorched trunk reverberated in her hands. Fen thrust his hand into the dented doorframe where darkness waited.
“Again!”
The howling giant brought the trunk around for a second blow. The wounded door became crippled. She prepared for an ultimate strike. Something exploded as wind rushed past Fen’s ear. A small dark hole appeared in the giant’s forehead.
Four turrets rose from hidden places beneath the surface. The roar of the Suzerain drowned beneath raw gunfire. A bullet struck Fen’s arm. The twin peaks of his elbow shattered into triplets. Sadanandan’s daughter poked at the dribble of blood running down her forehead, was struck again, and fell.
An Armasar sprang high into the air and fell onto a turret. It shattered. Umman Manda cheered as they surged ahead. They ripped the gunners from their armored nests. Ancient fifty-caliber guns collapsed beneath the weight of so many people. They tore the heavy equipment free, exposing sealed portals the gunners had used to crawl into their weapons. Those portals collapsed. The Suzerain swarmed inside.
A broad circle nearly a full length across opened in the ground near the door. Fen shouted a command at several passing Manoack. They began to beat their powerful arms against the dying door. The frog folk, he learned in the days that followed the Duma, were together the only people that the hideously strong Sadanandan feared. He turned back to the opening circle. A copper ring was rising from some kind of empty place in the ground.
He felt the whirring before he heard it. The static field pulled the hair on his arms towards it. He grinned as he swallowed the urge to vomit, ran towards the hammer, and dashed through the shrinking gap between platform and chamber as the hamme
r sparked to life. It would not last long as hundreds of lightning-fearing Suzerain swarmed that, too. The device burned their hands as they clawed for the seams.
Fen landed in the chamber. The startled operators backed away from their terminals. He felt a dull pain in the dense muscle of his shoulders and turned to see an oni mask attached to a messenger with a crackling baton in his hand. Violet light flickered from the end held between them. More lightning. No, electricity. Lundoo taught him this.
Fen swatted it away. The man drew a long curved knife from his hip and swung once, twice, faster than Fen had seen most humans move. He predicted the next swing and caught the knife’s razor edge in the bony ridges of his knuckles. A haft of bone flew free. The oni swung a leg around to chop Fen’s legs out. He dropped his knee in time to ruin the man’s knee with a sickening crunch.
An operator screamed behind him. They fled through several doors. He considered the ruined guard, smelled his spent bladder, and walked towards a hideous white light pouring from a partly open door.
But this light, however awful, was stark and steady. The room hummed. His gooseflesh rose but his hairs did not react. It was only a sound from a lightning maker. No, it was called a generator. He pushed the door open to see where the operators had fled while completing some task. A solid metal cart like the cart that brought the weapon to the Duma blocked the door. He flung it aside. It shattered against a wall.
Inside the room was all the horrors of the hell he did not believe in. Hammers lined both walls. He looked at his fingers and then back to the walls. His father had taught him to count but he could not find the words now. A throbbing red demon lived inside his skull. It ate everything he tried to think everything except the drive to hurt these people who tried to murder everything he loved. There were simply too many hammers. Several racks were empty.
The Sin Eaters Page 33