The Owners

by Tara Basi

  “Nurse Trinity, how do we sneak a ten tonne bomb under a Block?” Stuff asked.

  “Details, my boy, details.”

  Mina decided it was time for her to take over, “And then there’s the ‘Who?’ I’d say the Iowa Block. It doesn’t sound like there’s anybody left alive in there. And I guess the Owners would be badly hurt if we destroyed all the stock that’s been ferried inside.”

  Jugger looked to Pinkie, and before he could say anything, she squeezed his hand and nodded.

  Battery Boy’s comment about his unborn child really seem to have hit home.

  “Tippese said the Block made weapons, and it still had some,” said Jugger. “They could be waiting for us, under the Block.”

  “It wouldn’t be a suicidal plan if it wasn’t full of crazy risks now, would it?” Trinity cheerfully explained.

  “Look, all I’m asking is we work on the Iowa plan,” said Mina. “See where it takes us. We’ve got months before the Owners arrive, and I don’t actually want to commit suicide. Okay?”

  Jugger wasn’t convinced. “Answer Stuff’s question: how do we sneak a bomb in? Then I’ll decide.”

  “Trinity?” Mina prompted.

  “Down in the basement there are scores of the three-metre-high battle-golems that you so admired. Truck sized killing machines. They look a bit like dinosaurs, the predator kind. Not the stupid ones with two tiny brains and a taste for leaves. The military call them Crushers. Cute, right? They’ll need some work to dumb down the smarts so the Block can’t stop them working. Or worse, Reference hijacking them and turning them against us. And you’ll all need a hell of a lot of training and simulation runs. These things are nothing like the yellow robots you’ve been playing with. They pack some serious firepower and can carry tonnes of kit and big bombs. We use those to get under the Block and plant the weapons. Okay Stuff?”

  Stuff looked worried and sceptical.

  Jugger exchanged a glance with Pinkie. “We’re in, for now.”

  Battery Boy and Stuff lay on the flat roof of a very tall New York apartment building, looking up at the Milky Way. It streaked across the clear night sky as though a giant paintbrush had been dragged lightly across the black, leaving streaks of flecked white paint. Piglet was parked nearby, and though it was old, scratched and dented, Battery Boy liked flying the ancient machine. The two boys contemplated the universe in silence.

  “What do you think the Owners are like?” Stuff asked, his hands behind his head, staring up at the sparkling night sky.

  “Who cares? They’re monsters, we’ll get them, make them pay.” Battery Boy was wondering if they’d see the Owners arriving. It was only months away if Tippese was right.

  “You really think we can win, defeat the Blocks? Jugger doesn’t.” Stuff said, obviously struggling to share Battery Boy’s confidence.

  “We have to fight to win. It’ll take as long as it takes; I’m never, ever, giving up. Jugger will fight too. He has his baby to think about now. He just wants better odds. Let’s see how the planning goes.”

  “Okay BB. We’ll fight together, like always. Hey, I found this old song, Block Rockin’ Beats. It could be our song, our Block war song, for the attack,” Stuff said, and fiddled with his music box so it played the old tune.

  It sounded good to Battery Boy.

  Chapter 7 – Getting to Know Eva

  Truculent savoured the sight. The comatose Tuned was strapped to a sleeping couch. It was the only object in his ship’s airlock. He was enjoying the scene through the viewing window. The vile, arrogant creature was finally silent; what a blessed relief that was. And soon it would be woken up and forced to explain what was going on. He would be a little disappointed if the Tuned trick finally failed and he was left with a normal idiot Tuned. Until now, ever greater distances from the shrine had made no difference to the Tuned’s ability to alternate between mocking Truculent and commanding him as though he was mere crew on his own ship. It was intolerable. Eventually he could stand no more and had his mechanical janitors take the burbling creature to the sleep chambers. After considering his options and judging that it must be more than far enough away from the shrine to be beyond the puppet master’s influence and any prying observation, he decided to act.

  His none-too-subtle plan was to awaken the Tuned in the airlock and threaten it with ejection if it did not provide the information he sought. Who was working the Tuned, how were they controlling it and most mysterious of all, why? Whether it was dumb, talkative, obstructive or helpful, Truculent had firmly decided this High Angel was going into space. Its endless insults to his dignity deserved nothing less. No one, not even the Inquisitors on the accompanying pair of Regulators, would question his account of the Tuned’s peaceful demise during travel sleep, and how he had then tearfully conducted the appropriate ceremonies before launching its coffin into space. The sacred holographic record of its expiry - including the Tuned’s last wish that he complete the quest for the Three - was already concocted and safely archived. Whatever happened after the Tuned awoke, it was being flung into space and that was going to be a most enjoyable moment. Truculent made himself comfortable in a large globular chair and touched the control that would awaken the un-holy creature.

  “Wakey, wakey High Angel, we have much to discuss and the sooner we conclude the sooner you’ll be able to return to your lovely quarters,” Truculent said.

  The cot the Tuned was lying on smoothly tilted upright so that the idiot faced Truculent.

  “What’s this place? What are you up to, you monstrously idiotic creature?” the Tuned replied, looking around the bare airlock with wild eye movements. Though its speech had improved, it was still unable to move or control its head.

  “Amazing, your little trick is still working, that’s very impressive. Now, we are both busy people so I suggest we conclude our business as quickly as possible and get you comfortably reunited with your cabin. All I want to know is who you really are, how you’re making the Tuned do what it’s doing, and why?”

  “How dare you! Have you forgotten that I’m the High Angel and you’re the snivelling Priest? Now let’s stop this nonsense. Tell me about the Three. Are we close to the planet yet?”

  If Truculent had the smallest morsel of doubt about killing the false Tuned, it was swept away on a tide of rage that this foul creature had a unique talent for conjuring up in him.

  “Listen to me you disgusting moron, we’re a long way from the shrine and there’s no one else on my ship. Unless you explain everything you’re going out the airlock. I’ve already recorded your sad death in travel sleep and the lovely funeral service. Your only chance of changing the historical record is to tell me what I want to know or I’m flinging you into the vacuum.”

  “I assume you’re familiar with the Ladder of Repentance?” the Tuned calmly asked, seemingly un-phased by Truculent’s threat.

  “What are you talking about you half-wit? Start making sense or out that airlock you go.”

  “As I recall the Seventh Rung involves placing the blasphemer’s feet in bulbous glass boots. They are then slowly filled with a transparent magma, allowing the punished to watch their own toes, feet and ankles ignite and then dissolve. I imagine it’s excruciating, don’t you?”

  “What is this drivel? Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “I believe that as you descend the Seven Rungs of the Ladder towards hell each punishment becomes more unimaginable. Of course the Rungs are metaphorical; sadly, for Priests who commit crimes of blasphemy, the punishments are not. Now, I’m not suggesting that what you’re threatening to do would involve any of the minor Rung punishments. That would be naïve; we both know that if you’re found out you’ll go straight to number One. Now, One is a real number. Only four people in your entire history have ever been sentenced to that particular horror. How does it feel to be a potential fifth?”

  Outwardly Truculent kept his smirk firmly in place while inside his gut felt as though it had been dropped into a blender.
The Tuned was well informed; there were indeed only four Priests in all the millennium of the Vigilance Empire that had been sentenced to the first Rung of punishment, and they still endured. The oldest had experienced indescribable suffering for a thousand cycles, the youngest for mere hundreds. Any form of assault on the living embodiment of a High Angel was an unspeakable desecration. Committing the ultimate blasphemy attracted the ultimate retribution.

  As part of every Priest’s training a visit to the House of the Ladder was mandatory. The Priesthood conferred many rewards, but only wayward Priests suffered the Ladder of Repentance.

  The House was a vast inverted cone carved out of a mountain on an ugly dark moon near the centre of the Empire. The Seven Rungs were represented by seven levels of unseen caverns, radiating outward from the visible cone face. Truculent, with a party of visiting seminarians, had trudged across the immense transparent roof of the vast horn, towards the central glass column housing the lift, the only access from the surface of the moon. As Truculent had gingerly traipsed across the top of the House he had been fascinated by the vast sloping walls converging far below his feet on a tiny black dot. It was a nauseating, vertigo-inducing introduction to the House of the Ladder. The extremely old lift descended a level at a time ejecting him, and the other trainee Priests, onto a frighteningly narrow glass platform that circled the shaft. A single misstep would send a clumsy novice plunging towards the black dot. A thin bridge led from the lift exit to the outer pitched wall of the cone. There were no quick transport doors here; everything was slow, old and deliberate. On each level, beyond the cone wall and hewn out of the rock were the galleries of the punishment’s history and the chambers for the act itself. After each level visit the tour party returned to the lift and descended to the next. Sometimes they witnessed Inquisitors’ machines inflicting punishments, more usually watched recorded terrors from the past annals of famous sinners’ punishments. The fallen Priests deserved everything they got, was Truculent’s overriding thought, as they sank towards the bottom of the cone.

  The cone shape adopted for the House was very deliberate. As the walls converged and Rung One approached, the increasingly agonising retributions dramatically reduced the number of erring Priests, and the space needed to process them. Finally, the column of glass abruptly disappeared through the black floor of the second level and emerged in the Rung One chamber. While everyone knew from the writings what to expect, Truculent’s experience inside that lowest space would never leave his mind.

  Truculent and the rest of his party were deposited in the centre of a dimly lit wheel-shaped cavern carved out of midnight black rock. The smoothly polished circular floor and curved wall of the room were completely bare. Unlike previous levels there were no instructive illustrations, historical records of the fallen, or information points detailing the nature of the individual’s crime and their punishment. There was nothing to distract from the scores of two metre diameter clear globes, which were suspended from the high ceiling. They were all dark and completely empty. Jarringly out of place were four circular islands of couches arranged under four singular patches of bare ceiling. The chattering trainees quickly fell silent and took their seats and waited.

  After a little while a single sharp note sounded as though a loud strident alarm had been cut off just as it started to screech its warning. Four new globes descended through the solid rock ceiling directly above the circles of reclining novices. The large balls were filled with a sickly fluorescent-pink liquid that glowed softly. Choked whispers of horror drifted up from the seated novices as hideously mangled and disfigured figures floated limply into view as they bumped up against the inner surface of the globes. The novices’ upturned, open-mouthed faces bathed in the pale glow were now utterly silent except for the rasp of strained breathing and repressed retching. Their eyes were locked on the unfolding horror as other vaguely recognisable bits of anatomy touched the surface of the globe directly overhead.

  Over the next hour invisible quantum devices remade the mangled corpses. Eventually, within each globe was a naked, wonderfully healthy looking ex-priest, suspended in their lonely ball of now clear life-giving liquid. No one was permitted to see what punishments were visited on the Priests when they rose into the ceiling. It was considered too disturbing and unnecessary; it was gruesome enough to see the results. The white-faced novices were forced to watch the entire process of reconstruction until they were gazing up at the wholly repaired bodies, in the prime of life, floating just above their heads.

  What Truculent could never forget was the last few seconds of the repair process. The same single short screech sounded and the four fallen ex-Priests abruptly, and simultaneously, opened their eyes. They were fully conscious, aware of their surroundings and with every memory to the very moment of their last death returned to them. In unison, their fresh faces contorted in terror and they screamed without sound. As the globes rose, before vanishing into the stone roof, one of the damned locked his pleading gaze on Truculent for the briefest of moments. Truculent shivered, realising that right now the ex-Priests were being slowly and lovingly pulled apart by the delicate instruments of punishment. In just a few hours the mangled corpses, swimming in gore, would descend from the roof and the whole sequence would start again.

  The experience cut the young Truculent very deeply. Even while he was absorbing the Tuned’s words Truculent’s memory returned him to that place. He knew the four he had first seen over a hundred cycles ago were still there, still alive, and still being punished. It gnawed at his mind that there was plenty of room for one more. But he could not let the creature see that he was concerned in any way.

  It was bluffing, he decided, it had to be.

  “Enough. You’re no High Angel; tell me what I want to know, now.”

  “I am exactly what I appear to be: a High Angel. We’re normally not allowed to speak. The gods granted me speech at news of the Three. We’re not interested in your Empire or its politics, only the Three. Kill this body and I’ll just pop up in another. I’ll denounce you, and you’ll be sent to the House of the Ladder. That’s not what the gods want, it will only delay acquisition of the Three. Work with me Truculent, we both want the Three, and I want to go home,” the Tuned explained.

  It still didn’t appear to be phased by his threat of airlock ejection. Truculent paused. This was not how he had expected events to unfold. At heart he was a truly devout man, but he had never believed the gods had intended the symbolism of the Tuned to be interpreted literally. The Tuned were a conduit for the Priesthood to speak to the Empire. The gods spoke directly to the High Priests through the bounty of the Channels, the divine HIQ, a wondrous drug extracted from fresh Channel afterbirth. It was unthinkable that this repulsive creature could actually be a High Angel. It had to be a trick, though he knew that no matter how much the Priesthood thought as he did, there was absolutely no doubt they would scream for the ultimate punishment. The rest of the Empire would call for it too if he was found out.

  “I’m not so easily fooled. There’s no doubt you’re somehow occupying this creature for your own ends, but that doesn’t make you a High Angel,” Truculent said. If it really was a High Angel, the implications were unimaginable.

  “Just give me a few minutes, I need to pray for guidance,” the Tuned politely requested.

  This was descending into farce. Only the lingering memories of those damned eyes in the Rung One globe caused Truculent to hesitate. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re wasting my time. You have five minutes to explain.” Truculent gritted his teeth.

  “Only a Tuned can cause a Channel to birth, correct?” the Tuned asked.

  “Yes. And?” Truculent answered, surprised by the question.

  “One of the ripe Channels you have on board will give birth in exactly one minute from now,” the Tuned asserted.

  “What? You can’t possibly know that,” Truculent blurted out, completely caught off guard. He mentally started a one-minute countdown while calling up an i
mage of the Channel pen. It showed twelve perfectly ordinary looking Channels bobbing around on a pool of high quality Crimson.

  “We’ll see,” Truculent added, as he focused on the Channel image and the seconds counted down.

  Exactly on time a Channel popped, with all the attendant mess. Two baby Channels floated out from underneath the deflated bag.

  Truculent was speechless and confused. If this really was a High Angel, he’d already committed enough blasphemies to be dammed many times over. He could feel the cold liquid of a Rung One globe rising all around him.

  “The successful spiritual joining of a High Priest and a Tuned is a wonderful thing that can only serve the Empire. It is my deepest wish that we achieve that bond, so I’m most willing to try again. It would certainly help our relationship if you could refrain from calling me Truc. I prefer Truculent, High Priest or Sir.”

  “Of course Sir High Priest Truculent,” the Tuned attempted a horrible smile, “and I’d like to try borrowing one of your clone bodies.”

  “What? Cloned what? That’s absurd, I would never,” Truculent replied, more flustered than he’d been in tens of cycles.

  “Truc, sorry Truculent, the gods know you have a collection of cloned, mind-wiped, pleasure bodies. Fabulous and rare historical beauties, apparently. And, this is the part I find hard to believe; you actually acquired them just for their aesthetics.”

  “That’s an insidious lie,” Truculent shouted. But he was reeling: this was his greatest secret and his only pleasure. And the Tuned was right, it was entirely innocent.

  “I need to go wherever you go on the trail of the Three and this body is very limited. The gods have given permission for me to try and jump,” the Tuned continued, ignoring Truculent’s denials.