20. RAIN
Rachel Heron jumped west at the head of her three hundred angels, exhausted, emotionally drained, and terrified that at any moment Olan Harrison would put her in a box.
He must have seen James While by now. He had to know what she was planning.
Her anxiety filtered out on the line and echoed back to her in bulbous, phantom creations; all her non-choices coming home to roost, each one a ladder leading down into darkness. In jumps across featureless tundra she saw James While lying in his own blood, cementing this course.
Betrayal.
For fourteen years she'd lived for Olan Harrison, attuned to his moods and needs as a matter of survival, and even now she felt him back at the Redoubt, perhaps too obsessed with Amo to see what she'd done. Now she held the severed threads of his angels in her hands; the three hundred most likely to rebel, who'd been boxed the most, who would fight Olan if she could only give them the choice.
Everything came down to that. Would Anna listen? Would Olan let her speak? Would the nightmare of the last fourteen years finally -
Something hit her like a cluster bomb to the brain.
She was -
Then -
She was yanked inside out, and her thoughts bit off abruptly and her jump collapsed with a violent yank on the cocooning fuzz of the line so that she -
- fell.
A scream whipped out of her mouth and was pulled away by the rush of descent. What the- ? Her body spun wildly and freezing winds slapped her face, setting her black strike suit snapping like sails in a thunderstorm, pulling blinding tears from her eyes and what the hell was - ?
The line was gone. Realization hit like an aftershock, an impossibility, but now she was falling out of the sky and that was real. She blinked and glimpsed a ground of gray and ice spinning far below, and a dazzling white sky above, and her host of angel bodies falling all around her like a dizzy black rain.
Her thoughts were jumbled and she tried to clear them, but the yank off the line had snapped her mind. Olan Harrison had drilled them on falling out of a jump before, but not like this. She tried to grab the line and jump again, but the pathways of her brain ran like non-intersecting train lines, leaving her to fall, paralyzed in both mind and body
In the midst of that, flashes came. She watched with mounting horror as hundreds of lights popped like coordinated fireworks on a falling plane around her. It couldn't be, but it was; an army of type threes flickering into existence in the air.
The attack began.
Rachel Heron stared helpless as the black and white creatures jumped faster than thought, so fast that they weren't falling anymore, they were flying. Like stuttering images in a zoetrope they jumped in hundreds of tiny increments to strike amongst her frozen angels; slashing ramshackle defenses, hacking every attempt to reconnect to the line, pouring over her tumbling force like a crackling black tide.
Then they were on her too. One snatched her ankle and sent a numbing shock up her spine that jolted her thoughts briefly into alignment, affording just enough automatic coherence for her to kick free. That synchronization broke the deadlock, and instantly she erected sputtering diamond shields built out of raw panic, just in time to meet the renewed assault.
A burning elbow clubbed across her face, barely softened by her flexing shield, while on the line a black blade plunged through to dig into the meat of her mind. She screamed, spun up a fission response and churned it out, but that only burned the head and shoulders off the creature at the tip of the spear.
She blinked and saw the spear.
A platoon of type threes had somehow hooked into each other mid-air, mid-fall, to take this spear-like form that now jabbed into her again, this time slicing into her thigh and latching on to her shield like a grapnel. She tried to kick away, starting a spin that showed her the retrogrades arraying everywhere, forming into physical spike-structures like bizarre cheerleader scrums, each one a spear or a blade or an arrow. They ignored the desperate rush of gravity and held coordinated group position via the constant thrum of jumps, allowing them to strike in sleek formation with the force of fifteen or twenty at every blow.
Already her angels were dying.
She felt their signals winking out on the line even though none of this was possible, none of it made sense. How could they be dying when Anna was still so far away, when there were so many jumps left to Istanbul, when she couldn't possibly -
She cried out her shock and pain as her shield buckled again, flinging herself in a wild jump fifty feet down. It earned her time but there was never enough, as a fresh spear of type threes flashed with her and slammed again into her shields. She had to think, staring up at the falling black sky of angels and retrogrades as she desperately swiped the spear's assault away. Not only was this impossible, a power she'd never dreamed of, it was also stupid; so stupid to die in a battle when all she'd wanted to do was surrender.
She turned that fury into a diamond blade that lopped the lead type three at the waist, cindered the clamps it had dug into her shield, and propelled a massive blast deep into the throng of its plunging spear.
The spear structure broke, its constituent members tumbling away like leaves in a gale, bouncing up and off other spears and her own falling angels, but in seconds they were replaced with another formation that swelled as it accelerated again at her chest, already fifty or so strong and growing.
She couldn't fathom it. The number of jumps required to re-form and maintain a bonded structure in the midst of free-fall dizzied her mind. It was impossible even for her angels, but for type threes? She'd experimented with them years ago as a military force and surrendered after the dozenth blew; they were far too volatile, too frantic to control with any reliability, at best they would be hand grenades tossed into the fray.
As if on cue a ball of ten nearby exploded.
She barely shifted the bulk of her diamond shielding in time to stave off the blast. The diamonds shredded the brunt of their flying flesh but couldn't prevent the meat spray impacting across her face and torso; each one a weakening seed that set more hooks in her, bending her across an iron will.
Of course, she realized at last, this was Anna.
She reeled and spun, seeing her last few seconds of existence playing out as the spear thickened into a battering ram a hundred-strong and closing, until she finally found her voice and cried on the line.
"I surrender!"
She pulled the threads of all her angels at once, yanked like marionettes into sudden stillness, and bared her shields to the ram as it steamed in. The ram's head slammed through her open shield, type three bodies impacted her in the air and hurled her back through the tumbling sky of bodies like a pinball, but they didn't impale her on the line.
She crashed and veered and fell, recognizing that the ram had pulled its punch at the last moment. She tugged on her angel's threads further, cracking open every shield to let the type threes push through and encompass them all like type twos buried in a flood of type ones, encasing her army of unkillable angels in a steely trap of fritzing flesh.
"I surrender," she cried again, as together her army fell in knotted clumps of bodies like heavy black clouds. She felt the attention of Anna's mind turning her over like a pig on a spit, as dozens of black and white bodies wrapped her in a tissue of onion layers, so the sky and the ground were shut out by black muscle and trailing white skin. There was a fluttering like butterflies wings, as her angels finally heard her cry on the line and realized how thoroughly they'd been betrayed, and then-
There was an almighty jump enforced from above, and in a dizzying flash she was on her knees on the ground. The world opened partially as her cloud of retrogrades peeled back to open a window out, through which she saw snow on the raw shoulders of a far-off splintery mountain range. Cold air burned her lungs, there was ice beneath her knees, and then there was Anna.
Rachel Heron's eyes widened.
Anna hung stationary in the air at a dozen jumps per second, shi
mmering like a movie screen, her thick black hair bunched around her head like a halo. The power streaming off her was incalculable, and it shut Rachel Heron's mouth and silenced the trembling of her wind-blasted skin. It fizzed out of every pore in Anna's skin; the volatility of a horde of type threes bottled in a single body, heading for an immense and terrible explosion.
Thoughts jolted through Rachel Heron's mind like the carriages of a runaway train. Was this better? This girl had power to put Olan Harrison to shame. With a thought she could re-engineer the world. It was terrifying, heady, unbelievable.
A silence fell.
Anna descended like a body sinking into invisible mud, until she stood on the ice, which melted and re-froze and melted constantly under her feet. She wore a billowing white dress festooned with long trails of white fabric, slit in places so her black skin gleamed through like the dark muscle of the type threes. Her face was swathed in a shimmer of power; highlighting haughty cheekbones, full lips, and arrogant eyes that blazed with rage.
The rage was everywhere around her. It lifted her up, crackling so brightly that Rachel had to look away. So she'd traded a god for a god.
"You surrender," Anna said, in a voice that carried through the minds of every angel there. All knelt now, cocooned within mounds of black and white flesh, their threads pulled, their minds boxed neatly into the cages Olan Harrison had prepared.
"Completely," Rachel Heron said, finding a gap in the line opened wide enough for her to think through. "I came here to surrender. My angels have rebelled against Olan Harrison in the past. I brought them here for you, Anna. They'll fight for you. Take them to the Redoubt and destroy Olan before he enslaves us all."
She held out the threads, two hundred and forty-three remaining, with fifty-seven already dead. What a waste.
Anna surveyed the threads on the line as if they were a handful of pennies, then a hint of concern entered her eyes. "His reins are upon you," she said. "Don't you feel them?"
Then Rachel Heron did. She felt the piece of Olan crouched inside her and watching, the piece that had never let go of her thread, had only lurked and watched.
She tried to eke out a warning but her throat froze and the sensation of the world rapidly receded. She was boxed; her thread in the hands of Olan Harrison. In the last moment before everything erupted, she saw that of course this had always been his plan.
She hadn't manipulated him, but been manipulated. He'd let her come here, and what had she done but carry a bomb into the arms of the enemy? Every thread was a fuse, and Olan had put her exactly where he'd wanted.
"Poor Rachel," came Olan's voice in her mind, carried across the thousands of miles in an instant, a private audience for her in the early fragments of the explosion, as her mind was already erupting. "You never saw."
Then she exploded on the line.
Every angel exploded.
The line burned black as the force of two hundred and forty three souls vented at once, vaporizing the shallow threads of all the type threes, shredding the girl Anna's mind and leaving only whispers and final seconds and regret behind.
Rachel choked awake in the last seconds of her life on the ice, utterly defeated and lying amidst a hundred hundred bodies, the snow falling across her face and freezing her within. She couldn't move because there was no link between her mind and her body now; eradicated by the blast. Everywhere her angels were frozen fast, and the type threes were frozen, and Anna was frozen. She felt the stump of her pulverized thread drawing taut on the line as the uplifting began, and she tried to hold on, tried to scream, but there was no purchase to be had in this body.
All around her angels scrabbled in the same way, desperately trying to cling to their earthly bodies, not realizing they were already dead. One by one they sucked up into the sky, where Olan Harrison would have them all after Lazarus; his marionettes to control in death as in life. He would bring them down as his slaves, imprisoned in boxes according to his whims, and it was all her fault.
She saw Anna rising on the line, her body already lost, the thread severed by the massive blast, and she poured her fear into the crystal vibration of words.
"Please. Please, do something. He'll hurt us forever."
The girl still shone with power. Even with her army dead and her body gone her fury blazed on the line, perhaps even brighter than before, as if death had only set her free.
"It's all right," she said as the line drew her up, drew them all up like a rain played in reverse. "He doesn't know what he's done."
She took Rachel Heron's hand and they rose together.
INTERLUDE 7
Olan Harrison stood on the Redoubt's third floor, at the screens of Rachel Heron's Strategic Governance department with her deputy Arter Rain at his side, still glowing from the success of his destruction of the girl Anna, the eradication of the disloyal angels, and the final disciplining of Rachel Heron.
At the same time, he watched the Last Mayor attempt his pathetic insurgence.
It was laughable. He'd drilled a tunnel beneath the wall, using up half his type threes in the process, and now was sending a steady stream of type ones and twos inside the wall, where they lined up for the five-mile charge to the Redoubt.
Few things made Olan Harrison smile now, but this was one. The futility of it. It was going to take the Last Mayor hours to get his whole army through, and even then it wouldn't be nearly enough. Olan had seven hundred angels left in the Redoubt, all of them devout and devoted, all of them boxed and trained, as well as an old world military base's worth of conventional weapons.
There were dozens of missiles left in the bays. There were twenty autocannon situated on all the access points to the Redoubt. There were drones carrying explosives, and bombs to bleach the line, and rings of hidden landmines, and of course at the center there was Olan himself.
It was almost disappointing.
Rachel Heron had been his masterwork. She'd always been idealistic, though a long time ago she'd let those ideals be swallowed up in ambition. He'd known since she'd raised him via Lazarus that her heart was not with his cause. He'd let her keep her scoop with his pattern on it, waiting for a day like this. Of the hundreds of voices in his mind, all of them had agreed that this course was ordained.
One day she would betray him.
He'd had more than a decade to turn that betrayal to his own ends. Allowing her influence over him to grow was nothing to him; her efforts always so tremulous, only seeking briefer periods in the box for some, more freedom for others. In some ways he'd been disappointed at her meager overtures, surely influenced by her fear. He'd tried to let her see him weaker than he was, and even then she had barely taken the bait.
The mission to James While was his final stroke of genius. Sending her to collect that sad frayed end, as if he still mattered at all, was beautiful. She'd done it, and he'd felt her heart finally crack. After that it was instinctive to let her see him weakened by his sparring bout with the Last Mayor; enough to spur on her great betrayal.
It was the only way to destroy the girl. He'd been watching her for some time; monitoring the growth of her phenomenal power on the line. For over a year she'd been the greatest threat to him, far more than the Last Mayor, and as such he'd prepared. Decency was her weakness. He'd seen her try to forge treaties with the SEAL many times, despite the cruelties they'd done to her. She wanted always for the least suffering for the most people.
He couldn't defeat her in all-out war. Or, perhaps, he could, but the cost would be immense, and he hadn't become a billionaire by paying costs like everyone else. There was always another way, and the voices gave it to him.
She would listen to a heartfelt surrender. It would allow him to manoeuver terrible weapons into her proximity, but they had to do it unwittingly, or she would see. It was a natural fit for Rachel Heron's tainted heart. Only she could offer a genuine surrender, dropping the shields of her three hundred angels in the girl's presence, and only with the shields down could he trigger the bomb
s he'd built into them.
His plan had worked like clockwork.
Now the girl was gone, blasted into the line. He would pull her down and make her part of his empire, using her power to fuel his own, reflecting back his victory.
It was truly a heady day, and now the world lay open before him. Only the Last Mayor at the wall was left to kill, and there was no rush to that. His wife would be there in a day, and Olan would welcome her. With the Last Mayor's help, he would make her and her people love him. He'd learnt much from their conversations, and there was so much more to learn. With the Mayor's help, boxed into Olan's mind like a second Little Olan, he would repair all his old mistakes and perfect his mastery of the line. In time he would teach these people to clamor for their own severing.
He envisaged a society where his touch was everything; a cooling balm on their forehead, a safeguarding hand guiding their dreams, a rite of passage for their ascension into his new civilization. Homo Deus.
Godhood was within reach. With the Last Mayor shackled as another voice in his mind, he would not be stopped.
He turned to Arter Rain, one of the earliest immunes pulled down from the line. If Olan remembered correctly, he'd been gored to death by a rhinoceros escaped from Bengal zoo, after the signal went out. A terrible stroke of luck, in the early days after the fall. Now, of course, his mind was a clamor of voices from above, only held together by Olan Harrison's will, boxing the parts of him that would drive him mad.
"He doesn't realize we can simply move the wall," Olan said.
Arter Rain didn't respond. Of course. Olan smiled. It was easy to forget, sometimes. He'd boxed every angel in the Redoubt as soon as Rachel Heron left, in preparation for the war. He trusted them all, but you never knew, and he'd need their strength in the battle to come. Mano a mano against the Last Mayor would be a joyous experience. The man had power, there was no doubt of that, but he was packed full of fault lines to be exploited.
Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Page 16
