Sam leaned in to give Ada a hug, and as she hugged back Ada wondered about that. She could see why Sam would say that - her suspicion of the living wasn’t something to be willed away by a single nice deed that could fairly be construed as self-interested.
Still, even if nothing came of it and they never spoke of it again, this was right. It was what power was for - fixing things. Fixing lives. “It’s just a shame to know we have the power to change lives and we’re not using it.”
Sam looked at her again, half-frowning, and shrugged. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. But I’m guessing you’ll want to get back to the coast to start helping ghosts now, won’t you?”
Ada pursed her lips. “Start? I’m already doing it.”
“Yeah, but I like to think I’m a nice person.” Sam grinned. “Even as ghosts go. Meeting the others won’t be as fun.”
Ada laughed. “I’ll make my own fun.”
They climbed back into the cockpit, and as they did Ada saw Sam glance at the black lines now running up her arms to the back of her palms. She said nothing, and Ada kept just as quiet about it, settling into the pilot’s seat as Sam sat curled up by her feet.
She lifted them off into the night skies, leaving the pyres of the geneforge to fade in the dark, flying across valleys and snow-capped mountaintops barely visible in the starlight. Sam wasn’t a lot chattier on this flight than on the last, but she seemed more relaxed, her shoulders looser. Ada had a good feeling about this - things were going well, on an upward course. She could do this.
Then they found the battle.
Cherry’s scanners showed two large bodies of people, one twice the size of the other, both strung out in the woods heading north. Light and violence flickered through the space between them, sporadically, and the smaller group was barely in the lead. One of those must be the ghosts.
“Oh, shit. Sam, what are the ghosts doing right now, as far as you know?”
Sam looked up at her with a frown. “Well, the plan was to spy on the human army and figure out where they’re going, and beat them to it. Not that we know what to do when we’re there, though.”
Ada reached out through Cherry to Zhilik’s communicator. Zhilik, you there? What’s the status in Hive? Does the army know where they’re going?
The response was quick. Ada - yes, everybody here seems to know they’re heading north-north-east, roughly. There’s talk of an ancient ruin.
Shit, they knew. And if everybody in Hive knew, that meant the army knew, and that meant the ghosts knew too. They were racing to that old ruin, and none of them understood just how critically important and fragile it really was. Frantic anger welled up in her chest as she imagined what might happen if they reached the shrine and damaged it.
“Okay, Sam, we need to find your Master and get down there right now. They’re running from that army, but I need them to delay the army as much as they can.”
“Good luck with that. The Master’s not exactly one to take orders from the living, after what happened last time.”
“Well I’m no gentle flower either, so we’ll be fine. They’re strung out in a long column - where would this Master be?”
Sam pressed her face against the glass, looking out into the night. “I don’t know - surrounded by an entourage, probably as far from the enemy as possible. I can’t see anything.”
Ada looked through Cherry’s enhanced eyes to the front of the smaller column - there was certainly a bulge in people there, maybe protecting someone. She made straight for that shape. This was no time for subtlety. “Cherry, can you project my voice outside the ship?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, do it.”
As she approached the head of the column, letting the ship’s cloak fall, she spoke. “Hello there, ghosts.” She heard her voice outside the cockpit even as the people on the ground suddenly burst into panic and commotion. “I need to talk to the Master.”
Suddenly something large moved, and trees shook.
“Cherry, what was -”
Something golden-red struck the sides of her ship. The passive shields glowed, hard light hexagons shielding them from danger. A diagram popped up, telling her that the impact was damaging her shields, but not critically. She could survive a lot harder punches than that.
Still, what the hell was attacking her?
“Fuck! Flashlight?” Ada stammered, spinning the ship around in the air. She could see something large moving, but she couldn’t quite tell -
Cherry’s six fins all flared up as floodlights, and Ada found herself staring down a dragon, wings beating in the air as it opened its jaws. A seething mass of red-gold hexagons blasted out from behind its teeth and splashed against her shields, and Cherry’s response was a gentle warning light pulsing inside the cockpit.
“Cherry, audio off! Sam - a fucking dragon?! ” Ada yelled, her heart was racing; dragons were terrifying creatures of story and legend. She had never seen one first hand, or even met anyone who had. What was she up against? She batted Sam on the shoulder with one hand, pulling the ship backwards with the other. “You could have mentioned that you had a gods-damned energy-breathing flying lizard in your camp!”
Sam reached up to shield herself. “We have three! I forgot to mention it, okay?”
Something hit the ship from behind, and she spun the craft around to see another dragon circling her. “Oh fuck me, another one? Sam, any reason I shouldn’t just kill these things?”
“They’re ghosts too.”
“They’re what?! You know what, nevermind. Cherry, warning shots?”
“You can fire any weapons at any desired intensity.”
Ada ground her teeth and squeezed time slow. Watching the movements of the dragons in time dilation was fascinating. She still saw smears of light telling her where they would be, Cherry predicting their movements mathematically, but those movements were so much more erratic and blurry than they had been for those starships in orbit.
Still, they weren’t safe from her. She squeezed off a pair of weak shots at the closest dragon, aiming a little off - she needed to scare it, not kill it.
She let time return to normal.
The shots snapped through the air and crashed into the dragon’s shield bubble. The golden filaments rippled and bobbed with the impact, but didn’t break. Shit. Back to time dilation. She fired harder, aimed truer, and let time flow again.
These shots did tear through the dragon’s shields, the golden shroud crumbling like paper. The dragon roared and swooped off, and the other one backed off too, apparently realizing Ada could harm or kill them up if she wanted. A few of the ghosts on the ground were shooting at her as well, but their weapons were so weak they barely registered on her shields.
She kicked the ship into reverse, knowing through her connection to Cherry’s sensors just where the other dragon was, and rammed straight into it. The dragon’s shield collided with her own, sparks flying, but the starfighter’s shields were far more powerful. The bubble of gold cracked with a thunderclap. Ada pulled back and spun around to see the dragon flailing to the ground, flapping helplessly.
She spun the ship around, but the supposed third dragon was nowhere to be seen.
“Turn the audio back on!”
The audio transmission was reestablished, and by now everyone on the ground had scattered. Shit, where was the Master? All she saw were scores of glowing human shapes that Cherry was highlighting for her.
She flexed the ship’s fins at them. “Okay you barbarians, listen up. I’m not here to kill you or - or your fucking dragons. Even if you send them at me, I won’t try to kill them. Against my better judgement.”
There was shouting and shooting, and a few more shots plinked harmlessly against her shields.
“Now I can tell you’ve got an army of the living hot on your tail, so we don’t have time for bullshit. We share a common interest - I can fix the afterlife. End the suffering that brought you here.”
The commotion on the ground quieted
somewhat. The shooting stopped. They were stretching her patience to the limit, and she almost wanted to start shooting at them now, but she didn’t. “And I could use your help. I need to talk to the Master. So are we doing this, or am I going to fly off into the night? No second chances.”
Sam was looking down into the forest, but at night there was little to be seen, and she wasn’t benefitting from Cherry’s augmented vision like Ada was. Still, she could probably tell that someone was stepping into a small clearing in the woods. That man looked up at Cherry and shouted. “Who are you?”
Ada grinned. This was an opportunity for some flourish. “I am Dark Angel Ada Liu, Arbiter of the Gods. Oh, and by the way - if you try to possess me, not only will you lose my titles and my knowledge, but my ship will hunt you all down and burn you all to ash. It knows the difference, so don’t even think about it.”
The man in the clearing raised his arms, and Ada pulled Cherry a bit closer. Sam looked up at her and nodded silently as the Master spoke. “Why would any of the living want to work with us?”
Ada pursed her lips. “The afterlife is a broken hell. The coders fucked it up. You think I want to go to a place like that when I die? I intend to fix their mistakes, to give everyone Elysium anew, a paradise for the dead. And I know you’re here because that paradise for the dead is what you’ve lost.”
There was a long silence on the ground.
Should she try appealing to their better nature? “You’ve been doing monstrous things, but you don’t need to be monsters. You can be something different, now. More than you are.”
“What could you possibly need from us ?”
“You’re rushing to an ancient facility you don’t understand and don’t know what to do with. I know exactly what I need to do with it, though - but if the human army gets there first and burns the place to the ground, I can’t help you. So I need you to stop racing the living and start bogging them down.”
The Master didn’t sound too amenable. “So you would make us into your own personal army.”
Ada rolled her eyes. “What? No. Look, if you’re not interested, I will firebomb this entire forest and take care of the problem by myself. I can handle it. But life would be a lot easier on me if someone was watching my back.”
“You, so-called Arbiter of the Gods, would trust ghosts to watch your back?”
“I would trust in your ability to see that we share a common goal. You’re not beasts.”
“And what about the gods themselves?”
“They haven’t complained to me yet.”
Suddenly the dragons appeared on the sensors, slowly walking through the woods. Why had they been invisible before in heat-sensing vision? How was Cherry tracking them now? The dragons looked up at her, cautiously, as the Master spoke.
“We may be interested. Come on down and talk.”
Ada bit her lip. She would need to come face to face with these people at some point, wouldn’t she? Best to get it over with.
Cherry, you’ll obliterate them all if they kill or possess me, right?
Yes.
Can the gods do anything for me if he walks me into the afterlife?
They do not have administrative access to the simulation. However, they do have debug access, for basic testing purposes.
Ada sighed. That means nothing to me.
They can offer some means of protection.
Then warn them I might need help. She turned to the Master, speaking out loud. “All right, then. I’m coming down. Don’t even think of trying anything.”
She slowly lowered the ship through the canopy, snapping a few branches aside as she did so. She tucked the fins back up in their landing position and felt the soft soil’s resistance beneath them as the ship came to rest on four of the fins.
“All right, Sam. If this is a setup, or if they’re not as open-minded as you say, everybody here is going to die.”
“They might be aggressive.” Sam sounded almost pleading. “Look, I know that if you can get them to take you seriously, they’ll believe you. I believe you, because I saw what you did in the Mayor’s tower, but they haven’t seen anything.”
“They’ve seen a ship!”
“Ships aren’t unprecedented, not over the thousand years we’ve been around. Invoking the name of the gods to take control of ancient artifacts, though? Just… give us a chance.”
Ada took a deep breath. The ghosts were people - they were dead people, sure, but people nonetheless. They could be reasoned with, insofar as people generally could be - which wasn’t saying much. They had to be able to see that something was in their own best interest. Then again, people in general were terribly short-sighted, and who was to say the ghosts were any different?
“I’ll give nothing but weaponfire if I feel I have no other choice, Sam. Come up, get up. Let’s go.”
The cockpit opened, and Sam scurried out. The ghosts started to emerge from the woods, and they weren’t bearing especially friendly looks. The Master stood alone, in the centre of the clearing, an average-built, pale-faced man with light brown hair and a scruffy beard. He frowned at Sam, at first, and then blinked. Sam cleared her throat.
“Master, I’m Sam. The last message you sent me was to wait in the wood-bar tavern off the city square for my contacts. The question was where are you from, and the answer was I’d rather not go back.” Sam sighed. “That was a terrible fucking idea, by the way. This lady here stumbled on it by accident.”
The Master frowned, and his look softened a bit. “Sam? Gods, where did you find a geneforge?”
Ada bit her lip, looking at Sam, and Sam glanced back at her. “She took me to one out east. Got me feeling a bit better.”
The Master locked eyes with Ada, and the softness was gone again. “I see. Buttering us up, I guess.”
He took a step towards her. Ada brushed her gun with her fingers, slowed time to a crawl, and thought out to Cherry through the suit. Get up behind me and shoot anyone other than Sam who gets close enough to use the walker’s gift.
Back in realtime, Cherry suddenly came alive again and rose into the air, staring down at everyone around her. The Master froze.
Was this opportunity worth risking her life for? What was it worth, really, when she could just try to do everything alone?
“Master, wait!” Sam exclaimed. “She really means well. She was looking for the shrine location when she found me as the Mayor’s captive. She can invoke the gods’ name to control ancient artifacts, I’ve seen her do it it.”
The Master looked between the two of them, and lowered his voice with a nasty chuckle. “Really? Then how about you ask the gods something now, then, huh? Ask them what happened to the man who killed the Starshadow. I’ve always wanted to hear the truth.”
The ghosts quieted, and Ada looked up to the sky, the ring visible between Earth and the stars. She pursed her lips and reached out to Cherry, who could reach higher, all the way to the ring. “Gods on the ring - who killed the Starshadow? What happened to the killer? This is important information, and not telling me the answer could lead to violations of the zeroth law.”
The voice of the gods responded from Cherry, filling her mind and hers alone. The Starshadow intelligence was deleted from the simulation several centuries ago by a human upload. Upload tracking suggests that upload is no longer in the simulation, but appears to have transposed into a human body. That body is currently standing before you, being referred to as the Master.
Ada blinked. She looked at the Master, at the creases around his eyes. He wasn’t afraid - at this point, he just looked filled with doubt. She glanced around the clearing, but though he was a few meters away, the rest of the ghosts were even further away. She stepped in closer and spoke a whisper, hoping they wouldn’t hear.
“You.”
Sam seemed to jump in her skin, and the Master looked like he had been struck. Ada smiled.
“Didn’t expect me to know that?”
Sam stepped closer to the Master. “How
many people know? You said it was a secret.”
The Master held up a finger to his lips. “Quiet. I’ve only told you and the rest of my friends from the old days, Sam, and they’re all accounted for.” He turned to Ada. “So you may have the ear of the gods. Ada, you called yourself Arbiter? That’s an old title - so old even I barely remember what it means. Where did you get it?”
“It was given to me by the gods when I visited them on the ring.”
The Master glanced up at that ring. Everybody knew the ring as a mythical place, a palace of gods and angels, crown of the world. Everyone except Ada; she knew better. It was just one more cemetery of ancient culture.
The Master sighed. “Well then. If you truly can fix the afterlife… that’s more important than us going our own way. Far more important. It’s one thing to take the dues denied to us in the past, but to build a better future is something we should all seek out, above all else.”
He turned around to the other ghosts, shouting out to them.
“This stranger from the sky promises to repair the afterlife, and I believe she knows the words of the gods. I believe she can do what she promises. On this - on the hope of a true afterlife, one where we do not vanish or become monsters - I will help her.”
The ghosts exchanged glances. Would they follow their leader, who would do the bidding of another? Or would they strike out?
To Ada’s surprise, one of the first ghosts to step forward - if one could call it that - was a dragon. This one seemed injured, too, missing its front paw. It looked at the Master and then to Ada, and then up to Cherry.
“You, stranger. We have need of your help, in the now more than in the future. The White Witch stands toe-to-toe with dragons, but she cannot stand against your ship. Kill her.”
Ada shook her head. “I don’t know who that is and I don’t care. I’m not killing anyone unless I have to - I’m here to save the afterlife, and if you’re going to put up a fuss then I’ll do it by myself, and I’ll expect to find you on your knees thanking me when I’m done. You understand? I’m not going to put up with your demands. If I don’t get what I want, we all lose! Or are you all too ignorant -”
First Angels Page 18
