The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “Doesn’t look Asian to me,” Alex muttered, helping Katya around a bank of machinery. The closer they got to the World Tree, the more the sound seemed to rattle and vibrate the hard parts of his body, his bones and teeth.

  “Must be using a dead body,” Katya explained, gritting her teeth to deal with what must have been significant pain. “After Alice wasted the original one.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “Shut up and hurry, okay?”

  Alex shut up and hurried. Mitsuru was obscured by a tight crowd of shambling, grasping corpses. The outer edge of the energy field that the World Tree generated was only a meter distant.

  “Going further would be a bad idea,” Samnang advised, from where she crouched on top of a nearby cluster of piping.

  “Oh, fuck!”

  Alex yelled, half pulling Katya, half falling as he dove for the energy field. When they hit it, there was a brief moment of dislocation, their visual afterimage lingering momentarily, frozen in time and static like a hologram, before that, too, disappeared.

  “How troublesome,” Samnang observed.

  ***

  Mitsuru waited until Alex and Katya departed into the World Tree’s glowing aura, for better or worse, fighting a losing battle against animated dead who were attempting to literally tear her to pieces. She cut and parried, buying herself time and space rather than hoping to do any real damage to the lumbering corpses that Song Li drove at her. Once she was certain that the kids were gone, Mitsuru finally activated the Black Protocol that had been steadily consuming her thoughts since Alex had helped her power it, before she began her attack. It was almost comical, that holding back the partially activated protocol had somehow been one of the most difficult things she had ever done, considering all the years she had spent struggling to operate it at all.

  There was no need for Mitsuru to cut herself. There was plenty of blood already.

  ***

  The Anathema soldier emitted light from one end of the visual spectrum to the other, dipping into ultraviolet and soaring into the infrared, changing frequency by the millisecond, alternating between tightly focused pulses and wideband emission – attempting to blind, to burn, to cut his way free of Michael. The capacitors beneath his tattooed skin worked exactly as Gaul had advertised. The energy manipulator died slowly, with Michael’s thumbs pressed deeply into the veins in his neck, feeding on his protocol in an act that had troublingly vampiric connotations. It wasn’t the first time that Michael had been disturbed by the alterations in his nature, thanks to the implant, but it was the most profound.

  Michael’s existential struggle was nothing compared to the Anathema’s desperate and spirited campaign to continue existing, but it was just as fruitless. The weaponized light went out gradually, his protocol dimming along with the light behind his eyes. Michael waited until he could no longer feel the Anathema’s pulse in his hands, long after the end of any struggle, long enough that it felt like a violation of their intimacy when he cast aside his broken body. The tightly interconnected weave of technology that had colonized his skin was rejuvenated, tiny batteries charged and humming in his epidermis, a dead man’s energy stored away to be expelled in some future act of violence, but Michael could not help but feel as if he had lost something in the course of the battle, something vague and wordless but precious to him nonetheless.

  Alice always said he was too soft for the field. Despite his victory, Michael could not help but give her words a certain amount of credence.

  Xia was brilliant, a proverbial candle burning at both ends. Even at a distance of tens of meters, Michael could feel the heat, and was aware of and slightly disappointed by the eagerness with which the nanite mesh in his skin absorbed even this ambient energy. As Xia incinerated the Anathema in the vicinity, bathing his skin in liquid fire that clung like napalm, Michael wondered what he had become, what he had made himself, though he spared himself the narcissistic pleasure of questioning his motivations. That would have felt too much like a betrayal, a trivialization of the Anathema energy manipulator’s struggle to continue living.

  Perhaps his heart was too soft to comprehend the work of his hands, but the introspection felt perverse and wrongheaded, when his feet still carried him obediently toward further battle, when his course did not change, when the questions produced answers that made him uncomfortable but did nothing to alter his intentions.

  Michael moved toward Xia without the truly feeling the resolve that he projected. Instead, he was motivated by something like acquiescence, fearing that if he stopped, he would be forced to call into question the acts that he had tossed aside, like the broken body of the Anathema he had killed. He told himself that it was simple, as Alice described it – kill or be killed, fight or be haplessly consumed by the violence that he had failed to counter with still more violence. No one was truly left untainted, and there was no nobility in his previous neutrality. It was impossible to stand apart, to carve out a moral high ground, when the security to contemplate such philosophical luxuries was bought with the blood of others.

  It almost helped.

  The fire had died down by the time he made his way through the wreckage, to find Xia staring at the embers and glowing hot metal with polarized lenses, searching for signs of life in the fused and smoldering ruins.

  “We should find Alice and Mitsuru,” Michael suggested, fighting back the urge to put a hand on Xia’s shoulder, well aware of the Auditor’s horror at physical contact, even with the remove of his armored and fire-proofed coat. “I think this is finished.”

  “Not until I say it is,” the Anathema countered, his voice dripping with good humor, as he strode through the heat and torn metal, hair and clothing burned away by the fury of Xia’s attack, skin reflecting the dull red glow of the partially liquefied metal. “I’m not done with the two of you yet.”

  Xia’s protocol activated, the air molecules around his hands excited to the point of ignition, a swirl of flame crackling across the distance and lashing against the metallic skin of the Anathema. There was no result. The Anathema laughed and continued forward.

  “You still don’t understand, do you?”

  Michael was not in the mood for explanations. He raised his hand, palm out, as if he were a crossing guard ordering a stop to traffic. The energies he had absorbed from the light manipulator collected beneath the skin of his hand, transferred from one set of specialized nanites to another, from those dedicated to the collection of energy to those equally committed to its expulsion.

  Form was just a question of will, an alteration of wavelength and rate of agitation. Light seemed inadvisable, given the way the residual flames from Xia’s attack reflected off the Anathema’s skin, and heat had already failed, so Michael chose what came most naturally – pure telekinetic force, a beam of raw physical energy passing through the air between them so suddenly as to seem instantaneous, sending up a cloud of dust and debris in its way, as if a particularly localized and focused gust of wind had blown through that small section of the factory floor. He felt nothing but a slight tingling at the skin of his palm. At the other end, he knew, he had delivered several tons of kinetic force, honed to a fine point and distributed over a total area of something less than a centimeter. The beam would have punched through a meter of concrete with ease, or punctured nearly a third as much hardened steel with enough left over to pulverize whatever was unwise or unlucky enough to shelter behind it. Whatever the properties of the Anathema’s reflective skin, it would be enough.

  Except, as the cloud of agitated dust and volatized metals cleared, he was still advancing, the same modest grin on the reflective surface of his face.

  “As I was saying, you don’t understand.” The Anathema did not bother to walk around a fallen girder from the collapsed catwalk; instead, he plowed through it, the metal bending and fracturing beneath his feet as if under tremendous pressure. “You are both quite impressive, I assure you. But I am afraid that, your protocols and alterations notwithstandi
ng, you are entirely outclassed. My name is Nick Marsh, and I truly regret what is about to happen.”

  “Xia,” Michael hissed, struck with a sudden and unbecoming fear at the Anathema’s steady and undeviating advance. “We need to hit him together. On three, alright?”

  “Don’t bother,” the Anathema advised, tossing aside an enormous section of concrete that obstructed his path. “It won’t make any difference.”

  Michael counted down to three. Xia’s ignited the air around the Anathema, depriving him of oxygen and covering him with a cloak of flames, while Michael expended the remainder of the energy he had absorbed in the form of electricity, a miniature lightning bolt arching toward the Anathema with a deafening clap. Despite the distortion of the wreath of flame that surrounded the Anathema, this time Michael saw it clearly – the bolt of electricity connected with the Anathema, then passed directly through, to discharge its energies on the metal wreckage some distance beyond. The fire shimmered and then died as Nick Marsh passed through it, his reflective skin disappearing.

  Where the lightning and fire touched, the Anathema’s form was briefly absent, nothing more than a swirl of discolored gas and luminous vapor. Then it coalesced, returning to an outline resembling that of a naked man, composed entirely of what appeared to be condensed smog, carbon-heavy gas carrying a heavy burden of ash and impurity. With a delicacy that was almost exquisite, the gas took on the contours of a face, even the expression of a self-effacing smile.

  “You cannot hope to injure me, unless I should allow for it. And even if I did, the effects would be only temporary.” The Anathema passed effortlessly through a meter of tangled steel and crushed aluminum sheeting, distorting briefly only to reform on the other side. “I control the composition of my body. Any volume of gas, of any type or density that I require, assuming that I can gather sufficient mass. Do you understand?”

  Nick Marsh reached out his hand, and his arm continued extending, crossing fifteen meters to reach Michael’s head as if he had thrown something. Michael tried to gasp in shock, and found no sustenance in the air he breathed, his lungs simultaneously full and screaming for oxygen in the throes of the Anathema’s grip. What passed through his lips tasted sweet and vaguely metallic, and a high, ringing sound filled Michael’s head as he dropped to his knees, hopelessly dizzy. Beside him, he could see Xia struggling similarly, though he could make no sense of it, the coherence of his thought further impaired with every desperate breath. He tried to make himself stop breathing, not to inhale any more of the miasma that surrounded him, to crawl free of it, but his body failed him, and he crashed to the ground in a clumsy and painless impact.

  “Nitrous oxide. If you use your pyrokinesis, I warn you that you will only succeed in burning yourselves alive,” Nick Marsh advised, nearing them with an expression that bordered on sympathetic. “Meant to be anesthetic. There’ll be no pain, just a bit of confusion, some euphoria, and then a quick, kind death. A measure of respect for your station, Auditors. My gift to you.”

  Michael’s vision blurred and blackened, and his hands reached for his throat, an echo of his early strangulation of the other Anathema.

  “You have my sympathies,” Nick Marsh informed them, close enough now that Michael could hear him over the thrumming sound in his ears, as if a helicopter hovered directly overhead. “You see, I died the same way. In a chamber, breathing in poison gas, the air rich with nanites. I died just as you are dying, but I had the misfortune to return, as you see me now, a thing both more and much less than I was. It was a mistake, I have come to realize – but it is one that you will not have to suffer.”

  Michael continued to try and crawl away, tried and failed to hold his breath. He struggled and could not remember why, could not think at all in the face of the terrible clamor that filled his head.

  “Mercy is a virtue, do you not agree? A kindness that even a dead man may offer.”

  ***

  The dead were consumed piece by piece, uncaringly launching themselves at the gradually expanding mass of nanite disassemblers that swelled and fluctuated around Mitsuru like a black cloud, like a thick mass of oil floating, suspended in water. Tendrils and horns emerged from the black mass of nanites, impaling and dismembering the corpses that Song Li launched at Mitsuru with increasing desperation. Mitsuru took no notice of the dead that she tore to pieces, Anathema and Weir alike. She was effectively unconscious, from trauma and blood loss, her heart barely beating, her mind functioning only on the most basic and primal level. She floated, supported by strands of black blood that held her upright and carried her gradually toward the World Tree, drawn by the subtle gravitation of the opening into the Ether. The battle with Song Li was little more than an afterthought, a passing and unconscious distraction from the primary goal of reaching the radiant World Tree.

  The nanites had a singular ambition – propagation. While they were not capable of thought, when their number reached a critical mass, they gained a sort of limited group consciousness, and that consciousness was hungry. Merging with the World Tree would allow the nanite disassemblers access to the virtually unlimited raw material of the world at large, via the perfect and unlimited conduit of the Ether. In the center of this growing catastrophe, Mitsuru floated, nude and half-dead from blood loss, aware of her own existence in only the most fundamental way. The Black Door inside of her was shattered to pieces, the fragments littering her mind as the power flowed freely through her body, devouring her from the inside out until there was little that remained of the Auditor other than a husk, the skin and bones of a woman who once called herself Mitsuru Aoki.

  Song Li cast the last of the corpses nearby at the growing shroud of black blood, trying to drive some portion of one of the bodies through the consuming mist, to incapacitate what remained of the woman within. One by one, the bodies were decimated and absorbed, becoming part of the mass that flowed inexorably toward the outer limit of the apport field.

  Karim Sabir swore in Arabic, then in German, but the words fell short, felt hollow next to the global calamity that he touched gingerly with the edge of his remote awareness. He motioned to Chike Okoro, and the Nigerian handed him a new magazine for his Barrett, specially designed rounds from Vladimir’s laboratory already loaded.

  “Are you certain?” Chike asked him, his voice trembling with sadness. “Is there no other way?”

  It was a scale model, he decided, a localized analog of the end of the world. Karim had been warned of the catastrophe that an out-of-control Mitsuru Aoki represented, but he was still disarmed by the sheer savage beauty of her dissolution. He felt a reluctance to intervene that was neither moral nor emotional, but rather aesthetic – it felt wrong, as if he would be putting an end to Mitsuru’s finest possible moment, cutting short an achievement that might have cost a lifetime.

  It was almost enough to make him put aside the rifle.

  “I am not,” Karim admitted. “But I am afraid. Alice Gallow believes that I am witnessing the end of the world, and I tell you, my friend, from where I sit, I’m inclined to agree.”

  It wasn’t heroism. Karim wasn’t capable of grand gestures. The most he could aspire to was an offhand sort of mercy.

  Alice Gallow had warned him, on the very first day, during his debrief. Karim had sought Mitsuru Aoki out on the beach at the Far Shores not long after, seeking to put a face to a name, to achieve a kind of rapport. He had deliberately made the act personal, emotionally charged, for reasons that were obscure to him.

  It was possible that he felt some guilt.

  This was buoyed by the awareness that Mitsuru Aoki, bleeding ravenous nanites out into the world, was every bit the apocalypse he had been promised. Her protocol’s aggression was universal – it consumed the quick and the dead alike, the architecture, even the landscape. The nanites within Mitsuru’s black blood used everything as raw material for replication, and were therefore multiplying at an astonishing rate. In and of itself, that was a disaster with no obvious end in sight.

>   Now the additional hazard of the near proximity of a World Tree, and the threat grew exponentially. A handful of meters was all that separated Mitsuru’s Black Protocol from becoming a universal catastrophe. The worst of all possible outcomes.

  The magazine slid home with ease. Karim charged the bolt and sighted the rifle with his remote vision, ignoring the scope. His finger tensed across the trigger.

  “I’m sorry,” Karim said, exhaling as he made final adjustments. “I wish it were otherwise.”

  At the valley between breaths, the moment between heartbeats, Karim pulled the trigger.

  Mitsuru’s body jerked when the first round slammed into her torso, lodging itself in the center of her rib cage.

  The outer portion of the bullet was coated with a depleted uranium shell, to punch through the walls of the factory. The tip was hollow, and mushroomed on impact, delivering the payload that was nestled in the core of round: a collection of dormant nanites, activated by contact with oxygen, derived from painstaking and careful experimentation on Mitsuru’s own nanite disassemblers. They were fundamentally similar, with one major deviation: the nanites the bullets introduced into the black cloud consumed only other nanites.

  The next bullet passed through her abdomen, while another splintered against her collarbone. The fourth embedded itself deep within her hip bone, while the final round slammed into the front of her skull, spilling its contents directly into her cranium.

  The black cloud froze, Mitsuru’s punctured and shattered body hovering motionless within its depths. Its slow-motion progress toward the crackling energy that surrounded the World Tree came to a halt.

  Then, as if suddenly remembering that it was subject to gravity, the black cloud rained to the ground, forming a small lake of steaming black tar with Mitsuru’s ruined body lying prone in the center.