“Lovely,” Alexander said when they arrived. “A perfect summer picnic spot. I suppose the fishing is good?”
“Usually is,” Julyan said, putting down his pack and removing hooks and lines. Next, he cut and trimmed slender saplings to use as rods. Alexander let him do all the work, but Julyan didn’t mind. He liked showing off his competence, something he had been given far too little opportunity to do of late.
Alexander waited until Julyan had put his knife away and was attaching the line to the rod before rising from the grassy knoll upon which he had been lounging. “You are very competent, Julyan Hunter. I hope when we need to recruit other assistants they will be as good.”
Julyan paused in the act of baiting his hook. “Other assistants? Won’t your machines and devices serve better than humans?”
“For many things,” Alexander agreed. “However, for some things only living beings will do.”
He accepted the rod Julyan handed to him, then said, his voice so deliberately casual that Julyan felt alarmed, “Before we do our recruiting, I need to test my own research. Siegfried and Falkner have their doubts, but I think…”
The next phrase Alexander spoke meant nothing and yet everything to Julyan. It wasn’t very long, perhaps seven clipped syllables, but the effect was instantaneous. Julyan felt as if a new sense had awoken in him, simultaneously making him more alert and yet curiously without volition.
“You await my command,” Alexander said.
“Of course,” Julyan said. He continued preparing his fishing line, but knew without a doubt that if Alexander told him to stop, he would without question or pause. “Does the seegnur still care to fish?”
“You may do so, but listen carefully to me. I have a few instructions. The first is that you may not tell anyone at all in any form or fashion, whether in words or sounds or writing or even through the actions of your body, what has passed and will pass between us this day. We came here. We fished. That is all. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Julyan felt a little hurt. Did the seegnur Alexander think him a fool?
“Now … Jump into the water.”
Julyan pushed off the bank into the water, fishing rod still in his hand. He began to sink, wondered if it was permissible to swim. While he was so wondering, he felt a strong hand grasp his hair—he had worn it in a braid that day—and pull his head above the water.
“Swim!” Alexander commanded. “Let go of the fishing rod and swim. I forbid you to drown.”
Julyan did as he was told, though he felt a trace of regret for his lost fishing gear. He could have successfully kept from drowning without dropping it. Unaware of Julyan’s dismay, Alexander was laughing in wild delight.
“Get out of the water,” he said. “Strip off those wet clothes. It would not do for you to catch cold.”
Julyan stripped, meticulously removing every item of clothing. Since Alexander did not command him to do otherwise, he carefully placed the wet items on a large rock in the sunlight, where they would have a chance to dry. Then he rose, uncertain if he should return to fishing. Perhaps he should ask permission to retrieve his rod.
“Stand still,” Alexander said, “and await my … pleasure.”
He was still laughing. Julyan thought he should feel happy that the seegnur was so pleased but, in truth, his skin crawled. He’d always liked Alexander best of the three Dane brothers. Siegfried was too much like the Old One. Falkner seemed to care more for his machines than for any person. Alexander had been the one who was easy to talk with, the least likely to condescend.
“I’ve found it!” Alexander exulted. “Julyan, does your lore contain hints that the seegnur could control the people of Artemis if they wished?”
Julyan considered. “Less the lore than some tales within the lore. It is implied, rather than stated.”
“My family,” Alexander said, “has reason to believe that biologically we are the heirs to your seegnur. My mother has gone out of her way to assure this lineage remains pure and strong, as have others before her. You should be pleased. Your response to the phrase I spoke confirms our belief.”
“I am pleased for you, seegnur.”
Julyan was pleased for Alexander. At the same time, he was fully aware of how uncomfortable he was standing wet and naked. Even though the summer air was warm, he did not particularly like how he felt. He wanted to dry off before the brackish bay water stiffened on his skin. He felt oddly vulnerable, something he did not care for one bit. However, he had been specifically told to await Alexander’s pleasure, so wait he must.
“Not all the seegnur knew this trick,” Alexander explained. “It would have taken too much fun out of the game, you see. However, with so few seegnur and so many Artemesians, protective measures were necessary. I’m sure you understand.”
He walked a slow circle around Julyan, then extended one hand and gently ran the tips of his nails over the skin of Julyan’s right flank, extending up and over his rib cage.
“Do you like that, Julyan Hunter?”
Julyan was honest. “No. Not particularly.”
Alexander smiled a slow, cruel smile. “How you feel doesn’t matter one bit to me, just as I suspect the feelings of others haven’t mattered much to you. How do you feel about that?”
Honesty forced its way from Julyan’s lips, although he fought to say anything else or at least keep silent. “I am frightened.”
“Good.” Alexander faced Julyan, then ran both hands over Julyan’s torso, down his flanks, then up again and across the front of his body, caressing in a manner lewd and lingering. “I like that you’re afraid. Now, do as I say. Await my pleasure.”
* * *
Adara was learning that being a world was a whole lot more complicated than she’d imagined. When she’d first realized what the strange entity invading both her dreams and her communication with Sand Shadow had to be—a gut-level revelation, rather than something coolly understood—Adara had thought of Artemis as the brain, the world her body, the whole basically an oversize variation of life as she knew it.
However, as Adara was learning, for Artemis brain and body were much more intertwined. Artemis had not simply been shut down, she had been both lobotomized and crippled. When Griffin’s crash had released into the planetary ecosystem a countermeasure to the destructive nanobots, Artemis had slowly begun to awaken to self-awareness once more. Then, upon awakening, the planet had immediately found herself battling for control of herself.
“You think your attacker was something left behind from the slaughter of the seegnur and death of machines?” Adara asked.
“Unknown, unknowable. That which was not even yet I had not the eyes to see, ears to hear, self to know. Barely born, immersed in battle, I found this self I am in the process of preservation.”
“Maybe Griffin can explain what happened,” Adara suggested, speaking aloud as had become her habit if no one else was around.
The huntress immediately sensed that Artemis was uneasy. Artemis was still incomplete. Adara could understand why, having been attacked twice in recent memory—for to Artemis, events of five hundred years ago seemed to have happened only a few months before—the planetary intelligence felt unwilling to let anyone know how vulnerable she remained.
“I won’t ask directly,” Adara assured her. “Griffin’s always eager to talk about his discoveries regarding the seegnur’s technology. I’ll ask as if I’m wondering about what we could do if something tried to take Leto over.”
The emotions coming from Artemis became more complex. Uncertainty remained, mingled with other elements. Artemis didn’t like Leto, yet, at the same time, she felt highly protective of her, even possessive.
“I’ll be careful,” Adara promised. “But if you’ve been attacked once, next time you might not be so lucky. It’s possible that whatever attacked you was as weak as you were yourself. As you grow stronger, so might it.”
The equivalent of a sigh.
Adara wished
the planetary intelligence would go back to talking, but often these days, Artemis resisted words as a very imprecise form of communication. Even though frustrated, Adara understood. How often had she struggled to find the words to communicate a complicated emotional state—such as her own feelings about Terrell or about Griffin? Nonetheless, Adara often found Artemis’s idea/emotion combinations difficult to sort out.
The problem was a variation of what Adara had dealt with when learning to communicate with Sand Shadow. Especially when a kitten, the puma had seen every object as unique. Each tree was its own thing. There was no general class of objects called “tree.” Each animal, again, a unique entity. Only with experience had the puma learned group classifications.
Artemis had her own ideas as to how they could solve the communication problem. Her own neural network was anchored in a wide variety of mycelia—not only in the more visible mushrooms and fungi, but in tiny spores and invisible living threads. She wanted Adara and Sand Shadow to accept some of her spores into themselves. Both human and puma, accustomed as they were to thinking of fungi as agents of decay and deterioration, had balked.
In time, Adara thought uneasily, Artemis will surely come around. She’s still reacting to her realization of how very incomplete her perceptions are. Even when she’s “with” me and Sand Shadow, she’s in hundreds, even thousands, of places, strengthening and expanding her net.
Over the last several days, Adara had learned just how incomplete that net was. When Artemis had discovered the gigantic hole that was Leto, Adara had believed that Artemis’s linked strands of perception were much more extensive than they actually were. She had imagined a tightly woven net, girdling the globe. That was how Artemis had been designed to be. That awareness of her essential design had colored Artemis’s earlier explanations.
In reality, the net’s mesh was wide and loose. When Artemis communicated within herself, it was—as best Adara could comprehend—as if she stood upon various strands and called to herself. Those calls provided temporary connections but, when Artemis let them drop, the gap returned. What made Leto so disturbing was that her area was a gap too wide for Artemis to call across.
I wonder, Adara thought, if in the days of the seegnur, Artemis had more strands, perhaps reaching up into the skies. Then she would have called across Leto without even realizing Leto was not there. I wonder if Artemis is even more uneasy because she wonders what other gaps there might be and if she’ll learn about them before they become a danger to her?
Yes. Being a world was far more difficult than Adara had ever imagined. Nonetheless, she was drawn into the experience, knotted tightly to Artemis—she and Sand Shadow both. The question was, would they expand as the net grew or would they tangle in the meshes and drown?
* * *
Some days after Adara and Sand Shadow departed for who knew where, Griffin arrived in Leto’s complex to find the resident intelligence very agitated and Ring behaving oddly indeed.
The big man had opened one of the enormous bunkers in which various spaveks hung inert in their “squires”—complex racks that not only contained a variety of diagnostic machinery, but also would have helped a wearer to put on the complex machines.
“He arrived here shortly after dawn,” Leto said, her voice that of a petulant little girl. “I warned him off, but he opened the bunker and has been going up and down, examining the spaveks and muttering nonsense to himself. Had he actually touched a suit, I would have taken prohibitive action, but since you have let him come into the complex, I felt I must forebear.”
“I’ll handle it,” Griffin promised, stepping authoritatively forward.
In truth, Griffin had no desire to bother Ring, for he had no doubt of the man’s good intentions. Ring had proven repeatedly that his motivations were too complex to be easily grasped. Therefore, if Ring wanted to stare at the prototypes, then Griffin was inclined to let him do so.
To Griffin’s relief, Ring slowly turned to face him, eliminating the need for open confrontation. This time, he did not cover his eyes as he so often did, but forced his slightly unfocused gaze to meet Griffin’s own.
“They are here,” he said with a gusty sigh. “This one…” He pointed to a suit tinted a dark, primary blue. “This one. It will, may, could, help. If I clean it, can you make it live?”
For Ring, this was as direct as communication ever became. Ignoring Leto’s sputtering, Griffin went to inspect the suit Ring had indicated. It seemed more complete than many, although several leg and arm pieces were missing. He was inspecting it, working out its probable capacities, when Terrell shambled in, rubbing his beard stubble and looking bemused. He’d stayed back in camp, probably to talk to Bruin about Adara, while he packed something for their lunch.
“What’re you doing?” he asked. “And why’s Leto so upset?”
“Ring asked me to inspect this spavek,” Griffin said. “He wanted to know if I could ‘make it live.’”
Terrell came to take a closer look. “I’d say you’d have a better chance with this one than with many others. When I was drawing it, I noticed some indications it had been in use. Look, here … and here…”
He hunkered down and pointed to a place where the blue coating showed darker, another where the material that made up a knee covering was scuffed. “My guess is that they’d tested this one, maybe even in a firefight.” Terrell had learned the term from Griffin and, once he realized it had to do with fighting with fire, rather than fighting fire, he had seized on it. “This isn’t one of the larger combat units, but it has energy weapons.”
He pointed. “If you look by the knee, you’ll see that there was some sort of fluid leak. My guess is that the joint was damaged by ‘fire’ and then repaired, but they didn’t bother to clean it up all the way because they were going to test it again.”
“And never had a chance,” Griffin said softly. “I wonder if we can activate it?”
“Why not ask your girlfriend how to go about it?”
Griffin listened to Leto’s sputtering, which was full of terms like “restricted,” “off-limits,” “unauthorized,” and “prohibited.”
He sighed. “It may come to that, but I’d like to see what we can figure out on our own. Maybe it’s as simple as making sure the power unit is connected. From what I’ve been able to tell, protocol here was to disconnect the power from any prototype not actually being worked on to eliminate the chance of accidents.”
Terrell rose. “What good would making it ‘live’ do? None of us know how to sail—no, pilot—one of these. If there’s one thing I learned from Helena the Equestrian, it’s know your animal before you swing astride.”
“I’ve piloted a wide variety of craft,” Griffin objected. “I’ve even worn power armor a time or two. I could handle it.”
Terrell slowly shook his head. “You can ride Molly, too, pretty well by now. I’d chance you on Midnight or Tarnish in an emergency, but Sam would have you off and trampled.”
“This isn’t a mule,” Griffin protested. “It’s a machine.”
Terrell kept shaking his head. “Not a machine as you know them. You’re the one who told me that the seegnur’s machines were meant to mesh with the minds of their pilots. How do you know that this suit wouldn’t decide you’re not the rider for it and throw you—or worse? What if it burns out your brain because you’re unauthorized?”
Griffin was about to protest further when Ring’s deep voice spoke with that curious lack of inflection that somehow managed to hold the attention more than any amount of argument.
“Not Griffin. Me. It will let me ride it. First, though, we must make it live.”
* * *
Julyan rapidly learned that the hitch in Alexander’s gallop wasn’t sex, as such, but control. He used sex—or rather the threat of sex—to control Julyan. If Julyan was obedient, Alexander kept his hands to himself. If Julyan was not obedient—even when the control words were not in use—then Julyan found himself doing things he wouldn’t have do
ne to any of his “mares.” Worse, Alexander told him to enjoy it and so he did. The memory of that enjoyment haunted him, waking and sleeping.
After a time or two in which Alexander proved to Julyan that those seven simple syllables would permit him to make Julyan do anything he desired, Alexander preferred the threat to the act. He still acted, just often enough and erratically enough so that Julyan lived in a constant state of tension whenever he was alone with the man but, as time went on, Alexander preferred to exercise his power in other ways.
One of these was making Julyan his unwilling confidant. Julyan quickly gathered that while Alexander was in accord with his brothers on many things, he had his own agenda—and that he deeply and sincerely hated Griffin.
“Maxwell doesn’t seem to wonder how we arrived here so quickly,” Alexander gloated. “Or how we found the region Griffin had gone to with a whole world to choose from. Do you?”
He and Julyan were alone in the commander’s quarters on what had been the residential side of the Sanctum. This area, it turned out, had been closed and sealed when the Old One had released his flood, and so could be explored as soon as the central area was drained. Unhappily, for Julyan, rows of dormitory rooms and the like held little interest for the two more warlike Dane brothers. Exploration had been turned over to Alexander, who was, ostensibly, trying to find out if the commander’s data storage units could be accessed.
“You told us that Griffin had not hidden his trail as well as he thought,” Julyan said obediently.
“Ah … He didn’t, but not as we implied. Griffin actually did an excellent job hiding his trail. We took precautions so we could track him.”
Julyan made an interested noise.
“Falkner and Gaius tampered with Griffin’s shuttle. First, it was to set beacons that would show us the direction in which Griffin went. Since the shuttle was mounted on the outside of the main vessel, that was no problem at all. When Griffin reached Artemis, a final beacon was dropped that would activate the others so we’d know it was time to follow. The signal took a while to backtrack but, even so, I think we were very clever.”
Artemis Invaded Page 17
