Ancil rushed out onto the rooftop garden, clearly seeing only the Dervla/RK1 entity.
“Yeah, shit happened, and it happened to me,” he said. “I remember when that Legacy bastard took you over and made you use the dagger …” He paused. “And there it was, happening to me—Derv, I’m dead but at least I’m here …”
“I felt the same, Ans,” she said. “It’s hard to get used to.”
“Hey, did you know that the chief’s around here someplace, only he’s a ghost.”
“He’s here right now, along with some other friends,” Dervla said. “We had to modify them a little for safety reasons and we need to do the same for you—there are some nasty types watching out for Pyke and all his friends.”
“As long as I can see and talk to the chief, I’m okay with that.”
“Just to let you know, when you’re a ghost it’s a rather colourless world,” Dervla pointed out.
“Can’t be any worse than the Steel Forest,” Ancil said. “Let’s do it.”
Dervla stared intently at him for a moment, then nodded.
To Pyke, everything remained unchanged, but Ancil was clearly staggered by the sudden appearance of Pyke and three strangers.
“Chief!” he cried, and he and Pyke grabbed each other’s hands and shook them vigorously.
“Damn good to have you back with us, laddie,” Pyke said before quickly introducing Klane, Vrass and T’Moy. “Been hearing a bit about your adventures since the museum job,” he went on. “Man, sounds like it’s been a wild ride!”
Ancil smiled and shook his head. “Such a crazy setup—you’re here while you’re still alive out in the really-real world! How do you get your head round it?”
“Just try to go with the flow of whatever gets thrown at us, ould son,” Pyke said.
Ancil nodded, looking around him. “This, though, is very cool, very noir!” But then he turned to Pyke and Dervla, suddenly anxious. “Has there been any sign of Moleg or Kref? They were next in line after me …”
Pyke felt a sickening dread. “How did it happen?”
Ancil’s story essentially picked up after Dervla’s account ended. Clearly, Raven had decided to stage a multiple execution, an opportunity for the deranged Legacy to indulge its malevolent appetites. Yet according to Dervla/RK1, the crystal shard was back in the other Pyke’s hands. He glanced at Dervla.
“What makes you sure that my counterpart has the crystal again?”
The Dervla/RK1 entity regarded him with gleaming eyes. “The data feeds we tapped into were clarified audio segments collected from variable tensility zones on the outer dimensional lattice …”
“You’re saying that sound vibrations can be picked up by the crystal?” Pyke was appalled. “It’s basically a skaggin’ microphone?”
“Hardly. The crystal shard’s exposed surface only has a few tiny areas capable of registering sound vibrations—if the shard’s leather case is fully closed up prior to being pocketed, nothing can be detected. All we know is what the audio segments conveyed, that Pyke has the crystal shard in his possession and that he encountered a ship passenger called Hokajil.”
“Hokajil!” said Ancil. “The old inventor guy we met before we entered the forward section.”
“That’s him,” said Dervla. “The audio feed was fragmentary but it appears that he is going with the other Pyke up to the bridge to somehow destroy the crystal shard.”
“But the crystal is indestructible,” Pyke said.
Dervla nodded. “We have no further details about what Hokajil said about how this was to be accomplished. But we need to make contact with your counterpart and persuade him to allow it to be joined with the other pieces—then we can engage the integrity enabler and prepare the whole thing for its complete destruction.”
“Did Arky show you the black planets?” Pyke said. “The splintered suns, all those strangling webs and cables?”
Inside the pale blue cowl Dervla nodded gravely. “He did. I’ve never seen anything that terrified me the way that place does. We cannot fail, Bran—this is why we need someone else to join us, to add their strength to ours so that we can attempt to communicate. We can modify the sublayer of the outer lattice so that they generate a neuropathic field, which can pass through the leather case and any clothing. Then it’s a matter of attuning to synaptic resonances and we should be able to talk directly to real-world Pyke.”
“I’d like to take the plunge,” said Pyke. “Paddling around in the shallows of my own brain has a deranged appeal.”
Dervla smiled. “You were our first preference since your underlying cognition-perception internodes may help the attuning process. If you are agreeable, we will incorporate you into our composite …”
“Sure, but first I need—we need to know if Moleg and Kref have ended up in here, too. Can you find that out?” Pyke and Ancil exchanged a sombre nod.
For a moment Dervla stood still and unspeaking, then her gaze met Pyke’s. “It is hard from this location to be certain about identities but we can see that two other high-autonomy actors were added to the simulation not long after Ancil. We have appended a basic city map with their locations to Ancil’s current awareness.”
“Excellent!” said Ancil. “I can see it!”
“Well, don’t forget that they can’t see you,” Pyke said, holding out the remains of the kitchen chalk. “You’ll probably need to scavenge for more of this.”
“Something I’m no stranger to, Chief—so, guess this is it, then.”
Pyke grinned and shook hands with Vrass, Klane, T’Moy and lastly Ancil. “It’s been a blast fighting alongside you all in one way or another. I don’t know how this is gonna work out for us, for them out there, but at least we gave it some heft!”
“I know how it’s gonna be,” said Ancil. “We’re gonna kick the Legacy’s rotten ass into some honking big trash folder then wave bye-bye as it gets erased. Then we get some colour back and a spring in our step, and we find a good bar to have several large drinks in celebration!”
Pyke laughed. “That,” he said, “is exactly how it’s gonna be.” He glanced at Dervla. “Now’s a good time.”
She smiled, reached out to his face with her hand and …
Did the light flow into him or did he flow into the light? Conjoined with Dervla and RK1 he became aware of distinctions and blendings—they were the Three who were One while being the One that relied on the unique strengths of the Three. And in this threefold unity they were in motion, gliding along a scarcely visible line as were myriad other knots of composite light, flying on bright lines that formed an interconnecting web of pathways. Except that their outward aspect was deliberately masked to appear dull, low-priority, while their pathline was projected as a minor conduit. The truth was that they moved independently of the pathline intermesh while mimicking that which they were not.
The dense interweave of lines spread away quite a distance, and all of it was clustered around a pulsing glow that looked like a hemisphere of spikes, rods, stacks and opaque shell-like segments which drifted between these curious protrusions.
[The simulation of the city of Granah]
The voice stuttered through his perceptions, sounding more like Dervla than the drone.
[We are steadily moving towards the periphery of the intermesh. From there we shall ascend to the sublayer of the dimensional lattice and begin our work]
Pyke, feeling like a compressed, telescoped version of himself, was content to glide, to watch and to marvel.
At the shadowy edge of the intermesh they dispensed with the pathline pretence and set a course for the sublayer, which Pyke understood to be the underside of the crystal shard’s tactile surface. Their composite appearance was now apparent, to Pyke’s perceptions a tri-axial agglomeration of bright nodes, enfolding planes and pulsing spirals. Beneath them the labyrinthine intermesh, and the glowing simulation analogue it enclosed, looked huge, colossal, a jewelled complexity amid inky darkness. Then RK1 reminded him of the scale
of the space-time-space contained within the entire dimensional lattice, and how the simulation and its attendant systems took up a minuscule corner of that entire yawning gulf. Reminded him also of the frozen, suspended horrors that waited on the other side of the partition. In truth, this was an unimaginably vast dungeon and they were a tiny mote crawling towards its ceiling.
Suddenly he began feeling elevated alertness, a sense of heightened threat levels, and a switch to flight and evasion mode.
[We have been detected—a killswitch, one of the Legacy’s interceptors, is heading our way—be ready for variable-vector course corrections!]
RK1’s voice came through stronger this time. As an observer Pyke could see a spinning oval object swooping towards them, wondering if this was comparable to being pulled over by the cops for having a faulty indicator glyph. Then, without warning, a jet of jagged lightning leaped towards their tri-axial form while bright rods and struts began to unfold from the approaching oval thing. In just a moment or two the new arrival had expanded into a multiplex reticulation, a dazzling megacluster of integrated systems and matrices—next to their triform coalescence, this entity had taken on a towering, oppressive presence. It was the Legacy.
It seemed that they were trapped in a lightning web—until RK1/Dervla/Pyke revealed the nature of their cunning by making their projected decoy disappear. They then employed a locale-switch, using embedded properties of the nearby sublayer itself to port their triform quiddity to one of several preset destinations, a tactic prepared in advance of this foray.
But the Legacy, backed by the full power of the simulation intermesh, used sheer brute force to hurl itself across the intervening distance. They had barely taken up a defensive posture before devastating charge-blows started to rain down on them. Pyke could feel RK1’s irritation at having underestimated the Legacy’s trans-systemic abilities, and Dervla’s grim, last-ditch resolve in the face of overwhelming odds, one of the things about her that he found most endearing.
The repeated attacks were weakening their tri-axial form, softening them up for the big one, a large and savage strike which shook them to the core of their composite. Already weak from the onslaught, the threefold composite split apart—Pyke felt it like a crack stabbing through his mind. And it was his mind. Separated from Dervla and RK1, he found his perceptions adrift in the gloomy darkness, while the huge, jagged form of the Legacy seemed even more immense than before as it loomed over the three dissidents. For a second it looked as if Dervla and RK1 were trying to merge again but before Pyke could reach out a bright pathline winked into existence, passing right through him. Against his will, it began pulling him towards the sublayer.
Amalgamated once more, Dervla/RK1 instituted a retreat manoeuvre and vanished. Pyke guessed that they must have reappeared somewhere else because the Legacy at once took off at a fearsome velocity. Pyke, however, could only dangle on this shining line as it drew him in.
Am I a balloon at the end of a piece of string, or a fish being reeled in? Pretty sure I’m not a person any more …
The surface of the sublayer came nearer and nearer, a smooth dark grey incised with what he thought were stylised circuit patterns but then realised were odd layouts of symbols of some kind. Even so, it was no help as the grey surface came ever closer. He had no face to feel with yet he did experience a weird drowning sensation as his viewpoint sank without pause into the grey.
Coldness in a void, then in a cramped, restricted space. Then he felt stretched out and vaporous, then heavy and clustered.
Then weight, body weight, the feeling of lying on cold stone. He breathed in, caught a faint whiff of burned wax, then opened his eyes to a dusky sky. Pyke sat up, looked around and let out a sound halfway between a gasp and a laugh—he was back on the Isle of Candles. The time-worn masonry, the skeletal trees, the lichen-patched flagstone, the glowing clusters of candles, the gathering shadows, all very much like the first time he was here. Except—he shifted forward onto hands and knees to get a close look at a nearby group of burning candles and saw that the flames were motionless and heatless. No wax melted, flowed or puddled.
Also, this time there was no Vrass to greet him. Instead, a different form watched him from the flagstone path that wound up to the villa. Pyke got to his feet, strolled out of the stone gazebo and over to the waiting observer.
“Heard you were dead,” he said.
“Rumours of my demise,” said the Construct drone, Rensik, “have been greatly exaggerated.” The drone had the miltech flanged boxy appearance from before that encounter with Raven right back at the start. “Although, to be fair, our entrapment in this place shares some characteristics with the usual meaning of ‘demise.’”
“No longer in the land of the living,” said Pyke. “But still not dead.”
“Or in your case, the reflection of a man still living.”
“Yeah, yeah, while all my friends die the death.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “So, where is this place? Is this the actual Isle of Candles?”
“It is. The Isle of Candles is actually a separate simulation running in the dimension lattice sublayer,” said the drone. “The Legacy apparently decided to create a buffer area for his candidates that was separate from the main simulation area. An anteroom to his lab of mazes!”
“Did you bring me here for something important, or are we just going to relax and philosophise while this bit of the cosmos goes to hell?”
“Oh, we certainly are here on important business,” said the drone. “I’ve been keeping tabs on my offshoot, RK1, and while I expected him to try to gain access to the sublayer I didn’t think he would pull such a foolhardy stunt.”
“You’re keeping tabs on RK1? From where?”
“From within the sublayer itself,” the drone said. “My violent messy obliteration was staged to conceal my translocation from the intermesh directly into the sublayer, right under the gazes of the Legacy’s own killswitch brutes. Tell me, was RK1 planning some sort of gambit to gain control of the integrity enabler?”
Pyke nodded. “That’s right.”
“Well, it was folly on his part to attempt it with only two autonomous cores—he should have taken as many as he could get!”
“Taken?”
“Very well—persuaded. It is impossible to overstate the power and resources which the Legacy can call upon. It would have been greatly advantageous if he had managed to reach the sublayer. Still, this is our situation, and every move has to be thought out to the finest detail.”
“I bet RK1 and Dervla will go back and try to get the others on board,” Pyke said. “They’ll try to gain control of that integral enabler.”
“Integrity,” said the drone. “The enabler’s not the problem any more, though.”
Pyke was nonplussed. “Why not?”
The drone bobbed slightly as it hovered. “Because I am the integrity enabler! My cognitive code is now spread far and wide throughout the sublayer of the dimensional lattice, so assuming direct command of it presents no difficulties.”
This was sounding great, thought Pyke. “RK1 talked about using the sublayer to generate neuropathic fields to communicate with—”
“With your counterpart in the real world—good! At least my offshoot was that smart.”
“So it can be done.”
“Yes, but we have to keep in mind that all manner of deceits and diversions are taking place out in the reality continuum. Here we are, clinging to the inside of a vast containment built to incarcerate and render inert the relentless Omni-devourer. At the same time, all this immensity and its frozen horrors are confined within an object riding around inside the jacket being worn by the original Captain Pyke! If I had a mouth I would be grinning widely at the cosmic irony
of it.”
“Okay,” said Pyke, thinking. “Okay, so the other me has the crystal. And he’s heading towards the bridge, in the company of someone called Hokajil who says he’s going to help him destroy the crystal …”
“Let me stop you right there,” said the drone Rensik. “In my capacity as master of the dimensional lattice sublayer, all data feeds from the crystal surface have to pass through my sensoring net, and from what I’ve observed—and from what the Legacy’s own analytics are telling him—I can say that this Hokajil is a devious, self-interested actor who is out to take possession of the crystal for himself. He told the other Pyke that there is a prototype device called a dismantler up on the bridge which will disintegrate the crystal shard. He lied—there is no such device. But I’m willing to bet that Hokajil has reinforcements waiting there for him, just to ensure a smooth transfer of ownership.”
Pyke shook his head. “So my sucker of a counterpart needs to be warned about the double-cross—that means you’ll be using these neuropathic fields to contact him, right?”
“Half-right—I’ll set up the neuropathic field conduit and you’ll do the communicating!”
“Why me?”
“Authenticity,” the drone said. “I’m counting on your—on both your intrinsic talents for abrasive interactions to establish that trust quickly, far more quickly than if it were I speaking to him. Did my offshoot explain how the integrity enabler allows us to destroy the crystal?”
“He said that our crystal shard and the other two had to be reunited again before it could be set up for the Big Smash with that integrity enabler.”
“Exactly—another gold star for my progeny. So, in addition to warning your counterpart about the devious Hokajil and telling him that there’s no dismantler, you will also have to explain why he must track down Raven and hand over the crystal.”
Thinking this through, Pyke stared intently at the hovering drone then gave a wincing shake of the head. “I can’t see him buying it.”
“Why?”
“If it were me, knowing what he’s learned out in the real world up to now, and having been through all that battling and struggling and … and losing nearly all his crew—I mean, I would find it hard to go along with the idea of just delivering our crystal into Raven’s hands. After all that, y’know?”
Splintered Suns Page 41
