A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “Come on.” Mo nodded down the beach, where we could make out his “camp”—a complex of tile-roofed villas stretching out from the beach and onto a system of piers built out over the water. Most of the paint had been worn away over the centuries, and a few of the outlying buildings had collapsed into the sea, but it was still recognizably a pleasure palace built for and by the superrich—or, more accurately, by their army of contractors and servants, I suppose.

  “You know, I always found the poverty you were willing to endure in your search for your God inspiring,” Jane told Mo, her voice deadpan dry.

  “What? The Jaliad left behind a perfectly usable beachside complex, and you expect me to just ignore it and build a hut out of thatched grass in its shadow instead? Come on—let’s get you settled. You can set off for the broadcast tower in the morning, and after that, you’ll have to wait for a reply as Schaz runs her decryption—you’re likely to be here for a while.”

  We trooped down the beach toward Mo’s seaside paradise; I took off my boots to feel the warm sand between my toes. The waves rolled in and receded with an impressive regularity, the bright light of the blue sun in the sky reflecting off the equally blue waters, the faint lavender tinge of the atmosphere the only break in the otherwise monochromatic color scheme of the seaside-blue sun, blue sea, blue jungle.

  There was a ramp leading up to a loading door on this side of the complex; Mo effortlessly pushed Sho’s wheelchair up that as Jane manipulated a set of impressively unrusted chains to raise the door itself. All the metal in the villa must have been treated with some sort of anti-rusting agent, to hold up for this long right next to the salten sea.

  Mo continued to push Sho inside, but Jane turned back toward the jungle, looking at the horizon, and I hung back with her. “Schaz?” she said into her comms. “We’ve made it to Mo’s villa; we’re good for now. Go ahead and engage your soak.”

  “About time,” Schaz sighed. “Do you need anything else? Overclocking the decryption algorithms may leave me out of communication for a bit.”

  “Just stick your head up every once in a while, check in,” Jane told her. “Otherwise—have fun.”

  “I do kind of love this,” Schaz admitted. “I mean, from a utilitarian standpoint, it does serve a purpose, but—”

  “Enjoy.”

  “What the hell is happening again?” I asked Jane. She just nodded at the horizon over the jungle—the direction we’d come from.

  “Just watch,” she said.

  I heard something in the distance, growing closer, fast, then Schaz appeared over the tops of the trees, and through the comms I could actually hear her, unmistakable: “Whee!” she shouted as she sped overhead, headed out to sea. She did an impressive loop—then plowed directly into the ocean, diving into the depths.

  I sighed. “Even Schaz gets to go swimming,” I complained to Jane.

  Jane laughed. “She’s not swimming, Esa,” she told me. “She’ll go as deep as she can, to where the water’s coolest, almost freezing, and she’ll expose her data core to that cold. It’ll help with the decryption—she’ll be able to work longer, faster, without risking an overheat. It also means the hyperdrive won’t have to cool for nearly as long, once we get into the atmosphere.”

  “She still gets to go swimming,” I said, then paused. “Wait. If the plan was for Schaz to do . . . that . . . anyway, why the hell didn’t she just let us off right beside Mo’s villa? Why did we have to hike through all that damned jungle?”

  “Partially so that we could know where the clearing was, where Schaz would be staying when she’s not running the decryption.” Jane shrugged. “She will have to stop every once in a while to let her drive core recharge. And partially for Mo’s benefit, so he could get a read on us before revealing where he lived.”

  “To give him a chance to decide if we really were here to kill him, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s your friend.”

  “He’s also former Justified. He knows how we view exiled. His parting ways with our sect wasn’t quite as . . . mutinous . . . as Javier’s was, but he still walked away with knowledge that could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. He has a perfectly valid reason to be a little wary of us tracking him down again, even after all this time.”

  I paused, still staring out at the ocean—I thought I could just barely see bubbles, breaking the surface, above where Schaz was currently sinking. “But he still trusted you enough to tell you where he was. You said you’d never been here before—he must have told you, and passed along the key to the defense network, too.” She nodded in confirmation, looking out at the ocean with me. I sighed. “So he trusts you, but he still thinks you might have come to kill him. At least now I know where you picked up your paranoid tendencies from.”

  She started to respond one way to that, then shut her mouth, rethinking it. “Maybe,” she said finally. “But maybe those ‘paranoid tendencies’ are why we’re still alive, Mo and I both. Maybe you should try and pick some of those up yourself.”

  I thought about that for a moment, then shook my head. “If I hadn’t seen you—or Javier, or Marus, or the Preacher—for nearly a hundred years, and you came knocking on my door: no. I don’t think I could fear you. I don’t think I’d want to be the person who could do that.”

  “It’s not fear, Esa. It’s . . . awareness.”

  “The reason he’s all alone out here isn’t just because it’s part of his search for God, or whatever. It’s also because he can’t trust anyone anymore. His mind—his experience, the years he spent as a Justified operative—won’t let him. Or am I wrong?”

  She shook her head. “You’re not wrong.”

  “I won’t live like that, Jane.”

  “Then you may not live long. Come on inside.” We stepped into the former Jaliad villa—now Mo’s stylish seaside retreat. The interiors were significantly more dilapidated than the exterior; the walls and the roofs and whatnot had been built to last, but the decorations inside had been expected to receive constant maintenance and upkeep from a likely small army of servants, servants who had vanished at the same time the Jaliad monarchy had. The frescoed floors and muraled walls were chipped and damaged; chandeliers had dropped and broken and been shoved unceremoniously to one side.

  There was still light, mainly from the large windows and skylights built into each room—the fixtures must have been made of the same stuff spacecraft portholes were crafted from, to have stood up to hundreds of years of exposure to the elements—but little to no electricity, until we came to the interior dining hall where Mo had set up a small operations area, full of networked computers and ad hoc equipment he’d cobbled together.

  “I just realized—you don’t have a ship,” I told him. “At least, not one we’ve seen.”

  He shook his head. “I came here with a group of pirates, seeking treasure,” he said. “I knew about the defenses, of course; they didn’t.”

  “And you didn’t warn them.”

  “And I didn’t warn them. I didn’t make them choose larceny and murder as their occupation, after all. I ditched out in an escape pod shortly before the automated defenses cut them to pieces.”

  “You came here, knowing the chances that you’d ever leave would be . . . remote, at best.”

  “I needed someplace quiet, to contemplate my deeds, to meditate and study. It seemed a very good fit. Making my passage here a one-way trip seemed . . . dedicated. At the time. Besides. If I’d truly needed offworld, I could have reached out to Red.” He nodded at Jane. “She would have come and picked me up.”

  “Maybe.” Jane made a show of considering the possibility. “When I’d found the time. This one keeps me pretty busy, you know.” She nodded at me.

  “You would have come,” Mo shrugged, seeing right through her little act. “Come—I’ll show you to some of the undamaged sleeping quarters. Most of them belonged to the maids and the cooks and the mechanics and other various staff, rather than the wealthy th
at kept this place for their own amusement; I think there might be a little poetry in that.”

  CHAPTER 6

  When I was done stowing my gear, I took a brief exploratory tour of the complex—another one of Jane’s mantras: “Always have three exits,” an important rule in a place as big as this, a maze of servants’ quarters, kitchens, living spaces, with balconies and walkways connecting the upper floors, most of which only led out to the ocean. My curiosity satisfied for the moment, I returned to the dining room where Mo had set up his equipment.

  The big Mahren himself was still sitting at the table, staring at the vidscreen, watching the recordings from our body cameras, studying our encounters with the strange being pursuing the gifted children. He must have watched them several times; there wasn’t all that much footage to go through.

  Still, he was riveted—all his attention devoted to the screen, not even acknowledging my presence as I entered, though just like with Jane, I knew he knew I was there. He simply wasn’t saying anything, not drawing any conclusions. At least, not that I could tell.

  “You know who he is.” Jane had entered just after me; she read her old mentor like a book.

  “I know what he is,” Mo temporized, reaching up to pause the vid. I moved around behind him, so I could see what he was looking at: the interior of Valkyrie Rock, the being of blue flame stalking us through the tunnels, its hand raised, about to fire an energy pulse. It must have been from Jane’s camera—it was the same attack I’d barely saved her from, by reaching out and manipulating the energy with my teke. And nearly killing myself in the process. “As do you. Or you should, if I taught you anything.”

  “Well then, you sucked as a teacher, because I have no idea, Mo. Come on. No games.” Jane pulled up a chair across from him; she didn’t need to see the feeds.

  Mo leaned back, still studying the figure on the monitor. “He’s a Cyn. That part is fundamentally clear.” I felt like there should have been a thunderclap or something after his statement—after all this time referring to him as “the guy in the armor,” we had a species, at least, to go with the lack of face—but the truth was, I only barely knew what a Cyn even was.

  “That’s not possible.” Jane said the words flatly—no affectation, just a statement of fact, like the star beyond the window was blue, or she could make a sniper shot at a thousand meters.

  “It’s self-evident.” Mo gestured at the vid. “The Cyn are the only beings that don’t breathe oxygen; the only beings capable of surviving in deep space for extended periods of time; the only beings that don’t use carbon as the basic building block of their biology, their molecular structure.”

  “It’s a long fucking jump from ‘non-carbon-based life form’ to ‘being made up of energy.’ ”

  “It tracks. The Cyn were always . . . viewed as different by the other species. Fundamentally. The old texts talk about them in terms—I think ‘awe’ might be the closest descriptor. We have very few records from the Golden Age, from before the sect wars. We know very little about the Cyn.”

  “I still think ‘they fucking glowed’ would have showed up somewhere in the old records.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. What do we know about them? Nothing for certain, outside of the fact that they were fundamentally different from the other sixteen species, Barious included.”

  “We know they vanished. They fucked right off, disappeared off everyone’s radar, off the edge of every map. Well before the pulse, well before . . . How long has it been since anyone’s seen one? Five hundred years? Six? Longer?”

  “Long enough for the fact that they’re made of fire to pass into myth and legend, I’d say.”

  “Mo—it’s just not possible. Where have they been?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t sound pleased about that fact. “But think about it, for just a moment. A being made of energy—what would they consume? For sustenance?”

  She shrugged uncomfortably; conjecture had never been one of Jane’s strong suits. I wished the Preacher were here. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, but it didn’t sound good. “More energy, I suppose,” she said. “That’s the only reason anyone consumes anything, really.”

  “And what do we call the transmission of energy, in wave or particle form? In organic biology, the energy we consume is called ‘caloric’; in a being made of energy, though, it—”

  “Mo, this really isn’t time for a goddamned physics—”

  “Radiation. I’m saying it eats radiation.”

  That bit I understood. “It eats pulse radiation,” I said, the implications making my head spin. “That’s how—the warplanes, on Kandriad, the nuclear blast—that’s how they were all possible. Because that fucking thing ate the pulse radiation that stopped the tech from working.”

  “Okay. Maybe. Maybe that tracks,” Jane said. If it did, it was . . . a complication, to put it mildly. What were we going to do, chain the asshole to some Barious factory to try and see if it would start working again? Pushing past that idea, though, Jane leaned forward in her chair. “It’s still a fucking leap to call it a Cyn.”

  “Which is more likely? That it’s the long-lost seventeenth species, the one we know was different, on a basic, bedrock molecular level, than all the others? Or that it’s some new being, discovered or somehow manifested in this dark age we live in?”

  “All right—time the fuck out.” I rapped on the table to get their attention. “Back up. Remember that I didn’t grow up with any of this nonsense—”

  “Neither did we, Esa,” Jane said, something almost amused about the tilt of her mouth. “The Cyn have been legend since long before I—or even Mo—was ever born.”

  “Still, you know what they are, theoretically, at least. Sho and I”—I gestured to Sho, who had just wheeled in, parking his chair at the edge of the table and listening in with interest—“we’ve got no clue what the fuck you’re even talking about.”

  Jane took a breath, then nodded. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” She looked over to Mo. “Where to start?” she asked.

  “At the beginning,” he replied. “In the Golden Age, there were fifteen species, all of whom reached space flight and hyperdrive technology at roughly the same time, ‘same’ here having a relatively broad definition. Despite the fact that they all evolved independently, many have argued for the hand of some greater force in that massive cosmological coincidence—if not a deity of some kind, watching over the galaxy, then a progenitor race, like the long-lost species that built the Barious.”

  I frowned. “I’ve always heard that there were seventeen species that made up the sentient beings in the galaxy,” I said. “Why only fifteen?”

  He lifted two fingers, then dropped one down. “I’m not counting the Barious—they were made, as I said. They didn’t evolve. They hibernated, instead, until the Reetha woke them up again. The second species I’m not counting are the Cyn. The outlier that proved how strange the coincidences between the other species were. All the others, even Barious, were carbon based, required the same basic elements to survive—caloric energy, hydration, even the same rough pressure and atmosphere, namely a high oxygen content. The commonalities extended beyond even those: similar gravitational forces on their homeworlds, close to similar orbital periods, day-night cycles, even basic social structures.”

  “So where do the Cyn come in?”

  “As I said—outliers. They evolved at roughly the same rate, in roughly the same instance, cosmologically speaking, as the others, but shared none of the other commonalities. They don’t breathe oxygen; they don’t breathe, period. Their biology is not based on carbon: that much we know for a fact, based on what few records from the time survive. Beyond that, everything else is conjecture and theory.”

  “A wild guess,” Jane added.

  He reached up, rocked his hand back and forth. “A guess, yes, but less wild than ‘educated.’ As you’ve seen”—he nodded at the vids—“the being pursuing you does not share the same commonalities
the other sixteen species do. It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that this creature’s biology is based, again, not on carbon—or even matter—but on energy, instead. Living energy. It’s just a quick hop from there to suggest that they didn’t survive, thrive, on their homeworld—wherever that might have been—by manipulating matter, the way the other species did; instead, they learned to manipulate energy. It wouldn’t be unrealistic for them to have invented fusion before they invented flight. That is why I believe . . . consuming . . . the pulse radiation would be as natural to him as breathing.”

  “It’s also why our weapons don’t affect him,” Jane ran a hand down her face. “Ballistic kinetic energy, the heat energy of lasers, even—when he triggered the grenade I shot at him, back on Kandriad. He just activated the dormant energy of the explosive.”

  “All right, but where the hell did they go?” I asked. “And why?”

  “No one knows,” Mo answered. “Maybe they did, once, but those answers have long been lost. They just . . . vanished from the face of the galaxy.”

  “Marus . . .” Jane shook her head, collected her thoughts. “He used to say that it was a commonly held belief—among historians, I mean, the few people left who studied the old eras, the time before the pulse—that the sect-war era started with something called the Valerina riots, and the Barious suppression that came after. That those were the first shots of the wars, even if they didn’t know it at the time. And maybe they’re right, in the terms of that’s where it began. But the faltering of the Golden Age and the beginning of five hundred years of fighting weren’t actually the same moment; we just tend to conflate them, to think one led directly into the other. Marus said—and he’d know, he studies history, he has to—he said that the riots and the suppression came a century after the actual end of the Golden Age. He said that came when the Cyn abandoned the rest of us.”