A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “I saw it, on the second level,” Javier said. “I’ll go.”

  “Be careful,” Jane told him.

  He grinned. “Quiet as a mouse,” he promised.

  I watched him go, stepping out of the lab as he descended again past the tree of corpses, then I turned; I didn’t want to look at that macabre sight anymore. That left me staring across the factory floor and out the wide window instead, to the sea of azure fog below as it rolled past. There was a storm building, circular patterns rotating faster and faster in the atmosphere, like looking down at a whirlpool—arcs of lightning flashed across the surface of the mist, a web of electrical discharge jumping from cloud to cloud.

  Jane came to stand by me, put her hand on my back. “You okay?” she asked.

  I shook my head mutely, rubbing my arms, still shivering from the drenching I’d taken as we’d made our way through the flooded tram tunnel. When we’d been pushing through the rest of the station, I didn’t have to think about it, the fact that this lab, our goal, was where the research my parents had been doing had killed them, the very science that had given me my gifts poisoning their bodies and stealing away their lives. If parents were meant to protect their children, my mother had done so in the most literal way possible, her womb filtering out the lethal dose of pulse radiation that was slowly killing her, while still leaving my own physiology irrevocably changed.

  Had she wanted to get pregnant? They’d kept it a secret from the Preacher; she’d told me that much. Was I the product of a long-deferred wish? An accident? Some kind of fucked-up research project, my mother intending to expose herself and her fetus to the radiation she was studying? My father hadn’t been in the holoprojector’s imagery, the team members whose recorded visages greeted new visitors to the lab: there hadn’t been a human male among them. Had he not been a member of this project? If so, why had he been exposed to the same levels of radiation my mother had? Maybe he just hadn’t been high-ranking enough to be displayed as the face of the project; maybe he’d been a maintenance tech or the janitor or something, and had only been poisoned when the research had gone wrong and he’d tried to save my mother. That was romantic enough. I could almost even believe it.

  “No, Jane,” I answered her question. “I’m pretty fucking far from okay.”

  She nodded, like that was about what she had expected. One thing I liked about Jane: she wasn’t about to pitch me some platitudes, I wasn’t going to have to listen to “time heals all wounds,” or “that which doesn’t kill us defines us,” or “how we’re born is not who we are.” Of course it didn’t, of course it does, and it sure has a fucking impact. But Jane knew that just as well as I did, and she knew that I knew, and she wasn’t about to try and convince me otherwise just because I was sad. I was standing within the laboratory that killed my parents; of course I was sad; what the hell else would I be?

  Instead, she just stood beside me, her hand on my back, just a presence: there if I needed her. There just to remind me that she was there. Sometimes—most times, maybe—words weren’t the comfort people wanted them to be, but just physically being nearby, being with someone, that was what actually helped.

  I appreciated it.

  “Javier got the servers up and running,” Schaz told us over the comms. “I’m in.”

  Jane rubbed my back, then returned to the medbay; I followed, despite being pretty much done with this place. All of a sudden, I didn’t really care why the Cyn had come here, what he’d butchered all these people for—Jane had been right, and so had Mo. He’d done it because he was fucking crazy, a zealot and a lunatic: there was no other explanation that would change those base parameters. He’d done it because the voices in his head had told him to, and he thought those voices were his god, and that hearing them made him a god, and so the lives of others meant nothing next to his own desires.

  Mo’s faith had driven him to search the cosmos for a voice he couldn’t make out any longer, a voice that came from inside himself rather than from some distant figure always just out of reach. This motherfucker had always heard that voice loud and clear; he just hadn’t understood that it wasn’t God at all, just his own madness.

  “What have you got?” Jane asked Schaz. I knew the answer wouldn’t be anything I wanted to hear.

  I was right. “It’s . . . I don’t think it’s a good idea to—”

  “Just tell us, Schaz,” Jane sighed. “We know it’s going to be bad.”

  “It’s bad, yes, but what I’m saying is—”

  “She doesn’t want to say it where I can hear,” I said suddenly; after three years, I knew when Schaz was being evasive, mainly because she was crap at it.

  “Esa, sweetheart, that’s not—”

  Jane was looking at me when she spoke. “Just say it, Scheherazade,” she commanded her ship. “She can take it.”

  Schaz sighed. “He was after her,” she said.

  Jane scowled; that wasn’t much of an answer. “What does that mean? He’s been after her this whole time, or at least, after gifted kids like her; it was something he learned inside those servers that put him on that path. That’s what we’re looking for: what painted the target on her back?”

  “That’s not—I mean he was after her even before he came here. I don’t know why. But what he took: it was her.”

  Something cold dripped from the top of my spine to puddle at its base. I’d known it wasn’t going to be something good. “When I was . . . born,” I said softly. “They took a genetic profile of me, didn’t they?”

  “That would be standard hospital obstetrics procedure,” Marus nodded. “To tailor your nanotech suite against hereditary diseases and the like.” I’d never actually received that nanotech—like vaccines, a child’s suite of miniature medical machines was implanted in stages across the first few years of their life. Given that by then the Preacher had already taken me and run, all the way to a world where medical nanotech had been pretty much a myth, I hadn’t had mine implanted until I’d been taking my courses on Sanctum, preparing to work as Jane’s trainee and partner while she healed from the injuries she’d taken during the fight with the Pax.

  My eyes fluttered shut; suddenly I didn’t want to be staring at this lab anymore, the medical center where I’d been born as my mother had died. “And that’s what he took,” I whispered. “My genetic profile.”

  “Your profile,” Schaz confirmed, her voice miserable. “Your tissue samples, your genome sequence, and your MRI scans. More. All of the medical information gathered on you after your birth, and there was a lot of it—the doctors here were scientists first, after all, and you were . . . an anomaly.”

  I couldn’t help but ask. “Why?” He was crazy, that’s why.

  “I don’t know. I’m . . . I’m so sorry, Esa. I can’t imagine how . . . invasive it must feel, to know that he has that information.”

  Fuck it. Fuck him. I was more than my biology; I was more than my gifts. I assumed that’s what he had been after—that like the Pax before him, he’d wanted to see if he could copy my abilities somehow, the abilities I hadn’t even known I had yet, that wouldn’t manifest themselves for more than a decade after my birth. His ability to manipulate the energy of his own body was dangerous enough; matched up with telekinesis, he’d be unstoppable.

  But if that had been what he was after, it hadn’t worked. We hadn’t seen him use telekinesis, not once over the past few miserable weeks. So fuck him twice: once for stealing my genome, and once more for being a failure.

  And another couple dozen times for all the lives he’d destroyed.

  “Fine,” I said, nodding, trying to seem assertive. “We know what he was after, and we know he didn’t accomplish shit with it. Can we get the hell out of this place, now?”

  Jane nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “That seems—” She stopped as a low rumble echoed through the lab, strong enough that we could feel it through the decking under our feet. The entire station was vibrating for some ominous reason.

  W
e ducked out of the medlab, staring out the window: sure enough, the view of the storms rising out of the sea of azure fog was listing to one side. Something had just gotten fucked in the station’s orbit.

  Jane touched the comm bud underneath her ear. “Schaz?” she asked.

  “I think we have a visitor,” Schaz replied.

  CHAPTER 11

  What the hell was that?” Javier asked, coming back up the stairs.

  Jane held out a hand to forestall him, still talking to Scheherazade. “Can you see—”

  “I don’t have cameras up throughout the interior, but based on the exterior sensors I do have active—and based on the fact that none of them picked up a craft on approach—I can only guess that a stealthed ship just rammed the station, not far from here. Based on the amount of force with which it hit and the parts of the structure that it displaced—”

  “It’s him,” Jane said.

  “It’s the Cyn,” Schaz agreed.

  “Schaz,” I interrupted. “Did you ever finish running that secondary analysis of the mask I took off the Cyn’s ship? Trying to figure out how to match the . . . the wavelength, the vibrational frequency of his energy signature?”

  “It’s almost done. I’ve had to redistribute some of my processing power—”

  “Fucking distribute it back. I need that frequency, now. How long?”

  “Well, now that I can apply some of Odessa’s dormant RAM to my—”

  “How long?”

  “Five minutes, tops.”

  “Do it.” I cast about; of course none of us carried energy weapons. We were all used to being prepared to fight on pulsed worlds, which meant adding lasers or other energy-firing guns to our arsenals—the sort of thing that would be eaten up by pretty much any level of pulse radiation—would have been rarely useful at best, and we’d all phased them out. Not that those would do any good anyway even if we did have them on hand; outside of a dedicated, fairly advanced armory, something better than what Schaz had on board, we wouldn’t have been able to reprogram their munitions to match the vibrational frequency of the Cyn anyway.

  So where else did we have access to an energy output that we could manipulate, that we could use to—

  Intention shields. Our shielding was a form of energy. But its frequency was set, the day of its installation. It couldn’t be reformatted without—

  Oh, god. I knew what I had to do. I really didn’t want to do it.

  “Do we know where on the station he . . . landed?” Marus was asking. “How much time do we have?”

  “Not far from here, but I’d bet good money that the flooded tramway would be a more difficult hazard for him than it was for you,” Schaz told him. “What with the ‘being made of energy’ and all.”

  “Could we fall back into the river?” Javier asked. “Use it for natural—”

  Jane was already shaking her head. “What happens when you introduce an electrical current to a body of water?” she asked Javier.

  “Oh. Right.” He grinned almost sheepishly.

  The station shook again, the view of the cloudy sea out the curved window seeming to roll. “He is on his way,” Schaz added, somewhat unnecessarily.

  “Marus,” I told the Tyll spy. “I need you.” Oh, I hated this plan. “Jane, Javier—buy us some time. Five minutes. If you can, peel some of his armor off. But don’t, you know—”

  “Don’t get killed.” Javier nodded, checking his shotgun one more time before throwing me a grin. “Don’t worry, Esa—that’s pretty much my theme song.”

  I frowned at him. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s a reference to vid programs, they . . .” He trailed off, then turned to Jane. “Have you really not exposed her to, like, any culture at all? What do you two do during long hyperspace jumps?”

  “We train. And this is not the time,” she hissed back.

  “Just hold him off,” I said to them. “Marus, back into the medlab; now.”

  Jane reached out, caught me by the arm. “You know what you’re doing, right?” she asked me.

  I gave her a wan smile. “No,” I said. “I’m winging it. I am totally out of my depth.”

  “Well, good of you to admit it,” she sighed. “We’ll get you the time you need. I led him on a chase around Valkyrie Rock for nearly an hour; I can buy you five minutes.”

  “In an hour, Odessa Station may well be sunk entirely in the atmosphere and on its way to the bottom of this world’s gravity well,” Schaz reminded her. “The pressure won’t be enough to prevent me from taking off, but this station was never designed to survive any kind of atmospheric descent beyond its current depth. Exposure to much more than the barest of atmospheres and it will begin crushing itself.”

  “Just like the Ishiguro,” Jane said, mostly to herself.

  “God, don’t remind me,” I told her. “Now move!”

  I watched her and Javier just long enough to see them approach the stairwell—Jane speaking low to Javi, likely giving him the benefit of whatever she’d learned in her cat-and-mouse flight from the Cyn back on the asteroid station—and then I turned to Marus, who was waiting patiently, his robe already shed: ready for a fight. “You said something about the medlab?” he asked.

  I nodded, and we both retreated within. I cast about for a moment, digging through the available supplies—overturning trays, pulling open drawers—until I found what I needed; an access port to the station’s systems, otherwise known as Scheherazade, and a single scalpel. I tested the edge of the blade against my thumb, then immediately regretted it, and not just because of the pain: watching the bright line of blood rise up through the surface of my skin was a chilling reminder of what I was about to ask of Marus.

  “You’ve got the steadiest hands of all of us,” I told him, flipping the scalpel and handing it over grip first. “Six fingers and all that.”

  “Esa?” He didn’t like the expression on my face. “What are you about to ask me to do?”

  I took a deep breath, then turned away from him, gripping the edge of the counter as tightly as I could. “I need you to cut open my neck,” I told him. “Peel back the muscle tissue.” Staring at the far wall and trying my damnedest not to anticipate the descent of the scalpel and the feel of it slicing into my body, I took a series of deep breaths, trying to calm myself. Based on the churning in my gut, I was failing pretty miserably. “I need to give Schaz access to the intention shield wired into my brainstem. It’s just at the top of my spine,” I reminded him helpfully, just in case he needed a refresher on human anatomy. “Once you’ve found it, run an access line from the station network port into the shielding unit itself.”

  “You have a plan,” he said quietly. That was the other reason I’d wanted Marus to do this, rather than Javier or Jane—they would have asked questions. So long as Marus thought I knew what I was doing, he’d be willing to follow my lead. He’d give me the benefit of the doubt.

  I hoped I deserved it.

  “I have a plan,” I agreed.

  “Let me find some anesthetic.”

  I shook my head. “We don’t have time, and I don’t know if anesthetic would interfere with my ability to control the shield. We can’t risk it.”

  “Esa—this is going to hurt. A great deal.”

  “I know that. Just—”

  He cut into my flesh with the razor-sharp scalpel. He’d only prompted me to say something—even if that something was about how much pain I was about to be in—so that I had been thinking about my response, rather than concentrating on the sensation of my muscles being parted and the blood that was flowing freely down my back, soaking into my body armor.

  I struggled not to scream; managed to at least choke it down to a whimper. The pain was bad enough, but Jane had taught me how to deal with pain, how to suppress it, or at least drown it out—what really got to me was the feeling of Marus probing with the metal blade of the scalpel inside my body. It made me want to puke.

  My arms were trembling, stru
ggling to hold me up against the counter—a very specific part of me wanted to turn around and fight, because I was under attack, something was causing me pain, and why wasn’t I doing anything about it. I forced that part of me low, into the pit of my stomach; it wasn’t any good, it was of no use, not here, not now.

  Marus kept cutting. The tiled walls of the medbay began to shake and split; a spiderweb of tiny cracks burst free of the mortar and the porcelain, like something had hit the tile from the other side, hard. Marus didn’t pause in his work, but he asked, “Was that the Cyn?”

  “No,” I ground the words out, “that was me.” I needed to keep a tighter grip on my teke, or my autonomic responses were likely to break Marus’s arms in an attempt to stop him from doing what I’d asked him to do. “Keep going.”

  Beneath our feet, the station shook again, and I could hear gunfire; somewhere behind us there was a bright flash, one I could only see reflected in the cracked tile of the wall I was staring intently at. Javier and Jane must have found the Cyn, or the Cyn had found them. Either way, we were running out of time.

  Marus kept cutting.

  CHAPTER 12

  Got it,” Marus said, dropping the scalpel with a clatter and expertly applying gauze and medical tape to the upper and lower extremities of his incision. “I’m wiring you in now.”

  “Schaz, have you got the . . . godfuckmaargghhh.” The sounds that came out of me disintegrated into guttural growling as Marus threaded the cable through my sliced-open skin, past exposed muscle tissue and nerve to the tiny black box at the top of my spine. “Rewire my intention shield,” I panted to Scheherazade when I could speak again, not unclasping my hands from their death grip on the cold counter, not even to wipe away the string of spittle hanging from my lips. “Reformat its vibrational frequency to match the Cyn’s.”

  “Esa, that will—”

  “Fucking do it!”

  The shield was wired directly into my nervous system; that was what let me control it with a thought, what let me control it unconsciously. When I saw an enemy raising their gun toward me, the shield would snap into place, blocking all incoming fire from that direction. In order for that to work, not only did the unit have to “trick” my cerebellum into thinking that it was part of my muscular system, it was also wired directly into my neural pathways—it siphoned off tiny pieces of energy from my own bioelectric field in order to charge.