A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “He’s talking again,” Jane told me, still leaning against my shoulder, slightly. She frowned, even through the pain. “You really ought to have your comms on.”

  “Why the fuck would I care what he has to say?” I growled. “He hurt Marus, Jane. Bad. He’s already slipped into cort.”

  “I know, Esa; I saw.” She was holding her comm nub as she spoke, so the Cyn couldn’t hear us. “Javier, too—I saw him fall. Bolivar checked his vitals—he’s alive, but he’s busted up. A few broken limbs, a concussion. If the Cyn figures that out and goes after him, tries to finish him off, we’re going to have to follow. That’s why you should listen; we need to keep him up top.”

  I growled again—a mean rumbling sound I could actually feel in my chest, too afraid and angry to actually make words—but I triggered my comms back on all the same.

  “—purity of my people, the purity of our beliefs, and we knew one day that a cataclysm would come, that your kind would only ever race toward your own destruction. But the old gods could no longer protect us, not from the new galaxy you had created. So we found a new god, ready to manifest, to be. And as she commands, so do I obey.”

  “You’ve killed thousands of people chasing me down,” I screamed at him through the water. “Do you even know why?”

  “Because she commanded it.” He had stood again, his form complete, rebuilt from its passage through the downpour. “My salvation lies in her deliverance.”

  “Any salvation that requires the lives of innocents isn’t fucking worth it,” Jane told him, glaring across the open space, through the sprinklers’ wash. “It isn’t salvation at all. You’re being used. Like every other goddamned idiot in the sect wars; you’re no different. You were handed a gun and told the only difference between right and wrong was that your side was one and your enemies the other. And you never thought to question that because it meant everything you did was right, and that horrible thing at the heart of you—the thing that enjoys doing what you do—it meant you could indulge that thing, that you could fulfill your psychotic need for bloodshed, secure in your moral superiority.” She shook her head. “It’s not your obsession with this ‘goddess’ that’s made you a monster, and deep down inside, you know that. She just gave you a reason to let the monster out.”

  I held my own comms silent. “Are we entirely sure that this ‘goddess’ isn’t just in his head?” I asked her.

  “Oh, not at all,” Jane replied, just to me. “I think he’s just a fucking lunatic, but pointing that out isn’t likely to help.”

  “And baiting him is?”

  Instead of answering, she looked up at the sprinklers; one by one, they were starting to shut off. Whether that was because the fire was “out,” or because the pipes above were just running dry—after all, a not-insignificant portion of the station’s water supply was now flooding the tram tunnels we’d taken to get here—we didn’t have much longer. The Cyn was moving now, stalking back and forth just on the other side of the falling water, waiting for his moment to strike.

  “We will return what you started,” he swore at us, discs of energy forming, then dissipating in the palms of his hands—the Cyn equivalent of clenching and unclenching his fists, I supposed. “The goddess’s call grows stronger and stronger, day by day; the return is inevitable. It will be summoned from the beyond, and it will pull the organic species back to where they belong. In the filth, in the dark, huddled against the return of the light.” He spat the last word, even though he had no mouth to spit with.

  “What the fuck is he even talking about?” I asked Jane, but she had an expression on her face, a terrible one, something that went beyond the pain of her injuries or fear for Javier and Marus.

  “The pulse,” she whispered. “He’s talking about calling back the pulse.”

  Of course he fucking was.

  His species was immune to pulse radiation—could subsist on it, if our conjectures were correct. The Cyn had fled civilized space over some long-forgotten disagreement with organic beings; apparently, they—or at least whatever splinter sect this asshole belonged to—had spent the last several hundred years convincing themselves they were an inherently superior species to the life forms they’d left behind, even though it was the Cyn who had fled, not us. It was frighteningly plausible that the coming of the pulse must have seemed like an act of their new gods—punishing those who had driven the Cyn away, rewarding his people with a goddamned banquet of strange radiation—and so now, at the whim of his “goddess,” he was gathering gifted children, just like the Justified. Only rather than training their gifts to protect worlds against the return of the pulse, he was planning on using them to hasten its return instead.

  I didn’t know if that was possible; the metaphysics of the pulse were well beyond me. But even if it wasn’t, he was clearly willing to kill a whole hell of a lot of people just to get at the gifted, just to try. Except apparently I’d proved myself too recalcitrant for his liking, and now I was just another target to be wiped out, so that the Justified couldn’t use my gifts in defending against the very threat he wanted to summon from the black space beyond the edge of the galaxy.

  It was studying the pulse that had exposed my pregnant mother to the concentrated dose of radiation that had given me my gifts; it was because of the Justified’s role in the pulse that the Pax had come to our doorstep. And now this. Everything always came back to that one fucking moment, a century gone and still defining the lives of every single sapient creature on every settled world spinning.

  We will return what you started. That’s what he’d said. Had he just meant the organic species? No—and if he’d thought his gods were behind the pulse, he wouldn’t have said it like that either. Which meant he knew it was the Justified that had brought the pulse into being, and he still thought it was the will of his goddess. Because he was a goddamned maniac.

  “Water’s almost gone,” Jane told me. “Did you get your weapon rigged up? The one you think you can hurt him with?”

  “I did,” I said, “but I’ll need a clear shot, and I’ll need to close the distance.”

  She cast a quick glance behind us, at the mechanical detritus that littered the wide-open space between the landing where the Cyn stood and the wide window showing the bright blue clouds of the gas giant outside—clouds that had risen closer since the last time I looked, the station’s slow descent inevitable at this point. “Pull back,” she said. “Find cover back there somewhere. I’ll draw him in. We’ll ambush the motherfucker.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t have anything you can hit him with,” I told her. “Just let me—”

  “Not negotiable, Esa. Schaz,” she raised her voice, “kill the lights.”

  Immediately, the water-soaked central area was plunged into darkness—the only illumination at all was coming from the incandescent Cyn himself, and the vaguely luminous clouds of the atmosphere behind and beneath us, reflecting the glow of the distant star. Trapped in the darkness between those two blue poles—bright azure radiance from the Cyn, a softer, turquoise bloom from the gas giant that, combined with the water still falling from the sprinklers, made it seem like the entirety of that side of the station had sunk beneath a sea—I had no choice but to follow Jane’s lead, and I slunk back toward the heavy detritus of the factory area as Jane did the same.

  Out the wide window, the storms rising up out of the planet’s atmosphere coursed just under the misty surface, bolts of lighting bathing the machinery in brief brighter bursts of illumination.

  In the other direction, the last of the sprinklers cut off, nothing refracting the light of the Cyn now—our enemy’s path to us was clear.

  Jane and the Cyn squared up against each other, Jane holstering my pistol somewhat awkwardly in her belt, and drawing a knife instead. What the hell she thought she was going to do with that, I had no idea. She was beaten, she was injured, she was still bleeding, even through the application of medical foam, but all the same, she faced down the glowing zealot who
thought he was serving a god, and she grinned at the motherfucker.

  “You want to get to her, you go through me,” she said, raising her blade. “That’s the deal; that’s how this works. Simplest thing in the universe.”

  The Cyn formed those discs again in his hands; this time, instead of fading out, they stayed in place, spinning and radiant and almost certainly deadly. “Death,” he corrected her, his voice still a whisper in my ear. “Death is the simplest thing in the universe.”

  “I know. That’s what I just said.” She held the knife forward and beckoned him with its edge. “Come and get yours, you son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Cyn lunged forward, going from his motionless stance to a dead run in nothing flat; Jane faded backward as he flung his energy discs toward her, his wrists snapping at the last possible instant to make the projectiles curve, their flight paths harder to predict. She dodged them anyway, ducking just slightly to the left as one carved through the air barely an inch from her face, then vaulting to the right, over the second. She was firing her—my—handgun before she’d even landed, emptying the magazine so fast I was afraid it would jam; she knew the bullets wouldn’t hurt him, but it didn’t matter—it wasn’t harm she was after, it was distraction.

  “Scheherazade, now!” She screamed the words even as she scrambled for cover behind one of the larger pieces of silent machinery—not cover from the Cyn, but on the other side instead, cover from the wide window at the back of the massive room.

  A shadow, through the turbulent light cast by the twisting clouds of the storm, and then Schaz was there, just outside, hovering in place, her guns spinning up. “Stay away from my crew, you giant electric son of a bitch,” she said—almost politely—and then she was firing.

  She used ballistic rounds first: shattered the window entirely, and there was a roaring rush of air as the atmosphere inside the atrium and the atmosphere of the planet tried to reach an equilibrium. The Cyn was pulled forward, closer to Scheherazade, off-balance for just a moment, and that moment was all Schaz needed to swap off the machine guns and onto her forward lasers, the stuttering fire brilliant and bright as it seared crimson through the room and punched right through the Cyn, drowning the interior of the factory level in fire.

  She’d reset her laser banks to the same vibrational frequency as the energy that formed the Cyn’s “body”—the same trick I’d been trying to use, except instead of the relatively mild output of my intention shields, she was hitting him with a ship-to-ship laser battery, enough energy in those bursts of light and heat to tear through blast-resistant hulls.

  The lasers punched through the Cyn, again and again—I hoped that, wherever Javier was below us, he wasn’t getting charred by the reflected blasts hitting the far side of the atrium—and the glowing figure stumbled to one knee, but he still wasn’t down.

  “Schaz, he’s got some kind of organ, at the center of him!” I called out. “Hit him there, target the—”

  It was too late. The Cyn was already reaching out, through Schaz’s firing pattern. She blasted his arm off, and it just re-formed: her big guns didn’t have the kind of keen accuracy needed to target the one tiny piece of his mass we needed to hit. We were lucky she was accurate enough to mostly contain her fire to an area around the Cyn. Even as the lasers tore through his energetic flesh, I could feel him reach out, the sensation uncomfortably close to how it felt when I reached out with my telekinesis.

  “Schaz, get out of here!” I screamed.

  She reacted immediately, trained and programmed to respond to commands from Jane or me in an instant; the barrage cut off and she was gone, ascending up past the upper limit of the window, and just in time, too. If the Cyn could have forced his way through her shields—and that was exactly what he’d been trying to do—he could have grabbed hold of her fusion core, triggered an explosion inside her bulkheads, exactly the same thing he’d done to the dead Barious who hung from the tree in the atrium except on an entirely different scale: the blast likely would have killed all of us, possibly even the Cyn, though I doubt he would have cared.

  That must have been what he’d done on Kandriad: if there had been a dormant fusion reactor in the factory complex, it would have given him exactly the fuel he would have needed to trigger the nuclear detonation, once he ate the pulse around it and brought it back online.

  Still, Schaz’s attack had served its purpose: he was weakened now, piecing himself back together again, the torn shreds of his luminescent flesh twisting like radiant ribbons that swam through the darkness as they re-formed his being, and his recovery was going much more slowly than the re-formation we’d witnessed after we’d caught him in the sprinkler system’s deluge. The glow from his limbs and chest was significantly less bright than it had been, almost cloudy in places; however it was that he created the energy that made up his form, it wasn’t limitless—nothing was.

  Jane didn’t wait for him to put himself back together. She lunged.

  She was going for the organ in the center of his chest; we could see it again, just the edge of it, but his energetic “skin” was sealing around it, fast, and she knew her window of attack was limited. I pushed off the ruined—and slightly on fire—piece of machinery I’d been using for cover, trying to reach her, to join her, to help her, but I had been significantly closer to the window when it shattered than either of them had, and the rush of the station’s atmosphere being sucked outside had pulled me far out of position.

  I wasn’t going to make it in time.

  The Cyn didn’t have a weapon; he didn’t need one. Schaz had done too much damage for him to spend his energy forming projectile attacks, but his very limbs were his weapons, and Jane had no way of blocking them as she closed—her knife would have just passed right through. The two of them were locked into close-quarters combat, Jane evading the Cyn’s blows by ducking or turning or simply shifting her center of gravity just enough to let his attacks pass her by, the Cyn laser-focused on the edge of the knife in her hand. He knew that was the only way she could hurt him, that anything else she threw was just a distraction, trying to open him up for a killing blow.

  There was no way I could close the gap between me and the two combatants as they danced around each other in a ballet of motion and light; I was just too far away. That meant I had a choice: I could draw my pistol, try to target the strange organ in his chest myself, or I could reach out with my teke, try to grab the Cyn directly—a risk, but I’d proved that I could hold his projectiles, so maybe I could hold him, rip open his wounds, give Jane a better angle of attack. Taking the shot with the handgun meant aiming at a target smaller than a human head, a target constantly in motion, and Jane would be well within my field of fire: if I missed, I might not just miss the Cyn, I might put the bullet right through her.

  I chose, left my pistol hanging under my arm, and reached out with my gifts instead.

  I knew as soon as I touched him: I had chosen poorly.

  If grabbing the Cyn’s projectiles had been like holding a searing-hot coal in my hand, this was like plunging my entire arm into a vat of molten metal; there was just too much energy, an entire fusion reactor’s power output contained within his form. The backlash was a physical thing—I was thrown backward, and only smashing into one of the abandoned pieces of machinery stopped me from being flung out the gaping window Schaz had shattered with her barrage. I hit, hard, and dropped to the deck, barely conscious.

  Conscious enough to watch, though. I was coughing red droplets of blood onto the wet floor, well beyond doing anything useful; farther away from the fight than when I’d started, and in no shape to be of any help anyway, but I could still see them, their combat like a play of light and shadow as Jane tried to cut open the being who shone like a star.

  She was ducking and weaving through his flurry of defensive blows, the melee seeming almost like some form of obscure theater: neither of them making contact, just feinting and sweeping through the darkness lit only by the glow
of the Cyn’s own luminous skin. Jane was holding the knife in a backhanded grip tight against her chest, looking for her moment: when it came, it would come fast, there would be a split second, less, where she’d be able to exploit it. So she fought, and she watched, and she waited.

  It came.

  She saw the opening even through the lashing glare of his limbs: he’d extended a punch just a hair too far, shifted the crackling light of his body to do so, creating a gap in the energy field of his chest that revealed the pulsating organ inside, the thing that was neither heart nor mind but might have been something of both. Hesitation was never part of Jane’s makeup—she struck as soon as it was visible, folding the motion into the sweep of her own defensive movement, as if that single attack had been what she’d been building toward all along. The knife plunged into his chest, sparks flying off the blade as it entered the energy that made up the Cyn’s body, diving for the beating thing at the heart of him.

  It missed the strange organ by millimeters, or less, as he shifted just slightly to the right.

  And she was open to a counterattack.

  He hit her, hard, right in the chest. I think he was trying to punch his fist right through her, but she still had her intention shield raised; just like when the Cyn had hit Javier, the shield converted the attack into kinetic force instead, but there was still a hell of a lot of force, and Jane went flying backward, toward the shattered window and the storms beyond.

  I tried to grab her, but she was just moving too fast, and before I could reach out with my hand or my teke she was gone, sailing out into nothing, hanging for just a moment in the upper atmosphere before vanishing into the lightning-laced clouds of the gas giant below.

  “Schaz, grab her!” I screamed, praying that Scheherazade could reach her in time. If she couldn’t, Jane would have a long, long, long way to fall.

  I saw Schaz dive past the window; she plunged into the azure clouds where Jane had disappeared, the churning storms of the atmosphere now nearly level with the tilting, sinking space station. As the swirling fog swallowed the ship up, there was a brief instant where I could still see Scheherazade’s form, illuminated by a flash of lightning that struck her shields. Then nothing.