The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  Guirrez looked at her strangely, and hummed to herself. “I’ll just put - which is your family name, Ada or Liu?”

  “Liu is my mother’s name.”

  “Uh, okay then, Miss Ada Liu. Hold still for a moment.” The stranger passed an odd device over her body, and it started crackling as it neared Ada’s hand. The one holding the locator stone. Ada’s heart-rate jumped a bit. What was it doing?

  “Ma’am, please show me what you’re holding.”

  Watching the colonial very closely, Ada opened her palm and pinched the inert stone between her two fingers. The officer looked confused as she stared at it, but reached for it. “Can I see this?”

  Ada hesitated, but she could easily get it back if she wanted to. She nodded and handed it over. Guirrez let it float in the air briefly, staring at it, then passed the scanner over it again and mumbled something incomprehensible into the comm devices on her head. Her eyes flicked between Ada and the locator stone, and after a moment she nodded, closing her fist around the stone.

  “I’m going to have to quarantine this -”

  Ada snapped. “What? Fuck you. Give it back.”

  There was commotion all around her, suddenly, as the customs officers started repositioning themselves. Reaching to their belts. Guirrez kept a stern face. “This… rock, is broadcasting some kind of signal. We need to make sure it won’t -”

  “Fuck off. Give it back. ”

  Guirrez pointed at the admirals with one hand. “Talk to the admiralty, they can make sure you get it -”

  Ada reached for the mental muscles coded into her back, squeezing time to a tiny trickle of grains of sand through a closed fist. Infinitely slow. She was not far from this human, from her locator stone. But moving like this, without gravity, was awkward.

  The handrails branched all over the ceiling, though, providing a great deal of purchase. She quickly called up a seeing eye of code and pointed it all around her. There was a crook in the handrails she could use as leverage. She was close enough.

  She let go of time, its full force returning in a rush, and kicked off from the handrail behind her, swinging her fist straight at Guirrez’ face. Her fist connected with an audible crunch, blood splattered, and suddenly the soldier was screaming.

  Ada slowed time again and saw the locator stone floating out of her hand as the colonial retracted it to grip her face.

  She let time move again and snatched the stone from the air, and suddenly something electric connected with her thigh. There was an irritating tingling sensation, but her suit reacted by flashing a loud mental alert in her head, drawing her attention to the left, where somebody was pointing some kind of weapon at her. She slowed time again, stretched dark tendrils of code out from her hands, and in moments that felt like minutes she coded disintegration sigils on all of the weapons of those present. As time flowed back to its regular speed, the weapons crumbled to dust and fragments in the guards’ hands.

  The metal dust, then, started expanding outwards. More people started screaming.

  “Suction! Emergency suction!”

  Red lights flashed. Ada watched for a split second of confusion as everybody brought their hands to their mouths, then understood - she had turned the guns to clouds of metallic dust, but without gravity to pull them down they could float anywhere. Including into people’s lungs.

  She slowed time and etched a force sigil into the air in front of her, aiming straight at herself, and as it burst in real-time it launched her back into the depths of the ship, away from the colonials and the clouds of rapidly expanding metallic dust.

  A machine started whirring, and suddenly the dust and the floating droplets of Guirrez’ blood were sucked away by a wind tugging at the hair and clothes of everyone present. They looked scared, mouths covered, and it dawned on Ada that she had done something an order of magnitude more dangerous than she had anticipated.

  “I - I’m sorry, I didn't think -”

  Sanako was behind them, holding up her hands and shouting. “Ada, wait! Stop!”

  People were swarming around the woman she had punched, glancing back at her fearfully. Ada clunch to the handrails in the ceiling, one hand extended towards the exit, watching them. Watching for signs they were going to attack her.

  They left her alone, though, three of them working together to haul Guirrez out of the adjacent chamber and deeper into the station beyond. The metallic dust was gone, now, and she heard a great deal of shouting and arguing in the station. Then, at some signal from Felisha, Sanako gingerly floated herself over along the handrails, stopping outside of arm’s length of Ada. She looked terrified, and spoke slowly.

  “Ada - it’s okay. We won’t do anything. We just need you to come with us.”

  “You won’t do anything?” That sounded unlikely. “What, until we land on the planet?”

  “Not like that. It’s complicated, Ada, but right now you’re safe. Just don’t hurt anybody.”

  “She tried to take my… my things.”

  “Ada, you broke her face.”

  Ada blanched. What? She was a coder, not a warrior - she couldn’t punch that hard. She had hit plenty of people before, and never done more than bruise them. “What do you mean?”

  “The - the bones in her face. The medic says they looked broken.”

  Ada stared at her right hand, her pale golden skin still bloody from the punch. She felt nothing - no sting, no bruise. Come to think of it, it felt more like she had rammed a rock into a tomato than connected with someone’s bones. “Holy shit.”

  “Ada - please just follow me. We need to get you down to the planet. And don’t - whatever you did to the tasers, don’t ever do that again without gravity. It’s very dangerous.”

  She looked past Sanako to the customs people, some of whom were coughing. Had they inhaled anything? They were being taken away, one and all, and Ada saw the doctor Cheren tending to one of them.

  Ada realised, in a flash, that she was incredibly dangerous to these humans. To these colonials. She wasn’t like them - she knew it, and they knew it. She wondered if they were even human. She wondered if they saw her as human. “Sanako?”

  The ensign blinked. “Yes?”

  “What am I? To you?”

  Sanako’s eyes shifted left and right, as though searching for answers. She sighed. “You’re scary, Ada. I don’t know what you are. But I want to help.” She extended a hand. “I know you mean well, and that this is confusing. Come on. Let’s get to solid ground.”

  So that was how it was going to be. She took a deep breath and nodded, stowing the locator stone back into a pocket near her breast. She needed to figure out what had happened to Earth and then get out of here. Whatever this Union was, it was alien to her and she was alien to it. If she stayed here too long, it was going to end badly for one of them.

  She followed Sanako across the ceiling rails, and when she arrived in the station something triggered the ship doors to close. Most of the other humans had disappeared. She heard loud shouting in the next room, echoes of words she didn’t understand. Zygomatic fractures. Pneumoconiosis. Lacerations. Ambulance.

  When they reached Senjat and Felisha, the admiral almost lunged for her, swinging over across the handrails and glaring her angrily in the face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? We have the courtesy to lift you off your godforsaken planet and -”

  Ada held up a palm, just to get him to shut up, but he flinched and pushed himself away from her, knocking his back into the handrails in an attempt to escape. For all his bluster, he was scared of her. That was a satisfying realization.

  She shifted her eyes between Felisha and Senjat. “What’s your fucking problem? This thing?” She patted her suit, where the locator stone lay hidden. “This is mine. Don’t take my stuff . Is that really that hard to understand? What kind of a civilization do you live in?”

  Senjat was livid. “You earthling, I don’t know what you -”

  This man was a leader of the Union army? Fuck hi
m. She had had enough of this. Ada swung towards him across the handrails, squaring her shoulders and staring down at him, her hair swishing ahead of her and framing him in a tangle. “I have killed older and stronger things than you, you miserable piece of -”

  Suddenly Felisha appeared beside her and thrust her hands between them, holding them apart. “Hold on now. I’m on the line with the Presidency. Admiral, he’s waiting.”

  Senjat’s face changed, but he still scowled. “Fine. Derksen, you take care of this. I’m not taking the elevator with this freak.”

  As he moved away through the station, Felisha turned to look at Ada, and her face was stern. “Listen. On Earth. Did you have any leaders?”

  Ada shook her head. “Nobody leads me. I’m not that kind of person.”

  “I mean politically.”

  Ada still didn’t know what politics meant. “I don’t know.”

  Felisha sighed. “King? Emperor? Chief? President? Chancellor? Duke?” She blinked. “Queen of the bloody Amazons?”

  Ada didn’t understand most of those words. “I don’t have a leader.”

  Felisha rolled her eyes. “Well the Union has two. We call them presidents, and the human president wants to meet you. Against our better judgement.”

  “He leads all… what was it, Sanako?” She stared at the ensign. “How many people?”

  “Nineteen billion.” She nodded. “Yes, Ada, he’s very important.”

  She considered it. If a man could get nineteen billion people to follow him, somehow, there must be something impressive about him. It was rare enough for cities to have leaders, let alone anything larger than that. It was a rare and special person who could rally thousands to her cause.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll meet with this leader.” She looked at Felisha. “But stop trying to take things from me. I have little enough as it is.”

  Felisha nodded. “Not after what you just pulled. The wounded are going down in the elevator first, so we’ll have to wait. You’re testing people’s patience, Ada Liu.”

  “You’re testing mine.”

  Felisha scowled and shunted herself away across the ceiling, leaving Ada alone with Sanako. She turned and looked at the ensign, who seemed utterly bewildered and more than a little afraid. Ada looked at her, and it didn’t escape her understanding that Sanako was a minor character in the entire operation. The poor woman had nothing to do with anything, and was just doing as told. It was easier, for some reason, for Ada to feel sympathy and guilt towards her than towards the others.

  She reached out a hand, tentatively, and grasped Sanako’s forearm. “Look, I know I’m making this difficult for you. I’m sorry. I know it’s not your fault.”

  The ensign nodded, and seemed to swallow some of her anxiety. “Thank you, Ada. I’m sorry, I know this must be very… overwhelming.”

  Ada frowned. It sounded like she had suggested Ada might be overwhelmed, but she wasn’t a child and didn’t have the technophage. Maybe she meant it metaphorically. “I guess so. Will it get… quieter?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so.” She glanced down again, then back up. “You miss her, don’t you?”

  Ada felt the weight of the locator stone near her chest. “Sort of. Yes. I was… hoping to spend more time with her.”

  The other woman nodded. “What’s her name?”

  “Isavel. Valdéz.”

  She laid a hand on Ada’s shoulder. “What else do you miss about Earth?” She pointed to one of the windows, where the great icy planet stretched out beneath them. “Maybe we can find something in Daneer that will make you feel more at home.”

  “I miss how simple it was.” Ada sighed. She missed romping through the forest, blowing open ancient ruins, always knowing something new was on the horizon. “You could go places, do things, never ask anybody. If you got into trouble you either fix it or you deal with people or you leave. Here… I feel like there are so many rules. Expectations. Ways of doing.”

  Sanako frowned for a little before speaking. “Maybe you’d like to go to the countryside. The, uh, wilderness. Lots of open space, not many people. There aren’t many small towns in most regions, just cities, farmland, and wilds. Do you like animals?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” She rubbed her head, briefly floating in midair without the handrail. “We’ll see. Will people leave me alone once we’re on the planet?”

  Sanako pursed her lips and sighed. “I don’t think so, not yet. A lot of people will want to meet you, Ada. Nobody has heard from Earth in a thousand years. Nobody’s been able to get close without the AI on that station shooting them. It’s a mystery.”

  Ada nodded, pressing back against the bulkhead. “It’s a mystery to me too.”

  Chapter 3

  When the elevator finally came back up for them, the only people left in the anchor station were Ada, Sanako, Felisha, and a few straggling human crewmembers. As everyone filed into the elevator the colonials kept a healthy distance from Ada, as though she might suddenly attack without provocation. They understood so little.

  T he space elevator itself was less impressive than the one on Earth, boxy and clunky like every other piece of colonial technology. As it descended and gravity asserted itself, she looked out the window, her gaze resting on the planet’s slowly welcoming wispy atmosphere, eyes picking out more and more details as they got closer.

  Freyja. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but she had certainly expected something more alien than this. A broad river cut through pale bluish-green steppes pocked with round lakes. The river suddenly vanished into a huge metallic lattice of rectangular spires that spread across the ground directly below them. That, she surmised, must be Daneer - the galaxy’s most ridiculously overpopulated city.

  Several smooth minutes into the descent, the towers of Daneer began to rise all around them. They were tall and greyish, more rudimentary echoes of what she knew from Hive or Glass Peaks. Vehicles zipped between the towers, small craft that looked nothing like the ships Ada had seen in orbit. The city floor was surprisingly grey, too - there were no weeds, no vines, only carefully-manicured greenery along roofs, balconies, and broad public spaces. Everything else was vast stonework plazas, and dark streets alive with machine movement. It didn’t look like a very lived-in place.

  As they approached the surface anchor, Ada glanced at the others in the elevator. Sanako was standing close, watching her out of the corner of her eye, but the rest were clustered around Felisha along the opposite wall. It still baffled Ada that she was able to punch so hard. Or - more likely - that the colonials were so frail. What was wrong with them?

  The elevator clunked to rest, doors snapping open. Dark-clad guards with weapons that looked more like guns waited just outside, eyeing Ada suspiciously. To their credit, though, they didn’t approach her. Unarmed humans and mirrans in pale blue clothing appeared next, flanking a male human in a dark blue suit. He was as old as many of the colonials, grey starting to eat away the roots of his hair, and he reminded her a fair bit of hoary old Elder Tan. By the body language of everyone around him, she assumed he was some kind of leader.

  Felisha stepped forward, and beckoned her over. “President Niu, this is Ada Liu, of Earth. Ada, this is President of the Colonial Union Alan Niu.”

  They were forgetting her titles again. She stepped forward, towards his open right hand, and grasped his forearm. “Ada Liu, Arbiter of the Gods, First Sorceress of Earth.”

  He blinked, in a kindly amused sort of way, and glanced at Felisha before glancing at her hand. “In the Union we shake hands. Like this.” He drew his arm out and grasped her hand, gently shaking it up and down. It was an awkward and silly motion, but if that was what they did here, so be it. She gripped his hand and shook it as well, and was quietly pleased to see him wince. “Although with a grip like that, I can see why earthlings might not do the same. Pleased to meet you, Sorceress.”

  She smiled inadvertently at his choice of address. “And you, President.”

  Felisha
continued. “This is Ensign Sanako Oshimi. She has been Ada’s handler since we picked her up on Earth. Under the circumstances, sir, she’s done a fine job.”

  The president glanced at Sanako with a raised eyebrow. “Regardless of what other officers will say, is what I’m hearing. Very well; Ensign Oshimi, thank you for your service.”

  Sanako looked flustered to be meeting the man. Odd; hadn’t she implied she followed him? Ada didn’t find him overly impressive, though she could tell he wasn’t completely devoid of charisma. Something grandfatherly, perhaps. She kept an eye on him, just in case it was a ruse, and he looked up at her again and smiled.

  “Miss Sorceress, if you’ll follow me, there are a great many people eager to meet you. They’re getting restless; you’re a very intriguing guest.”

  While most of the ship’s crew moved off through inconspicuous side doors, Alan led her along, and she heard Sanako and Felisha following behind her. Where to? These large corridors presumably led to the main entrance, but everything was so… empty.

  Then somebody opened a door, bright white light poured into her eyes, and when her vision had finally adapted they were outside, in Daneer. Reflections of the sun bouncing off glassy windows stabbed at Ada’s eyes, and she tried to shield them with her hands. Something was churning across the vast open plaza before them, something multicolored and uneven that seemed to stretch all the way to the nearest towers. There was a deafening sound coming from it.

  What the hell was she looking at?

  Oh, gods. Those were people.

  Was this what a million people looked like?

  A voice boomed across the square. Alan? Maybe. She couldn’t focus.

  Her muscles tensed as she stared at the incomprehensible crowd out ahead of her, mirrans and humans of all imaginable colours. Banners with words hung in the air above them, papery reeds jutting out of this swamp of heads, swaying in a breeze she couldn’t feel. Drones buzzed overhead, dozens nearby and hundreds further afield, dark mechanical eyes fixed on her. Everywhere she looked seemed so densely packed she could barely make out any details.