A bolt secured it. This time, it was on the wrong side.
The Razormen were far too inhuman to curse.
The Sons of the Vanitar and the remaining five Razorman had released Vante from the net, and brought him to the platform.
None of them were restraining him or otherwise impeding his movement. The idea that he could run was a sick joke.
“This is fine,” the woman said. “Let Andrei Kazmer run and swoop to his heart's content. I want him to marinade in the hopelessness of his situation. As soon as he's exhausted, he will gladly surrender himself to capture.”
Vante didn't speak.
It hadn't helped him once with Emil Gokla, and It wouldn't help him with Emil Gokla's underlings .
You just could not talk your way out of an encounter with these people.
“So, did you turn to murder after you met Kazmer,” one of the men asked Vante. “Or did it just come naturally? Birds of a feather, and all that? You must know so much for one so young, and we're eager that you share your knowledge with us. Quite ravenously so, in fact. Emil used to suck your blood. Now, it's your brain that interests us.
In time, they heard the thrumming of wings over the roar of the hovering Adagio.
Nine Razormen landed on the platform in perfect synchronization.
They were a disgusting mess. Chunks of what appeared to be rotting meat clung to their armor. Maggots wriggled in drying pools of slime in every crack.
Nolund Esper gagged on the smell. “Why are there nine of you? Where's B-20?”
“Deceased,” a Razorwoman reported. “Target flew past some sleeping genehacked hybrid dinosaurs, waking them in the process. B-20 did not escape.”
Esper cursed. “So where's Andrei Kazmer?”
“Target escaped through a trapdoor, then sealed it from the other side when we tried to follow. The presence of said genehacked hybrids meant we could not successfully gain access through the door. He is now in an unknown place in Zephyr city.”
The woman looked like she'd sucked a lemon. “Well, isn't this wonderful? What the hell do we do with this, Nolund?”
“I don't know, Zana” he said. “You and Raya worked out this plan. I was advised it was foolproof.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We have the full cooperation of Zephyr City's municipal leaders. We can take the city apart, square by square, looking for him. With all space flights grounded, there's no chance he can escape. It's just a matter of time until he gives himself up to us.”
With terrible avidity, everyone was focused on Vante.
“In the meanwhile,” the tallest among them said, “consider the bird we have in the hand, not the one in the bush.”
“Why don’t you talk to us, boy?” Saldeen Zana said. “You know some things. Where has Andrei Kazmer gone? Does he have an apartment in the city? Is he squatting out of the back of a Dravidian?”
“Idiot,” snapped Nolund Esper. “Now he knows we have zero information, and can waste our time by telling tall tales. The subject should never know how much the interrogator knows. If you’d paid attention to Wilseth, you’d know all this.”
Saldeen glared at him with rancor. “Then you handle this.”
“Gladly. Watch and learn.”
Vante was shivering with fear. He shrunk away, trying to become smaller, as if they might lose him on the ground. His childhood was just a blurred montage reel of street fights and squabbles among his fellow orphans, but he’d never felt the kind of fear he’d felt now, the kind of helplessness.
He’d always been too unimportant for anyone to care this much about him.
He longed for this, just as he’d cursed it in the past.
Nolund Esper retrieved a circular disk from within his pocket. On it was an array of dials and sensors. He tapped the metallic contact plate with his finger, wincing as he did so.
“This is a phobia resonator,” he told the boy. “What are you afraid of? Monsters? The dark?”
You. Vante thought.
“Maybe not much. You spend your days swan-diving above a sea of pure sulfur. But no matter how brave you are, this device knows your fears. It will seek them out, and take you on a journey. Are you ready to go?”
Now Vante tried to run.
His fear-loosened legs immediately tripped, sending him sprawling.
A pair of Razormen hauled him back upright.
He caught sight of a maggot caught between moving plates on one man’s armor, being steadily ground into a paste. He saw its tiny little eyes, staring at him.
Then the phobia resonator was rammed home into his sweat-shiny skin.
For a moment, there was just an icy rush of sensation behind his temples. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Just something.
It was as if a draft had been blown through his mind, evicting all memories and their contents. Now there was a space. A stage. Perhaps an arena, a Roman amphitheater. Dreading what was coming next, he realized that this was a sensorium, a place for his brain to feel things.
Soon, visions filled it.
Emil Gokla.
His unslakeable cruelty.
His rapacious need for youth.
The man was aged beyond ancient. He had celebrated his hundredth birthday, and several others past it.
The secret to his longevity? He drank the blood of young children.
It had started slowly at first. The sensation of needles stippling Vante’s skin had been novel and exciting.
And he’d still trusted Emil at that point. Believed his hollow blather that it was all in the service of some greater purpose.
But soon he realised that Emil would not stop, would not slow down, and would keep bottling his essence until his body hollowed out like a sack.
And he made enquiries. Discreet ones, among the people in Titan who had no vested interest in keeping Emil Gokla happy.
He’d learned that there had been many children like himself before, all of whom had been tasked with fulfilling this great purpose. Almost all had died in the end. And there would be many others, after him, also charged with fulfilling this purpose.
The great purpose of keeping Emil Gokla alive.
The great purpose of keeping his sick, bloated, centenarian heart beating, beneath a layer of skin beaten to leather by age, long beyond the point where nature would have stilled it.
Each day, Emil stole more of his fresh, healthy blood.
As his veins gave up more and more, Emil found himself stunted, withering. His days playing outside and making friends turned into days spent inside, vaguely absorbed in some holographic videogame or movie. And at the end, he hadn’t even had the energy for these simple past-times. Life had become the game. Reality had become the movie. And always, the ending was the same.
Needles.
Piercing.
Being bled to the verge of hypoxia and death, before being allowed to recover for a little while.
He wished he could have saved himself. But in the end, just as someone else had damned him, someone else saved him.
It was Titan, days before the end.
His head was a fog of deprivation from basic nutrients. He spent nearly twenty hours out of every day asleep. Down the hall there was a fridge full of bags of blood that should have been circulating in his body. Emil Gokla injected them as needed, which was now very often.
He was lying in his room, vaguely aware that the woman Raya Yithdras was paying another visit.
Vaguely, dispassionately, he was aware that they were plotting the overthrow of the Solar Arm.
Sarkoth Amnon, once Emil’s most talented and ruthless protégé, had turned against him. His defiance would be his end.
Soon, Raya would journey to Selene, and attempt to oust him peacefully. If that failed, the armories of Titan and Ceres stood ready to attack.
Success was assured. By peace or violence or combinations of both, all of them would end the same way.
Vante listlessly raised his head as there was a knock on the door to
his room, and the corpulent figure of Raya Yithdras entered the room. He disliked her even more then Emil Gokla, if that was possible.
She sat down on his bed, and asked how he was feeling. Whether he was happy living here. Whether he ever thought that life might hold better things.
He wasn’t able to talk much. And his silences answered most of her questions.
“I have known you for even longer than Emil has, boy,” Raya had said. “I was at the orphanage. And I picked you out. It was my goal that you would live a long and happy life.”
To this day, he’d had no idea whether or not this was true. He couldn’t remember seeing Raya outside of the mansion, but that didn’t mean much. At the orphanage, many adults had come and gone. When you were an orphan adults all looked much the same, as undifferentiated as ants, and you weren’t too good at remembering faces and names.
“Let’s cut to the heart of the matter,” Raya said. “Do you want to be here? Does this bring you joy, or fulfillment? You look like a skeleton. So much of your essence has been gone, drained away. This is understandable, if you are doing it for a cause. But are you?”
He’d tried to think then. His brain had trudged out some excuses.
Emil Gokla was a great man. And he’d invested a massive amount of trust in Vante by confiding in him his secrets.
Murder. Espionage. Terrorism. He’d dumped these facts into the boy, a shared conspiracy that would literally be repaid in blood.
Some version of this must have choked out from his lips. Raya nodded.
“But I still have not seen the part where you benefit from this, boy. I can tell you my secrets all day long. Every statesman has a conspiracy, and once you grow up, you realize that none of them are much more damning than any other. It seems like Emil is still much in your debt.”
Once you grow up.
Already Emil had started addressing this matter in the hypothetical. What had been a certainty now became a speculation, like seeking out gold in the asteroid of Titan. It was now barely more than a vague moonshot that Vante would live to see adulthood.
But this woman thought it would be a certainty. Why did she think that?
“And I’ll tell you something I’ve learned about debts,” Raya smiled. “The debt-collector decides when, where, and how they’re due.”
She turned to leave.
“Emil will ask you to bring him some blood tonight,” were her parting words. “In the fridge, you might want to try the bag on the far right. Just a suggestion.”
Then she was gone, into the gloom, letting him feel a sensation so utterly alien and foreign that it took him a few moments to realize it was hope.
Emil Gokla had died later that night.
Nolund Esper pressed the phobia resonator deeper. "Where is Andrei Kazmer?"
Suffering.
"Where is Aaron Wake?"
So much suffering.
Vante writhed in the grip of the Razormen as the phobia resonator tore furrows of fear into his mind. He didn't scream, or cry out, but tears flowed from his eyes in twin rivulets.
The nightmares wouldn't stop. Emil Gokla, twisted and distorted into a caricature, arms and legs ten feet long, each tooth a loathsome railspike aimed at every vein and artery in his body. Realistic sensations of his body just bursting apart, unfolding like a map, the huge diorama of arteries and veins and capillaries unspooling out to their full length of 100,000 kilometers, every square inch extruding his blood into the maw of this savage man.
"I DON'T KNOW!" He shouted.
"Are you sure you don't know?" he heard Nolund Esper ask.
"YES! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE! STOP!"
"Then let's talk about Emil Gokla," Nolund said smoothly, changing tacks like a sailor into a headwind. "What do you know about the manner of his death? Please step us through this. Raya Yithdras in particular is very confused about why you would kill your kindly old benefactor."
Ghoulish visions of Emil's sneer played out in his head.
Then, something in him broke clean in half. Leaving only jagged points and shards.
"Raya did it!" he howled. "She killed him! She put the blood in the fridge! It was her!"
The Sons of the Vanitar exchanged glances.
Confused ones.
"She put the poison in his blood bag! And she told me which one to give him! She wanted to control the whole Solar Arm, and she made him fucking die! Torture her, not me!"
Saldeen Zana looked concerned. "The boy is babbling. He doesn't understand what he's saying."
"Oh, I disagree," Nolund's face was steel. "I think he knows exactly what he's saying, and he's trying to throw us off course. B-78, I think you'd better turn the phobia resonator up another level."
"Confirming orders," the Razorman said. "The next level will induce permanent neurological trauma in the subject."
"He is disposable," Nolund said. "We need to find Kazmer now."
The Razorman nodded in affirmative.
Reached for the dial.
Turned it up another level.
And that was all Vante was aware of before he was thrown off his feet, flying through the air like a leaf in a gale.
The phobia resonator spun from his chest, flying far away until it was just another part of the amorphous smear of motion.
Everyone was flying through the air.
He should have heard cries, and screams. But he heard nothing. His eardrums reported no sound whatsoever from the outside world.
He was blown clear off the edge of the platform, soaring out into space. For a moment his eyes drank in the vast vista of Venus, her poisonous beauty, and realised he was about to plunge into the depths.
Already there were bodies falling.
But it was not so.
Seemingly without any conscious control from his brain, his Vyres came alive, unfurling in a sheen of pure metal, flapping and beating the air.
His fall slowed, then stopped, then reversed.
He was rising above the carnage, suspended over a pit of doom, and started heading back to the platform.
He'd live.
Perhaps.
When he alit on the platform, it was like landing back in a dream that had threatened to verge into a nightmare. His head was a single sonorous pulse, delirious with madness. To his left and his right were Razormen, struggling over the escarpment. Some of them had wings, and had saved themselves. But some of them hadn’t, and had plunged to their deaths.
He saw Nolund Esper and Saldeen Zana furiously moving their mouths, pumping out sound waves that he could not hear.
But the eyes of everyone, Nolund, Zana, the Razormen, the remaining Sons of the Vanitar – was focused on the figure standing on the other end of the platform.
Aaron Wake. Andrei Kazmer.
Two names, twined together like an inseparable braid.
A police officer. A marine. A god. A scientific experiment. Someone capable of kindness, and capable of ruthless sadism to dwarf anything the Sons of the Vanitar would dream of in their short remaining lives.
He was wearing marine combat armor, and was carrying a sonic cannon..
He spoke words that Vante could not hear. But as he lip read them, he knew they were meant for him.
“Get somewhere safe. This won’t be pretty.”
Wake pumped the sonic cannon and fired some more pulses of compressed noise.
Again, the Sons of the Vanitar and their metallic pets were sent flying like ninepins.
Then he discarded the sonic cannon, and drew his Meshuggahtech.
Only one setting needed for this. Full automatic.
He squeezed the trigger and blasted the platform from one end to the other. Sparks flew from the metal boardwalk as a fusillade from hell was unleashed.
Three of the Sons of Vanitar convulsed as they were raked by gunfire. They were hurled from Zephyr City in a shitshow of blood. The others dropped to the ground, whether wounded or dead or feinting he couldn’t tell.
The Razormen showed no reaction
whatsoever to the bullets pounding into their chests.
He was vaguely aware that Vante was flying away. He wished the boy well. A sentiment that made him unique among the entities standing on this platform.
Some of the Sons of the Vanitar were crawling back to their feet, and creeping back to the sanctuary of the Adagio. He’d deal with them later. He had bigger, sharper fish to fry.
The nine Razormen advanced on him. None of them had even been wounded by the hailstorm of fire, as far as he could tell. He ejected the empty clip, and fitted a new one in, then started nailing them with three second bursts.
The foremost among them took three bullets to the chest. They rocked him back, but he kept on walking.
Wake fired again, aiming at the head.
Headshots were bad form. The human head is a tiny target, very easy to miss, but Wake didn’t care. All three of the bullets connected, but they sparked uselessly from the mask, leaving shallow dents in the metal.
Now, the masks seemed more redolent of a knight’s visor than anything meant to disguise their identity.
Christ, he thought, still shooting away. I cannot hurt these things.
“You are very stupid,” the lead Razorman whispered. “The meat does not cut the knife.”
Then he unfurled his Vyres, and launched himself at Wake.
He filled Wake’s vision with terrifying speed. A jutting blade stabbed out from each wrist, and he led with the sharp points.
Wake just barely avoided decapitation from the swinging blades by launching himself into the air. As he did so, he reached below, snatched the tip of the Razorman’s wing, and tore it out of its socket.
His center of balance ruined, the Razorman lost control, and crashed into the same wall that Wake and Vante had been pinned against.
The Razorman slumped down, blood trickling from a superficial cut at the back of his neck. Then he picked himself back up, and resumed the chase.
So did all eight of his friends.
Dodging and weaving past the onrushing Razormen, Wake caught a glimpse of several Sons of the Vanitar trying to escape through the ramp into the Adagio. With his path momentarily clear of Razormen, he brought his Meshuggahtech up, and fired a single quick arc.
Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Page 13
