Pale in the face, he hauled himself up another flight, slewed around the turn and then gasped up another. Finally, he remembered to tap on his comm. "Thirty more…only thirty…huuuugh! Magdalena! Can hear you hear me?"
Gretchen's head cracked against the stone floor, sending a bolt of pain through her skull. Malakar dragged her along the passage, heedless of the human's flailing limbs.
"Malakar," she managed to croak out. "Stop!"
The gardener turned, her face livid with scars, dull crimson battle-armor still scorched with particle-beam impacts, one eye a glassy white where shrapnel had torn into the socket. The kujen 's guardsmen clustered around her, armor and weapons equally worn. Most of them were barely adult, though not one soldier remained young.
"We must go back," Anderssen said, using the wall to help her up. Icy fear rolled along her arms and back. "They are trying to wake up the kalpataru. I have to stop them. It must be destroyed."
"Are you mad?" White-Eye bellowed, her voice booming with anguish. Claws clenched the hilts of her force-blade. "We've not heard from homeworld in sixteen years – with that device we can reopen the communications network, send for reinforcements, send for our families! My scientists are sure they can restore the linkage and bring up the planetary net in only hours."
Malakar's face interleaved for an instant with the crippled Queen. Gretchen swayed, clutching at the wall. "No, no, we mustn't do that!" Her voice boomed strangely and Anderssen felt a wrenching sensation, as if other voices were forcing themselves through her mouth. "The Jeweled-Kings attacked us and seized the device because it's horribly dangerous -"
"No more of these child's superstitions," the scarred Jehanan screamed, blade flaring sun-bright in her hand. Gretchen flinched back and Malakar lunged forward, stabbing with the length of shattered lohaja taken from the wall cavity.
"We've paid dearly to reclaim the kalpa' and by HГєnd's name, I'll invoke its power mysel -"
Anderssen hurled herself away from the blow – saw the jagged end of the board smash into the face of a Jehanan soldier bulking in the corridor – and everything popped back into reference. The soldier squealed, snout bleeding, and knocked the board aside. Gretchen surged up, throwing the point of her shoulder into the thick, armored chest. The Jehanan slammed into the wall.
"Quick, Malakar!" Gretchen shouted, struggling to hold the massive soldier pinned. He hissed like a steam boiler in her ear and flexed forward, flinging Anderssen into the wall. The gardener swung wildly with the board, but the soldier ducked and slashed at her head with his claws.
Gretchen snatched a cutting tool from her vest, thumbed the little device to high-beam and jammed the hissing plasma-jet into his neck. The Jehanan squealed, scales flaring red-orange. Flame spilled away from the tool, blinding him. Anderssen threw her weight behind the cutter – scales popped with a snap! And there was a gout of scalding steam as the plasma-torch sheared through the scaly integument and erupted into his chest cavity.
Malakar hooted in horror, scuttling back, but Gretchen kicked the body away, her face grim.
"Come on," she said, thumbing off the tool, "we've got to stop them. Find his gun."
Parker stumbled through the door into the apartment, gasping for breath, sweat streaming from every pore. He collapsed to his knees on a sleeping mat. "Oh god, Mags, they're right behind me!"
"I heard you," Magdalena said, briskly rotating the wheel controlling the door. The six triangular sections rasped closed and she threw the locking bolt with a clang. The Hesht turned, ears back flat, and sniffed Parker's sweaty head. "Pfawgh! Stewing in your own waste! Can you even stand?"
The pilot groaned, forcing his fatigue-exhausted legs up. He was trembling from head to toe. "I don't…feel so good."
Maggie snarled in disgust, showing all her teeth, forced herself up and slapped self-adhering black packets on either side of the door. "Get into harness, sog-tail. Now!"
The pilot staggered to a pair of open windows and slumped against the wooden frame. Most of their equipment had been gathered up and stuffed into Maggie's duffel, but a black fleximesh harness lay out and Parker managed get one arm into the proper opening by the time the Hesht reached his side.
Magdalena seized his other arm and forced the harness on, glossy black paw sealing the clasps and jerking the mesh to a proper fit. Parker bleated, feeling doubly abused, but was having trouble standing without assistance. "Now, Maggie, you're not thinking we have to -"
"There is no other way off this floor and out of the building," the Hesht growled, slinging the duffel across her stomach. The sound of Jehanan voices hooting and booming echoed dimly through the door. A sharp rapping sound penetrated. "Clip to my back," she said, snapping two dark green monofilament spools to the front of her harness. "Now, kitling, no time to laze on the rocks!"
Startled, Parker put his chest to the Hesht's back, hooked harness to harness and wrapped his arms under her shoulders. "All aboard," he muttered.
Magdalena squared her hips, planted her feet and lifted with a strained hiss. A little dizzy, Parker clenched his legs back to get them out of the way. Awkwardly, the Hesht turned around and backed into the window, paws gripping the frame on either side. Monofil line hissed from the spools on her harness. Parker caught a glimpse of a line of anchors driven into the floor of the room.
"Will that – ayyyyy! Oh sweet Jesus!" Parker squeezed his eyes shut as Maggie tipped backwards.
The Hesht worked her feet into a solid position, a cool breeze gusting across her pelt. She carefully took a pair of monofil gloves from a pouch on her climbing harness and tugged them on. Inside, the banging on the door had ceased and she could hear a drill whine sharply against ceramic. Dust puffed from the center of the portal. Both gloves on, she powered them up and watched for the winking green light indicating descender field strength at maximum.
The hexagonal door shattered with a crack! and bits of ceramic rattled against the windowpanes. A cloud of dust billowed into the room. Maggie heard a cheerful beep from the gloves, clenched hard on the monofil line and kicked back. Wire hissed between her gloves and she, Parker and the duffel bounded back a half-dozen meters. Her feet hit a section of blank concrete and started to skid. She leaned further back, forcing her boots flat on the wall.
Parker felt cold wind ruffle his hair, the cawing of native avians from far below and absolutely nothing beneath his swinging feet. "Oh goddddd," he bawled, clutching tight.
Takshilan guardsmen burst into the apartment, one ducking left, one right and another dodging forward in the middle. All three were clad in bulky cloth armor plated with hand-sized ceramic lozenges. Their long snouts were covered with leather facings, their deep-set eyes masked by bulging goggles. The one on the left turned, the muzzle of his automatic rifle sweeping across the empty room.
"Kramat -" he started to call out, beckoning the rest of the squad forward with one claw.
The black packets pasted beside the doorway detected heat and motion within their limited perception and blew apart. Choking white smoke blasted out, hiding the near-supersonic expansion of tanglewire coils. A thread-end smashed into the chest of the lead commando, puncturing his armor. He was thrown down, gasping, and the wire stiffened, tearing through scale and muscle. The room filled with a glittering black cloud. The other two soldiers had leapt back in time to avoid the brunt of the blast, but the knockout gas in the smoke flooded over them.
Someone in the hallway – spooked by the high-pitched ting-ting-ting of wire anchors punching into the walls – fired accidentally and the entire squad opened up, blazing away at the smoke. Tracers ripped through the haze, smashing the remaining windows. The lead commando, still tangled, was torn in half by the fusillade, his body jerking violently. Ricocheting bullets whined through the apartment, scoring the walls and clattering into the corners.
Magdalena looked up, saw the windows shattering into a cloud of glittering, plunging glass and kicked off again. Her legs were starting to cramp. Parker was a thin l
ittle human, but his squirmy weight was no furless kit clinging to her pelt. They bounded into another section of concrete and she kicked off again, flying past a row of windows.
Inside, a wide-eyed Jehanan child stared out, caught sight of a completely unexpected apparition, fluted in terror and scrambled under its sleeping rack.
The broken windows rained past them, forcing Maggie to duck her head and swing in close to the wall. Slivers of greenish glass caught in her pelt and spanged away from the concrete. Without looking up, the Hesht pushed off, monofil whirring through her harness and gloves. This time her legs were tired and they bounced into a row of windows. Glass splintered under her boots, and Maggie crabbed to the side, trying to reach concrete. The window groaned under the stress, cracked lengthwise and burst inwards.
One leg plunged into the opening, crashing through a shelf of potted plants. There were outraged hoots inside. Maggie kicked her leg free, shoved off with the other and swung past three more intact windows. She glimpsed two very large, very angry Jehanan males inside. The monofil whined, complaining, and she clenched hard with the gloves. She flew down the line as the descender released, their weight swinging them into a shallow arc.
Maggie forced her paws to release, skipping across ceramic facing. Their swing slackened, losing momentum, and they bounced to a halt against a concrete rib jutting from the face of the building. Parker grunted, suddenly jammed into a rock-hard surface, and his eyes flew open. The Hesht braced her feet, panting.
"Ooooh…my stomach feels…" The pilot stopped, squinting, his goggles automatically zooming in on the rushing shape as he focused. "What in the Nine Hells is -"
A shrieking roar filled the sky. Maggie snapped her head around, alarmed.
A huge, winged silver shape blasted past – less than a kilometer away – between the apartment tower and its nearest neighbor. Sunlight gleamed on swept-back triangular wings and blazed from a mirrored canopy. Slender black canisters nestled under the wings. Bright red insignia were blazoned on the double-finned tail. Superheated air howled from twin fairings at the rear of the aircraft.
"Yeeeee-hah!" Parker screamed, his entire body jolted with adrenaline. "Lookit that!"
The Jehanan jet fighter boomed past, slicing between the skyscrapers. One of the black cylinders suddenly broke free from the wing, ignited in mid-air and raced off to the southeast at supersonic speed. The boom of its passing hammered at Maggie's ears, making her blink with pain. The jet hooked left, flashing out of sight between the towers. A corkscrew of shimmering air remained, slowly untwisting in the haze.
"I can fly one of those," Parker shouted – half-deafened – in Maggie's ear. "I can!"
"Of course," Maggie choked out, twisting her neck to clear her airway. "Leggo!"
Parker relaxed his arm, looked down automatically and went white. "Eeep!"
The Hesht kicked off and they sailed down another twenty meters, passing more windows and sections of bare concrete. This time they touched down within spitting distance of a building adjoining the apartment tower. Maggie clenched her hand repeatedly and they bounced down onto whitewashed plaster. Parker's legs touched slate tile and he collapsed bonelessly.
Magdalena grunted, taking his weight in her legs, and unclipped the monofil tabs. Squeezing the tabs twice, she threw them up into the air and ducked down.
The microspools clicked into retract and both tabs began reeling in the monofil at top speed. They vanished in the blink of an eye, racing up the side of the building.
Pushing the terrified gardener in front of her, Anderssen hurried them back to the opening. The floodlights were still shining bright as the sun. Wiping blood from her face, Gretchen crouched down, casting a wary eye at the chamber of the kalpataru.
The survey comp lay undisturbed on the floor, but now it had woken up and was happily scanning away.
"Get ready," Gretchen said, voice tight with strain, as she picked up the comp. A rising sense of fragility was swelling in her mind, as though the stone under her feet, the bulky shoulder of the gardener, even her own skin was growing thinner and thinner with every passing second. The comp was reporting a steadily rising level of ambient electromagnetic energy in the vault. She adjusted her goggles, making sure they were on tight. "In a second, I'm going out there. When I do -"
Anderssen closed Malakar's claws round the handle and trigger of the captured pistol.
"You have to shoot out those floodlights. Do you understand?"
Malakar stared at her with huge, wild eyes. Gretchen tried not to focus on the section of wall slowly becoming visible through the Jehanan's head or the white scars slowly emerging from her brown old hide. "Shoot? Me?"
"Yes." Anderssen fixed her with a fierce glare. Her fingers were trembling as she tucked the survey comp away. "You have to shoot out the lights."
"I…this old walnut's never used a gun like this before," the Librarian stuttered, gingerly holding the bulky shape of a beam-pistol in her claws. "I can't do this – she's the kujen ! Our Queen! You're talking treason and murder."
"There's no time -" Gretchen heard the second generator whine up to full speed and threw herself through the opening, cutting tool tight in her right hand.
"There's only moments to spare," a voice hissed from her mouth. "We should have listened to the Jeweled-Kings when they tried to warn us… Now it's almost toolate."
The heavy power cable shivered, current flowed through to the induction plate. The technicians – Gretchen caught a flickering double-image glimpse as she rolled up, Jehanan scientists in leather harnesses and too-small-seeming Imperial tools superimposed over much larger counterparts in advanced armor, festooned with tools properly fitted to claw and limb – were stepping back from the gleaming black arc of the tree.
This time the single ringing tone leapt instantly into immanence. The green void unfolded, rushing out to encompass the room. Gretchen stumbled, feeling the shining, sparkling effusion as a physical pressure on her face and hands. The arc unfurled, countless threads stiffening, forming a sharp-angled triangle. Then another, inverted triangle blossomed within the first, then another, inverted again. The shivering, endless hnnnnnnnnnnnnnng of the device slid upward, shrieking into ever higher registers.
Anderssen pushed forward, feeling time grind slow. The floor mottled and cracked and she became terribly aware of the vast pressure the artifact exerted on its surroundings. Stone crumbled an atom at a time, the air congealed, electrons crept sluggishly from valence to valence. Only the arc itself remained immobile, impenetrable and immune to the crushing press of time. The blaze of its power pierced the vault above, lancing towards the sky hidden beyond the marble dome, and down, plunging into the roots of the world.
The flood of visions touched old memories in Anderssen's mind, culled from endless days spent in library carrels, stacks of dusty books piled up around her 'net terminal.
Two eagle-faced abzu lift their sacred cones towards a juniper tree surmounted by a winged sun-disk. In the leaves of the divine tree are held all knowledge, as well as the fruit of eternity.
A cold, implacable awareness flooded out from the kalpataru, touching every comp within its purview.
Murdered Osiris is placed by divine hands into the heart of a tamarisk whose roots burrow into the earth, reaching the land of the dead, and stretch up to the heavens, entangling the stars. The god's eyes fly open, his sundered body returned to life.
The comp behind her on the floor turned itself off.
A gnarled ash rises against the abyss, branches spread out over all the worlds and across the sky. Three of the tree's roots reach far indeed. One winds among the Aesir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, which is the source of all that is cold and grim. It was created many ages before the earth was formed. Under that root is the spring Hvergelmir in the midst of Niflheim, and Nidhogg the Serpent gnaws the bottom of this root. From this spring flow the rivers Svol, Gunnthra, Fjorm, Fimbulthul, Slidr and H
rid, Sylg and Ylg, Vid, Leiptr, and Gjoll, which is next to Hel's gates…
Gretchen's own perception attenuated, grown suddenly vast.
Photons flooding from the floodlights continued to crawl forward, brushing aside the thick soup of molecules floating in emptiness. Every computer-controlled object in the chamber – her chrono, the generator fuel regulators, the Jehanan commander's hand-comm – stopped working.
Waiting.
The wave of electron paralysis leapt outwards, permeating the bulk of the ancient ship, flooding across Takshila and its myriad buildings, washing through the jet fighters howling in the late afternoon sky, licking across every comm and comp and Imperial device within the planetary magnetosphere.
Every device halted, set aside its allotted tasks and fell quiet, seized by the irresistible power of the kalpataru.
Listening.
In that same still moment of time, Gretchen perceived all this, ears flooded with sound, eyes drowned by a million unfiltered points of view.
And the shimmering tone of the kalpataru changed: a keen, sharp wail echoing out of the abyss of time trapped in the ancient metal. The matrices of form inside the howling green void shifted, attempting to attain proper alignment. Gravity dragged against them and the wear of millennia fouled the trembling dance, but the machine adapted, resorted, shifted, pressed mightily on time and space, trying to fold aside barrier after barrier.
The dials on the Honda fuel-cell generator pegged over to maximum and the entire machine began to whine dangerously.
Here, the kalpataru wailed after an eternity of patience. I am here! Command me!
All this Gretchen perceived, but she found herself powerless to act.
In her mind, at one instant, she was everywhere within the purview of the machine, a helpless passenger swept along in the tide of radiant power.
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