Angela Strange: Legend of the Arc-Walker

by Mick Fraser

  “Well,” said Gage without looking up from her console, “she killed enough of them. Snowy’s right.”

  “That was a different life,” Shimmer responded, her voice taking on a harder edge than Angela had heard in it before. “We all used to be something different. You should appreciate that, Construct.”

  Now Gage did look up, a mocking half-smile on her lips. “Reel it in, ghost, or I’ll rip that fucking suit off you and flush you through the vents.”

  Shimmer remained still and calm. “You have an open invitation to try.”

  Drenno threw his hands up. “Can it, you two. We’re coming in to harbour. Gage, you stay on the ship for this one. We’ll send the cutter back for you when – if – she lifts the curfew.”

  The Auton waved a dismissive hand. “Whatever.”

  Catching Angela’s eye, Drenno nodded towards Gage. “Guin kinda hates her.”

  Dizzy chuffed. “No ‘kind of’ about it.” He tapped the command console. “Five turns til gear-down. Let’s hope she’s in a good mood this time.”

  “Let’s hope she’s forgiven me, is what you’re saying.” Drenno chided.

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  CHAPTER 29

  ~ORACLUS~

  IT WAS DEEP night as Dizzy piloted the Shadowstar down through wisps of cloud towards the spreading forest and the tower of gleaming light at its centre. As they approached, Angela surveyed the landscape through the belly-gun cameras: foliage covered everything, a sweeping, all-encompassing canopy of dark-crested trees, highlighted by the glow of three other moons and interspersed here and there with flashes of colour, all given a pale silver hue by the moonlight. As they came closer, she made out clearings and gullies, rolling hills beneath the treetops, splashed with sparks of luminescence within the shadows; some of the plants made their own light, weaving multicoloured neon threads through the darkness. She caught sight of a wide river, glistening like polished platinum in the light of the moons, and swept the camera along its winding length until it disappeared beneath the forest canopy.

  Something burst from the trees and Angela started, swinging the camera to follow its flight. It was a huge bird, its white and gold wings as wide as a plane, its tail an arrow point, its great crested head dipped low as it hunted. It moved out of sight and she returned her gaze to the river, where she now saw sleek shapes gliding beneath the water, gleaming fins cutting swathes through the surface.

  Before too long, Drenno told her to buckle up as the Shadowstar descended towards a huge clearing within a ring of towering trees. There was a landing pad marked with white paint, surrounded by flashing yellow lights.

  As they touched down Angela peered from the main screen, made uneasy by the sudden stillness. “You said even Evayne avoids this place, but we had no trouble getting in. Not even a security check.”

  Drenno nodded in amicable agreement. “True. But Guin knows us.”

  “Not to mention,” Dizzy said, “you have no idea how many guns are on us right now.”

  “Besides which,” Shimmer added, “it is not about brute force or deception. It is about respect. The Faraan are the last Celestial race in the Reach, which makes Guin one of the most powerful creatures alive. Even Evayne recognises this.”

  Leaving Gage and Winston aboard the ship, Drenno led the others to the airlock and activated the disembarkation ramp. Wearing the brown jacket and Elbian gang-runner outfit that Gaelan had picked out for her before Haze, Angela felt curiously under-dressed without her hypersuit, but her wardrobe was quickly forgotten as she followed Drenno and Illith down the ramp.

  The smell of the forest enveloped her, pine and jasmine, the twang of merging spices, the musty, damp scent of the river. The air was so cool and clean that its touch seemed to quicken her, and she breathed it in deeply, smiling absently until she realised Illith was watching her. The Silsir raised one slim eyebrow and shook her head.

  A little way from the landing pad was a large, well-lit cave entrance that led deep into the mountain upon which the settlement of Tanglethorne was apparently built. Another ship, smaller than the Shadowstar, swept overhead, gliding towards a second pad beside theirs. Angela looked back to the cave, its walls of smoothed stone lit by flickering torches and overgrown here and there with dark green and crimson vines. She tried to imagine what the mistress of such a place might look like, this legendary creature who seemed to incite such fear and awe even in the beleaguered crew of the Shadowstar.

  Two figures, cloaked and hooded, appeared in the cave, walking swiftly towards the waiting crew. Angela felt immediately on edge. “Anything else I should know about Guin?” she asked, mostly to fill the silence.

  Drenno chuffed. “Yeah: don’t interrupt her, and don’t stare at her horns.”

  The hooded figures drew nearer. “Are they Faraan?” Angela enquired.

  Drenno shook his head. “No. They’re Kal’mani, altogether less impressive. It’s the welcoming party.”

  The duo halted before them, exuding an air of impatience. One of them mumbled something with barely concealed scorn, and Drenno spread his hands.

  “Neebum shar,” he replied. “Wee asta neeba mulani Guin, kethesta peen.”

  Shimmer, her face close to Angela’s ear, said: “Last time we left, we left in something of a hurry. Drenno and Guin have not really spoken since.”

  Drenno caught the tail-end of her words and shot her a look like a bullet. He turned back to the Kal’mani. “Nee esta shar. Wee asta neeba Guin, moba, mo-abba, masso.”

  Apparently ignoring him, one of the Kal’mani approached Angela. The deep, all-consuming darkness within the hood revealed nothing of the creature’s face, but it smelled faintly of wet dog. Angela wrinkled her nose.

  “What is this?” it asked, its hidden mouth labouring around the words. “Hmm. Mistress Guin be happy what you bring her, Drenno-dai. Come: you follows. We take boat.”

  The creatures led them into the cave, past the spitting torches and tangled vines. Occasionally, the floor vibrated gently. Angela glanced at Shimmer, who pointed one slender finger upwards. “We are beneath Tanglethorne,” she explained. “The primary power generator is directly above us.”

  After passing several diverging tunnels, they emerged from an exit on the far side of the cave, onto the bank of the wide river where a row of sleek, dark open-top boats were moored, gently bobbing in the current. The river snaked off into the distance until it was swallowed by the black trees. A chorus of toads serenaded them within from the dense foliage.

  Angela allowed herself to be strapped into one of the boats between Drenno and Shimmer. The Kal’mani’s hands were soft-furred and clawed. Illith, Six-Tails, Dizzy and Gaelan took seats opposite. Water sloshed around the boat’s keel.

  “The journey does not take long,” Shimmer told Angela. “Rivercutters are swift.”

  One of the Kal’mani stayed ashore, while the other perched on the prow, and slipped its clawed fingers into two sets of rings set on elaborate frames either side of its seat. As it brought together the fingers of its right hand, the rings glowed white and the boat swung smoothly in the water until the prow faced the distant treeline. The Kal’mani pushed both hands forward and the Rivercutter began to glide along the river, churning up surprisingly little surf despite its acceleration.

  Angela looked up at the star-salted sky, then to the nearest moon that was so large and clear and white that it seemed she could reach out and touch it. Its silver light bathed everything, adding majesty to the smallest plant, grandeur to each tiny pebble on the shore. As they neared the treeline, the river’s surface became less clear, peppered with white algae and enormous lily pads the width of cars, crowned by high arching stems and flower heads that glowed with pinkish-purple light.

  Something broke the surface of the water beside the boat and Angela tensed. A black fin, rippling with tendrils of azure luminescence, cut a shimmering scar through the river.

  “Toorren,” Drenno said, leaning forward.
“Don’t worry, they’re out of season. Harmless for now. They just like the purr of the cutter’s engine.”

  The dark treeline loomed and the toorren broke off, its black length disappearing down into the depths of the river.

  “Shimmer?” Angela called to the Ri’in. “You said Guin built all this by hand? How?”

  “The Faraan are – were – planetary engineers. They did not only invent modern terraforming, but greatly refined it over the centuries. The process of making a world habitable takes many decades, depending on the race intended to populate it, but to create a living, breathing world from nothing? That is a science akin to magic.”

  Dizzy leaned forward. “Now ask how the good Captain managed to upset an immortal warrior-queen who builds magic moons out of thin air.”

  Drenno gave the To’ecc a dark look, and Dizzy laughed. “I do love that story,” he chuckled.

  The Captain glowered. “Yeah, and I’m never going to live it down.”

  Gaelan nudged her father’s ankle with her foot. “It is amusing, Do’vah, in hindsight.”

  Dizzy smiled, pointing one of his left hands at the Avellian. “See? Even your daughter agrees it’s a great story.” His glistening reptilian skin reflected the dancing colours of a cluster of glowing plants on the nearby bank as he leaned in to tell the story. “We’re going back a year or two ago, right?” he began. “Reebus Naxx hires us to haul a shipment of experimental crop accelerant called Veril-6 from Underlight to Hallowstone, three systems away. Easy enough job, except we had to steal it from an AEGIS research outpost first.

  “I got us in close with the Jack and Rathe hacked the security net with false codes, and Drenno, Illith, Gage and Shimmer went in under the guise of maintenance engineers fixing the coolant system. Whole thing went off without a hitch, until Captain Romantic felt the sudden urge to chat up the chief of security.”

  Drenno scowled in the broken moonlight. “We were cornered, and I was stalling. Someone had to do something.”

  “Yeah, right. Unfortunately, she was Uvanoi and in the market for a new host, so she came on pretty strong. Took him off to the office and got really amorous. So Illith here, not being one to tiptoe around a crisis, marched in and dragged him out, at which point someone noticed Shim and Gage loading three crates of Veril-6 into the back of our ‘maintenance’ ship.”

  “Ouch,” Angela said. “What happened?”

  “Shit got crazy,” Dizzy laughed. “I mean, really got crazy. We barely got out, and they scrambled everything they had after us, which wasn’t much to be fair. We needed a plan and couldn’t risk heading straight for Hallowstone. Nearest AEGIS black spot was right here, in Wishbone. So we plotted a course, but, not wanting to cause trouble for Guin, decided to hide the crates here until the heat died off, then pick them up later. So we stashed them in the forest, safe and sound.

  “Unfortunately, we didn’t seal them properly, and the Veril-6 got out and contaminated a nearby lake. Turns out it wasn’t just a crop accelerant, it was a hormone accelerant, too. By the time we came back, Guin was up to her neck in tiny, stinking spindletoads. They were breeding at a rate of about five-thousand a day!”

  “My god,” Angela gasped, trying not to look Drenno in the eye. “How long were you gone?”

  Dizzy, belly laughing now, had to struggle for calm. “Fifteen days! Shit. Guin was not happy. She wouldn’t give us the shipment back until we caught them, either. We had to round-up seventy-five thousand spindletoads the size of my thumb-pad!”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Well, that’s why we left in a hurry last time.”

  Angela looked to Drenno. “Oh my god, you didn’t clean it up?”

  “Hey!” he snapped. “That was a lot of fucking toads. And we got most of them. More than half. At least. But we had a deadline. Guin understood.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because we’re still alive,” Dizzy answered, settling down. His scaled skin was glistening with moisture. “But shit, she’s going to be so thrilled to see us tonight...”

  They fell silent as the Rivercutter passed beneath the forest canopy. Angela watched their faces for a moment, each glazed by moonlight they didn’t see. She realised that they were somewhere else now, and the mood had shifted, oh so subtly, to something more sombre, more reflective. The mention of Rathe, of a shared memory, had taken them back. Even Drenno, who a moment ago had been agitated, now stared at a point in the middle distance.

  Dragonflies the size of her forearm buzzed by Angela on crystalline wings, snatching her attention away, while somewhere in the darkness something chirruped over and over. Willow-like trees trailed their long branches in the water, each frond wrapped with veins of neon green and pink. As they sailed past rows of huge flowers the size of medicine balls, the heads opened to reveal brightly-lit petals that coughed out tiny clouds of glinting fireflies. Angela, in awe, didn’t notice the boat decelerating as it neared the shore.

  The Kal’mani ferryman steered it to the harbour by twirling and flexing his thin fingers, and the Rivercutter came to a smooth stop. Angela looked up at what lay before them and couldn’t stifle a gasp.

  Twin gates of gold-inlaid dark ebony stretched up twenty or thirty feet, and beyond them, its gargantuan spires scraping the belly of the clouds, stood a huge citadel of blackened chrome. Fires burned atop each of the three spires visible from Angela’s position, and ships, tiny at this distance and identified only as pinpricks of light, flittered to and fro far, far above.

  “This is Skyhearth,” Shimmer explained. “Seraph Guin’s palace.”

  The Kal’mani helped them to un-strap and disembark, then led them to the gates which began to swing open apparently without instruction or stimulus. Keeping step with everyone else, Angela followed. They were led through high corridors carved into the grey rock beyond, where the torchlight cast hyperactive shadows on the walls and dark vines clung to every surface as though anchoring the fortress to the ground.

  Eventually they came to a wide, dimly-lit room in which torches burned high above them, dripping and spitting occasional sparks that plummeted to the earth like tiny comets. As the Kal’mani left the crew standing in a line in what Angela guessed to be the centre of the room, the torches seemed to burn brighter, illuminating the ground upon which they stood but leaving most of the room shrouded in darkness. Drenno and Dizzy looked nervous, Illith seemed pissed off and inconvenienced, while Six-Tails, Gaelan and Shimmer stood silently, heads bowed. Several other Kal’mani entered the room, forming two rows before the crew, marking a walkway of sorts.

  Something stirred in the darkness just beyond the torchlight, and Angela peered into the gloom, realising that there were steps ahead of them, wide and shallow, leading up into a deeper blackness. There came a clipping sound, growing closer, and she recognised it as footfalls. She realised she was holding her breath, and was ready to curse herself until she saw Seraph Guin and could hold her breath no longer.

  CHAPTER 30

  ~SERAPH GUIN~

  THROUGH SHADOWS AS thick as wax, the Faraan emerged into the firelight. She was at once both humanoid and utterly inhuman, and something in her presence whispered to a primal fear cloistered deep within Angela’s very being. She felt like some ancient pilgrim confronted at last by the manifestation of her God, who felt terror and awe where worship should be.

  There were wings, colossal and black-feathered, arcing out from a frame that towered above even Six-Tails by several feet. Her body was perfectly formed to the point that her physical appearance transcended the concept of attraction. Her bronzed golden skin was supple and smooth, and a mane of hair as black as sable cascaded over her shoulders and back with the fluidity of a waterfall. It swished like smoke around a pair of curved grey ram’s horns as she descended the stairs, her cloven hooves chiming in the silence like the hammer of the gods. A tail curled around her legs with an almost erotic grace, its tip an arrow point. In one hand she gripped the long haft of a golden spe
ar, the crescent blade shining in the torchlight. She was demonic and beautiful at the same time, terrifying and alluring, a predator in every sense. Her eyes were stark white, disturbingly soulless and yet glowing with an undeniable purpose.

  The Kal’mani who lined the stairs fell to their knees as she came, touching their hidden foreheads to the gleaming floor. Angela, torn between bending the knee and showing her defiance felt Drenno and Shimmer shift on either side of her, and realised that they now bowed before Seraph Guin. She dropped her head.

  Guin came forward until she stood directly before them, and from the corner of her eye Angela watched her raise her blade and touch the gleaming edge of it to Drenno’s throat. He flinched, but only a little.

  “I had not expected to see you so soon, Ellys Drenno,” the Seraph said, her voice a purr, her accent exotic, almost Middle Eastern. “I thought you more sagacious. Where is the Auton?”

  “On the ship. Like you said.”

  “Like I said... Are you here to unburden yourself of more contraband? Perhaps a dangerous chemical that obliterates my crops, or sets my livestock to over-zealous rutting.” She removed the weapon, turning her odd white eyes on Shimmer. “Soul-daughter. I have missed your clarity.”

  Shimmer reached out, touching hands with the Faraan. “And I your wisdom, Soul-mother.”

  Turning to Six-Tails, the Faraan smiled. The Endrani med-tech bowed deeply, and Guin faced Illith. The Silsir regarded her with cold eyes, and Guin placed a hand on her snow-white shoulder. “You did not want to come.”

  Illith didn’t shrug her off, which Angela was expecting, but instead said, “I don’t believe you can help us, and we have much to do.”

  The Faraan nodded. “That is reasonable. And you are correct: I cannot help you. But that does not mean this is a journey wasted. After your previous visit, if I did not want you here, you would not be.”