Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

  To his horror, the umpires advanced his clock. Missed shots had a price, and a costly one. He walked off his malaise, sat back down, and tried to focus, sparking a cigarillo to calm his nerves. Uri suppressed his revulsion and tried to get on with it.

  “Looks like you’re going to have to hurry,” Sava radioed.

  “Hone your aim.”

  “I’m on meter-high stilts in a dust storm, lieutenant. This rifle’s firing high-caliber rounds, I can’t guarantee shit.”

  Uri and Farzad exchanged queens, another Alkonost killed. Jaweed was taking clean shots, benefiting from the lee of the western hotel tower. Luckily, most of the men seemed ignorant of chess play’s subtle tactics, lessening the impending sense of doom. But a few were in the know. The whole perversion was an unfathomable horror. Uri tried to dissociate the reality from his actions; he had to get on with it. More pawn exchanges bloodied the queenside board, the black and white smeared with gore.

  “The pace is picking up, eh?” Sava radioed.

  “You’re going to have to call the moves quicker.”

  Forty-five moves in, Farzad was left with a rook and a bishop along with a scattering of pawns. Uri’s count was much the same, but he’d two rooks, linked and much stronger. As he prepared to move Sava into the center, one the Padshah’s men, a lone pawn in the center, started to crack. Screaming in a gibberish of pidgin Turkmen, he threatened to run off. Unsure what to do, Sava cursed him.

  “There is no clock stoppage for this,” Farzam informed Uri, the flamboyant brother’s usual gleeful whimsy turned dour. “If he runs, you forfeit!”

  “Sava, you’ve got to calm that son-of-a-bitch down!”

  “Or what?”

  “Or you resign, and Jaweed—or whoever the hell—kills you where you stand, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Sava lowered his rifle and pulled the trigger, ripping open the thigh of the hysterical subaltern. Falling to his knees, the man balled his fists and begged the balcony for mercy. Sava peevishly wagged his forefinger; the message was crystalline.

  One of Padshah’s men got up from his settee enraged, and stomped over to Uri in protest. Uri tried to ignore the man’s beard-spittle tantrum, but was overwhelmed by his bullying gesticulation. The fractious Turkmen made a grab for Uri but was stopped by one of The Brothers’ cadre and pulled into the periphery.

  “What’s the ruckus?” Sava asked.

  “One of the Khan’s men is throwing a fit, a little annoyed by your draconian stratagem,” Uri radioed. “Can he crawl at least?”

  “He’ll crawl, by damn.”

  More bodies slapped the polished marble like butchered meat. An exchange left Farzad with a bishop and Uri with a lone rook. The rook—an Alkonost grenadier from Second Cavalry—relaxed on his shorter stilts. Having escaped the glut of sacrifice, his chest slowed to a steady rhythm. Uri was ten minutes ahead of Farzad, with twenty-five minutes to go. The endgame was afoot and speed was a necessity.

  Less than a minute a move, the pieces stilted around the black-and-white tessellate in a cumbersome waltz. The slick of blood challenged balance, and with each move, Sava and the remaining Alkonost fought for equilibrium. A last pawn exchange cleaned the board, the heaps of black and white corpses—now gray and red—lay indiscriminately along the perimeter. With two opposing pawns isolated on the far kingside file, the four pieces battled on.

  “How much longer? You have him, you just need to finish him off!” Sava barked.

  “I’m trying.”

  “Fifteen minutes left!”

  “I can see that.”

  Uri chased Farzad’s bishop around the board until the eightieth move. Sava squatted on his stilts to line up the pawn shot. Ten minutes left. The shot was twenty meters away, and Sava’s fatigued legs trembled.

  “Take your time.” Uri bit down on the nub of his soggy cigarillo.

  Sava said nothing.

  The bullet penetrated the boy soldier’s chest. A percolation of viscous purple dribbled down through the talc, raspberry syrup over powdered sugar. Sava screamed the move, but the pawn failed to drop. The 7.62mm round had entered and exited cleanly, its momentum preserved.

  “Ah hmm,” Farzam said. “That’s going to hurt.”

  “Five minutes!” Farzad shouted.

  “Wait!” Uri begged. “Give it more time.”

  The brother’s shook their head in synchronicity; the deathblow had not been meted. In shock, the boy stood resilient. Uri watched helplessly as precious minutes vanished with the clock reset. Another annoyed Vepr burst brought the move to completion.

  “Sorry, lieutenant. That kid should be dead.”

  “Forget it,” Uri radioed. “Stay nimble.”

  Running on the aluminum stilts, Uri ordered the three remaining pieces around like a drill sergeant. Using his rook, he cordoned Jaweed down to the first rank. With two minutes remaining, and Farzam’s bishop idle and impotent, Uri ordered the last sequence of moves.

  “I’ve got him, Sava. Get ready.”

  “A pleasure.”

  Cornered, Jaweed’s eyes widened. Gasps of shock and desperation filled the courtyard, mixed with the jubilant shouts and laughter from the Khan’s contingent. With one move to mate, Sava reloaded a clip and aimed the rifle at Jaweed. His chrome fangs glinted in the fading tangerine light.

  “Rook to d4, finish him.”

  Sava’s eagerness betrayed his restraint. Uri heard gunfire, muffled and distant. Pops and ricochets played along the balcony. So close, Uri felt the splinters of marble-chip ejecta. Sava pulled away from Jaweed and surgically fired a volley into the hotel’s aeries. A man yelled as he fell from a deck, his rifle and ragdoll body tumbling into a desiccated copse of palms.

  “Snipers!” Sava yelled.

  Sava unloaded into Jaweed’s skull, dismantling bone, cartilage, and brain tissue from the Turkmen’s thoracic, finishing the job. Uri stepped back under the terrace soffits but was garroted by the steroidal mass of a huge djinn-like nomad. Long knives with serrated edges lunged in, aimed for the gut. Uri fought off the assassins, kicking with a rabbit’s frenzy.

  “Mach, I’m going for Uri,” Sava yelled over the ka-chunk, ka-chunk of stilted running.

  Uri was bleeding, sticky wet heat drenching his side. He’d been stabbed. Losing strength and flailing, he squirmed to escape the thrall. Every breath was trauma as piano wire kinked his windpipe. He heard another semi-automatic burst when a crush of bodies piled onto him.

  Sava, still attached to stilts, dove over the balcony to disrupt the assault.

  The Brothers were gone, shuttled away by their cadre. Through blurry eyes, Uri struggled to orient himself. The Khan’s men were dead, splayed over broken furniture, pulpy craters perforating their backs. Lying on his side, Sava unloaded his clip into the henchmen’s twitchy bodies as Mach and two mission intelligence agents strafed a swarm of enraged nomads.

  “Mach, I need a knife,” Sava yelled.

  The specialist reached down to his calf, pulled a survival blade from its sheath, and tossed it to Sava. Cutting away the nylon straps, he shook the stilts free. Uri craned his neck, looking for the Alkonost rook; the man was nowhere, consumed by the mob.

  “We’ve got to get him out of here!” Sava yelled to Mach. “He’s losing blood.”

  “I’ve radioed the Second, there’s a Hind inbound, a rooftop about half a klick to the northeast,” Mach said, packing up the odd recording device from the tripod.

  “Grab a tapestry and throw him on. We need to get him out of here.”

  Uri bounced along, his dead weight manhandled like a slaughtered pig. Sharp cracks of weapons fire mixed with the chanting hollers of the berserk. They were on the move, dragging him through Awaza’s slum warrens. Dust and ash snowed down, coating the bloody pools on his abdomen.

  For the last stretch, Mach and Sava grabbed his floppy extremities and lugged him up a darkened stairwell to a concrete roof. Someone popped a flare as the whoop of the Mi-24 gunship floated t
hrough the whirling sand.

  “Almost there, lieutenant.” Sava grinned boyishly, his fangs farcical.

  Uri held onto Sava’s hand with a death grip, unable to whisper a thank-you. A puff from Mach’s cigarette and four ccs of morphine ended the day.

  “The brothers Farzad and Farzam never intended to lose, did they?” Mach shouted over the rotor din.

  “No. It was just a fig leaf,” Sava shouted back. “An easy way to get what they wanted. Keep Alkonost off their backs. The Khan was never going to get anything out of this, and neither were we.”

  “Then why?”

  “Worth a shot.” Sava shrugged. “You got it?”

  “Yeah.” Mach tapped his satchel, the black recording cartridge tucked inside.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  April 2164 C.E.

  Skulls loomed in the seawater. Some were jawless, while a few were smaller, onion-sized, probably infants. He saw thousands of them, some barely human. Sava attempted to reach for the bony swarm, but paralytic sloth hobbled him. A jungle of algae clouded the murk. The wispy brown fibers brushed his skin, the slimy texture causing an involuntary shiver.

  A pale glow filtered down through littoral water, cold and leaden. He yelled, but his lungs were drowned with saltwater. This was a punishment—he had a suspicion—a lynching staged by the fleshless aquatic mob.

  Who were they? Their black sockets revealed no emotion, no spite, hate, loathing, ambivalence. The skulls were blank, a bare canvas. Regardless, these floating water spirits—these vodyanoy—had him in their aquatic embrace.

  His body rippled with diseased veins. Gazing down, a tangle of metallic fibers bound his ankles together. A stalk of rust crawled up from the fathomless depths and anchored him to the abyss like a tree root. The encrusted mesh dug into his flesh. He felt no pain, only the unease of deadened capillaries crowded by a parasitic intrusion.

  Sava tried to reason, to plead his case, but they’d muzzled him. His waterlogged larynx produced only porpoise-like squeals. Numb hands could not gesticulate. With no other means left, he prayed to his vodyanoy captors in the psychic cant of their benthic tongue.

  What do you want with me? he emoted, worried eyes bulging black.

  “You are our guardian, our watchman,” they replied, voices bubbly.

  I guard nothing. I’m your prisoner. Who are you?

  “We are the homunculi.”

  The what?

  “The meek. The seed.”

  You’re judging me—this is my punishment. You think I did this to you. I did not, Sava begged.

  “It matters little,” burbled the watery chorus. “What matters now, is that you remain with us, our eternal protector.”

  What are my crimes?

  “In a lawless world, ‘crime’ lacks definition.”

  Sava felt a sharp sting in his mouth. He’d punctured his lip tonguing the sharpened steel of his canines and the metal-wire bridge that connected them. He tried unsuccessfully to spit out the metal teeth.

  I’m not a monster.

  Silence.

  Release me . . . please.

  The frayed rust column wiggled and constricted around his lower extremities. Like burrowing worms, threads of malleable metal punctured his bloated flesh. His movements had been sluggish, but now the infection ossified his ankles and knees, immobilizing the joints completely.

  “We cannot. We’re your children, your progeny, and you are desperately needed.”

  An encircling serpentine shape moved among the vodyanoy skulls. The dim light distorted it. A fin, a tail, a snout. Sava felt the leviathan yank him from below. The skulls drew nearer. He shut his eyes and shivered as the slimy craniums caressed his skin.

  Deeper still, he felt the cord snap and was free from his moorings. Lacking ballast, he drifted through the submerged horror. His mind was a cacophony of inaudible mumbling; they were arguing amongst themselves. A violent jerk from below, and his limp body floundered. A megalodon—his leviathan—had rammed into his useless feet, clouding the water with milky gore. He felt no pain, only an anesthetic disassociation. The trauma buoyed him, the weighty flesh gone.

  Sava ascended through the murk. The bony throngs fell away. The forest green of the lower depths gave way to vibrant purple, and with the haunted sea’s improved visibility a shimmering surface materialized. Like an angel, he floated high above the osseous spheres. They stretched out to the edge of the sunken horizon, multitudes in the millions.

  “Miserable bastard nightmares,” Sava groaned, pulling himself onto a stiff elbow.

  Like arthritis, the pain was crippling. He heard and felt the perforating rips, the sub-dermal welts bruising black. Rolling over, he tapped the bed lamp and pulled back the sheets. His skin looked gruesome under the full-spectrum halogen. Like synthetic leprosy, rigid tributaries linked blotchy provinces of contusion. His joints felt clogged with detritus like gears seized with rust. And every morning was worse.

  “We’re dying.”

  Sava swung his legs over the edge of the bed and felt a burst of pain as his knees bent. Gritting his teeth, he let loose a high-pitched wail. He grabbed his field blade and whetstone, then stumbled back to his bunk. Someone knocked on the door.

  “Sava. You awake?”

  “Barely,” he replied, voice shaky. “Come in, Mach.”

  A thin wedge of gray light pierced the stuffy darkness. Mach rolled his wheelchair into the doorway’s threshold. His rigid arms trembled with effort. He tried to look Sava in the eyes, but sweat-matted hair fell over his bloodshot eyes. Filthy and stained, his thin medical pajamas clung to him.

  “Wilco said there’s a dead zone forecast, a big one,” Mach slurred, his lips syrupy with drool. “An out-gassing event in the Baffin marshes, a few flashovers, the beginning of the rainy season and all that. It’ll be here in a week.”

  “Right. That figures,” Sava said, exasperated. “Any news from East Anglia?”

  Mach slowly shook his head. “No, even the short-wave’s down—or we can’t get access. Nobody’s talking to anybody. It’s like we’ve fallen off the face of the Earth.”

  “We have.”

  “Almost by design, huh?”

  “Almost.”

  “What’re you going to do with that?” Mach nodded at the bayonet. “ ‘Getting on with it,’ as they say?”

  “Not a bad idea,” Sava joked. “No, just a little experiment.”

  “Wilco says he thinks he’s figured something out, wants you to come take a look when you get a chance.”

  “He’s up in the control room?”

  Mach nodded, then tried to leave.

  One of the wheel hubs clipped the door jamb; the paraplegic was too feeble to jostle the chair loose. Sava limped over and freed him. A waft of stale urine and body odor overpowered him. Shocked, he wasn’t aware how bad his friend had gotten.

  Sava shut the door and fell back onto his bed, waiting for the wheelchair squeak to wane. Lifting up his pajama leg, he deftly sliced across a discolored weal near his knee. The chronic throb and the extremely sharp blade muted the pain. Quickly, he pulled apart the cut and took a look before blood could fill the wound.

  Dabbing away the blood with a sheet corner, he could see the growth: a fibrous, sticky mesh interwoven into his derma. Shoring up the organic weave were subways of black corrugated veins, the tree trunks to the smaller branches. Slow panic. He didn’t doubt what grew inside him. But it’d been augmented, transmogrified, the Morosov engineers adapting Illithium’s cancer to infiltrate other parts of the anatomy.

  “What the hell have they done to us?”

  Previously confined to the brain, the networks had served a purpose: reading and writing thought, but for what possible purpose did it extend through the whole body? A suitable torment for whatever hell awaited him, sure, but why such an exotic revenge? It seemed unnecessarily elaborate. He injected his last syringe of cortisone before struggling into a jumpsuit.

  The mess hall was just that. Everyone was too pr
eoccupied to clean up. Stacks of trays filled with reconstituted mush sat piled on grungy aluminum carts. The congealing reek attracted armies of insects, both flying and crawling. Sava shuffled over to the freight elevator and punched the up arrow. No one used the Crown’s spiral stairway any longer, the climb too excruciating.

  Wilco sat at the control board in his roller lounger, a filthy blanket tucked around him. Two Alkonost recruits sat nearby, monitoring the radio protocols for signs of life.

  “Nothing yet?”

  “The only link we have is to Al’ Madina’s Ku-band weather feed. All other channels are dead.” Wilco sighed. “Right now, we’re tracking the dead zone, here.” He pointed at an orange blob crawling over the pole like a tidal invertebrate. “It’s mammoth. Could have us locked down for a month, maybe more.”

  “Great. Listen, Wilco. Mach mentioned you might’ve figured something out.” Sava was impatient, frustrated by the grueling slog to make it upstairs.

  “Right,” he said, swiveling around. “You know that ARIN number from the intruder’s transmission?”

  Sava nodded.

  “I’ve been doodling around,” he said, tapping his pen to a notepad. “There’s four concentric dials on the vault door, right? If you break up the ARIN number properly, instead of 2112-313-1100, say you have 211-231-31-100, or 21-123-131-100, it will match each dial’s zero to five hundred ticks. The last number has to be 100, since there’s no 00 . . . ”

  “That’s maddening. You’ve got too much time on your hands,” Sava said dismissively. “What do you want from me?”

  “Permission to go down to the vault and give it a go.”

  Sava shrugged. “With all these permutations, how long do you think it’ll take?”

  “A few hours, maybe a day, depending.”

  Sava agreed, lacking the fortitude to argue. Wilco might be onto something. What was the point of sending the damned ARIN number anyway? Sava mused. Ex-Alkonost, who gives a shit? There may be an ulterior reason.

  “Just make sure someone mans the radio, got it?”

  Mach protested as Sava doused him with water. Wielding the detachable showerhead like a pistol, he scrubbed and rinsed his emaciated, rigid body. Mach had been his specialist since his recruitment, and Sava had never heard him spew so much vitriol.