Second Contact

by Guerric Haché, Keezy Young

  “You know, I think I should thank you. You may have done something terrible, but I probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t. And I certainly wouldn’t have had the chance to change the world. So thank you, Venshi, for setting this all up, just so that I could come along and knock it down.”

  She grasped the skull and lifted it up into the air, bringing the torso along with it. It could barely move at all.

  “I wonder if when you die, you’ll go to the Elysium I created for everyone.”

  Ada slowed time and, quickly and efficiently, caught the machine’s mockery of a skull between two force sigils, crushing it completely flat. The torso stopped moving entirely, the lights went out, and she dropped the ruined husk onto the ground.

  She reached for the mass of floating sigils that was a golem’s core architecture, and smiled. She connected with it, feeling around with a neural connection just like the one she had to the code on her back, and when she hit the right spot she was suddenly hit with memories.

  Venshi’s memories.

  They were like her own, almost, although they disappeared entirely when she disconnected from the floating sigil. She reached back in, trying to dig through things, but she had no anchors, no knowledge of what Venshi knew, and so all she saw were flashes. Images of Glass Peaks through the ages, images of the Fall, images of the first Ghost War. She kept digging, pushing, hoping to remember something from Venshi’s past that would be useful, but she had no connection to anything Venshi had experienced.

  Then she came across an image of Isavel, and she stopped, thinking about it, trying to recall more. What was this? What was going on?

  She saw Isavel inside some kind of building, surrounded by people who looked like priests. There was a tall blond man next to her as well, someone who looked more like a hunter than a spiritual man. The eldest woman present, a priestess, was speaking.

  “She has been blessed by the gods, and chosen to lead us in our struggle against the ghosts.”

  Isavel’s eyes were wide with confusion and fear. She didn’t seem to understand what was happening, or why it was happening, or indeed who she was looking at as she stared through Venshi’s eyes.

  And Ada felt the evil calculations going on in Venshi’s mind as well, the memories not only of the senses but also of the mind, like all memories. She saw Isavel’s vulnerability with her own eyes, but she felt Venshi’s desire to exploit that vulnerability and turn Isavel into a weapon almost as though she had once felt it herself.

  Disgusted, Ada reached out with her foot and kicked Venshi’s shattered remains across the cavernous ruin.

  This was not all there was of Isavel in those memories, though. There was more, much more, and Ada found herself pouring through them, trying to find… she didn’t know what.

  Then she found Isavel again, looking worn and tired and alone. She looked Venshi in the eyes with something like defeat as she asked her question.

  “Venshi. Do the gods let their servants retire?”

  Ada sensed Venshi’s evil mind at work, here as in all the memories, but above all she sensed the ageless golem’s contempt in this one moment. Venshi knew - Venshi watched - and she understood that what Isavel was looking for was not war, or justice, or the service of the gods. Isavel was looking for peace and happiness, and she genuinely believed the gods were looking out for her in some way. Venshi’s contempt for Isavel’s unreflected longing for happiness ran deep - almost as deep her seething disgust at Isavel’s faith in gods.

  Ada pulled out, unable to bear it anymore. She stepped away from the golem code, away from the corpse, and turned away from both, running her hands through her hair.

  Contempt. Contempt not just for faith, but for the faithful. Ada was intimately familiar with that feeling - she had felt it hundreds of times before, for almost every person she had ever met. But not Isavel - never Isavel. The sensation of feeling such an emotion aimed at Isavel herself was utterly wrong, like somebody taking her bones and carving them into weapons to be used against herself.

  Why?

  She looked back at what she had done here, at the ruin of this evil creature that had tried to manipulate Isavel. She looked upwards, through the cracks in the ceiling and the dust suspended in thin beams of light, to the ring and the gods above who had also manipulated Isavel as well as Ada herself. This world was filled with creatures who had used Isavel’s faith to their own ends, seeing her only as the faith she had, not as the person with that faith.

  In another world, a worse world, Ada might easily be one of them.

  She reached out to the golem sigil, pressing and shrinking it down into a small orb that she could carry in her hand, like some kind of toy. But before she left, she dove into the memories one last time, still looking for Isavel.

  Isavel was lying on the ground, asleep or unconscious. She was surrounded by people, most closely the golden-haired bodyguard Hail that Ada had met earlier. It was night, and three people Ada didn’t recognize were staring guiltily at each other.

  “What is the matter with her?” Venshi’s question came with no real feeling, except some utilitarian concern.

  “She just - she collapsed -” Hail stammered. The bodyguard looked completely stricken with grief.

  “I saw her coming from your end of the camp.” Venshi knew the blue-haired-warrior who spoke as Rodan. He pointed to the tall blond hunter she had seen earlier, as well as the darker-featured hunter woman who was holding his hand. Venshi knew them, too, as Sorn and Marea. “Did she see you two?”

  Sorn in particular looked very guilty. “I didn’t see anyone nearby -”

  “Did she hear you? Pathfinder gifts, remember.”

  The two hunters exchanged nervous glances. “I thought we were quiet -”

  Hail looked up at them, at their hands, and it was as though she noticed the entire situation for the first time. “Sorn. You’re Isavel’s lover.”

  “I - I mean, yes -”

  A look of rage crossed Hail’s face. “You didn’t tell her you had found another? You didn’t ask how she felt about it? Why not?”

  “I - well, she’s already having a hard time being the Herald - I didn’t want her to think she wasn’t -”

  Hail stood up and shouted into the other hunter’s face. “As the Saint Herald she deserves your gods-damned respect! ”

  Venshi looked on the proceedings through a thick sheet of disdain. It was incomprehensible, to her, that a person’s need for intimacy would so blind them to the greater good they were trying to serve. Another node brightened in Venshi’s webwork of memories, a distant, ancient recollection of a man she had once loved herself, and betrayed without remorse, in the service of acquiring equipment for developing the technophage. For the greater good of humanity.

  Ada pulled out of that memory, trying to get away, and saw a cascade of other sights and sounds, many unrelated to anything, mundane and cataclysmic all intertwined.

  Isavel was sitting on the roof of the temple in Glass Peaks, alone except for Hail’s watchful eye from a few meters away, and there was a red panda running around her. She was laughing as the animal climbed up onto her lap and tried to eat the food in her hand. She popped a berry in its mouth and grinned with glee as the animal munched away at the gushy red food .

  Venshi’s memories were coloured with disgust at the animal’s mere existence, an abstract philosophical horror at some complex history of nearly-failed conservation, genetic tampering, public campaigning, and domestication that had lead to the red panda becoming a feral species in a land it should never have set foot in the first place. Ada understood few of Venshi’s thoughts on the matter. All Ada wanted to do was rush over to Isavel, sit next to her, and tell her it would get better. Everything would get better. She must feel alone, but she wasn’t.

  Ada tore herself from the memories again, breathing heavily, staring at the golem sigil. She shook her head, trying to chase the anxiety and self-doubt from her mind. She was not going to ruin anything - she was going to
fix everything. Isavel had given up on her gods, and Ada wasn’t going to try and manipulate her. She was not like Venshi. Everything was going to get better. How could it not get better? She had power, and she had Isavel’s trust, and Earth was changing. She couldn’t mess this up.

  Ada staggered out of the ruins, out into the crater her code had left behind, scrambling up the steep edge of the mountain’s wound with the golem sigil firmly in one hand. As she emerged over the rim and stood up, dusting herself off with her free hand, she saw Zhilik, Tanos, and Sam staring at her with interest.

  She forced a smile, trying to hide everything that was weighing her down.

  Tanos nodded down the crater. “That was quick. I thought that would take a lot longer.”

  “Felt like hours.” Ada sighed. “But I found a lot of answers - as well as this little thing. This is the code that makes a golem run just like a human.”

  Their eyes all widened, none more than Zhilik’s. “Synthetic consciousness. You want to use it?”

  “It can’t hurt to know how.” Ada pointed west. “Come on - I want to get out of here. We need to prepare for the future.”

  Sam nodded. “I agree.”

  Ada only barely noticed something amiss about the ghost’s words as they got into the vehicle and sped back towards the sea. She was too busy thinking about Isavel, manipulated and abandoned by the people she relied on. About the light pulsing of the locator stone in her suit pocket, one of the few things pulling her up instead of down.

  Chapter 8

  They weren’t going to do what Isavel wanted.

  It was more a disappointment than a surprise. The distance between her and the faithful, the angry, the charismatic was apparent. Like a bad actor she had wavered in her delivery of the Herald, had fought with too little bloodthirst against those they saw as the real enemies. She never had been given the role of heroine as a child, after all - perhaps it wasn’t just on account of the olive skin that set her apart from other children.

  News of another ghost walker, coming from her, did little to faze anyone preparing for war. They nodded placidly and voiced agreements, but in their hearts the real threat remained Campus and its inhabitants. They deferred to Mother Jera, who apparently now spoke for both gods and mortals alike.

  Luckily, fear of Ada’s exotic weapons was more effective at steering them. They marched north towards the thicket of islands clogging the strait’s narrowest point. It would delay the march, for a time at least. Time enough for her to find a new way to delay them further? Perhaps. She had to try.

  She and Hail had been at the head of the army as it left Glass Peaks, a rumbling serpent of people and animals and machines slithering up the coast. When an idea hit her, the two of them sat and waited under the firs that dominated the shoreline. Shadows crept towards them as the sun began to pass overhead, the daylight more fully blotted out by the branches and needles of these trees than by the distant ring and all the gods it housed.

  A hauler soon appeared further down the column, and as it approached they stood up to walk towards it. There were only a handful of these machines, and this one at the heart of the army, as she had expected, carried Mother Jera and a few others.

  When Isavel stepped alongside the hauler and into view of the elder priestess, though, she found the old woman’s face quickly soured with consternation. “My child, why aren’t you pursuing the ghost walker?”

  Isavel’s mouth hung open. She had spent the better part of the day yesterday trying to convince them to divert the army to find that walker. What was Jera talking about now? “Excuse me, Mother Jera? I thought we had decided he was not a threat.”

  Mother Jera waved her hands around. “ We had, certainly, but you seemed quite insistent. If he is such a threat, why are you not going out there to solve the problem on your own? You are entirely capable of it - you did kill the last two, after all.”

  Isavel opened her mouth to speak, but she wasn’t certain what to say. Jera didn’t give her much time to figure it out, either. She had not been expecting this.

  “Or was your insistence on his danger to us not sincere?”

  The hauler was only moving at a walking pace, but Isavel almost stumbled as she walked alongside it. For all that she had enjoyed putting on plays as a child with her friends, nobody would ever have picked her out as a talented actor. Still - did Jera know, simply suspect, or was she fumbling in the dark?

  There was nothing to be gained from honesty at this point. Not if she wanted to keep to the gods’ request and protect the city. She needed to retain what standing she still had with the city’s most followed elders. She stiffened her jaw. “No, Mother Jera. I was simply hoping for some assistance, but… you are correct. With the gods at my side, I can take care of a single ghost walker without an army to his name.”

  Mother Jera’s hands were shaking, and she was holding something, a sort of amulet Isavel had never noticed before. She looked down at it even as she spoke to Isavel. “Very well. Gods be with you, Saint Herald Valdéz. May the interests of our city always guide you.”

  They did. Her interests were entirely aligned with the interests of the city. She wished the same could be said of the city’s own collective decisions. “Of course.”

  She turned away, letting the hauler pull out ahead of her, and turned to stare at Hail. She felt shamed, as though it were patently obvious to everyone that she was no longer their ally. She had of course grown more withdrawn in the past weeks, but what had they expected of her? Had she perhaps failed to meet what others saw as the standards of someone of her role and titles? Nobody had ever expressed any such expectations to her.

  Perhaps that was the issue. Perhaps a Saint Herald was only worthy of being followed when they were novel, when their fervor came without prompting, when they never stopped pushing forward. She had stopped, had wanted to breathe, had wanted to reconsider. She had lost momentum.

  “Isavel?”

  She blinked, shaking her head a little and focusing her eyes on Hail. The hunter’s blond hair was bound up at the top of her head, but stray strands still swayed in the breeze around her blue eyes. There was something a bit alarmed in those eyes, though, as though Hail too were starting to realize just how far Isavel had drifted from being the beating heart of an exalted march. Isavel nodded at her. “Well nevermind my last idea. We need to keep the respect of the elders. Let’s get a hauler.”

  “I don’t know how to drive one.” Hail’s gaze wandered uneasily. “Do you?”

  Isavel had tried once or twice, and found the physical connection with the vehicle to be baffling, a nauseatingly alien sensation of feeling its position and orientation and movement as hers. She would rather not. “Let’s see if we can get the coders to drive for us again.”

  “Them?” Hail frowned. “Isavel, they’ll get killed if we get into a fight.”

  Isavel lowered her voice. “I don’t intend to get into a fight.”

  Hail’s eyes narrowed. “They could get us banished or killed if they suspect your motives .”

  Isavel glanced around them, trying to see if she could find the coders and evaluate them with new eyes, but they were nowhere to be seen. Would they? She wasn’t sure why Hail would suggest such a thing, but it was… not beyond the realm of possibility.

  People around them, she realized, were still staring at her. Wondering, no doubt, what their Saint Herald was doing standing around as the army walked by. Why she wasn’t leading the charge. What she was thinking. Where her loyalties lay.

  She had had enough of that suspicion as a child, her father’s people seeing her mother in her and her mother seeing her father’s people. She leaned in closer to Hail. “I’ll risk it. I need to get out of here.”

  Hail nodded. “As you wish. I’ll keep an eye out. They may be further back.”

  “Then let’s head that way.”

  As Isavel walked through the crowd, crossing gazes with dozens of the thousands who had decided to march from the city, she saw less awe
in them than she once had. More confusion. She tried to stand tall, tried to keep her shoulders straight, but knowing that she was trying to undermine the very vengeance they seemed prepared to die for, she felt herself straining under their gaze.

  Her hand found the locator stone in her pocket, and while she kept it hidden lest anyone familiar with code see it, its presence was comforting. What would Ada say?

  It was for their own damned good.

  She smiled lightly, and that thought carried her through to the back of the column, where Hail spotted the coder siblings. Zoa’s face froze when they reached her, while Ren’s opened up with confusion more readily. “Saint Herald?”

  She glanced between them. “We need a pilot.”

  Zoa frowned a little. “There are plenty of people -”

  “People I don’t know.” Isavel raised an eyebrow at the blue-haired coder. She didn’t want to deal with the additional uncertainty of a person she had never even met before. “I would prefer if you two could come along, but of course if you need to stay with your fellows -”

  Ren shook his head. “No, no. Zoa, it’s fine. Of course, Isavel, we’ll help. Who else is coming?”

  “Myself and Hail. That’s it.”

  Zoa glanced at her brother, but nodded. Was she worried about something? The coders certainly were traditionalists, but Isavel had never thought them particularly invested in the divinity of anything that happened around them. The question remained open as the coders huddled off through the crowd, towards the hauler heading up the back of the column. Best hope they got used to it.

  Once they had secured the hauler, the coders took another moment to peer at her, Zoa’s fingers twitching against the metal hull. “So where are we going, exactly?”

  “To kill the last ghost walker.” She saw the panic in their eyes, and didn’t let them get a word in. “He doesn’t have an army, as far as I know. He’s hiding. This is more of a hunt than a battle. I can take care of him alone.”