Second Contact

by Guerric Haché, Keezy Young

  Kseresh was looking too. “Ada, it seems our enemies are too quick.”

  “Weapons - you have weapons, right?”

  He looked nervous. “We have weapons in storage, but I cannot ask my people to man the walls when the shuttle is prepared to evacuate them. I - wait, get back.”

  Everyone on the ziggurat hurried away as the shuttle roared and rocketed into the air. Ada shielded her eyes from the engines’ red-white glare, as ugly and primitive a sight as she had ever seen on a spaceship. “How are we supposed to delay them? There are only so many golems!”

  Kseresh flatted his ears. “I do not know. I can let you have the weapons, but -”

  “Give us the weapons.”

  They both turned to look at Sam. Behind her, climbing up the steps of the ziggurat and creeping onto the edge of the roof, were ghosts, the human shadows who had lingered here for weeks. All of them, Ada guessed, crowding up the steps of the ziggurat. Some bore their stolen gifts, some bore weapons, but many were unarmed - the ghosts had not discriminated in their possessions. Hundreds of faces tinted red in the shuttle’s rise. There were not nearly enough.

  “We’ll hold them back. Buy you time.”

  She reached out. “Sam -”

  “Ada, stop. We’ve all died before. We know where we’re going. We took these lives from innocents; it’s only right we give them in service of innocents.” She stepped forward and looked the elderly outer in the eyes. “Open the vaults, and we’ll do everything we can. We die and we live again, but you… don’t. We know that. We hate that. I don’t want it to happen. ”

  The only sound was the shuttle’s roar, ever quieter as it strove for the heavens. Those standing nearby on the ziggurat had turned to watch the ghosts, as though only now really grasping their presence in the city.

  Elder Kseresh leaned to the side, reaching for one of the younger outers standing nearby. “Open the weapon vaults. Let them take everything.” He reached out to Sam and laid his alien hands on her shoulders. “We will remember this.”

  Sam nodded, her lip curling a little. “So will we.”

  As she turned, Ada grabbed her by the arm. “Sam, you can’t -”

  The ghost looked her back in the eyes. “I didn’t let you give me a new body so I could live with it, Ada. I took it so I could die with it. Take it into eternity with me. Maybe it’s time.”

  Ada let go, watching silently. What was Sam thinking? Where was Tanos? How - why would they just… give themselves? They were ghosts , body-stealers for gods’ sake. They weren’t paragons of virtue.

  Sam raised both arms in the air, spread wide, and shouted. “Elysium!”

  The ghosts responded to Sam’s shout, fists in the air, cheering and turning away from the fading glow of the shuttle. After a split second of confusion, Ada remembered that she, too, had something to offer. Not her life, certainly, but something nonetheless. She followed them.

  Golem weapons rang out across the field as she hurried back into the city. The golems might slow the onslaught, but it wouldn’t last. Isavel would be out there trying to save lives, after all, and that would mean destroying the golems. Ada had to think of something else, something to hold the humans back.

  Isavel wanted to save lives, but Ada didn’t need to save all lives. She could sacrifice some humans if it meant slowing the advance - they started it, they’d pay for it. It would probably save more people in the long run, anyway. If only she had some kind of way to…

  The idea struck, and sent her weaving through throngs of ghosts back into the ziggurat, searching for the outers’ communications device. Found it. She reached inside, her dark code worming into the machinery, and let the neural translators on her back do their work.

  She felt around, grabbing, tearing, finding the code that made it run. She tore it out wholesale, scarring the metal as the seared out the bright lines, holding the pure sigil in her hand. Long-ranged communication - long enough to reach the gods and be ignored, because the gods didn’t listen to outers.

  They’d better fucking listen to their Arbiter this time.

  She climbed to the roof of the medical building, the highest point in the city, and slammed the locked door aside with a force sigil. The city’s circular wall felt unnervingly small and weak from up here, as her eyes drifted to the line of hulking relics and the army behind them. Ghosts were setting up on the city walls, responding with guns and heavier weapons and gifts and all the firepower they could find.

  Ada let the sigil in front of her drift, intertwining it temporarily with the sigils on her back, reaching into the air with code that would sap light and heat from the sun to power the communicator and feeling that energy pour into her own body as well. She felt the communicator sigil like a new voice, and flung it towards the stars.

  “Gods on the ring! I am Arbiter Ada Liu, and I demand you respond to me!”

  The gods’ polyphonic warble spilled out from the sigil itself. “Arbiter Liu. A colonial ship is in orbit, evacuating mirrans. Is this intentional?”

  “Yes it’s intentional you fucking imbeciles!” She pointed. “And we need to get them all off! I will not let them die here!”

  “That is very human of you.”

  “Isn’t your zeroth law the protection of humanity? Help me! ”

  The gods were briefly silent. “We must confer with the other arbiters. What do you require?”

  Ada saw the convenient shape of the army. She pulled out the locator stone, and it told her what she already knew - that angelic shape, off to the left, was Isavel. Off to the right was nobody of consequence. She slipped the stone back into her suit and growled, wishing she didn’t have to compete with three dead Arbiters for the gods’ attention.

  “Godfire.”

  The gods were silent. “We cannot kill -”

  “I don’t want to use it to win , just enough to scare them. Make them question the sanity of what they’re doing. Slow them down. A single shot could scare them into routing, remind them of the power of their gods, save lives.” She blinked. “Oh, also, I forbid you from firing on any of the ships in orbit right now.”

  After a long silence, the gods responded. “The other Arbiters are uncertain, but they have agreed to concede you one shot from the orbital defense cannons. They consider your technophage immunity valuable, and agree that a deterring shot might be our only immediate way to help minimize the mid-term casualties. It will also be useful to reinforce cultural norms against warfare with the mirran diaspora, and to remove those tanks from circulation. Choose your target carefully.”

  Tanks? They must mean the shielded and shelled weapon platforms walking around down there. She kept her eyes on the glowing white point that must be Isavel. “Believe me, I’m going to be very careful.”

  A flash across her vision brought forth a strange, bright red shape, like a flattened sphere on the ground with a single long pillar reaching up into the sky, at a slight angle, connecting with the ring.

  “We are ready to fire. You have access to our target designation system.”

  She found new mental muscles suddenly awake in her brain, and used them to move the shape around, positioning it carefully. She didn’t want Isavel anywhere near that red shape. She chose her target, watching the shards of hard light flickering back and forth across the battlefield, and set her jaw.

  “ Fire. ”

  The shape disappeared, and for a moment there was nothing but a twinkle in the sky. Then something was approaching, coming in hot and fast, a crystalline slug of light the size of a hauler. The godfire slammed into the right side of the army, a twisting explosion of brilliant blue sweeping dust and dirt into the air. One of the beetle-like tanks disappeared completely, and she saw another topple over.

  There was screaming in the fields, and for a slipping handful of moments, almost silence.

  “Target hit. Ada Liu, while you are available, we would like to clarify -”

  “I’m not available, I’ve got a battle to fight!”

 
The humans were reeling, fleeing the godfire and backing away from the golems holding the field. A cheer went up from the walls, where ghosts had set up to fire at the army from afar. Ada almost smiled. They could manage this.

  The relic tanks on the field turned their weapons to the city, a flurry of blue hexagons chewing through the top of the walls. The ghosts that weren’t cut down jumped off. Even as the human army staggered and reoriented itself, those tanks kept the ghosts from pushing that advantage.

  Shit. They couldn’t manage this.

  Ada looked back at the ziggurat. There was nothing coming down from space yet - hell, it was entirely possible the shuttle hadn’t even reached its parent ship. She reached into the comm sigil and tried to listen, this time, instead of speaking. Maybe she could hear them.

  She heard shouting. Angry, worried shouting, barking that sounded at times like the outers’ language and at times like hers, but were clearly neither. These mirrans sounded different to the outers here, too - something about the resonance of their voices was off.

  No matter. Ada let the sigil fall silent and ducked back into the medical building. There was nothing here Ada could use to buy them more time. She burst out into the streets and rushed towards the walls. Parts of them had already been broken; she reached a gap in the wall and slowed time to a crawl, snaking a seeing eye out onto the battlefield. The screen sigil in front of her eyes flickered as the eye darted across the ruins and the meadows, reaching the golems.

  Many of the golems were already broken, lying shattered or crawling along without legs, shouting inane warnings about property violations as the army stomped over them. They weren’t experts at target prioritization either, many of their shots plinking harmlessly off the tanks’ bubble shields. The tanks themselves then, big evil six-legged metal eggs, stomped forward and jammed their claws into any golem that got too close.

  She dropped the code. Shit. Even with the humans were staggered and regrouping, those tanks could mow straight through to Campus if she did nothing. All the dead ghosts in the world wouldn’t stop them.

  “Damn it, Isavel, couldn’t you have warned me?”

  She had to do something about this. She yanked out a ration and bit into it. Hopefully this wouldn’t go as poorly as last time she had tried something crazy.

  Ada stepped through the gap and raised her hands, eyes fixed on the tanks. She squeezed time slow and reached out, dark chains of code lashing through the air over many long minutes compressed into a fraction of a second, each a carefully constructed, self-reinforcing coil that would do her bidding far from where she was standing. Seeing eyes led the way as the code coiled far and wide, passing unharmed through the nearest tank’s shield and latching onto its hull.

  Perfect.

  She immediately started tracing inverted force sigils onto the inner shells of the tank. Along its joints, along its guns, everywhere - all of them mostly inert, powered only by the dark code’s own inherent energy, unending but weak. Then she wove them together, linking all the little sigils into a single whorl at the bottom of the tank, and disintegrated her way into the bottom, exposing its power core and linking it to her weapons.

  The tank’s own energy supply flowed into the code and the force sigils glowed and burst with energy, crushing the tank to pieces all at once and sending shrapnel flying. Shrapnel and the blood of some human occupant. Her mind went blank for a moment, and she felt a pang of guilt. She could have just disintegrated the legs, if she had stopped to think about it.

  She was about to do this to the next tank when she noticed something bright in the corner of her own fleshy eyes - weapons fire, a huge blue-white tank shot headed straight for her head. Damn it. Why had she stepped outside the wall? She dropped all her other code and started tracing sigils between her and the shot, but the tank fire was powerful - could she hold it off? Could she disintegrate it?

  The angry hexagon slid slowly through the air, but not slow enough. It was moving at a visible pace even as the rest of the world was practically still, and in a panic Ada wasn’t sure whether to try deflecting or absorbing or breaking it. She tried ducking, but her body moved incredibly slowly. This was not good. She still had time to do something, though, if only -

  The world around her shimmered. Tiny blue-green cubes bloomed out of nowhere and, after a brief glow, burst into many more along their sides, leaving a totally different world in their wake. One of the thousand worlds slowly materialized around her as the canon shot slid towards her head, and suddenly there was nothing under her feet and Ada was falling, the code she had been trying to weave breaking off and crumbling to dust.

  Whatever was going on, this was an improvement.

  She let time go back to its normal speed.

  The tank shot flew straight over her head, passing out of this world again, and she landed with a thunk onto a woody jungle floor. She looked up and saw nothing of the world she had been in.

  “What the -”

  “Ada Liu? Is that you?”

  She looked up and saw a lanky, brown-skinned man she didn’t recognize. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Erran.” He stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you. I have a friend called Sam who I owe a favour; she wanted me to watch out for you. Since you were about to get shot -”

  “What? When did you meet Sam?”

  “Last night. I was just passing through, thought I’d see if -”

  “Gods - okay, fine, you saved my life. Get me back up there!”

  “So you can get yourself killed?” He shook his head. “Come on, let’s climb that tree. When I bring us back to the root world we’ll be behind the city walls.”

  The world here was remarkably quiet - insects sang their songs, strange bird cries and a hot breeze rustled through the canopy, but war was nowhere to be heard. She looked around, mistrustful. “This place is creepy.”

  He waved her over. “I don’t like it either. Come on!”

  She followed the walker to the tree and started climbing it, thick aerial roots and mossy trunk not nearly as pleasant to the touch as the rough bark of a cherry tree. As they climbed the tree, she looked back down to the walker. “You’re a ghost, aren’t you? What the hell are you doing here?”

  He looked guilty. “The last of our walkers, yes. The tanks are my fault. I needed a bargaining chip to get Isavel to spare me, and she needed an excuse to get the army to wait another day or so before attacking. Not that it won much time, apparently.”

  Suddenly this world melted away and they were back in Campus, weaponfire hailing into the city from beyond, needling the tallest buildings at random. A broad tank shot sliced through the top of a tree, the branches crashing into the streets and smashing the glass in a building’s ground floor.

  Ada punched Erran in the shoulder. “You asshole!”

  “Look, I was just trying to stay alive! I needed leverage. She’s fierce, she could have killed me if she put her mind to it.”

  Ada wanted to berate him, but she knew it wasn’t his fault. After all, she had consigned him to this fate herself, under vaguely similar circumstances. “Okay, fine, but what am I supposed to do against those? ”

  “Why the hell are you whining?” He looked bewildered. “They had five and you’ve already taken out two. I’m pretty sure they’re at least worried now. ”

  Ada looked at the ghost, the walker, and her mind raced. He was new. Could he be useful? Could she make him do anything? “How do you feel about dying?”

  His eyes widened, and he took a step back. “No thank you!”

  “Okay, okay - I’ve got this. Demons! Can you summon a demon?”

  “I -” He wrung his wrists, frantically looking around into space and avoiding her eyes. “Maybe? I’ve never tried. I don’t even know - well, I can kind of guess - ”

  “Summon a gods-damned demon and get it out there!”

  “What am I supposed to do if it gets killed?”

  “Can’t you summon one that doesn’t die?”

&n
bsp; “Maybe?”

  A weapon punched through the wall a few feet away from where Ada was standing, spraying them with concrete. She shielded her face and hurried away from the wall. “Too many maybes!”

  “I’m sorry I’m new at this!”

  Tanos suddenly ran past her with her gun in his hands.

  “Hey - hey Tanos! Hey get back here!”

  He was gone around a corner before she could decide whether or not to follow him, and then Erran suddenly squawked. “Holy shit, we still have one of those?”

  She looked up at where the walker was pointing. A dragon soared overhead, roaring dragonfire straight at the army. Ada knew of only one dragon in the region. She shouted in despair, shaking her fist at it.

  “Oh come on! ”

  Then she remembered something.

  “Oh! Come on!”

  She dragged the walker along with her and ran to the medical facility, where the few material bits of her research remained. Erran looked deeply confused. “What are we doing?”

  Somebody had set up a heavy weapon on the roof of the building and was firing at the army. Ada swore. Those idiots would draw fire to the building if they hadn’t already.

  Then again, the entire city was drawing fire.

  “Let’s find you a demon and superpower it!”

  “What does that even mean? ”

  “Doesn’t matter!”

  “You’re crazy.” And yet despite that, the walker followed her into the facility.

  Ada closed her eyes and drew out the golem sigil, rummaging through drawers until she found a tiny, sharp knife. “Give me your hand.”

  “You’re holding a knife!”

  “Just a shallow cut!”

  “Holy shit, what -”

  She grabbed the palm of his hand and dug into it, jamming the knife into the viewer that let her look at tiny tiny things.

  “Ow what the -”

  “Shut up! I got this!”

  He looked around, as though for an escape. “You’re insane!”

  She slowed time, taking stock of what she was seeing. Two common human gifts - check. Technophage - check. A fourth particle remained, and it couldn’t be anything other than the walker’s gift. The work she had done on removing the technophage involved simulating the new immune gift inside the code itself, and it was a trick, but she was more than able to do the same work with this walker’s gift, given a bit of time and finicking. And in time dilation she had plenty of time, stretching out in front of her for hours.