Second Contact

by Guerric Haché, Keezy Young

  The code that sapped heat and light from the sun grew and grew. Weapon fire tore through her dark branches, but only in the slowest motion, and Ada reached up to replace them as they fell. She needed the energy - her code needed the energy.

  The sigils floating between her and the army were being chewed away faster than she could replace them. If only she had more - more sigils ready to move into place -

  She created another wraith, this one’s entire being dedicated to that swarm of defensive sigils. It became a fountain of crackling dark spindles, yet another black mass reaching out from behind her, everything swarming out around the ziggurat. She moved everything, slowly, left to right.

  Then, faster. And faster.

  A dome of dark, smokey code enveloped the entire ziggurat, swirling around it at a mad pace. Every tank shot and weapon blast and hunter’s strike from beyond struck some sigil, and though the sigil was destroyed it was immediately replaced in the chaotic swirling by more, and more, and more.

  Almost nothing got through.

  Ada extended her seeing eyes out beyond the ziggurat, looking for strays, feeling the rage of the sun coursing through her veins.

  The ghosts were fighting and losing, but here she would do what she could.

  She was everywhere in the city at once, dedicating a little of her time to each problem, sustained and careful attention to her but splinters of a moment to everyone else. She found the few outers who had not yet made it to the ziggurat and guided them, shielding them from attacks as they ran from cover and climbed the steps to her haven.

  She couldn’t save them all, but she saved who she could.

  Isavel was there, in the fields, chasing down wraiths. She was not in the city yet. Good - maybe her followers would wait outside as long as she did.

  That hope was short-lived. A man with a turquoise armband climbed the ruined walls, roaring as he brandished his warrior’s sword. What would happen if she used a disintegration sigil on a human, she wondered?

  She did, and the sudden pile of gore was almost enough to make her break time dilation and retch. She immediately abandoned that wandering eye. There was no need to see that. Better to stick to force sigils.

  A hauler thrummed out of the city, somebody firing out of the cockpit. Almost no ghosts remained, and the last few were taking cover in ruins. Still, she was not quite ready for the city to fall. She dug reinforcement sigils into the remains of the walls, hoping to hold them longer. People and horses were already entering what breaches had been made before, but Isavel wasn’t among them yet. Ada coiled code towards a nearby tower, disintegrating its foundations and watching it collapse on top of the intruders, sealing the breach in the wall. For now.

  The tanks had caught on, firing at the energy sigils floating high above the ziggurat. She felt the drain, felt her human weakness shuddering through the branches of code all around her. No!

  She reached up and made more and more of them, a bloom of darkness to devour the light. But it wasn’t enough - the tankshots tore through dozens at a time. They would need to remake themselves.

  She was about to start crafting a new sigil when she realized the just how fast she might end the world with self-replicating sigils hungry to devour all light.

  No, no, she had to think of something else.

  She reached out into the fields, out into the grasses, found the ashen ground where Isavel had killed the demon. She allowed herself a smile - it was almost like they were children playing catch. Except people were dying.

  She found the code there, inert and tangled on the ground after the body that had sustained it disappeared. Code that could open a portal to another world. She tore it up and picked it apart, looking at it and recreating the same thing in front of her physical body, by the ziggurat, just to reinforce it in her memory. When she was done she annihilated the original. The less she left for the coders of the Institute, the better.

  She interwove the walker’s sigil with energy and levitation sigils and flung it out into the city. Again, and again. Bubbles of other worlds burst up like mushrooms, strange places that flickered in and out of reality, chaos directed by walker instincts without any guiding mind, sustained by dark tendrils reaching up to the sun.

  “Ada!”

  The code’s wind was whipping everything into the air on the peak of the ziggurat, the outers were cowering from the hurricane of code all around them, and Jhoru was waving the communicator.

  “The shuttle is landing!”

  There was a monstrous roar from beyond the code and Ada’s eyes snapped back. The Chengdu was careening through the air, flashing and shimmering in the morning light.

  “Tell them to hurry!”

  “They do not understand -”

  “ Tell them not to be afraid! ”

  She slipped back into time dilation, eyes everywhere. A tower came crashing down before Ada even knew what had hit it. Something was running through the streets - no, gods, that wasn’t the street - a solid bubble of ocean, nestled around one of the walker sigils, and a hunter got too close. The thing in the water world tore the soldier in and swam away, a chewed and bloodied corpse popping out the other side of the walk and crumpling to the ground.

  The Chengdu was falling, bleeding blue-white light and thunder as it went. Where was the dragon?

  The city was flooded with people, the golems were all but destroyed, tanks were marching on the walls. Only ghosts and wraiths remained, and the ghosts were fast disappearing. But the wraiths made a name for themselves now, inchoate whorls of black attacking anything that got too close.

  The Chengdu crashed into the ground barely one street from the ziggurat, power core overloaded, a flash of light that spewed concrete and ancient metals in every direction. The shockwave rippled against the hurricane of code all around her. Ada desperately tried to repel the shrapnel and debris, but some of it was just too large and had been forced too hard.

  She lashed onto them, disintegration sigils ready, and the largest pieces crashed into the top of the ziggurat and immediately crumbled to dust. Smaller shrapnel she hadn’t seen cut into everyone present, and as outers screamed a jagged flake of metal grazed the back of her right hand. She scowled, holding her hand close, but the wound was shallow.

  “Where’s that fucking shuttle?!”

  She looked up. It was coming down, heat flashing along its underside, but it was slowing. It was circling the city, she realized, as though thinking twice about this whole Earth business.

  “They say it is unsafe -” Jhoru was stammering.

  Ada screamed at the sky, and turned to Zhilik and Jhoru and the hundreds of others still waiting. “I told you I’d get you off this fucking planet and I won’t let a bunch of jittery aliens tell me otherwise!”

  She slammed into the ground with code, darkness seeping into every pore of the ancient rock, a levitation sigil ready to go. She couldn’t fathom how they could dare to float there simpering, so close to completing their mission. It enraged her. Fuck these aliens and their cowardice. She rose into the air, drinking in sunlight and summer heat and turning it into black code all around her, seething wings of dark sigils that pushed her into the sky. To hell with gravity.

  She rose above the hurricane of code around the ziggurat’s peak, above the dust and the fire and the warping distortions of other worlds and the wraiths, and she looked the bulky ship right in the eye and pointed down.

  “ Land this ship! ”

  She couldn’t see into the shaded cockpit window, but after a few long seconds the ship started descending. They got the message. Ada let herself back down into the eye of the storm.

  Tank shots struck out towards the shuttle as it approached, but Ada batted them away, redirecting them with force so they just missed it each time. She landed back onto the roof of the ziggurat and destroyed the levitation sigil - she couldn’t remember to do it every time, but damned if she wasn’t going to leave as few hints as possible.

  She turned and shouted over the ro
aring wind. “It’s coming! Get ready!”

  A tank shot struck the shuttle and it rocked as it entered the hurricane, but it didn’t fall, settling down uneasily. It slammed its door down onto the roof, and before she could even see what was inside the outers started rushing in.

  Zhilik shoved Jhoru off into the crowd and she glanced back in terror at the chaos around them. He returned to Ada and laid both hands on her shoulders.

  “Ada - you must flee.”

  She looked around her at the madness, the technicolor fires and the billowing columns of smoke and dust, the screams and explosions and unearthly sounds from the bloodied ruins of Campus. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’ll figure it out!”

  He flatted his ears and nodded. “Very well.” He hugged her, the outers quickly filling the shuttle behind him. “It has been a pleasure.”

  “You’re overstating it.”

  He grinned a toothy, alien grin and embraced her. “You should have faith in the goodwill of others.”

  “I do. Sometimes.” She furrowed her brow, trying not to think about this right now. “Zhilik - gods, get out of here!”

  More weapons were training on the hurricane of code now, trying to pluck away at whatever little remained of the inhabitants. Zhilik nodded and ran for the shuttle as the last of the outers climbed aboard. Ada watched them, parents and children of generations of their kind on Earth, forever trapped and suddenly cut free. It was a damn bloody cut.

  Where would they go, beyond the stars? What worlds awaited? What hazy memories of humanity might lie out there, abandoned and forgotten by the homeworld?

  Who was the enemy who had done this to them all?

  She looked out onto the ruins, barely visible beyond all the darkness swirling around them. Tanos and Sam were likely dead, or if they weren’t yet they were trapped. The city had come apart at the seams and become a killing field.

  All that was left was to find Isavel, and cross the Earth looking for her answers. There was no place -

  She turned one last time to see the shuttle, and saw them. Humans, two of them, inside the ship. Not ghosts - dressed wrong, looked wrong, acted wrong. Standing next to Zhilik and Jhoru.

  Staring at her.

  They were short, they were strangely dressed, but they wore technology - held it in their hands, wore it on their heads, used it, touched it, understood it.

  Humans staring at Earth, their own fabled homeworld. Staring at her, Ada Liu, eyes wide.

  The ancients’ human civilization lived on, unbroken, out among the stars.

  Chapter 19

  “Gods, Ada, I can handle this, but really? ”

  Isavel stared up at the massive ship that was pouring saltwater onto the field, firing into the army as it approached. Dark code crisscrossed its underbelly, and its voice boomed some ancient language as it flew.

  She turned and ran, trying to get out of range. One of the tanks turned to fire at it, but as the shots zipped in they shattered against a kind of shimmering in the air, a shield unlike anything Isavel had ever seen. What the hell was she supposed to do with this?

  Isavel darted from the warship’s shadow, trying to figure out an angle of attack when something else came roaring out of the city. A dark shape, a twisted and writhing black cloud, tore its way past the cracks in the city walls and swam through the air, darting towards the nearest warrior and slamming her off her feet. It looked suspiciously like code, but it was clearly alive .

  “What in the thousand -”

  She tore off after it, shield alight and palm blazing, peppering it with hard light. The shots passed cleanly through as the creature parted its whorling form to let them through. Demon? Was this another demon? It didn’t seem to be walking the thousand worlds, though - it looked like a rogue fragment of Ada’s sorcery.

  The thing tore into people left and right. It needed to be stopped. She ran at it, blade ready, and as it veered around to tear into another warrior Isavel stepped between them and raised her shield, anticipating a strike.

  It didn’t strike at all. It paused and stared at her for a second before veering off again, attacking someone else.

  “Hey! Hey! ”

  She chased it down. It wasn’t turned towards her, but as she jumped for it blade swinging, it nevertheless slipped out of her way like smoke, splashing across the ground and bursting up to surround and tear apart a horseman.

  Isavel roared dragonfire as it did, with no regard for the man trapped inside, and they were both obliterated. The code creature broke down into a hundred tangled bits of darkness that crumpled into the ground impotently, and its victim’s charred corpse collapsed as well.

  Good. She turned around. There were dozens more.

  “Gods damn it pull back! ”

  The people looked around at her, bewildered. Could they even hear what she was saying?

  “Pull ba -”

  Something loud and heavy grabbed her by the shoulders and tore her into the air. She swung her blade at the dragon’s claws and it dropped her, roaring as she gently lowered herself to the ground with her own dragon’s gift.

  She flung a shield towards the dragon, feeling the force seep from her arm in hexagonal pearls of light, but the dragon’s own shield was apparently working again. She shouted instead. “Get down here so I can fucking stab you! ”

  The dragon spat fire and light at her in response, an inferno enveloping everything around her, but her shield shrugged it off and left her standing in the middle of a circle of ash. She ran out to get a better view, but by then the dragon was gone, hiding behind the massive ship that was still battering everything in sight.

  She tore at the nearest of the ethereal code creatures, their spindly code reaching out like barely-substantial hands to those around them. None of them approached her - they were busy with the rank and file of the army around them, and even if she put herself directly in their paths they never raised a single tendril to oppose her.

  Isavel roared dragonfire from her jaws and hands at them, managing to blast a few into quickly-vanishing black dust, but they were slick and slippery, avoiding almost any attempts to be pinned down or cornered, doing as little as they needed to to throw people off their feet or kill them before moving on. They were precise, cold, and calculating.

  Suddenly Isavel was being shot at, and not from the city. She raised a shield and turned to see coders, hiding behind a ridge, guns trained on her and firing. The people around her panicked, and some of them pointed and shouted.

  “Ghosts! Back there!”

  She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Damn them - she didn’t need to protect them. She shouted loud agreement. “Ghosts!”

  The warriors and hunters around her charged the coders on the hill, who clearly hadn’t reckoned with this. The code beasts gleefully threw themselves into the melee, tearing apart anyone who got too close.

  Cannonfire from that enormous ship continued thudding into the field, cutting people down left and right as the metal bulk slid a few human heights above the field. That would have to stop.

  She turned around and ran straight for it, reaching deep into the dragon’s gift, feeling every part of her being grow lighter and lighter, growing out wings of light from her back, the gifts of the dragon and the warrior intermingled. She kicked off into the air towards it and soared, and the ghost dragon itself saw her, bearing down on her with all claws ready.

  She spun in the air, hard light wingtips cutting into its scaly armor as it came too close, and suddenly she thudded onto the side of the warship, feeling the cool, salty wetness of its armor under her palms. Dragon’s claws of light at her fingertips, she dug her way up the side of the ship as it turned in the air, massive cannons along the sides thundering into the chaos below.

  With a shout and a grunt Isavel heaved herself on top of the ship, higher than she’d like, and the dragon landed opposite her on its roof. It hunched its shoulders and roared straight at her
.

  “I will have your body and your unholy gifts -”

  She was in its bubble. She pointed with a warrior’s sword on her first and let loose, the shimmering blade ripping into the dragon’s chest and silencing it. The body collapsed onto the roof of the warship, gushing blood, limp wings collapsing around the edges of the ship in a dying embrace.

  Isavel marched right over to the body and grabbed it by its spiny shoulders, heaving it to the side. The dead ghost dragon slid off the ship and crashed down below, kicking up screams and dust alike. Dragons never learned.

  There was a door at the back of the ship and she ripped into it with glowing hot claws, tearing away at its seams and joints. She got inside and red lights started blaring. A voice started shouting in an incomprehensible language and Isavel tensed up, but after a few seconds she realized that was only the ship itself. Her eyes scanned the halls, frantic, as she muttered to herself.

  “Okay, okay, what now?”

  She looked around for something to destroy, but she had no idea what anything in here was, and set off through the ship. She soon found one room that looked promising - aglow with ancient technology, lights glittering and flashing and buttons and controls everywhere. In the centre was a vast, floating image - a map.

  She stepped closer, and saw that it was quite clearly displaying the army and Ada’s motley forces as red and blue, respectively. There was a lot more red than blue, but both numbers were significantly smaller than Isavel might have expected. People were dying, everywhere, in far greater numbers than she would have liked. At best, hundreds would survive the day.

  She watched the ship pick off several red dots at a time, all vanishing at once with each word from the cannons. This ship was part of that problem.