Isavel called up her claws and started tearing into the machines around her. Sparks flew and the ship shook and the red lights blared more frantically, but it wasn’t going down. It was too powerful, and its beating heart was not here to be torn out.
She ran down the narrow halls of the ship, opening doors and praying.
She found it in the centre, a room as far as possible from the outside. It was a massive glowing thing, not unlike the heart of a watcher. Ada had wrought dark scars of code down into it, no doubt powering the code on the ship’s underside. Here was the heart.
Isavel had dealt with these before.
She stuck her hand in and grabbed it, and was immediately afire with heat and energy. Her eyes flung open as she jutted out every single blade of light she could manage, wings and shields and blades and pure light from all her skin, lancing out and cutting everything around her to shreds, all that energy flowing through her and out again as destruction.
Then something fizzed and something else shook, and Isavel was thrown back by a sudden jolt to the side of the ship. She looked up, dazed, and saw the power core was dimming and flickering. She felt lighter, and not by her gift. The ship was falling from the sky.
She hadn’t thought about that, and panic seized her. If she was in this when it crashed…
She ran for the stairs, scrambled to the top of the ship as it tilted through the air. She stood firmly on the dragon-blood-slicked metal and glanced into the city, and something beyond her comprehension played out before her eyes.
A huge sphere of dark slashes and clouds was whirling around a squat building amidst the taller buildings, whatever was inside eclipsed and visible only in flitting seconds. Weapons from outside were starting to concentrate on that hurricane of magic, digging into it and sweeping code away, but it was self-replacing, unfaltering, not letting anything through.
The ship was about to crash.
Isavel ran to the other end of it and jumped off, wings wide, lightness in every limb. She drifted through the sky, a long swoop down onto the ground opposite the careening ship’s trajectory. Before she even touched down there was a deafening explosion behind her, and she dropped to the ground, shields up on both arms, taking cover. Metal and dust blew across the ruins, light flooded the air, and a shockwave threw everybody from their feet. Shattered glass poured down from every building. Bubbles of the thousand worlds bloomed around her, flickering in and out of existence and trapping the unwary in their maws.
Isavel looked up. That alien craft was coming down again, for the third and, she was certain, final time. This was almost over. She had to find Ada.
She looked back at the army that was quickly rushing into the crumbling, blood-slicked ruins of the city. Hail and Erran had a fighting chance, perhaps, but she might never find them again. She could search for them with Ada, but right now she had only one path.
Gods protect them.
And she hoped the gods protected her, too. They still owed her answers - answers about what she was, and why they had chosen her. With Ada at her side, she might finally be able to get those answers. Things might finally start to make sense, to fall into place.
She bolted towards that strange, tiered building in the centre of Campus where the ship was landing. She ignored the code creatures as she ran and they ignored here in turn. She dodged the many extrusions of jungles and ancient cities and deserts and broken geometric landscapes that bled into reality. She felt shots trained on her from all sides - ghosts? Coders? Who knew anymore? It was all over, the old lines had dissolved. She just needed to reach Ada.
Heavy weapons poured violence into the city, snapping concrete off what buildings still stood. She jumped over bodies, ghost and outer blood intermingled. She reached the base of the stepped structure and started climbing. At the top, raging and impenetrable, was a typhoon of code whipping wind and dust through the air around it, blotting out the sun and straining and rippling and buckling under the pressure of weapons from beyond.
One step, then another. Higher and higher. When she reached the edge of the storm it parted for her, no questions asked, enveloping her safely and letting her through.
She climbed the final steps, into the eye of the storm, and saw her there.
Ada.
She was standing meters away from the ship, the outers gone. Ada’s head was turned towards two human shapes standing in the maw of the alien ship. One of those shapes was holding out an arm, extended towards her.
“Ada!” She shouted, approaching. “Ada!”
Ada turned around as she approached. She looked nervous. She looked scared.
“Ada what’s wrong?”
Ada craned her head around as though looking for answers. “I - Isavel - there are humans. Up there.”
Isavel looked at the alien craft, up at the sky, at the ring that dominated it.
“What? So what? Listen, Ada, we need to go -”
Ada held up a hand. “Isavel - Isavel, I think I have to go.”
Isavel’s mind went blank. “Go? What do you mean, go? Go where?”
Ada turned and looked at the ship. “I need to go with them.”
No.
She couldn’t be saying this.
“Ada no - you can’t go! There’s no point!”
“There is a point!” Ada gestured towards the ship. “They must know what happened, Isavel! They understand what happened during the Fall! They know why - why all this is happening! They can help us fix it! Isavel - Isavel, come with me!”
Go with Ada. Leave Earth - leave the gods - leave any hope of ever discovering what her entire new life meant . Leave an unhealed wound, an empty chasm forever yawning in her mind. And for what?
“I don’t care about the fucking Fall!” Isavel shouted, grabbing Ada by the shoulders and shook her. “You’re staying here! I still don’t have any answers from the gods and I can’t -”
“Isavel, I need answers too! I have to find out what happened! And you...” Ada’s eyes widened, as though she were seeing something new for the first time. “Isavel, you’re immune to the technophage. You’re - you’re amazing - you have to stay.”
Frustration was welling in Ada’s eyes, and the wind was whipping her dark hair into a storm.
“Isavel, this world needs you.”
Here it was. After months of Ada being the only person Isavel could rely on to see her as a person, here she was - the Herald again. Isavel looked onto that ship, and a wave of despair clawed its way up her legs and into her chest. She stared back into Ada’s eyes. “You told me you needed me! Me, Isavel!”
“I - I -”
“Stay here!” She dug her fingers into Ada’s arms. There had to be another way. “Stay here and we can - we can find the gods and - we can find -”
“This is bigger than Earth, Isavel.” Ada glanced up. “Bigger than the gods. There’s something out there that scares the gods themselves, and if I don’t find out what it is we might never be safe. You - you can -”
“I need my answers, Ada. The gods owe me my answers, they owe me a real life . If you won’t stay -”
The ship suddenly buckled under a blue flash, a tank shot reaching its way through the storm to hit it. The humans behind that wall of light looked terrified, and they were waving and shouting. Ada looked at them, and then back at Isavel.
“Isavel, please, I’m sorry, I have to -”
Rage and frustration and despair radiated through Isavel’s every nerve, and she reached out and slapped Ada across the face as hard as she could. Ada winced and backed off, but Isavel pulled her in again, close, and planted her lips on Ada’s. She clung desperately to her even as she knew she would let go, running her hands down the side of Ada’s face. Their noses alongside one another, she tipped her forehead forwards and rested it on Ada’s, digging her fingers into Ada’s back before shoving her away.
“If you want to leave me, Ada, then get the fuck away from me.”
Ada’s eyes were red, but she stumbled backwards, toward
s a shuttle that was already starting to pick up and hover as smaller weapon shots tore through the storm and raked across that dull metal hull.
They locked eyes as two of the outers reached out to grab Ada. The ship picked up and left. Isavel watched Ada disappear into the sky, watched until her eyes couldn’t see, watched until her hunter’s gift couldn’t even tell her where Ada had gone. She felt tears on her cheeks - her own, Ada’s, it was all the same.
The storm collapsed around her, a monstrous whirl of code and magic and energy falling to pieces and leaving an ashen ring around the peak of the ziggurat, with Isavel, utterly alone, at its centre.
Chapter 20
Ada watched Isavel recede. The ship pulled up, the shouting and the roar of the wind and the whine of the shuttle’s engines around her barely registering. She watched her tiny shape kneel amidst the black storm as it fell apart. She still felt the scraping of Isavel’s fingers against her back, and reached her right hand under her arm to touch the spot.
A furry four-fingered hand pressed down on her shoulder. Zhilik.
“Ada. They need to close the door. We are leaving the atmosphere.”
Slowly, gingerly, she crawled into the shuttle’s recess, pressing her back against the bulkhead as the door hauled up. Trapping her inside. Her face was wet and red-hot, her eyes blurry. She kept staring at the door long after it had shut. Kept feeling those fingers on her back.
What had she done? Was this right? She could still jump out - maybe she could still -
One of the alien humans crouched in front of her, filling her vision, a ugly, hideous dumpling of a man with a balding scalp and something technological attached to the side of his head. He opened his mouth to speak but she reached out, grabbed his face in her hand, and shoved him away. She was trading Isavel for this?
Zhilik knelt down beside her. “Ada, they will not go back down.”
She nodded. Of course not. She was in this for the long run. She had wanted answers, so she was going to get the damn things.
“Ada, is there anything I can -”
“You can shut up!”
She hugged her knees to her chest, flexing and relaxing her hands and arms, and the two humans watching her stared for a few quiet moments before taking a few steps away. They stayed within sight in a nearby hallway, glancing her way between whispered words unfamiliar. It sounded like the dialect of the ancients, maybe. Maybe not. She couldn’t bring herself to focus on them; she’d figure it out later.
She’d need to, if she was ever to come back to Earth. She had to come back, once she had figured out what had happened all those centuries ago. She had to come back and find Isavel, and fix this. Fix everything. Maybe Isavel would understand, in the end.
She slipped into time dilation, where the shuttle’s shudders became a slow undulation of the world around her, and called up code spindles in the air. Twisting, binding, weaving them together, a long-range communication sigil took shape. Her hands were shaking, slowly wavering in dilation, and water was pooling at the edges of her vision, blurring her sight. She returned to normal time so she could wipe her eyes, and finished the sigil complex.
“Gods on the ring.”
The sigil warbled with the polyphony of the gods, but they sounded squeaky, weak, suddenly rendered pathetic by a vaster universe. “Arbiter Liu, what -”
“Protect Isavel Valdéz. She is the only person who matters on that damned planet.”
The gods whinged. “The ship you are on -”
She crushed the sigil in her fist and let the broken code crumble black to dust, fading into nothing halfway between her fingers and the floor. The humans in the corner, that man and a younger woman, gawked at her. Ada didn’t bother making eye contact.
She rested her forehead on her knees and shuddered.
Was this worth it?
She needed to know what had destroyed ancient civilization, what power was out there for the taking, who the enemy was. She needed to find out, because nobody on Earth ever would. If she hadn’t gone with these aliens now, she might never have gotten another chance, and the lost opportunity might have haunted her forever.
Might. She needed those answers, right?
She pulled her legs closer, trying to remember what it felt like to have her arms around Isavel. The feeling of Isavel’s fingers digging into her back was fading. She couldn’t count them individually anymore - they were just a dull feeling, seeping out of her back and her mind.
It was a while before she heard a soft clinking on the floor to her right, and Zhilik was there again. “Ada, we will reach the orbital soon. Would you like to see it?”
She stared up at him and let go a ragged breath. “If it’s as ugly as this piece of shit, no.”
He sat down next to her silently and draped an arm over her shoulder, staring at the sealed door in front of them. There was writing on it, the same script the ancients used. Maybe she could read it later.
She leaned forward and rested her cheek on her knees. Zhilik patted her on the back. It was a long, long while before anything but painful splinters of memory crossed Ada’s mind.
The ship was moving differently, slower and changing directions, and Ada felt herself growing lighter suddenly, as though she weighed almost nothing. The humans and Jhoru walked over - no, they hopped over, bounding and then suddenly just floating. Jhoru said something to Zhilik in a low tone, and Zhilik looked at her.
“The shuttle is going to dock with the carrier. Everybody needs to leave the shuttle.”
She started gripping at the metal wall as she floated, panic welling in her chest, her mind finally drawn back to her physical body as she struggled to understand and right herself. “What’s going on? Why are we floating?”
“There is no gravity in space.”
“Bullshit, I’ve been in space before.”
Zhilik looked back up at the humans, who backed off in something like fear. A short little woman was saying something into a communicator. Ada was still floating, but at least she was stable against the bulkhead.
There was a heavy thud, some mechanical clunking, and a hiss. The door shuddered down unevenly, as though haltingly cursing the morons that built it, and more mechanical thuds outside told her it was connecting with something. Ada looked up. The shuttle was in a large, unevenly lit chamber that looked more like the inside of an overcomplicated steel rib cage, and the door had connected to a longer walkway that lead to a broad platform circling the shuttle. Beyond it were hundreds of outers already on the ship, awkwardly bobbing around as though underwater, gripping handrails as they held onto their scrabbling children, dusty and ragged clothes floating up about their bodies. They all looked scared.
Then the outers on the shuttle emerged, appearing from the corridors around them, pushing against walls and almost swimming out to meet their fellows. It was awkward and chaotic, and Ada clung to the wall, watching them pass. There was shouting and yelling, names were called out, families and friends found each other. Others called names that had not made it onto the shuttle, with slowly mounting desperation.
“Isavel.”
Jhoru followed them, and Zhilik made ready to push off the wall after her, though after a moment he turned back to look at Ada. He looked worried.
She waved him on.
She’d figure it out. She held her head, trying to dampen the stinging, aching burn coursing through her chest.
After several long moments she heard the human woman on the communicator speak again, and more shapes emerged from the depths of the shuttle. They shunted themselves along the handrails with practiced gestures, much more elegant than the outers had been, though some of these were mirran as well. Others, of course, were human. Aliens, all of them.
They were greeted outside the shuttle by more of their kind descending into view from above the shuttle doors; at the forefront was a straight-backed, pale-haired woman with strands of grey in her gently floating hair, wearing the neatly trimmed blue-grey uniform most of the crew seeme
d to be wearing. People were flanking her. She was probably in charge of something. Did they expect Ada to do a dance or make a speech?
The stranger locked eyes with Ada and approached, slowly and cautiously moving along the handrails, as though Ada were some kind of wild animal. She nodded, swallowed, and said something barely intelligible. She was probably introducing herself.
Ada flattened her legs against the wall, trying vainly to look like she was standing as she floated in space. All the humans backed off. They all looked a head shorter than her at least, most of them frumpy and old-looking. What was wrong with them? Were they inbred? Sickened by other ancient weapons?
She addressed the woman in front.
“I want to see Earth.”
They looked at each other in confusion, so Ada shoved past them, scattering them with the sudden motion out into the wide bay beyond the shuttle. She grabbed onto the handrails there, ignoring the stares. The outers, in their ragged clothes and curled and nervous floating postures, looked nothing like the longer - taller - more snug-dressed mirrans who had come to rescue them. Here and there were humans, too, in small numbers, and they all stared warily at her as as she floated past. Where the hell had gravity gone?
She rounded on the shuttle, and found it was embraced by great mechanical arms rooted in the walls, holding it in the middle of the docking bay. She couldn’t tell how it had gotten inside - the area seemed sealed shut, with no windows onto space.
“Where’s Earth? I want a window.”
The humans who had approached her initially were following her, and she realized that as people filtered out of the docking bay, they were giving her a wide berth. Suddenly Zhilik appeared from behind them again. “Ada, Jhoru said there are windows. Follow me.”
She looked between him and the alien humans.
“Show me, Zhilik.”
She shunted herself along after him, through the weightless ship in the alien humans’ wake, and as they moved the ship started making great, cavernous sounds. The humans shouted something and started pulling themselves towards the walkways using the handrails, and Jhoru turned around to both of them. “They say gravity is coming back. I think.”
Second Contact Page 28
