Given time, she’d have learned the strategy for space fleet battles too. Now there was a great life skill. Aunt M was a walking encyclopedia of training and precisely what an upcoming king would need.
So few days were left. From what she’d heard, this Gathering was within a week or two, and the Gathering promised some great change or disaster for the Mekkers.
The latter, she prayed.
She woke one night to find Ryke sitting at the side of the bed and was sure he looked on her, studied her. At something like midnight, it should’ve alarmed her. He only smiled and whispered, “Sleep.”
When she woke in the morning she wondered if it had happened. A dream, surely? It was as likely as Ryke turning into the Easter Bunny.
She and Ryke sat across from each other at a table eating some sort of cereal with a gross milk product that made her wish the Mekkers had enslaved cows from Earth too, so she could have milk.
He placed the spoon beside his bowl. “I have something important to say to Badh today.”
“Oh.” Was this good or bad? He’d been acting oddly. Morose was perhaps the right description. Or preoccupied. “Can I ask what this is about?”
He drew in a breath and his shoulders rose, making her recall how nice they’d felt under her hands. But, she switched her gaze to his face, he was about to divulge something?
“You said to the Followers that they should’ve searched for the original book. You were right.”
“I was?”
“Yes. The day my mother killed herself, I saw it from above. She’d left her book on the deck up here, near where she jumped. She didn’t walk in. She leaped. The book? I picked it up.” His gaze became unfocused. “I didn’t read it. I knew what she’d done, and I was only ten years old. Ten. I was young. She broke something in me that day. I kept the book until after we farewelled her, then I took my flyer and landed on a core and I lowered the book into the Engine Sea on a cable. So you see...” He looked at her. “I know where it is.”
She turned to stone. Jesus H... He knew where the original was.
Were those tears glistening in his eyes? Perhaps not.
She knew she had some in hers.
“I’m sorry.”
Her words were so inadequate.
Ryke was a monster, but he’d seen his mother choose to die. This...she was crying for the boy he’d once been.
* * * * *
When he left later, he said he would tell Badh about where to find the book.
She was still unsettled. What was she doing? The book she’d thought to pretend about was real and locatable? So many coincidences, though her job on Earth had sometimes involved deductions from a multitude of seemingly unrelated facts.
But this, it was far-fetched even for her. Was she actually prescient?
On the way out the front door, with Aunt M standing aside to let her past, she decided the answer was no, at least until she had more evidence. She was almost afraid to suggest anything else to the Followers. Maybe by saying it she was making things happen?
Ugh. Also no to that. A big N O.
Food for much thought though. Ryke was a man with a past no one would envy. Some would think it explained his personality. No, again. He was just an asshole, if one she would’ve given a hug to, back when his mother died, if she’d been around.
She kept expecting him to declare her his client again, any day soon, and for everything to shut down, for mister interrogator to make her do stuff she hated. Shut her in a cupboard full of spiders with an ass plug up her or something. That was his sort of angle.
Instead, he was gradually becoming nicer. Still the asshole, but nicer.
Which actually...scared her.
Studying with Aunt M was nothing more than sitting about pretending, especially when there might be a new book version in her hands, one day soon. She’d planned it so she could eat the midday meal out here – the Mekker version of a light meal. Some sort of bread with meat and salad stuff. She knew their names for the food but it made her feel weirdly better to call it not-lettuce and not-carrot. She wanted the real stuff in her mouth and before her eyes.
Even with a cushion under her, her butt was getting numb sitting here. Before this window a wide half-circle of the floor was cleared of the fake dirt under the crops. This was riveted metal.
Aunt M walked up, blocking her view through the window. The mechling had a habit of patrolling the perimeter, as if she might make a run for it, or an enemy might turn up and attack.
“I have something to show you, if I may?”
“Sure.” She swallowed the last of the food, brushed her hands on her light dress, and climbed to her feet, then brushed off the dirt on her leggings that’d strayed from the farmland. “Lead the way.”
Aunt M strode off and brought her to a spot among the plants, not far from where she’d had lunch.
She stared at what Aunt M had found, trying to make sense of the higgledy-piggledy shapes.
Those strange, dissonant, mechling thoughts hadn’t hit here out here, not since the day the Followers had met to discuss the text. Now though, the memory returned. She felt it run into her bones and shake her.
There was a link, her mind insisted. This is the work of something bad.
Duh. She didn’t need fancy logic to figure that out. Here was a small strip of dirt bare of crop. Instead of plants limbs sprouted from the earth. Mechling limbs, crooked and smashed, and the bright colors on a few of the visible carapaces showed dents, scratches and raw metal.
“What is this?” she whispered?
A niggling fear was building – like in a horror movie where a vital clue has been shown. She’d be sitting on the couch screaming at the actors to grow a brain because everyone was behaving as if the severed hand in the garbage was some freaky accident, and not because the axe murderer next door had dismembered someone.
“I believe something is eating mechlings, Gio.”
“How the hell can you eat a mechling?”
“That, I do not know, but whatever is doing this might be dangerous.”
Well, she thought, as she walked the edge of this robot graveyard, this explained where Badh’s missing mechlings had gone.
They didn’t have horror movies on Aerthe, but axe murderers? Those were possible.
Chapter 32
Ryke had said he’d inform Badh of where the original text lay. It wasn’t that simple.
He wanted to leave things as they’d been for decades, to leave it all be. The grief of his mother dying had taken a long time to wane. For years he’d been overcome in waves, even if he didn’t show it on the outside. It’d wrecked him seeing her die, being unable to do anything but yell for help. Then he’d watched them all decide it was impossible to rescue her because she’d gone in of her own volition.
He flew the core for hours, helping repair small things, replacing crystals, helping to reset a power cable leading from the core sphere at the bow that’d blown. Mechlings scampered at his feet, bringing supplies, holding things, tying the cable in place while it was fixed.
Memories crammed in. This had been all he’d done once, in his late teens, when he was young and naive.
Badh was here too but he said nothing to him about the book. It didn’t seem the right moment.
He went off to eat by himself, to sit at the edge of the deck above the place in the sea where his mother lay and contemplate whether he was a coward or sensible.
Her body would be nothing but bones by now, sloshing about down there. The book being made of thin metal pages would be mostly intact, maybe corroded a little. Ditto the cable.
The Engine Sea wasn’t waik energy but some sort of associated radiation. It ate flesh if you left it in there long enough. A small dipping rapidly added to your blue. Death closed in fast. Sometimes people fell into the sea and mostly they emerged, though aged by the radiation and maybe wiser.
If a decker jumped and walked the bottom, no one would volunteer to rescue them.
Standi
ng on the cores fixing the crystals gave you tinier doses, but the body took a long time to die from those. It shortened your life, made you a pretty crackled blue, but such was the lot of a decker.
If the book could be recovered, this would put the Followers into a spin from which they might never recover. It might split people into inalienable camps. It might also prove to be a revelation.
Gio and her visions and guesses had made him speculate. Why was all this happening now, when they most needed a solution? It was odd and he doubted he’d ever figure it out.
He tucked away the last of his food into a small backpack, donned the wing harness and stretched his wings to their full span, climbed upon the rail, and dived.
The swoop took him close to the sea and he skimmed it a while, watching the glasslike surface leap, surge, and froth. It was predictable, most days, which led to some of the younger men daring each other as to how close they could go.
Above, his wings flickered through the phases of light – startling blue from the sea, yellow-white from overhead lighting tinting the edges of the filigree. It lent a beauty to the flight he’d never surpassed in his life. Doubted he ever would.
He found Badh at the bow again, walking the damaged core in the cleated shoes they used to cling to the irregular surface. With a small upturn of flight and then a dip, he landed neatly. Then he folded his wings and walked to his brother.
“Hi.” Badh nodded. “We have a lot to do here still. Not sure we will get the crystals to make her better.”
“No. I can see that.” The piece that’d slid and crumbled from this waik sphere had been at least a fifth of its mass. “I have something important to say. Something I perhaps should have said a long time ago but I decided it was best left to the past. It’s about Mother and her book.”
Badh stood open-mouthed, his face gathering darkness like a storm from the outside.
“No. What did you do?”
He couldn’t know but was fairly sure Badh was running through all the worst possibilities. Maybe this, the truth, was the worst one?
“I saw her jump that day. She left the book on the deck. I found it when I ran over. I nearly jumped in after her.” It’d been so tempting. It was obvious she didn’t want to be saved, and so he’d thought on first judgment that it was his fault, that he should’ve done something better, that he should’ve helped her more when she came back from wherever she’d been.
“So you have that damn book? All this time and you keep that to yourself?”
“No.” He shook his head. “No. I tied a cable to it and threw it into the sea on the other side of the core she died beside. Almost threw it in after her but I hated the idea of it sinking down and touching her where she lay dead.” He pulled a rueful face.
“It’s in the sea?”
“Yes.”
“Ryke...” Badh half-turned away and put hands to hips. “You lied for years? To me.” He muttered. “You lied to me. It’ll take a while to get over this.”
He understood. “The book was metal-leaved, maybe the cover too, beneath the hide.”
“So.” Badh turned back slowly. “Maybe we can recover it?”
“Exactly, and with what Gio has said and found out lately, I figured it was worth a try.”
Badh’s stare was intense. “Yes. I’ll organize this. You fuck off so I don’t punch you.”
He snorted. “Don’t think you’d land that but I get it. I get why you’re angry. Just...consider why I did this. I watched her kill herself.” Even now the ugliness of that memory tore him up inside, twisted his guts. “It’s killing me to tell you. Dragging this up from the past...” He shrugged. “I’ll leave you to it. Also, be careful. Please! I don’t want to find out you or anyone else died getting it out of the sea.” He moved to leave, unfolded his wings then halted.
“What now?”
“How do you plan to do this?”
“Metal cable and book? I’ll lower one of our big magnets. Shut off power drain and that’ll calm the sea a bit. The hull coating down there renders the hull inert but the cable at least should be big enough to be attracted. Simple, as long as the metal is the right sort. Cable should be. Book, I’m not sure.”
“I don’t know what it was.”
“I know. I figured that. Hey.” He ducked his head for a moment then looked up. “I already forgive you. Okay?”
“Thanks.” Ryke nodded. “That means a lot to me. I’ll get back to Gio.” He should say more, but didn’t know what those words should be.
The flight back calmed him. He hated this shit, and so he filed away his emotions under Done as he walked through the crop, shrugging on his coat, and continuing down an aisle between plants.
She was near one of the windows beside the crop area, staring down at something.
When he arrived, he saw the reason for her blank expression.
A row of dismembered and obviously dead mechlings waved their bits and pieces at the air, stuck in unnatural poses. As if they were plants about to grow. Little legs, a few antennae, the shells. He went to his knee and dragged one body loose, dirt spilling. Then he turned it upside down and around, looking for damage. A large curled-metal hole led into the brain region. His coat lapel light shone inside the cavity.
“What’s caused this?” Gio asked.
Nothing remained of what should’ve been brain, a few shreds at most. The power cell had also been removed. He dropped it and rose. It was not at all easy to get inside a mechling. The Scavs never managed it.
She grimaced, gestured at the dirt. “Scary? I mean they’re only mechlings, but what could do this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe something has been happening Badh didn’t mention?”
“He said he was losing or missing mechlings?”
“True.” He stared over her head toward the residence. “You get back inside. I have to go inform Badh. I doubt he does know this. It could be –”
No, he shouldn’t say a sun-mad mechling. The topic was off-limits for slaves. A frightening thought arrived and he looked to Aunt M. Locking Gio inside with this might be a mistake.
“Wait. How are you functioning? Well?”
“I am fine, sir. Shall I watch the lady for you? Though whatever causes this, it appears to only attack mechlings.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“If you worry that I have been compromised in the way some mechlings are, I assure you I will not suffer that ailment.”
“Why is that?”
“My brain is different, sir. It only contains a small amount of the same material as mechlings.
And it was too coherent to be sun-mad.
“Yes. You watch Gio. Do that. Go. Now.”
Though it used up several minutes, and his brain was poking at him to move, he escorted her to the door of the residence and waited for the door to close and lock before he turned and jogged for the nearest gap in the deck. He dropped his coat and boots, switched to core-flyer shoes, and dropped over the edge with his wings still unfolding. They snapped out and he zoomed onward, sticking to a fair height above the restless sea. Something made him believe urgency was required.
What was with all these suppositions and intuitions? Even he was suffering from them.
There was something wrong. Or soon would be.
That woman seemed to attract trouble.
He expected to have to go all the way to the bow but instead he found a small party of deckers working from the waik sphere beside the sea, exactly where the book should be. They already had a magnet lowering into the sea. Badh was rushing this.
He swooped around the cable connecting the magnet to a small crane above on the deck, and landed on the sphere. Crystal sparked under his shoes as he picked his way over its surface. A dark, brooding man stared down at the sea where the magnet’s cable entered – his brother.
“Why are you rushing this?” He stopped beside Badh. The book would be on the very bottom and the magnet had yet to stop moving. Going deep, the cable unwound slowly.
“I think it’s important, that’s why. We’re already decades late.”
A grim tone. Accusing him maybe. He supposed they were late.
The cable stopped and began to reverse, and two deckers went lower to where the sea lapped the sphere. They guided the cable, drawing it closer to the sphere, feeding it through their gloved hands. Badh cautiously walked down the curve also, to stand slightly above.
The magnet itself emerged, cascading glassy plumes of the sea that smoked then smoothed into the surface. The cable glued to the bottom of the magnet...he recognized it.
“That’s it. You have it.”
“Wasn’t hard to find the site from your description. If the metal is weak, it could snap.” Badh also pulled on gloves.
More cable appeared. How many yards had there been? It’d been so long and he wasn’t certain. He crept closer.
“Stay back,” Badh muttered. “You’re out of practice.”
“I’ve less blue than any of you. Let me. Fuck. I deserve this.”
“The blue? Or the honor?”
It would be an honor, in Badh’s eyes. Maybe he should stand away. As he backed a little, the book was drawn from the sea. The little package sent a pang into his chest. The smallest shred of metal linked it to the cable, and so he remembered what he’d done – his mother had the book fastened shut with a locked thin cable in an X shape around the book, and he’d clipped the bigger cable to that.
It would break. He could see the weight of gravity pluck thread from thread of that fine cable, unwinding it.
The two deckers grabbed for the book as it tipped and began to fall back into the sea. Badh lunged. A man toppled in then the other. Neither had the book, but Badh snatched in from the air then plunged face first toward the sea. His arm speared in, the book held high in the other.
And Ryke snagged the back of his coat, stumbled forward a step, but he braked and held position, his legs straining. The two other men pulled themselves ashore while he backed up and hauled Badh fully onto the sphere.
Branded Possession (The Machinery of Desire Book 3) Page 21
