Context

by John Meaney

  Then freefall, arcing, and the landing.

  Cargocrabs—they could tell from the scraping sounds, the sudden jolt of movement—carried their container outside, and stacked it against the others.

  Tom and Elva waited till all was silent, then waited some more, until they could no longer stand it.

  ‘Me first,’ said Tom.

  It was night, and cloudy, but the black vault still showed distant stars and the wind, though soft, was in continuous motion, bearing the sound of dark leaves rustling and the grassy scents which no subterranean dweller would recognize.

  Elva swallowed, stumbled, but did not cower: it was the most impressive reaction of a non-acclimatized newcomer Tom had seen.

  But still she walked unsteadily, in the wide open spaces beneath infinite night skies, and Tom would have to lead for now.

  They were on level ground, a gentle portion of a long slope, and its grass-covered surface looked silver by the light of triplet moons.

  Tom led the way upwards, to a knot of trees and undergrowth near the ridgetop, and used Elva’s small sharp knife to cut away branches, pulling them down to form a shelter.

  They had no food, no water.

  But they were used to waiting.

  As false dawn lightened the night a little, Tom whispered, ‘Stay here,’ and crawled out from the shelter.

  Elva remained crouched inside.

  The stacked cargo pods still stood downslope. There was no sign of cargocrabs; the flyer itself had long departed. The diminishing night was clear, and—had it not been for the containers—he would have thought himself alone in a vast natural wilderness. Beneath him, a long plain led onwards from the foot of the ridge, spanning many klicks before reaching a range of low, dark distant hills, only just visible against the purple-grey horizon.

  Woody scents, a sharp hint of some purple bush’s fragrance—he recognized the plant but could not name it—made his nostrils flare. He took a long, deep breath, then slowly let the pure air slide from his lungs, bringing a momentary peace.

  Then Tom turned and crawled upslope, to the ridge’s apex, and looked down over the side.

  Chaos...

  And knelt there, unmoving.

  Below lay a huge structure, all of crystal, like some titanic bloom which shimmered, ethereal in the fading moonlight, and its heart seemed twisted through extra-dimensional folds which Tom could not truly see.

  There was a small clump of undergrowth, surrounding a stunted tree, nearby. Tom crawled to it, lay down beneath its meagre cover, and waited for the dawn.

  And soon enough, the eastern sky was painted pale, washed-out lemon, and the grey clouds were tinged with yellow.

  Then sunlight caught the vast spreading crystalline building, if that was its function, and it burned with the brightness of a thousand sparkling suns, a blazing glorious dawn-fire which hurt the eyes with its brilliance and made Tom want to crawl away and hide.

  He waited, though, for the first of the big transport-flyers to glide overhead and settle down to land. He counted four hundred passengers disembarking down multiple ramps, and every person wore light grey edged with crimson.

  More flyers touched down.

  And then, from some membrane-covered shaft opening in the ground beyond the great crystalline construct, many more people began to climb into the open. And headed, like the others, to the vast stadium-like crystal flower.

  Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Blight-subsumed individuals were converging upon the structure when Tom finally dared to crawl back through the long grasses, back to the knot of trees where Elva crouched alone, waiting.

  Sunlight dappled the interior of their branch-covered shelter, and Elva squinted against it. She sat cross-legged, bulky black satchel in her lap, listening to Tom’s description of what was occurring outside. For all her mental strength, there was no way that she—without conditioning—could move around on the world’s surface in daylight. Agoraphobia aside, it was now too dangerous to leave this place.

  ‘We made a tactical mistake, then.’

  Tom nodded. ‘I thought we could get far away on foot before I signalled my contact. But now ...’

  Elva touched the back of his hand. ‘Not with thousands of Eminence-Absorbed around us.’

  ‘Absorbed?’

  ‘What it sounds like.’ Then she sat back, clasping her hands round her knees. ‘Signalled how?’

  ‘What do you— Oh. Like this.’

  Tom reached inside his mouth with thumb and forefinger, steeled himself, then twisted. There was a crunch, and the tooth came free.

  He held out the red-stained molar and spat warm blood.

  ‘Transmitter seed.’

  ‘Not very big.’ Elva, with no hint of squeamishness or distaste, took the tooth. Her strong fingers split it apart. ‘Null-gel coated. Good. But no range to speak of.’

  ‘I know.’

  If only there‘d been a way to set up long-range comms...

  ‘But’—Elva held it up, checking its design—‘it can feed off almost any energy-source, I’d say.’

  ‘I guess so.’ Tom frowned. ‘Does that help?’

  ‘Tell me again about the crystal building.’

  In a lifetime of taking risks, Tom did something that scared him more than all the rest combined.

  After waiting for the last of the marching crowds to disappear inside, through the ground-level entrances set all around the convex crystalline building, Tom crawled over the ridgeline and stood up.

  He waited for a burst of automated graser fire, a shout of alarm, but nothing happened.

  Then slowly he made his way downslope, walking as though he had every right to be here, heading down towards the place where tens of thousands of his enemies, or human components of the one Enemy, were congregated to carry out strange purposes of their own.

  Blades of grass whipped around his feet.

  Closer.

  And then he was at the bottom, before a blank entrance, and the great convex building curved outwards, above his head, an improbably massive structure which surely could not hold its own weight.

  Entranceway.

  Tom closed his eyes briefly.

  For Elva.

  And walked inside.

  ~ * ~

  64

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  A passageway like glass led onwards to what might have been a great arena. Massive waves of sound—no voices, but rasp of cloth and sound of breath from such a multitude magnified, took on a life of its own, became a deep inchoate roar of white noise—beat down upon him, froze him in place. People were standing up ahead—

  But there was a small opening to his left and he slid into it.

  It was a curved tubular shaft, twisting and curling, elaborate in shape, leading upwards.

  Climb.

  There might have been a flicker of motion outside the shaft—broken kaleidoscopic images shattered and refracted by the complex inner structure of this place—but Tom was already ascending. Counterpressure techniques allowed him to chimney-climb, faster than he would have thought possible, propelled by fear.

  No shouts followed from below.

  Climb.

  It was glassine more than crystal: no sharp edges, but with an impossibly convoluted organic structure, as though it were some vast living flower through which the microscopic Tom Corcorigan was crawling.

  Faster.

  There was a tricky traverse, a junction between capillaries, and he slipped.

  But he slid only a few metres before catching a lip, a junction, and then he was moving upwards through the transparent structure once more.

  And came out, with the yellow sky blazing overhead.

  Like an insect—and likewise insignificant, he hoped—Tom crawled along a narrow curving glassine ridge, part of the ‘roof’ of the great complex blossom, and looked over the edge, into the hollow centre.

  As he had seen earlier from the hilltop, the glassine pleats and petals folded and bent through strange,
extradimensional axes which the human eye could not follow. When Tom tried to focus on the phenomenon, he felt vertiginously sick, clutched his handhold, looking away quickly before he fell.

  Beneath, the blossom-building’s core was hollow, and vast numbers of grey-uniformed people were already seated. Twenty thousand people, Tom eventually estimated, and many more were still taking up their positions.

  Movement, overhead.

  It was skyborne, a distant watcher-drone, and Tom slipped over the edge, and braced himself inside a capillary.

  Foot pressure alone kept him in place as he adhered the tiny tooth-transmitter to the glassine material. If the energy focus was anything like he and Elva expected, the transmitter’s nanosecond burst would reach clear to the Academy, thousands of klicks away. It would modulate some of the Blight’s own radiated power, before the immense concentration burned the transmitter itself into a miniature smoking ruin.

  Go now.

  He swallowed, holding still. The feel of the crowd, the invisible vibration of those myriads of wills subsumed into one...

  But a security drone was coming—perhaps it, too, was an infinitesimal sub-component of the Blight: that dark power surely transcended the organic—and Tom had to move.

  He let go.

  I’m scared.

  Slid downwards.

  There were few drones sweeping the sky.

  From his hiding place, crouched at the glassine exit, Tom kept careful watch, analysing the pattern. Then, when he was sure—as sure as he could be—that he was in an observation gap, he broke into an uphill run. Running outright—no point in acting nonchalant—pushing hard, lungs bursting and thighs burning, deep in the animal joy of it, up to the top of the slope, then down over the ridgeline without looking back.

  Nothing followed.

  There was something hidden in the grass, a root, and he tripped without injury, turning his fall into a roll, and rolled again sideways and into the knot of trees. A laugh rose inside him, but he quelled it; despite his relief, the danger was not over yet.

  He crawled, gasping yet feeling energized, to their makeshift shelter.

  But it was empty.

  NO!

  He checked again, but it was true, the shadowed interior was empty.

  Elva was gone, taken by drones.

  He walked out of the tree cover, into the open, uncaring.

  Drones...

  He saw them, but they were heading away from him—no, away from the crystalline structure—flying as fast as their lev-units would allow.

  Tom walked to the top, and looked down from the ridge.

  It was glowing.

  No...

  White light, growing.

  Greater than the sunlight.

  A thousand suns...

  It blossomed truly, a vast wave of white light.

  A blazing globe: the Blight, gathering its power.

  Shielding his eyes, crying inside, Tom rolled back over the ridge.

  The strange impossible light continued, great beams of it thrusting through the sky, throwing strange, stark black-and-white shadows across the grassy ground. The crystalline stadium had become a giant spotlight, trapping the world in its blazing illumination.

  Highlighting a trampled trail which had been invisible before.

  Squinting.

  It’s growing brighter.

  Tom moved with his eyes squeezed almost shut, following the trail.

  White sky, burning now.

  Elva. I won’t lose you.

  Half stumbling, half running, while his eyesight remained.

  Not now.

  Lost the trail... No.

  There.

  And found the membrane-covered shaft, an ellipsoid shining with reflected white intensity, and slid inside, ignoring security, just burrowing down into the solid depths of Nulapeiron, into welcome shade and safety.

  White light still blazed at the bottom of the shaft, but a few metres into the horizontal tunnel beyond, he was able to open his eyes normally. Pale orange stone walls, dark floor. Utilitarian, clean. Though he was beneath ground, this was higher than the Primum Stratum: he had not descended far enough to reach normal depths, and the air still felt strange.

  There was another shaft opening in the floor ahead, beyond which the corridor continued.

  Which way, Fate damn it?

  He ran forward.

  There were doors to the sides, all locked and hardened to opacity. And farther on, a long chamber terminated the corridor. He stopped, panting, looked around, feeling desperate.

  Damn, damn.

  Ran back to the shaft.

  This time he realized there was a descending tube, its interior coated with some viscous liquid which smelled faintly tart, and knew he had no choice. He lowered himself over the edge, felt the liquid cling to his black bodysuit -imagined a slurping sound—and then let go.

  The transport-liquid propelled him downwards.

  It was a climber’s nightmare: falling into the void. But it was controlled, and as he hurtled downwards, breath torn away by the slipstream and trying not to yell, he tried to estimate the drop. One klick, maybe two.

  Deceleration.

  Tom’s heart pounded as the slope curved gently and the liquid grew viscous, slowing his descent, until he slid out onto a horizontal chute and fell to the floor.

  Blinking hard, he got up and walked, trying to focus on his surroundings: shining mother-of-pearl, swirling shades of grey. He was not just back in Realm Buchanan, but in the heart of the Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum itself.

  Part of him wanted to sit down and cry.

  Elva...

  Tom pushed on.

  Somewhere above ground the titanic crystal structure was pulsing with energy, blazing brighter than the sun, but here the tunnels grew dank, some part of the Collegium which was long disused, with scraps of derelict machines—broken scrubdrones, the chassis of a burned-out levanquin—strewn across the cracked stone floor.

  Tom stepped to avoid a filmed-over puddle from which acrid vapour rose ominously—

  Something.

  —and stopped dead, listening. Was something hunting him, or was it Elva and her captors?

  The sound came again, from a black opening to his left. With silent steps, careful as a neko-feline stalking ciliate prey, Tom crouched low and moved inside.

  He came out in a rained square-cut chapel, ancient and deserted, lit only by mutated patches of wild fluorofungus which rippled with disease. In its shattered alcoves old worn-featured statues had collapsed, and lay at odd angles amid the rabble and broken shards. It was dank and unsettling, but it was not the place Blight drones would take a prisoner to.

  Tom closed his eyes, cursing himself.

  ‘Ah... Cor-cor... igan.’

  A statue.

  Against all his training, Tom was paralysed.

  The statue moved.

  ‘Who are—?’

  But then he saw: in the shadows, a white fragmented face slowly twisting in his direction. A rainbow shimmered, as a pale shaft of light struck a diffractive microfaceted surface where one eye should have been—but the other half of that broken face was a blackened ruin.

  It was a Jack, damaged beyond imagining.

  In the past, when a fearful Tom had glimpsed them, Jacks were preternatural beings whose skins were laced with sensor tracery more sensitive than the best of scanfields and femtodefences, while their bodies enclosed weapon systems of legendary power, capable of blasting hugely superior forces into oblivion.

  But this one ...

  Fear of the shattered half-human thing crept over Tom, until the Jack raised one hand, revealing ripped sinews and power cables, laid open to view with the flesh torn asunder.