by Kurt Johnson
I wanted to live.
44
“Wake her!”
“Really?”
Something slapped my jaw, making my teeth clatter. Weakness was getting old. I wasn’t covered, and woke up exposed. The morning air held a chill that hinted at rain. Wind flowed across my face, filled my first waking breaths with the choking smells of burning chemicals. I wrinkled my nose, coughed, and tried to wrap my arms around my knees for warmth.
“That wasn’t anything. Gleans are supposed to be strong.”
Some idiot smacked the cheeky part of my face into the part of my brain that was listening to the conversation.
“STOP!” I shouted, springing to my feet. I waved my hands in front of me like a blind person reaching for furniture she knows is in front of her.
“What is wrong with you fools?” I demanded, rubbing my cheek and squinting at my surroundings. The concrete slab was reassuring underneath my feet, but the familiar grey, square boringness of the camp buildings instantly brought where I was depressingly back to me. I stood in a circle of my friends.
I glared at them, hand on my jaw, as I opened and closed my mouth.
Mieant was the furthest away. Guiltily, he held his palms down, as if only the floor was his responsibility. His long hair waved as he shook his head. His big, black eyes looked down, highlighting his lashes. Nonch snaked up beside Mieant, one claw arm holding a water cup and the others flat against his side. His sensor stalks were smooth, like flat hair; he looked like he wanted to be a billion kilometers away.
Cri, however, was right where she wanted to be. Two hands held her stomach, and for a moment, I thought she was in pain. Her other two hands were poised above me, like flips waiting to turn on their targets below. Cri’s eyes glowed, and her hair curled into black whips in the rising wind. She wasn’t in pain. I frowned. She giggled, not looking sane at all.
The molten red and orange pendant hovering in front of me stopped me cold. It was red hot, making the air shimmer around it. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. The fist-sized, diamond shape from my past was not possible. I’d flushed him. We’d looked for him. I’d given up hope. And he’d never floated before.
I opened my mouth wordlessly, glancing first at Nonch and then back to the familiar metal form suspended in midair.
“I….”
I snatched him from the air and fell to my knees, dimly thankful that he’d cooled off fast enough not to fry my palms. Adrenaline surged through me, displacing the nausea and weakness. His metal edges pressed into my neck as I clutched him to my body. AI!
My friend was alive! Light and warmth fell over my mood, dispelling a large part of my guilt. He wasn’t dead. He was OK.
He had come back to me.
I wasn’t alone.
“UNIVERSE! YOU’RE BACK! I AM SO SORRY!”
“LET GO! Eighteen centuries go by, and teenagers are THE ONLY THING IN THE GALAXY THAT HASN’T EVOLVED!” This he said aloud.
I blinked, uncurled, and held him away from me.
I’m so angry, Raystar. You have no idea. NONE!! How could you do that to me?
I…was confused. Angry. Scared, I thought back. My friends were looking at us. Perhaps only Cri understood that we talked mind-to-mind. I didn’t care. I hugged him, overjoyed at his return.
Nova, Ray, couldn’t you let me finish my sentence, at least, before you flipping flushed me? Grief cracked his voice, and I winced at his pain.
I was so happy to have him back, so relieved to have him safe. But our reunion was….
Ray, TWO Battle Groups are coming. You think this ’natch-infested marble is going to drive them off by shooting nutrition at them? Despite the Glean protection, arguably the only force that could destroy the Convergence, these people are openly hunting you. Don’t you see?
I didn’t.
“I….” it was the best I could get out.
Gnnng, he said to himself. Focus… he said again, I think to himself. I have so much to tell you. This isn’t the time for this conversation.
“Did you at least talk to the Elion, like I’d told you?” AI asked out loud.
Uh. No.
With a small grunt of, uh, sheepishness that captured pretty much everything else I felt I’d messed up on, I lowered him to the ground. I sat, cross-legged, a bit away from my friend.
I had completely forgotten about the Elion.
Nonch, Cri, and Mieant were still as statues, trying to puzzle together the verbal and nonverbal conversations between AI and me. Clearly, they sensed the craxy intensity of the exchange.
AI was covered in unrecognizable sigils. The hole where my leather necklace had woven through him was gone. Dust puffed outward in a three-meter circle as he shimmered, rising to hover with the tip of his diamond pointed toward me. He’d changed.
AI mentally huffed disbelief. You forgot?
In the silence between us, his mental eyes rolled as he snorted. I had the impression he’d dropped his hands to his sides and was looking around, exasperated, trying to find the clue I’d lost.
Thunder rumbled, and the chemical wind ruffled everyone’s hair. AI’s yellow scanner flashed over me, pausing on my collar, my heart, then my stomach. I heard him sigh, and then he verbalized, “You had all these years to destroy yourself horribly.”
In a flicker of defiance, I shared my last few days with him. What I had been through. That should count for something. It wasn’t like I’d been sitting on my hands.
Well, he started out in his old AI tone after listening to my story, I trekked ALONE through kilometers of underground Ruins with that psychotic, reprobate nano-deviant from the controller trying to eat me at each turn, when…wonder upon wonders, I realized that floating through tunnels wasn’t a practical form of transportation!
Yeah. Wonder upon wonders. He was still a gravity-well filled jerkhead. I had no idea what a reprobate was, either.
MAYBE, he continued, I could have JUST flown myself over legger-infested ’natch fields. Or I suppose the aircar would have been a way of getting around. Oh. I remember why I was doing this. My best friend flushed me down the loo! At the last words, a small ruby star of anger glowed in the center of his diamond shape. My friends stepped back from his heat.
I remained where I was and glared at AI as the anger churned in my gut. I hadn’t asked for any of this. I was a kid. You know, I do homework? Play video games? If someone expected me to handle this flip better than I’d been flipping handling it, I’d be happy to flipping give them my flipping purple DNA stuff and flipping introduce them to Godwill and….
Nonch swung three sword arms between us, nudging AI away. The beginning of a headache tapped at the base of my neck, and I felt a trickle of wetness from my nose. He positioned himself so we formed a triangle. My sleeve came away wet—not glistening, but instead glimmering, as electricity danced through the fabric of my shirt where it had absorbed my nosebleed. My friends leaned millimeters away from me. In the reflection of their eyes, I saw the beginning of a halo forming in my jagged, purple hair.
Nonch turned his weapony head to me.
“Pause a moment, Raystar-friend. I am gaining understanding. THIS is the defective synth you flushed down your sanitary waste recycler?”
FLIPSTICKS! That wasn’t ANYTHING AI needed to hear! And I’d never claimed he was defective! My anger washed away like a receding wave, and I gulped. I was pretty sure that if I had called him defective, it was in an affectionate way. Like a nickname. Or something.
“It does not seem defective,” Nonch voiced, oblivious to my giant eyes and minute head shakes that swished my bangs back and forth AND, IN PRETTY MUCH EVERY LANGUAGE, MEANT, “STOP!”
“But.” Nonch turned his predatory head, his full intensity, toward AI. His sensor stalks flared. “You could have done more. Your secrets do not inspire trust, and in your keeping of them, you bring my friend harm.”
A yellow beam washed from AI and splashed over Nonch. His feathery stalks rippled as if caressed by a lig
ht touch. “You don’t want a piece of me, baby Crynit. Don’t lecture me on my job. My beef is with our prima donna here.”
Nonch and I traded skeptical glances. Baby Crynit? Beef? Prima donna? Nonch, confused, lowered his sword arms and looked at me. I sighed. “AI, meet Nonch and Mieant, and you know Cri,” and I pointed to each in turn. “Friends, meet my, um, meet my oldest friend, AI.”
“I want no confrontation,” Nonch said, backing up a meter and lowering his claw arms, “but your presence and actions require explanation.”
“Pfft,” AI sighed. “None of your tiny, futuristic, alien minds could handle the—” Sucking in a virtual deep breath, he reined himself in and continued. “Gnnng, OK. I’m the advance party. The ‘hooh-rah!’ you hear when you open a can of whupass!”
He paused and snorted at our blank looks. “Never mind. I came up through the Ruins inside the camp perimeter. There’s a world down there only Crynits really know about.” He pointed at Nonch. We traded glances, remembering our friend’s remarks about the underground Human Ruins.
“Uh, Sir.” Mieant paused and looked at me, then back to AI. “How did you find us?”
AI muttered to himself and replied, “Asrigard, I got ‘Eyes and Ears’.” He turned, glowed green, and shone a light on Cri’s neck. “Those tattoos on her neck are broadcasting video, audio and location.”
It didn’t register for a second. So caught up with moment-by-moment survival, I’d forgotten about the tattoos Dad had put on Cri. My sister’s jaw dropped. She slapped her lower hands over the tattoos. Joy lit up her face—and then instantaneously was replaced by panic. She covered the ‘O” her mouth made with her upper hands.
Dad was brilliant.
“Nova,” Cri whispered, looking at Mieant, “They saw US.” Mieant’s eyes got big.
“Yep. Everything and everyone in Cri’s line-of-sight, from our nightmare-inspiring Sarla,” AI continued, turning away from Nonch to Cri, “to you, Juliet, and your prissy Romeo over there.”
He chuckled, and we all frowned. Our nanotranslators came up with nothing for “Juliet,” “Romeo,” or “prissy.” AI continued. “We isolated your location based on the visual feeds and the initial route they used when they brought you here. It took much too long, but we found you.”
We’re neither forgotten, nor lost! My shoulders and neck tingled as his words sank in. Nonch’s sensor stalks rose as he considered the implications of being found—of being re-connected with the people who loved us and, perhaps, the ones who protected us. Mieant stood taller.
Hope changes everything.
“Your parents are coming. I came to assess the landscape. Do triage.” I touched my stomach, absently wondering where my pain had gone. He spun toward me. “You’re the triage. That f–flipping Godwill injected you with an awful thing, Raystar. I’ve immobilized it, and I’ve healed you with what energy I can spare.” He drew closer to me as he spoke. “But you have maybe two days before you turn into goo if we don’t eliminate the infection.”
Then, in my head, he said, Ray. I can’t do this anymore.… I can’t watch what these people are doing to you.
I looked at my friend, not understanding. Between his anger at me for flushing him, his disappointment in me, and something else, he was conflicted. And even stranger, I felt like I should know what he was talking about.
“Is it correct then, to believe that the Ceridians have a plan?” Nonch inquired politely. As he used pheromones as a secret language, he had probably inferred from my expressions that AI and I communicated via some alternate means as well.
“Why!” AI pivoted toward Nonch with a well-managed flourish (given that AI was a fist-sized, floating, diamond-shaped pendant). “Yes, my sufficiently courteous friend! In precisely one minute and thirty-two seconds, Sathra and Nent are going bring us home!”
One second earlier than expected, a six-meter-thick plasma-flower of destruction punched through the atmosphere at ground level, crushed the force fence, and sent dirt and debris skyward in a blinding, neon-blue flash.
Blue fire crashed across the field’s barrier, melting three autoturrets within its heat radius. The concussion swatted AI to the ground, and we all did our species’ version of head-over-butt tumbling as the shockwave pummeled us with brutal force. Nonch, of course, had a hundred feet and fared better; his sensor stalks swished like hair in a gust of wind. Starbats raged and again surged from the Ruins they’d just resettled. They were getting their exercise.
AI yelled something about schedules and precision.
Pfft. Life wasn’t convenient for him either. Which somehow made me feel better.
I recognized the two guards who stumbled out of the vault building in various states of attaching their power armor.
The fence’s autoturrets swiveled. I threw myself to the ground as their orange eyes pivoted over us and launched streams of glowing orbs toward some target on the horizon. Plasma balls flew like meteors, shrinking as they approached their distant purpose, and then flashed a brilliant white and lit up the clouds before Nem’s atmosphere carried the thump of their explosions.
What was approaching over the horizon had an epic version of “returning” fire.
Ancient Human buildings lit up with staccato explosions as they got in the way of my parents’ response. Structures that for 1,800 years hadn’t received any attention, had minded their own ancient business, had fixated on their prior glory, crumbled in shock as their ankles were blown out by row after row of flowery energy blossoms. The titanic sound of metric ton upon metric ton of metal and kilometers-tall structures falling into each other like dominoes reached us seconds later.
The two guards who had eyed us just that morning as we’d explored the camp clasped the last segments of their armor on and rushed to assemble a heavy cannon. Futile. Their eyes grew moon-sized, so huge you could see the blaze of the fiery projectiles streaking toward them in their black sclerae.
I hoped they had hugged someone this morning before coming to work.
The camp was being razed as easily as a bully would shove over a little kid’s sandcastle. Defenses were brushed aside as nova after nova vaporized their matter. Buildings flew in all directions and structures vanished in plasma’s hungry orange fire. I’d never witnessed such power, such destruction.
But we were still alive. Mom and Dad had great aim. Shrapnel whirred around us, and through luck and reflex, we were not crushed, impaled, pierced, or beheaded.
A red sun streaked over our heads, incinerated a huge section of the prison fence, and blew a crater’s worth of dirt skyward. Fence turrets that didn’t immediately explode were thrown in twirling, fiery spirals that ricocheted off the Ruins before thudding to the ground. Starbats cried and swirled as their millions of nests in the Human Ruins were disturbed. I was sure those creatures would be starbatting about this for centuries.
The morning the gods fought.
Godwill, followed by Sarla, stepped out of the vault building. He was in the battle armor I’d seen him in the previous day. He pointed to us, and my friends dropped like marionettes with their strings cut. They writhed, screaming and clawing at their collars. My bet had paid off. I’d deactivated my collar, and while I was free, I didn’t want him to know it. I followed my friends to the dirt, grasping at the plastic ring around my neck like I was trying to stop it from chopping my head off.
“INCOMING! Cover your eyes and ears!” AI yelled from under the cot where he’d tumbled. Despite their pain, my friends complied.
The world turned white. Searing heat pressed down on my back. The whump that followed shoved us all at least two meters from where we’d lain.
Nova and gravity wells! Firing an atmosphere cannon at a target WITHIN the atmosphere was insane. After a millisecond of dead quiet, thunks and clanks sounded as gravity pulled whatever had been thrown toward space back to the ground.
I raised my head and looked back toward the direction of the heat, sheltering my eyes against the swirls of orange flame and blac
k smoke. Not a bit of the NPD cruiser was visible. An enormous hole dripped molten metal into its glowing center, which was a pool of red lava. Godwill would not be able to follow us in the cruiser, at least.
My parents might be insane.
But they were OUR insane.
In the distance, a goliath approached. Mom and Dad’s assault tank was becoming visible. It shrugged off the base’s dwindling plasma fire like one brushes dust from clothes. The tank’s forward shield was set to “obliterate.” Air glowed crimson with shimmering heat as it pushed aside, melted, and burned whatever the hulking assault tank drove over. Millennia-old Human buildings crashed aside in slow motion.
The six-plus, meter-long twin barrels of the tank’s atmosphere cannon swung toward us. Blue energy crackled at the dual muzzles. My eyes grew huge when they paused on exactly our position. The atmosphere cannons resumed their rotation a millisecond later, targeting the camp’s remaining autoturrets. In a flash that lit up the ground, the sky, and the Ruins, their next shot cracked the air like a Galactic whip, and the ground behind us erupted in chunks. Wind, not to be left out of this contest of Armageddon, churned hot, acidic dirt into each of our breaths and blinks.
Smaller comets streamed toward us from the tank’s eight other plasma cannons. Return fire lancing out from the prison-camp guards and the remaining autoturrets splashed against the tank’s shields. The tank’s autoturrets immediately targeted the sources and sent an answering string of orange light screaming back at the offending enemy. Oblivious to the lethal exchange, Godwill marched toward us, a skeleton made bulky by combat armor. His too-tight skin pulled his mouth back into a perpetual grin, and his bulging black eyes took in the destruction with what could only be called glee.
Backlit by fires blazing everywhere in the camp, he was terrifying. A purple nimbus pulsed around his hands and skeletal head, and a red gash on his cheek dripped silvery blood down his uniform.
