The Will to Battle
Page 45
It took Papadelias’s curses over my tracker to make me remember it was my job to make sure Mycroft didn’t run away. I ran three useless paces. What could I do? There lay Mycroft’s hat in the dust beside me. Could I call Huxley? Make them bring Mycroft back? Huxley’s parting mutter had been a curse, I realized; Mycroft had evaded them, too. Martin, Papa, and I had debated whether to handcuff Mycroft to one of us as usual, but decided for the ceremony, just this once, that it was safer to keep Mycroft mobile, ready to dodge, and help. And there they went to help. I should help too. That was the solution: catch up with Mycroft at the shore. There would be a rescue mission, nurses, decompression tanks, boats, blankets, and I would find Mycroft again. I babbled the situation to the Prince, Who digested it in masklike silence, which somehow awoke dread’s first traces in me, like the first scent of some deadly gas.
The Prince called a special car to take me to the coast as quickly as was safe with the airspace full of wonders. I was to meet Achilles there, who had hitched a giant bat, and was shouting commands to all Myrmidons to follow as we could. I thought about it more now. Atlantis was defenseless. At MASON’s order every aquatic U-beast had been on the far side of the sea chasing the Sanctum Sanctorum violators, every hippocampus and seahound and panoctopus and plasma-ray and kraken, absent in this moment that the billion arrows of complacent Earth flew, just as Mycroft feared. That was the thought in my mind when my tracker bleeped the tsunami alert.
It feels like a cruel joke calling it a small tsunami. I’ve been told it wasn’t a nuclear device that collapsed the city, just many smaller blasts, plus the implosion of the city structure. The safety systems in my car refused to go within four kilometers of the coast with the tsunami warning; I had to land and run the rest of the way. Images flowed in of the water receding from the beach, of the crest, at first just a band of different blue across the sea’s horizon, which only an expert could read as danger. Satellite photos showed the blast zone as bull’s-eye ripples around a heart of bubbling froth, but only as they neared the coast did the crests swell into monsters. Mycroft was airborne, I told myself. Utopia’s soaring rescue force is safe from even the ocean’s longest claws. Still, I ran harder. Footage from the coast showed colorful wings and coats of static hovering high among the gulls as the tsunami hurled sailboats and shards of dock against the walks and shops of Romanova’s famous northern beachfront. I ran even harder. A camera bot zoomed in on flotsam and bodies bobbing on the sea. I ran harder yet, or was it that the running grew more difficult? When I reached the coast, it was all hospital floats and volunteers. The fantastic vanguard had moved on, flying across the waves to the blast’s heart, leaving on shore only common human chaos. Spotting my uniform, everyone was quick to offer me work, but a ride out to sea was a long time begging.
Neverland rushed to Atlantis to save Utopia. The brightness of the wild fleet felt like hope itself when my tracker showed them approaching the froth-white epicenter. We on the coast were trapped, but they came from the west, where the tsunami crests were but one more ripple on the belly of the sea. The Seaborn nation-strat loved Atlanteans like bas’sibs, and knew every current of the Mediterranean, and the dangers of the human bloodstream, too, which was the survivors’ true enemy as eddies bore them surfaceward. Houseboats, racing yachts, schooners, ferries, silverjacks, spitting hydrofoils, and tiny runabouts all knew their parts as the voice of Graylaw Tribune Jay Sparhawk and the salt-white sails of the Ahab’s Folly led the rescue. Dragons and griffins flocked to them, and robots sparkling against the broad jewel of the sea. Utopia’s static-bright vanguard alighted on the boats and deferred to the instructions of those who know waves as we know sidewalks. People were hauled from the sea, the drowning given breath, the dying dignity. Then explosions ricocheted across the seascape, white and savage. I still don’t know what they were: mines, time bombs, leftovers, some accident of pressure as further infrastructure burst below, but I saw one explosion claim a brave water taxi, another a shimmering milliwing, another a schooner whose planks shattered in the blast, and then the medical alert told me that Mycroft was unconscious, then that their blood oxygen was dropping, dropping, and the pressure rising, rising, and then the heartbeat stopped. I shrieked, begged, attacked a nurse and stole their hoverbed and started out, and Achilles marshaled a ship, and Papa barked orders from HQ, and MASON sent a special force, and Huxley let the Sea Knights know, and the Nemo Watch, and O.C.E.A.N.U.S., and all that time the heartless tracker kept on making us watch a green line fall as Mycroft’s blood grew stiller and more toxic, and the pressure gauge ticked off meter by meter the sinking of the corpse.
It wasn’t real as long as I was still working, helping Neverland haul bodies from the sea. It wasn’t real as long as my arms burned, and fresh tasks made time blur. It wasn’t real at sunset. It wasn’t real when strong arms dragged me to a bed, and made me realize I was too exhausted to rise again. It wasn’t real when I was carried back to Romanova, and laid on sofa plush, and commanded to eat soup. Mycroft couldn’t drown, Mycroft was Mycroft. It was another trick, a plan. We didn’t have a body. They would turn up again, bruised and salty, or O.S. would call to say they had them, or Madame. But the tracker kept transmitting. Maybe they slipped their tracker? No, they couldn’t anymore. Not even Papadelias has the authority to make prisoner attach a tracker nonremovably, but MASON could have a Familiaris’s head grafted onto a zebra if they wanted, and had granted with vindictive enthusiasm Papa’s request have a surgeon make Mycroft’s tracker permanent. Now that tracker counted out the stages of decomposition. We would’ve sent a diving team after the signal, but there were so many corpses, and so many survivors waiting injured in the depths, we couldn’t waste resources hunting for one body. After seven hours the signal started moving, the flesh still with it, and the tracker registered the belly acid of some fatted sea beast. A few hours later even the flesh was gone.
It still didn’t feel real. If I had seen them die, if we had had a body, a photograph, blood in the water, then maybe, but we had nothing, and nothing felt like nothing. Missing in action. Lost at sea. Mycroft could have walked in through my door anytime, full of excuses. And there were injured to treat, and actions to plan, and I was still working from the sofa when J.E.D.D. Mason came in, with Their suit set to white mourning static like the coats, and walked up to me, and stood there staring with Their black eyes, and said in Their gentle monotone: “Mycroft was.” That was all. They came all that way just to say it to me. They knew I needed to hear it. I needed to hear it. And then I said it to myself inside, and it was real.
My nose itched, and my cheeks were wet, and my eyes were hot. I got up and ran. I didn’t know where I was running, but there was Papa’s office—no one stopped me—into Papa’s office, and there was Papa, and their cheeks were wet, and their eyes were red, and we hugged each other so tight, and we screamed. I’d never screamed crying before, but it came. There was no difference between the sounds: screams, sobs, gasps, mine, Papa’s, together. Mycroft always said no one should mourn them. Well, shut up, Mycroft, we’re going to make you eat your lunch, and take your pills, and sleep your hours, and rest your rest, and we’re going to mourn you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.
And we’re going to make sure your damned seeds fly.
Except it’s so, so kind that Mycroft doesn’t have to see this stupid war. See people praising the Atlantis strike. Oh, at some point someone announced that Atlantis was where the Utopians had hidden the harbinger adepts, the willing ones who consented to go with them and give Utopia a monopoly on Armageddon. Now most of them are gone, and no one (or fewer people anyway) can end the world. We’re all supposed to feel safer. And a lot of people do feel safer. Except who knows if it’s true. And even if it is true, they—we! Human beings!—we built a dream city under the sea, and then we blew it up. “To keep the world safe!” Maybe. I do like the world. But I loved that city, and they killed thousands of people, and while they weren’t all innocent, they were all dedic
ated to the quest to conquer death, age, and the stars. I suppose Atlantis will become one of those city names that means ‘atrocity’ forever now, like Hiroshima. But there’s no room left in me for that to sink in. Mycroft is dead. I want to say “the best and wisest person I’ve ever known is dead” but saying that of Mycroft Canner feels wrong, even though it also feels so right. What am I supposed to do now? Write an obituary? I’m the Anonymous, I have to write an obituary for civilization as we know it, not just Mycroft Canner. Then someone said I’d better take over Mycroft’s chronicle and—strange, I just finished crying, I didn’t expect this sentence to make me start again. Someone said I’d better take over Mycroft’s chronicle. So here I am.
That was the first day of the war.
HERE ENDS
The Will to Battle
Mycroft Canner’s Chronicle of how Humanity learned to make War again
* * *
HERE BEGINS THE WAR ITSELF
whose Chronicle I name
for Mycroft’s hope and mine
Perhaps the Stars
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
ADA PALMER
I can’t say more, not now. Not in one page. At such intensity reflection, resolution, consolation, all need a whole book to not feel hollow, like a sketch. That book is coming. In the meantime, what I can do is thank those who helped us get this far:
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who said yes
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who taught me the process
Anita Okoye, who made the process miraculously smooth
Kay Strock, who helped me balance so many tasks
Liana Krissoff, whose careful edits made it better
Victor Mosquera, Irene Gallo, and Heather Saunders, who made it beautiful
Diana Griffin, who helped it reach so many people
Katie Shea Boutillier and Harry Illingworth, who carried it across the sea
Amy Boggs and Cameron McClure, who took such good care of it, and me
Doug and Laura Palmer, who gave me everything
Lauren Schiller, who helped a thousand million ways
Carl Engle-Laird, who helped me become the person who could write this
Jonathan Sneed, who named Terra Ignota
Irina Greenman, whose passionate Latin made it grander
Sarah Alys Lyndholm, whose artful Japanese made it subtler
Lila Garrott, whose shared projects made it richer
Alan Charles Kors, who opened the Enlightenment for me
James Hankins, who opened the Renaissance for me
Jo Walton, who told me it was good; no really good
Steve Brust, Cory Doctorow, and Ken Liu, who read so deeply
Max Gladstone and Fran Wilde, who welcomed me so warmly
Michael Mellas and Steph Neeley, who read with such excitement
Matt Granoff, Crystal Huff, and Ruth Wejksnora, who read with such care
HRSFA, Double Star, Balticon, Worldcon, filk, fandom, who gave me community
You, who trusted me enough to keep reading,
which really is the most important gift of all.
Also by Ada Palmer
Too Like the Lightning
Seven Surrenders
ABOUT THE Author
ADA PALMER is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Harvard University Press published her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, in 2014. She is also a composer of folk- and Renaissance-tinged a cappella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. Her personal site is at adapalmer.com. She also writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF- and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com, or sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Chapter the First: We the Alphabet
Chapter the Second: Human Dignity
Chapter the Third: Is This the Spark?
Chapter the Fourth: Ghost
Chapter the Fifth: Strangest Senator
Chapter the Sixth: Lex Prohibit—The Law Forbids
Chapter the Seventh: Grace
Chapter the Eighth: Enemy Sanctum
Chapter the Ninth: Repercussions
Chapter the Tenth: Our Secret Truce
Chapter the Eleventh: Inviolable
Chapter the Twelfth: The Temple of Janus
Chapter the Thirteenth: The Five Gates of Esperanza City
Chapter the Fourteenth: Filial Piety
Chapter the Fifteenth: Some Notes of Martin Guildbreaker on the Simultaneous Advancement of Four Investigations
Chapter the Sixteenth: The Witch
Chapter the Seventeenth: The Witch Again
Chapter the Eighteenth: Terra Ignota
Chapter the Nineteenth: Angry, the Leviathans
Chapter the Twentieth: The Race for Cato Weeksbooth
Chapter Twenty-One
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments ADA PALMER
Also by Ada Palmer
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE WILL TO BATTLE
Copyright © 2017 by Ada Palmer
All rights reserved.
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Cover art by Victor Mosquera
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-7804-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-5876-3 (ebook)
eISBN 9781466858763
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
First Edition: December 2017