The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3)

by Chris Eisenlauer

Something like electric current shot through Braams at the sound of Jav’s voice.

  “I’ve had a preoccupation with fairness, you know?” Jav fairly stuttered through shivers that shook him visibly. “I always feel guilty doing what we do.”

  Braams started to turn towards Jav who was crouching, hugging himself against the shakes that plagued him and to keep his guts from spilling out. “It’s a contest. It’s bigger than me, I know; there are countless others involved, but I put myself up as collateral each time.”

  Braams felt a convulsion, and wasn’t sure of its source. He shrugged it off, took a step towards Jav through a fine red mist that had risen once again.

  “If I lost, then I wasn’t good enough,” Jav said. “That’s what I used to think.” He shook his head. “But I don’t care about fair anymore. I don’t care whose fault it is. I’m tired of losing the people that are close to me. And I want to hurt those responsible.

  “It’s over Braams,” Jav said, pulling off his shredded shirt and leather jacket. “I’ve been holding it back, but now I can satiate the Curse, maybe once and for all, with you. With all that you have to offer, I can narrow the focus, limit it to you so that no one else need suffer its effects now or ever again.”

  Braams felt the alien pulse rack his body again, an indefensible hammer blow distributed across and throughout his being. He felt drawn forward physically, his head in particular, as if tugged by the escaping blood. He clasped both hands his face, to try to stop the flow, to squeeze the halves of his helmet together to seal the crack, but the pulse came again, more forcefully, and so, too, the blood gushed with greater intensity. The air was heavy with his blood now, filled with a red haze, with great red drops condensing nearly to the size of his fists. It was all spillover from a spiraling conduit, streaming from his face to Jav’s, to the Ritual Mask, where it disappeared so that the immaculate white plate was always maddeningly visible, its shadow eyes mocking.

  He felt dizzy. Through the haze he saw that Jav was standing, that his right side, so recently torn open, was mending, that his right arm was whole again.

  As the Mikai Curse cycled up, larger and larger volumes of blood were torn out of Braams, each loss nauseating him and debilitating him incrementally. He could do nothing to stop it. In fact, all the while, he was trapped in a loop of fever-thought: as the blood escaped him, he lost all contact with it; he struggled to connect with the blood as he had been able to do before, but because of the taint of the Mikai Curse or because the blood was not coursing through anyone’s veins, it was invisible to him in the only way that mattered. Though the blood had been collected over centuries, marked for him, for the salvation of the Three Worlds, it was gone, and worse, it was being used by the very threat they had hoped to counter with it. In an epiphany, crushing in its implications, he thought he might understand the paradox that had troubled him since Olka Stusson first approached him with the secret knowledge of Keska Kessel’s prophecy. Despondency threatened to drown him.

  Jav was experiencing a rare lucidity as the Mikai Curse worked, which allowed him some degree of control, at least directionally. He couldn’t start or stop the Curse at will—not yet, anyway—as, ultimately, it was an autonomous system, but he had the sense that the Ritual Mask drank now as it never had before, first repairing his body, then filling the well of its need, bringing it to maximum power. There was something else, too, some additional reservoir that needed filling, and Jav soon realized what it was. A voice spoke in his head then, one that sounded eerily like his own. “Summon them. They will answer. They have no choice.”

  Jav understood. He also understood that it was wrong somehow, but it was the only answer. He summoned the Kaiser Bones while Dark with the Ritual Mask and a change came over him immediately.

  The pulses had stopped. Braams was bent over with exhaustion, but composed himself, and straightened. He looked at his hands, dark now, almost black, and withered like dried fruit. With the blood no longer coursing through the air, he could see Jav clearly, but what he saw was unexpected.

  The face of the Ritual Mask was the same, but it was set within a shell of identical ivory. The ivory was an unbroken second skin, knitted together asymmetrically, perhaps a centimeter thick, molded to Jav’s body. Jav’s Raw Physical Power with the Ritual Mask was 30,660. It was double that with the Mikai Curse satisfied. This already made Jav one of the most formidable Shades ever, but when he went Dark with the Kaiser Bones, his RPP increased by another twenty times, raising it to 1,226,400.

  Braams was emaciated and grotesque, but he wasn’t finished yet. “You are a perfect void to me,” he said. “But I think I understand now. You, as you are now, are the King of Spades and you were only made possible by my existence. The Blood Solution was our damnation, not our salvation.”

  Jav said nothing.

  Braams nodded, the truth of his own words sinking in, becoming real to him. “Keska Kessel couldn’t have known. And yet, it makes no difference. I will not make this easy for you.” Braams dropped into left front stance, and quivering slightly with isometric force, he pushed out his right claw hand over his crossed, lowered left arm.

  It was a kind of salute to which Jav replied in kind, raising his hands to form the dragon’s head claw. When he moved, the boney shell crunched audibly, as if it were crushed and remade at every bend and with every movement. Each hand quickly resolved into a tight three-fingered claw, and Jav was moving, his hands darting out before him, one over the other, his fingers seeking Braams’s throat. His movement was broken, though, punctuated and stiff, as it was with the Ritual Mask, only more pronounced now.

  Braams had some difficulty accurately reading Jav’s actions, but still managed to block each of the incoming strikes, backing away to match Jav’s advance. He stopped abruptly to bend backwards, folding almost in half, so that Jav swiped empty air and was nearly impaled on a driving right kick. Jav was unfazed, though, and scooped Braams’s leg out of the way. Braams spun with the motion and attempted to rake Jav’s covered face with a back-sweeping left claw. Jav caught his wrist, stopping him in mid spin, and shot a tight, snapping right roundhouse kick to the back of Braams’s head.

  Lines shot through the Blood Frame’s helmet, spreading from back to front to connect with the already existing crack. The blow staggered Braams, but he recovered quickly, snatching his hand free. He whipped his claw hands furiously, so that sparks marked the passage of his fingers and liquid fire began to swirl about his hands. Wherever his hands went, trails of that liquid fire followed.

  Jav could feel the heat, real and dangerous, pouring off of Braams. His hands came with tireless rapidity, high left, high right, high right, high left. Jav blocked with expert facility, but was lulled into a false sense of Braams’s ability. While Jav was preoccupied, blocking Braams’s high strikes, Braams’s speed was steadily increasing. Jav was matching it, but anticipating Braams’s pattern and so was not prepared when Braam’s feinted and instead of going high as he had been he drove a palm into Jav’s bone-plated chest. This upset Jav’s momentum, opening him up for two follow-up strikes that knocked him back a step each. What each strike also did, was cause a small-scale nuclear explosion. Braams proceeded through the first, the second, the third, and attempted to grab Jav by the throat with a fourth strike, should he still be in one piece.

  Before the light faded enough for him to see, Braams could feel Jav’s neck, solid and unyielding in his grip. As the air burned around them, debris rising up from the ground into the glaring red sky, the two regarded each other.

  Jav’s hands were like lightning and for the third time were about Braams’s head, holding him fast in the Kaiser Claw. The speed and force were sufficient enough to unbalance Braams, who nearly fell backwards as he let go of Jav’s neck reflexively.

  “I’m sorry. It can’t end any other way.”

  “Do it,” Braams said. “Kill me. Steal the Three Worlds. Go on your way and steal all the worlds there are. There will be a reckoning, Jav Holson. Some
day someone will send you to hell and I’ll be there waiting for you.”

  “Goodbye, Garlin Braams.”

  With a quick, forceful jerk, Jav twisted his hands and Braams’s head was reduced to a dark red briquette between them, spinning and splintering under the opposing pressures. For a moment, the little dark shape hovered between his hands. As the effects of the technique wore off, Jav closed his fingers around what remained of Braams’s head and started to walk towards the Root Palace.

  Braams’s body, still standing, began to ooze, sizzle, and burn within seconds. The white shapes of the Blood Frame blackened, cracked, and exploded like great kernels of corn.

  As Jav proceeded towards the Palace, he noticed a sudden drop in temperature. He turned and continued walking backwards, scanning the horizon for who he knew must be present. She was limping, but Bela Fan was there. Jav raised two fingers in a salute and turned back to face the Palace, his stride unbroken as the ground under his feet crunched and whitened with frost. The frost, Jav noted, was beautiful, but couldn’t hide the hundreds of fused half-bodies—Palace personnel summoned to act as Braams’s army—that littered the plain.

  As he drew nearer to the Palace, Jav was relieved to see that many still lived. He stopped when he came across Vays, resting up against the Palace exterior, and Set tending to him.

  “I’m glad to see you’re still alive,” Jav said to Set.

  “Once you cracked his face, Braams either lost or gave up his control. I tried to get as many people back here as possible, including him,” Set pointed with his chin to Abanastar’s prone form some ways away, “but I think you saw that I was only partially successful. If I hadn’t been Dark, I’d probably be decorating the ground as well.”

  Jav nodded.

  Set turned to Vays. “You okay? Looks like Bela is on her way back, but I want to go check on Slowe and the others.”

  “Yeah,” Vays said. “You go ahead.”

  Set regarded Jav, as if just now noticing his changed appearance, and hesitantly clapped him on the shoulder before taking his leave.

  “How about you, Holson?” Vays said. “Are you okay?”

  Jav stared at him with the inscrutable crease “eyes” of the Ritual Mask—the living shadow eyes had receded. Finally, without saying a word, Jav shook his head and walked off towards the ruined facade of the Palace.

  He jumped up to the first exposed level with no effort and no AI. Though the fires had subsided and the smoke had thinned, he paused there a moment, focusing his attention on one area in particular, hesitant to proceed. But he did proceed, jumping again to another level exposed higher up. He stood now in what was left of his quarters. It was black, smoky, and sticky with oozing resin. In the far corner was a huddled shape, blackened and reduced by the tremendous heat. He regarded the dark red briquette still clasped in his left hand, then the shape in the corner again. His closed his fingers about the contents of his left hand and squeezed, raising his fist and letting the resulting powder fall free. He snapped his hand to be rid of any residual dust, took a step forward, and crouched down before Mao Pardine. After a time he reached out and gingerly took up her remains. Cradling them to him, he began to weep within the boney shell that covered him.

  “I’m going to take you somewhere beautiful, Mao, while such a place still exists here, and I’m going to bury you there. In a beautiful place, surrounded by beautiful things, where no one—” His breath caught before he could continue. “Where no one can hurt you. You’re going to see Mai now. Tell her I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Jav backed out of the corner slowly with Mao in his arms, turned to stand at the edge of the broken floor, and shot like a streak from his place.

  21. THE 21ST GENERATION

  10,691.241

  After three months, much of the gaping hole Braams had left in the Vine had grown back, though it was discolored, and like Raus’s right arm, would be a permanent scar, a reminder of all that was lost on Shaala, now Planet 1405. With Braams fallen, the remaining Entitled offered little resistance, and that very day, Icsain proved his value by locating and enslaving them all—twenty-seven of them—with the Relic Cords. Iss and Voskos, now Planets 1406 and 1407 respectively, had no real defensive capabilities since all the Entitled had come to Shaala for the fight. Those of the Three Worlds, regardless of their plight, were loath to turn their mass drivers against each other. The planets had been tethered with heavy, reinforced blind runners within fifteen days of the Vine’s initial planetfall on 1405 and by now, the germs and toxins imported from thousands of other defeated worlds had reduced all populations to negligible levels. There was no one left on any of the Three Worlds who was not dead or dying.

  The resources harvested from Three Worlds were staggering. The cost was just as staggering, but the Empire enjoyed a return to conditions not experienced for several decades now, perhaps even centuries. The Vine would heal completely. New Grans would be built. Plans were being laid and changes were taking place.

  At the base of the Palace within the encircling courtyard walls, the Emperor addressed the survivors of Braams’s assault. The Palace regularly accommodated three hundred thousand people, but the courtyard held a mere third of that number. Reconnecting with the rest of the Empire would take time, but they were in no danger now, and if a new danger should appear, they were well-equipped to meet it, or would be very soon.

  The image of the Emperor, a giant carved gourd with subtly shifting fire-lit features, flickered within a half-enclosed dais of what appeared to be woven driftwood set within the facade of the Palace, just above the main gates.

  Arrayed below, the Shades made a line and were backed by the hundred thousand survivors. All of them faced and were intent upon the Emperor.

  “We have suffered much,” the Emperor said, his voice booming, but a whisper at the same time. “Wheeler Barson and Lor Kalkin will be sorely missed. As will our friends and family lost in the terrible fire which nearly ruined us all. But we can rebuild. We are rebuilding. And now is the time to make new traditions to meet the future as we enter into it.

  “Since the inception of this Empire, there have always been three Generals and a Squad of three Specialists. That has served until now. Our conventions have been strained beyond the breaking point and we must adapt.

  “From this day forth, with the inauguration of the 21st Generation, the Generals will be four. Squads, too, shall consist of four. Our numbers are incomplete, a condition that has plagued us for some time, but this shall soon be rectified.

  “First, though, we must offer our thanks and say farewell to the 20th Generation. Mefis Abanaster. Tia Winn. You have served the Empire in what will likely prove to be its darkest era. You have each earned early retirement and a world of your choice. I am only sorry that Wheeler Barson cannot join you.

  “Lor Kalkin survived the Plague Squad and led the Death Squad. His contributions will not be forgotten. The Death Squad is hereby retired, but its remaining members still have work to do.

  “Jav Holson.”

  Jav stood straight. He was clad in the Kaiser Bones, which were fully restored. When he returned a week after the day he’d defeated Braams, there was no sign of the augmented form he’d assumed. He’d been sullen and hadn’t offered any explanations. No one had pressed him.

  The Emperor continued, “You are now First General of the 21st Generation. Your Gran, Gran Mid, is already under construction and should be completed in another ninety days.”

  Jav bowed. “Thank you, Lord Emperor.”

  “Raus Kapler.”

  Raus stood next to Jav, towering above him, making him look like a child.

  “You will Join Jav Holson as a General of the 21st Generation. The construction of your Gran, Gran Pham, is similarly underway.”

  “Thank you, Lord Emperor,” Raus said.

  “Icsain.”

  Next to Raus was Icsain, impassive as ever.

  “You, too, will join the 21st Generation Generals. Your Gran, slated to
be known as Gran Lej, is still in the planning stage and will take substantially longer to complete.”

  Icsain bowed, but said nothing.

  “This brings us to our fourth General,” the Emperor said. “Gilf Scanlan. Step forward.”

  From the rows of people close behind the Shades, consisting mostly of Division Directors, Gilf Scanlan, Director of the Military Hardware Division, stepped out from his place and moved out to the space between the Shades and the main Palace gate.

  “Gilf Scanlan. We are fortunate that you have survived. We will not tempt fate any longer with your mortality. Your genius has aided the Empire countless times and in countless ways. It will be preserved. This day you are a Shade of the Viscain Empire.”

  An animate length of vine darted out from beneath the Emperor’s image. It snaked agilely down to Scanlan, bearing with it a strange device, that was roughly cube-shaped, and fifteen centimeters to a side.

  Scanlan accepted the package and examined it briefly, immediately intrigued by the intricate clockwork gears that turned and worked. He sought the power source, a motor, a spring, anything that might account for its motion, but saw with a glance that it was, in its way, like a mobius strip, self-powered, and thus also a perpetual motion machine.

  “Take the Creation Cogs. Accept your gift and be transformed.”

  “Yes, Lord Emperor,” Scanlan said. He hesitated for a moment, taken by the beauty and simplicity of the Artifact and unwilling, only for a moment, to give that up. But he wasn’t giving it up. He hugged the cube of what looked like brass and bronze to his breast where it disappeared with a blinding flash.

  When the light faded and Scanlan was Dark with the Creation Cogs, his body was thick and heavy with blocky brass plating. He now stood taller than Jav and Icsain, but was not quite Raus’s equal. Set within his chest, exposed and delicate and contrasting with his stalwart appearance, was a more elaborate version of the Creation Cogs, ticking, working away at infinity. All of him appeared to be brass. Over his right eye was a thick monocle, the casing held by a chain, the lens rotating with its own agenda.