Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  Keep it together, Celeste!

  She rocketed downward through the airy isles like a bullet through cotton.

  * * *

  Gethin heard the airship ripping open around him and the metal squealing like a piteous creature. The violent pitch of descent tipped it into a nosedive. A maelstrom of wheeling bodies emptied into the sky as he clutched the column for all he was worth.

  “Give me an audio readout of the ship’s altimeter!” he shouted to Ego. He couldn’t hear his own voice.

 

  The airship dipped so suddenly that Gethin’s legs were suddenly dangling above him. He amped his muscles to keep his grip.

 

  He glanced around in the feeble hope of spotting his compatriots. Instead of finding them, he observed a woman hanging from the ceiling’s I-beams, her face stretched into an awful inaudible scream. Her green cloak flapped around her. She might have been a superhero from old comics, hugging the beams as if to lift the entire craft against gravity.

 

 

 

 

  * * *

  Celeste fell.

  She could breathe now; this consolation was just enough to suppress her giddiness and constrict her focus. She became aware of a small object hurtling up towards her, a black fleck visible against cropfields and roads.

  The pseudopod came like a birdshot fired at a clay skeet. She dropped past it, watching her hope go wide as the pseudopod flew past, seemingly destined for space. But behind her, the device swiveled thrusters, shifted its straight trajectory into an arc, and swept around, descending towards the falling human.

  Celeste saw the ground hurtling towards her.

  [I am here, Celeste.]

  The voice lanced into her thoughts. Celeste sobbed at the maternal tenderness in that synthesized harmonic. Alone without family or friends, without Jeff, she at least had her ship.

  Peripherally she realized the pseudopod was now a few arm-lengths away, bridging the distance by inches. Screaming as it cut through the air to reach her.

  Celeste grabbed for it, touched its hot and unexpectedly soft shapestone exterior. Her fingers snaked into handholds that deepened for her fingertips; within the molecular latticework, tiny commands flashing, directing reconfigurations, rendering handholds into a pliable substance not unlike rubber. Straps of this flexible metal-flesh snaked out and embraced her. The thrusters fired anew, exhausting themselves as they defied the grim gravity-well of Mother Blue.

  Celeste glanced over her shoulder at the sky.

  There, like a massive bomb from earlier, barbaric times, the airship was pitching through the sky. By the time Celeste’s pseudopod had angled its descent into a gentle glide towards the treetops of an unknown woodland, the airship was plowing past her into those same woods, snapping canopy as it went.

  The ship shrieked out of sight and exploded.

  Part Three

  Outlands

  There should always be a wilderness.

  Recognizing the delicate social contract between government and individual, there should always be a place for an individual to go if he or she decides they dislike the social contract or what’s become of it.

  The Outlands, the Wastes, the gloplands, we hear, are such a place. But the people who dwell there don’t choose this exile; it is forced upon them by an accident of birth. They remain because they must, sharing that wilderness with the remnant fragments of Warlord gangs, victimized while we play in our ivory arcologies. They fight for scraps of food with beasts.

  They deserve it, you say? Is it because their ancestors refused to cooperate with the early unification under Apollo, Enyalios, and the armies of Lady Wen Ying? Are sons and daughters to be punished for the sins of their shortsighted forbearers?

  Is it the old religions that still dominate these communities, making us fear the insidious influence that destroyed civilization at least twice before? Haven’t you wondered why these people cling to Bronze Age belief systems? Deprived of endless life, they will grasp at whatever crutch they can.

  I have written these columns for fifty-nine years now, and have seen no change of attitude. The Wastes shall remain Wastes, you declare with your inaction, and to hell with the people living there! I have hosted programs, gone into the Outlands with people, brought them supplies. I have interviewed the ones who suffer there. Some of you have sent aid, when the newsfeeds stir you to action. But we are too far gone, as a society, to truly effect change. We dwell in our digital Xanadus and shall not be moved.

  Earth can never shake off its past.

  But I can.

  Dear readers, I am leaving Earth for redworld shores. Mars! A world without war, without Wastes.

  Farewell to Blue Hell! I embrace MarsAlone!

  Gebhard Bleibtreu

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Hanmura2 Goes to Club Nadsat

  In his tearoom, Sakyo Hanmura2 broke meditation after a few minutes and, acting on an astonishingly atypical impulse, took a Lunarcab to New Shinjuku.

  On Mars, he was accustomed to daily meditation in his corporate tatami room, where he could hear the dim gurgle of garden streams through rice-paper walls. There, too, he might thumb through the jade books of Basho or Miyamoto Musashi, or traverse the forested shadow of Mount Olympus. Hanmura had even written his death poem while contemplating the caramel Martian firmament that was, year by year, turning more violet, folding into bruised purple sunsets, and destined to imitate the heavens of Earth. Such loss! His death poem reflected that…the impermanence of worlds while he, Hanmura, was forever.

  His company’s Lunar facility accommodated his tastes well enough: a tatami-matted room with shoji walls and rich, buttery light radiating around rock gardens. The low gravity was a reminder that he was not on Mars, though. Even with magfiber footwear, he felt like a helium balloon every time he moved.

  He was restless.

  Anxious.

  Needful of things he could not identify.

  So he went to New Shinjuku. With only three bodyguards.

  In the Lunarcab, he slid a skin-shell over his head and let the fiberoptic mesh conjure up a randomized Japanese face. They docked at the city’s western gate and went straight to a club he’d often seen on the covers of glossy hedonistic magazines. Club Nadsat.

  It was a structure four stories deep, each level boasting a different aesthetic theme of urban grittiness. Graffiti-sprayed walls, brick enclosures, Wastetown rubble, and a sunken abbey. Hanmura2 entered at ground level. The dance floor crawled with a mix of Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean partygoers interspersed with dreadlocked Africans and gangly Caucasians.

  The club’s music was a thudding tribal heartbeat. Hanmura2 grabbed a table along the balcony, unsure of what to do with his strange impulsiveness. The club-goers roiled like green surf. It made him think of a cruise ship he had been on, back when he lived Earthside and frequented the Caribbean. He remembered a scuba expedition at night. The floodlights igniting the ocean. Like swimming in milky jade. For years afterwards, he’d made annual pilgrimages to Caricom just to experience that ocean again.

  “Get me a sake,” he told Hideo, newest of his bodyguards. The man was halfway to the bar when Hanmura2 called him back. “No, no. A beer. Whatever they have on tap.”

  He smiled behind his skin-shell mask. Yes, let me not be Hanmura tonight. This body will be destroyed in a few weeks, memories and all. I will vaporize like some forgotten dream. So a dream I shall be then, and a good one at that.

  “Who drinks beer anymore?” a voice asked behind him.

  Hanmura2 looked to see a round-faced woman smiling at him across the rim of her fluted champagne glass. She was Philippino, maybe Malay. Pretty. Imp-like eyes set above a dainty nose,
with wide smiling lips. A dynamite fuck-me figure clad in a red, form-fitting cheongsam. Her hair was tied in a bun, set with red chopsticks.

  And beside her was another girl, taller and paler. Real Japanese, by the look of those sculpted cheekbones and elegant limbs. Smaller breasted than her voluptuous friend, her hair in braids encircling her head, she wore a deep blue kimono.

  “So? Beer?” the red-dressed woman teased. “Try a Godblood.”

  His true self would dismiss these frivolous tarts in favor of something more refined. His Olympus castle contained a geisha house, stabled with Renaissance women trained in no fewer than forty musical instruments, capable of reciting thousands of poems, able to sing in up to thirty languages, accomplished Arcadium counterparts and superb equestrians, who could storymod more tales than Scheherazade, and match his wit with lovely brazenness. What could these Lunar whores do to compare?

  His true self would scoff, showing cold iron in his eyes and lips.

  But this is a perishable me!

  “Godblood?” he said. “That’s a pheromod.”

  Both girls stared at him, unbelieving. They burst into laughter.

  “Why, so it is!” the red-dressed girl exclaimed.

  “Mocking me?” Hanmura2 asked, modulating his voice to inject playfulness into the words.

  “Do I get spanked if the answer is yes?” She moaned sharply while thrusting out her head in a silly faux-orgasmic pose.

  It was crude, obvious, overtly Western.

  But dear gods! he thought helplessly. I want her! I want them both!

  He regarded the nihonjin. “And you? Are you a spanker or spankee?”

  “I’m Masami, and let me give you a clue what I like.” She turned to her smaller friend, lovingly grasped the back of her hair, and with the other hand slapped her face. Hard. The girl’s cheek matched the hue of her cheongsam for a moment. Masami drew the trollop closer, shoving her face against her neck where the girl began kissing, mewling submissively at her cleavage.

  “Looks like three would be a crowd,” Hanmura2 said, turning away.

  “What do you think a girl has two tits for?” Masami challenged.

  He stopped. Bodyguard Hideo was returning with his beer.

  Hanmura2 looked at the girls. Looked back to Hideo.

  “Send the beer back,” he barked. “And get me a fucking Godblood.”

  Both girls giggled.

  “Now you’re talking!”

  Hanmura2 straightened in his chair. “I talk all fucking day. Tonight, I’m not interested in conversation.”

  Masami’s eyes were firestones. “Good, because that’s not my game either.”

  Hanmura2 felt pinned by those eyes. Stars! Her gaze was pure predator, icy hot, the raw force of an instinctive dominatrix. He decided he had completely misjudged her age.

  “Then let’s play your game,” he said, matching her steel. “And maybe you can bring your pet too.”

  “Oh, she comes wherever I want her to.” Masami cruelly grasped the other girl’s wrist and said to her, “Let’s go, little girl! Let’s follow the bad bad boy to a room.”

  He waited only to get the Godblood from Hideo. Then he eagerly tailed them to the next level down where bungalows honeycombed the walls. Masami looked at the drink in his hand.

  “Try it,” she ordered.

  Hanmura2 brought the cobalt blue liquid to his lips. His sensorium deftly jacked the grayweb to look up what a Godblood was. The definition appeared in his eyes:

  GODBLOOD. A synthetic pheromone and energy drink.

  He swallowed a sip. His poison receptors weren’t triggered. He swallowed more. It tasted the way a live wire might, if melted down to a drinkable fluid that diffused, not dispelled, its electrical properties. The tingling went swiftly to his loins.

  Masami and her partner (whom she had introduced as Pet Momo) keyed into one of the bungalows. Hanmura2 had barely entered when they were already skinning out of their clothes. Momo’s busty figure made him salivate. No way that was a natural body. She must have been grown from a patchwork genotype. Her nipples were swollen with excitement. Masami had the advantage in sleek legs. Hanmura2 fought to restrain himself, transfixed with animal hunger by two sets of rounded breasts.

  He turned his back on them and undressed with cursory motions. Leaving his boxer shorts on, he folded his clothes and stacked them in the corner.

  Then he glanced back to the girls.

  They were gone.

  In their place was a giant black scorpion.

  Hanmura2 didn’t waste any time standing in amazement. He tapped his left forearm twice to summon his guards.

  The scorpion stretched its tail. The segmented appendage extended like a bristly, unsightly tree, the tip grossly swollen with venom.

  Hanmura2 repressed the urge to run for the door or overturn the bungalow’s futon to use as a shield. He was immortal. And this whole thing was probably some sick joke being played on him. Maybe by Gates or Bielawa. He wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction.

  The scorpion’s tail reached a zenith and began to bloat. At the same time, the lower portion of the creature was shriveling, retracting its pincers into its head, the body dwindling as if all its life juices were being pulled inexorably into its tail.

  And the tail was becoming something else.

  Hanmura2 gasped as the armored scorpion shapeshifted into a man.

  In seconds, the arachnid was gone. The man was all that was left of it, and he floated lotus-style, like a grinning Buddha on an aerostat shelf. Hanmura2 gaped, knowing this was just an illusion but unable to look away.

  He had never seen this man before. Vaguely Middle Eastern, bearing a swarthy pallor suggesting Arabian roots. Curly black hair crowned his oval head. His face was sculpted with a forbidding sharpness, and despite the hooked aquiline nose there was something in his elongated features that suggested reptilian origins. Black eyes peered beneath pitched eyebrows. A bristly chinbeard hung many inches beneath his mouth. He wore a very plain, pitch-black garment over his lank body.

  He was smiling.

  “I’m not impressed, Masami,” Hanmura2 said. “Parlor tricks.”

  “And yet you currently exist on three worlds,” the man said in a clear, crystal timbre. “Is that a parlor trick also?”

  Hanmura2 walked straight at the apparition. “Allow me to show you a parlor trick.” His hands clenched into iron fists.

  An instant later, he was pitched against the far wall. The collision felt like it should have flattened him. He crashed to the floor, blinking stupidly, while his flesh crawled with pain as if he’d been splashed by hot water.

  “I like that one!” the man said cheerfully, and he extended his legs to the floor. He strode over, peeled Hanmura2’s skin-shell from his face as the CEO lay weakly. Then he lifted him up by his hair.

  Hanmura2 glared weakly at his attacker. Every inch of his skin throbbed like a blistering sunburn.

  “My name is Apophis and you are in violation of IPC law,” the stranger said. “I am here to place you under arrest.”

  Hanmura2 stared dumbly.

  “Will you come peacefully or not? Because –” the man’s good-humored face became serpentine, “– I can be very unpleasant if I’m vexed. Dost thou vex me, you little insect?”

  Hanmura2 didn’t bother messaging his guards again. Whatever was happening here, his communications were being jammed. Hideo especially would have been here a half second after the command was given.

  Apophis tossed him into a corner, like chucking a small suitcase.

  Am I being hacked? Hanmura2 wondered. Is this guy feeding false images to my optics? Hanmura2 pressed behind his ear to deactivate his sensorium. The whirring in his head went silent.

  The man was still there.

  “I shall present you with a choice,” Apophis said af
ter a moment’s pause. “I can haul your ass before the Redemption Board. They will be happy to make an example of the powerful Sakyo Hanmura. Edit you down to your core personality, I suspect. Not to mention the stocks in Hanmura Enterprises will plummet, horror of horrors!” The man chuckled, and he circled the bed. With each stride, his black tunic altered. The transformation was incredibly subtle. In four steps he was wearing a sable coat, pale trousers, and his chinbeard had reshaped into a Mongolian goatee.

  “Your second choice,” Apophis said, “is to rule within the new power structure of humanity. To be a satrap of the empire that is to come.”

  Hanmura2 waited. His heart thrilled with confusion and fear.

  A skin-shell? That had to be it! But he had scanned both girls. They had no tech whatsoever.

  “Is there some purpose to this?” Hanmura2 demanded.

  “I represent Stillness,” the man said, growing grave all of a sudden. Too grave, too grim, as if the mood change were done by the flick of a switch. Hanmura2 got the distinct impression that everything he was seeing was a carefully calibrated illusion; this maniac’s emotions switched too rapidly.

  Hanmura2 sneered. “Stillness. Earthly terrorist group. What of them?”

  “They wanted me to pass along some very important information to you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The person responsible for destroying Base 59 and the shuttle was an experiment gone haywire. The Prometheans have rewritten the rules on what is possible, Hanmura-sama. If the IPC realized this…there would be war.”

  “So?”

  Apophis’s liquid eyes shimmered. “Whoever tips off the IPC to this illegal creation would slay the great Dragon.”

  Hanmura2 scowled. “I don’t conduct business in this manner.”

  Apophis looked perplexed. “What manner? Negotiating with a scorpion man? Come on! It’s the only way to do business, my friend!”

  “If you have information, why not contact me in a more traditional way? Why this stupid lure?” And how did he throw me so easily? Enhanced muscles? Cybernetic strength augs? That should have shown up in a scan. And my skin…why does it feel as if it’s been burned? “Answer me!”