by Brian Trent
Ego would know it; Gethin made a mental note to ask his Familiar about it later. He tested the splint.
“Feels good,” he said. The ground was worn away beneath him, and ceramic tiles showed through a tangle of weeds. Corroded copper piping jutted from a hillside.
This used to be someone’s bathroom, he realized.
They were quiet for a moment, catching their breaths. Somewhere deep in the forest gloom, a creature howled. All heads jerked towards the sound.
Keiko cast a worrisome glance at the darkening sky. Where the clouds were visible, they looked like dull iron.
She wiped her neck. Went to the prisoner.
The man nodded agreeably. “Hi.”
“I have some questions to ask you.”
“Can I pray first before you kill me?”
Keiko reached into her tool-belt and removed the magpie claw. She gripped the handle with two hands, twisting one clockwise, and the cylinder lunged several inches, yawning its head open like a metallic piranha.
The soldier didn’t even flinch. “If you think that thing intimidates me in the least, you never been to the Outlands. That’s a toy.”
Keiko smiled. “Think so?”
“Go ahead,” he demanded. “Cut me, bleed me.” His blue eyes closed, and he said in near-song: “You may violate the sanctum but not the soul, for I am bound for a better world.” His eyes opened and glared. “You people are rotting meat, injected with preservatives and perfumes to dispel the stench. You spit in God’s face! But He’ll have you. The nova-fire of Judgment will find you, deformed and degenerated like the Grendels of Cain.”
“Your—”
He persisted, smiling and defiant. “I’m the one forever fated, while demons get their death belated. I find—”
“You are forever fated!” Keiko insisted, and she held the magpie for him to see. “This is a Digital Capture sim-Cave. And it is an implement of Satan. This end pushes through your eye, guides itself like a hound-dog straight to your most recent grouping of memories…the ones fresh from consolidation in your hippocampus.” She paused deliberately, seeing him process this information. “In other words, the magpie will rip out your recent memories. Not nearly as thorough as a DC. But frankly, I don’t care about your childhood. I don’t care what your musical tastes are, what your cognitive map looks like, what your emotional climate is. I want your recent memories, and this will get them.”
“Then take them,” he said, with noticeably less enthusiasm.
“It also takes your soul.”
The soldier’s lips formed an expression of hilarity, but before he could vocalize his amusement she continued.
“That’s the secret your leaders are so angry about. We finally figured out a way to snatch the body’s immortal soul from where it sits, in the hippocampus, and imprison it in these portable jails. Like Reverend Marlo Morris.”
The name plainly registered on the soldier’s face. His eyes flicked from the device to Keiko’s cold expression. “You’re crazy.”
“Forty years ago, outside of Memphis. Morris was one of the masterminds behind the Stillness raid of a Prometheus transport. You’re too young to have been alive for that, so I’ll fill you in. They killed sixty of my people. Used heat-lances to knock our transport out of the sky. They cut into it, pulled out the survivors, and crucified them. Set up a live webcast. Nailed my workers to crosses and set them on fire.”
The webcast had run for several hours. Women and men, still in their Promethean uniforms, being doused in kerosene and lit ablaze. The victims burned like torches until the screeching went silent and the agonized straining against their bonds ceased.
And then they sprang back alive, still crucified, only now charred and livid red.
Stillness burned them again. And again. The priest overseeing the ceremony dutifully informed a horrified public that the only people responsible for such torture were a society in which regenerative nanites and medpacks kept the meat alive, defying God and death with its blasphemy. Stillness was merely demonstrating how innately wicked eternal life was, and they illustrated this lesson over the course of eight hours of flame and piteous screams.
“On hour nine,” Keiko said, “Prometheus retaliated.”
“Killing children!” the soldier yelled in blossoming outrage. The spit flew from his teeth. “And whole families!”
“Some of them,” Keiko admitted. “Others live forever, in sim-Caves like this.” She shook the magpie. “Reverend Morris had presided over the torture of my coworkers, so Prometheus figured death was too much of a mercy. We snatched his soul. No eternal Paradise for him. Just endless suffering…on PI’s all-time greatest hit list.” She touched a button at her wrist.
It was difficult to tell where the hideous screams that followed were actually coming from. The magpie, or speakers embedded in Keiko’s hand.
“Pleeeeeease nooooo!” the voice screamed. “Dear God help me!!! Let me gooooo!”
Another voice, childlike and soothing, cooed over the torture. “There is no escape, no escape ever. You belong to us forever.”
“God it hurts! Heeeeeeelp! Heeeeeelp me! Mercy! Mercy!”
“Thirty years of this, thirty million more to go, thirty years of this, thirty million more to go…”
“Noooooooo! Anything! I’ll do anything! God have meeeeeeercy!”
The ululations reached an inhuman crescendo, sounding more like a demented musical instrument than anything a human vocal chord could produce. Then it crashed into desperate wails and sobs.
“I dennooounce them! I…sttt…I denounce Stillness! Pleeeeeease! Letmeout! Ahhhhhhhh!!”
“Thirty years of this, thirty million more to go, thirty years of this, thirty million more to go…”
Gethin saw the soldier blanch. The man looked searchingly at her face. “It’s…a recording.”
Keiko touched her wrist and the sound cut off. “Tell me what I want to know or you can join Morris in hell. Cooperate and I’ll kill you quickly. Go straight to Heaven, tell your God what we devil-arkies are doing, why He gets fewer and fewer souls each year because we keep them imprisoned on Earth for all time.”
“God will flood this world and release our brothers!” the soldier screamed.
Keiko shrugged. “Hold him steady.”
Jack immobilized the man’s head.
“No! Wait!”
The magpie claw came within a half inch of his face.
“Where were you headed?” Keiko demanded.
“Shimizu! We were going to Shimizu!”
“Why?”
“Following orders. Some upcoming assault!”
“What assault?”
The soldier’s neck bulged with tendons and veins. “I don’t know!”
“You fucking liar!” Keiko spat, and pushed the claw into his eye.
He squealed, kicking his legs out spastically. “No! I don’t know! Fathers Tiamat and Apophis were going to tell us when we arrived! I swear! We knew nothing—”
Gethin leapt forward. “Who did you say? Fathers who?”
The soldier looked wildly at him. “Tiamat and Apophis!”
Gethin and Jack exchanged a meaningful look.
“Who are they?” Keiko asked.
“I’ve never met them! They…they are the leaders of the Crusade! They speak to us…and command us…for the Crusade!”
“What Crusade?”
“To bring Stillness to Earth!”
“You’re already on Earth,” Jack said with disgust.
“Stillness! Peace! Tranquility!”
Gethin seized the man’s chin and yanked to meet his eyes. “How?”
The man inhaled a fierce lungful of air, and when he shrieked his red face pulsed with a spiderweb of veins. “I don’t know!”
“Ask him if Fathers Tiamat or Apophis acqui
red some missiles recently.”
The voice came from the woods behind them.
Keiko spun and planted one knee in the dirt, leveling her pistol like a gunslinger. The magpie claw dropped to the soil beside her, frightening a millipede into the damp sanctuary of a log.
Celeste Segarra emerged casually from behind the trees. A salvaged combat shotgun was slung around one shoulder, and she was wearing a Stillness robe turned inside out, so the stitching of the pockets was visible like crude surgical scars. Those pockets bulged with scavenged materials; Gethin noted the silver foil of prepackaged airship meals, although his attention was quickly drawn to the cobalt-blue pseuodopod she carried. It was about a meter long, and she had looped one arm through the back to grip it like the shield of a gladiatrix.
“How the hell did you survive that fall?” Keiko demanded.
“I’m feather-light.”
The Promethean kept the woman in her gun-sights while she regarded the strange shield she carried. Gethin thought it looked heavier than it should be. His impression was one of condensed mass – it was clearly straining the Outlander’s arm and shoulder despite her affectation of calm – and he had the impression that it could spread out this extra mass into a lengthier shape if need be.
Shapestone. Was that the secret of her legendary ship?
The look in Keiko’s eyes told him she was coming to the same conclusion. “Where did you get that?” she asked.
Celeste leaned the pseudopod against a tree. The weight was obvious as it sank inches into the dirt. “From the Mantid,” she replied.
Keiko instinctively checked the sky. “It’s around here?”
“No. It’s near Athens, lying low.”
Keiko puzzled over this. “Are you saying that your ship fired off a rescue drone from Athens while you were falling? That it caught up with you at terminal velocity?”
“Expended every volt of power to do it. I was riding vapors to reach the crash site.” The Outlander pointed. “Ask that asshole about the missiles.”
Gethin couldn’t help but smile. “Nice to see you, Segarra.”
The soldier, as it turned out, didn’t know about any antimatter-tipped missiles. But he had heard rumors that his Crusade was stockpiling weapons from around the world. What type of weapons, and for what ultimate purpose, he couldn’t say.
And through it all, Celeste listened and thought of the fiasco at Quinn’s compound.
We all underestimated Stillness, she thought. They aren’t scattered or leaderless. They’re tightly knit and organized. What happened at Quinn’s was no accident. It was one acquisition front out of many. They’re doing the same as King D. Combing the Wastes for antebellum weaponry, stashing it away, building up for a massive strike.
A cold wolf’s paw of fear touched her heart. If that was true, then there was another problem far closer to home for her. Two different groups fighting over the same Outland scraps meant that Stillness had likely learned about StrikeDown’s own stash. Perhaps King D. was their next target.
Fuck. The wackos would ruin everything.
Celeste cleared her throat with aplomb. “Soldier boy! Where can we find your glorious High Priests?”
“They find you,” he said weakly. His pulse beat raggedly in his neck.
For another few minutes they interrogated him to learn what they could. Several ‘teams’ were being dispatched to the Shimizu pyramid, he said, for reasons unknown. He knew nothing about an IPC-Stillness arrangement, and didn’t seem to have heard of Colonel Leon Tanner. But he did know the organizational structure of his faith, and the three High Priests that currently ran it: Mother Eris, Father Apophis, and Father Tiamat. This latter persona was the ‘Great Master’ who sat, spiderlike, at the center of the organization’s web. He preached about pure life, a life without tech, machines, and ‘noise’. Once the world walls tumbled, all mankind would return to this state of anarcho-primitive utopia.
Stillness. The return to a simpler life. The death of machines, industry, and arky tech. The end of immortality and of humanity’s desire for the stars.
“He knows nothing else,” Gethin said thickly, turning away.
Keiko lifted the claw.
The soldier had calmed considerably since Celeste’s arrival. Better to die and plead forgiveness in the afterlife than suffer eternally in a digital inferno. Seeing the magpie again, however, his ashen face shivered.
“I told you everything!”
Keiko shoved the device into his eye. This time it was no bluff; the guiding probe drilled straight through the organ, spraying juices down the screaming man’s face. It took three minutes to cull the memory dendrites, while Jack kept their wailing victim steady with one hand and clamped the other over the man’s mouth. When the claw retracted, he snapped the soldier’s neck.
He dropped the body into a small gulch. Then he looked back into Keiko’s satisfied eyes.
* * *
They marched another thirty minutes in silence. When they halted again, this time sandwiched between boulders and the gnarled flanks of serpentine trees, evening was in full gloom.
Keiko wiped her forehead and met Celeste’s gaze. “So your ship can throw you a lifeline from Athens? Have it pick us up.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Why not?”
“Because satellites must be scouring the area for us, and I won’t risk exposing my ship to the goddamn IPC. You people pulled me into this whether you meant to or not. And I intend to live…with all my cards intact.”
“Kill your sensorium,” Keiko warned. “Power it down so they can’t track you.”
“Already done. You think I need schooling on how to stay off the grid?”
The woods were incredibly dense. The saws and bulldozers of civilization hadn’t run through here in at least four centuries. Only Gethin had seen environments like this up close and personal, in the tropical Ecuadorian mountains, in the deeply shadowed woods of northern Russia. It was disconcerting how easily nature reclaimed the bones of mankind’s ingenuity, and as Gethin considered the devastation of the Final War, he calculated (as he had done many times) that a few more megadeaths in those fragile days might have rendered the entirety of Earth into a timberland like this. Cockroaches crawling through buried pipes. Colonies of algae and bacteria forming furry carpets over unused papers and plastics.
He checked his splint, tied and retied the bands. “Keiko, that was one hell of a bluff back there. The soul-in-the-hippocampus bit. Incredible.” He grinned coldly. “It was a bluff, right?”
His ex-wife was carefully plucking slivers of glass from her face. “It’s an effective bluff,” she quipped. “We’ve been running that routine for twenty-five years, and the results you saw are textbook. Success-rate eighty-seven percent of the time.”
“So it was just a recording? You pay a voice actor?”
Keiko raised an eyebrow. “Grown squeamish with age?”
“Digital prisons are against IPC policy.”
“Squeamish.”
“Maybe I’ll drop a line to the Republic and have them petition for full disclosure. If Prometheus is using digital prisons—”
“We’re not,” she said flatly.
“—they’ll have your top brass frozen for a thousand years.”
Keiko flicked a glass shard off her fingertip, looking unconcerned. “What I said about the attack on our transport was true. We sent Hassans and CAMO agents to investigate. Reverend Marlo Morris was just another Wasteland prophet; every few years, someone like him pops up. Our agents recorded his sermons. When we wiped out the villages, it was decided we needed a new method of interrogation. Strictly bluff stuff.”
“A magpie does snag memories,” Celeste said carefully.
“Not with any real efficiency,” Gethin explained, but his heart was pounding. He felt the tickle of possible futures unf
url like a ribbon in the wind, twisting like a bifurcating trunk into new pathways…each eventually connecting to the three flavors of The Divine Comedy.
Celeste gave a crisp, bitter laugh. “Oh, the cleverness of me.” She spat on the ground just a half inch from Keiko’s boot. “Your crash site must be crawling with reporters and agents. Tanner will quickly realize we’re not among the dead. He’ll come after us.”
Jack shrugged. “Cappadocia is two days east. What other choice do we have?”
“Two days in the gloplands? You ever try to survive out here before?”
“I’m not worried about mollusks,” Jack said sullenly.
“Ever see a dire dog pack? They typically run three hundred strong. A flash flood of oversized wolves. Goddamn turret couldn’t mow them down in time.”
Gethin paled slightly. He had seen dire dog packs. “This region is dotted with Wastetowns,” he said. “Let’s find one.”
Celeste folded her arms and gave them a sneering, up-and-down appraisal. “You guys waltz into a Wastetown dressed the way you are, you’ll end up on a chopshop’s table. Keiko’s tool-belt alone is worth murder. Hide it, sister. In a bag or up your snatch.”
As if on cue, the howling they’d been hearing at various intervals came again, nearer, more numerous and from different directions.
They’re triangulating our location, Gethin thought. Sniffing us out and communicating to the pack.
“Maybe it’s just wolves,” Jack whispered.
Celeste took an anxious breath. “If natural wolves survive out here, they’ve become runts of dire packs.” She ran her fingers through her sweaty hair. “Take off your uniforms. Tie them around your waists. Anything that has a PI logo has to be hidden or discarded. You too, Gethin. Throw some dirt on you. Good.”
They obeyed her instructions in silence. A light rain began to fall. The forest glittered like black glass, and Jack, already half-naked, now gave the appearance of a Paleolithic Goliath.
When they were done, Celeste surveyed them. “It will have to do. Those Promethean pants still have logos on them.”
