by Brian Trent
Chapter Fifty-Four
Oblivion
For the second time that week, Gethin awoke to blinding pain. A strangled cry escaped him as he tried to sit up, his entire body twisting in agony. He swatted away the medgrid loading screen when it flared in his optics. The trauma had rebooted his entire sensorium.
His world was pitch-black. For a moment he wondered if his eyes had been scorched out. Then he felt the closeness of the air and heard the spilling of sand between the mountain’s rubble. It wasn’t blindness he had to worry about. It was being buried alive.
His clothes, too, were wet, heavy, and reeked of blood. Gethin felt the knobby flesh of his mutilated hand. He ground his teeth from the pain. Crazily, he found himself focusing on how thirsty he was. His tongue moved thickly between chapped lips. He felt sand in his teeth.
“Gethin?”
Celeste’s voice was paper-thin in the blackness.
“Yeah.”
Gethin found her hand and squeezed it with his remaining fingers.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Dying, probably.” He wondered what the medgrid did when its subject was mortally wounded. Were the crosses replaced by reaper scythes?
Celeste coughed weakly. “Yeah. Me too.”
“You upgraded yourself in Cappadocia, didn’t you?”
“Not enough, apparently.”
The matter-of-fact coldness in her voice caused his heart to spasm. “Celeste? Tell me where you’re hurt.”
“What does it matter? We’re buried beneath a fucking mountain and the whole world is going to war.”
A surge of defiance rose in him. “It does matter. Can you move your legs?”
“They’re both broken.”
“You sure?”
“Yes I’m sure!”
He released her hand as his sensorium finished its reboot. His medgrid flashed automatically, and while there were no reaper scythes, there might as well have been. Wine-dark lettering appeared against the blackness:
VITAL SIGNS CRITICAL. USER DEATH IMMINENT.
He heard a soft, perilously weak cackle in the pitch dark. It took him several seconds to realize it was him.
Fighting delirium, he switched his optics to infravision. The cave-in appeared in soft blue blobs of shape. The ceiling was inches away, sandwiching them into a narrow shaft.
“Ego, can you detect any com signals?”
Sorry? he mused. That’s interesting. He had used his Familiars for years and never heard remorse from them. Maybe this was a factory default that sprang out when the host was about to exit the stage of life.
Gethin reached for Celeste’s hand again. She was a blue phantom beside him, an angel of shadow and cobalt hues. “Be right back,” he promised.
Celeste’s face was marked by splashes of black blood. “No hurry.” She imagined their bodies being found many eons from now and displayed in some museum. MAN AND WOMAN. Someone might write a damned sonnet in speculation on what these corpses were doing so far beneath the ground.
Gethin grunted, sweaty and constricted in his pain, as he crept towards the far end of the cave-in. It was difficult to see. He thought he could discern a faint pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel.
I’m going to wake up on Luna again. No memory of any of this.
It was a paralyzing thought. For him, Celeste Segarra would never have existed. Later, Donna McCallister would likely say he had worked with a female Outlander. He would wonder what she had been like.
And Jack? A name only on a report he would not remember having wittten.
Keiko? No reconciliation or renewed history.
And Lori?
Gethin curled into a fetal crouch, throbbing with his injuries. He called forth his email inbox and selected Lori’s message.
He expected to see Lori’s pretty face, slender figure, the chestnut-brown hair hanging loosely over her shoulders. He thought he would see her desk terminal, the beige walls, Cody prowling on the carpet.
Instead, when the email opened he was surprised to see a bed of grass, and a long-stemmed Martian rose freshly planted in the soil.
“I plant this flower in memory of Gethin Bryce,” came Lori’s voice. She was not in frame. “Gethin was my husband of ten years. We loved each other very much. He was from Earth. He was my partner and confidant.”
Lori took a breath. Gethin remembered that sound. He remembered how her shoulders would lift.
“Gethin Bryce was killed during a shuttle accident from Mars to Luna. Some people may think he can come back from the dead with Earthly tricks and replications, but my husband no longer exists. This flower is offered in his memory, and I have planted an oak tree in the Elysian Fields of Olympus so that I may see it in years to come…and remember his life and death.”
“Farewell to you, Lori,” he whispered in the darkness. He hit delete. The email dissolved.
And then, it seemed, so did he.
* * *
Except that he didn’t. The wave of dizziness passed.
“Celeste!” he cried in a ragged whisper.
Silence filled his ears. He took a fierce breath of the diminishing air and was about to scream her name when he heard shuffling in the blackness.
“Not dead yet,” she managed.
Gethin crawled, galvanized by pure, hateful defiance like some damaged crab scraping across the rock-studded sea bottom.
Where was Enyalios?
“Sy’hoss’a!” he managed. “Sy’hoss’a!” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded like the grating of gravel.
“Already tried that,” Celeste whispered. “While you were out. Practically said a fucking rosary. The missiles ruptured. Enyalios, Apophis…they had to have been killed.”
“We’re still alive.”
“You blurred us to relative safety. Those two weren’t going anywhere. Locked in hate to the finish.”
Gethin stared at the ground. He noticed the iron tracks of the tramline. He looked to the impossibly distant speck of dim light and realized that they must be in one of the tram tunnels.
“Hold onto me,” he said, shoveling her into both arms.
“Can’t even see you, Bryce.”
“I can see you.”
Holding her was the toughest part. Gethin felt her hot tears against his neck as he hobbled, his broken bones cutting into muscle like glass.
“Don’t…want…to…die,” Celeste muttered.
“I won’t let you.”
The light ahead grew wider.
It might have been minutes or hours or years before he finally reached the end of the tunnel, and he saw that a landslide had collapsed the mouth into a dead end. Any hope that the Mantid was waiting for them with medical miracles and a glass of brandy evaporated.
He closed his eyes and could hear the sound of the waterfall through the tiny fissures of rubble.
“Id,” he said, voice slurring. “Send an emergency IPC broadcast.”
*Already did Gethin. You don’t have to tell me everything.*
He slumped against the wall, holding Celeste. Her pulse thudded delicately in her neck and, acting on impulse, Gethin kissed that small spot of life. Then he passed out.
Celeste Segarra died in his arms a few minutes later.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Triple Suicide
It was Sakyo Hanmura1, in his corporate palace on Mars, who made the decision in the hours to come.
While the citizens of Sol were gaping at the mushroom cloud that had flung Sinkiang Mountains into rubble that reached the periphery of space, and the IPCS Nobunaga was little more than fireworks over the Pacific Ocean, and a massacre was being reported in the Shimizu pyramid, there were riots on Mars.
Newsfeeds were too busy to pay attention when the CEO
of Hanmura Enterprises broadcast a special announcement. In fact, only two stations chose to run it at all.
The real-time communication began simply enough. The famous man appeared onscreen in a white kimono, surrounded by the cherry blossoms of his garden. There were pagodas and babbling streams. Hanmura1 was no stranger to public broadcasts – he was a well-known face and common panelist at economic summits. He always thought that was important; his competitors were hidden hydras, while he humanized his corporation. He usually wore his trademark black suit of eelskin.
Not this time.
“I have betrayed you,” he announced. “I have violated the IPC Multiple Extant Sentience Law. During a time of chaos, fear, and war, I have exploited these tragedies for my own personal gain. And I cannot live with this shame.”
Exactly how he had arranged it, no one could later be certain. The screen split into a tri-panel. At precisely the same minute, two other Sakyo Hanmuras emerged, similarly dressed in white kimonos and kneeling before a mat. Three tanto blades went into three hands.
“As is my right,” Hanmura continued, “I formally request the deletion of my DC file from all Save centers, everywhere, to atone for these crimes. I pray that in time, the worlds may forgive the actions of a flawed human being.”
Three Hanmuras undid the front of their kimonos, and in eerily perfect unison, spoke the same death poem. Three Hamuras drove three tanto blades into three stomachs. Three assistants finished them off with flawless decapitations.
Video of the triple suicide became the most downloaded clip in the history of mankind, until Harris Alexander Pope’s victory during the Partisan War, twenty-six years later.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Reborn in the House of the Living
Thirty-nine hours after the mysterious explosion at Sinkiang, Gethin Bryce found himself in a jade-green room staring at his hands.
A sweep of horror rushed through him and he bolted upright, the bedside monitor beeping wildly, as he struggled to recall recent events. Dimly, he remembered clutching Celeste in the underdark. Beyond that? His memories ended like a map with a chunk ripped away.
He glanced around. No black robe hanging from the wall.
It was not a regen center.
“Please lie down,” the bedside’s monitor intoned in a crystalline female voice. Chinese calligraphy was engraved along its framing. XIANYANG MEDICAL CENTER.
But Gethin was too riled for easy compliance. He activated his sensorium, immediately checking his messages.
Thirteen messages appeared from Donna McCallister. He skimmed them quickly, gaining a cursory idea of events following the explosion. The Sinkiang mountains had been transformed into a smoking caldera. The landslide had buried surrounding villages, and China’s regen centers were working round the clock to accommodate the flood of purchase signals.
War between Prometheus and the IPC was over.
He was scrolling through further messages when the door to his room opened, and Keiko Yamanaka and Jack Saylor stepped to his bedside.
“Celeste!” he cried. “Where is she?” He was dragging himself out of the hospital bed when a third shape hobbled at the doorway.
“You!” Gethin roared in a sob of relief and heartache. “How the hell did you survive?”
Celeste Segarra approached his bedside with both legs in support braces. She was purple with bruises and recent surgeries, though the tiny twitch at her lips could pass for a smirk. “My purchase in Cappadocia was worth every penny, apparently. How did you survive, Bryce?”
“I’m stubborn.”
“And pulverized,” Keiko told him, nodding solemnly. “Broken ribs, internal bleeding. They had to regrow your hand. It would have been easier just to regenerate you.”
He grimaced. “No, thanks. Though I’m guessing my insurance premiums will go up now.”
Keiko shook her head. “Are you kidding me? The world doesn’t have all the details yet, but they know our names. Gethin Bryce won’t have to worry about insurance premiums. President Song mentioned you by name as one of the architects of peace.” Keiko’s lips were a thin line. “Seems he’s angling to have the four of us endorse his re-election campaign.”
“That’s because he doesn’t see what’s around the corner.”
“And you do?”
“Yes.”
They waited for him to say more, but after several seconds it was evident he had neither the strength nor desire to elaborate.
He reached for Celeste. She took a precarious step to the very edge of his bed, evaded his questing hand, leaned down to his face, and kissed his lips. They beheld each other, drinking in the other’s poignant gaze.
Are we still enemies? she asked with her eyes.
He offered his tenderest smile. Let’s try not to be.
Jack said, “There are some APAC officials outside, wanting to talk to us. I think we’re going to be here a long time.”
“Apophis?” Gethin asked. “Enyalios?”
“No sign of them.” Keiko took a breath. “I don’t think anyone actually believes the story Apollo told you. I don’t think I do. I mean, they could have been AIs programmed to act as primordial intelligences. Anyway, there’s a lot of gossip out there. Charges of conspiracy. You know how people are.”
I do, he thought.
Gethin lay back in bed. He could already hear the clamor of an approaching crowd. Keiko and Jack rushed to the door and yelled for hospital security.
Alone for the moment, Celeste touched his face. “What did we do, Gethin?”
“Don’t know yet,” he said, and before he could elaborate a new email sprang to his eye. He read it where he sat, while the noise from the crowd – reporters and police, mostly – coalesced into a riot.
“Lynch mob?” Celeste asked, looking concernedly towards the door.
Gethin didn’t reply.
“You okay?”
“For the moment.” He looked her up and down. “You look like shit, Segarra. The next time you upgrade yourself, make sure I’m with you to get the best deal, okay? Now go rest. We’re going to be here for a while.”
She kissed his cheek and joined the others by the door. People were yelling, angry voices competing to outdo one another. Someone screamed. The crack of a pistol sounded from the hospital lobby. Over the intercom, a voice boomed in Mandarin.
Gethin closed his eyes. In his private darkness, he read the mysterious email once more:
TO: Gethin Bryce
FROM: Unknown sender
DATE/TIME: 07/28/322, 1132 ET
SUBJECT: None
MESSAGE: Your turn now, my friend. We had the world long enough. No gods, no masters, no lords, no monsters. It’s up to you to decide what to do with that.
Gethin ignored the chaos from the corridor.
It was weeks before he came to his decision.
It was years before he could do anything about it.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2018 Brian Trent
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Matteo Middlemiss, Josie Mitchell, M
ike Spender, Will Rough, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-018-3, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-016-9, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-019-0 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York
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