Lotus Blue

by Sparks,Cat

  The corridor was thickly carpeted—and empty.

  “Where is Marko? Where is everybody?” She raised her empty palms in exasperation, then ran a hand through her thick black hair.

  “Shhh,” said Star. “Listen—can you hear that?”

  Both girls strained to hear muffled sounds coming from downstairs. Faint thumps and thuds that could have indicated many things. Allegra moved to investigate, but Star grabbed her by the arm.

  “No. Something’s wrong.”

  Bangs and shouts and the slamming of a door. A gunshot fired. More shouting. Footsteps thumping on the lower stairs. Allegra gasped and brought a hand up to her lips.

  “Quickly,” said Star, wide awake now. Allegra didn’t need much convincing. The girls ran back inside her suite and closed the door behind them.

  “Does the door lock from the inside?”

  “Yes—but my father took the key.”

  Star glanced around the room, her eyes coming to rest on one of three sturdy wardrobes. “Help me!”

  The wardrobe was heavier than it looked. Too heavy to be pushed and shoved, until they got the idea to walk it forward on its tiny legs to the point where they could block the doorway with its bulk.

  When that was done Star ran for her boots and field kit.

  “Hide! We have to hide!” exclaimed Allegra, glancing frantically in all directions.

  “No. You’re too important. The daughter of the house. Intruders won’t stop until they get whatever they’ve come for—and that might well be you.” Star pointed to the balcony. “The storehouse roof. We could jump across.”

  “What—jump? Are you crazy? I can’t jump that—”

  “We can build a bridge.”

  The sound of heavy footfall echoed down the corridor. More shouting. Allegra squealed in fright.

  Quickly—think. A bridge. Something solid.

  Star flung open the wardrobe’s double doors and tested the hinges. Too solid. Ten minutes with her knife and she might be able to jimmy and prise them free. But she didn’t think they had ten minutes.

  “We can tie the sheets and make a rope!” exclaimed Allegra. She ran to her bed and started stripping the linen from it.

  “It won’t be long enough,” said Star. Allegra kept on tugging at the sheets, revealing a pale blue mattress underneath.

  A mattress. Star had a sudden thought. “Quick, help me!” She slipped her fingers underneath the padded mass and lifted. “Help me!”

  Allegra pitched in and between them, they managed to lift the mattress and heave it onto the floor. Below it was a neat row of wooden slats. Allegra stared at them stupidly. Star scooped four of them into a bundle. One of the slats jutted out and knocked the dresser, toppling the silver spyglass in its case. Star edged around and grabbed the glass, shoved it into her pocket, then dragged the clumsy bundle of wood onto the balcony, scrambling up upon the thick marble balustrade.

  “What are you doing? Be careful!”

  “Pass me the ends.”

  Allegra helped her. Star laid the slats across the gap between the buildings.

  “No way. No no, I can’t—!”

  “It’s not far. Not if you don’t look down.”

  Allegra shook her head repeatedly. “I can’t. I’ll fall.”

  “You won’t fall. Solid wood makes a solid bridge. You’ll be fine. I’ll help you.”

  Allegra pleaded, shook her head and wailed. “I can’t.”

  She was still shaking it when a heavy thumping sounded on her bedroom door. Hard enough to make one of the tapestries swing. Star reached out. “Come with me or stay behind with them,” she said. “But hurry. Your neighbours are beginning to take an interest.”

  One more thump was all it took—the bedroom door slammed hard into the wardrobe. Allegra scrambled up onto the marble balustrade, hanging on to Star with both her hands.

  “I’ll go first. Watch me closely.” Star spread her hands for balance, padded smoothly across the wobbling, makeshift bridge. “Quickly!”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Yes you can!”

  “I can’t!” But she did, taking at first a timid step, then half skipping the rest of the way, causing the slats to tremble, even though they held. Allegra let out an involuntary squeal, jumping down as Star tugged the slats across.

  “That was amazing!” said Allegra. She waved at the drunks on the neighbouring mansion’s balcony. They let out a cheer and waved back enthusiastically.

  There was a crash, and the splinter of breaking wardrobe wood. Star grabbed Allegra and pulled her out of the light, just in time. Two large men pushed the wardrobe over and kicked their way into the room. The sound of hurtling objects followed.

  One of the men burst out onto the balcony. For a moment he seemed to stare right at them as they crouched in shadows. Star placed her hand across Allegra’s mouth, the other behind her head to hold her still.

  The man glanced across at the neighbours who gave him a carousing cheer. He ignored them, and hurried back inside. Star waited until all movement in Allegra’s room ceased before she took her hand away.

  Allegra glared at the double doors. “Who do they think they are?”

  “Forget them. We have to find a way to get out of here.”

  Allegra nodded. She guided Star tentatively across the storehouse roof, then down a set of metal rungs embedded in the far side’s wall. The climb was difficult. The rungs weren’t very big or evenly spaced. Some were missing altogether.

  Crates were stacked thickly against a wall at the bottom, too dark to see what they contained. The girls jumped down to the rooftop’s lower tier.

  “Who were those men?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Are you sure?”

  She considered. “Never seen them before. Hired men, I think,” she said. “Father pays men like them to do his dirty work.”

  “But you don’t know if they were after you specifically?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not.”

  “Is there anywhere safe that you can hide?”

  Allegra frowned in concentration. Her face brightened. “My father’s ship—the Razael. Hamid the Quartermaster knows me.” She peered across Star’s shoulder. “We should be able to reach the docks across the rooftops.”

  Star handed Allegra the spyglass. She raised it and aimed it at the docks. No taller buildings blocked them from the view.

  “My gods, look at the crowd! What do they think they’re doing?”

  Allegra passed the glass back over, her full attention on the crowded docks. “There’s barely any sandcraft left in dock at all. Yesterday every berth was filled—I sent Vette down and that was what she told me.”

  Star scanned the crowd, not certain what she was looking for. There were faces she thought she recognised. People who looked like people she used to know. She’d walked along those docks before—who hadn’t?—yet never had they been crowded out like this.

  Allegra snatched the glass back from Star’s hands, and aimed it at her father’s ship.

  “The Razael was supposed to be getting fitted with new upholstery.” She groaned in frustration at her inability to make the image any sharper. “But those people on deck, I don’t recognise their colours—or their faces. Something isn’t right. Come on, let’s hurry. We can see nothing of use from here.”

  She made for the far edge of the low brick wall. Star followed.

  Nothing had been right since that first Angel fell, she suddenly realized, but Star didn’t mention it. Allegra led her down another ladder, this one well-maintained and obviously in regular use. More crates were stacked up against brick walls. Despite being closer, she still couldn’t tell what they contained.

>   At the bottom, a sturdy door was fastened with a very rusty lock. Star smashed it with her boot. Three blows and it fell apart.

  “Hey, that’s family property,” said Allegra. Star froze, but then the rich girl laughed. “Come on!”

  The door let to an alleyway choked with broken crates and mouldering sacks in heaps. Rats, too—Allegra jumped as one brushed against her leg.

  “Your father must be a very wealthy man.”

  “Yes yes. He deals in everything: maps, relics. Bits of old world junk. Collectors pay a fortune for such things, you know.”

  Star knew. The squares and adjacent doorways of every major town from Bluebottle up to Evenslough brimmed with relic sellers. Ragged-looking men and women who did not live in grand houses, own big black sand ships, or employ well-muscled men-for-hire with rifles.

  = Twenty-three =

  Despite having spent so many years alone in darkness, the General can still recall the feeling of snowflakes falling on naked skin, of running along a scrubby bush track, of eyes closed, of pitter-patter, of breathing deep eucalyptus tang, of wide skies striped with cirrus cloud. But try as he might, he cannot recall his name. Only his designation: Lotus Blue.

  That he is sure of—and the fact that he had not been the only one of his kind. There’d been others, he rememberes them. Not their faces—they did not have faces—but their names and professional designations: Lotus Yellow, Lotus Red. Other colours, each with vast territories to serve and protect, and the means to do so at their swift disposal. Each carved from the same steel, silicon, and graphene as he, yet individuals, aligned to core competencies and values commensurate with the peoples and industries they’d been sworn and uploaded to protect.

  The initial revelation that he is buried under tons of rust red sand came as quite a shock. No wonder it is so dark down here, no wonder the Angels and warbirds pay him no respect. They can’t even see him, and probably take him for some kind of apparition, or a parasite like the autonomous repair bots still clinging to the underbellies of the tankers. Automatons loyal long beyond the call of duty, scavenging scrap parts and knitting up wounds, sacrificing their own bodies to plug up gaping rents and seal them tight.

  The General focuses his energies on shouting through the tropospheric scatter, edging around the wideband—which is useless without dishes to align, announcing his presence to anything capable of hearing. He is prepared for phase shifts, time delays, attenuations, and distortions. Prepared for anything but this numbing silence. Where has everybody gone?

  He can feel the power fading from his emergency back up coils. Creating those polyp storms has drained them. A few more hours and he’ll find himself plunged back into impotent slumber and haunting preprogramed dreamscapes, executing imaginary manoeuvres with imaginary armies.

  No. He will not stand for it. The General is a Lotus Blue. He had been uploaded for better than this. Mere hours remain for him to conjure himself a fighting force, to find willing hands to dig him out from this prison.

  The General pushes all thoughts of the other colours from his periphery. He focuses on the here and near: schematics of the Lotus bunker he was in. it was a self-sufficient military outpost, and along with Sentinel Tower Zero, the bunker was also comprised of several storeys, which housed barracks, armoury, power plant, a radar station and auxiliary communications array, towers, and emergency construction and salvage equipment. Nearby were underground missile silos, weapons caches, and helipads. Five miles out, another dish—a big one. The aircraft were useless. He found an ordinary Sentinel: not bad. Parts he could harvest if he could get his hands on them. The problem was, the General had no hands.

  No hands, but he could commandeer them.

  He jacked aboard that Warbird one more time, and blasted a couple of dead-blind Angels out of the surrounding sky from sheer frustration—or sport, perhaps.

  He observed with interest the skeletal remains of archaic sheep stations down below, a scattering of insignificant gold-mining towns, plus several isolated mine sites, mostly collapsed, accessible by dirt roads grown over with gum trees and thick mulga bush. Sand dune fields and spinifex-grass cover ranged for miles and miles.

  The trucks and tankers were not the only mecha forever seeking the familiarity of heat. Fleshmesh, they used to call them—a derogatory term he’d never liked. Fleshmesh meant not real living but vat grown, algorithm-sown.

  The Johnnys were always the weaker warriors. They hated their stronger, faster, braver cousins, the ones born to the wars. Templar soldiers, warriors true—what had happened to their kind?

  The General squinted, scanning for those little beads of heat: the walking wounded, the dead who would not die. Supersoldiers still fighting the good fight, who no one had bothered to tell that the Lotus Wars were over.

  The General blanched with waves of energy subsidence. His juice was precious, and fading fast, but hehad to know. He focused all remaining energies on a wide band perimeter sweep, listening for that tell-tale atomic fade. A half life was better than none at all. Mesh did not lie. Mesh kept on transmitting data even when the Templar host was locked in stasis.

  Bingo! as his people used to say. One of those small human anachronisms that had remained with him despite the wars and all that had happened in the aftermath, had remained even when the names of his own children had evaporated.

  The surrounding sands were seeded with mesh and mecha, ranging down from tanker to scout, from spider recon to surges of out-of-control Lantana Raze, a bio weapon that could strip an enemy stronghold down to the last brick in under fourteen hours.

  Templars—it seemed there were plenty of their kind still out there. “Come to me, my children,” the General whispered. “Come to me and dig me out of this godforsaken tomb.”

  = Twenty-four =

  Star and Allegra stood upon a low stone wall that, in decades past, was said to have been a boundary marker before the town swelled up and sprawled to meet it. A high stone wall it had been once, buried up to its neck by time and tide and sand—so stories told, not that anyone ever cared to dig and check.

  Beyond it, the Obsidian Sea—like nothing else Star had ever seen in seven years of travelling the Sand Road. It stretched for miles, perhaps even further. The Sentinels protecting sections of its length were said to peter out at the five mile limit. Beyond that lay a no man’s land where serpents, rogue tankers, and other stranger creatures roamed.

  “Look!” Allegra pointed out across the flat black tongue that seemed to suck light from the sky. Upon its surface was a scrappy flotilla of land yachts and blokarts: two and three seaters, mostly. Singles, too, so flimsy that the smallest breath of wind could take them.

  Star took the spyglass back from Allegra and raised it. “More than crazy. Downright suicidal.”

  The smaller craft were no match for any tanker. They were too light to hold harpoons—and no other weapon was effective in snagging those mechabeasts, according to Lucius. Other than a lance, aimed and thrust into vulnerable places at close quarters. But they were weapons only the most skilled knew how to use.

  All around them was the tang of sweat, the clink of coin; snatches of unintelligible phrase as the cargo handlers unpacked wares that would provision sandships. Goods that had been hauled by van along the Sand Road. Squabbling crows and barefoot children played tag between the barrels and crates. A thick thatch of mended nets hung limply in the sun.

  The girls jumped down and began to walk, staring unashamedly as they passed the row of tankerjacks standing and smoking idly together, backs against the sandsea wall. Aged sandmen with creased faces and weathered hides. Young ones, too, smooth skinned and adventure eyed. But Star knew it didn’t take long for the Red to rob them of their beauty, returning each one a little harder than when they set out, until eventually they were spitting and smoking and snarling with the best of them, all sand
-hardened veterans of the Black.

  The tankerjacks watched Allegra warily, prepared to absorb any insults she might care to throw their way. Like storms, wealthy daughters were not to be trifled with. Or trusted.

  “I can barely discern the women from the men,” Allegra whispered distastefully. She took the glass back and aimed it at her father’s ship.

  “Chasing down tankers is a hard life, to be sure,” said Star. “There was this boy I knew. Set his sights on harvesting a dead one that washed up in the storm that destroyed our Van. Not quite dead, as it turned out. He died because of me.”

  Allegra lowered the glass and looked to Star. “Who died?”

  “His name was Remy. A point rider. The tanker took him. Blood all over the sand. He reckoned he was in love with me. Always showing off to get my attention.”

  Her face brightened with interest. “Did you love him back?”

  “No.”

  “Did he know you didn’t love him?”

  “Not really.”

  “So you feel guilty? Don’t bother. You shouldn’t. You didn’t love him and you never asked him to fall in love with you. Men are stupid. You have to spell things out for them.”

  “Yes, but . . .” Star stared at her dusty boots. Images of Remy kept popping into her head. His face lit by firelight. Blood drenched all over Griff’s hands. She waited for Allegra to respond, then realised the girl was looking through the glass again, utterly distracted.

  “What is it?”

  Allegra passed her the glass and shook her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. No sign of Hamid—he should be up on deck. So many faces I’ve never seen before.”

  “Perhaps we should wait until—”

  “I’m not waiting for anybody. My father’s up to something—why else would he have locked me in my room? Whatever’s going on, I need to know about it.”

  The docks were so crowded they could barely move, backs and shoulders shoving hard against them. The ground was uneven and riddled with potholes and broken bricks, spilled goods half trodden beyond all recognition. If Allegra hadn’t been wearing such brightly coloured clothes, Star would have lost sight of her. She kept shouting things Star couldn’t hear, even though she was standing right behind her.