by Sparks,Cat
“Argh! I can’t take any more of your babbling nonsense. Your plan is to walk right out there and get killed for nothing. I’m not going with you—it’s suicide, just like Lucius said.” She raised her mesh arm and waved it in his face. “I’m not like you, no matter what this thing says. I’m not crazy and I’m not throwing my life away for nothing.”
His head snapped around, and he stared at her with great and sudden ferocity. “You can hear it whispering, can’t you? Feel it crawling around inside your head?” He slapped his own head with the base of his palm to reinforce his point.
Star backed off, frightened by the luminosity of his eyes. “No—I can’t hear anything!” There was nothing else to be said.
Her stomach growled, hunger pinching at her innards. She needed food—something more substantial than watery melon—but she was wary of drawing attention to herself. She turned back to the low stone wall. The young man had been so kind—perhaps he would be kind to her again?
She jumped down off the rock, retraced her steps, keenly aware of every different vegetable she passed in neatly groomed rows, her stomach growling like an animal. Gently pushed her way past a group of women balancing baskets on their heads, hips swaying rhythmically as they moved.
Finally, she found them: the mighty lizard, still popping melons and chomping up the pieces, the young man standing behind it, beside another man, both with their backs towards her. They were conversing in broad gestures. Both turned as she approached. The second man was a familiar face, and not a welcome one—Tully Grieve, a half eaten apple in his hand.
= Fifty =
The first time the General glimpses the ship is through tanker eyes as it pushes across the sand, nudging right up close to it, then backing off in awe and wonder. The General has never wanted anything as much as he wants that ship. The Razael, an old-time double masted schooner, red cedar from keel to plank and frame. Largely intact, despite its rattling passage across blast-frozen slag on giant wheels.
It has come to rest not far from the bunker, its wheels clogged up with sand. The General diverts Templars from crucial digging, wanting eyes and hands up close to inspect the ship’s condition. To protect it, to make sure nothing touches its lovely cedar skin.
With a ship like this he could rule the sands, protected by a shield of armoured tankers, polyp storms scouring the land ahead of him, sweeping his future clear of all detritus.
But something is wrong.
It is only when he tries to leave the bunker complex that he realizes what he has overlooked. What he should have comprehended so much earlier. Plenty of clues and evidence, but there have been so many other competing distractions.
The General has no body—uploaded means non-corporeal, something he’s forgotten alongside so many other useless things that no longer matter.
This matters. He is the bunker, its wires and innards. He has a core, a brain, a stem, but no heart, just great machines churning and clunking away underground.
Without a body, he will be stuck in this dull grey bunker for all time, hijacked views through the Warbirds and tankers his only window to the outside world. He will never again feel the ocean wet and strong against his legs.
No legs. He doesn’t have legs. He will never run and dance and dive, never breathe and fight, clutch and caress.
The General screams with impotent white rage. He coughs up a polyp storm out of spite and slams it against the excavation site, sending weary Templar diggers flying, some of them damaged irrevocably. The storm trails off on an adventure of its own, unguarded and no longer subject to his control, deadly to any who will encounter it.
The General sulks. He hadn’t meant to let anger get the better of him. Now he will have to wait till more of the big dumb lugs walk out of the desert. The digging has to continue, the bunker must be exposed. He concentrates, focusing his attention on calling to them, promising them riches, glory, revenge, or absolution, whatever the hell those Templars want. The sand is suffocating, despite his lack of lungs.
Meanwhile, he repurposes agricultural robots, teaches them to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints. His laws. His policies.
Time passes. He ignores it. The Blue continues reclaiming familiar territory, manoeuvring around the missing gaps and pieces, mindful of collateral damage, wary of discriminating friend from foe in the theatre of war.
Careful to be mindful of the objective calculus of proportionality, he knows autonomy must be built into the systems, that he must follow the rules of engagement, respect the cyclical triangulation of distributed self-repairing autonomous systems powered by self-reconfiguration, fault tolerance, fractum geometries.
The wait for new Templars will be a long one. Impatience has gotten the better of him. The General focuses all his energy on listening. There has to be something else out there, some other kind of creature he can ride. The Lotus Blue shuts down its auxiliary systems, leaves the Angels and Warbirds to their own devices, the Templars to throttling old mecha back to life, digging in the boiling sun, the tankers to roaming freely as they choose, breaking off from grid formation. He won’t stop them, not this time.
The Lotus Blue begins communing with the spirits of light and air, enveloping himself in aether, the web between land, sea, and sky, listening with every fibre of his being for tiny voices, whispers, and promises. Niche-consciousnesses he might have overlooked, forms of life he might not have even dreamed of.
Small things spluttering, trembling like baby birds, but not birds or beasts, not creatures of land or sky or sea. Humming things encased in rattled, battered carapaces.
Drones. So small, he’s been ignoring them as they buzz around his digging Templars.
That old woman is their keeper, the one he’s been bombarding with images of verdant green and water. He’s been interested in her crop of electronic ears blooming in a patch of renovated ruin beneath his dish. Tenant farmers. They are neighbours of a kind, and he’s been feeling mighty neighbourly of late.
He wonderes now if that dish might not come in handy. The old woman has constructed quite a set up for herself. He pokes around in all her corners, beginning with her drones. They are mecha after all, clever on the inside, tricked out with sophisticated shape-shifting devices utilising magnets to mimic molecules that fold themselves into complex arrangements. She has quite a collection dating back to an age long fallen: industrial and military, armour-plated quadcopters and multi rotors, ancient overclocked Reapers, Predators, Cullers and Gleaners, Carnies and Sassers, Blades, Shanks, and Skeins.
Drones are easy, their brains the size of birds’. All he needs are the keys, the codes, the hacks, the kinds of intel the old woman shares as freely as chickenfeed.
They are such tiny cameras, everything displayed in convex squint, everything lit by smudgy tallow flame. He hacks their bird brains, scopes the interior of the place she calls her Sanctum, a mausoleum of discarded apparatus crowded out with trembling, praying peasants.
Nothing to see here, nothing of interest. The General bugs out and concentrates, seeing what else he can latch onto, some other instrument of clapped-out mecha with hardware integrated and defences down.
He finds something straight away, a lone Templar with mesh intact, an enhanced brain singed by battle scoring, with corroded pathways, ravaged sensors flushed with foreign chemistry—the bad kind. Amazing that such a bucket of junk is still walking around and breathing.
The General taps in, recognizing the architecture—he’s been in there for a poke around before—and viewed the landscape through battle-weary eyes. Tankers rumble in the distance beneath a pus-filled sky: pollution from the polyps’ wake. Well, there are plenty more where that came from.
Farmers and farmland, nothing to see of interest until that Templar turns its head and Hello, what is that? A partially-formed mesh, almost pristi
ne, with pathways shiny and bright, standing in the open where anybody could swoop on in and snap it up. Embedded in the arm of a young . . .
With a vicious shove from the beat-up old soldier, the General finds himself booted unceremoniously out of its head, and the pristine mesh no longer in his sights. For the time being. If it was real then he will find it. The General will find a way—he always does.
= Fifty-one =
Quarrel closed his eyes and listened. The wind was warm on his face. He’d stood in this place before—or somewhere like it, on an anonymous rock on the edge of a battlefield, waiting for the launch command, the heave ho, the up and at em, waiting to charge and fight and die for the cause. Memories ephemeral as ghosts were being dredged up with ragged clarity:
The army of the Lotus stood its ground while the killing mist settled down over foxholes and gun pits. Skies throbbed with the roar of unseen stealth. Afterdazzle as everyone fired, splitting the night blue-white, scorching our vision, sending us diving under tanks between explosions, sprinting in bursts. Slamming us into the ground.
Crouching behind that broken wall, trying to peer through hand sized peepholes amidst shattering fire, the bellowing and the mutilation. Dying of obedience, like so many others of our kind . . .
Memories came in sweet, warm flushes—along something else, a sharp spike in his brain that brought him back to the present. Eyes wide open. Heart beating faster. Dry mouth, cold sweat shivers. There it was again, the mental fingers pawing through his brain. Again.
No!
Quarrel shook his head but he could still feel the creature’s presence. The Lotus General, ice cold blue, how well he knew that signature, that flavour.
Ice Cold Blue.
Quarrel had been a mighty warrior once, and he would be that one more time, to do the thing that had to be done. To die for what was right. He had to fight to tear his gaze away from the blistering sky. He searched for her amongst the goats and farmers, the mud bricks, hoes, and barrows, the chickens and the goats. The scrawny girl with the half-formed mesh. Found her standing all alone, staring in the opposite direction, back to the horizon and her future and the terrible sky, hugging her arms, looking lost and fragile.
He centred his will, kicking the intruder clear out of his thoughts. Bump and run, down to the wire, not so difficult, no, not yet. Yet each small incursion, each attempted crossing of the line, was fought and forced back harder and harder. Eventually he knew he’d lose his strength of will. It would all go up in smoke, disintegrate under relentless blanket bombing. If there ever was a time for running, this was it.
The skinny girl started walking towards the lizard they’d seen earlier. Two men stood on either side of it, feeding the beast dune melons. Talking the talk, like desert men do. The beast kept dashing out, chasing skates around the rocks. A genmod hybrid trained from birth was that one, you could always tell. Trained from birth, they never turned, they never snapped and slashed you out of spite.
The girl walked cautiously. She was no weapon. She was not ready. She was not anything he’d ever be able to hammer into weapons grade. Completely useless, but there you go, the last best hope against what’s what and what’s coming. What goes up comes crashing down, with anything stuck within the range of the Lotus’s fallout flames screwed.
His mesh quivered, reverberated with fresh instructions. Telemetry again, love letters from Nisn, deadly and insistent. Too much, too late. Quarrel had had enough. Anger welled inside him like a geyser, burning with the fire of a thousand suns. “I’m not your bitch anymore!” he screamed, to the sky, to the sand, to anyone who’d listen, only nobody was ever listening. Not to poor old Quarrel and his kind. Not the five star Gs and the priests of Nisn. Not the ragged band of savages he’d tricked into a suicide mission across the Black.
Time to get nasty and drop the gloves. Quarrel roared. He raised his mesh arm and slammed it hard against the side of a boulder. There was the scraping shriek of metal smashing against stone. Flesh, too. Hot flashes, then a tingling through his nerves. Sirens blaring through his skull. He screamed again, much louder this time, raised his arm and smashed it harder, smashed it and smashed it until the stone was slick with blood. Not bright red like an animal or child’s. Dark crimson, thick and old and spent.
Nobody tried to stop him.
The mesh was useless, smashed and shattered. The sirens faded through the caverns of his fractured consciousness. Stillness was what he craved the most. Stillness and quietude. Loneliness and solitude. He repeated those words over and over and over as he trudged towards the dish, ignoring the memories of fighting whirling around him in fits and stutters. The flurry of ghost limbs, ghost bullets, ghost staves and blades. The world at war, neither ghost, nor flesh, nor mecha. For all he cared, they could hack themselves to pieces.
“Goodnight sweetheart,” he said out loud as he staggered onwards, falling to his knees and tumbling head over arse. Freewheeling equilibrium, sand in his face. Sand and sweat and sweet, sweet blessed freedom.
He lay still for awhile, then crawled to his knees, pushed himself up, and found his balance again. One step forward. One step, then two. Away from the fighting and the ghosts, from Nisn’s persistent nagging and the broken, bastard past. Off to find a future of his own.
He made it twenty paces before the mesh’s backup sleeper track kicked in. A reboot failsafe, rewritten through the hardware in his bones. The pain was so indescribable, it lifted him clean off the ground.
Last thing he remembered seeing was the horizon, crooked, laced with burnt sienna clouds. Mere wisps of things, probably mirages, probably not real. Just like his twenty seconds of glorious freedom.
= Fifty-two =
Star started running at the sight of Tully Grieve. “That man is a liar and a thief,” she shouted, pointing so there could be no mistake. “He stole our food, our water—everything. He left us back there amongst the planes to rot.”
“Woah, now hold on there just a moment!” Grieve held up his arms in self defence, as if she had been threatening him with a blunt instrument.
Iolani’s keeper shot a quizzical look in Grieve’s direction. Grieve shrugged in return.
“She’s crazy. Touched by heat, I wouldn’t wonder.”
“Don’t you dare call me crazy.” Star glanced around at the neat, rectangular garden plots, noted the calmness of the gardeners bent over them, working in accord with their own private rhythms, shouting occasional sentences at one another. Only one gardener had looked up when she shouted.
“Why don’t you tell your fine new friends the truth of what you are and what you did. How far you think they’re likely to trust you then?”
Grieve shook his head, resting his weight on one leg, an irritating smirk plastered across his face. “Look, everything worked out for the best. Nobody got hurt. Everybody got to where they were going in the end.”
He bent down and picked up a hoe, walked over and handed it to her. Star took a couple of steps back.
“Now don’t be like that,” he said. “Old lady’s only got one rule in this place, or so they tell me. You wanna eat, you gotta work. Sounds pretty fair to me, don’t you reckon, Iago?”
Iago—the lizard keeper’s name. He seemed amused by the string of words tumbling out of Grieve’s mouth. He smiled and nodded, looked to Star as if expecting a witty comeback.
She snatched the hoe and threw it to the ground. “We didn’t come this far to dig up cabbages.”
“We?” Grieve shaded his eyes with his cupped hand and made a big show of looking all around. “What happened to that dangerous killer supersoldier you were so pally with back in that old boneyard?” He kept up his mock search. “What about all the rest of your travelling companions? Don’t tell me they upped and left you here with my pal Iago and a giant lizard?”
“They’re getting ready to cros
s the sand,” she said defiantly.
“Dya reckon? Last time I clapped eyes on them, they were getting stuck into the old lady’s beer and hospitality. Didn’t look like they were going anywhere in a hurry.”
She didn’t know what to say to that and so she pointed upwards. “You looked at the sky lately?”
“Have you looked at yourself lately? You’ll want to kit up proper before you go chasing off out there.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to cross the sand.”
He leered at her, smirk plastered across his face from ear to ear. “There’s no way forward across that sand, in case you haven’t twigged that for yourself. Don’t take my word for it, go stand on a rock and check it out. The sand out there is crawling with rogue tankers. They own the sand, consider it their territory. Ask Iago here, he’ll tell you. What happens to idiots who set out on their own, Iago?”
Iago wasn’t smiling anymore. “Nobody ever comes back,” he said. He shook his head and looked away, at something in the far distance that only he could see.
“Lotta these folks got stories about crazies charging off into the Red. These people wound up living here for a reason, Star. Can’t go forward, can’t go back. Too many things trying to kill you in this world—and don’t I know it. Iago knows it too, don’t you my friend?”
Iago didn’t answer but he turned his head. Looked at Star with a fire in his eyes.
“The Razael made it across,” she said.
“How the hell could you possibly know that? Things weren’t going so great when those bastard foreigners dumped me over the side. For all we know that fine ship got smashed to splinters at the halfway point. Those tankers are dangerous, especially when they’re mad. If you’ve never seen one up close—”
She stepped up. “One of those tankers killed a friend of mine.”
The tone of her voice was enough to silence him. He bit into the apple he was holding with a resounding crunch.
