“I have responsibilities,” Pepper said. “One of them is to destroy this threat. The last is revenge. You’re panicking right now, but you’re not dead. You need to keep yourself pulled together. You made a mistake, I’m trying to help you save your life.”
Pepper grabbed the collar of the groundsuit. “I would go down if my suit didn’t leak. I would have gone for the aliens. I would ride the city down to the surface with you. You understand. I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t, if I had the right equipment. Understand?”
Timas swallowed. “But we’re falling out of the sky.”
“When they drop probes on planets like Chilo they don’t include parachutes.” Pepper tapped Timas on the cheek. “They let them drop out of the sky. If you want cloud data, you use the parachute to hang out up here for a while. But if you’re headed for ground, you jettison it. How fast does the probe, filled with delicate instruments, hit the surface in soupy air like this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Timas, look me in the eye and guess.” Pepper again tapped the collar of the suit, getting him to look forward.
“A hundred miles an hour?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen?”
“Fifteen miles an hour. The thickness of the atmosphere that deep changes terminal velocity. The city will still have air, compressed into odd spots, but still helping buoyancy. The heat will also add buoyancy. It’s why your suit filled with air gets easier for you to use down on the surface than up here.”
“Fifteen.” Timas looked down.
“The atrium is the core of the city, made out of nanofilament, as are the layers. They’ll flex, but hold at those speeds.” Well, near the atrium they should, the edges would snap for sure. But Timas didn’t need to know that. “You keep your cool. Find a place that’s soft and safe where I just told you, and then your job is to get to Hulbach so that they can go rescue those kids from the craft down in the docks. Here, this is a beacon, you hang it from your neck. Use your chin to trigger it. Even Hulbach will hear it. It’s pretty powerful. Raga from orbit will hear it, okay?”
That got his attention. “Okay.”
“You stay here, though, until the heat starts cooking the Swarm. You don’t want to get attacked.”
Pepper latched the helmet on to Timas and slapped it. Timas gave a thumbs-up, and then Pepper left him.
Already acrid Chilo air had started to seep in everywhere. In the distance Pepper heard coughing as people struggled to breathe.
He had thirty minutes of continuous power left in his suit. Less than he’d wanted, jumping around so much. Had that been worth risking Timas’s life for, even with all the assurances Pepper had given him?
Pepper couldn’t be sure as he sprinted out of the docks and up through the city, headed for the airlocks. It took too many minutes to get up there. There was also a risk that the escape bubble would not be able to work in the pressure they’d descended to. Pepper had been adjusting his ears all along.
Swarm waited for him as the elevator opened. It only took Pepper a couple minutes to empty the clips in his gun as he tried to clear a path to run down. The air almost choked him, thick with acid and carbon dioxide.
Even altering his lungs in anticipation wasn’t helping. Most of Yatapek’s breathable air had been mixed with Chilo’s up here.
The doors shut, hit his elbows, opened again.
Pepper pulled out his sword. The empty-eyed people crushed inward, and he walked out into the middle of them, step by deliberate step.
“You’re just lining up for me now,” Pepper said. “Aren’t you?”
Each step was accompanied by the death of another piece of the Swarm trying to stop him. It was clear what it was trying to do: slow him down to trap him here on the doomed city. It just threw bodies at him, regardless of the cost. The counter-infection had reduced its numbers, but what hundreds it had, all moved to block Pepper’s route out of the streets.
“A brutish solution.” Pepper swung, time after time again. He created a charnel house of blood and severed heads. He stopped only to dip into houses, seeking pockets of fully breathable air where he would gasp and listen to the Swarm batter at the doors.
Then he’d break back out into the street to force his way to the next house. Blood dripped down his arms via the sword and stained his boots where he crushed in heads.
A strange peace washed over him. He’d always anticipated dying in battle. This stand would not be forgotten: slaying the Swarm while standing on the deck of a doomed city falling down toward a hellish ground.
It fit.
The Swarm would win. And that pissed him off enough to pick up his pace, slowly pushing the carnage along, aware that Swarm blood ran in the gutters of Yatapek’s streets. He’d moved from the elevator through the central street, almost to the last houses, when the Swarm stopped.
The bodies, their strange communicative waves of fronds shifting, moved out away from him.
He tensed, expecting weaponry. A grenade, a distant sniper shot . . . anything. He staggered, alone in the street, in front of a faceless enemy, that looked back at him with hundreds of faces that had once been people.
The Swarm spoke to him again. Parts of the entire crowd spoke each phrase.
“We are no longer effective.”
“The battle is over.”
“We offer you the freedom to pass, if you will give this message to our otherself.”
“Our nature has been betrayed, and it undid us.”
“We trust you will keep your word.”
Pepper looked at the line of speakers. Then nodded as he coughed. “Is that it, or should you tell me something more detailed?”
“Our otherparts may already know about it.”
“If not, it can determine what we mean by pondering.”
Okay. Why not? “I’ll pass it on. I give my word.”
And then like some bizarre honor guard, a lane opened. The Swarm stood side by side along the road. Pepper staggered through it.
Minutes later, shooting up toward the clouds, looking down at the city far below slowly plunging down toward Chilo, Pepper crossed his legs.
Betrayed?
What could betray the Swarm?
It was a question he had to shelve as he rose above the clouds and into the still explosive air battle. A strong wind current would take him toward the Aeolian city.
If he didn’t get shot out of the sky by any number of airships and crossfire on his way there.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
People died not too far from Timas. They collapsed against the wall, bent over, sucking in deep lungfuls of air and then coughing and choking. One of the soldiers dropped his gun and the bottle in his other hand and staggered past Timas. His reddened eyes darted around the room. He fell forward and balled up, gasping, wheezing, and sucking at air that only betrayed him.
Timas could hear the screams, distantly, through his helmet. He wished he could block them out, but he couldn’t. Could he go out there, and see what was happening to the people who couldn’t escape?
Not yet.
He sat on the bench in his suit, staring straight ahead at the lockers until one of the posters began to curl and blacken.
Too long.
Timas staggered up and walked out.
All throughout the docks people lay sprawled in tortured poses. He stumbled past them, trying not to look.
He had no idea how much time he had left. Or if the elevators would even work. He had gotten too scared and he’d frozen up. He might die yet.
Halfway to the elevator something moved. A strange-looking member of the Swarm with extra-thick skin, like nothing Timas had seen, staggered forward. It was adapted for the deep, he realized. Thick, almost skeletal skin. Glassy eyes. It struggled to breathe, but it still lived, unlike anything human in Yatapek now.
When it saw Timas it changed course, stumbling for him. Timas patted his waist. His gloves clanged against the groundsuit. His gun remaine
d left behind. Not that he could have used it, but he felt naked.
The creature hit, and Timas grabbed its throat. He struggled, off balance, scared of falling on his back and damaging the radiator fans on the back of the suit. It pushed him, but weakly. Timas leaned forward, thinking about the choking soldier, and squeezed. He kept pushing and tightening his grip, screaming, until he fell forward with its dead body limp in his hands.
Shaken, he pushed himself back up to his feet.
Heat rippled off everything, and just as Timas reached the elevators the power shut off to the entire city.
Darkness reigned. Light spilled in from the atrium, and in the distance through the layers via the edge of the city. But everywhere else, night.
Timas ran toward the edge of the city where he could see what path to take.
Each layer had grand steps leading up to the next at the edge by the city’s shell, like at the mezzanine. He began to clamber up them, struggling his way foot by foot. Condensation dripped from his visor as he panted. He sprinted as best he could in the heavy suit for his life.
He wasn’t going to get as high up the layers of the city as Pepper recommended. He stopped at one point, looking out of the city and realizing that the city wall wasn’t bulging inward like the airships he’d seen fall.
Because it was already holed.
As he realized that, the city broke through the last cloud layer and Timas saw the surface.
Now he ran inward, into the dark, toward the atrium. With every heavy step he scanned for more modified Swarm. Fortunately, no more came. He cut through alleyways, homes, and kept going until he found a garden.
There was a fresh pile of dirt near a half-finished flowerbed.
Timas lay down face-first on it as the entire city started to shake violently. They had hit ground.
He could twist himself to look out the side of his large helmet and see the city, all askew from his perspective on the ground. At first, it shook, like on a heavy turbulence day. But then nearby buildings collapsed, facades falling forward. It was worse than any heavy weather he’d ever been through.
Layers trembled, visibly curving, and roaring filled the air, thudding through his chest.
Pieces of the upper structures started breaking off and raining down around the city’s edges. The walls exploded, compressed as waves rippled through them.
Then the real shock hit. The ground underneath Timas kicked him up into the air. He fell back onto the dirt face-first and smacked his head against his faceplate.
Dizzy, lip bleeding, Timas waited as the world came to a stop. Girders, large chunks of plating, and then a mountain of dirt rained down on his layer’s edges, but the atrium held firm.
The rest of the city was a mess and he was trapped in its maze with hardly any light. But he was alive, and on the surface of Chilo.
Timas fumbled about with his chin and triggered the beacon Pepper had given him. In the sweaty darkness, still feeling rumbles outside, he wondered what to do next.
PART EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Pepper sat in one of the round airships that Hulbach Cavern had given to the Ragamuffins so that they could ship people from Aegae down. He hadn’t had time to visit a medical pod; others needed assistance more than he did. But he had scrounged up a fully powered pack for his groundsuit.
He filled out the bulk of the craft’s interior on one side. Someone had removed three chairs for him to sit on the floor, back against the curved wall. Claire rode with him on the other side, free for now of Amminapses’s control. She sat in her chair, staring ahead, deep in thought.
“How’s Aegae?” Pepper didn’t want to sit alone with his thoughts for the whole length of the trip to the surface.
“You were there,” Claire muttered.
“I left the moment the Ragamuffins arrived. I haven’t been back. We just picked you up: talk to me.”
Her eyes darted around the cabin. “The Swarm’s been shoved back into the lower three layers. The survivors there were using an environmental control to vent the air, level by level, then repressurize. They think within a week, between the Heutzin cure, starvation, and brute force, that the Aeolians will have a city of their own again. One that they’ll be sharing with Yatapek’s survivors.”
In orbit Ragamuffin ships clustered, a show of force. Every day more of them arrived. The League had pulled back. No one was interested in a full-scale space war, and the League could ill afford to lose all its ships.
They claimed to have been coming to offer aid.
“There are other cities the Ragamuffins are taking?” Claire said.
“Yes.” From orbit the Raga coordinated a careful action against the Aeolian cities. Any Aeolian cities with tethers to orbit saw them cut, the counterweights deorbited. “Anything in orbit’s mapped by control ships, anything capable of holding a human, destroyed. We have the high ground again.”
And of course, Heutzin’s cure, as it was being called—hopefully to Amminapses’s annoyance—was spreading to counter the original infection.
“Our luck,” Pepper said, “is that this wasn’t released on a normal planet, with cities and air and roads and land. Here, with each city its own world, it slowed down, and once you have the high ground, it’s somewhat controllable.”
“Are you going down to be involved in the talks?” Claire asked.
The League had always been a threat, but not on this level. Now the talk was on about creating a counter-entity to the League, formalizing the process of getting Chilo defended, and turning the DMZ into something else.
So delegates with the authority to make things happen had arrived. Cousins to the people in Yatapek came from Aztlan on New Anegada and made their way down to Hulbach. From Capitol City in Nanagada more Ragamuffins arrived. Pipiltin from Yatapek’s few sister cities that swirled around the Great Storm joined as well. Though poor and low in population the Aeolians aboard the airships wanted to settle in these safe Azteca cities. Avatars from the Aeolian fleets flew down to Hulbach as well.
“No. The last thing you’ll ever see me do is get involved in that.”
Pepper had heard rumors of the various aliens within Hulbach secretly sending representatives of their own, without the Satrap’s knowledge, to join the conversation. All of them needed to unite against the League and pool their resources, they said.
The League had thought loosing the Swarm on Chilo would break the Ragamuffins and whoever survived on Chilo, and make the ready to be pulled into the greater human umbrella for an undivided front.
Instead, it had prompted something else.
The Ragamuffins had called it a commonwealth, but after the Nesaru and Gahe formally came to the table and asked for representation, one annoyed negotiator, not interested in having aliens at the table, wondered if it shouldn’t be called a xenowealth.
The term stuck.
The Xenowealth sprung into creation, born in the high-pressure muck of Chilo’s surface.
“Then what are you coming down here for?” Claire asked.
“Visiting someone.”
She pulled her knees up. “They thought I was insane to come back down. The Aeolians offered me citizenship in the Consensus.”
“You turned it down.”
“Amminapses offers extended life in exchange for a hundred years of service. I have one year left.”
“You could die tomorrow,” Pepper said.
“Big rewards take big gambles.” Claire let go of her knees. “My parents were owned by Gahe, content to parade behind glass for visitors. They were pets. They got fed, they were safe, they were happy. I wanted more. And since then, I got it. I’ve seen so much more than they could have imagined. I’ve seen the three suns of Midhaven set. The crumbling reservation walls of Astragalai. The Dawn Pillars, with suns peeking through the dust.”
“And what are you going to do when you get free? Other than act like a tourist and see more amazing sights throughout the worlds.”
“Undo th
e damage I may have done these past hundred years. Sometimes I’ve been released, standing in front of people whose lives are ruined. These hands have killed. I didn’t do it, but the blood has been left on them anyway. After that, maybe, I will be truly free. Judging by what I know, I will have two, maybe three hundred years of life after that to see the worlds, and everything else.”
Pepper nodded. “You think it will take a hundred years. I’ve found that redemption drags out longer, because there’s always someone else who needs help, some consequence of something you were involved in that keeps perpetuating.”
Claire’s eyes widened. “You’re one, too?”
“No. But I know blood is never a simple equation. You have to fix the things that cascade from the problems you cause, and sometimes, you cause even more problems doing that. I also know that once you make a compromise of the kind you made, other compromises come just as easily later on.”
The craft fell through the crust of Chilo’s surface down into Hulbach.
Katerina waited for him when the hatch opened. But Pepper had one more question. “Those worlds you’ve seen, what was the most recent one, before Hulbach?”
“Midhaven.”
Interesting, Pepper thought. Very interesting.
“Claire,” he leaned forward. “I would beg you to leave the Satrap. It cannot end well.”
It never did.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Timas wasn’t sure if he wanted to see Pepper. It still felt like the man had condemned him back on Yatapek. Or at least tried to kill him. But here he stood in the small medical room. The hulking groundsuit Pepper inhabitated was now polished and buffed, gleaming in the cold hospital lights.
By the time he’d been saved, the suit had started to fail and he’d been gasping for air, about to pass out. But all that seemed worlds away, waiting to die inside the ruins of his old city.
So Timas said nothing at first, but took the carefully offered metal guantlet that Pepper still now called a hand, and shook it. “You survived in one piece,” Pepper said.
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