“Hello,” the man sighed, his voice little more than a whisper, dry as vellum. “I didn’t think anyone was coming.”
“No one was,” I replied, and reached out slowly to touch his neck, feel for his pulse. I moved slowly, deliberately, so as not to startle him. I couldn’t really see his eyes in order to check for sure, but I was certain that he was in shock. My people could be very dangerous when badly injured, because our instincts tended to take over at unexpected times. He let me touch his neck, though, and the pulse I felt was steady, if a little weak. He took a long breath, his chest rattling wetly again, and I winced. That sounded like a punctured lung, slowly filling with blood. “What happened here?”
The ranger laughed and the sound tinged with a dangerous mania. I didn’t move, I just watched him bare his fangs and cackle for a long minute before he said, “Volistad, right?”
“Yes,” I said simply, waiting for the inevitable accusation. I should be dead; I was taken by the Dark Ones. I was a traitor- whatever Elder Lot had told my people.
But the wounded man only shook his head spasmodically and croaked out another dismal laugh. “It’s good to see that you’re alive, Vah, though I wish someone had told your sister that.”
I recognized him then, something about the way the man had called me “Vah”, after the first letter in my name. It was something about the way his jaw had moved, the way his lips had shaped the words around his fangs. Though his features were hard to determine in the sickly light of the glowstone fragments, I knew him. “Thukkar. Is that you?” He was an older ranger, one of the senior members of the patrol teams. He did more tunnel patrols than he did hunting expeditions, so he and I had rarely crossed paths. But I knew who he was, and he knew me. He had always been strong, fierce, and proud, and seeing him broken like this was…wrong.
“Aye, it is, Vah. Though there’s little left of me below the waist, I’m afraid.”
“What?”
Thukkar chuckled. “I can’t move, boy. I think that through the fall I broke my back. I thought I was just going to sit here until I either starved or my blessing ran out. I knew they wouldn’t send search teams down this far- not when they said… they said…” He broke off, collapsing into a fit of wheezing coughs.
“Palamun’s face,” I swore between my teeth. Then I frowned. “What was that you said about my sister?”
The ranger winced, and gave me what might have been an apologetic look, or a grimace of pain. Or perhaps it was both. “Nissikul. They… they told us you had been corrupted by the false god we came out here to kill, said that you had been killed doing her dark bidding. They said that you had tried to assassinate Elder Lot, and he had been forced to kill you.” He chuckled ruefully, then stopped, wincing again as he fought to stave off another barrage of wracking coughs. “Nissikul was furious, of course. Wouldn’t hear it when the Elder told her to stay in the village. We were all prepared for the attack, and she just appeared, told us she was going into that storm to kill the god who killed you, and just went in.”
“She what?”
“Oh, that’s the best part. Lot and his little acolytes couldn’t get through the thing. They kept getting thrown back, pelted with ice. Little Nissi just walks up, tears off her furs-” He paused for a moment, as if reminiscing wistfully. I considered flicking him in the ear with one of my claws, but I thought better of it. She wasn’t his sister, after all. And besides, he was plenty beaten up already. He shook himself out of his stupor. “Anyways, she just throws her furs to the ice and just walks into that great black stormwall like it wasn’t there. A few moments later, and the whole thing comes apart, so the Elders told us to charge.” He waved at his legs, which splayed uselessly out in front of him. “Well, you know how I was always a fast one. Me, Cetterak and Peerka…” The ranger gestured at the mangled bodies flanking him, each of them bloodied beyond recognition, skulls deformed, and limbs twisted and broken. The humor went out of his face, and the edge of something darker crept into his voice, flickered across his face. “So I’m running, and I hear Nissikul just roar, like I have never heard her do before, and I’m crossing that trench where the storm was, and all I see was her bringing down a greathammer, made of that black witch-ice the ‘Callers’ are always using, and that’s the last thing I remember before I woke up here.”
I crouched there for a moment, in shocked silence. Nissikul had done all this? With one blow? “Well, Thukkar, I’m not dead. The Deepseeker saved me. He says the Elders are corrupted, and that the god you all just tried to kill is our only hope. And I’m going down there to find her.”
Thukkar just shook his head, another cackle rising from his shuddering chest. “Then you best hurry. Nissi was here when I woke.”
I froze, midway toward reaching for my waterskin so I could offer him a little relief. “She’s alive?”
“Oh yes,” the ranger croaked. “Less one arm, though. It’s over there.” He pointed off into one of the chamber’s uneven corners.
I followed his hand and squinted into the dark. Sure enough, there was something lying on the ground, something about the size of a woman’s arm. “She went down there with only one arm?” I couldn’t even imagine what state she must have been in to keep moving through all that pain. I knew Stormcallers were hard to kill, but Palamun’s face, that was insane.
“Well, she just grew another one, made of that witch-ice. She left me some of her rations and told me to wait for rescue. I don’t know if she really thought someone would come to get me this far down or if she was just being cruel.” He pointed back up the passage toward the nexus. “Then she just left. I think she was trying to find that god so that she could make sure that she finished what she had started.”
I swore again, standing. I had to stop her. “Vulyak Dwert!” I spat viciously to the side. “I have to stop her. I’m going to go stop her, and then I’m going to go find Lot and throw him down here.”
The ranger wheezed out another string of broken laughter. “Are you now? Well, that I might like to see. Though like this… I doubt I’ll get the chance.”
I looked down at the ranger, at his useless legs, at the awkward angle of his back. If he stayed here, he would die. Even if he somehow made it up to the surface, chances were that he wouldn’t make it. I couldn’t just walk away from him, but I had to find Nissikul. I couldn’t just take Thukkar back to the nearest ranger station. They would probably put an arrow in my eye the moment they saw me, armor or no. So I was the Deepseeker’s champion? How was I supposed to do that if I left a wounded man behind to starve or freeze? Frustrated, I took a few steps from the downed ranger, threw back my head, and roared with rage. I let my fury rip its way out of me for a few moments. I was sure that even the frantically coupling lovers on the surface had probably heard me. Oh well, it made me feel better.
I turned back to the ranger, who was watching me with no real expression on his face, just a sort of refined indifference. I couldn’t just leave a man behind, whatever was at stake. Joanna could defend herself, and this man would die without help. Consequences be damned. I bent down and quickly began tearing apart the furs of the fallen rangers, dividing the tattered hides into strips I could use. I had to work fast. I would be giving Nissi a head start, but I had to bring Thukkar with me. I could keep him alive, and perhaps Joanna or that spirit she was always talking to, could heal him. Carefully, I shifted Thukkar into a position more conducive to what I was trying to do. He was a good sport about it, only groaning a little anytime I accidently put pressure on his ruined back. I worked quickly, and the strips became a harness, one meant to strap the man to my back like he was a child. It was going to be a very long night. With as much care as I could manage, I strapped the crippled ranger to my back, secured him in such a way that none of my weapons dug into him, and I began to climb back out to the nexus. I had a long, long way to go.
…
Joanna
When I woke, my suit had been re-sealed. I ran diagnostics on all of my systems and checked
my various supply tank capacities. I wasn’t doing badly: my nutrient tanks were still eighty-percent full. My metabolism was artificially slowed when I was plugged into the suit, and I was able to synthesize most of the nutrients I needed with the fabricator, provided I had access to the appropriate raw materials. Water wasn’t really a problem. I reclaimed ninety-nine percent of the water I passed via “still suit systems”, and besides, I was living on a giant glacier. My air balance was not the best- I had lost most of my nitrogen supply to emergency backfilling when my suit had been breached- but I could manage until I found another supply. I had already been able to reclaim some valuable gasses from the dissolved corpse of the burug. My fabricator nanites had gone over the body with brisk efficiency, claiming whatever supplies they could find and storing them in the depleted tanks. Analysis showed that even liquefied burug flesh could easily be rendered into base nutrition- with the exception of the “heart” that I had found. None of my sensors or records had any idea what that thing was. I would need to put together an analytical lab when I was safe again. But all of that could wait until I helped Barbas come back to himself. So I stowed the “heart” in one of the storage containers attached to my armor, and I set off into the ice to find the missing parts of my qarin’s mind.
At first, the going was slow. As I had already determined, the tower had been completely destroyed, and the wreckage had been distributed at random through the unpredictable and changeable system of crevices, tunnels, and channels that had been cut or split into the ice. I fabricated a powerful multi-spectrum scanner from one of the blueprints stored in my suit’s library and just wandered through the glacier’s hidden world, following the faint traces of signal that I could pick up with my scanner. Fortunately, most of the systems that Barbas was running during the attack were accessible by wireless network, and they had their own backup power storage. That meant that the first parts of the AI’s mind that I found were relatively simple things to track. Their broadcast signals were still transmitting, reaching out blindly for a network with which to connect.
Collecting those fragments of Barbas’ personality matrix was a straightforward process. I just had to get close enough to those fragments to attach their host machines to my suits internal network, and then Barbas would reach out and reabsorb the shard of his mind contained within. Before long, he was speaking with some resemblance of his normal self, and we were talking and sharing ideas as we searched. He was able to remember which systems he had been connected to, and this made the search just a little bit easier. But soon, we ran out of systems with functioning wireless connections, and we were back to random searching.
At Barbas’ suggestion, I modified my scanner to detect any trace of radiation from the fusion core detonation. The reactor we used- the one all Formers had been trained to build and use, had several fail-safe systems built in to prevent the widespread dispersal of radioactive contaminant, so the region of the glacier around us wasn’t actually overly contaminated. Trace fallout showed up here and there, but the fact was that the core of the reactor was most likely still intact, contained in its thick, almost impenetrable shell. What had actually detonated in the attack was the array of power capacitors. They had discharged their stored energy down into the “ground”, and that had made the blast we had experienced. The core itself had probably melt a path down through the ice until it cooled off and rolled into a deep hole somewhere, sitting battered but unbreached, waiting to be reclaimed. And we would come across it. Nonetheless, we detected a few sources of radiation that were slightly more potent than the general background, and we followed them, narrowing down our search to three separate sites.
The first turned out to be the ammunition storage for the gauss rifle emplacement, a twelve-foot tall magazine of depleted-uranium rounds no bigger than the tip of my littlest finger when it was un-gloved. They gave off enough radiation to trip the sensors, but they weren’t on Barbas’ list of systems he had been controlling, so we marked the location on our running map of the glacier and continued on our way.
The second site was more promising. When I entered the pocket of collected rubble, I detected two different systems from Barbas’ list. “Hey, ‘Bas,” I said, unable to shake the habit of speaking out loud. “Pay dirt.”
Barbas took a few moments to respond. His voice no longer sounded flat or muffled, but he sounded incredibly tired- the way I might sound after seventy-two hours without sleep. “Joanna, you know I don’t have access to all of my files, and that includes most slang. I don’t know what ‘pay dirt’ is.” He didn’t even sound irritated, just exhausted.
“‘Pay dirt’ is… you know what, it doesn’t matter. I found two systems from your list!”
Barbas perked up a little, and I felt the now familiar itching sensation on my neck, like someone was reading over my shoulder. “Ah. The long-range scanner and the main data archive. That should help quite a bit.”
I moved into the little irregular cavern in the ice. It looked much the same as the last few- scattered rubble stuck into the frozen walls at odd intervals, extending up a narrow shaft into the unseen darkness. The floor of the little space was scattered with scrap metal and tangled cables. Most of what I saw was useless, unless I wanted to sit here for a few hours and let the fabricator break it all back down into useable raw metals. Still, I marked the caverns location on my map. Chances were that I would have to return here. A lot of the material storage I had brought with me to Chalice had been used up in the creation of the tower, and I would need to reclaim that wealth of scrap eventually. But for now, I just needed those systems. I needed Barbas. I needed him whole. I needed my escape from this frozen hell, and I needed the only friend I had here. For some reason, this thought brought the image of Volistad, unbidden, to my brain, and I remembered the furious Stormcaller swinging her hammer, screaming that I had killed her brother. Was he dead? What had happened up there?
I eyed the first system, the long-range scanner array, which hung from a random web of steel cabling about twenty-five meters off the ground. I couldn’t quite reach that with a leap- though my armor gave me a high-jump that would make even one of the old pre-war Olympians jealous. That kind of height was more in pole-vaulting territory, and I wasn’t sure I could pull that sort of athleticism off, powered armor or no. Instead, I picked a path of rubble that seemed more or less securely frozen to the wall and climbed up the long way.
When I reached the sensor array, I winced to see all of the sensitive antennae and delicate dishes bent and smashed. At the core of the mangled equipment, however, I found the processor and internal battery array. In a testament to the redundant systems Barbas and I had installed all over the tower, it was still powered, and still running. A single red LED light winked on and off from inside the plastic housing, blinking at irregular intervals. Barbas suddenly spoke in my ear. “That’s Neo-Morse rhythm code. Let me translate.” He was silent for a moment and then spoke again. “Joanna. This is Barbas. Help me.” He cleared his non-existent throat uncomfortably. “It just keeps repeating that message.”
I frowned. “The fragment of you in there- it… he’s aware, isn’t he?”
“The fragment of me in the gun was. Why not the part of me in the sensor scanner?”
“So that is ‘you’, and you are also ‘you’?”
Barbas laughed, his usually calm tones touched with an edge of hysteria. “What is ‘me’ anyway? What am I really?” Silence followed his outburst, and then he said. “Just connect to the damn thing so I can re-absorb him.”
“Isn’t that sort of traumatic? If all the pieces of you that we’ve found have been aware all this time, wouldn’t each of those shards of you now have different experiences? I mean, if your personality is largely defined by your memories, wouldn’t each piece we find be a different person? A different Barbas?”
Barbas’ voice turned sharp all of a sudden, a nasty sarcastic tone slipping into his voice. “And what? What’s your point, Joanna? That I should leave well enough alo
ne? That each of these minds is a special and unique entity?” He laughed, the sounded inhuman, more like the processed, machine sound of an antique disk-drive cycling unevenly than the usual vocal expression of mirth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a human. If your brain got cut into fifty pieces, you would die. Me? I’m like a starfish. I’m not a person, I’m just pretending to be one to keep you from going crazy. That’s why I’m here, doing this. That’s why they bothered to make me at all. I don’t really have a name, just a brand, a type. I’m not Barbas, I’m an IPICAP, an ‘Immersive Psychological and Instructive Cranial Augmentation Program’. ‘Barbas’ is just a name for you to hold onto so you’re able to accept me being here. It’s all a game. It’s all just a stupid game.”
I reeled, shocked by the sudden vehemence from him, the bitterness in his voice. “Barbas, what-”
He cut me off, the strange anger gone from his voice abruptly, replaced again by the exhaustion, the grim resignation. “I’m sorry, Joanna. Please just network to that shard so I can absorb it. The faster you get this done, the sooner I can be myself again.” When I didn’t respond, he sighed. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I just need enough of me back to put our dream-world back together. Not being able to run it just makes it harder for me to be me. It just reminds me I’m not real, and that’s difficult to take. Without the cabin, I’m just… I’m just a ghost in your head. I feel like scrap data hanging onto a system that doesn’t really need it.”
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 44
