by Robert Reed
But wisdom won, and that tiny army retreated without a fight.
Peering into the telescope, King watched Diamond run away from one piece of wreckage, heading straight for the fire above.
The Ruler’s bridge was filled with bodies and voices. Every human was scared, sounding more foolish than usual. King listened to voices that mattered, keeping tabs on the battle’s progress. If war was a circle drawn on the floor, then the world was standing on the ring’s edge, toes touching the paint. Important generals were making plans for full-scale battles. Prima as well as Father shouted orders, trying to keep the fighting at a lesser, less combustive stage. Once and then again, King lifted his face to glance out the big windows. Half of the world’s weapons had been jammed into the same sliver of air. Guns fired but never steadily, and most remained silent. Flares and signal lights and individual men waving bright flags added to the chaos. Both species were screaming for something called Order, for respect of the rightful leaders, for hesitation instead of haste, and all the while everyone was aiming for neat resolutions that were never possible to begin with.
Prima was a little more in charge than anyone else.
Again and again, she ordered her fleet to move together and claim the wreckage, rescuing survivors and recovering bodies. But the papio were closer to the Bountiful, more abundant and very short-tempered. The telescope operator beside King named units and counted bodies, telling an assistant where to place each enemy soldier on a big map of the reef. She was scared enough to make mistakes, and nobody heard much of what she said. Then Prima asked about Diamond, and the operator confessed that she couldn’t see the boy, that he had vanished inside the heavy smoke.
King gave a huge wet roar, telling the entire bridge, “I see him fine.”
“You can’t,” his colleague said.
“I see where the smoke curls around him,” he replied, laughing in his best human fashion.
Every one of King’s ears listened to the bridge, and he had memorized where everyone stood. Father was protecting ground a little bit ahead of Prima. But that didn’t fool anyone. Everyone was talking and every voice was scared, but when the tiny woman spoke, the entire bridge grew a little bit quieter, and if she talked about strength or perseverance, the mood calmed for the next few moments.
A young lieutenant acted like Prima’s shadow.
Sondaw was handling papers. King heard the papers moving, and then Prima asked for a summary, and her shadow read that the base at High Coral Merry was signaling only one message. Nobody wanted war, the papio said, but there was a rescue mission of grave importance underway and to please let their brave people do their important work.
Some generals scoffed, but Prima demanded opinions.
A colonel named Meeker came forward, pointing out that nobody was positioned for a fight. Formations were scattered, and other formations were crammed far too close together. If true war broke out, both fleets would have allowed themselves to begin in awful circumstances.
“Like a mist of fuel in the air,” he said.
“One spark,” Prima said, understanding the image. Then in a louder voice, she told her fleet, “We aren’t the spark today, people.”
King began to like this brave, fierce female human.
Then the officer beside him said, “There he is. I see the target again.”
Diamond was running back the way that he came before, emerging from the smoke and swirling ashes.
Breezes bent the smoke, causing it to gracefully follow after the boy.
Every day before this day, imagining war, King dressed armies in majestic colors and marched them forwards with great purpose. In his mind, the papio and humans were two combatants standing beside contested ground, and they would trade blows and insults and bleed each other before inflicting even worse wounds, and one species would win and the other would retreat, and there was order to what he envisioned, and the imagined drama sometimes left him joyful.
But now, experiencing the thinnest example of real war, he found nothing honorable or orderly. This was mayhem. This was waste on a fabulous scale. Real war was more like a storm than any fair contest between warriors. Storms rose to sweep through the world, and they had no souls, and they were idiots—mindless, changeless impulses to be endured, or they would crush everything in their path. War was very different from one brave soul standing on his important floor, guarding the lens and his telescope for no reason except that this was the most interesting place to stand.
“What am I seeing?” the operator asked.
“A female papio,” said a third operator. “But no, she’s huge . . . isn’t she . . . ?”
King’s telescope was the last to see the apparition running over the barren, uptilted coral. But he noticed Merit before the others, and he had enough time to bring the focus to the old slayer as he fell and then recovered. A crisp shout of directions pulled the other telescopes to the scene, and every little telescope and pair of binoculars were raised, people claiming to see nothing or everything.
Father and their leader moved to the pilot’s window.
“What is that?” asked Prima.
The giant papio had stopped beside the old slayer.
“List,” she said. “What is that thing?”
The officer beside King said, “Oh. She’s trying to help Merit.”
Then the slayer was dead, and after the shared hollering, shock fell into anger and the bridge turned quiet enough that only one voice was audible.
Prima said, “You know. I think you do know. Is that the papio’s child?”
Father said, “Yes.”
“Tell me about it,” said Prima.
Everyone wanted to hear the answer. King wanted to hear. For all of his insights and honest chatter, List had never mentioned this creature, at least not in earshot of his son.
“It’s physically huge,” Father said.
“Gigantic,” Prima said.
“Female in appearance.”
“What else?”
“The creature’s inhabited by different minds, different personalities.”
“What does that mean?” Prima asked
“She’s stranger than ours,” said Father. “Your child, and mine.”
King kept the one eye fixed on the papio, watching it climb farther up the ridge. Diamond was standing on higher ground, and the whiffbirds descended, and the giant easily dropped one of war machines.
King stepped back from the lens.
What was apparent needed to be words, and he spoke them. To his father, he asked, “Could the attack from two days ago . . . could that belong to this creature?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, Father, what do you guess?”
List didn’t like the subject, the tone. Something caused him to straighten his back, and King knew that more secrets were being hidden from him.
Five leaps and then King lifted his father overhead, pressing him near the ceiling. Just short of screaming, he asked the squirming man, “What else do you know?”
“Nothing,” Father insisted. “We have an agent, he’ll report again soon.”
Then the indignity was too much. With a stiff voice, the Archon of Archons said, “You will put me down.”
King dropped him and then caught him just before he struck the floor.
More leaps and he was standing back at the telescope, watching his tiny brother do nothing while that bizarre sibling climbed closer.
Diamond was facing his father’s killer.
And that was the moment when Prima pulled her shadow across the bridge, finding an empty piece of floor where she could talk and the lieutenant could listen. Everyone else was watching the scene below play out. King watched, and he breathed in great gulps, trying to make sense of what glass and his eyes showed him.
But all that while, he listened with every ear.
Prima said, “If we discover that this is . . . ”
“Yes, madam,” Sondaw said.
“The criminal.”
“Yes.”
“We need options,” she said.
“Of course, madam.”
“I need someone outside the normal lines of command.”
The lieutenant breathed, saying nothing.
“You. I need you. But only if you’re ready to carry out my orders.”
“Madam, of course,” said Sondaw.
And after a moment’s reflection, with the slowest, most careful voice in the room, the young man asked, “What do you want my hands to do?”
The smoke and black ash stood tall, ignoring the wind and the wash of propellers. Twisting currents made the smoke swirl, and from deep inside came a rumbling, low and purposeful and almost too soft to notice. The boy stood on the dead coral. Divers charged up the rugged raw slope, and the soldiers tried to block her route. The papio didn’t want Diamond injured. Bountiful’s gutted belly was scattered across the landscape below, flames dying, survivors moving slowly. Save for a few fingers of stubborn reef, there was nothing beyond the wreckage but air. The morning was staggeringly brilliant. Graceful airships flew under the shaggy green and happy wilderness, and most of the forest was nothing but healthy. Slice away the violence and pain, the stark emotions and dangerous trajectories, and what remained was a lovely picture that a mind could swallow and then cherish for the rest of its days.
Divers threw a massive lump of coral, and one whiffbird dropped and died.
The smoke swirled within itself, and it shrank, growing denser, the rumbling turning into a familiar voice.
“I’m here,” said Quest.
Diamond glanced over his shoulder.
There was no smoke behind him. Particles of coral dust and ash were suspended on a framework of narrow airborne fibers. Quest had eaten bodies and consumed a fat portion of the ship’s stores, and while the fire raged, she discovered that heated corona skins had an appealing flavor, bits of them incorporated into her huge new body. She was vast, she had never larger, and she was still trying to gauge what she could make from these far flung ingredients, and how quickly she could work, and which shape would do the most good.
Divers chopped up two papio with a makeshift sword.
“I’ll help you,” Quest said.
Diamond shifted his weight, saying nothing.
Divers threw a third soldier into the rotor, and she sprinted toward their brother, one hand grabbing at the rising coral while the other brandished that bloodied piece of sharpened bone.
“What are you doing?” their enemy asked.
“Standing like soldier,” said Diamond.
“You should have run,” she said.
“You should run,” Diamond said.
“Your people aren’t close enough to help,” Divers said.
The boy wiped his eyes and dropped his hand again. Divers paused, coming no closer while her eyes lost their focus. Then as their sister reached up with her empty hand, climbing again, Quest yanked every last thread to her center. She gave herself the shape and effortless grace of a jazzing—a black predator with black eyes and a forest of long milky teeth. Except she was far larger than the living jazzings, and louder, and for as long as she screamed, there was no louder voice in the Creation.
Half a day of careful labor and she could produce a beautiful body, larger than Divers and far more powerful.
But she had only moments to work, nothing but rough ingredients to weave into some kind of order.
Divers climbed close enough to swing the broken rotor.
She aimed for Diamond’s narrow neck.
Quest shoved the boy down and absorbed the blow, the sharp edge burrowing into a damp matrix of muck and extra water.
She felt nothing but the nagging pressure.
Divers retrieved her sword with a hard yank, and Quest leaped at her, nothing on those feet but the illusion of claws. She used her mass, and she used surprise, the impact driving their sister off her feet and the rotor from her hand as they tumbled across the jagged ground.
Red blood mixed with sooty water. Divers was extraordinarily strong—far beyond what a mortal jazzing could match. But she struck nothing of importance, and she bit what didn’t matter, and then both of them lay sprawled together in a broad bowl where clay lay beneath trapped rainwater. Divers squirmed until she was on top, one hand holding down what looked like a face while the other hand struck and struck and struck all of the body, searching for any weak point.
A cannon on the nearest fletch fired, the shell impacting beside them.
But before the debris stopped falling, whiffbirds and wings began pummeling that fletch, corona scales scattering like shiny leaves while one of its engines dragged smoke in its wake..
Short of breath, Divers quit striking her enemy.
An idea offered itself, and from a human-style mouth deep inside, Quest shouted to her brother, “Run now. Fast as you can.”
But Diamond had already vanished.
Divers invested a moment laughing at this unexpected puzzle.
“You’re the ghost,” she said.
“My name is,” Quest said.
Divers dipped her head, genuinely intrigued. “Yes?”
And Quest turned back into smoke again. She was huge and dense, and then an instant later she was everywhere and vaporous. The world went black, and Divers was swallowed up by the amorphous twisting flesh. Shock became panic. Divers breathed in reflex, ingesting fibers and charred twists of corona skin, and then her lungs rebelled, a string of brutal coughs striking her like body blows.
And once again, Quest shrank.
Her plan, the inspiration, was to shrivel and compress, smothering her enemy in a dense black blanket. Without breath, Divers would collapse, and by then there would be more soldiers crawling about, probably from both species, and Quest could slip away in the midst of that chaos.
She was proud of her plan, even after it failed.
Compressing and smothering was work, and it took too much time. Divers swung into the pressure and kicked hard and reached out, using memory in place of eyes . . . and getting hold of the rotor, she pivoted and lashed out once more, hard and then harder.
The smoky body began to tear and collapse.
The giant papio body stepped out, filthy red with her own blood, and she swung at a likely point in the blackness, doing nothing. But then she pulled the rotor free, slicing at another angle, and Quest lost track of her half-born body.
Like black sap, she flowed into the bowl with the rainwater.
Divers stood on the shoreline of this living pond, and where she saw movement, she swung hard, each blow making Quest miserable and weaker and more scared.
Nothing in the world was bigger than her fear.
And that was when what was essential inside her climbed free from what was dying, and while Divers hacked and chopped at the black goo, the tiniest shred of her soul raced away on invisible feet.
One scared soldier had dropped his big rifle before fleeing.
Diamond was standing in the little gully when he lifted the weapon with both arms and a knee. He couldn’t outrun Divers, and that’s why he needed to fight. But the rifle was heavy, and it was covered with buttons with important, secret jobs. As an experiment, the boy tugged on the trigger, and nothing happened. So he pushed buttons and tried again, startled when a single round emerged with a sharp crack, and a bullet longer than his longest finger dug its way deep inside the old dead coral.
Soon Divers came hunting for the source of the gunfire.
With a deep breath and some luck, Diamond lifted the gun’s barrel and fired eight quick shots, three rounds piercing his sister’s chest.
She watched him.
The gun was too heavy, and it fell back to where it was happiest, left behind and useless.
Divers lifted her sword, and she stepped closer.
She was wounded, but the flesh was already healing.
“They’re coming,” said Diamond, and he pointed upward.
“Not fast enough,” Divers said.
>
One cannon blast had started a full-scale battle. The fletch was limping away while more fletches arrived. Two whiffbirds collided with each other, and a swift wing was struck by someone’s gunfire, screaming its way past the reef’s edge, twisting down toward the demon floor and whatever lay beyond.
“Where’s Quest?” Diamond asked.
“Is that the ghost’s name?”
The boy nodded.
“I killed her,” said Divers.
“You killed everyone on Marduk too,” said Diamond.
“Hardly,” Divers said. “I said a few words, wishing for your death, and the rest of it happened on its inevitable own.”
She raised the sword higher, aiming with care.
“What are you going to do?” Diamond asked.
“Remove that brain from those little shoulders.”
He stepped back, in reflex.
She stepped closer, laughing at the gesture, or maybe something else. “And then,” she said. “Do you know what I’ll do, brother? I’ll throw that head of yours. Believe me, from this ground, I can toss you into a place where nobody will ever find you again.”
Diamond was ready to drop.
And Divers swung the sword once, aiming high on purpose. There was no time to react, and the blade was past and back over her head before Diamond could think about moving.
He was doomed.
In that doomed head, he made wild little plans for his revenge.
Divers edged closer.
“Stop,” the boy begged.
“When I’m finished,” she said.
Then came a noise at once familiar and strange. The woosh began somewhere close, followed instantly by a solid thunk, wet meat absorbing some terrific momentum.
Divers and Diamond were equally startled.
For no apparent reason, the giant had fallen on her side.
Diamond saw the wound filling with urgent blood and the torn tissues fighting to reassemble themselves, and that long papio face was filled with doubt and a growing horror. Divers was still holding the makeshift sword. She used one end of the blade to dig into her body, widening the hole before it healed and closed.
