He did not rest his guns.
Finally, Jin took Lian into his arms. Her eyes were closed, but he detected her pulse. Weak, erratic, but there.
Her consciousness was drifting someplace he couldn’t touch, but he could save her from this forsaken place at least.
The ship began to vibrate with a deep, powerful rumble, and Jin knew there was no more time.
Lian cradled once again in one strong arm, Jin ran beneath the hole he’d created and leaped up, firing one-handed until his gun tore through the clerestory to the open air above, and him behind it. His leap took the two of them hundreds of metres above Warden’s Stave.
Then, in mid-air and falling Jin took Lian in both arms, his thrusters ignited and he fought the snow-filled sky to blast himself and his friend away from the ship, flying through ice and storm.
Moments later, Warden’s Stave died in green fire and took every abomination inside along with him.
*
54.
Light to See by and Light to Blind
Starboard Aisle/Upper Level
Warden’s Stave
Ulrich and Anna ran headlong into dark corridors and the scuttling and slamming, the scratching of sharp limbs and legs of the insane Mechs followed them, echoing. Ulrich had no idea where they were, and his heart pounded, his hip was on fire, as were his shoulders, his neck, his knees. Age, fitness, and so many injuries over so many years. He pushed through, just like he always had.
Anna was not fit, or fast, and she was ahead of him, wasn’t she?
Come on, you old bastard.
The whole thing might well have turned to shit, but what could he do? He was a leader, and she was in his care. This was combat, fighting. Whatever Anna was, she wasn’t a soldier.
Chittering sounds followed them wherever they ran, along with that horrible wet clanking, like the Mechs dripped blood or ichor from strange mergings which should never have been. Horrors like those Ulrich had seen during the Aug War. Things that should never be melded together, and didn’t want to be.
Still, in the dark, with just that sound and their panicked, panting breath for company, Ulrich wasn’t too proud to admit to himself he was fucking terrified.
They passed lit corridors and dark corridors, and then, Ulrich’s mind still functioning even as his limbs and joints burned, he noticed a pattern. Some corridors lit and flashed as they neared, then, as they passed others, new corridors lit and flashed as they fled. Who else could they be lighting up for, if not for them? The Mechs?
No.
Ulrich slowed, then stopped as their passage split to the right and left. He thought perhaps the right passage led into, and maybe through the Nave, through the engine housings. At this point he was lost.
The lights on the right flashed, and continued flashing.
‘Anna, turn! Follow those lights. Look!’
She slowed, twenty metres or so ahead and tried to rest, panting, hands on her knees. She didn’t have the breath to speak. He didn’t, either, but he wasn’t dead yet, and he wasn’t giving in.
‘Don’t,’ he told her, ‘Keep moving, even slow. There. The flashing lights. That way.’
‘You sure?’ she managed, coughing up something and spitting to one side.
‘No,’ he said. ‘but we’re shit fucked every way, right? The ship’s helping. Guiding.’
‘You think?’
‘Yeah, but...’
That was as much as he could manage, and he coughed, too.
Does it matter, at this point?
He didn’t have the puff to say so, but it was obvious enough.
So they moved on again, slowing, tiring, but hope lent a little strength to both. They followed the lights along corridors, through blast doors, into empty halls and through vast rooms where coruscating white sparks ran along the walls, into other chambers with unknown engines, or machinery, and places with abandoned and discarded parts unwanted by the cannibal Mechs.
The ship – they hoped – led them down, and up, and then further up, until they were continually and steadily ascending by elevator and stairwell toward what could only be Warden’s Stave’s clerestory.
Both breathless, aching and slow, they had only faint hope and flashing lights to go on.
Is what it is, Ulrich figured.
They might well have been in worse shape than Ulrich’d ever known, but one thing, if nothing else, improved – that mad scramble of Mechs following them had quieted, and then some time later it ceased altogether.
A door closed behind them, and another opened ahead.
‘It’s sending us somewhere,’ said Ulrich in the lull.
Anna replied with a worn shrug.
‘How do we know it’s somewhere we want to be?’
‘We don’t, Anna...but what else is there? You think if Warden’s Stave wants us somewhere, we have any way to fight that? I’m damn sure you and I can’t hold off these things with a couple of guns and good intentions.’
Neither brought up Lian or Jin. There was nothing they could do. They could barely help themselves.
The door ahead closed, then opened again. Like the ship was impatient, or just bored of waiting.
‘Come on. Whether the ship’s helping or fucking with us, the best way is on.’
Anna’s head dropped, but she nodded. ‘It’s all we can do.’
How long do we go on though? How much longer can we?
Not long, it seemed.
Mechs burst through walls, through vents, came rolling, or running, or clattering on all manner of limbs, or by levitation, rotors, wheels or tracks.
Fuck, thought Ulrich.
‘Fuck!’ Anna yelled, but her words weren’t an echo, and they were lost anyway because as she shouted her gun was already blazing. She fired quicker than Ulrich had drawn his own pistol. He had two, and then one because his left hand, with two broken fingers, turned stupid and threw the gun from his grip.
Anna was better with her short gun that she had any right to be. She caught enough of the advancing Mechs to slow them, and then Ulrich had his second pistol firm in hand, his left palm only steadying his aim. He let loose with everything he had, and when the pistol failed him he brought his long gun to bear on the Mechs. He and Anna slowly retreated toward the open door at their backs, away from the Mechs, as they emptied everything they had at the horrors.
The long gun, at short range, was powerful enough to blast Mechs into pieces, but the Mechs weren’t firing on them.
They wanted their flesh.
Anna was firm and unflinching beside Ulrich, the tiny gun large in her small hands. She hit as often as he did, but there were far too many, and they weren’t following any kind of logic, other than to overwhelm them – the Mechs took no cover, showed no sign of slowing – more like wild things than things driven by any kind of intellect.
Anna screamed at them, then threw her pistol. ‘I’m out. I’m...’
Warden’s Stave’s voice roared through the din of their small battle, as though through the walls themselves, and even the Mechs paused, perhaps in awe, or just dumb confusion.
‘Destruction in one minute and counting. Please evacuate. The path is open.’
‘FUCK!’
Ulrich had been stunned, too, forgetting to fire. He pulled the trigger, rifle at his hip now, but it had run dry, too.
He flung it aside, swearing again, and he and Anna gripped each other’s hand tight.
‘Run,’ she said.
That sounded like a great idea.
The lights went out, the power went out, and the doors were open all along a path that wasn’t on any map of an ancient church, but a walkway purposely added on between Warden’s Stave and what lay at the end of their journey.
Citadel, he’d called it.
The Mechs and lower, beastly robots barely evolved from automatons threw themselves over each other, pursuing Ulrich and Anna as they ran staggering on weak legs well past done.
If it came to it, Anna had fought beside him all
the way. Ulrich decided he would stand between them and her and give her time to flee, if he could. He’d skirted around death so long, surely it was time. It was best this way.
‘Nineteen...eighteen...’
The ship’s countdown was deafening throughout the tight hall leading to Citadel, and the Mech’s chasing still didn’t open fire, but they were closer by the second.
The idea of being torn apart didn’t appeal, but he was ready. He slowed, just a little, so Anna couldn’t do anything stupid like stop right along with him and kill them both.
Ulrich decided to trust in Warden’s Stave, and skidded, turning to face the Mechs. She would live.
And as he stopped, the Mechs must have decided a dead body was better than no body. Base intellect, some kind of instinct, told the Mechs that their prey were about to slip from their reach.
One fired and a projectile clipped Anna’s head. She stumbled along, on her way down and out.
Ulrich didn’t question himself, didn’t hesitate. Sacrificing his life for hers wasn’t an option if she couldn’t run. Already, she’d staggered to one side, leaning against the passage wall. More Mechs fired on them.
Now or never.
Ulrich ran again, head down, and snatched Anna around the waist before she could fall to the floor and threw her up and over his shoulder while he moved. None of his old bones snapped, and with a last, desperate effort he and Anna tumbled through the last door and found...
Silence.
From noise, and panic, they’d rolled from the ship at their backs to some perfect haven of still and calm, some wonderful idyll.
Behind, Warden’s Stave exploded into insane shades of green fire and the ship was gone. Ulrich stared back, expecting to see some kind of cloud – rock and dirt, or a wave of fire, or a black mushroom rising into the dim daylight of the snow planet, but whatever energy the Shields of the Kind used, it was not nuclear, or fossil, or anything he understood.
Warden’s Stave didn’t leave any sign he’d ever been. All that remained to indicate anything had lain out there atop the rocky surface and ancient ice was a vast crater of black stone and a hovering cloud of dirt.
It was as though the whole ship had been removed from the landscape and existence itself, gone like a bite from a piece of cake.
Ulrich closed his eyes – even behind what must surely be some kind of field a million times more powerful in magnitude than Jin’s, Warden’s Stave’s death, magnificent and somehow fitting, had been blinding bright and hurt his eye. He groaned, rubbed at his remaining orb until the dancing spot of light etched on his retina faded.
When he opened his eyes once more, for a moment he thought it was the remembrance of Warden’s Stave’s final act that he saw, still, but he blinked, and blinked again, and then he remembered why he’d thought of Warden’s Stave as a limb.
Because the ship had been but a limb, but something as great as the ship surely had to then be attached to something miraculous.
It had been.
He’d found the core, and Citadel.
*
PART SIX
...it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
-
Frederick Douglass
KIND
55.
Anna Wakes Again
Got to have something to hold onto, Anna’s father had said. Then, he’d died, and she’d been on the streets, just another homeless child starving and bathing in filthy, deadly rain.
She had nothing to hold onto, because he’d gone and got killed, hadn’t he?
Inside her sarcophagus, her egg-tomb, she’d had a tooth.
She gave that tooth away, and someone gave her a present. Something to hold onto. Something of her own.
Cassie Kiyobashi.
Groaning in Ulrich’s arms, Anna clutched her left hand, and her right, but the gun was gone.
She remembered an octopus sculpted from ice (Sculptor of Octopi, she thought) and Cassie showing Anna how to fire that gun.
I never fought before, she’d told Cassie.
Why are you here, Anna? Why on Hush at all?
Better than where I was, Anna said.
She’d fired the gun, hadn’t she? Shot them down.
Mechs.
Anna felt something fall into her hand, in a dream, or in real life, she didn’t know, but when her eyes fluttered open she found she was holding onto something – the rough, scarred, thick-knuckled hand of the soldier.
Ulrich Bale.
‘You saved my life.’
‘Kind of...’ said Ulrich. ‘But Warden’s Stave was part of that, too.’
Anna reached up and found a sore, scorched wound on her scalp.
‘Fuckers shot me.’
‘Yes. Yes, they did,’ said Ulrich, and his old face wrinkled up into a smile.
‘You stuck around,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’
‘You want to get up?’
‘Is it safe?’
‘Maybe. Up?’
‘Not really.’
‘Come on,’ he said, and Ulrich helped Anna to her feet and steadied her.
‘They didn’t follow us?’
‘They couldn’t,’ said Ulrich. ‘Everything’s gone. Warden’s Stave took them all.’
‘What about Lian? Jin?’
Ulrich shook his head, and she thought perhaps she saw the first sign of new sadness atop the old ones which Ulrich always wore like armour.
Anna tried to move, and winced. Her legs were rubbery, and didn’t want to play.
‘Slow down,’ said Ulrich. ‘You took a hit.’
‘Woah,’ she said. She tried to focus on something other than Ulrich, but doing so set everything spinning. She turned her head aside from Ulrich just in time to save him from the bile she wretched out. That brought tears to her eyes. Woke her up some, too.
‘Ug. Wait...maybe safe?’
‘I think she should probably take that one,’ said Ulrich and turned Anna gently around in a half circle. ‘Anna...this is Citadel.’
*
56.
Citadel
Citadel
Upper Plaza
Anna and Ulrich were in a central chamber high and full of artificial light entirely enclosed within a dome of pure energy. The dome emitted a faint, pale blue light, and was translucent but unmistakably there – the weather outside the dome covered it in constant snowfall, and though the snow slid down from the apex of the dome it only remained clear for moments before the snow blanked out the sky once more.
They found themselves in a space, a dwelling or at least an organised structure, that was clearly more than they could see around them, because corridors and pathways led this way and that all over and around the odd plaza they had entered. No plant life, or any indication this place was used for anything, and yet, it was stunning. Plain steel and the planet’s rock, a river of meltwater running from some place beneath the ships, so that the plaza was surrounded by the planet, but part of it, too. It felt like a distinctly alien structure, but it wasn’t alien in any sense Anna might have imagined it. It wasn’t human, though.
And yet, Anna saw all those things in no more than a stolen glance.
The Avatar known as Citadel was of obvious human origin, and like the plaza it was both something and not. Real and unreal, the possible and the impossible become as one.
She – Citadel – was a giant sending, a holographic conjuring, which stood before the two of them.
A Titan, but not the same as Jin. She was a being of vast, accentuated proportions but with an undeniable beauty, too. She shone from some place within, as though the core of the hologram inside her was a separate entity. Where Jin had no features, this sending was clearly female in the form of her body, and her features – expressive and full...and smiling.
‘You are most welcome to Citadel, Anna of Earth. We see you very well.’
Anna glanced to Ulrich, but Ulrich shru
gged. ‘Knock yourself out,’ he said. ‘Not literally, but you know. It’s your show.’
Anna reached up and touched the spot on her head where something had struck her. Her hair was missing anyway, but the scalp, her scars, her flesh, seemed the same as always.
Did I knock myself silly someplace?
‘What are you?’ she asked.
‘We are a joining,’ said the Avatar Citadel. Her smile wasn’t condescending, but warm, almost maternal.
‘What do you want with us? You let us in here? Or Warden’s Stave?’
‘Warden’s Stave is part of us, and we were part of him. It is a terrible loss to us. We cannot be replenished, and we are lessened for his sacrifice.’
‘His sacrifice?’
‘He ailed, and your enemy and ours was the author of his death. She saw to that.’
‘Hush,’ said Anna. ‘What does she want? Do you know?’
Ulrich rarely rested, and even now, after so long running and fighting, he paced. Anna had barely ever seen the old warrior stand still.
Citadel gracefully bowed her head.
‘Yes, Anna. We know. She wants what we have. Hush is intelligent, but she lacks innovation. That spark of the humanity. Soul. Originality. Art. There is science in art and the opposite is surely true, no? Creation itself...is that not art?’
‘I’m sure we appreciate you saving us, and, you know...thank you. But, what?’ Anna sighed. ‘Can you help? Can stop her...give us...’
She couldn’t finish that sentence, though, because the simple fact was there was no right or wrong way from here and nothing she could ask for. What did she and Ulrich want? What was there for them now? Had she been expecting a hot meal and a nice warm bed? What did their wishes have to do with anything that had happened since they woke?
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