Dusk

by Ashanti Luke

  The orange light seemed to turn Cyrus’s eyes blood-red as he turned to face Jang again. Cyrus’s lips shifted under the shallow curls of his beard and Jang realized he was rambling. “The short of it is, if the avatar is modified the way I think it is, if we run some subroutines to get the Xerxes to access the Agamemnon database, we could get Darius to help us put the pieces together in ways that we never could. You know, because stubborn and closed-minded were algorithms we had to fake, they aren’t inherent in the program, and therefore don’t restrict it like they do us. So I think, if I’m right that is, this might be the only way to save these people before the Echelon comes see us.” Doree, finished with her weaving, looked over at them as she placed the cloth in her bin as Jang added, “And honestly, I’m starting to like it here.”

  The crimson tint seemed to wane from Cyrus’s eyes, but he only managed to nod. Jang nodded back, and then hopped off the mound, trailing his lab coat behind him like a cape as he moved toward Doree. As he secured his coat by the lapels, Jang turned back to Cyrus, brushed his hair to the side, and smiled, “You did save us all that day, more than once.” He then turned and raised his shoulders up as he walked out of the shade and into Doree’s embrace.

  Before Doree and Jang could retreat to the shadows, Cyrus called out, “Notify the elders. I think you may have found our distraction.” Jang stopped, not sure that his idea had even been a plan, but Cyrus continued, his spirit lifting as he spoke, “We train for one Dhekad, then we mobilize. Get to work on phreaking the comm-sat system, stat. I need to contact our friend Denali.”

  Torus Balfour Denali stood addressing his two Hexads and four Pentangles at the conference table. He had begun by speaking on the recent rash of Apostate attacks and on how a high alert had been issued from the Prolocutor himself. He himself knew that the Echelon would be called in to handle any large-scale offensive, but he could not mention them in this meeting because the existence of the Echelon was classified to anyone with less than six vertices.

  The Apostates had become so bold as to attack Echelon units directly over the last Dhekads, and it seemed that some other attack was imminent. Denali also briefed them on what they had learned of the escape that had taken place on the Advent. Apparently, they had been mistaken, and the men who had escaped actually had been a team of scientists from Earth. He had kept his men in the dark because, even though they had not experienced much combat, the fact that they had been totally defeated by eight scientists who had little, if any, military training, would have sent their already waffling morale through the baseboards.

  He spoke of the Apostates’ tactics and how his advisors thought the Apostates might find a way to attack Druvidia, which Denali believed was nonsense because he was privy to information that was classified to even higher vertices—the Apostates were all infected by a disease that meant extended lack of sunlight would be deadly to them. So, the information passed down to him through this highly dubious Prolocutor was either deliberate misinformation, or evidence that even the great and elusive Echelon had no idea what was coming down the cable.

  Denali had just regained the ability to speak without pain a Dhekad ago. Most of the damage from Cyrus’s unorthodox attack had healed, but his voice still crackled after long speeches as his vocal cords had grown weak in the day cycles he had not been allowed to speak. He stood to point out a possible location of the Apostates base of operation on a hologram of Asha above the conference table, but he was stopped as the door slid open.

  “Torus Denali, there’s a holo-sat transmission for you. It is has a six-vertex caption.” Denali looked at the others in the room and did not need to speak. The Pentangles all stood simultaneously, dipped their heads slightly as they crisply placed their hands over their hearts, and then lifted their heads just as sharply before they walked through the door. Denali nodded at the Quadrad that had delivered the message, and as he too left the room, he could be heard radioing the message to the dispatcher.

  Denali sat, and a hologram appeared on the table in front of him that made his blood stop in his veins. On the table in front of him stood Dr. Cyrus Tiberius Chamberlain, the eminent astrophysicist from Earth who staged an escape by setting a room on fire and hanging from a dais by his very own neck.

  “How are you gentlemen?” he said. The greenish tint in his skin, indicative of the disease that afflicted the Apostates, was clear even in the grainy holo-sat signal.

  “What do you want?” Denali asked, reclining in his chair. The Hexads seemed as flustered as Denali, who felt this very transmission, despite what Cyrus had to say, was insulting.

  “Forgive me for being rude. How is your neck?” Denali grumbled and inadvertently brushed his hand across his throat, but before he could respond, Cyrus continued, “I have been assured that your men cannot trace this holostream, but as I do not have time to tarry, I will be brief.” Chamberlain folded his arms in the image and focused on Denali.

  “Get to your druthers Chamberlain so I can tend my business.”

  “For starters, that name is no longer welcome to you. You and your monkey-boys can relate to me as the Knight of Wands,” the image of a knight on a horse wielding a flaming staff appeared, obscuring Cyrus. The knight reared back on the horse as he spun the flaming staff over his head in a glowing blur. “I am the father of the Knight of Swords and the vanguard of the Children of Set.”

  “Spare me the soliloquy, you...”

  “Continue to test patience and I will continue to test your ears. I have but one demand—return to me the body of my murdered colleague from your necropolis.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I will set something on fire,” the knight on the horse appeared again and pointed his flaming staff at Denali, “and I guarantee it will be something that you will miss.”

  The knight waved his staff and flames erupted around him on the table until his image was obscured. Cyrus’s voice persisted through the room. “Bring Dr. Villichez to the J.L. Orbital at precisely the fourth hour of the twelfth DC Ketomuriox, or I shall test more than your tolerance for oration.”

  Denali yelled that no one made demands of him, but the feebleness of his retort became clear as the flame on the table faded into nothingness.

  “What should we do,” Hexad Thule asked, obviously trying to help Denali regain the dignity his outburst had drained.

  Denali breathed heavily to himself as he massaged his throat again and then spoke almost to himself, “We will do as he asks,” he almost stopped there, but the need to reassert himself overwhelmed his tongue, “and we will wait for him to make a mistake.”

  twenty-five

  • • • • •

  —Dada, you ever wish you had another child?

  —Well, the Uni prohibits it in population controlled areas.

  —I don’t mean another one like a second, I mean like instead of me.

  —No Dari, why would I wish something like that?

  —I dunno. Sometimes it seems like I give you and mommy such a hard time. And sometimes mommy seems sad. Like sometimes she doesn’t have anyone to talk to like you and me talk. Maybe if I had been a girl…

  —No Dari, I definitely do not want another child. Both your mother and I love you very much and would never trade you for anything.

  —I dunno Dada. I want to be good. I mean I never really want to be bad, but it’s hard sometimes. Like school is so frustrating, and I try to deal, but before I know it, I’m getting yelled at again.

  —I think that’s a part of life, Dari. We all have our roles. I have to let you try and figure things out on your own, but when you do make bad choices, your mom and I have to be there to reset your kilter. If it didn’t work that way, no one would ever grow.

  —So you’re saying that me being a clown fish sometimes helps you grow too.

  —Exactly. There are things you come up with that I never could imagine, and sometimes it’s good stuff, sometimes it’s absolutely bunkus, but it’s always challenging. It’s stepping u
p to the challenge that makes us grow, whether we want to or not. But I would never wish you were something that you were not. I only want you to be the best youyou can be. But sometimes, whether you realize it or not, I do understand you, and I sympathize, but we all need someone to get our butts on the lev sometimes.

  —You never need anyone to get your butt on the lev.

  —I think your mother would beg to differ, but I do have someone who gets me on the lev even when I don’t want to.

  —Who’s that, mommy?

  —You.

  —But how Dada? I never make you do anything.

  —Believe me, because of you I have done many more things I should have done, but wouldn’t have.

  —Well, hopefully there will come a day where you won’t have to.

  —I hope not. I like doing those things. You make me a better man. From now until the end of days, for you I would walk to Hell in a propylene undersuit, walk right up to the devil himself, slap him in his face, and then stand there and wait for his reaction.

  —Ha. That’s funny Dada, but I hope it never comes to that.

  —Even if it did, Dari, I wouldn’t regret one nanosecond.

  • • • • •

  There was a ringing in Cyrus’s ears that no amount of yawning could remedy. At first, he had thought it was the field created by the z-drive on the lev, but these gravity wave levs didn’t create the same fields as the ones on Earth, and even his sensitive ears should not have been able to pick it up. This was something else—something from within. The more he thought about it, the more he understood. All the dire situations he had experienced here on Asha, and the handful he had been confronted with on Earth, had all been brought to him. Some of those situations might have had more diplomatic solutions, but each of them had, in some way, been constructed by others. But today he was initiating contact. He was bringing his fight to their lobby. And these were not just Flying Monkeys. It wouldn’t just be reservists and volunteers ordered to hold their fire. There would be highly trained, methodical jobbers who had given up their own society for the power that training and method afforded them—and they would kill to maintain that power.

  Men were going to die today. And they would die from Cyrus’s own initiative. The need to turn around, to order the whole thing off, arrested him, but he shrugged it off. The deaths would be hard to stomach, as they should be, but one thing the escape had taught him is that it would be a much easier supplement to swallow if the men that died were not his own. Whatever was going on here was bigger than any of them. It was bigger than the Echelon, the Ashans, and—perish the thought—even his own son. If the Ashan pyramid and the underground city were truly built by some civilization more than a half-million years ago, it could even be larger than all of humanity. And if a handful of megalomaniacal men, for their own sordid purposes, sought to inveigle an idea that affected all of humanity at the expense of human life, those men needed to die. It was a grim truth to embrace, but it was a truth nonetheless. If things went as planned, that truth would not have to be realized. But Cyrus did not have to live an Eos-life to be old enough to know that the best laid plans of mice and men often went worse than awry when lives were on the betting table. He tried to push all this to the back of his mind, but it settled in like a mag-lock bolt. But soon enough, the gooseflesh, the jitters, and the lip-biting would give way to survival instincts, martial training, and field tactics, and at the end of it all, they would be successful, or success would no longer be an issue. That ephemeral comfort had been enough to keep him looking toward the darkening sky that reached out to him from the end of the thinning atmosphere. He just prayed everyone else had found the same pause.

  Jang could see all the ships moving on various partitions of the holomonitor from his deck. There were three individual holoscreens around him. It was like Conquest on galvacet, and the idea, as nerve-wracking as it should have been, exhilarated Jang to the point where his fingers quivered with excitement.

  And then, the last of the eight ships was in place. There was no need for silence in their current position, but he needed to get used to it, so he subvocalized anyway, “The chicken’s in the bread pan peckin’ out dough.” Jang wasn’t even sure what the code meant, but Cyrus said it had something to do with some ancient music sphere. It was almost guaranteed that even if his countermeasures did not spoof the Echelon’s broadband scanner, no one on Asha would know the line meant that everyone was in place, and now was the time to commence their individual orders. He found himself oddly comfortable in this space that was barely large enough to house him with all the decks and monitoring equipment. But nestled inside the secret compartment in Cyrus’s ship was the best place he could be to communicate to everyone. Using the Echelon’s own communications system would be easier at the source, and it would generate less notice from anyone who happened to see the bandwidth he was using. Somehow, knowing that made sitting in a compartment the size of a lav stall much more palatable, even though it made his toes numb. Then Jang forgot about his toes and his own anticipation began to rise as he felt the slight shift as the craft he sat in lifted from the ground and began on its way.

  Cyndyl watched the ground beneath them pass by in waves. She had seen the interiors of the cities a few times, and each time she was overwhelmed by the ominous sprawls of buildings and drab constructs and the grav-levs that moved in long lines that wove between them like lasers. All the sights, the artificially lit aves, the monstrous domes that robbed the cities denizens of the glory of the sun, were, to her, abominations. Being born in the sunlight of Avalon, she could barely believe the stories she had heard of human fetuses reared in manufactured amniotic sacs, of people passing their entire lives without ever feeling the unfiltered rays of the sun, and of the innumerable dead, logged and filed in droves in the stagnant necropolis, waiting without dignity to be recycled into nutrients for the artificial soil of the common fields. The very thought of it, as Ashan dunes rose and fell beneath them, filled her throat with a slight twinge of bile.

  She had never been sent to apportion a bier ship before. There was something slightly dubious about the nature of their mission, but to her, as they sped on their course to intercept the ship carrying the body of a man the Knight of Wands called Doctor Villichez, this mission was payment of overdue respects to the dead. And as the target blip appeared on the holographic imager, Cyndyl gave the command to activate Taewook of Cup’s signal scrambler. In a few moments, they would spare the body of Knight of Wands’s colleague from an unnatural fate, and they would set the plan in motion that would save the Knight of Wands himself.

  Cyrus spun the craft around and backed it into the docking moor. When he did finally leave this Orbital, it would most likely be in a hurry, and having to rotate the lev on its z would only be a waste of time—time they might not have. As the ship rested against the moor, Cyrus heard Jang’s voice mimicked by the network computer, “Setting the spoofs now. I’ll be in the entire system in ten minutes.”

  Cyrus thought about telling Jang not to rush. He did not realize that the subvocalizing unit picked up even unintentional signals until Jang responded, “This is like trying to get into a whore’s pants. All you need is the right assets.”

  “Cut the chatter, monkey boys,” came through Cyrus’s earwig in Uzziah’s voice as Cyrus stepped out of the ship to face four armed Eurydician soldiers in vacuum gear.

  “Welcome back, beta-hound,” one of them said over the speaker in his suit, and even through the distortion lent by the face shield, and the gain on the amplifier, Cyrus recognized the last voice he had heard on his first trip to the Orbital.

  Cyrus was a little surprised by the familiar voice that made the blood vessels in the back of his head throb in remembrance, but he should have expected it. What he had no reason to expect, after they had searched him and he had been led—with more respect this time—into the hallway adjacent to the docking bay, was Dr. Winberg, dressed in full Eurydician regalia. He wore a pendant of a hexagon o
n his chest above a name plate and a number, which must have been chosen by him, 24601—the prisoner that had somehow become a hero.

  “I trust your landing this time was much more… pleasant,” his lips formed his trademark smirk as he offered his gloved hand to Cyrus.

  Cyrus shook his hand reservedly, hoping his reservations would be perceived as confusion rather than distrust, especially since he did not know which emotion held the most sway over his reaction.

  Cyrus nodded and then waited to see where they were leading him. He knew the bier ship would not arrive for another half-hour, but they could not have known he knew, and he was interested to see how they would stall him. Two men walked before them, and two men afterward, but they seemed to defer to Winberg. They led Cyrus to an observation deck overlooking the sun. The windows of the deck were tinted to protect against the direct light from Set, but even through the tint, the rays of sun on his face felt like the long missed touch of someone dear. As they approached the glass, Winberg waved his hand, and their escorts stopped behind the line where the tiled floor ended and carpet began.

  Winberg pantomimed a gesture, the men took three more steps back, and then Winberg led Cyrus to the edge of the glass. “Beautiful isn’t it?”