by John Meaney
‘What are you?’ Tannier’s face was blanching. ‘I don’t know your species.’
But he was staring at Roger, not the Zajinets. And he was controlling the surrounding inbuilt weapon systems currently focused this way.
‘It’s me,’ said Roger. ‘I’m no alien.’
Tannier shook his head, as if trying to shut out noise.
He thinks I’m an enemy.
‘Tannier, I’m your fr—’
Golden fire spat, coruscating across the quickglass walls. Then Rhianna flowed past Roger, whipping the heel of her palm against the side of Tannier’s jaw – he had not seen her approach – and the knockout was immediate. He did not fall, but his brain had short-circuited – out on his feet – and that gave Rhianna the opportunity to take hold of his head between both hands and say: ‘Relax.’
Already out of it, his mind dropped into a type of trance, as Rhianna continued, soft-voiced, to tell him to soften his muscles and let go.
‘And when you awaken you’ll see and hear everything that’s around you so do it now!’
She snapped her fingers.
‘What did you–?’ Tannier turned fast, locking his gaze on Roger. ‘Shit, you wouldn’t believe what I just saw.’
‘I bet I would,’ said Roger. ‘Keep sharp, because that bitch Helsen can mess with anybody’s mind.’
But the walls were melting open at two points in the room, some sixty degrees apart, seen from his position near the centre.
Rhianna’s gown had become jumpsuit and cloak. She whipped up the cloak as a white collimated beam of smartions tore at her, smashing apart on the shield her cloak had formed. Tannier gestured, causing a smartmiasma to propel itself from the walls and ripple through the air, heading for the man who had fired on them.
Which meant the other attacker had to be—
Helsen.
The nearest Zajinet was writhing and flaring, while the other two floated back, distancing themselves. Roger raised his fist, tu-ring pulsing.
Now.
Helsen’s face was a snarling mask surrounded by twisting darkness, and she was clearly about to attack but he had no idea how. A pre-emptive strike was his only chance.
His ringware attacked on two fronts, launching subversive infiltration against every piece of smart-tech Helsen wore, carried on her person or held inside her body, while direct control of D-2’s quickglass caused the walls to spit out a cloud of smartatomic needles. On a timescale of femtoseconds Helsen was fighting back; but the floor rose up around her, swirling, because Roger had intuitive, cerebellum-mediated control of the quickglass itself: he could move it as if it were his body.
Even that might not have been enough, were it not for the shrieks of public alarms, and Tannier’s grin. Whatever comms interference Helsen and Ranulph had put in place, Tannier had bypassed it. Perhaps they had failed to realize he was senior law enforcement with appropriate authorization; or perhaps they had counted on the mind-altering trance to keep him out of the fight.
Darkness whirled around Helsen. And something more, involving sparks of sapphire blue.
No.
Roger glanced back at the Zajinet, now thrashing against invisible bonds.
‘Stop her!’ he shouted to the other two Zajinets. ‘Don’t let her leave!’
They might not emit sound, but they could either hear it or process the neural patterns involved in speech production. Blue light ran along their quivering forms.
You think you can teleport away?
‘Fuck you, Helsen.’
He pulled away his smartlenses and let his inductive energies rip, tearing across the room. When his vision returned, smoke billowed from the place where Helsen had stood, but there was no stench of burning meat.
Shit.
She was gone but – he spun to check – the scarlet Zajinet remained, dimmed yet pulsing, free of whatever bonds had trapped it. Perhaps Helsen had tapped the Zajinet’s ability to transport itself along the realspace hyperdimensions, using it to teleport herself away from here; but she had failed to kill it.
Or she didn’t want it dead.
Rhianna and Tannier were fighting smartmiasmas that appeared to be closing in, both of them too busy to see Greg Ranulph stalking closer, ready to attack with primal violence while they focused on the high-tech battle. Ranulph’s teeth showed, lips pulling back as he neared his targets.
‘Ek em Ulfr-inn,’ said Roger.
And felt the blood-rage upon him.
When he snapped out of it, the world pulsed away then back, regaining focus as his arms and shoulders shook. At his feet lay seven unconscious men in dark-blue body armour – where had they come from? – while behind him, bloodied meat streaked the floor. Ranulph’s head was off to one side, tongue lolling and torn arteries leaking the last of its blood, its eyes swollen in death-fear, separated from the butchered torso and limbs.
Rhianna and Tannier looked ashen. Some two dozen armoured officers crouched near the walls, visors hiding their features, gauntlets raised to propel smartmiasmas at him.
‘I’m … all right,’ he said.
Quickglass and gore dripped from his hands. He did not remember security officers arriving. He did not remember death and blood.
That wasn’t me.
All three Zajinets were pulsing in time, forcing their words into everyone’s awareness.
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Slowly, the officers straightened up. One of them dissolved her visor, stared at Roger, then turned to Tannier. ‘You sounded the alert, Captain.’
‘Yes, and he’ – Tannier pointed at Roger – ‘saved us, the Zajinets as well as Rhianna Chiang here. And me.’
Roger, still trembling, spoke as if freezing: ‘H-Helsen is gone.’
The officer in charge, her face hardening, looked at him.
‘She’s the suspect responsible for this?’
‘Yes,’ said Tannier.
Opacity covered the officer’s eyes, then her smartlenses cleared.
‘City-wide lookout, here and Deltaville both,’ she said.
‘Good,’ said Tannier. ‘I hope your people are all right, Lieutenant.’
‘They will be.’
The others were still focused on Roger, but the lieutenant in charge walked over to Rhianna, and stared at her now-revealed obsidian eyes.
‘Pleased to meet you, Ms Chiang,’ she said. ‘You look a little different from your usual public appearance.’
‘You know how it is,’ said Rhianna. ‘Can’t stay in party best all day long.’
‘Hmm.’
The lieutenant stopped in front of Roger. ‘So. Pilot.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he told her.
Some of the supine officers were stirring.
‘You saved your worst for the terrorist,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, you’d not be standing there.’
He nodded.
‘Interesting lives you celebrities lead,’ she added.
‘I’m not famous,’ said Roger.
‘You are now. In certain circles, anyway.’
FORTY-ONE
EARTH, 778 AD
Waves smashed against rocks, down below to Ulfr’s right. Wind rippled across the promontory’s grasses. The salty ozone smell heightened his awareness as he turned, looking for his enemy, ignoring the troll-spirit that glimmered in the air beside him.
‘Where is this place?’
He spoke but did not care about the words. Finding Stígr was the thing.
No ravens.
Those same dread notes sounded in sequence, their origin far off, yet he could not tell their direction. In the distance, the tall stone building stood but did not call to him. Stígr was somewhere else. Inside the crystal point of Ulfr’s spear, the enclosed rune continued to shine red.
There.
Beyond a rolling hill, he had glimpsed what might have been a shapeless hat, and perhaps t
he top of a walking-staff. Instead of following, Roger walked off to one side, looking for a better perspective.
‘There’s a cottage, I think.’
Some kind of shelter anyhow, its inhabitants waiting to be betrayed and destroyed by this word-twisting, soul-knotting bastard of a poet.
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The troll had yet to speak clearly, but this seemed a call to action.
‘Yes,’ said Roger.
Spear horizontal at his thigh, he loped forward, reached the top of a low hill – Stígr was making for a round cottage, for sure – and ran downslope. He sped up at the lowest point of the dip and pounded up the next gradient, while the troll-spirit floated along, keeping pace. Could it not just appear in front of Stígr? Perhaps the journey carrying him, Ulfr, had exhausted the troll.
Then it stopped, hanging in place as if afraid to advance.
Thórr’s balls, you coward.
Ulfr ran on.
Cresting the final rise, he saw Stígr pause, glance back from the cottage entrance, then duck inside. This was the time for Stígr to die, remembering Eira and Jarl and everybody else he had betrayed and killed with twisted words, causing others to deliver the blows.
In heartbeats, Ulfr was at the entrance, ready to plunge in.
Shit.
There was no sign of weaponry, but Stígr would be in a defensive position, so Ulfr threw himself inside, yelling, leaping deep into the darkened space – no, there was a source of light – and spinning to see Stígr drawn back against one wall, lit by the blue glow from the other side of the cottage, from a thing glowing like sapphire but stained here and there with blackness. Bound by the darkness, held in place.
Troll-spirit.
Not the one that had brought Ulfr here, but the one that – it was obvious now – had borne Stígr from place to place with its sorcery. Even now, Stígr grinned as darkness-within-shadow curled around him, and sapphire sparks twinkled as the air itself revolved.
‘No!’
Twice before, Ulfr had launched an attack as Stígr was disappearing by sorcery, but this time the source of the magic was right here, and Ulfr yelled as he whirled and stabbed deep into the troll-spirit with his spear, the rune blazing scarlet as he struck, and a massive crash or perhaps Thórr’s hammer flattened him, making the world go black.
It might have been a handful of heartbeats later when he pushed himself upright on the damp, mossy floor. Neither Stígr nor the captive troll-spirit were there. The cottage interior was in shadow. Though his spear lay intact, its point was quiescent, the rune invisible.
He crawled out of the cottage, every muscle sore.
‘You.’
The scarlet troll-spirit hung there, darkened in places. Perhaps it had fought a battle of its own, holding off the darkness that was powerful enough to imprison a fellow troll-spirit and make use of it.
‘I killed your … friend.’
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Finally, a clear response. Whether it felt anger, he could not tell.
‘I’m sorry.’
No further words came. Perhaps it mourned its dead comrade. Perhaps – Ulfr felt this insight come upon him – the troll-spirit’s death had been a release from torture, as Jarl’s death had been. Or perhaps that was a self-serving delusion with no meaning for the troll-spirit that survived.
‘Did it – your friend – transport Stígr away from here?’
For a moment, it shone in silence, then:
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Ulfr snapped back to awareness, looking in every direction, all pain forgotten.
‘He’s here still?’
The troll-spirit bobbed, then rose to a level higher than the cottage roof before descending to hang level with Ulfr.
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So it meant to carry him to Stígr’s side while it still could.
‘Yes.’ He transferred the spear to his left hand, and drew out his sword. ‘Yes.’
His name in Runic adorned the blade, soon to be drenched with the poet’s blood.
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Halfway through the swirling, Ulfr knew that he had misunderstood the troll’s words, or perhaps he felt the enormous distance that the sorcerous spell reached across; but though he tried to yell, no muscle could move until the magic’s work was done.
Damn you!
Then he fell onto high ground once more, to the place he had enjoyed so much before Eira’s decision to step into space, and death.
‘Damn you.’
He was back on Heimdall’s Point, and the wounded troll-spirit was rotating out of sight. Ulfr’s home, his village, lay below.
Stígr leaned against his staff, sobbing. His cloak was torn, and damp shit caked his inner thighs. Even his ravens had deserted him.
‘Ho, stranger!’
The words were not of the Tongue, yet close enough that he knew their meaning.
‘Wounded, are ye?’
He tried to nod, but his head drooped, neck muscles softening, and he could not raise it again.
‘Come, brethren. We carry him.’
Men in rough robes congregated around him, crouching to take hold. Then Stígr found himself being raised, his eye turned to the sky, glimpsing shaven tonsures on the heads of those who held him.
The other children, laughing.
It was a memory of childhood celebration, being tossed in the air before the feasting, long before the darkness came to rule him. Now, he saw the bobbing sky, caught an upsidedown glimpse of a great stone building – his destination? – then old memories and new pain became too much and he let go, tears in his single eye, burning in the scarred socket as he fell into void.
FORTY-TWO
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
The reports said that Admiral Asai had passed away during his sleep, of natural (but unspecified) causes. Max, Pavel, Clayton and Clara, sitting around a flowmetal table in an off-the-grid safehouse, had a different view of the news.
‘They’re beginning to move openly,’ said Pavel.
‘Clearly.’ Max reopened a 3-D graph, a globular web of arcs and nodes. ‘That bastard Schenck has revealed himself. You think this is all of his inner circle?’
‘You’ve been observing them for longer than we have.’
‘Then I think we’ve got them identified, and most of the next layer out. Beyond that, we’re still struggling.’
No one had tackled the most important question.
‘Are they really secessionists?’ Clara meant seceding from realspace. ‘This darkness phenomenon seems a bit … metaphysical, or something. But Schenck’s not just after power, is he? It’s his long-term vision that worries me, because I’ve no idea what it is.’
‘I wouldn’t overestimate him,’ said Clayton. ‘Just another sociopathic political type.’
‘Who’s already got as much power as you can achieve in the current system.’ Pavel was staring at Max’s graph. ‘Clara’s right. What direction would he take Labyrinth in if we let him take over?’
Max closed down the holo once more.
‘I’ve got a suggestion.’
‘What’s that?’ said Pavel.
‘Let’s not find out. Let’s shut down Schenck while his plans are still inside his head, and nowhere else.’
‘You’ve got my vote,’ said Clayton.
No one pointed out that this was no democracy.
‘All right,’ said Clara. ‘I’m going to bring it out into the open. We’ve all been worrying about it, I’m sure.’
Clayton said, ‘Analysing, not worryi
ng.’
‘If they’ve taken out Admiral Asai, do they know about us? Do they know who we are?’
‘We’re still here,’ said Pavel. ‘That’s a good sign.’
‘Can we counterattack?’ asked Clayton. ‘Besides assassinating Schenck, which he’ll be taking precautions against in any case, how do we stop them?’
Max was regarding Clara.
‘Is Schenck associated with secessionist philosophy in most people’s minds, would you say?’
‘Er … Those who follow politics, yes.’
‘Hmm. I’m pretty sure you’re right.’ Max looked at her, then Pavel. ‘In which case, a little information campaign might be in order. If we leave realspace, it’s not just that humanity will do business with the Zajinets. Scientists created us once, and they can do it again. A shortcut might include capturing some of us, perhaps with a bit of vivisection thrown in.’
Clayton’s scowl signalled dislike of such an indirect response.
‘I do have an additional idea,’ Max went on. ‘It involves using some skilled Pilots, preferably neutral in all of this, and preferably without their knowledge.’
‘Recruiting innocents?’ asked Clara.
‘It’s a tough game we’re in,’ said Pavel. ‘I thought you realized.’
To save Clara some face, Max said: ‘You’re right, but there’s some information we need to disseminate. Information I’ve been sitting on for way too long.’
Pavel shook his head.
‘Any information known to come from you, Schenck’s people will find a way to discredit.’
‘That’s why I need to churn things up,’ said Max. ‘And with luck, come back with eye witness testimony.’
Before they would agree to the plan, the others demanded to see Max’s ship. His departures and arrivals had been covert for many years: few of his colleagues still living knew what she was like, his vessel. That felt poignant: thoughts of ageing might carry overtones of desolation for anyone, but more so for Pilots; for they were not always solitary beings: sometimes they were symbiotic partners.
The quartet stood in a place deep inside and orthogonal to the core of Ascension Annexe.
‘Where is it?’ Pavel looked around. ‘I can’t sense a—’
