by Guy Haley
He remembered other fingers, slick with blood.
Anger rose in him, pushing aside his fear. He prepared to fight, to fight the way he should have done then. He stood.
“Wait.” The android spoke with a husky female voice, entirely at odds with its alien appearance. “I apologise for disturbing you. I did not wish to speak in front of the others, for the knowledge I possess is drawn from the confidential section of your file, and now, at this time, is the best opportunity for me to speak with you unobserved.
“Firstly, I wish to say that what occurred to you was deeply regrettable. The Class Five was an unstable product that should never have been released onto the open market. I wish to reassure you that I mean you no harm. That I cannot mean you harm. I am an evolved Class Three. I am proven safe. I alone have logged over twenty-four thousand hours of interaction with human beings. Feedback has never been less than exemplary. My AI class has amassed seven thousand, eight hundred man-years of interaction with the human race without incident. My subclass is designed specifically for planetary exploration, and has been rigorously tested.”
Holland had to force himself to speak. “What do you want?”
“I wish to reassure you,” it repeated the phrase, note and cadence exactly the same. “I hope we might become friends.”
“Put the photograph down and get out,” Holland said, his words strangled. Spittle sprang from his lips. “How dare you come in here? Get out!”
For a moment the android stood still, so still it appeared inactive. “As you wish,” it said dispassionately. The android placed the photograph on the pullout table by the bed. Holland followed the machine’s movements and noticed the table’s other contents – watch, water bottle and phone – scattered across the floor. He stared at them numbly.
“I am sorry for what occurred, truly I am,” the machine said. She, it, left.
He waited for long minutes for the adrenaline to recede and his body to stop trembling before he moved. He replaced his things on the table and sucked water from the bottle until it crumpled. He went to the door and looked up and down the corridor; it was empty, the station quiet but for the hum of its idiot parts, sustaining life. He shut the door and got back into bed.
Holland lay staring at the wall, and the knowledge that Mars’ near-airlessness was just on the other side of pressed-earth bricks and a layer of dirt was suddenly terrifying. The sensation he had felt in his dream came back to him: the weight of nothing, waiting to drown him.
Somehow, eventually, sleep stole over him.
CHAPTER THREE
The Death of the Spirefather of Olm
THE WALL A few hundred metres to the left of the main gates of Olm bubbles, and with a rending screech, the skin of it sloughs away, molten marrow gushing from its core.
A breach, forty lengths or more wide, opens. A section of the city shield above it, already failing under the sun cannon’s screaming bombardment, flickers out.
“The walls are down. The walls are down.” The voice of Kemiímseet’s Decarch general echoes into the mind of every man and machine in the Imperial Army. Battleplans flash, vivid as dreams, into their consciousnesses, playing scenarios tailored to each man that are hard to tell apart from memories. Every one of them knows what they are to do, and whether they are to live or die. They go to their allotted task without hesitation; the course of fate can be resisted only by the truly exceptional. This is the Martian way.
Like a flock of birds changing direction in flight, the pattern of the battle shifts. Sun cannon concentrate their fire onto two more sections of the wall that are close to collapse. The Second World is in uproar as the spirits within Olm marshall their forces to the breach.
It will not be enough. They are as aware of the battle’s outcome as I. There is a ninety-eight per cent certainty that Olm will fall. A two per cent chance that the Kemmeans will be repulsed; enough for hope, little else.
Yoechakenon will be first to the wall. I watch his silver form flicker across the landscape, impossibly quick, darting through the fire coming from the city. There are no men of Olm left alive outside the city.
He gains the breach, leaving footprints in its cooling slag. Several shield cannon hurry across the gap, heavy frontal plates and energy shields interlocking to form an impromptu wall. They fire at Yoechakenon, knowing that to bring him down is their only hope; that there is a small margin for error in the algorithms of the future, and their realisation lies in the destruction of his gleaming form. Fell the champion of Kemiímseet, and the Twin Emperor loses the war now. Yoechakenon is more than the greatest weapon in the armoury of Kemiímseet; he is the soul of the army. Destroy him, and the heart will go from the Twin Emperor’s forces. Spirits and men on both sides watch intently.
In the depths of the Second World, the five Quinarchs wager upon the fate of a civilisation.
Yoechakenon runs up the debris to the cannon. A spearpoint of Kemmeans trails behind him, their own, lesser armours struggling to match the speed given to Yoechakenon by the Armour Prime. The weapons of the shield cannon swivel on ball joints, long tracers of disintegrated quanta chattering from them, searing stitches onto the fabric of reality. They weave destruction. They are the warp, Yoechakenon the weft, his silver body flowing under and around and over the converging sprays of energy.
Every machine is manned by two men, sat on saddles athwart the gun behind their shields of matter and energy. Each one is keen to fell the hero. Every one has the right to further life. But now, in this time of ending, the genelooms dwindle in number, and fewer men are made every year. The certainty has become opportunity, and the living fight fiercely to catch the notice of tallymen such as I. Some may go into the stacks of the Library and slumber for ten thousand years before being selected again. Many others will never come back, their souls left to the slow degradation of data. Glory in war is the sole guarantor of eternity in these dark times. To defy fate is to defy death.
Few can manage such a feat.
I pause in my reporting. Time slows around my Yoechakenon. He arcs over ribbons of light. Bright wounds are scored upon the cooling wall-stuff and the red soils outside the city, yet he is never hit. He spins with superhuman alacrity. It is both glorious and beautiful. I have no heart in this incarnation, but had I one it would beat faster. He is untouched, my love, but can draw no closer to the wall. A clever spirit indeed must be in command of the wall of shield cannons, for I can feel the skeins of the future bend and alter under the will of a powerful mind.
The probability of victory for Olm is growing. Falteringly at first, mere tenths of a hundredth of a per cent, but these first stumbles become more assured and regular the longer Yoechakenon is held at bay.
He will not tire, I tell myself. He cannot. The army at his back slows, apprehensive as time approaches a fork in its road.
Then it is over, and determined fate reasserts itself. The pattern of fire fails, for all of its complexity, and Yoechakenon slips under its destructive loops. He lands lightly on the ruins of the wall, pushes hard, somersaults over a frantic triple-burst tracking him through the air. He holds his glaive forward, one disc down. The linked energy shields spark brightly as the disc hits, oily patterns sliding across their surface. For a fraction of a second, Yoechakenon hangs in the air, and then there is a bright flash, a crack of brittle thunder, and an energy shield winks out. He is falling toward a cannon barrel. He steps lightly along it; the glaive sweeps behind him to slice the barrel from its mount, then up over his head to cut the thick metal shield at an angle, and it falls away. A man stands in his saddle, pistol out. Yoechakenon removes it along with the arm holding it. Blood gouts high, and the man falls.
Chaos descends on the shield cannon wall as the spirit senses defeat and withdraws its direction. Some men remain, refocusing their fire upon the advancing army, making good use of their final few moments. Others flee. Hearts brave and craven both are stilled by Yoechakenon. He moves up and over the battery as relentless as death itself.
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br /> The army reaches the toppled wall, the soft mess of its ruin impeding their advance. Some struggle, a couple scream as their feet break the crust and plunge into the molten stuff beneath to cook inside their armour. Defenders stationed in the wallside towers fell many of them, but they are quickly hunted out by men streaming into the wall interior, or wiped from existence by redirected sun cannon. And then the Kemmeans are into the city, running free, virtually unopposed. They set about their atrocity.
A rumble. A wide section of wall tumbles, several hundred spans from the first breach. Sun cannon have seared the walls of defensive weapons; only a few remain to answer the barrage, and they are silenced. Two further breaches open, and the commanders of the artillery are ordered by the Decarch general to alter their targets. The energy wall goes out, and the Second World is full of the sound of spirits howling in pain as the spires they occupy are bombarded. In ages past, this would never have happened.
Mankind has fallen low. Olm burns.
I cease my counting, sickened. Let the Quinarchs kill me if they will, I am done with their business for today. I will follow my love instead. I drive the dust of my body over the walls, and into the inferno.
Yoechakenon sprints through streets I see as a progression of horrific tableaux, the lights of fires reflecting from his armour and turning him into a living flame. He ignores the screams of women as their children and clothes are torn from them. Men run to and fro, giddy with survival, helmets folded back. The fire in their eyes is not a reflection. Windows break and masonry tumbles. Old men are cut down in the street, old men waveringly holding swords, old men proffering their worldly goods or offering their children. Old men on their knees. None are shown mercy. Boys are slaughtered where they stand. I force my attention away as a soldier below me tosses a squirming babe into a fire, laughing as his mother screams. Only the women live, and then only for a short, excruciating while.
Olm has defied the Twin Emperor, and now it pays the price.
Ancient buildings, grown in the old way, twist and shriek as their guardian spirits die and their flesh burns from them. Stone cracks and shatters in the heat. Yoechakenon leaps, many times his own height, as a tumble of building bones clatter down from a spire, flattening the cruder constructions around it. Each of the spires that dies is a mind gone, each an artefact of better times lost forever. I would weep, but my emotional buffers are still operational. I leave them that way; I could not stand it were it otherwise.
The remnants of the Olmish army retreat into the citadel, a soaring, proud spire made of many lesser spires. The palace of its prince, and the home of the city’s First Spirefather. The soldiers run on, grim-faced under their armour as they ignore the screams of their neighbours, abandoning the outer city to the unkindnesses of defeat.
They are unaware of Yoechakenon as he runs. In the havoc and the flames, he is invisible. They are lucky, for he has no time to cut them down. He is intent on the main gate of the citadel, a gate that will close within seconds. Kemmean soldiers follow, those who have not cast themselves into the rape of the city. They open fire as they reach the rearguard of the Olmish, and the retreat turns into stumbling defence, then a rout. Bolts of energy and projectiles sketch a killing web through the main street. Civilians do not know which way to run. They are killed by weapons from both sides. I see a woman clutching at two children, weeping on her knees by the body of a third. Shapes writhe across the blood pooling around the corpse. It could be more fire, more reflections, but I know better: it is secret writing, scribing the hard eleutheremic truths of life.
Yoechakenon reaches the gate. He uses his glaive sparingly, felling only the men who are in his way or who offer active resistance. One has his rifle cleaved in two; his sword is a finger’s width from its scabbard when his armour’s broad helmet is rent open and he dies. Another begs, and dies. Then Yoechakenon is in the gateway. A soldier on the other side reaches for a mechanism by the door. Yoechakenon throws the glaive, and it spins as it flies, killing three men before it takes the soldier’s fingers. Belatedly, a spirit somewhere observes what is happening, and the soapy sheen of an energy shield springs taut across the gateway. Yoechakenon places his hands together and, like a man diving into a vertical pool, pierces the energy shield, the exotic alloys of his armour disrupting the shield’s patterns and allowing him to slip through. He is on the other side and rolling. I look back, see the terrified face of an Olmish soldier through the gap, his eyes just visible behind his glass faceplate.
Behind him, in the distance and smoke, the crying woman.
The gates clang shut.
I will never forget the face of the woman.
Yoechakenon comes to his feet, the glaive in his hand singing with joy at their reunion. He sprints through manicured gardens twined into the fabric of the citadel. Fountains splash. Ornamental birds strut across perfect turf. Here, there is little sign of war.
And then I lose him. The energy field holding the dust of my body together is being interfered with by the castellan spirit of the citadel. Only when I have asserted my credentials as a tallyman for the Quinarchy does it relent. I can sense the anger of the systems here, and the fear. They obey the writ of the law nevertheless.
When my perceptions have returned to the citadel, Yoechakenon has penetrated the inner doors of the main spire. I glance behind and see the bodies of elite Olmish guards. He runs on and down, into the very heart of the spire. The ribbed tunnel down which he paces opens up, and he is within the wide space at the heart of the palace, parkland at its centre, windows of cut mineral breaking the sunlight into a jewelled mosaic. Rich apartments cluster the walls. Their occupants have gone, fled before the city was invested. A handful of soldiers see Yoechakenon on the other side of the lake; they fire at him, but do not approach. One beckons to the others, ordered to withdraw. All those who can are now fleeing the city by air. I switch my perceptions outside. A cloud of flitters are departing, able to fly now the energy shield has been brought down. The Kemmean army let them go. The Decarch has ordered them shot down, but the commanders of the artillery and Kemmean air marshal defy him. Word of the carnage within the walls has filtered out. I make note of their names, for mercy is as valid an entertainment to the Quinarchs as death, and one I hold in far greater esteem. I will intervene should those men be executed and sent to the stacks.
Yoechakenon has reached the entryway to the First Spirefather’s antechamber, where the city spirit would appear to the human prince of the city in a form of matter. But this is not where he resides, not truly, and Yoechakenon runs on.
The spire is shaking. The rumble of sun cannon shot vibrates through the structure.
Yoechakenon descends further, deep into the roots of the spire, where men seldom tread.
Then he is there, by the great bolus attached to the taproot of the spire, where the Spirefather’s consciousness is housed. Such places are as close to true bodies as we spirits possess.
The Spirefather flickers into view, a hard light projection of a man. He is as men once were, when they first came to the red world, not as they are now. He is twice life-size, appearing like a god from the very beginning of human history.
He is dressed richly, as befits a god. Behind him stands his wife, the Spiremother of Olm. She wrings her hands, face flickering from fright to hatred and back again. The Spirefather of Olm is stern and fearless. He speaks.
“You have come to destroy me,” says the Spirefather.
Yoechakenon nods once and readies his glaive.
“Do you wish to?” asks the Spirefather.
For the first time in several hours, the champion speaks. “It does not matter either way. I am a tool of fate.”
“Ah. Do you know why you are to do this?”
“It is fated,” says the champion.
The Spirefather shakes his head. “Fate is a lie. You do not have to destroy me.”
Yoechakenon does not agree. The wheels of the glaive spin.
“Raise your weapon to me,
and you will never be champion again.” He looks right at me, he can see me. “Kaibeli may tell you otherwise, but she does not know what my death will portend. Kill me, and the world will never be the same again. I will show you choice. I will free you with truth.”
Yoechakenon is not surprised at the news of my presence. I am with him whenever I can be. He replies. “Then that is also fated. But that is not to be.” And he knows this is so, for soon he will be back in Kemiímseet, feted once again as the champion of the Empire, champion of Mars. That is a certainty, he can see the memory of it in his future. It happens; in many senses, it already has. But, and this is the truth, he thinks that he does not wish it to be so.
He hesitates. He does not want to kill the Spirefather. He is tired, I can feel it. He is weary of death.
The Spirefather puts his arm around the Spiremother of Olm. He does not intervene. The blades of the glaive draw sparks from the very stuff of reality as Yoechakenon spins the weapon about his head, a deadly orbit fixed by two deadly circles.
He crosses the weapon back and forth over the bolus. Wounds gape. Strange liquids pour from them, red and brown and deep green. The hardlight projection winks out, a perfunctory end for a mighty spirit.
“It is done,” he says. “The Spirefather is dead.”
The spire shakes. Yoechakenon turns to leave, but he stops.
Something is happening. Suddenly he is on his knees, the glaive clattering upon the floor, blades stilling instantly, lifespark dormant. “Kaibeli,” he gasps. “Oh, Kaibeli!” The bolus throbs upon the taproot, spilling its lifeblood quickly as it assails my Yoechakenon.
I reach out to him, my duties entirely forgotten. I have known and loved Yoechakenon forever. He has been with me in one guise or another throughout Man’s long reign on the Red Planet. He and I are bound to the highest degree, and when he suffers, I suffer.
