by Tim Pratt
I’d expected corpses, but there were none. “We return to flame when we die,” the Pilgrim explained. “The ship has a great incinerator, and I presided over their funerals. Every member of my sect is a priest, so they had the proper rites. I will not be granted that, alas, but they say God is forgiving. I ask only that if I fall in the coming conflict, you give me to fire, if you can.”
I wanted to reassure him that it wouldn’t come to that, but I knew better. “Of course we will,” I said.
“Keep your suits on, or you’ll need final rites yourselves,” Vicki said. “The radiation levels here are appalling.”
The Pilgrim showed us the armory, full of gleaming weapons that were all curves and shining edges. War was an art for his people, it seemed. He took Vicki to the bridge of the ship, half the panels flickering and the other half dark, at least until Vicki got into the computer systems and cleaned things up. The Pilgrim sat in a great chair in the center of the bridge, which was tilted slightly, making it into a recliner.
“This is wonderful,” Vicki said. “Your weapons are more advanced than anything I’ve seen.”
“Stolen from the Assimilationists,” the Pilgrim said. “In order to fight them, we needed to be their equal in battle. It’s a shame we can’t fly anymore.”
“Those systems are far beyond my ability to repair, alas,” Vicki said. “But having even a stationary weapons platform is rather more than we expected. With the drones providing mobile units, and time for us to prepare the ground… yes, we might have a chance, especially against a small advance squad like the Lector is likely to use.”
Minna went off to look at the ship’s gardens, and returned hours later to say that she’d tweaked the plants to absorb radiation, which would help them grow, but that they weren’t safe to eat, and they wouldn’t be able to cleanse the ship fully since there was constantly new radiation leaking from the engine. “They are happier plants now too, so I am happier also.” She was profoundly bored by all the tech and weapons talk, so went outside to look at the sparse local flora.
That night we camped beyond the range of the radiation and discussed our preparations. We knew where the Lector was going to appear; we just didn’t know when, or with what kind of force. We knew he’d survived a significant explosion unscathed. “That knowledge provides us with the threshold we must greatly exceed,” Vicki said, and talked about how to do that.
I half-slept in my strange fugue state, watching the stars move. There were two moons in this sky, one large and one small. I knew I’d lived beneath one thousand one hundred and thirty-four skies, counting my own, but how many stars? How many other inhabited worlds in each of those skies? I saw only the smallest piece of any given universe, and each one might very well teem with as much variety as this one, with its galactic empire and countless alien races. The vastness of reality was dizzying, and staggering, and I knew I’d never see even the smallest fragment of the smallest fraction of the smallest degree of the whole curve. That was true of anyone, though, even those who lived in the same universe their entire lives, because every world was vast. The Lector, with his relentless hunger to move and control and command, didn’t seem to understand that. As smart as he was, he wasn’t smart enough to know that he’d barely glimpsed any of the places he’d brought under his heel. None of them mattered to him, individually, any more than any given person’s life did. He would argue that every world and every life was insignificant when considered against the span of the infinite… but nothing mattered against the span of the infinite, so if you wanted to care about anything at all, you had to care about the small things. There was nothing in the multiverse but small things.
I wondered if the worry that kept the Lector up at night – if anything did – was the deep and secret knowledge that he was just as insignificant as everything else.
In the morning, when the Pilgrim was rested, we began our preparations, and continued them for over a week. The repair drones – crablike machines a little smaller than me – began to transport panels and struts from the ship, creating structures scattered around the valley and up the hillsides, each one with a cannon or two salvaged from the ship’s offensive systems, arranged to provide overlapping fields of fire. Vicki could control the whole array from anywhere within a few kilometers. They were all solid enough bunkers, and none looked like a headquarters, except the ship itself, where, of course, we had absolutely no intention of being when the battle came.
Drones were repurposed and made into war machines, armored and armed, and they scuttled in the brush to await the enemy. Minna and I carefully covered some of them in dust and stones and plants – Minna made it so the weeds would even stay alive and grow on the machines – so they could hide better and blend into the terrain. The Pilgrim and Vicki ran various scenarios and tweaked the parameters of our position, and Minna and I moved as far away as we could and covered our ears while guns boomed and sizzled. “I don’t like this, Zax!” she shouted.
“I don’t either!” I shouted back. “It will all be over soon!”
One way or another. My tongue touched the new tooth Minna had implanted in the back of my mouth.
We always had a drone or one of us watching the hut where we’d arrived, though it was unlikely the Lector would arrive without us realizing it. The hut was gone, torn down, and the whole area was now ringed with weapons and mined with explosives, all set to go off the moment anything tripped the sensors. The Pilgrim thought that every other preparation was redundant, because nothing could survive that ring of hell. Minna, who’d seen the Lector’s Moveable Empire in action, was less confident, and I concurred.
These have been long days. I’ve spent so long hurtling forward, whether I wanted to or not, that I have no practice at all with patiently waiting.
The place where the hut used to be just exploded. The whole cliff-top is burning white-hot.
Here we go.
Epilogue
This brief epilogue to the Journals of Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree is written by the hand of the Lector himself: Supreme Ruler of the Collectorium, High Priest of the Church of the Sanguine, Defender of the Skies, The Crown Incarnate, He Who Tends the Grasses, The Ender of History, Champion of Champions, The Terror Above, The Wheel-Breaker, The Ice Axe, The Pure Vein, The Broodfather – well, it goes on. It seems every world I conquer wishes to gift me with their own unique sobriquet. Some whisper their names for me with the awe due a prophesied king, and others spit it with fury at a foreign interloper, but I accept them all equally.
I will shelve this journal in the office of whatever world I eventually settle on as my Prime Throne, and encourage visitors, penitents, and acolytes to read it as a cautionary tale, and as a testament to my greatness. Zaxony began with natural abilities I could only dream of having for my own, and if he had he possessed the courage and the strength, he would be the one dripping titles from the end of his name – but it is not just power that makes a king. It is will. I had the will, and so I took his power.
Zaxony attempted to make a last stand to thwart me. He failed, obviously. He is in custody, in a filthy room on the grounds of this laughable fortress. He has been filled with stimulants to keep him from sleeping his way out of this situation. I will go see him, soon. We are old friends, Zaxony and I. In a sense, I owe everything I have now to him.
For those reasons, I will execute him with my own hand, and will do so as painlessly as possible, given that my chosen tool of execution is a very large knife.
Then I will move his body to a sterile room, and apply much smaller knives. I have been eager to dissect him. Given the wonders I found in his blood, what else might I find in his body?
My story continues, but this is where the tale of Zaxony must finish.
Thus ends a chronicle of failure.
Sniper Fire • The Lector Dances • Slugs in the Garden • The Skeleton’s Name • Implosive • Zax in the Box
So, that didn’t go as planned. (Vicki says no battle plan remains intact after f
irst contact, which they might have mentioned before.)
We saw the entry point to this world light up in a cascade of ordnance, and I thought, “Is that it? Is the Lector gone?” Minna and I were near one of the bunkers, so we dove inside and used our radios to contact the Pilgrim, who was on a nearby peak, armed with a sniper rifle, watching.
“Only one person came through,” the Pilgrim said. “They had blue fur, and they were holding some sort of great beast on a chain. They triggered the explosives.”
I groaned. The Lector must have gotten into the habit of sending scouts through first, in case Minna left traps again. He’d probably done it when he called for us in that place with the tiny people, too, and we just didn’t see it.
“More people have appeared since,” the Pilgrim said. “The ones you described. A skeleton… a slouching girl in a dirty jacket with a hood… six more soldiers and beasts… they are sitting up, moving out, securing the area, observing our defenses. Ah. Here he is now. Your Lector. I am lining up my shot.”
We could see the arrival point from our position halfway up a steep slope, and I thought I recognized the Lector, though at this distance he was just a black blur. Minna handed me her glasses, and I looked through them, the Lector leaping into focus – gesturing, directing his soldiers to head down to the fortifications in the valley, Polly and the torturer flanking him. Smoke rose around him, and the whole area was rubble and ashes, and, at a glance, he looked like a conqueror, come to bring death – except his wispy hair and steel-rimmed glasses were incongruous in that armor, like a professor playing dress-up for a party.
The Lector staggered backward, and a shimmering blue field lit up around his body. Twice more he staggered, and the blue shimmer flickered. The Pilgrim was firing his rifle, and whatever energy or projectile it fired was making a dent in the Lector’s force field.
Polly leapt in front of the Lector, and some invisible beam cut her neatly in two, a diagonal line running from her left shoulder down to her right hip. She fell to the ground in pieces and howled, then began dragging her torso toward her legs. She didn’t bleed, any more than a turnip cut in half would, but her body didn’t do much to stop the beam, either, which drove the Lector to his knees. “Keep it up!” Vicki crowed from my hand.
The Lector rose, rushed forward, and dove right off the cliff, plummeting to the valley floor below. I remembered his leap from a hotel balcony, and how he’d landed unscathed. I tracked down with the glasses to see him dusting himself off at the base of the cliff.
The torturer, meanwhile, was calmly assembling a tripod and screwing together lengths of cylindrical metal, activities which did not fill me with confidence.
“Minna!” the Lector’s voice boomed. “Are you ready to end this? Your little small potatoes revolution has grown tedious!”
“Inputting firing solution,” Vicki said.
The guns came alive. They focused their fire on the Lector, but also took the time to pick off his soldiers and their monsters, which snuffled and snarled on the end of their chains. The guns aimed for the skeleton, too, but he was down in the crater where the hut had been, and none of the weapons were angled quite right to strike him there as he calmly continued his work. A few of the drones went scuttling up toward him instead.
The Lector moved, impossibly quickly, a pale yellow shimmer in front of his face, dodging the beams and projectiles, somersaulting and dancing and spinning – and laughing as he came. “He has some sort of tactical heads-up display!” Vicki shouted. “And that armor is an exoskeleton, moving faster than his body could otherwise. He has some kind of system predicting the path of the attacks and dodging. Inputting randomization as a countermeasure. Pilgrim, can you hit him?”
“Not from this position.”
“Hrm. Then can you kill that skeleton?”
“Affirmative.” I watched as the skeleton’s skull exploded, onyx eyes falling to the ground… but the skeleton was not at all perturbed by this, and screwed the last bit of metal onto the tripod-mounted gun he’d been building.
“Can you take out the cannon?”
“I’m trying. It’s not as fragile as the skeleton. Shots are bouncing off.”
The skeleton reached down, patted blindly at the ground, and then picked up one of the onyx eyes and fitted it into a scope on top of the cannon.
“Minna, taunt the Lector please,” Vicki said.
We’d been prepared for this. She cleared her throat. “Lector! You have tried to kill me but you cannot kill me. I will always salt your ground, dig up your roots, burn your branches. I will raise armies against you and you will fall, in this world and every world. You are not smarter or better than me.”
Her voice boomed from the PA of the wrecked ship at the heart of the valley, and the Lector began to dance and pirouette his way toward that instead. Occasionally one of the beams or projectiles clipped him, now, spinning him around, but they didn’t stop him.
“I’ve met potted plants more dangerous than you, Daisy!” he called.
“Your turn, Zax,” Vicki said.
“Lector, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
The Lector stopped, and took a beam full in the chest, knocking him flat, but then he rolled and dodged before Vicki could concentrate more fire on him. He crouched behind a boulder, out of sight, but his voice boomed. “Zaxony. Your talking corsage found you, did she? I was perfectly willing to let you go. You’re a fool to let her drag you into her war. Now you both have to die. I am cultivating a great and glorious garden, and the two of you are slugs. And your little pinky ring, too.”
“Why don’t you come and get us? We’re right here, waiting.”
“Do you think I’m afraid to walk into that ship?” he bellowed. “Do you think I’m worried about whatever pitiful defenses you’ve set up in there, whatever ludicrous little traps you’ve set?” He paused. “Well, in point of fact, I am, at least a little. Alan, is the cannon ready?”
The skeleton clanged his knuckles against the shaft of the cannon three times in reply.
“Pilgrim, destroy that weapon!” Vicki cried.
The Pilgrim fired his sniper rifle, but the shots didn’t make much of an impact on the cannon, though they shattered Alan’s body further. The cannon was at least semi-autonomous, because it moved and pointed toward the wreck, onyx scope glistening.
“Blow them up, please,” the Lector said.
Minna and I ducked. The cannon fired whatever it fired, and the world went white.
The idea was, if all else failed, we’d lure the Lector toward the wreck. Once he was within the blast radius, the drones stationed inside would pull the failsafes and let the engine breach containment entirely, and then… an implosion, essentially, sucking everything within a hundred meters down into a bit of highly radioactive mass the size of a pebble. The cannon did a perfectly fine job of breaching containment and triggering the implosion. There was a flash, a brief hurricane of displaced air, and the ship vanished, along with much of the ground around it and several of our nearer gun encampments.
The Lector was a good ten meters outside the implosion’s range, though, and safe from the worst of the radiation, too. He stood unsteadily and laughed. “That was almost impressive! I don’t suppose you were in there, though, were you?”
“The best we can hope for, right now, is that he thinks we’re dead,” Vicki said.
More soldiers began to appear in the crater beside the cannon, waking up and fanning out. They were met by our drones, and small arms fire clattered. The drones might slow them down, but wouldn’t stop them.
“We have to reach the Pilgrim and escape,” I said.
Minna nodded, and we slipped out of the bunker and hurried, low to the ground and (we hoped) hidden by brush, toward the worst-case-scenario rendezvous point. The Pilgrim would meet us in the shade of a nearby boulder, equidistant between our two positions, and then we would give him a sedative and jump to the next world and figure out what to do from there–
Tha
t was the plan, anyway, but the soldiers had a flying machine, and they caught us instead, dropping an actual net on top of us, and then fired darts at us – not tranquilizers, or even paralytics, but stimulants. My eyeballs ached and my blood fizzed and I drummed my feet against the ground. I couldn’t have slept if I’d wanted to. I didn’t want to. I fumbled Vicki off my finger and shoved them into Minna’s hands. “Run, Minna,” I said. “Sleep away. Go, both of you.”
“Zax–”
“Go. I’ll find you, if I can.”
“Be… be safe, Zax,” Vicki said. “We’ll never stop fighting.”
Minna kissed my cheek, and then her eyes rolled back, and she fell asleep. No one can dose Minna with anything against her will. I’m a lot more adaptable than I used to be, but I’ll never be a match for her.
I hoped the Pilgrim was all right, that they hadn’t caught him, that he’d survived. He’d fought for us, knowing he might die, and I wished I’d gotten to know him better.
One of the soldiers uncapped and drank a tiny vial of something, fell over, and vanished before he hit the ground. Off in pursuit of Minna, no doubt. She could handle one soldier.
Two more of the blue-furred troops grabbed me and dragged me to my feet. I couldn’t stop babbling, the stimulants rushing in my blood: “We’re trying to help you, don’t you get it, we’re fighting him, you could fight him, you could stab him, or poison him, he doesn’t have armor on the inside does he, or maybe he does, but he took your world, don’t you want to stop him, you can never go home, did he promise he’d take you back, he’s lying, he doesn’t know how, he’ll ever know how, he will just eat and eat and eat worlds forever–”
