“There is food in the nearest refectory area. You may proceed. Follow the blue signs.” A winking arrow appeared on the door.
“Some clothing – oh.” A loose robe lay folded on one stool. It was a minor struggle to dress herself, but at least the mirror showed that she looked vaguely human. The discoloured patches on her scalp were already hidden beneath a peach-fuzz of hair, and although she was hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked she didn't quite look like a skeleton. Just very, very hungry. “Show me to the refectory.”
The door opened onto a twilit perspective; an alleyway paved in dust ran between anonymous blocks of mud-coloured brick. The light had a curious quality to it, like dusk beneath a cloudless sky. Oshi shuffled at first, until she felt that her sense of balance was up to the job of walking. A blue arrow in her lower-left field of vision pointed the way; as she followed it she tested her wisdom access. Nothing doing ... just a blank echo where there should be a susurration of artificial life all around her, and the moron-level mumbling of the on-line services. So the Duat doesn't have a psychosphere? She tried not to let it faze her, but it was disturbing all the same. That's wrong. Things must be sliding badly ...
The refectory was in a high-walled compound off to one side of the alley. Oshi followed the arrow through a dusty wooden gate, into a low-ceilinged room with a dumb waiter built into one wall and some stools and tables scattered about. The shadows turned everything a murky tint of grey. Oshi sat down. “So what's to eat?” she asked.
“Rice. Eggs. Quorm. Potatoes. Please specify preparation required.”
“Oh.” She looked down at her hands, so thin and pale that they looked as if they might break off at the wrist if she tried to do anything strenuous. The range of food sounded remarkably limited. But ... “I'll have whatever you can cook which is closest to my metabolic requirements. I need to gain weight and muscle tissue.”
“Medical records consulted. Please wait. Your meal will be ready in eight minutes.”
Oshi nodded and stare at the backs of her hands. She was remembering: another time when she had been blind, and hungry, and weak. She'd been constantly in pain. Then there was the other time, when she had been strong and fast and could see everything, but still couldn't hold everything at bay – her first encounter with her own limits, on Miramor. She unconsciously phased her vision down into the infrared spectrum, following the luminous pulse of blood in her arteries and veins. Then she looked up into stranger wavelengths: ultra-violet, dim beneath the efficient lights. The gatecoder had received her entire blueprint and implemented all of it, not just the portions with natural origins. Another mistake; any customs program worth its processor time should have screamed blue murder about my add-ins. All the stuff the Boss dumped on me.What's wrong? Damn, but I can see again. Everything except what's happening.
There was a scraping noise; a chair pulled away from the table across from her. Oshi looked up as Raisa sat down, red-eyed and yawning. “Crazy time to go eating breakfast. Everybody is asleep ... how do you feel?”
Oshi grunted. “Like shit. How do I look?”
Raisa shrugged, pulled a face. She looked tired, her face sagging slightly. “Like you said. Don't worry; the 'coder left biostats in your intestines. You should be able to absorb food very efficiently for the next few days. You'll put on weight like you wouldn't believe, honest.”
She stopped talking, sat back and stared at Oshi. Her off-centre expression made Oshi feel unaccountably uneasy, so she focussed on the wall instead; they sat in silence for a while.
“You're the first new arrival in years,” said Raisa. “Are you part of the project?” Oshi turned and stared at her. The other woman's fingers tightened on the table edge. Presently, she looked down. “I suppose it's not too much to hope for a straight answer.”
“The project. What project?”
“Evacuation.” Raisa looked up. “Have you ever been to the Centre worlds? If you're not part of the project, where do you come from?”
Oshi was noncomittal: “I travel. No, I've never seen the Centre.”
“It was – “ Raisa stalled in mid-speech and took a deep breath. She looked very disappointed. “We hoped you were part of the second wave.”
“We?”
“The others. They're giving you a wide berth, lots of time to adjust. It's been years, you see. We started out as a pathfinder team. Some of us still are, except that we don't know whether – “
“– whether there's anyone following you?”
Raisa started. “What!”
Oshi dropped her spoon on the table with a clatter. “I'm not a fool,” she said tiredly. “You hoped I'm from your home world, but I'm not. Pathfinders need followers. What was this? A migration? Colony hijacking?”
“We had no idea there was anything out here.”
Oshi stared. The other woman looked tired and depressed, the reluctant bearer of news worn ragged with repetition. “Hang on. You beamed out with no destination in mind?”
“Come on. It's not unheard of! Aim at a system and hope there's a gatecoder looking for incoming packets. If you miss, there's the rest of the universe to hope for.”
“But that's a suicide bet!”
“And these times are dangerous,” Raisa said, a clipped, false brightness in her voice. “If you've never been to the Centre you have no right to judge just how dangerous.” Her voice rose: “ they were going to destroy our world! Never mind that they already had all the planets outside the water belt around our primary – they wanted our world too! There was a total Dreamtime lockout. They took it over completely. Anyone who tried to access it fried their brains out. We had to build a gatecoder from library specs and aim it where we thought someone might see the pulse. Don't you see? It was our only hope of survival!”
Oshi picked up her spoon again. “Who was attacking you? Who are these people you call they?”
Raisa stood up: “I was right. You don't know anything. I sent word to Boris, via the network, but they didn't believe me. Nobody told you, or word never got out.”
“Word of what?”
“There's a war going on. Did anyone tell you?”
“A war,” Oshi frowned. “Tell me about it.” Her stomach churned uncomfortably.
“There are monsters in the Dreamtime. Not human; not Superbright either. We can trade with Superbrights, did you know that? At least, we did. But then the others came and ... purged ... them. By the time we realized that something was loose in the Dreamtime within the system it was too late: we'd lost three processor moons and a large proportion of our industrial infrastructure. War broke out, but our strategic systems defected halfway through. We barely had time to put together a pathfinder group and beam out; the rest were due to follow, as many as could make it to the kluged uploader sites for evacuation. Then we found ourselves waking up here. First contact was forty-two years ago, but most of us were stored in download buffers while He decided what to do with us; the damned gatecoder can only handle six bodies at a time. I've been here eight years now, and He said the buffers were empty. So where did you come from?”
She didn't sound very interested, but something in her gaze made Oshi hesitate for a moment before replying. “A place called New Salazar.”
Suddenly she had Raisa's complete attention. “Tell me about it!”
Oshi looked at her and saw her naked longing. It made her want to steal the truth and re-work it into something she could present, that Raisa would accept. “A nice planet,” she said: “vast forests and blue mountains, oceans that cover almost half its surface. Cities of marble and glass, blended in with the landscape. Civilized and rich and peaceful.”
“You're sure none of the pathfinders made it through to your system's gatecoder?” Raisa demanded eagerly. “We broadcast to several systems in this sector –”
“No. I'm quite sure.” Oshi shuddered, hoping it was true. The idea opened horrifying vistas, a billion refugees beaming into Year Zero Man's tender mercies.
Raisa turned away. “Sh
it. If we'd modulated our transmission through a degree or two ...” her shoulders shook. Oshi looked away, spiked by a sudden rush of self-disgust. “Instead, we're here.”
“What's wrong with that?”
“You'll find out soon enough,” Raisa said from the doorway. Her voice was shaky. “Even if your wisdom and upload feed isn't working. Oh, I should add: there's no Dreamtime backup here. Death is permanent, as far as we can tell. Another irony: try to avoid it. See you tomorrow.”
“And you,” Oshi murmured, scraping the rim of her bowl. She watched Raisa close the door – which grated on the stone floor – and listened to the retreating footsteps with a sense of deja vu. “Damn.” Something about Raisa made her feel wistful, brought back memories. She looked down into the bowl, trying to make sense of her mixed feelings. You know nothing. Yes, but how am I going to adjust? What had happened on the station in orbit about New Salazar was bad enough that if she stopped to think about it she could work herself into a screaming fit: but this was worse in a way. Totally disorientating.
Oshi sat back. “What did I expect?” she asked the air. It seemed like a good question to start with. Vague visions of meeting the Superbright who ran the colony mission danced through her head; another creature of the same species as the Boss, she supposed. But this – a war evacuation – she'd never heard of such a thing before. An evacuation from a rich world too, not a dirt-poor backwater farmed by cynical Superbrights, but a puissant and sophisticated Centreworld! “What is the universe coming to?” she whispered. “Shit.”
Her bowl was empty, her belly was full, and her body was telling her it was time to sleep. Oshi stood up and pushed her chair back. Absent mindedly, she realised that she was still holding her spoon. I think tomorrow I will obtain some answers, she resolved. As she turned to leave she put the spoon down. It clattered oddly when it touched the table: she glanced back and saw it lying next to her bowl, the stem bent at right-angles where she had gripped it.
Slowly, a smile spread across her face. Yes, I think I will obtain some answers tomorrow ...
Dawn throughout the entire colony was postponed for an hour while the Goon Squad tracked down the new arrival. Word had gone out: Anubis, the dog-head, wanted to see her. Nobody tried to warn Oshi; the presence of the Good Squad was an automatic curfew that nobody in their right mind would dare to break. So she was still asleep when they broke down her door and jabbed their guns in her face.
Jolted awake by a presence leaning over her, Oshi opened her eyes and began to shove the sheet down – then froze in mid-gesture. Sudden terror leered down at her. The Squaddie waved the muzzle of its gun around: “you to get dressed!” it crowed, rearing up on its hindmost six legs. “ Il Duce see you!”
What the fuck ... gut-deep coldsweat fear swept up her spine. Her eyeballs flicked to infrared, EM, other spectra in a blur of raw information, taking in too many eyes, limbs, tentacles, something like a small cannon pointing at her face and a hole where the door had been, an acrid gunpowder smell in her nostrils –
“You to get dressed!” repeated the monster, backing up a few centimetres. “ The Man see you!” An angry chitter echoed from the corridor behind it.
Confused and scared, Oshi scrambled back into the farmost corner of the room, jammed up against the wall. Her head felt like fog, decaying, acrid – or was that the smell of the thing in the doorway –
The thing was pointing a gun at her. It would probably be a good idea to do as it said.
“Just a, a moment –” she began.
“DER FUEHRER!” shrieked the thing in the doorway. “Wants to see you,” it added conversationally.
Oshi blinked. Some kind of living terror weapon, every instinctive fear of insect/reptile/predator rolled into one bad dream ... “I'm coming,” she said. She forced herself to uncurl and reach out across the bed for the robe she'd worn last night; it took more self-control than she'd imagined. The edgy, jittery terror of being unarmed and of having a gun pointed at her – she was used to that. But those biting jaws, those clutching fingers ... I'm still alive, she told herself. So there must be a reason . ..
The Squaddie backed up into what was left of the doorway while she clothed herself. It gripped the smoking support posts with two pairs of scaly hands, pointing the cannon at her with a third pair. The black bundle of gun barrels tracked her of its own accord, tiny red eyes swivelling voyeuristically across her body. Oshi shuddered, wiped a hand across her brow. Her pulse pounded in her ears, her skin was slick – behind the Squaddie, everything was dark. “ Ayatollah see you!” it cawed, backing into the alley. “Hss-ss-s ...”
Smoke and darkness, mist and night. Oshi edged forwards. Trembling – hungry – muscles not responding properly although she was in far better control of her body this morning – she looked round. “I can't see,” she complained, blinking her vision to IR in time to see the Goon Squad arrayed along the alley in all their gory splendour.
The sight was too much. Oshi backed up hard. A tentacle lashed forward, whipped around her ankles; another caught her around the shoulders, pinioning her. Pressure blurred everything for an instant, then she felt the touch of many hands ... “You go to see Anubis,” it gibbered in her ear as she was rotated, feet over head, smelled something hideously familiar from the scaly hide that rippled and stretched against her. She fought back against a hot urge to vomit; if they were going to kill me they didn't need to put on this show ... there was a jolt, then a bump that rippled through her spine. Then they were moving. Going to see the dog-headed god.
There followed a jouncing ride through acrid-smelling darkness, clutched too tight to breathe in the scaly tentacles/claws/fingers of a living weapon with bad breath. Her neck felt far too light – my head, where's my head? – Oshi deliberately caught her tongue between two molars. The pain worked; subtly modified neural paths cut in, shifting her senses into three-dimensional acuity until she could identify each individual light receptor in her eyes, could taste through her fingertips the scaly hide of the Goon bearing her through the winding alleys of the town. She sensed the other Squaddies behind and in front, blocky guns angled to cover the sealed entrances of buildings occupied or otherwise. The Goons were living weapons built for fighting in built-up areas – not very intelligent, certainly not as efficient as cyberweapons, but loyal and dependable and viciously fast.
Oshi forced herself to relax, remembered a calming mantra, willed herself into control of glands and limbs and senses. She let her face slip into neutral, trying to give nothing away. Maybe I can escape later she thought. Difficult but not impossible to fake a citizen wisdom interface as well as skin, visual recognition ... something slid into place in her head, some tiny component of glacial stillness, and she was back in charge again. Should escape for however long it takes to link up with the resistance and get their side of the story. Whoever they are. She could sense their presence; the existence of the Goon Squad implied some kind of armed threat to the status quo.
A sudden gust of cold air told her they were outside the built up area before her captor jinked sideways in a curious flowing motion, bouncing through a gateway on many-jointed legs. The grass glowed pale red with the heat from below: small creatures froze or dived for cover as the Goon Squad sprinted past. There were trees to either side, modified mangroves and the soil support plants that kept the environment ticking over. Dusty brown soil and stones jumbled underfoot as the Squad pounded uphill. There was something ahead: Oshi tensed even before her captors began to slow.
Flip – she was upright, still clenched breathlessly tight in appendages. Her abductor raised her towards it's face. She couldn't help it: she flinched, cringed, tried to pull her head back from the monster.
“Ill Duce see you NOW!” it screeched at her, drool spraying from its mandibles. The end-wall of the colony bulked vast and faceless behind it, a slab of metal stretching vertically into the sky. It glowed a dim orange to her infra-red sight. A door appeared in the wall, needles of darkness growing outwards wit
h silent speed, fracturing into chilly night. The Squaddie whirled backwards in a storm of bony legs, yanking her with it into the darkness beyond. A rill of static clamped down on all her senses, flaying perceptions into fragments of knife-edged pain and fear. Her body seemed to do a fast dissolve from the inside out, coring her as cleanly as a drill: her last thought before it happened was the walls, they're full of bones
Peace.
Oshi awakened. She tried to open her eyes, winced at the stab of pain that sparkled through her skull. She tried again, one eye then the other. She was lying on her back, looking up at a curved ceiling painted with miniature fields and groves of tiny trees. The wall beside her was bare steel, streaked orange with rust; it met the ceiling in an arch high above. A huge grey lump of stone protruded from it, bisecting her view of the ceiling. A tiny wisp of haze drifted across the roof above it.
She turned her head. The floor she was lying on dropped away beside her. Sudden vertigo: her head swam as she looked up and saw, not a painted ceiling, but the real fields that lined the other side of the colony cylinder, many kilometres overhead.
Oshi sat up, slightly nauseous in the low gravity of the near-hub region. About point one of a gee, she estimated. Where have they gone? Things came clear; she was on a narrow ledge on the end-wall of the colony, about a fifth of the way down from the hub. There was no sign of her abductors. The ledge was about ten metres long; at one end of it there was a door, and at the other end an entrance of a different kind –
No. I am not going to go in there. Not again. The aversion she felt was terrifyingly strong.
She rose to her feet unsteadily. “What –” she began. The world pancaked around her shoulders. “Is – “ She looked round. “happening?”
The door opened, creaking. Steps worn smooth with age led up in an improbable sweep of gothic lunacy to a parlour beneath a high-arched ceiling. Now she could see inside it, she realised that it led up and out into the huge grey structure that jutted out of the end wall of the colony. Huge windows leaned outwards at an improbable angle, canted across the axial abyss. A small inorganic drone shaped like a skittle waited in the centre of the room.
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