TWENTY-FOUR

 

 

THE SPIRIT IS a walking wreck. It can stand, but only just, and then with weak knees and a shiver in its step. Hail can balance it enough to keep upright, but it’ll need months in the foundry blocks before she’ll have it flying again.

It’s what happens when you use a shell like a battering ram. The flicks are full of jockeys hurling themselves at each other, body and soul, but in reality the machines could never take it. Hail’s is no different. She threw it at the strange, delicate thing that met us at the doors, but the glassy shape was tougher than it looked.

There are fractures through the Spirit’s superstructure, and thousands of hairline cracks in its hull. It’s got a shattered collar strut and a line of matching breaks all along the inside of its chest. Even with all of that, it should still be able to fly; the real damage is halfway between her burn-chambers and the rest of the machine: a split down one of the heat-shields meant to keep its thrusters from cooking its insides out. The gap isn’t big enough to do any real damage, at least not yet, but if she turned too hard or too sudden, or hit windshear along the way, then it’ll grow into a fullblown breach.

We watch over her while she bottles the shell’s most recent mind-state and wipes its stacks of anything NorCol’s competitors couldn’t find out for themselves. At least, the Juno and I watch over her; Salt has got other things to worry about.

The Decatur stands, swaying gently in the breeze while it tries to understand all of the harm it’s managed to do itself, and the jockey waits for the antiflam to kick in. He worked his machine well past its margins, but the damage won’t be deep. The fight didn’t last long enough for that. A couple of his sensors will be strained and a few of his cooling vanes fused together, but anything that won’t heal with a couple of reboots can be worked around, isolated while backup systems take the load. Salt will be feeling it as badly as his shell, but he isn’t complaining where we can hear him.

We lost a few plates to the fight, put ourselves under load heavier than we should have, but Juno was always a brawler. Built from solid-cast blocks, tough and rangy.

No word on the jockey, though.

“You got space for one more?”

I blink, or rather, we do, lens covers acting out my surprise. Hail is standing in the dust at our feet, one hand resting easy on the butt of her service weapon, the other holding up a sturdy silver case with 4131 stencilled across the front. The Spirit rests on one knee behind her, silent but not quite inert. Not quite.

“Decatur’s feeling bruised,” she shakes the case, “and I’d like 31 to have some head space until we can get back to Horizon.”

Shit.

“We do,” we reply, relieved that I’m not the one who has to talk. “Just give me a second,” says a snippet of pre-recorded voice.

She cocks her helmet at us, looks around at the dust. “Uh, sure.”

The Juno and I move as fast as we can.

We wake the body in the saddle, priming it with drugs and warmth and IV-administered calorie-mix. It’s been asleep for nearly the whole journey from the Stepping-Stone, nearly fifty hours now, if ‘asleep’ is the right thing to call it. Comatose, maybe. Dormant. Dead.

Lost, while my mind wandered between the storms.

Anywhere else and this would be easy. I’d trim the pilot-sync and think about closing my eyes, spend a moment remembering which set of limbs was which. But the body in the saddle is all dead weight.

It isn’t responding. I can’t tell whether or not the thought belongs to me.

Then we give it another.

We drop a second measure of stim and antiflam in through the body’s tubes, watching the minor earthquake that follows and counting off the little sparks of nerve-activity.

There. It can feel us.

Try again.

We try to throttle the connection, drop it by increments, but there’s a skip; we drop from high-functionality to dull fifties in a flash, and the world goes dark and formless.

51.12

“Rook?” comes the call from somewhere outside. Somewhere far away. Hail’s voice is thin, stretched out by the distance.

I’m fine, is what I mean to say, but I can’t find sounds to match the thought.

“I’m fine,” says the Juno on my behalf. “I stood up too quickly. Think I’ve pulled something.”

Hail snorts. “You and Salt need to start a club. Want me to come up?”

No.

No, no, no.

But the thoughts don’t find any more shape than that.

The Juno adds a tremble to my voice. “I need a minute.”

“Understood.”

Somewhere, I find a way out of the panic.

Thank you, old bird. I try to swallow, but it takes more control than I can manage right away. I force my swollen tongue around in my mouth, but it’s numb and heavy, enough to make me feel like I’m choking on it. I need another one.

58.14

There’s a voice somewhere out ahead, a thought formed around familiar shapes, but I can’t quite hear it. A window dawns across my private stretch of darkness. Are you sure? it asks, shapes cobbled together by a wetware bridge and projected across the visual centres of my brain. My whole world is in those words.

I almost manage a nod, but it comes out in spasms.

The Juno watches me for a moment more, but when it opens the taps, I can feel more from the machinery around me than from my own dumb muscle.

Worse—it’s an overdose, and we both know it. We’re well past what the company guidelines think is sane, overridden by access privileges that the Juno’s manufactured on demand. One more, and we’d need a crash team on standby, jumper cables ready to pull me back from the dead. I nearly ask for another dose anyway, but a little detail finds its way in through the dark. Enough to know how much trouble I’ve set up for myself. My muscles are the kind of stiff you get after you come out of surgery, locked up and dry-throbbing. Somewhere below me, little sparks mark the places where the nerve-jacks thread my skin, flaring as the Juno disconnects them and retracts the wide bore needles that bond my senses to the steel. I can’t feel the saddle, but pain plots the outlines.

I shiver, and more comes into focus. My head is suddenly too heavy to bear, fighting to tip me over. There’s cold concrete in my lungs that comes up thick in ugly, hacking coughs. For a minute, I think I might turn myself inside out. I freeze and then boil, all the while fighting to keep from hurling into my helmet.

This isn’t working, comes up in one thought.

How about this? follows another.

The suit runs through the steps for connection loss. It starts with the bitter compounds used to get you back in contact with the sync sensors, to get your thoughts running loud and clear enough for the shell to read.

We use it to let me into the bounds of my own skull, but the body isn’t happy to have me back. I have to work for everything.

It takes all the will in the world just to get me back on my feet, and then I’m out of breath and wallowing in sweat. A dehydration warning flashes in my visor, advises me to try another IV, but I think I’ve had enough of needles for the time being. I take a long drag from my suit’s drinking-tube, but I regret it right away. The water is as warm as skin, but that doesn’t stop the pain mapping the outlines of my insides, showing me every swollen millimetre from my gullet to my gut.

The suit reads the sudden ache, floods my eyes with warnings and fights me for control. It’s decided that I’m in shock, and that I shouldn’t be moving around, let alone trying to dismount. Maybe I am, but I’m not going to let it sit me back down.

I run through all the overrides I can reach. When they aren’t enough, I bring the Juno in. Together, we overwhelm the little mind that manages the suit systems. It complains, warns me that NorCol will get a log of everything we’ve done, but the threat is empty. Juno’s trimming the file as fast as it gets written.

We force it to do exactly what we tell it to—make it respond to every tick and twitch and shiver as if I meant them. The Juno helps me steer the thing, helps me walk it around the cockpit and collect my service weapon from its holster.

The painkillers kick in, leave me feeling a little less like I’ve actually died, and a little more like I’m still bleeding out. I teeter on the edge of my little lock, and feel the brush of something else, weight and half-heard sounds.

Don’t do anything stupid.

More stupid, you mean.

I wait while the cockpit cycles air, splits the seals on the operator’s lock. Hail is waiting just below us, right where the narrow ladder unrolls and hits the dust.

“Still alive?”

I don’t try to speak, not yet. I keep my visor angled so she can’t see in. “Only just,” says a recording.

She hands over her little silver case, but holds tight for a second before I pull away. “Look after it.”

“You know I will,” says the Juno.

I carry it back inside the cockpit and connect the Spirit’s mind-state to our reactor grid. The case has batteries of its own, but they aren’t meant to last forever. Hell, they aren’t made to last more than a couple of days, and without power, the mind inside will die. The Juno doesn’t have room to share its thoughts, but the Spirit probably wouldn’t understand them anyway, so we give the ghost of the newer shell a sandbox to itself, and enough space to help us with calculations as we go.

“It’s locked—” I say, out loud, but I’m not thinking. My throat seizes, turns the sound into gravel. The Juno saves me.

It plays the sound of me clearing my throat, followed by a “Sorry.” Then it starts again, translating my thoughts into something Hail can hear. “It’s locked down, Hail. Mind-state checksums are green. Still alive and all intact.”

“Thank you.”

She can’t hide the relief in her voice. There’s a pause, and then the offer of a small network, jockey-to-jockey.

“Shall we go for a walk?”

 

 

WE DON’T HAVE space to take the shells with us, and so we leave them to their own devices. Their internal logics have mapped a defensive pattern and phase lines in case their fragile jockeys need extraction. At least, the Juno and thorny Decatur have; the Spirit stands out in the open, alone and far ahead of the others, watching the distant reaches of the cavern. It isn’t trying to hide, but there’s no reason to. It’s a walking wreck, never to fly again.

The steel knows that well enough.

The Juno has a copy of its mind-state, updated every few moments across the net, not that having its thoughts online would change things now. Its jockey is off-board, and that’s all that matters. The Spirit has nothing to lose, and no fight-or-flight to make it doubt itself. It corrects its stance, bolstered by calculations from Salt’s clever shell, trading measurements and simulations to keep it balanced and still standing on its feet. The machine has dropped all of its excess weight, damaged ablators and warped weapon mounts falling to the dust. Its surviving plates are flared wide open, the remaining weapons crackling, picking up dust along their rails where static makes it cling.

I can feel the heat from here, see the shimmer around its vents. If something came into sight, Spirit would be on it in a second, pushing out every solid round still in its magazines. If that wasn’t enough, the shell has called up the last of its fuel, injectors primed and reactor chambers throttled to the edge of overload.

The other two hold back, keep cold and covered. If the Spirit’s going down, it’ll do it in liquid steel and scathing starlight. They’ll hold vigil.

Hail waits with them.

She’s standing on the first of the oversized steps when I reach her, looking out over my head at the thing that used to be her body. The black doorway frames her, makes her seem smaller, even with the extra height.

“It isn’t dead yet,” I whisper.

She doesn’t respond, not just then. She works a fist, breathes deep. “It might as well be.”

A deep voice finds us. “Then we’ll see that it lives again.”

We both glance back at Salt, strolling up behind me. He seems much taller now, the heavy flight suit adding height and volume. More than I remember.

Then again, it’s been days since I’ve seen him in person. He’s a voice on the network, words on the tightline, a bundle of spines and angled armour-plate that’s only a distant relative of the man standing in front of us.

Hail sways gently, as if she’s caught in a breeze. A blink, and she seems to remember herself, forcing her eyes to focus on us. She’s got the jockey stutter worse than usual, worse than just a few minutes ago, but that’s to be expected. It’s just starting to sink in. When we set out again, she’ll be leaving a part of herself behind.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

“We’ve got your wing,” I say.

“All right.” She blinks, shakes herself out, and tries again. “All right,” with a little more substance this time. “Let’s go.”

“Uh,” says Salt, “there’s the small matter of these stairs.” He rings a knuckle against the first step. “If that’s what we’re calling them.”

“It’ll do for now,” I peer up and over, catch an eye on the open doorway ahead. It’s maybe half as tall as Juno is, but the steps are taller than they’d need to be, even for that. I look up at Hail. “How’d you get up there?”

She shrugs, a little looser now. “I was angry.”

Salt chuckles at that. “Remind me to stay out of your way.” He steps back, looks the rock face up and down, and glances back at me. “You go first,” he says.

“Ah-ha.”

He rests against the rock, offers me a knee and shoulder. “You can do it.”

“Fuck you.”

I can’t see his face past the craggy visor, but I can feel him grin at me.

I set my boot on his knee and grip one of the big plates around his collar. His height gets me most of the way up, and Hail slaps a hand around my wrist and carries me the last of the way. When it’s Salt’s turn, he stretches to meet us.

“Like hell,” I mutter. Parts of me are seizing up just looking at him.

Hail sets a boot to the edge, leans over the side. “Take the left.”

We add our muscle together, suits straining against the weight, but he’s tall enough that we don’t have to work for long.

“Just two more to go.”

I glare at Hail. “Thanks for the reminder.”

She doesn’t wait for me to catch my breath, but jogs across the step, skips, then jumps. Her scrabbling boots carry her to the edge of the next step and she hangs for a second on her fingers, uses her suit muscle to pull herself over.

She waves us closer, and puts out a hand to catch me. “Your turn.”

I size the jump. “Anyone else, and I’d figure you for a Werewolf.”

“Didn’t have the temperament,” she says, no hesitation.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but then, I’m not surprised either.

She flexes her fingers. “Come on.”

If it was me on my own, I’d botch it in a second. I’d slip, maybe cramp up, or trip over myself and hit the wall.

34.88

But I’m not alone.

53.10

The Juno and I measure ourselves against the incline, do the calculations in the shared space between our heads. We pilot the flight suit back to the furthest edge of the step, and bunch ourselves down around knots of artificial muscle. We divert most of the available power to our legs and core, dig our toes into the stone and launch.

The first stride is as long as I could manage on my own, but the next is twice the size and completely impossible. A third, even longer, and we kick off, suddenly airborne. We’ve already plotted our flight path, skin tensing as the ledge rises to meet us. We don’t have the power to clear it, but we knew that already. We shuffle power back up from our legs, dump it all into arms and chest and shoulders. We catch the lip on one hand, kick out, wheel across the edge and come down on skidding feet, our armoured fingertips dragging behind us.

Hail watches us.

I blink. Me. Watches me.

28.13

“Are you sure you weren’t a Wolf?”

12.81

I shrink back into the boundaries of my own skin and battered muscle. My head feels cramped, like there isn’t enough space to hold me. Breathe in, breathe out.

I hold out my glove and flex the strands that power its knuckles. “I’m a jockey, same as any other.” I close the fist and meet her eyes, but I don’t know what to read in them. “A flight-suit is just a little shell, right? Same idea, just a little smaller.”

She watches me, but Salt gets in before she speaks.

“Well done. No, really.”

I find him down below, looking up with arms crossed.

“Just don’t be expecting a repeat.” He spreads his hands. “I’m not making the jump. I’m not even making the crawl. Either you haul me up, or you do the next part on your own.” He chuckles at our expressions. “What?”

We drag him over the edge, rinse and repeat for the last step, if a little slower and saner.

“Christs,” he mutters, once we finally clear the top. “Would you look at that?”

As if we could do anything else but stare.

 

 

I’D CALL IT a door, but that would be missing the point. It has all of the features—hinges, locking bolts, a heavy frame to hold it all in place—but you’d only call it that because you didn’t have a better word for it. I need something better; the idea of a door, taken somewhere deep and dark.

It lies where it fell, flat on the far side of the threshold, huge and threatening.

Hail stacks us up against the doorframe, looking in. I’ve got her back, and Salt leans against the wall across from us. He’s got a stubby shotgun the same colour as the rust-sheen plating that keeps him alive, and almost as bulky.

We hesitate—all three of us. We should’ve punched through as soon as we cleared the step, rolled around and swept our way through the room on the other side, but we’re all feeling it. A heavy dread, curdling in the pits of our stomachs.

Hail takes a breath, waves us through a ready check and punches through. We follow, skirting around the huge metal slab and fanning out with gun-sights tracking cones of IR sensitivity.

Nothing moves to meet us, but we know the difference between caution and paranoia—if there’s any chance of something on the other side, we have to take it as a certainty. Sigurd’s hollows killed their way here, died in droves just to reach the doorstep. If there was anything alive on the other side when they arrived, it’ll be dead now.

That doesn’t stop us running through the clearance patterns. We move in overlapping circles, tracing our way around an empty chamber. Smooth walls match our turns, rising to a dome above us, carved from valley stone. A single opening at the far side leads to a narrow passage into the dark. We take up positions, check our visors and the extra senses in our guns, but we seem to be alone.

“Clear?” asks Hail.

“Clear,” says Salt.

“Clear,” I reply, a moment later. “You feel that?”

“Is my skin crawling?” growls Salt. “Yes. Yes it is.”

We turn as one, look back at the giant slab.

Hail puts out a hand and draws it back. Her visor lights up. “I don’t read anything off it—”

I glance back at her. “—but it’s giving us all pins and needles?”

None of us want any closer to it, but that doesn’t stop it drawing us in. We step around it one last time, roll through our helmet displays looking for any sign of particle wash. Salt gets his shell to scan it from out in the cave, but the machine comes up just the same as we do. Some mild interference, but from an unknown source. Nothing that can kill us, no reason for us to be injecting anti-rad. Nothing to be worried about, if it wasn’t so obviously something to worry about.

It lies flat on the ground where Sigurd dropped it, cracked flooring buckling around it. It’s as thick as dreadnought-plate and so dense that you can almost feel it tugging on you. Silver blisters mark where company guns tried to break it down, but I can’t see anywhere where they made it through.

Scratch that. The huge hinges have been peeled back. All around them are claw marks, gouged through the metal.

But they’re massive.

“What has hands like this?” I ask.

Hail follows my finger, comes around to get a look. “Christs,” she mutters. “I don’t know.” She puts her hand out straight, picturing pale-blue fingertips. “It wasn’t a Spirit.”

“Wasn’t a Decatur, either,” mutters Salt. He works his gauntlet open and shut. “I could fit two fists inside that palm, easy.”

“Decatur is big for her class,” I say.

“Big for anything walking,” he replies. “But this was bigger.”

We trade glances. “What peels plating like this?”

“A monster. Bigger than anything else.” He spares a glance for the two of us. “Watch my back.”

With that, he slings his shotgun, sets both hands on the fallen door and heaves himself onto it. He doesn’t get far.

“You should take a look at this.”

We follow in his footsteps, gritting teeth. The static fizz grows as I get closer, running through my hands when I go looking for grip. It drives a shiver through my bones and sets every muscle twitching to the same electric beat.

But now that I’m up here, I can’t do anything but stare.

The face of the door looks burned, rusted and pitted, then polished to an acid-wash sheen, showing hidden depths and odd colours in our helmet-lamps. Every part of it has been carved, a field of shapes that might be empty eye-sockets, rows of things that look like teeth, thickets of grasping fingertips. Howling, reaching, dying.

“Christs,” mutters Hail. “What do you think it is?”

“The end of all things.”

I don’t realise that I’ve said it out loud until I feel the other two staring at me.

“You don’t see it?”

Hail shakes her head. “Show us.”

I walk to the top of it, where I trace odd outlines and the curves of unfamiliar hulls, ship-shapes rimmed with jagged lightning bolts. “The skies are dark”—I shift, mark the shape of an eclipse—“and something is blocking out the sun.” I sweep wide. “Stars are falling, and the ground is splitting open.” A few steps over, and cities crumble, towers toppling. “See that?”

Salt sets himself on his haunches. “They look like the glassy shells outside.” He runs a finger across them. “Arranged in a battle line.”

“And before the middle of the scene, every single one of them is dead.” Halfway down, swirling patterns cut the image in half, twisting everything around them. “The waves cover everything. Below them, all the faces of the drowned.”

Hail finds the last of it. A strange, oblong shape that breaks through the clouds in one corner. “And this is the boat that got them out.”

Salt frowns. “There’s a story like that.”

She watches him. “About drowning?”

“In part.” He taps his helmet on the chin. “But that isn’t the point of it. Not if I remember right.”

“It’s about the boat?”

“About a boat, and an angry god with a reset button.”

I’ve heard it, even if I don’t remember where. Something old, carried with us all the way from Ancient Earth. “A god that floods the world so it can start over.”

“Maybe that’s what this is,” says Salt, aiming a glance down the passage ahead of us. “The final resting place of the boat that brought them out.”

Hail matches his look. “If you’re right, they had the boat before the flood. No reason to record it on the door.” She squints into the dark. “It might be a tomb for all of those they couldn’t save. A memorial.”

But I’m shaking my head. “Sigurd didn’t risk a dreadnought trying to break into a graveyard.”

Salt shrugs. “Depends what got buried.”

Hail looks over her shoulder at me. “What makes you say that?”

“Think about it. You don’t put a door like this on a grave, not for one person and not for a thousand. Same as you don’t put rail-slugs or shrapnel on a jockey’s funeral mark. You drink a beer and leave a name in the paint, maybe drop one of your badges as a memento. You cheer when someone says their name, but you don’t waste time remembering how they went out.”

“You don’t put it on a lifeboat, either.”

I click a finger at her. “Exactly. It wouldn’t fit. The boat is all the symbol it needs to be. You could put it up on a block and remember all of the people it saved. This here—” I tap a toe on it, single out a twisted, howling face. “This is about the dying.”

Salt weighs it out. “So what is it, then?”

“It’s just like everything else in this place,” says Hail. She’s got it now; I can see it in her eyes. “It’s made to hide something, to keep it locked tight and impossible to reach.” She kicks the metal. “Almost impossible.”

“And probably trying to kill you,” I add.

Salt watches us. “So is this the angry god? You think they caught up to it—decided they’d bury it, put it in a cell and make it pay for all it did?”

“Almost,” says Hail. “They meant to keep it buried.”

“But you’ve got the wrong story.”

I take it all in with a sweep of my hand. Millions of lives sketched out, given the twisted shapes of their last moments. All around us, the same strange pattern, repeated over and over. Coils and constellations, and six barbed stars above all else.

“There are no gods here. There’s only the flood.”