31

 

Meloku didn’t need to sleep often, but when she did, dreams arrived fast and ended quickly. She was dreaming a dream of angels and planarships when an impulse from her demiorganics jarred her awake.

Her eyes fluttered against the darkness. She instinctively switched to infrared, but she was too scattershot, too confused, to make sense of the blobs around her. She groaned and rolled to her side. Endorphins and serotonin-killers flooded into her, but they couldn’t throw off all the effects of chemically induced sleep. Will-o’-the-wisps danced in front of her eyes.

She snapped, “What?”

Companion said, “The watchdog programs you left at the anthropologists’ field base are contacting you.”

“Sorry,” Meloku said, sheepishly. There was no point in lying, in telling Companion that she hadn’t meant to be irritable when she obviously had. “What’s happening?”

Companion said, “The signal was cut off mid-broadcast.”

That caught Meloku’s attention. With effort, she sat and threw off her covers.

The messages hadn’t been long. One watchdog had mentioned an electrical disturbance in the communication chamber’s power grid. Another program she’d left to watch for shuttle activity had detected a seismic disturbance, but nothing that fit the profile for a landing. And then the signal had simply ended mid-datastream.

Meloku called the field base, and queried NAI. NAI replied that everything was normal. No earthquakes, no shuttle landings, no power spikes. Habidah was in Feliks Vine’s office with her pet monk. Kacienta and Joao were fucking in Joao’s quarters.

Her watchdogs also reported no abnormalities. “Explain the last truncated transmission,” Meloku demanded.

The watchdog that had reported the power anomaly replied, “False alarm / minor power spike tripped threshold.” The next chimed in, “Minute buckling in underground support occurred directly behind sensor/triggered alarm. Compensated/corrected.”

The response came five milliseconds too late.

The explanations didn’t rest well with her, but the delay was a warning flag by itself. There was no good explanation for it. Her watchdogs operated with the precision of a pulsar. She hadn’t thought Habidah capable of subverting them.

Companion asked, “Shall I advise Ways and Means?”

Meloku tried not to take too long to answer. The most likely explanation, of course, was that it was a test – another way for Companion and the amalgamates to gauge and judge her. Companion kept telling her that she needed to suppress her innate need to take charge of a situation without arranging for backup. She needed to learn to subordinate herself.

“At once,” she said. “Tell Ways and Means I suspect criminal tampering. Keep it apprised of anything new I discover.”

She called up several counterintelligence programs locked away in her demiorganics’ deep memory. She’d never used them outside of training. The amalgamates approved their use only in high-stakes security crises. Anything that might threaten the amalgamates’ plans for this world certainly qualified as a security crisis, particularly if Meloku’s old colleagues weren’t as naive as they’d seemed.

She could feel the black programs in the back of her mind: cold and dark, like beads of ice. They numbed every part of her they touched. Thoughts that touched them shrank back, withered like desiccated roots. To them, she was also an enemy. Agents like her weren’t allowed to glimpse anything of them lest she learn too much about how they functioned. She shuddered and pushed the programs on their way.

The black programs took no prisoners. At once, their preliminary reports returned. They injected themselves into the field base’s NAI and dismantled it from the inside. They devoured NAI’s brain from the inside out, digesting it. They puppeted its remains. To anybody interacting with NAI, it would seem to speak and answer exactly as before. That was just an imitation, though – a viper wearing the skin of a grass snake.

Her black programs hunted and consumed her watchdogs in the same manner, considering them already compromised.

Meloku’s frown deepened. The black programs had found nothing. The situation was exactly as her watchdogs reported it. Habidah and her monk remained in Feliks’ office, and Joao and Kacienta at their labors. There had been no alarms, no abnormalities, no detected infiltration other than her own.

The reported power spike was too suspicious to ignore. Yet the gateway apparatus itself was powered down, cold. Even the air was undisturbed.

She slumped, frustrated. None of this was adding up. On a whim, she checked the timestamps of the reports.

The first report from her black programs had come back five milliseconds late.

Adrenaline pounded into her chest.

The remainder of the reports had come back exactly on time, but that couldn’t hide the glaring error in the first. She’d been told that the black programs had never been bested by any power encountered. This was either one hell of a test, or she’d just brushed up against something the likes of which the Unity had never encountered. Either way, her response should be the same.

“Contact Ways and Means at once,” Meloku told Companion. “Highest priority. Our project has been compromised by an extraplanar power–”

A spear of white-hot energy shot between her eyes, through the center of her brain. The spear drove upward, twisted, and sheared her mind neatly in two.

The next thing she remembered, she was on the floor, tangled in blankets, pain like needles screeching across bare nerves. She felt as though she lay on sheets of nails, that her fingernails were being pulled out, and her skin had ignited. She must have screamed. She heard pounding, as if at a great distance, at her door.

“Mistress! Your Holiness!” It was Aude, her cook and chambermaid. Her knocking grew increasingly desperate. She tried to knock the door down. She wouldn’t be getting in. Meloku had secured her door with field projectors.

Meloku choked. Her tongue wouldn’t work, and tasted like moldy copper. She cast her blankets off. A flood of dizziness overwhelmed her. She couldn’t swallow. She was about to vomit, she realized; a wholly alien and disorienting sensation. She hadn’t thrown up since she’d been a toddler, when her first augmentations had been installed. Her demiorganics should have clamped down on that.

She tumbled to her side and heaved her dinner across the floorboards. She coughed viciously, and spat. Her mouth tasted of malarial swampwater and citrus. She ordered her demiorganics to block all but essential sensory input. Pain and nausea continued to rack her body. She tried again.

“Please open the door, Your Holiness!” Aude cried.

The pain was fading, at least. “Go away!” Meloku shouted, when at last she could. She sat against her bed, shivering. Her knees and elbows were bruised from the seizure. At least she seemed to have avoided biting her tongue.

She had definitely come under some kind of attack. She tried to call up records of the seconds before the whiteout. Again her demiorganics refused to answer.

“I’ll go and get help, Your Holiness,” Aude said. “In God’s name, I swear to you that I can help.”

Fury seized Meloku’s throat. “Go die of the pestilence!” she rasped.

Aude’s bare footsteps thumped down the stairwell. Meloku rested her head on her knees. Her mind felt empty, sluggish. “Companion,” she said, aloud. “Help.”

She waited. Silence. A slowly widening pit began opening in the center of her stomach.

She kicked her soiled sheets away. Whatever had happened, it had been enough of a shock that her demiorganics seemed to have been jarred out of contact with her nervous system. The pain was nearly gone, and still nothing answered her. She looked about, lost, and gave the mental command to switch to retinal infrared. Her bedchamber remained dark.

Her pulse thudded against her ears. She spat again, but her mouth was too dry for the taste to come out. She’d had her first demiorganics installed when she was five. She’d never been without something answering her thoughts since. No wonder she felt like she couldn’t think. Part of her was missing.

She counted another ten seconds before wailing in panic.

A minute later, she was on her feet, leaning on the window shutters. Her whole body shook. Adrenaline seared her chest. She could hardly keep from hyperventilating. Her pulse beat fast, making her head spin. Her body hadn’t been unregulated for all of her adult life.

Despite all of that, she had to try to think, to figure out what had happened. She had to stay calm, take stock of her resources. She asked her demiorganics for a medical diagnosis. Her cheeks burned when nothing happened. She set her hand on her chest, took deep breaths.

Companion couldn’t be gone for good. That just wasn’t going to happen. She’d never been alone since it had been installed.

OK – the first thing she knew for sure was that her demiorganics were nonresponsive or dead. Possibly for good. How could that have happened? The first option was that her demiorganics, and Companion, had been remotely shut down by a hostile force. The second was that they had been damaged, again by a hostile force. The shock she’d experienced certainly seemed to indicate some kind of nervous system trauma.

It had all happened when she’d investigated the event at the field base. Her counterintelligence programs had been compromised. The reports they’d sent back to her could also have been compromised.

That meant she could have been compromised, too. Any virus so advanced would have little trouble crossing the synaptic barriers between her demiorganics and her organic brain, and rewriting her like a piece of software. Just like she’d tried to rewrite the field base’s NAI.

She couldn’t assume that that was the case. She had to keep moving. The only way she could do that was by believing she was still herself.

She needed to communicate to Ways and Means. A shuttle could pick her up in minutes. She dug her field kit from under her bed before she remembered that all of the equipment she’d brought with her – the field projectors and weapons and sensors – had been made to interface directly with her demiorganics. They wouldn’t function for an ordinary human being.

She opened the shutters and looked to the stars. Her demiorganics sent status updates to Ways and Means every few minutes. When it stopped receiving those, it would realize something had happened. A shuttle should have already been on its way to meet her.

That was assuming, of course, that whatever power had attacked her hadn’t anticipated that. If it was as powerful as it seemed, it wouldn’t have any trouble subverting a satellite and faking the updates she sent to Ways and Means.

She stared at the stars, hoping, willing – praying – for one of them to come for her.

After ten minutes, her jaw hurt from clenching. Voices clamored at her door. The door shook with the force of their pounding. The security field shone a gentle blue.

Meloku instinctively ordered her field generators to power down. Nothing. She groaned, restraining frustrated tears, and walked to the door. The field generators, at least, could be turned off. From the other side of the door, the field was impenetrable, but the protection only went one way. She waved her fingers a centimeter in front of the projectors, disrupting the particle stream. The field flared violet and vanished.

The door cracked open; a man fell through. Without infrared, it took too long to recognize him. Galien. Aude stepped over him.

“Well?” Meloku asked, as if nothing was wrong. The quaver in her voice gave her away.

Aude dropped to her knees. “Forgive me, your Holiness. You were screaming. Your door – it was as if a demon were holding–”

“I suffered a vision,” Meloku said, and paused to try to figure out where to go from there. The pause lingered. “It was a messa… it was a revelation. I am not ready to talk about it yet.”

Galien picked himself up. He dusted his legs and eyed her. As superstitious as these people were, they could also be cynical enough to surprise her. Galien always spoke on two levels. “Shall I fetch a physician?” he asked. “Prepare medicines?”

“There is no physician alive that can cure a terror of God,” Meloku said. “Go.”

Aude swiftly departed. Galien took a step as if to follow, but stopped. “I have never known you to struggle so dearly with your reasons.” With her lies, he meant.

“I did have a vision,” Meloku said. Maybe a touch of the truth would soothe the anxiety from her voice. “About terrible deeds in a faraway place.”

“Outremer?” Galien ventured.

“Farther.”

“Prester John’s kingdom?”

“Only idiots believe in Prester John in this age,” Meloku snapped. “There is no far eastern Christian kingdom attacking the infidels from their opposite borders. It’s all steppe horsemen.” She put a hand to her forehead. She was getting a terrible headache.

Galien caught her pained breath. “Perhaps we should call that physician after all.”

“I have no desire to be bled dry or have my piss sniffed. This is…” She searched for words. “This is a spiritual crisis, not a crisis of the body.” She still had hope that, at any moment, the sky would open with reentry sonic booms.

Galien set a hand on her shoulder and steered her toward her bed. Before Meloku knew what had happened, she was seated next to him. He kicked her vomit-soiled blankets farther under the bed. “It certainly smells like more than a spiritual crisis.”

Meloku didn’t know what had possessed her to allow him to lead her other than sheer distraction. For the first time, it occurred to her that she didn’t have her defenses. No tranquilizers or diamond-tipped darts, no augmented muscles.

“It’s extremely suspect for you to be alone with me,” she stammered. “I want you to leave.”

“Your Holiness.” Galien shifted his grip to her hand, and tightened it. “My future saint. I am extremely indebted to you for elevating me out of that refuse pile of a scribe’s office. But my livelihood is tied to yours. Everything that you made me to be depends upon you staying healthy in your body and in your wits.”

He was the kind of person she’d chosen to keep close. It shouldn’t have surprised her that he remained driven when she least wanted him to be. He asked, “What really happened here? An intruder? A guest overstaying his welcome?”

“Nothing so vile.”

Galien placed his free hand on Meloku’s forehead. She jerked away. “Certainly not a fever. You’re cold as the moonlight.”

“I truly did have a vision,” Meloku said.

“Of what? People are going to hear what’s happened. Tell me what you saw.”

She pushed herself a little farther, but his hand restrained her. She said, “By God’s blood, I won’t allow you to take charge of me.”

“Very well, Your Holiness. Please tell me what it was you saw.”

“The shadow of a demon, bent to devour the world. Swallowing angels as it advanced.”

“Very prosaic,” Galien said.

“This is not a play. I do not vomit for theatrics.”

“Are you sure?” Meloku glared and he relented, or pretended to. “I know you would go to many ends to make a point, but I don’t know what point it is you’re trying to make here. It would help me serve you if I knew.”

“All I need from you is time to interpret my dream.”

“It’s a dream, now, is it? There’s a distinct difference between visions and dreams. Take care to choose the right word when you tell others about this.”

She opened her mouth to snap some threat, but stopped. He had a point. She heard no shuttle. She was stuck with the natives. She had to manage them well. They were her only resource.

Her only resource to accomplish what?

To discover what had happened to her. To alert Ways and Means. To find out just what was going on at the old field base. To be with Companion again.

As daunting as that list was, it helped her organize her thoughts. For all that she’d learned about herself in the last few minutes, she’d held onto at least one thing she could be proud of. She wasn’t going to give up.

She pulled her hand away from Galien and stood. She strode back to the foggy window. She said, “This isn’t the kind of vision I would feel comfortable sharing with the mob.”

Galien asked, “Then what profit is it?”

“I didn’t think of the profit while I was having it.”

Galien let his silence speak for itself.

Meloku smiled, briefly. She underestimated the natives on occasion. “You never believed in me, did you?”

“I believe God wants you to prosper. Everything that’s happened so far has worked in your favor.”

“And this doesn’t match the pattern of my previous revelations.”

“To put it that succinctly, Your Holiness – no.”

“Just because there isn’t a pattern, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a plan.”

That sounds like the lady I knew,” Galien said. “Then what is your plan?”

“I don’t feel like sharing it,” she said. “I’m still piecing it together.”

“Forgive me if I should say that sounds like a contradiction.”

“Watch yourself. I do not forgive easily, at this moment above all others.”

He didn’t answer, but she didn’t wish to turn to see his expression. She held a hand to her temple. In spite of this outrageous headache and everything else, she was starting to recover herself. Setting goals, no matter how distant, kept her focused.

She just wished she could speak with Companion. Whatever had happened to it, she hoped it was going to be all right.

Everything on her list could be accomplished at once if only she could contact Ways and Means. Whatever had done this to her seemed intent on keeping her from that. It had attacked when she’d been about to warn Ways and Means of the severity of what was happening.

Her first priority had to be to contact Ways and Means. But how to reach it when she had no way of signaling it and the enemy was likely impersonating her signals?

She would have to create an event too big for Ways and Means to ignore. It would have to be something caused by transplanar technology. Anything natural, even a large fire, could be explained away by her impersonator. She ran through a mental list of the equipment she’d brought with her. None of her tools would work, and none of them held power supplies large enough for an explosive discharge that would attract Ways and Means’ attention.

She did have tools like that at the field base, however. All of her personal equipment would only respond to her demiorganics. The same wasn’t true of the field base, where equipment was meant to be passed from person to person. Overloaded, the field base’s generators could lay waste to hundreds of square kilometers.

At the field base, she’d find whatever had done this to her.

She shuddered. Her other choices weren’t great, either. Ways and Means had other agents on this world, but the nearest, in Paris, had left, abandoning the French court as uncontrollable. She didn’t remember where the next agent was. She’d counted on her demiorganics to keep track of that.

She said, “I need to prepare for a journey.”

“Leave Avignon? Just when you’ve got the city pinched between your fingers?”

“I never did this for me. It was all for a higher power.”

Galien reached over her shoulder and pulled the shutters closed. “I have a hard time imagining a city more suited to the glorification of God than Avignon. If He would have you in another city, the opportunities would have to be great.”

“I’m not traveling to another city. I need to find the demon in my dream.”

“And where would it be?”

She hoped to disarm him with precision: “Forty-five miles south of Lyon.”

Galien scoffed. “I thought you said that you had dreams of faraway places. I grew up farther than that, and walked here.” Still, he sounded relieved. A trip across France was hardly the crusade he’d imagined.

“It’s far away to me,” Meloku said.

“You traveled here from Constantinople, did you not?”

Meloku didn’t answer.

“Your Holiness?” he asked, and for the first time tonight he sounded unsure.

“I need help to get there.” Without demiorganics, she couldn’t trust her abilities in a fight against Habidah, not alone. “Mercenaries. Horses. Food and fodder. However much my money will pay for on short notice. We’ll collect benefices from the cardinals.”

“You’re certain this will all lead to the profit of God?” Galien asked, doubtfully.

“In the end.”

“The French will hardly welcome an armed party traversing their territory.”

“The French can’t stop the English or the bandits already ravaging them.”

“For as much as you have the people and prelates of Avignon under your power, I doubt many of them will be enthusiastic about your expedition.”

“You can’t talk me out of this.”

“I’m trying to keep you from throwing out all God has given you so far. Your reputation–”

She turned sharply, and let a little bit of her carefully rebuilt control fail. “My reputation is not worth dogshit if it will not help me in my time of need. And neither are you people.” Right then, she would have turned Avignon into a pyre if only it would catch Ways and Means attention.
Galien paled. It suited him.

He nodded and silently ducked out the door. Meloku, blood cooling, walked to her bed. It took a while to even her breath.

There was no point in going to sleep now. Without her demiorganics to regulate her, she might sleep for eight hours. She couldn’t afford that. She couldn’t miss anything, not even when it seemed all there was to do was think and wait and watch.

The sky outside her clouded window shone still and silent. Without her enhanced senses, it was all dead to her.