The Firmament of Flame, page 7
Still, I reached out and gently removed the scattergun from her grasp, placing it back in one of our racks of many, many weapons. “Shotgun’s her best bet,” Sho said skeptically—I’d bet good money he’d been the one who had suggested it in the first place.
“I know you’re a fan,” I said, looking pointedly at the double-barreled sawed-off he wore on his waist—of the bad habits he’d been picking up from Javier, a love of street cannons was … one of them—“but she doesn’t know how to fire them, and she’s not as strong as you. A shotgun’ll break her shoulder.” I couldn’t keep a smile from my face when I said it—Jane had said much the same thing to the Preacher when she’d first met me. “Take this instead.” I reached for a submachine gun on the rack, the same basic design as Bitey, without the bells and whistles.
I showed her how to change the fire selector, and how to change out the magazine; she nodded, watching carefully—she’d learned the basics of this sort of thing in training, but each weapon was different. Still, her eyes occasionally darted up to my face, the faint widening of her pupils—even darker than the rest of her eye—the only hint of the nervousness she was carefully trying not to betray. “You’ve got this,” I said, putting a calming hand on her shoulder; she glowed slightly in response. “Just stay behind Sho and me, do what we tell you to do, and you’ll be fine. I don’t expect you to actually kill anybody today, Meridian; you’re here for the network core, and that’s all. At most we may need you to lay down some suppressing fire—just shooting in the general direction of the enemy will do the job.”
“But if I’m shooting at the enemy, won’t they be shooting back?” she asked nervously, laying her hand over mine, on her shoulder, even as the momentary glow faded. “Isn’t that—isn’t that what ‘suppressing fire’ kind of entails?”
“You’ve got your intention shield, you’ve got us—you’re good,” I told her again, ignoring that—correct—little piece of supposition. “This is what you wanted, remember? Why you came along—a chance to be part of the adventures.” I grinned, just a little. “This is how adventures feel.”
“I feel like puking.”
“Sounds about right, yeah.”
“We’re almost in position, Esa,” Schaz warned.
“Got it.” I moved to the airlock, taking a deep breath to steady myself.
“Wait, that’s it?” Meridian asked, sounding confused. “Don’t we need—we’re not landing, not setting down, shouldn’t we have … anti-grav gear, or descent cables, or parachutes, at least?”
“You don’t need parachutes,” I told her, having to raise my voice to be heard as the door began to slide open and the golden atmosphere began to rush in: it tasted … strange … metallic and almost sweet, like licking burnt sugar from an aluminum plate, but was perfectly breathable otherwise. “You’ve got me.”
I didn’t even look as I threw myself out the door. Partially that was bravado for Meridian’s sake—the more confident she thought I was, the less afraid she’d be—but mainly it was because this shit was fun.
Schaz was hovering about thirty feet up from one of the marble-plated balconies, and there were no sentries in sight; a good sign. As I fell, I pushed out with my teke, the downward force “crunching” a bit as it met the marble, then exerting an equal and opposite amount of upward push on my descent, slowing my fall until I touched down with … only a bit of a stumble.
I did absolutely ruin the fancy floor underneath me, though, cracking the marble apart into splinters that glimmered in the light.
Nobody in view; Schaz had chosen our insertion point well. “Come ahead,” I said, touching the comm bud under my jaw as I did so.
“Alreadydidlookup!” I whipped my head upward and reached out just in time to grab Sho with my telekinesis, catching him just in time to prevent him from breaking half a dozen bones on landing; he was laughing as he rolled off of the invisible platform I’d “built” beneath him. I bopped him on the side of the head with my knuckles as he came to kneel beside me with his shotgun raised, his tongue hanging out in a Wulf grin; then I looked upward for Meridian, who I could see standing at the edge of Schaz’s ramp.
You can do it, girl. Just one step. Just one step into nothing.
And if you can’t, I’d rather know now, before we actually got into combat. We could figure something else out for the network—if you were going to freeze, freeze now. All the training in the world wouldn’t stop that from happening if it was going to happen, and it if was—
She didn’t freeze.
I slowed her descent much more elegantly than I had Sho’s—mainly because I’d had more warning—and she set down as gently as a feather, only a slight hesitation as she raised up her own submachine gun (though there was a moment where she got her elbow tangled in the strap). All the same, she was grinning too, a little bit of light shimmering again from her obsidian skin. “That was fun!” she said, and I grinned back—I had a feeling we were going to be—
“You! What the hell are—” There was a Bright Wanderer sentry who’d just … wandered into view on the other side of the archway from the balcony, staring at us with wide, glittering Tyll eyes, probably drawn by the sound of my descent cracking the marble floor apart; for just a moment, we froze, all four of us, and then the sentry was going for her gun and I didn’t even think, just grabbed her arm with my teke and pulled, and she went flying over the railing, disappearing into the golden glow of the clouds beneath us.
“Now, her?” Sho said to Meridian, stepping to the edge and looking down. “She definitely needed a parachute.”
CHAPTER 10
Esa
“You just … you just murdered that woman,” Meridian said, staring with wide eyes toward the balcony where Sho was still looking downward, following the path of the Wanderers’ sentry. Meridian wasn’t glowing any longer.
“Probably,” I agreed. Almost certainly, in fact—even if she hit one of the anti-grav generators buried beneath the cloud cover beneath us, she’d have reached terminal velocity well before then. It was a long way to fall.
“She was reaching for her weapon, Meridian,” Sho said as he stepped back from the ledge, apparently satisfied the cultist sentry wasn’t going to sprout wings and make a return. “Esa was justified.”
“She was reaching for her weapon because we showed up out of nowhere at the tower she was supposed to be guarding—”
“You saw all those warships they’re building in orbit, Mer.” I shook my head, checking the action on Bitey for the fiftieth time—it was what my hands just did when we were in a potential combat scenario and they didn’t have anything else to do. “Dreadnaughts may not be planet-killers, but they are city-killers, at the very least. I’ve seen what a dreadnaught can do to a civilian population that doesn’t have any defenses against it—seen it in the skies over my own hometown. These Bright Wanderers aren’t planning to unite the galaxy through peace and goodwill.”
“She was brainwashed, desperate, just like those people—”
“And desperate people will kill us if we give them half a chance; she’d bought into this cult nonsense bullshit, at least to the point where they trusted her enough to put a gun in her hands and tell her to shoot at anyone she doesn’t like the look of—up to and including the other desperate souls who arrived with her. Whether they’ve done that convincing with a cocktail of drugs and a healthy dose of groupthink, or whether she came to that decision of her own free will, that’s where she was at—and it’s where any others we see will be at as well. So we’re going to kill them before they kill us, and I need to know: are you up for that?” I was channeling Jane, and I knew it—a part of me was marveling that I could be so cold, asking myself if I really meant what I was saying. But I needed Meridian to get past this; it didn’t matter that she was young or pretty or unprepared, we didn’t have room for anything else.
For the first time, I knew what it must have been like for Jane and the Preacher during the flight from my homeworld, surrounded on all sides by the Pax, with me desperate for answers they didn’t have time to give in the middle of a firefight.
She nodded, once, even though there was still something a little shell-shocked around her eyes—though I didn’t know what she’d expected; she’d been through combat training, seen the guns we all carried, seen us return to Scheherazade and Khalipon and Bolivar with empty magazines and bloodstains on our clothes the few times we’d seen action on our little outward-bound journey. I mean, I got it, I understood—seeing the aftermath of the thing and seeing the thing were very different—but all the same, we had a job to do.
She was at least trying to move past it, though, which was good; what was also good was that Schaz had apparently managed to set us down on the very balcony of the network hub: I could see it pulsing in my HUD in the very next room, sending information flowing out through the invisible ether.
We stepped inside the tower, underneath the soaring archway from the balcony, and if I thought the exteriors had been ostentatious, they had nothing on the interior: it was all one big room, the domed ceiling rising at least four stories over our heads, and absolutely all of that ceiling was covered in a kind of shimmering, scintillating material that was at least a synthetic reproduction of crushed Klitek pearl, if not the real thing.
The walls looked like they had at one point been covered in tall hanging tapestries—you could see on the marble where some places were darker than others—but those had long since been torn down, replaced with a kind of looping, archaic script, painted directly onto the cladding in a language I couldn’t read, but recognized all the same: it was the same as the etchings on the Cyn’s armor and the robes of the proselytizers for the Bright Wanderers, those we’d watched—from a distance—as they recruited from pulsed worlds. The designs were as much schematic as they were linguistic, seeming nearly arcane, or at least alchemical: the vertically oriented script was bizarre purely in the fact that it seemed to share no common root at all with the universal system of writing and language developed during the Golden Age.
Still, that meant the designs were ultimately meaningless to me, so I turned back toward what lay at the center of the room: the network hub, weirdly out of place on a raised dais, all computer banks and whirring machinery where there clearly should have been some kind of throne or altar instead, the center of power for whatever skyfaring people had built these soaring towers.
I mean, I supposed it still was that—the center of power—just in a very, very different way.
“Take a look for the network router,” I said, bringing up an image in my HUD of what a router for this sort of system ought to look like. “It should be kind of … kind of tube-y, and … sort of blinking-ish—”
“Okay, yeah,” Meridian sighed, shaking her head and running a hand through her long black hair, “this is why I’m here.” She pointed a finger at a random piece of machinery halfway across the room, instantly recognizing the stupid thing among all the other tall, tube-y, blinking pieces of machinery. “That’s the router. Shut that down, and the AIs onboard the various dreadnaughts will be cut off from the network. Then all the other team has to do is retrieve the password from—”
A sharp cracking sound, and the smell of electrical ionization, followed by melting plastics and metal in an acrid tang that made me wrinkle my nose; Sho lowered his paw as the network router gave its last gasp. “Shut down,” he said simply, the fur on his palm still standing on end from the static of the charge he’d thrown into the electronics.
I grinned at him. “I take it there is some sort of reactor, lower in the tower?” I asked; he couldn’t generate electricity, just harness it, which meant the energy from that blast had come from somewhere.
“Oh, yeah,” he replied in the affirmative. “More power flowing through these walls than there was at Raizencourt Observatory. I’ve got juice for days, when you need it.”
“Right,” Meridian nodded, taking Sho’s … rather drastic interpretation of “shut that down” in stride. She moved quickly up the dais, kneeling in front of one of the many, many monitors on the hub. “Let me try and get—”
A massive clash from behind us, coming from the balcony: the sound of metal on marble, with real weight beneath it. Even without turning, I knew that sound—had been, in equal parts, dreading it and desperate to hear it again, ever since I’d put a knife through the Cyn that had killed Sho’s mother. It was the sound of the metallic exoskeletons the Cyn wore, crashing down as they dropped out of flight.
I turned, slowly, already building a telekinetic burst into my palm; Sho fed a slow trickle of energy in my direction, and I made a link between that flow and the intention-shield capacitor built into the base of my spine. He had recognized the sound as well, and knew all hell was likely about to break loose.
The Cyn was kneeling, out on the balcony, in the crushed ruin his landing had made of the marble floor, deepening the cracks I’d made in my own descent. The metallic wings of his exosuit were still spread behind him, haloed by the golden glow of the suns peeking through the clouds, and despite myself, something caught in my chest: fear, yes, but also exhilaration. Rumors were one thing; even scans could be faked, somehow. But here one was, in the “flesh,” so to speak, confirmation that the Cyn I’d killed hadn’t been alone in the galaxy.
The first one had beaten the hell out of our crew; we’d fought him, lost, fought him again, fought him again, nearly lost, and then I’d faced him alone, and barely scraped out a win. But we’d learned from that fight—that was what we did. We’d modified our tools, our arsenals, had been preparing for this moment all during the outbound trip: I’d spent plenty of time during the long stretches of hyperspace between systems going through the last fight in my head, learning from the memory. I wasn’t going to lose again.
Sho and I both took a step down from the dais; we separated out, just a bit, each giving the other room to work.
“What’s—”
“Don’t turn around, Meridian,” I told her flatly, beginning to spin the energy from my shields—energy replaced by Sho’s flow as quickly as I was siphoning it off—into the teke burst vibrating between my fingers, until I was holding a whirling storm of light in my palm. “Just keep working. We’ll deal with this.”
We were ready to deal with this.
The Cyn kneeling at the entranceway didn’t say anything. Didn’t move, didn’t draw a weapon—much like his brother, he was wearing a heavy exosuit, a way for him to interact with the physical world around him, since the being inside the suit was comprised almost entirely of light and fire.
Whereas the first Cyn we’d seen had been relatively sleek, the metal of his suit almost seeming painted onto a slim, well-built bipedal physique, this one was markedly heavier: at least as broad through the shoulders as Sahluk, and nearly as tall, like he was wearing plate armor to the first Cyn’s sleeker chassis. Even his helmet was more aggressive: curling metal horns curved upward from the sides of the head to meet again like a tangled crown above, and the carven eyes were trapped in a narrow glare.
We simply stood there for a heartbeat, then two, Sho and I flanking Meridian, staring down the Cyn. The first move would be his, and all three of us knew it—he studied us for a moment, just as we studied him, the air thick with energy and the potential for a great deal of violence.
“Heretics,” the Cyn said finally as he stood, slowly, his voice coming over our comms channels, “broadcast” along the spectrum of energy that was reserved for radio waves. “Defilers. Your very presence in this holy place is—”
So that was his first move—a fucking speech. I wasn’t impressed.
I hit him with the full weight of the teke burst I’d been building in my hand: there was enough strength there to crush a tank, and never mind the weave of electricity I’d buried in the center, a burst of energy that washed over him like a wave of pale fire. It did exactly nothing to the Cyn—didn’t even make him furl the metal wings that rose behind him like sheets of razors.
He cocked his head to the side, an expression that seemed less one of curiosity—given all the hate carved into his armored face—and more of mean amusement. “So. Three martyrs, come to offer themselves up. An imitation among your number. Unexpected—but useful.” As he spoke, he reached with both hands to the small of his back; reaching for a weapon, no doubt, but slowly, like he had all the time in the world. “All the chaplains and all the inquisitors have worked for decades to seek your kind out, and now three of you deliver yourself right to our door. I feel the goddess’s will, in that. Is it possible that you, imitation”—he was speaking directly to me, now, his mask tilted just slightly in my direction—“that you shall be the one to open the way to the Palace, where all the other martyrs have failed? I think so. I think you shall open the doors with your sacrament, with your pain.”
None of that sounded friendly, though I hadn’t expected much else.
His hands came back into view, now that his speechifying was done: he held a pair of axes in loose grips, held them like he knew how to use them. The Cyn I’d encountered had been armed merely with a pair of razor-sharp claws, but this one had actual weapons to go along with his exosuit.
I’d assumed the Cyn we’d fought—on Kandriad, on Valkyrie Rock, on Odessa Station—had been their best, the warrior sent out into the galaxy to retrieve the gifted from wherever he could root them out, a twisted knight-errant trusted to survive far from the safety of his home. That had been a flawed assumption; I realized that now. Rather than a soldier, the Cyn we’d fought had been the Bright Wanderers’ version of Marus—an intelligence gatherer, a spy, trained to cover his tracks rather than for out-and-out conflict. Now, we were facing the Cyn version of Sahluk—a warrior, Bright Wanderer security, a true combat operative.
