“I designed the first elevator, connecting earth to heaven…” declared a digital voice above my head, only to be silenced a moment later by another boom that sent crystal and stone spinning across the room.
I ran bent almost double, hands over my head, and made it to a corner, turned, made it another two or three plinths further, before my pursuer, having grown bored of blasting holes in the memories of the great of this world, sighted just ahead of my mad dash and fired once more.
This time, the force of shattering stone was near enough to my face to knock me back, the shock spinning me sideways and down as shards of white sliced through cloth and skin. Chunks of flying rock like fists knocked into my chest, my legs, my gut, my arms where they curled around my head. Perhaps if the gravity had been weaker, I might have shrugged it off; this unlikely thought rang in my singing ears as I stumbled, tumbled to the ground, trying at once to get back up on my hands and knees and slipping immediately in a sea of hot snowy dust.
I gasped for air, lips coated in powder, heard footsteps approaching, crawled a few steps, crawled a few more, and was met for my troubles with a mechanically supported boot to my belly.
What air I had left in me vanished.
The displacement field, designed to knock projectiles aside, didn’t enclose the boot of this man – that would have made walking impossible. But it began at his ankle and rose upwards, the uneasy disruption of all things around it making my eyes ache, myears hiss with the otherness of it, the distorted rupture of twisted space, twisted senses. There was no dignity in how I collapsed, no spark of defiance. It was Tu-mdo again, eyes down, hands covering, cowering, calling out but please, but please, I didn’t do nothing wrong. Astonishing how quickly the urge to meekness returned; remarkable how, after all this time, I was still tiny before the Shine.
The boot kicked again, then the hot muzzle of the gun rolled me over, pushed me up against the wall, weapon pressed into my chest. The face of the man who was going to kill me swam down closer, one eye of pale blue, one eye of bio-enhanced black, the pupil widening and contracting as it read me, picking through a dozen signs and data points invisible to a mere organic eye.
“Where’s the interface?” he asked, speaking Mdo-sa. A little box on his hip translated the sounds into a cheap mockery of Adjumiri, so flat as to be almost unrecognisable to any native speaker, the grammar of a child. I nearly laughed to hear it, and laughing hurt, but everything hurt so I might as well hurt while laughing.
Laughter did not amuse the off-worlder, this stranger with a gun. He pressed it harder into my chest, the heat starting to burn against my skin, leaned in so close I could hear the soft hiss of the apparatus running into his nose, snarled: “Where’s the interface?”
“Gone,” I replied in Mdo-sa, and saw at once the flicker of surprise to hear his own language spoken back at him. “Already off-world. The quanmechs are picking it up apart as we speak; they’re inside your communications, they’re listening to every word. They’ll have the location of every Shine blackship within a month, your fleet will be shot out of the black, and then they’ll come for you. Every Unionist and rebel, every Accord world, they’ll come and they’ll take the Shine down.”
He didn’t believe me, of course; he had been trained not to imagine, not to conceive of such things, and so he could not. But my voice – the accent of my world, local and precise – held him for a moment in place. “Who are you?” he asked, as the Adjumiri translator at his hip mangled the sounds.
“I am a monster,” I replied. “When you shoot me, you had better watch my corpse. If you take your eyes off it, if you blink, it’ll be too late. You’ll need to check and keep on checking – you’ll need tobelievewith all your heart that I’m gone, because if you doubt for even a moment, I’ll be back. The ghost of Hasha-to will come to get you, he’ll crawl out of the dark, slither through the walls to pluck out your heart, so you be sure – you be absolutely certain – that when you shoot me, youbelievethat I’m dead, and you’d better keep on believing until the day you are ready to die.”
He’d heard of Hasha-to.
That was a surprise, mingled with as much disappointment as relief. Remarkable that the Shine hadn’t kept word of it down. Disappointing to think that if there were ever a statue raised to me, the plaque would read “Here is the ghost of Hasha-to; you must believe that he is dead.”
His surprise – the flicker even of his fear – was not going to stop him shooting me, of course. He was too well trained in killing to let a little doubt get in the way.
I tried to close my eyes, and couldn’t, hypnotised by the determination settling in his face. I thought about thirty-three years. That was how long it would take for the neutrino blast to arrive, that final burst of matter that would shatter the remnants of this world into its atomic parts. Before then radiation would kill it. The atmosphere would burn away, the seas would boil, and if my body was still intact on the surface of this planet, perhaps it would rise and fall, rise and fall, an endless gasping, heaving, suffocating death for thirty-three years, until at last the final remnants of the Lovers blew me away. The thought was curious; not curious enough to drown out the terror.
A gunshot.
It was not the explosive, chest-cracking, heart-searing roar of the Shine’s weapons.
Instead, an electrostatic snap-hiss, barely loud enough to scratch a statue, let alone shatter it into dust. The disruption field rippledwith the impact, the force a smothering bag of sand slamming into my face as his systems absorbed the shot. It took a second blast to overload his primary generator; the third was enough to finally sear flesh. They came only moments apart, which meant I had a full view of the man’s journey towards death, from surprise at the first shot, fear at the second, pain at the third, and the final turning-out, shutting-down, ending-of-it-all on the last, which was not an electrostatic blast at all, but a needled dart of poisonous russet that thwipped silently into the back of his neck. I was staring into his eyes as he died, and I knew it, recognised it, saw the way the pupils of one blue eye – his organic eye – widened, and then stayed wide, even as his weight sagged forward, falling on top of me. His other eye opened and closed a few times more, internal algorithms still seeking data and command – but his brain stem was mulch and pale fluid slithered from his left ear as he collapsed, crushing me beneath a mix of muscle and military-grade gear. So much for Shine armour-tech. I grunted beneath the weight of the body, too weak to yelp, tried to worm my way free, look to my rescuer, heard a soft padding and smelled burned hair.
Rencki and Nineteen, the former’s fur still marred black from burning, the latter bobbing by qis side, the painted eye not even facing towards me, all pretence of anthropomorphic nicety discarded. I heard myself gasp, a sound somewhere between life-sustaining relief and bone-crushing breaking as Rencki trotted forward, tails still raised and quivering, and then Gebre was there too, hauling the body of the fallen soldier off me as if he were not wearing mu-blasted steel, as if a man were not dead at ter feet.
“Maw! Are you hurt?”
This thing in ter voice – it is not love.
Te refuses to love, and that is all there is to say. Te cannot bear it.
I tried to click my reply, easier than words. “Can you walk?” Rencki barked, and qis speaker system had been damaged, the soft, soothingly organic tones of qis voice popping at the edges as qe spoke. “Maw – can you walk?”
“Yes,” I mumbled, as Gebre pulled me to my feet. “I can walk.”
“Good. There are four more assailants in this building. Most of the inhabitants are already dead. We need to go.”
“The truck…” I stumbled, as Rencki bounded towards the door.
“The truck is gone,” qe barked. “The first thing the Shine did was burn it and everything inside.”
“Then…”
“There is a garage one floor below,” Nineteen declared, voice a narrow band of sound transmitted from I couldn’t tell where on qis flat body. “And a speeder.”
