CHAPTER TWELVE
Lem
Lem watched palm to palm with her reflection in the control tower window as the electric field ate Retrack City from the spaceport out. There were two of them now, in this dream, one on each side of her.
On the left, in a long blue gown, hair frizzing like a halo of lightning over translucent patchwork skin that seemed to glow like kintsugi at the seams, stood proper Stygge Sterba, taller than Lem, back straight as an arrow, and hands folded.
On the right, leaning back on his haunches, muscles deceptively relaxed while light glinted off his sharpened tusks, crouched the impish Biouk that was, apparently, also Lem. One leathery black ear perked up toward her, and the other, torn, lay horizontal, twitching here and there. It was like a smirk, or a challenge. He was laughing inside.
“I get it,” Lem said. “My conscience is doing a guilt-trip three-way with past, present, and future. This whole imaginary spreading energy thing—some kind of metaphor for the heat death?” She tilted her head toward Sterba. “And you’re here because I got you killed but can’t prove it. You’re not really her, though. You’re the Accuser, right?”
The image of Sterba stood silent as death.
“What about me?” asked the Biouk imp.
“You’re a weird dream from when I was little,” Lem said. “When I used to want so badly to be Biouk, and I didn’t fit in with the humans. I don’t know why you’re mad at me. Am I seeing you because I’m back on my home planet, but since I’m out of the Frelsi it feels like home is mad at me? Why am I mad at me?”
“Ratschica!” The imp slashed at the window with his claws, spitting a curse Cinta had always forbade Lem from using. As soon as the word left his muzzle, a sudden pleasant tickle welled up inside Lem—a sensation of fun she could only compare to stealing food, or tripping someone in a fight. Lem met the eyes of her shorter self, and saw with the gleam there that he knew. But he didn’t say as much; instead, he said: “You’re stupid. You’re not mad? We became what the Frelsi humans wanted for over a decade. Put up with all their names and weird glances, the interspecies compromises, the rules. Then you became Growen for the worst five months imaginable, and it was like I was being boiled alive in the community grub-brew. And all that suffocating, all for what?”
Lem stammered, incredulous. “Dude, we had a year underground in Beryllia to work this out. Why you doing this to me now?”
“Because then in Beryllia you stuffed down the warrior spirit, hid the electromagnetism, like a filthy non-hunter. You plan to do this again with the next chapter of your life, hiding, hiding, hiding? Nah, bika,” he dropped the slang for a mating age female who couldn’t afford a canopy home, “I’m seeing my shot here, and I’m taking it now.”
“Look, tiny teeth, no one is more real than me. I—”
The icy woman refashioned from stardust cleared her throat. Lem and the angry Biouk fell silent immediately, waiting for their superior to speak. Lem found herself suddenly overwhelmed with the desire for Sterba to turn her head and look her in the eye. Sure, she could see the woman’s face in the reflection here on the window as they watched the field spreading outside—but if Sterba turned her head, would that face decay, maggots in every socket? Or would ice crystals crackle across her face from the dead of space? But she hadn’t had a chance to freeze solid—they blew her up. Would her face melt off, then?
The curious terror swished through Lem’s belly as if her intestines hung outside her body, dripping onto the floor. Lem didn’t like it. They’d had so many nightmares about each other long before meeting; it seemed like they knew each other—out of place in their own worlds, isolated and odd and too intense for everyone around them—and for a brief moment Lem had hoped they could both live. But they could not, and now she wanted to see those blazing blue eyes again that no longer appeared in her sleep.
But Sterba’s icy form stared straight ahead and didn’t grace Lem with even a glance. “You do not feel bad because you killed me,” she said at last. “You feel bad because you didn’t.”
“Yeah I did. Dude, you just said I did! Just because no one believes in me doesn’t make it true.”
“Perception is reality,” laughed the lemur.
“No,” said the woman in blue. “You did not kill me. Burbura, Skraeli, and Fort Jehu—those actions were me. We are what we do. And you didn’t prevent them.”
“I was the first one to try!”
“Say that to the dead,” Sterba said, her voice as cold as if she herself wished someone had stopped her genocide.
“I had to do it the way I did. I was never going to get anyone to believe me. You were literally a dream. That was my only intel—a dream.” Lem growled. Something she hated more than either of these specters had begun to well up in the corners of her eyes, and she brushed it away to snap: “How do I get out of this dream, now?”
The reflection of the patchwork space woman, and the reflection of the rebellious Biouk, looked at each other knowingly.
The world flashed again. A furry ball of mass impacted Lem’s torso as the Biouk sprung at her—with a sonorous metallic ring her back hit the floor. Lem raised her hands to fight—the Biouk leaned close with a precocious toothy grin.
“What if I told you,” he twirled a necklace of teeth around his long foreclaw. “It’s not a dream?”
“What?”
The world flashed a deeper shade of blue, and Lem sat up to find herself alone. In the control tower. Surrounded by unconscious bodies as the water from the sprinklers continued its prattling trickle against her atmosphere hood. There was no Accuser. There was no Sterba. There was no angry nega-self, whatever that had been.
There was only the spreading electrical field that was very, very real.
“Holy shyte, the city!” Lem cried out, jumping to her feet. As she did so the field burst outward, engulfing another row of buildings, and brightened. “Oh shyte, oh shyte—I’m doing this. I’m doing this how?”
She wasn’t trying. She wasn’t pulling or pushing or thinking of out—she certainly wasn’t thinking of eating all the power in the city. “Okay I have a static repulsion field that powers up when I’m in trouble, repels cartridges and shyte. Maybe this is a version of that. Okay so just sit down, calm down—”
Stilling her heart rate and slowing her breathing did nothing. The orb continued to spread. She saw at least two hospitals in the distance. She saw Frelsi air-riders zipping around the edge of the light. She saw, for a moment, a future where she destroyed everything and she didn’t want to and she didn’t want anyone to get hurt and that was the whole point of this exercise and the new weapons test and she’d been trying not to be so angry these days and oh shyte—
Was that it? Was the angry Biouk with the torn ear her internal metaphor for this?
She tried to meditate, to get back into the dream to talk to him, to do anything to come to grips, to fix it, to get control—and no matter what she did, the field continued to spread.
JEI
The spaceport towered above us now, a vast ivory cylinder sealed with reinforced polymerwall. I didn’t know how we’d get to the top with the elevators out, but I’d have to improvise later—we had less than ten minutes before the field left the western district. I drew my mace to smash through the wall—
It wouldn’t power up. Bloodseas, my mace’s power cell was Faraday-shielded, and it usually worked even after EMP blasts, so why—?
“Didn’t think so,” Seria grunted just behind me. “Wristband’s not even working.”
Yes, I know. But my mace had never failed me. I felt naked without it.
But naked or not, we needed to get in, and I began to trot around the tower, to the left, looking for—should be—
The hole about halfway up the spaceport’s trunk, left by a hasty Lem Benzaran, looked as small as a tree-borer’s nest from down here. Too far for a grappling hook, if I could even find a downed blitzer to steal it from—gear like that was too expensive for standard Frelsi issue. Bloodseas, how would I get up there?
“Help me, Njandejara,” I heard myself mutter with clenched teeth. No, stay calm. I loosened my jaw and breathed. “Help me.”
I fastened my mace to my belt again, and closed my eyes, trying to remember all the openings to this building from the readouts. There was the street entry here—sealed shut. Lem was supposed to get in through the landing platforms via bus—also sealed shut, and anyway even the lowest branch lay at about double the height of the hole she’d left, so far above even the rainforest canopy that it almost hit the clouds.
“Give me something,” I breathed.
From one of the old manuscripts in my mind,
The mountains will be made valleys, and the valleys lifted up …
“Yeah the world’s on its head. So down. I’m going to go down.” I sprinted back the way we came with Seria trailing me. We hadn’t even considered it with the electricity on—the hundreds of huge fans in the ventilation ports here would make a red mist of you before you even felt it—but that was the beauty of this mess, now, wasn’t it? It was opposite day.
The huge grate into the earth lay within eyesight of the hole in the tower—Lem probably saw it from above when she came in. The small service hatch in the grate was heavy, but didn’t have a lock on it. Whirring spinning death blades were deterrent enough.
“If the electricity comes back on, we’re dead.” I made sure to meet Seria’s eyes as I said this. I wasn’t exactly offering her an out, but there were other ways to help.
“Always wanted to be a red cloud,” she shrugged.
We climbed down into the ventilation pipe, pushing blades out of the way like forest leaves. It wasn’t a deep hole—just big, and wide, no taller than my height—and the fat pipe turned immediately toward the spaceport tower, but the fans were packed so densely right behind each other it was excruciatingly slow going stepping through them. The darkness stank of rust and cleaning solution; even our soft boots made loud hollow clangs against the floor, punctuating each sluggish minute in arrhythmia. Feel the cold steel through my glove—rotate the whole fan, like lifting a vertical sliding door—bend down under the one blade while stepping over its neighbor to just fit through the angle—
Seria’s curse behind me almost had me jumping into a sharp blade. I stiffened, fists clenched. “You good?” I asked.
“Fine. Just cut myself on this thing. We have ten minutes until it takes out the city’s largest hospital, by the way.”
“Tracking.”
“Sure hope no one’s on life support over there.”
“Tracking, thanks.”
Dim blue light checkered through the inside entrance just ahead. Just about five more fans. My back didn’t love ducking while stepping over things, not with this dizziness pulsing through my scalp. So close. So close and so slow. Just—wanted to—tear everything—out of my way—breathe. Rushing and cutting off a hand does no one any good.
I heard myself growl with agonized impatience anyway. Just two more—rotate—step through—
I threw the grate off above us like a man tearing waterboarding cloth off his face, scrambling into a sprint before I’d even gotten to my feet. The emergency crank-lift was right here, a thick brown and red metal platform hooked up to a hydraulic rail system on the side of the tower. Seria kept up—still too slow for my taste—I urged her aboard with a firm pull and slammed the release lever.
The millions of gallons of water pressure held back by that little lever gate surged into the hydraulic rails, shooting us into the air with the speed of a slingshot. I stumbled, and almost fell off; bloodseas, the world was spinning.
“No warning on that start there, at all,” Seria coughed, gripping the hand-rail and scowling up at me from her forced seat on the floor. I shook my head, and looked away, afraid I might hurl right on her face. The whole living weapon display left me so weak, and I wished someone else could do this—hell, I wished me of an hour ago could do this—but if you hesitated, if you didn’t commit, people died. There wasn’t time for doubt, or misery.
Shyte, I really might vomit, though. There was a time where this would hurt my pride more than anything else. I was over that now, after Mera.
At least the wind of the ascent soothed the heat on my face. Even at this height, as pressure loss slowed us down, the crank-lift climbed almost as fast as an automated elevator. And the control center floor—our ceiling—had another tell-tale smashed hole in it—
“You need to hold the brake,” I said, pulling Seria’s hand to the lever. “When we stop under that hole, you need to stay here and guard the platform.”
“Guard the platform? From what?”
“You’ll see,” I said.
But I wanted to find Lem alone. And Seria’s glare told me she knew that. She’d flipped out when she heard I selected Lem as my civilian resource, and she wanted nothing more than to punish the traitor we couldn’t trust. Call it tattling or call it intel, she wanted to see what had gone wrong.
She couldn’t voice that, though. If I needed back-up guarding our transportation, I needed back-up guarding our transportation, and whatever lay in the control tower, it was far above her combat level.
I just hoped it wasn’t above mine.