Chapter Sixteen
Nathan and the others spent the night in a trio of lavish guest rooms within T’Ohai Palace while Aiko-Six kept watch. He doubted that level of caution was necessary, given how their hosts had quickly warmed to their presence, but it never hurt to exercise caution when dealing with an unfamiliar society.
Mi’ili—the white-haired geggle-friggle girl, or whatever Vessani had called her—stopped by just as he was about to turn in for the night. She suggested she join him for some “extra cuddles” while giving him a mischievous, innuendo-filled smile. No need for Vessani to translate this offer!
Nathan tended to view divergent relations through a lens of hesitation, owing to his own past experiences. One time, he’d made the mistake of dating an avion—a cute and gentle young woman, to be fair—and he’d learned two important lessons from their first painful night together:
First, always leave plenty of space around the bed when sleeping with an avion. Their wings will knock over just about anything.
And second, the wings were considerably stronger than they looked. He wasn’t sure if he’d touched a bad spot at the wrong time—or a very good spot at the right time—but the ensuing reflex response from the young lady’s wings had clubbed him in the head so hard he’d blacked out briefly.
He’d woken up on his back to a view of swirling stars and swaying breasts. The young woman had apologized earnestly before attempting to reinitiate proceedings, but the bone-rattling impact to his cranium had killed his interest in further activities.
He’d kept his relations with divergent women to a minimum ever since. Not that he didn’t find the various female forms attractive. Far from it, in fact, though he drew a strict line when it came to centaurs. He’d even been hit on by one once. She’d been . . . pretty, he guessed. At least the top half of her. Very nice hair, too, but he had no clue how that kind of physical congress was supposed to work on a mechanical level, and he felt no desire to suffer through the inevitable learning curve.
Nekoans, by comparison, were what he considered a “safe” deviation from baseline, at least when it came to potential relationships. The tail wasn’t strong enough to present a hazard, and he considered their cat ears quite attractive. The only aspect of their appearance he found off-putting were the eyes. Something about those vertical pupils always gave the impression they were up to no good. Which, now that he considered this most recent offer, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
He was sorely tempted to let the young nekoan into his room, but this would be his first night amongst the locals, and he wasn’t in the mood for whatever drama might spill from a cultural misunderstanding. He decided against her offer and turned her down as politely as possible. She made a pouty face at him but departed without further complaint.
He found it difficult to fall asleep after that, and the one dream he recalled involved him fleeing for his life from a horde of ravenous kittens, most of them with white hair.
They started off the next morning by joining the royal court for a simple breakfast of rice and—unsurprisingly—tuna. Grilled and salted to perfection, but it was still more tuna, which Nathan could have done without after the fishy overload he’d received from last night’s tuna surprise.
D’Miir skipped breakfast and spent much of the morning walking the palace grounds. He retained his cane, but even at this early stage of his recovery, he paced around confidently while putting almost no weight on the walking stick. He greeted his daughter and each of the visiting foreigners with a jovial air and loudly proclaimed the success of Rufus’s medicine, which didn’t hurt their standing with the locals in the least.
Nathan finished his rice and then picked at the grilled tuna while a small but excitable crowd formed around Rufus. True to his word, the cleric provided D’Miir with five more vials of silver panacea. Aiko-Six had retrieved the vials from the Belle for Rufus, driving out to the ship once everyone else was up and about. The cleric asked the crowd to form a line, and he sat down with each of them to discuss their needs. By the time Rufus finished administering his sixteenth patient, Nathan tapped him on the shoulder.
“Yes, Nate?” he said, folding his tool pouch back up.
“We’re heading out to the deifactory. You joining us or staying here?”
“Staying.” Rufus fitted the pouch back into one of his belt pockets. “I think I’ll have more luck with the raider’s body.”
“I figured as much. Aiko wants a look at the corpse, too, so you’ll have her as company. Call if you need anything.”
“Sure thing.”
Nathan joined Vessani and Joshua by the exit, and together they followed Ret’Su to the back of the palace, which connected to the deifactory’s base level via a long, canvas-covered pathway that cut through a flowering garden. Ret’Su led them into one of several glass-walled, inclined elevators and selected a level from the control vlass.
“The reliquary is on the top floor,” she said.
The elevator accelerated up the pyramidal slope with only the slightest jostle at the beginning. The palace and city shrank away, and Nathan stared out across the habitat’s segmented interior. Sunlight shined in from above, reflected off the giant mirror angled above the “upper” window. A line of puffy clouds blew in from the sea, bloated and gray with moisture.
Behind them, levels flashed by with most entrances leading to dark, cavernous interiors.
“How active was this place before the raiders stole the Black Egg?” Nathan asked.
“About one in every twenty levels,” Ret’Su said. “Though the deifactory hadn’t yet reached its peak for this cycle.”
At least five percent then, Nathan figured. Not bad for a deifactory out in the wild.
“And now that the Egg is gone?”
“The deifactory has once again fallen asleep. The reliquary is the only place that’s still active.”
Nathan glanced over to Joshua. “What do you make of this? You ever hear of a deifactory shutting down all of a sudden?”
“Not like this,” Joshua said, “but I wouldn’t read too deeply into that. No two deifactories are identical. Clearly, the Black Egg is a critical component of some nature, but I couldn’t say more without at least getting a good look at it.”
“Have you ever heard of deifactories with similar artifacts?”
“No. The Black Egg could be unique to this deifactory. Or perhaps this habitat, or it could be a feature common amongst this local cluster. I simply don’t know enough to say more.”
“Gotcha.” Nathan waited for the elevator to finish its ascent.
They came to a halt on floor 410, which Nathan guessed to be about a kilometer above the cylinder wall. That much altitude took a dent out of their rotational velocity, which in turn reduced the apparent gravity. Most people wouldn’t have noticed the difference, but Nathan’s experienced spacer legs picked up the subtle decrease in his body’s weight.
The glass doors split open to a brightly lit corridor that smelled faintly of flowers, and Ret’Su led the way in. Vlass panels covered the walls, most inert, some broken, but a few displayed system status boards, production queues, and available pattern serials. Nathan stopped in his tracks when his eyes passed over a familiar series of letters and numbers.
“That’s the serial for a Hawklight-pattern!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Joshua’s head whipped back, and he hurried over to Nathan’s side. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty damn sure.”
“Is something wrong?” Ret’Su asked Vessani.
“I don’t know.” Vessani joined the others by the screen. “What’s up, guys?”
Joshua tapped the serial number and mouthed the words “spaceship pattern.”
Vessani’s ears and eyebrows shot up.
“Yeah,” Nathan whispered. “If we somehow manage to retrieve the Black Egg, then your people have a real shot at catapulting themselves straight from low-tech all the way up to high. That said, let’s keep this to ourselves for now. No point getting everyone’s hopes up, only to dash them later if something goes wrong.”
“Okay,” Vessani whispered back. “But I think you’re forgetting something.”
“What’s that?”
She wiggled her ears. “We nekoans have very good hearing.”
“Oh.” He tilted to the side and looked over at Ret’Su, who smiled and waved at him. “You heard all of that, didn’t you?”
“Every word.”
“Right. Of course.” Nathan cleared his throat and tugged down on his jacket. “Where were we, again?”
“About to visit the reliquary. This way, please.”
She led them into a small, circular room where the sweet scent of flowers grew overwhelming. Vlass panels lined the room’s circumference except for an alcove at the back, and nekoans had covered the floor with flowers, slender branches, bowls of fruit, and paper effigies folded into more flowers with a few paper pyramids thrown into the mix.
Vessani drew in a deep breath and smiled. “It’s been a while.”
“Not to knock your traditions,” Nathan told the two nekoans, “but I don’t think all these flowers are helping.”
“I find it hard to disagree,” Ret’Su confessed softly.
The nekoans had etched elaborate prayers into the walls and ceiling, using any space not taken up by a vlass. They’d used the crafted tongue, and most of the prayers were to the deifactory itself rather than the Pentatheon, humbly asking it to produce more.
Not likely, Nathan thought. Not with most of it dark and dead.
He waded through the mass of flowers to the alcove at the back. The elliptical recess formed half of an egg-shape about the size of his head. Devices at the top and bottom gave the impression of connectors for the artifact.
“What do we have here?” Joshua worked his way up to the back wall, trying and failing to avoid crushing flowers or paper offerings along the way.
“The Black Egg used to be here?” Nathan asked. “In this slot?”
“That’s right,” Vessani said.
“What made your ancestors fixate on it? Why the Black Egg and not another part of the deifactory?”
“The Black Egg always showed some activity,” she explained. “Even when the rest of the deifactory slumbered.”
“What kind of activity? You mean the vlasses in this room?”
“That and more. The Black Egg’s shell is translucent. You can see stuff moving inside.”
“What sort of ‘stuff’?”
“Not sure. A fluid of some kind, maybe?”
Joshua stuck his head into the alcove and shined a flashlight on the upper connectors.
“There’s some sort of residue here.” He picked at the connector with his fingernail, then inspected the coarse gunk he scraped off. He rubbed the material between his thumb and forefinger. “You could be right about it circulating a fluid. I think this is degraded computronium around the connection.”
“Makes sense to me,” Nathan said. “Yank an important part of the factory’s control system, and the whole place takes a nap.”
“That doesn’t help us find it, though.”
“Maybe check one of these screens?”
“Worth a shot.” Joshua extracted his head from the alcove and stood up straight again. He surveyed over the room and then trudged through the mound of flowers to a nearby vlass. The screen illustrated a 3D diagram of the deifactory with a great many sectors highlighted in red.
Joshua began navigating through the menus in a meticulous manner, picking one option, drilling down as far as he could go, and then exploring every report or feature he could find before pulling back to higher-level screens. He continued this process for about twenty minutes while Nathan and the two nekoans waited patiently.
“Sorry,” Joshua said at last. “I don’t see anything here that can help us. No functions we could use to track down the Black Egg, and no sign the deifactory even has a clue where it is now. The closest thing I found is an option to produce a new one.”
“We can order a replacement for the locals?” Nathan asked.
“In theory, yes.”
“But?”
“But the deifactory seems . . . stuck, for lack of a better word. Whatever supervisory system this installation used to answer to is gone, likely destroyed during the Scourging of Heaven. Normally, this would cause deifactories to fall back to local control, but this one hasn’t. It’s still trying to process commands from a supervisory layer. I’m guessing that’s because it formed a new connection after the original fell silent.”
“A connection to the pentatech we’re after?” Nathan guessed.
“I believe so. But that second connection is . . . confusing it, I guess you’d say. It doesn’t know what to make of the commands it’s receiving, so it kind of stumbles along, partially reactivating for a time before it loses contact and reverts back to a standby state.”
“Which is the seventy-one-year cycle we’re familiar with,” Vessani said.
“Right,” Joshua agreed. “Repeated up to the point where those raiders yanked the Black Egg.”
“Then this place is never waking up again?” Nathan asked.
“Not without the Black Egg.” Joshua let out a frustrated exhale. “And I have no idea how to find it.”
The corpse smelled faintly of tuna.
“They used colonche to embalm the raider?” Rufus said, staring down at the naked, dead cyborg on the table.
Aiko bent down and wafted the air above the corpse toward her head. “That and a few other fluids by the smell of it.”
“Why am I not surprised.”
The nekoans had guided Aiko and him to a house of healing outside the palace walls. Rufus wasn’t sure how much healing actually occurred in the building, given their primitive technology, but the facility was clean and its staff friendly as they brought out the preserved corpse for inspection.
The raider had been an adult male, possibly twenty to twenty-five years old, with shaggy, unkempt hair and a defined musculature dotted by scars from what appeared to be sloppy implant insertions. His body showed mild signs of divergence with gray skin and subtle points to his ears. His clothing—a tough, leathery garment dyed dark red—sat folded at the foot of the table.
“At least they preserved the body,” Aiko said. “Better this than a rotting corpse. For you, I mean. I can shut off my olfactory sense anytime I want.”
“A fair point. Any thoughts on how we should proceed?”
“Not really. I’m following your lead on this one.”
“Very well. Let me start by testing for a connection.” He placed his fingertips on the edge of the table and closed his eyes, then recited a brief prayer to Codex to help clear his mind. “There. I can feel a short-ranged juncture. His implants are still active and talking amongst themselves. Let me see if I can—”
His surroundings vanished, and he found himself floating through a starless void. He spun around, searching for a way to orient himself, and eventually found one. A jagged maw leered at him, floating in the middle of space as if it were a tear in the very fabric of reality. Dozens of broken, metal teeth lined the mouth, opening to a wet, dark, undulating throat that stretched away to infinity.
The void-lips moved, and thunderous words rammed themselves into his mind.
The Wound.
The Wound.
Flesh and Metal.
I Want.
I Need.
It Burns.
It Scorches.
Flesh and Metal for the Wound!
The mouth gaped and lunged toward him, and only then did he realize the true scale of it. He was nothing more than a speck of dust that passed through two mountainous teeth on his way toward oblivion. He flinched back, but to no avail, and the jaw snapped shut with a deafening clap. It swallowed, and unseen forces sucked him down the throat.
There was no wind. No sound. No sensations other than an incredible sense of speed. On and on it went, faster and faster, until he finally saw something approaching from the far end.
At first it appeared as a dark metallic blot, but it grew swiftly in size, resolving into an iron ring with inward-protruding spikes tipped in blood. He wondered if it had been worn on someone’s finger once, and if so, how much skin it might strip off when put on or removed.
“You all right?” Aiko asked.
“I— What?” Rufus blinked and shook his head. It took him a moment to realize he was in Aiko’s arms, staring up at her face.
“You tipped over, so I caught you.”
“Oh. Thanks.” He put a hand on her shoulder and used the leverage to haul himself upright.
“That bad in there, huh?”
“I’ve seen better.” He rubbed his face. “It was a disturbing, nonsensical jumble in there.”
“Here you go.” She picked his wig off the floor and handed it to him.
“Thanks.” He fitted the wig—this one with blond curls—back on and straightened it as best he could without a mirror. “The interesting thing, though, is I’ve seen some of that mess before.”
“Where?”
“In my recent visions.”
“Then the two are connected?”
“It seems so, but I still have no idea what any of it means.”
“Want to give it another go?” Aiko asked. “Maybe this time while lying down?”
“Perhaps later.” He rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s see what we can learn from the body next.” He began at the chest and traced a finger around a circular scar on one side of the rib cage. “Look here. I think we can rule out Saturnian implants.”
“Why do you say that? We haven’t even cut him open.”
“It’s not so much the implant but how it was administered.” Rufus traced a bone. “They broke one of his ribs installing it, and it didn’t heal cleanly. I can feel the old fracture.”
“What, did they just shove the insert plug through his rib cage?”
“Perhaps they did.”
“Why would anyone do something that stupid?”
Rufus shook his head and examined the next scar.
The implants he was familiar with—such as his own neural enhancements—were deifactured, self-installing mechanisms. Doctors didn’t cut open patients and stuff the implants inside. Few possessed the skills and knowledge to even have a chance at success, which was fine, because Saturnian implants installed themselves.
They came from the deifactories in boxes or bands that were placed over the target body part. All doctors needed to do was strap the patient in and hit go. The machinery took care of the rest. Rufus remembered a sense of pressure when the installer had drilled through his skull, but he never experienced discomfort. Not even after the surgery.
“At least five insertion points on the torso,” Rufus said, then inspected each limb. “And it looks like two scars to each arm and leg, roughly centered on the major muscle groups.”
“Performance enhancements?”
“For the limbs at least. Not sure what the torso scars are for.” He compressed the rib cage at various points. “There’s something solid inside.”
Aiko held up her vibro-knife. The blade whined to life, pitching into the ultrasonic range.
“Want me to check?” she asked.
“In a moment.” He moved to the front of the table, lifted the body’s head, and turned it to one side. “Oh my. Would you look at this?” His face wrinkled in revulsion.
Aiko craned her neck to view the back of the raider’s head. “It kind of looks like someone shoved a stake into the back of his head.”
“Which is consistent with what we’ve seen elsewhere on the body.” Rufus thumbed the flattened nub protruding from the base of the raider’s skull and pulled back some of the man’s unruly hair to gain a better look. Metallic veins zigzagged out from the nub in all directions.
“Can I cut him open now?” Aiko raised her blade once more.
“I suppose so. Start with the chest cavity, please.”
“You’ve got it!” She braced the corpse with one hand and drew the blade down the center of the raider’s rib cage. The vibro-knife cut through the man’s sternum effortlessly.
Rufus was no stranger to the dead or dying. His skills as a cleric naturally brought him close to the ill and injured. He’d told himself examining the corpse would hardly be different, but that changed when Aiko jammed her fingers through the body’s split sternum and cracked the rib cage wide open.
He may have turned a few shades paler when that happened.
“It’s less gooey in here than I expected,” she said, gawking at the cyborg’s innards.
“It is?” Rufus asked, his voice squeaking. He cleared his throat and stepped up to the open chest cavity to find most of the raider’s organs had been replaced with synthetic parts. “So it is.”
“What do you make of all this?”
Rufus let the flutter in his stomach die down, then took a soothing breath to steel himself. He bent forward to study the artificial organs.
“There are a lot of them,” he said, “but they don’t strike me as all that remarkable. For example, this one here appears to be an enhanced heart, and these two must have served as replacement lungs.”
“More performance enhancers.”
“Seems so, but let’s make sure.”
“Where do you want to start?”
“At the top of the chest cavity. We’ll work our way down, one implant at a time.”
They spent the next half hour removing and cataloguing each of the raider’s artificial organs, though the exercise yielded no new revelations. They were about to close up the torso when both of their commects chimed, followed shortly by a whooping siren that originated from the palace grounds.