CW: war, colonial ideology, guns, killing, blood, racial fetishization (white on black, Latinx), racism (anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-Latinx), homophobic slurs, corpse desecration, torture, body horror, mass destruction
The plan came together the way my best ideas for papers had, over nights struggling at the edge of sleep. I now had, of course, every experimental sleeping drug known to Edison Lens at my disposal, and military doctors telling me the optimal level of rest for my physical and cognitive performance, but their vision of my optimal cognitive performance wouldn’t include working around them, for which I couldn’t pass up that window of hyper-wakefulness with no inputs – unless I wanted to avoid it – especially if I wanted to avoid it.
A synthesis of my doubts and my ambitions; Holdfast’s and Sieh’s and Halation’s thoughts. I feared it was too much and too little of each agenda at the same time
There were only three real threats to my authority – Waldo Beek, Fingal Hadak and Edison Lens. Most of the other high-ranking power players who weren’t affiliated with either of them in some way as legible to the other troops as to her were affiliated with nation-states. The highest-ranking officer of Edison Lens on board, Caroline had informed her, was a tall and scarecrowlike old man named Timon “Tim” Baresch, a man she described as “glacial” and ambitionless yet who seemed to frighten her.
Of course, there were much bigger threats on their way. Like Hiram Ogier himself, or whoever was to helm his flagship. The longer I waited, the less I would weigh.
With every day since I woke up, it looked clearer – we were losing. We had taken an unpopular side (this was my fault), at least in this region.
With the Ribbons eliminated, we had been able to take a proper reconnaissance mission into the atmosphere and assess our original strategic objective, the state of the Network. It wasn’t good. A trace concentration of third-exponent crystalline particles in the air was the only evidence of its presence, and even these had a pronounced tendency to self-disassemble under any degree of observation. It had been hit with some kind of autophagic virus. (“Are you sure nothing like that exists for organic matter?” Bennett-Fog pinched the bridge of her nose under her glasses. “How is that possible?” “Too many different things count as organic matter.” Halation in me explained. “It’s usually easier to come up with fairly simple bioweapons aimed at one. But since this war cuts across species, bioweapons like that are too big to be useful anyway.") Contemplation might consider sending a new one, but only if we could secure it against on- and off-planet attack, which would basically require planetary hegemony anyway.
There were legends among the Ferrous Masks of a backup stored deep in Towers’ now-inaccessible core. The Cosmic Probabilistic Encyclopedia (stored on every 200+ petabyte computing device in the Lung) gave these legends no more than 0.4% probability, and even if they were true we would have to. But Fingal Hadak, who had once in his past life as a musician released EPs called “V.I.T.R.I.O.L.” and “Inorganic Bituminous Graal” (had I heard that last, in skipping vinyl snippets, in Mab’s lieutenant’s basement apartment?), and hadn’t been seen or located via Denpa for 6 days (“Colonel Kurtz speedrun,” at least Jax could laugh), was apparently searching for it.
(I knew from Bennett-Fog’s probability lessons that this was a bad comparison, it even gave its own meta-accuracy over Earth 54% to Towers’ 76%, but I looked up Earth in the Probabilistic Encyclopedia and found a measly 12 predictions, including the likes of “will there be a bicontinental empire”. That we would make contact with the rest of the universe before destroying ourselves was placed at 13%.)
The more we lost, the less goodwill I had to deal with Beek. Beek’s war – or Hadak’s – looked like the ones we could win, though on the long game, it looked like we were losing them too. I reluctantly authorized three bombing runs on targets picked out by the Ferrous Masks, but the more bombing runs we authorized, the less meaningful it became to attempt any information control about the bombing. And while there was obviously nothing resembling opinion polling, going by attacks we were taking and contact with new groups, we were making – or radicalizing – enemies 2 to 1 for every ally we gained. In the command meetings I made the case for building out a new Entangleweed network with the help of the Ferrous Masks’ existing communication and survey networks. But that could be a long, brutal slog, and would require even more of the reinforcements Beek wanted.
If I killed Beek right now, it wouldn’t matter. Someone else would take his place, because he had structurally engineered the war to proceed the way he wanted it. “Wanted.” I wasn’t sure even he had thought through what an apocalyptic bombing campaign would look like on a pumice planet.
Hadak was another story. He had to be eliminated first, because he was the one who could survive here. No matter what happened, even if the Lung and the ships were destroyed, he could survive here. (Could he really? Was I taking him too seriously? Was he even alive?) He could fight without reinforcements, with his bare hands. He could wander from tunnel to tunnel, faction to faction, massacre to massacre, worm his way too deep in this planet to ever find him again if we didn’t find him now. He could bring the spirit of human (white, colonial) warfare here – and somehow, I felt, to the rest of the galaxy, everywhere – without planes or bombs or artillery, the way he understood (or worse, believed in) it, from first principles.
Sieh didn’t believe any of this. That was why I trusted Sieh. His unit was going into the “Polyp Crater Operating Front”, 300m below surface in a fortified “micronexus”. They were so much further down than anybody else they were only getting general mission objectives and sending back tall tales. Supposedly they were hiding routes still further down. And mass graves. Hopefully we would be able to get any evidence – it’d be all too easy to dispose of down there.
“The unit commander there is one of Hadak’s trusted fighters – not just someone who jumped on his bandwagon out here like the Irons Unit. Hadak even gave him a new name – Zsàkos Gàdor.” Both obscure references to the cross-cultural folkloric figure of the “sack man” – known in Haiti as “Tonton Macoute”. “His real name is Tyson Valladares, a Miami Cuban delinquent who went into Academi straight out of high school.” Baugh had filled me in on this guy – he had been keeping tabs on him back on Earth, stuff that didn’t get into his recruitment file, some of it even new to Edison Lens. “His main deployment was in Haiti, where he had an off-record… hobby of seeking out memorabilia, anecdotes, and anyone who could claim a connection to the Duvalier-era secret police.” The notorious “Tonton Macoutes”, who sold the blood of their prisoners on the black market and used vodoun rituals to intimidate their enemies. “He had a complete uniform, with a straw hat and mask, in his bunk, and a vintage machete he’d even take on missions.”
“Sounds like your typical privateer, conquering the wilderness,” Guo noted, and a mental image popped up of several adventure movie characters cutting through palm leaves.
“That’s normal for people like him.” Enfield added. “In South Africa, many people in the gated communities thought this way too”
“So we’re dealing with the equivalent of a first world idiot then,” Guo surmised.
My mind drifted back to my last interrogation with Beek. “OK so, if you want to understand where that guy and the Sacred Band of Sol come from, you’re gonna have to know about the skinning circles. You studied this, you already know about how SEAL Team 6 in Iraq had small groups of people who’d take long “skin samples” from kills and bring them back to base, right? But you don’t know who they were specifically. Either the people who ratted, didn’t tell their commanders, or their commanders, despite being willing to tell civilians, didn’t tell you. But all those people, they knew who each other were. Not just within units, across units. Across theatres, by the time I met them. They take an oath, they do gay hazing shit. Hadak wanted in first chance he got. Now, I didn’t give those guys trouble for the same reason nobody in Iraq gave those guys trouble. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. But that, of course, depends on a balance of how much trouble they’re willing to make. Hadak’s the first psycho I ever met who wanted to fuck with that balance.”
“Just stay sharp,” Malin rang in on comms. “Even an idiot can be a threat. Let’s just do this by the books…”
I could see on my private monitor the view from the five bodycams, in ordinary light and infrared. Wavering circles of blue-white headlight swam across each other and overlapped, melting form out of the grey staticky dark. (The real texture of the darkness down there – the trace light dripping from dozens of metres above, the coloured flecks of phosphorescence on promontories and in cracks – I had to imagine myself. But it was important, as Bennett-Fog (who wasn’t quite in the loop of what they were planning, but suspected) had told me in an agitation I’d never quite seen before, for me not to take so many missions on the front myself. Given what had happened last time, even my pride agreed.
The “Operating Front”, within this overexposed underworld, was a solid grey block at the end of every path. Craggy shards of a variety of shapes and sizes, some in the Stonehenge range, had somehow been tessellated so as to hold together with nothing but a thin layer of marrowlike Geoplaque between them, and no spaces besides thin, rectangular arrowslits. Sieh and Malin were rappelling down from the top, a wide gulf accessed through a narrow checkpoint in the bottom of the bowl of settled wreckage from the crater. Below they could make out a glimpse of the still untouched depths below the bottleneck where it narrowed, the 20-metre square face of the structure suspended between their closest points. Guoh and Enfield advanced through the wormlike “secret” tunnels inside the rippling cliffs, which had also been redirected to leave the Operating Front the only safe access to further depths. (They had been sent in ahead of time to ascertain that this was in fact the case and there were no viable branches unaccounted for).
No movement, no light until they landed. “Maybe they’re out?” Jax’s direct voice in my ear, watching the stream with me. But as soon as Sieh’s boots landed on the black and blue-grey slab, banded like gneiss, the barrel of a DDM4 stuck through each arrowslit. From somewhere else invisible on video, a red laser sight manifested on Sieh’s chest in Malin’s camera, Malin’s head in Sieh’s.
“Contact.” Malin’s voice undeterred by the fragments of the slab burst underneath her as she dove close to the walls, hesitating before Sieh confirms over radio.
“Walls are safe. Stay close to me,” he said using a quatro-optic to detect things like explosives, researched and curated for the mission.
Guo and Enfield said nothing but they’d already reached the ends of their tunnels. Each setting a C2 charge, the clay stuck to the where the ground would be and a green light blinked on it, detonators in hand.
“Say the word and we’ll breach. Just make sure you have a way to fly.”
“Mhm,” Sieh murmured in agreement, keeping the M4A1 SOPMOD trained out of the corners of the walls until two figures emerged, weapons up.
“State your rank and your business.” The voice from inside was raspy and somehow theatrical.
“We’re here for an inspection. Orders from Leona,” Malin said.
“Literally who?” enunciated with a sneer and some static suggestive of laughter from the cramped box of echoes. Should they have used my last name, or was it a ritual of insubordination, or were these guys so new they weren’t even being told who was in charge? (The IEEF strategic council had agreed that it would give civilians more confidence in the mission if my status in the chain of command was obfuscated until you were already subject to it.) “What is their rank and designation?”
“Your mission commander,” Sieh reminded, already glancing at the bowls of their knee pads, his eyes almost reverberated as if what would happen in them would morph in an instant but it is all contained with his grip on his primary weapon. “Now are we going to argue the semantics, or should we head back and pursue…other actions?”
“You threatening us, half-caste?” one of them said.
“You’re itching for blood? That doesn’t sound like the commander,” said the other. “Now she’s befriending psychopaths?”
“But at some point you’ll understand what they’re on about yourself, if you don’t already have some idea. Like, killing civilians, torture, you can say what you want about those kinds of things, but messing with corpses? I mean, I don’t like it, don’t understand it, and I’m a Christian, so I have no reason to do it. But suppose you’re not, and the people you’re killing aren’t. They’ve done worse to your buddies, they couldn’t care less. By that point just killing somebody isn’t enough, to deal with that feeling, especially if you’re really angry or really good at it – it’s like cumming, like what, that’s it? So why have a rule about the bodies once they’re already dead? Don’t tell me secular society believes anything about them, it can’t. It’s just a symbol that you’re not supposed to feel anything about it. Which is an insane thing for people who never fight, to ask of people who do.”
“We’ll explain it all to your commanding officer. We can work out a compromise. Prevent all this,” Malin suggested.
“Think we’re stupid? Unload your weapon.”
“As you wish.” Malin smiled and Guo, in the tunnel, pressed the detonator, blasting the wall on his side while Enfield’s remained intact which caused the contacts to flinch. One of the guns disappeared from its arrowslit, while the other opened fire as Sieh disappeared from its narrow range of vision. They have better range of fire on us than we have on them, but we can get close at the right angle and they can’t see us. I hadn’t thought of what they were going to do with that when I said it in the briefing, but Sieh ducked low and with one hand went straight into the arrowslit and grabbed the barrel, then did something and flipped it and it clattered out of his hand. Sieh’s camera instantly filled with the aghast face of the enemy as he leaned in, giving them an easy lunge with knife just long enough for Sieh to pull them up by their bullet belt, taking their knife out of the sheath from the shoulder and placed the blade on throat while Malin covered a third who had emerged from a hole in the wall, the trigger of the M1014 Semi Auto Shotgun blasting away all sound, everything firmed until sound returned only once she blinked, the other naked man stumbled to the ground like the Dying Gaul statue, the involuntary spasm causing them to open fire into the walls hoping by some fate they could shoot Malin in their final moments but to no avail, Malin already stood next to Sieh scanning for all contacts while he held down his target against the edge of the arrowslit.
“Talk.”
“Fuck you. I knew this was a hostile takeover. I ain’t telling-”
Sieh pressed the knife closer to flesh, blood blushing on it.
“That’s okay. I reckon there’s one, two, maybe more of you? In an army, you’re not you. You’re just a part of a collective, right? Your individuality, your defiance means nothing. And the best part? There’s more of you, so we can just keep shortening your numbers until there is just one more left…and whether they talk is completely relative.”
“You sick-”
Malin turned the shotgun upward and brought its skeletal stock down on the contact’s head, knocking them unconscious. Sieh stood, examining the knife for an instance before throwing it away, its agile blade clatters uselessly onto the ground. Through gritted teeth the other contact cried and groaned, little screams tried to take any kind of air while he watched the two operators standing over him, unable to process even that they merely exploited whatever gap in defense there was, almost like a tragic flaw but there was no trace of emotion across his enemy. Only life and the taking of it.
“And then when you do have emotions anyway, they’re all directed at yourself. Which is most American vets I talk to – because those are the ones they tell you it’s OK to have. They want you to hate yourself because they’re scared of you, and they’re jealous of you – I’ve said that myself, I’m sure you’ve heard me, I just think there are normal ways to deal with it. Well, relatively.” He laughed and stared at me to see if I would. “You did too, didn’t you? It’s OK, you’re on the other side now. Anger and hatred don’t really freak the civilians out, anyway, they just make you look contemptible, cowardly. That’s not what Hadak is about. Hadak is about joy. Or at least, enjoyment. I don’t know if you’d call it joy. But a society that can’t enjoy war is one he’d call” – Beek made air quotes – “circumcised.”
“Sick?” A voice boomed from the hole to the other side of them. The man pulling himself out was a strange colour, coppery from a carefully maintained tan that had already faded a bit from underground. “Bro. Where you think we are?” His head was bald and pointed like a bullet, adding at least two inches to his height, straining his straw hat open at the top – I wondered if it was some sort of body modification. Like Hadak, he was painted, but more simply – no blue, just black: ragged brushstrokes marking bones, intersecting and overlapping with the lines of a nylon harness. Rows of circles up his forehead; semicircles like bags under his eyes, toothy zigzags around his mouth. “We don’t speak like that here of ones like us. The sick ones are the ones behind us. The men of Earth.” In the dizzying dark of the Towers underground, he wore sunglasses – surely kitted out with some kind of infrared viewer, but indistinguishable at a glance from Oakleys. A Phonk beat skitzed from a round portable speaker wired around his belt. “You. You are of power like us. Why you wear cute little clothes of housepet?”
Learned about Judge Holden from Youtube videos headass.
Jax started nasally pseudo-rapping over the stream chat the second he came on, the sprung rhythm, crunk twang of some Southern nu-metal chorus half-remembered: “so in-SAIN, so in-SAINN, this the typa shit that go so in-SAINNN…”
“It’s a murdah-OCRACY!” At almost the same time, Gàdor lapsed into a sort of UK drill voice. Cringe harmonic. Then stuck out one finger, downpointed at his opponents. “You, what’s your rank? You know, the real scoreboard, for men just like it is for girls – bodies?”
“A society that makes a hard and fast distinction between war and everyday life, not even like a ritual distinction but a distinction you can’t see, can’t participate in, that’s the same thing. And that’s what civilians need to pretend soldiers can’t enjoy to maintain. He claims he saw this in Mexico, in the cartels – now those were real savages – people who went straight from picking fights on the playground and forcing themselves on girls in the bathroom to repping their town in blood feuds and having songs about them on the radio. Me, I think he already had the idea on his own. And I mean, if that’s what you want, it’s not at all hard to get without making some faggy cult about it. Let the civvies be civvies, let them believe what they want – that keeps ‘em out of our way. That’s the weakness, you know, with any of these guys, whatever makes them need to be seen all the time, as everything they are, and everything they aren’t. Naked, y’ know, and painted.”
Malin flicked a glance at Sieh who stared in a vacuous way letting the eventual quiet whittle down the words until they are only these echoes that shrivel into wind. But from this, she knew he was quite bored of this but was also relieved as he then got on comms.
“Echo, what are we looking at.” He said finally.
“We’re looking at 10 targets along the tunnels. The Apocalypse Now guy’s got a protection detail around him. Be prepared” Enfield noted with a note of disgust I had heard in reminiscences of his homeland, Congo, of mercenaries or PMC’s working security, some of them with painted faces saddled in plate armour and velcro, pretending they were some kind of animal or beast whenever they set foot on the savannah or karoo. Little more than another rowdy tourist.
“Roger, clear it out”. Sieh radioed, moving forward to confront the painted man. Strafing, his movements become light and simple so they could easily transition into another form, morphing a silhouette that’d usually be a target. Malin’s visor could only see this from where she glanced him and the enemy, all these openings she gazed into as she brought up her auto-shotgun, the front sight a single post peeled at its sides revealing a green node in the middle, as if the coordinate to a kind of triage she and Sieh formed around the painted man, containing him until they could fully limit his movements. The way she saw him, she would tell me, was no different than an ordinary civilian, like many she would see in her normal life at this distance that allows them to pass each other by. Nothing being able to enter it, nor her, nor a conflict that happens elsewhere.
“Oh, ignore them, that’s not the body count I’m talking about.” He stepped forward, letting his ropey muscled arms (slight freckles on the shoulders not quite disguised as paint-splatter) swing down in front of him like an ape in display. The DDM4 rearing its head back up lazily from his wrist. “If you want battle one to one, I’d be honoured. Will we be playing – by Sacred Band rules? You know, with a geas?”
Only women can place a geas, in Irish mythology, but Hadak’s meaning is simply a contract. Little more enchanted than a suburban swinger’s BDSM mortgage, except the kind of person who gets recruited out here seems to fall for it all the time. The one by which he secures his “enjoyment” over you if you lose.
Enjoyment hardly registered to Sieh, Gàdor slipped around the optics of the EOTech sight as if a phantom teasing the reticle, hopping over the 5.56mm rounds meaning to clip his legs. Yanking his rifle up a bit leads the reticule, Gàdor’s face permeated the edges and Sieh pulled the trigger. Blood ran down a face and Gàdor stopped himself, flinching at the sudden slice that almost undid his composure before firing off bursts to Sieh not knowing he was in range of Malin who fired her M1014 shotgun. His eyes darted with an undisguisable relief that he could still move, felt his grazed cheek with his unarmed hand. Any closer would have been fatal but he only found himself closing in on Sieh. Cackling (booming with sharp edges), he drew his knife, perhaps expecting Sieh to have to retrieve his own, but what he saw was merely the form of a normal soldier. An impression to which others would give nods and formulaic words of approval.
Sieh shifted back to bat away the knife’s blade with the barrel of the M4A1. “Typical, trying get distance to use your primary,” Gàdor actually monologued out loud and moved swiftly to his enemy’s side, knife about to dig into the soft parts that the armour clasped. Sieh’s hand blurred in every recording, hardly touching his holster and he moved close, twisting his body so that Gàdor’s arm would be parallel to his chest. Before Gàdor could pivot his knife to stab Sieh’s neck, he felt several punches through his plate carrier, breath knocked out of him and he scrambled to the ground, finding himself returning to his DDM4 by the time he could see Sieh using his Glock chambered in .45 ACP, his elbows jutted at angles that if anyone got close could easily get entangled in those limbs before meeting their end to that handgun. Despite the distance, and the supposed advantage of an assault rifle against a pistol, unease was starting to show on Gàdor’s face as he dove out of the way of a smoke grenade rolling under his feet from Malin and he clicked his tongue. Frenzied eyes, cracked paint to expose little bits of flesh under it, every time his head turned away from them was relief that he tried to get away from by trying to keep either operator in sight but they moved like apparitions, Malin conducting his movements and all Sieh had to do was set up the final punctuating note.
On the way out to the Playscape, Halation was silent. We could hear rumblings from inside the walls, even through the membrane of the Lung, on one side and then the other, as if we were inside a hungry stomach.
She had agreed – no, she had made the final decision, with the same firmness as every other. But she had made it at least partly out of guilt, a guilt that she did not want to excise from her tropism.
My own guilt now ran in the opposite direction. If all went well, which is to say if all went as badly as it was looking like it was going to go, I would be abandoning my men. At least most of them. Of course, even Beek had discussed “lifeboat” contingency plans. This was just one he wouldn’t even know about.
But for her, it was abandoning and betraying something even more fundamental. And that’s why I have to do it, after all you’ve done for me.
We stepped along the floating catwalk of white thatch. ‘The scenic route’ – Weirs could even ‘walk’ along these structures in their neutral form, like a kinesin along a microtubule. Various woven geometric enclosures stuck out at different ends, white wicker gazebos involuted with the complexity of dreamcatchers. In one of them to our left Aqueduct was waiting, dangling a line of fishing rope like we had seen at the Internexus between all their pairs of limbs, sitting on their Fabber organ.
“Hey! What can you catch up here?” Halation’s voice jumped ahead of mine into the vocalizer. I’d have thought she’d know, but at least she’d know what the answers meant.
Three, four seconds for their head to turn – I hadn’t been sure Aqueduct wanted to talk to me, but I wanted to talk to them once before I disappeared, partly to find out. Eventually something at the end of their line lost their interest. “If you run a current through it, you can get it to attract Pennants just like Yayaraya in the cartridges. Oh, I should be careful, your species is electrically conductive, right?”
They ran a depolarizing magnet over themselves and returned it to a woven bag that looked more like one from Earth than any I had seen here so far, down to the grassy texture of the material (though when I looked closely at the weave it was a completely alien topology, based on hexagonal knots), coiling the rope with another hand and passing it to us. You can use it normally, they tapped with a third.
I wonder why I keep getting mixed up with people who want to destroy the ground. Idiom but also literal. I wonder if it’s something wrong with me.
I don’t like… things being like this. Wandering in the dark like folk-durationism. (Remarkably close translation, you could make this a thing on Earth, we probably know someone who could. Even without cartridges.) Never knowing what you have in common with anyone you meet, having to second-guess everything.
I’m sorry. I looked up only when I was pretty sure they had said what they wanted to say.
No, thank you. It’s important that you can… face me and acknowledge this. Acknowledge your reasons. The Entangleweed never did that – although maybe if I’d let them… They trailed off into their own thoughts for a minute and counting before I decided to continue.
Right, they also… was our ‘ground destroying’ worse than what they almost did? People were shocked by the Ribbon bombardment but you– they– almost destroyed this whole mesa.
It’s not unheard of to blow things up, to alter the environment intentionally. It’s done to make Internexes, agricultural basins, chemical and ecological reservoirs, stableways… Or simply to control a collapse that’s anticipated to happen anyway. What the Ribbons were doing was unprecedented because it was random, because they were aliens, who didn’t know the terrain. Well that made everything exponentially worse for us, didn’t it. (Also meant it would be harder to rally propaganda against the attacks on the mesa, although if we could prove somehow that it was a purely defensive strike…) There’s a process, normally, of consultation with everyone in range to be physically affected… which was easier with the Network, of course. The Entangleweed positioned themselves as experts, they had connected all the local communities so they could do something like this again... I suspect they had some actual plan to use the remains of the mesa, it couldn’t have been a lie or they would have lost credibility with everybody, they talked about building an underground plateau. Of course, now that you're a threat to the environment, it's open season.
I wish I had been told, Halation thought with us, what my own messages were doing. Being used for. I wouldn’t have changed my mission, but I would have said something. But I was used to probabilistic packets missing. My ship was faster than most, so I might have been deep in history by the time they could reach me. Faster-than-light didn’t mean Absolute Space and Time, though maybe the Adipose would in the regions it reached – it mostly meant time shenanigans. I had set a single standard for the speed of all Earth’s Inchworm Drives, to make sure we had a continuous timeframe with our home planet, but a sufficiently faster one could land in Earth's history. A “relative absolute space” was also maintained by the maximum Asymmetry before an Asymmetry Field became a Strong Asymmetry Field, a fully prohibited technology for other reasons, as cosmological constant. A one-person ship drifting through space, intentionally untraceable, was no one’s priority for communication.
It must have been lonely, Aqueduct sympathized. I like long ascetic exercises in solitude but only if I can talk about them after.
Yes. Halation resonated, almost purred. We must be wary of our desire for companionship in this war.
Some of us don’t have anything else! Or, believe in it. I was going along with them because they wanted to shelter my Waltz, but I really hoped for what the Entangleweed were doing. Our old Waltz were the kind of people who… the Network going down was the best thing that ever happened to them. Nobody could watch them or call them on how they treated us. There was one old Fabber who’d been predicting it since before I was born - they even taught us how to use Entangleweed.
There were people like that on my planet, I added. Honestly, they ran half the country I lived in, but pretended they didn’t.
A section of the “sky” bloomed a sickly-sweet pink, in concentric and overlapping circles, as the surface of the Asymmetry Field reacted to some force or impact.
I hope that doesn’t happen here. I have no idea what they’re doing now. If they’ve joined up with any of the factions. They didn’t want to, I guess that was their redeeming feature – they didn’t trust anyone, I guess that’s why I want to trust people so much. I hope they’re not right.
I thought about my dad. They can’t be right. We know they aren’t. Even if you’re wrong, I’m wrong, we’re wrong, we’ll just have been wrong in different ways. …Are you going to stay with us?
I shouldn’t… accept the Unreciprocable that easily. And I don’t think I could stand a third betrayal.
We’re planning… depending on how this goes, we might leave. Halation took over the hard part for me again. That’s one of the responses to the Unreciprocable, right?
Yes, but it’s getting harder for people to take it seriously. The more unreciprocable crimes stack up, the more aliens land here, the less scary banishment seems.
The colours died down, and glancing up briefly I saw a Transport Morph re-entering carrying half a dozen men, strapped down to Weir Biers, bubbles of foamy Towers healing-stuff engulfing their faces and stumps of legs and arms. They passed no less than 30 metres away, returning to the Hiawatha, and none of them glanced back at me.
Some day I’d like to make a cartridge about the human birth process. It sounds terrifying. No egg, no extrusion, no discrete morphs, just a whole body growing inside a whole body with no idea what it is and tearing itself out…
I laughed. Not quite. A baby is kind of a morph? Before we started cutting open corpses from battlefields to get modern medicine, we used to draw ‘homunculi’ as tiny adult humans, and it’s quite different.
‘Kind of’ a morph the same way your genders are ‘kind of’?
Kind of the same way. I laugh, and Halation laughs differently, inside and along the connected skin. But we have a duty to be precise in first contact. Differently, in that it is a morph as chronological sequence, not as variation. The same, in that there is no hard and fast bound, only a process of development on one hand, a spectrum of difference on the other. I didn’t even feel Halation taking over, but those were her words. I couldn’t speak like that, I trained myself out of speaking like that. In academia they’d think you were putting on airs. Maybe she awakened it in me, maybe our speech was neither of us anymore.
Do you think anybody’s going to have a baby up here anytime soon?
Ha ha. Hopefully not. The gender ratio on the Hiawatha was 78:22. I didn’t spend enough time around the women’s wing of the barracks (which wasn’t mandatory, just a self-selective cluster), relative to how much I worried about them. I had recently appointed a new member of Rho Aias there, a Chinese officer named Yilin Song, who watched Mao-era revolutionary musicals alone or with a bedmate every night in her bunk. There was something I was actually thinking I wouldn’t mind recording on a cartridge, in the next little bit. You could be in charge of… editing, whatever you need to do to make it something. I’m going on a mission and I don’t know if I’ll come back.
Huh? But if you don’t come back, won’t the whole mission…
There’s one way we can survive to the end of the mission – the end of the war – even if we don’t come back. Putting it in words to someone who wasn’t part of the plan – although I almost wanted to offer it, maybe I would, I couldn’t tell if it would be graceful or insulting – was an important test. The Adipose node in the Asymmetry Field here can back up a copy of a living being on our exponent of scale using 10 13th exponents of energy. It’s only connected to one other node – the one at the research monastery on Tumour. Holdfast gave us the idea.
That’s… a lot of energy.
Yes. The methods for generating it here were less destructive than I was used to, but even with “negentropic self-reference” as an entire branch of mathematics, energy (and Meteorological constraints on its use) was the other main reason the galaxy wasn’t a world of arbitrary shape-shifting omnipotences like Caroline Bennett-Fog expected at some of the technological thresholds they had crossed. Even the Adipose wasn’t, as I had at first feared, a huge tactical advantage capable of transporting weapons and personnel arbitrary distances instantaneously; its inventors had mainly thought of it as a cosmic telegram that got around the Strong Asymmetry rules. A human body and brain-state, of course, weren’t an impossibly large message by the standards of computational life. But they added up quickly. Like texting too many videos. You have to keep this a secret. Only a few of us can go. Myself, Bennett-Fog, Baresch (Caroline felt obligated, and I needed at least Edison Lens on my side when I came back), Serrao, Ghost, Flagg. The tentatively named ‘Xenovanguard’.
Your brother?
He wants to stay behind. And I needed someone here to lead Rho Aias but – this part stung.
But then, maybe nothing would happen. Maybe we’d turn things around here. I felt afraid I had already foreclosed that possibility by not devoting all of my energies to it. The excess that would be needed to reject the statistical tendency – the negentropic self-reference – redirected to a fantasy of rest I’d allowed myself to admit to the enemy.
(“Don’t be silly,” said Bennett-Fog the last time I expressed these doubts. “We should have done this months ago, we knew it was possible. And if you’re being serious about the subtext, I would have always preferred a closer examination of both sides.”)
You could get backed up… if you want. I feel like I destroyed too much of your life out here.
It was already. I’m not worth that much. It was an objective statement, in the idiom of a culture that had been making those exact kinds of individual-energy value calls for millennia. Where no one was worth less than they needed, but nobody was worth what, say, an American was.
(I remembered obsessively calculating the resource cost of my own transition, comparing it against other American lifestyle costs like owning a car. This probably delayed it more than any of my other hangups, even the Coven. My dad was an economic conservative before any other kind, not a libertarian out of idealistic principle but a hoarder, scarcity mindset of a divine grace that could only be offered to an unknown 144,000 but he didn’t believe even they were worthy, the hidden tzaddikim of the Rapture. He had grandparents who had endured the Depression, trekked straight north from the Dust Bowl and not stopped walking until they were sure it was physically impossible, and admired the spending of Roosevelt and no administration after. If you were going to spend like that you had to build real things and real lives with it; as a communist I still believed that.)
Then… I definitely wanna let you make the cartridges. This’ll be, if any of them survive… all my army will have of me for maybe three or four months before I come back with new forces. And Mai… any version of me that isn’t backed up will want to say good-bye to her. And let the faction leaders here kill each other off. Though skilled people like Sieh would remain here, shepherding those who could be trusted (and my brother) toward the Hypernexus apparently 28 18th-exponent units from here, to give a new introduction and thread the narrow case in Non-Reciprocal Law for “responsible and dissociated” status. It helps us a lot if you play them as propaganda, obviously, but I’d rather you make them as art. Keep them yourself, or for your own purposes, if you want.
Risking going after Hadak would give me a propaganda angle with people here. They wouldn’t care that I – and Halation – were theoretically an opposing (and commanding) faction within this army if I didn’t do it myself.
I don’t… actually know how to make cartridges, you know, right? I just know a lot about how they’re made. But sure, I’ll try. I’m… even if you’re a shitty First Contact, there’s always honour in being entrusted with First Contact. Thank you.
Heh. You remind me of this character in a manga back home who lives after the end of the world and just wants to film movies, to the point she follows the main character around with a camera and pushes him to do crazy things just so she can film them.
I winced at my own friendliness. I was in too much power to have a friend. But I was also in too much power not to have one.
(When I was a kid, ‘a girl’ meant ‘a person who could make friends anywhere’.)
Those are the ones that are a bunch of closed temporal frames, right? That’s a movement here but never really became a medium. And two-dimensional visual approximation was barely touched until we could put images directly in our heads…
Art theory terms, I’d found, translated back and forth better than political or social or even purely material ones. Material ones were the hardest; how do you explain how one rock or one tree is named for its shape. Ahasurunu sang because the song suggested something even if it suggested nothing, a colour on space.
Anyway. I’m not the one pushing you around to do crazy things. I’d just as rather you not, but I see that others clearly will without you anyway. And I’m happy to record them, but know that if I have to condemn them I will.
That’s what I was hoping you’d say.
So, by going off into that lost Ferrous Mask communication shaft that the Lung had apparently been built on top of and no one told me, that Hadak had to find out by torturing locals, I knew I was trying to die. It was fine. Even with her. Caroline had been right about me fighting on my own, just now it was kind of the plan.
Each member of Expedition Team Boxer received one copy of the following cartridge. Each was connected by (lostcopy)Halation up to a distance of 20m, who could access and record across every cartridge, though could not remove recorded material. The producer Aqueduct Sunbite has stitched overlapping thoughts and sensoria (380-750nm sight, 20-20000Hz hearing range, touch, smell, intra-operable interoception), from single stream to chorus of five, together into a single track synchronously comprehensible in standard consciousness density from third-order intra-operability and up.
Guo lay on the bench clad in his underwear staring up into space, stars stung at his eyes twitching slightly in between lapses of rest, his knee risen up, his heel touching his thigh. Several of these poses tried to embody this leisure, chiseling its surface onto his stomach, how it falls like an archery bow reverberating after it shot its arrow. Enfield joked about people in bright shorts and UnderArmor tank tops in dancehalls, something even Sieh saw in Hong Kong, more as part of the frantic activity that whizzed by him with the metallic urges of traffic lights on green, rushing buses swinging around the corner and the brisk footsteps of crowds through the crosswalks at Causeway Bay outside the SOGO shopping complex, a large billboard of a smiling face luxuriated in the pearls of jewelry stores on the ground floor. Iron thickened the air as once Sieh wiped off red splatters over the plate carrier. Even in that room, no amount of must from the gasoline fumes could obscure the ravenous feast the chainsaw took off the subject’s leg after they refused to talk. They said things about them being inhuman. Them saying that only made me think of people in pedestrian scenes rather than a kind of thing the species of human might do. The moment he said this, Sieh knew that he stripped him of all his mythologies, his brain only focused on sensation now of his severed blood vessels flowing profuse, the subjects blubbers turning from pedestrian to blubbers as his lips only touched each other when he realized he was ironically in a way, just flesh.
‘Sieh…’ Malin said crouching in front of him as he continued washing the clothes by hand. She suggested to take it to the washers but Sieh insisted on washing them in a way that seemed oddly touching to her, like watching someone take care of a house. But only she knew about Sieh, his smile or whenever he lightened his movements from its usual correctness there was something deeply malevolent about it, seeing things only as vectors and movements. A kind of deadly objectivity and in the face of it, he sheds his stoicism for a controlled annihilation of the target laced with a slight joy. From what she had read of their main target: Hadak, he seemed to have a penchant for this kind of thing and their meeting was starting to concern her. But she only focused on the clothes for now as he lifted them out of the maroon water, suds running down the plate until they formed several rivers and Malin placed her hand on Sieh’s wrist. “I think that’s enough.”
Snapping out of it, Sieh saw her expression, distant but calling on him to enact this same distance to realize what he was doing as he saw the clothes.
“I suppose no amount of washing would do much anymore, will it?” he asked.
“Enfield already suggested the washers at the base…unless you don’t want Leona to find physical proof of what we did. Especially being empty handed.”
“It wasn’t completely for naught…”
“What do you mean?”
“Because it means the enemy is simply human. Just like we are. It’s only a matter of time before their delusions can no longer nourish them.”
Malin had heard Sieh speak like this. Even when they captured the subject they spent days depriving them of water, reducing them to a state of desperation, of wanting life, whatever that meant. Even then she always wondered despite the coolness of Sieh’s operations, had there been a point where he too might have been consumed in a different world that was unlike life as a civilian, or those routines that people supposedly did. Routines she could never adjust herself to, much to the chagrin of family so that when she worked para-military, even after the agitations or raids or operations, she would sit in her Toyota Liteace van alone until night, almost forgetting to eat so that when she came outside of it, there was a freshness to the bustles of marketplaces she walked in, but she knew it wouldn’t last. When she met Sieh then, there was a guardedness in the way he looked at crowds disguised in leisure, how they glimmered almost taking a silhouette before blinking away, seeming that even in this sort of peaceful scene, they had the same shape as an enemy combatant. In another country elsewhere, there was a coup d’etat happening and that increased or lowered prices around it. Some of the people profited while others didn’t. A kind of necessity around it. During a previous operation, once they left the lights of sirens and chatter of reporters behind the cordoned perimeter, Sieh and Malin entered a warehouse, red soaked into the fabric of clothes, fingers arched up from people unable to crawl anymore. What she remembered most was that despite his efficient movement, his eyes lingered on these scenes, almost as if it were a secret, these deaths and this violence that no one would ever see and even now, she wondered if this was something he wanted to see.
Commander Lillywhite strode into the shared area, her coat slung over her black undershirted shoulders. “Well, Chainsaw Man, I wanted to say it doesn’t work, but it looks like it probably did in this case. The oldest Rusty Moons have heard of the place he talked about, and they think the Waltzes around Polyp Massif wouldn’t have. Still… is that how you conducted interrogations back home?”
“Not particularly. Most people still thought about going home, at the end of the day. Although if most people came on a mission like this. They would have already forgotten the possibility of even seeing home in the first place.” Guo said.
“Yeah, but is ‘home’ what determines how we should act? The way I feel is we have to be more careful out here since we’re not at home.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, rivulets of Halation stretching out through her shadow in two directions. “Although that guy was with us, so that doesn’t really apply there.” And at the same time, the human Leona was starting to appreciate that opposite intuition that so many people here lived by, not the suspicion of homes that merely declared themselves such, but the sense of a debt of solidarity, independent of feelings or morals, she’d had the last time her home was a nebula of people who weren’t at home. But she would bring that up later, if she found the words. She had already defaulted on those debts before, after all. She was already a warlock (Hadak used the word in its original sense of “oath-breaker”).
Halation handshook with Malin and Enfield. Brief overlays of each shared perspective. Halation had been shocked by the violence of the interrogation as it flashed through Leona’s brain, but in each new mind she touched she found it continuing in a kind of movement that made the memories flow easier, like stretching a dormant muscle.
“Not all of us had been so lucky to have homes,” Enfield said. “That feeling is always nomadic. Perhaps that is something that brought all of us together. We’ve all lived through a violence that we’ve had to force upon others or have forced on us. But it’s not like we had no choice either.”
“I have gone without,” Leona reminded him coldly. “It wasn’t always worse. I could have again.” Why hadn’t she? It would have been harder to keep a steady outflow of cash to Mai; more money, ironically, had to go in and out when you lived on the street.
“You say that rather easily, but don’t think it so noble to put yourself in that situation.” Malin’s eyes narrowed.
“It’s okay, Malin,” Enfield put his hand up. “We are not here to argue about pain. We deal it ourselves. Everything else is just weight, and how much of it we recognize as being too much. And as far as I know from the commander, she does not deal in such simple terms… So… Commander. How do you feel we should act? I’m sure you can enlighten us, including our very quiet Sieh.”
Sieh barely reacted to his name but he always appreciated that Enfield had such awareness of everyone around him. When he went to consulting events, he would see him always checking on the guests in the room and came to Sieh as if there was no one else he so wanted to see. Buying him a drink at the bar, he appreciated it and it seemed he didn’t bear the guardedness most people had when they were bought drinks like some favour was about to be brought up. He only drank his can of soda.
“Again, what I was going to say is that it doesn’t work, for the precise reason that it works. As in, the problem of interrogation is both that a person knows something and isn’t telling us, and that we don’t know if they know. If you give someone no option other than to give you something, anything, they’ll give you anything, whether they have it or not. You’ve turned them into Azoth Homunculus, and they’re just as likely to hallucinate. I lucked into getting confirmation really easily, but there’s no reason that information had to be there. Effectively, we happened to have two sources instead of one, but if we’d just had that one, it could as well have been zero.”
Sieh then walks forward placing the can down on the table.
“That does seem like you, Leona. Being able to consider these things. I am not saying that we’re working in a space removed from yours, nor is it privileged. Frankly, that is the kind of thing charlatans like Hadak prize, people who try to free the battlefield from the inevitability of politics, or so, what is right and wrong, or what is it we’re supposed to do…I felt that, even when we train together, as I’ve shot you in VR, I had the feeling you’re from this place outside of this. Many of us here don’t have long lifespans…nor foresight. I, and Hadak are just like that, at the end of the day. We’re from this particular landscape where death is all that comes for us…I suppose then, maybe you’re lucky because you’re the one who will see what comes up after all of this. Even if you don’t know it yet. Whether it is the right one or not becomes less of a concern now”
“I know. There’s a reason I let you do this and not them. You’re pointed in the right direction, even though I want to talk more about how you understand that direction before we collaborate on these terms against less obvious enemies.” She opened the projector app on the Smaragdina tablet in her hand. “Anyway, the direction they’ve pointed us is straight down. Wouldn’t be very good for us if they were wrong.”
Malin glanced to Sieh and seized her gaze upon seeing him, a slight smile but she knew it too well, the malevolence behind it and all she could tell where the vectors are already preparing their course, and whether that would still be the right direction, she could only guess.
[Montage to several human songs as heard on a mental loop, garbled and overlapping. Anime style Leona in red on a rec room whiteboard, Halation hovering over her shoulder in blue as a slime girl angel. Jax trading off verses of Mercy in karaoke against thick Ugandan and Korean accents.An Arab man picking up a boxy Southeast Asian woman and carrying her down the hall. Tik Tok memes based on a dance from one of the last seasonals that aired before they left Earth. Several verses of a song speculating about what the Commander had in her pants. Intranet flame wars over World of Tanks mods.]
“We’re nearing the Flume. When you see flecks of blue light passing below, that’s it,” Leona’s voice echoed from below, though Guo couldn’t see anything at the moment. “When I was at the Six-Frond Internexus, it’s what we were fishing in. The groundwater is very fast, so fast Hadak got here from the crater in just three hours. But the entrance to the shaft is beneath it. There’s a very narrow air pocket where we can get around it without getting caught in the current or going off in some other direction. Look for an opening about this shape” – a wireframe image downloaded onto everyone’s helmet.
“Copy,” Sieh replied.
“Sounds like a terrible waterpark.” Guo said.
“Feels like because of our body cameras, it makes you sound more like an action movie character,” Enfield chuckled.
“What do you think Hadak would look like at the end of the body cam?”
“Who knows…we just have to find him.” Enfield shrugged as they made their way to ground water.
Guo’s flashlight reflected a lustreless bronze around edges matching the shape in the file, like the mouth of a crushed daisy, almost organic veins and crenellations in the rock. And a big pale lump of wriggling pseudopods filling all but the furthest edges, a giant bacterium or some kind of fused supermaggot.
On closer inspection, its flagellae were broken Tower limbs, branching fingers torn off like crab legs or occasionally crushed to limp streamers or tied in knots. Only the heads were intact. It was a Mob, but it was barely moving, the broken ends waving but the main body mesh staying put, stuck between the lips of the bubble. Overlapping voices rose from stretched and swollen mouths, rasping so that their overtones just barely cohered. Malin called for order with the vocalizer. The head with the longest crest, its eyeholes gouged ragged at the ends of their swivels, spoke. “Don’t try to move or separate us.” Each clipped sentence a different mouth. “We’re stitched together with explosive fungus.” “We were the guardians of the Astragalus Flume-basin, a neutral Meteorological body, our responsibility for this area should be established by a Backup 28-Gneiss-66.” “We have been subjected to this Unreciprocable Crime by the Algal Bloom Fingal Hadak and his war-band.” “Please, by any safe means, help us–” At this last angry moans and howls rose up, swallowing the plea under “You should have listened to those of us who can see! These are Algal Blooms!”
“Poor bastards…” Guo shook his head. “We obviously can’t take them apart without harming them and even then, having to blow them up from a distance might be more risky.”
“This is the equivalent of using a hostage to block the way. We cannot just treat them like a mere obstacle. And they are not an active threat so it would be useless to attack them,” Sieh said.
“So, even the calculating Sieh has a heart too,” Guo chuckled. “And even after dealing with Gàdor the way you did.”
“It was precisely because of him, I chose that course of action. Killing him after was something I considered but thankfully the medics stitched him back up. The only thing he’ll know is that we can pull him apart anytime we want to, he’ll think twice before even moving a finger. I somewhat doubt he can even be an effective combat asset given that.”
“Your respect for life is as frightening as the way you can use a weapon… You make it look so easy…” Malin said.
“Life is not something that can be severed from us. It is what we are. Even this Mob here, debilitated but living just the same. It is almost inherent…” Sieh stated.
I can interface with the fungus, maybe, if it’s still… alive? Halation struggled to recall enough about the obscure species that had previously been used to bombard the Lung to determine which versions of the category applied. We could find out, anyway, if we could get close enough to touch it.
“We could, couldn’t we,” Leona muttered out loud, “it can lurch and scream at us but all its limbs are broken. But…”
…the consent handshake, Halation acknowledged, would be difficult. Can I speak first.
“I am not an Algal Bloom.” Leona hummed in Ahasurunu. It wasn’t a common language here, but in a group this size… Indeed, as expected, silence spread like a ripple from one head half-wedged in a bubble in the rock. And where it crested, loud babble rose up again. “Or not only. All of us are connected by a Weir researcher from the artificial ecosystem in Tuber Plug above. The Algal Blooms you met are escaped from our captivity. We are trying to recontain them.”
“Why the fuck do you have them here in the first place?” “Offworld researchers have made enough trouble!” “You’re here for it. The same thing they are. The backup.” “The guardians exist to keep things like you away!” “Ahh, even without the use of our limbs, we will die as guardians…” “Well you told me no one ever came down here” “You should have let me go when my lover from the Marlstone Sea–”
There were also mouths too crushed for their words to be made out.
“Don’t separate me I’ll die if I’m separated” “Separate me save me separate me”
“If I connect to the fungus, I may be able to separate those who wish to be separated, while keeping those who wish to remain connected…” Leona’s body choked with Halation’s tears. “I’m sorry, I know this is not enough, we can send down more help or supplies, with real medical tech.” We’re going to need everything we can spare ourselves, if things go like our bodymaps are showing.
“Enfield. See to it they’re taken care of. When help or supplies come in, direct them here.” Sieh radioed.
“What? Then there’s only the three of you going after Hadak…What are you planning to do.”
“Us being here, even if we may not know all of what the commander is intending, the least we can do is to protect and preserve those who have been wrongfully injured.” He had been talking about “life” just moments ago, but from Leona’s studies of military and law enforcement, this was where she would have expected a policeman to use it, and the awkwardness of ‘wrongfully injured’ almost felt like a pockmark where it had been left out.
“I will see to it they are treated, but that is not why I have reservations…Are you going to face Hadak by yourself?”
From Sieh’s camera looking at Enfield, it frames his confrontational expression but it is not one that necessarily corners one for an answer so much as it pulls out the words already, sneaking out to seize upon the moment with ,once again, nothing to say. Enfield must have known that silences while mighty in some ways are never impenetrable. Air that always finds a way in.
“Of course.”
“You can’t be serious,” Malin then stood in front of him.
“Come on, Sieh, I’ll have to bring you a stool with all these jokes you’re telling” Guo laughed.
“I’m not joking. Also I’m standing. I haven’t sat down this whole time.”
“The one time you’re serious?!” Malin gasped.
“Anyway, it is important to have more people on the outside rather than settle this with killing a single person. While he is a target, there are more important things than hunting him down. I think it’s better that you attend to the crucial aspects such as examining the rest of the space, potential fallout in Hadak’s command or even seeing if they’re plotting things around us.”
“Thank you.” Leona’s voice had the tone of command. She was holding out her hand toward the writhing Mob, not touching, yet. This is already a small-unit mission, and if we’re badly outnumbered we can retreat. “Now, is that enough sign of trust?” Halation’s variation of Leona’s voice rang out between the cramped walls. “We are leaving behind one of our own, decreasing our own numbers against the enemy, because the enemy is not a goal independent of the well-being those he has harmed.”
“There is no more well-being to be had.” “There is only the duty of the guardians. If we forsake it now…” “If those of us who need each other are left to each other alone we will not have enough.” “Enough what?” “Blood.” “Digestive fluid.” “Marrow.” “I’m not going to not accept help for you miserable –” “What are we doing, we are a Mob, we move as one. If any can be helped all must help. That is how a Mob moves.” “We’re not a Mob anymore, we can’t move.” “Not a Mob not a morph an atrocity let them help let them help LET THEM HELP”
Leona stepped forward, slowly, and the dissenting voices quieted.
“You too –” she gestured to her unit – “it’s better if Halation has more points of contact.” Montage of distinct first experiences of feeling a Weir stretching out along the hyphae of a fungus for the first time – and finding nothing to work with. I can’t work with it. It’s not interoperable enough. Leona remembered Halation spreading along grass, a dragonfly… And I didn’t make the grass dance in the ground. There are things an organism this simple can’t physically do. It doesn’t move except by growing. I can hold it back from exploding, while I’m in it. (How did they keep it from… but the guardians had secret ways of activating and deactivating the fungus, which their guests had stolen. Wait, then were you the ones who… “Splinter group, that’s why I told those kids not to leave, splinter groups cause all this trouble!”)
“We’ll have to cut our way through.”
Silence.
“I’m looking for points… where individuals wish to be cut free… that line up.” Calculating routes through the rhizome. “We should be able to do this without…” A long pause grinding like an engine. “Unwilling casualties.”
“Can we hold it long enough to cut through all the fungus?”
How long must it have taken to do this… “If we send for a Weir with the medical team, they can handle the rest.” There were, in fact, Weirs at the Lung specialized for medical uses of symbiosis who hovered in acorn-shaped bubbles with special extrusion points, who might be able to do more, command the fungus enough to cut it directly without setting it off… without having to go through white layers of chitin with the Karambit, this time Leona would do it herself, at least lead the way… Halation would anaesthetize… they wouldn’t cut anyone who wasn’t begging, Halation would anaesthetize, they would cut gently.
[damage to cartridge: Error 698592. Access next available memory?]
The first stretch of the path they found through the semipermeable membrane of webbed foam at the bottom of the Flume was a straight shaft like a mineshaft on Earth, with a rail of hangers for Tower limbs frustratingly just too far apart for humans to reach. The unit figured out a consistent, quicker-than-climbing method of jumping between them with grappling rope and gloved hand, not necessarily the same one as their targets had settled on.
Infrared goggles were unavoidable here. Reduced resolution in visual data.
Then, after a period of time measured internally in completely personal, unprecedented units [montage of sense-of-time samples], they reached another membrane and through it – with an ‘electric password’ provided by the Rusty Moons – found what looked like fractal pumice; blue-white rock in the glow of cool heatmapping; two or three visible openings large enough for a human body in every open space; openings at every scale below in regular divisions; no tunnels, just adjacent bubbles, of size varying up another degree of scale. From somewhere far below trickled a wan hint of light. Despite the structure of the space, the shaft continued straight; yet it no longer had the same relation to its surroundings, as when the rock had been black basalt, with most openings not large enough for a groundhog.
“No sign of movement within the shaft…”
“Foot steps at zero.”
“Can you get a read on the depth of the tunnel?”
“About uh…500 m, maybe more? We can’t confirm yet.”
Walking down, a cavern opened up around a large hole about 20m deep. Guo stood at the edge of the cavern’s entrance, the smooth profile of his silhouette blending in with the rocks as if it too bent and corrugated into their incongruous shapes, the first muzzle flash only revealing a phantom. Malin supported Sieh, standing behind him as he set up a place to rappel down.
“Should we drop smokes? Screen our entrance?” Guo asked.
“No need for now. Let’s proceed slow.”
Hooking on they jumped down but caught the rope, their fall halting as they swung onto the wall, combat knife loosely attached by a string on his wrist, spinning in the air a bit as if a free floating malice about to stick its fang into the unsuspecting soldier walking below them.
The eerie, birdlike sound anticipated by fourth or fifth units the blowdart, cut from a fibrous white-translucent reed, that pinged on the motion detector built in with the infrared vision further fourth or fifth units early, toward Guo’s neck.
Halation, on detection, plugged the angle into the helmet computers to line up with the borehole radar map.
Swinging slightly out of reflex, Guo started to move forward, the soldier below noticing the enemy and brings up his weapon but even then, Guo brought up his MP5, the shortening distance between him and his target becoming a perfect place to subdue and terminate them. Sieh had already landed on the ground, his first step seeming the only visible one toward the enemy as he already disappeared within the curves of the tunnel. Every time his fingers twitched, they looped into the guard of his combat knife, its blade tearing through flesh in deft yet free slashes, the one instance it hit plate armour over bare oiled skin, all he needed was for the contact to try and grab him only for them to miss as he moved to their side, bringing them down to their knees with one kick that stabilized him, the battlefield appearing to him in a brief yet clear mirage and all his movements becoming a recreation of it within the melee. His rifle remained untouched, only dangling at his side as if a metronome, almost tempting someone to grab it, and the few that did only realized that their grip inadvertently set up the M4A1 to aim right at them as Sieh, noticing his weight being pulled to the side took hold of the rifle’s grip and pulled the trigger. Malin approached this by the book, laying down suppressing fire, both surprised and not surprised that basic maneuvers such as using smokescreens still remained effective. Despite them having IR goggles on, they couldn’t just fire blindly but their caution only allowed her a way through, giving her a bevy of exposed points to attack from as kills connected her path, gaining momentum as things seem to fall into place, as if the swift mechanical precision of a clock.
“Clear.” Sieh reported.
“Clear as well.”
“Yeah, clear.”
“The unit they were down here with was supposed to be ten,” Leona cautioned. She reached out and grabbed a thin bridge of the wall, crumbling it within her palm. “This is computationalized rock, right? Is the backup supposed to be within this stratum, or below?”
There’s no way to say, because it doesn’t have power, so there’s no way to access anything that might have been stored here. It could be a node of the backup. It could have a code for some other reservoir.
There’s more light in here, said Halation, than there should be at this level. Natural light.
There didn’t look like it, but the finest gradations in darkness were detectable by the interlocking radial quilt of photoreceptors spread algorithmically even over the Weir sensory surface; a trace, dust in the air, drifting from somewhere far away but not as far as they had come. Aqueduct’s talked about this. Some really deep installations have ‘light-tunnels’ – vertical openings and series of reflective surfaces that pipe light from the surface all the way down here. This would be… deeper than they’ve ever heard of one. But it’s possible, somewhere… which direction?
As Halation stretched through the tunnels around them – each member of the search party now crawling through gaps one or two chambers apart, horror movie wisdom notwithstanding, spreading the net – a gradient measurable only in second exponents stabilized across the mesh. Azurite.
So they moved, separately, in the same direction.
There were no more ambushes. “Wouldn’t they want to stay out of the light?” It was a random guess, the only direction that gave them any direction in this three-dimensional foam. Therefore, other humans would have been drawn to it too. “If they could notice it. They don’t have a Weir with them… right?” But they had other equipment; if Leona turned up the sensitivity all the way on the night vision goggles it looked like a faint static of green pixels, floaters. Until they stepped, at about ⅓ of its height, into a roughly globular bubble, the size of a two-storey house, through which several small beams aligned into a single shaft so sharply distinct, even as it illuminated the space around it, that Leona thought of those brass bars used in baroque sculpture to indicate light.
“Solstafir!” Hadak boomed, grinning his thorny mouth tattoos taut, at the bottom of his beam of negative space. “Amber streams from Sol are not unlike the waves of the sea, nor the endless horizon of ice.”
Below – which should have been worse ground – but it was harder to descend slopes this steep and shaky than to climb, face and hands forward. A spray of bullets flew towards them from the light below.
A thrown fragmentation grenade from a gap in the side of the opened tunnel blew the opening structure against a wall that it blew open again, while Hadak emerged from the following flashbang and smoke on calloused foot, Scar-L slapping against bare thigh, Desert Eagle cocked against clavicle.
For that moment, Sieh dropped himself under the magnum’s length just at the side of his head before throwing himself out of the way, his hands catching the ground in a somersault, bending his knees to catch his fall, M4A1 immediately trained on target, Malin and Guo provided cover but break contact once Sieh gave the word to keep their distance. Despite being able to dodge in a swift yet flamboyant way, it still jarred him. For a moment, some might call it a fear of death, or the unpredictable but his teeth gritted into a smile. Malin heard the slightest quiver of mirth in his voice even at the radio, his frequency smooth yet finely jagged, watching a landscape from faraway and then seeing its elevation changes upon entering it. This was where Hadak would enter.
“Not bad! So you aren’t completely held back by your millennia of hydraulic civilization,” Hadak laughed.
Sieh brought up his M4A1 firing in bursts Hadak easily maneuvered around almost as if the concentrated shots made it so predictable. Leading his target did little as he always stopped short but he had to keep moving as Hadak popped a shot with his SCAR-H’s underbarrel FN40GL grenade launcher. Knowing he’d be on the move, Hadak took few but deliberate shots with the 7.62x51mm rounds. Despite the large calibre, Sieh still took caution but it made Hadak an easier target as he could not move and fire catching glimpses of Hadak through the muzzle flashes as he cooked a grenade lobbing it toward Hadak. But in this, gold sculpted the rocks out of the darkness in brief flickers and he could almost put these together, what could be seen in all that that could suspend all this as he reached closer to Hadak whose grin widens upon reaching him, but he also smiles, reflections twisted on the metal surface of a blade both sharp and soft light. Hadak also glimpses the barrel of the Glock 17 in front of him, its bore seemingly engulfing him, flames bulging into the face of the 9mm bullet where he threw himself out of its trajectory, smoke parched his flesh.
Mere objectivity, such were the killing points that both men aimed for. Hadak’s blade missed Sieh who moved his head back, feeling the bulge of his throat exposed before grabbing hold of his Glock 17 again, his other hand acting as a guard, moving towards a natural retreat as Hadak also backed off, a cut on his face from a 9mm round as drops of blood followed him. Sieh thought of him like an opaque illusion, his movements further obscuring his intent, even foregoing openings to kill but that did not make him any less dangerous. Taking a Serbu Shorty shotgun from his thigh, he shot it towards the ground in front of him, 12 gauge shell fled and clattered on the ground fleeing from the hole created as Sieh dropped down, switching to the M4A1 firing above where Hadak’s profile pulsated through the semi-transluscent ceiling. Despite the 5.56mm rounds not being strong enough to penetrate, it ate away enough to make room or cause a structural weakness on the ground causing him to fall. If anything, Hadak must have hated that Sieh was making him act this way, influenced by structures he usually balked at. A kind of submission.
I’m two chambers Quartz from where you’ve landed, Leona’s thought tingled along the Weir-tracery on his nerves. Lead him over to me.
Hadak glanced down the hole with distaste – “You prefer the Hive even here, army ant? This planet will be a fitting grave for you.” He turned his head to the light and whistled for a moment before jumping in with two feet straight, like a diver, arms at his sides and both muzzles flaring, like booster jets at his sides.
Above them, from between the rays he had referred to by the Icelandic word for sunbeams-through-cloud, two more nude operators descended on wires like spiders. They descended exactly where the beams disappeared into holes in the floor of the chamber and sank straight through. Malin’s extrapolation ran through Halation: They’ve clearly mapped this space already. Assume they can find you.
“No shit.” Guo scoffed picking up a QBZ-95 Bullpup rifle from a slain soldier
“We’re in a realm where predictions hang in the balance” Malin said, tracking Hadak but still maintaining her distance. The battlefield, this thing that would suddenly wrack someone in its fervour before they find themselves watching it happen, something not happening to them, survival was the trembling heart’s daze.
Hadak’s blazing entrance blew open two sinewy bridges of rock in the chamber where Sieh had landed and sent him falling even further, where as soon as he landed he disappeared into a side-opening. His voice rang through the echoing rock around them: Meanwhile, cut off from Leona by a new hole in the ground, Sieh backed into an extended corridor, in the shafts of light at either end of which Hadak’s operators had just landed, posing.
They closed in on Sieh. It was only a matter of time before Malin, Guo, and maybe even Enfield might join in too. As he alternated pointing his M4A1 at both without firing, one remarked something into a headset about the ant looking like he was out of ammunition. Yet they did not attack, only savouring the thought of Sieh succumbing to despair. Their glee only nourished Sieh’s mirth as he brought up the M4A1 to his opponent in front of him who flinched firing his weapon but he didn’t hear the M4A1’s empty click as Sieh crouched with the Serbu Shorty firing it one handed causing the enemy in front to duck out of the way. Throwing the M4A1 at his attacker behind him, the discarded assault rifle clattered to the ground, he sprinted at the wall, jumping off it, his fist landing down to the enemy. Balking at such a maneuver, he easily avoided it only to realize it hid his other hand drawing a long knife from the sheath on his lower leg driven into their torso, their next breath only caused him to choke and seize, opening their hand to drop their weapon, a SIG SG 751 SAPR that Sieh deftly turned to the enemy fingers clutching the ribs of the bevelled handguard, firing the battle rifle’s 7.62mm round bored open his opponent’s stomach, intestines spat onto the ground, Sieh’s boot turned towards the other contact behind him and with a quick twitch, the tremor of the rifle firing, its subsequent round made a surgical slice through the target clutching at their throat, open mouth unable to voice their cries, a large crater left in the wall behind them.
Meanwhile, Leona tried to follow Hadak’s voice which seemed to be somewhere slightly below-Azurite to her, training her Roland Special on the ringing gaps in the floor, through which the rhythmic mutter rose like: “This is the nature of the earth as a whole, and of the regions round about it, and in the earth, in the cavities all over its surface, are many regions, some deeper and wider than that in which we live, others deeper but with a narrower opening than ours, while others again are shallower than this one and broader. All of these are connected with each other by underground passages, some narrower, some wider, bored through in many different places…” A shadow crossed over Halation’s line through the gaps in the rock and she spun around in the opposite direction of the voice, pulling herself a navel-level porthole and dropping down a crack to land in a meandering worm-trail vein, a bit less than six metres behind him.
Hadak turned around. “Quiet, but not quiet enough. You have come closer to how human animal used to stalk his prey, but most of your sensitive surface is still covered in noisy encumbrance.” Was he using his schizo rambling as echolocation? He charged, Desert Eagle (in his left hand) filling as much of the space with noise and shrapnel as possible, while his open-palmed right came swinging like a trebuchet over his shoulder and down toward hers, 12-inch Damascus kukri twirling on a short leather strap around one finger.
Firing the Desert Eagle once more, the .50 AE round pummelled the ground leaving a large hole prompting cracks to form, the enormous leverage of that gun comparable to his own overwhelming strength. Not only did that magnum complement him physically, it also required a kind of wild unflinching demeanour to control its recoil, a weapon that would always threaten to be off target, slip out of its wielder’s grip or be burdensome. However, his finger was unable lift itself from the trigger, an obstruction wedged itself into the guard unable to prime another shot, the Desert Eagle rendered effectively useless as his eyes widened at this. Leona smirked at the antenna of the walkie talkie – the failsafe for the Azoth Denpa – she shoved into the Desert Eagle’s trigger guard, preventing the trigger from resetting. Another .50 AE round chambered but it was only dead weight as the firing pin could not be activated. He swung the Desert Eagle around, if not to club Leona, to shake off the walkie talkie inside it, looking like an overly strong oaf who could not shake off one minor inconvenience. His other hand was occupied trying to bend back the wrist that had slipped the hook of the karambit between the larger knife and his finger. He’d retracted the finger, letting the knife slip off and into the air, before grabbing it again by the hilt and clamping around her fingers at the same time. The two knives vibrated between their hands as his raw strength dug in around and between them, like it had with the first Tower it had met. Beek had taught him how to establish dominance with a handshake; with Leona he knew he was exposing his surface to the mind-reading, nerve-manipulating alien. He could feel it and stare it down directly. Hello. I too am a nervous system. A predator of nervous systems, in fact. I understand what you are. The mushroom showed me, the loosh eaters taught me. It’s not just your pathetic ethics, a nervous system cannot simply overpower another. Only bodies do that, not signals.
While they stood frozen in interoperation, the disabled Deagle swung down and bent her arm at the elbow. Her hand released, his pulled away with both knives, and he swung it back up at her chin as she brought the Roland Special up into the opening made along his arm toward his eye. He ducked his head and kept running, slamming her by the diaphragm even as she evaded his bladed fist into the open space through which Sieh had initially dropped.
“Leona! Hit the dirt!” Guo cried – somewhat redundantly – on the radio.
She landed deliberately and stayed down. Tremors unsettled the space but it wasn’t long until the walls around them tore open in silence. A .50 BMG round from an Anti-Material Rifle. Its long steel beam of a handguard and its square body dwarfed Guo who lay prone looking like a curvy outgrowth out of the weapon. Claymores surrounded both his sides even having a cracked floor underneath to slip down should he need to escape. Malin weaved through the holes created, Hadak’s silhouette clear as she took her PP-19 Bizon, 9mm rounds fed down the helical magazine spitting dozens of rounds. Hadak moved out of the way, looking annoyed as he knew this was merely some kind of diversion, half expecting Sieh to pop out from somewhere. That would be how he’d end this, as if the end of a logical sequence.
Double knife hand guarding the side where Leona was pushing herself back up off the ground, he removed the SCAR-H from his back and fired another grenade in the direction of the approaching gunfire.
Too predictable. She switches out the tubed magazine for another, the hail of 9mm rounds knocked into the grenade causing it to explode mid air, knocking her back a bit. Reacting to this, Guo fired at Hadak, the excessive heat emitted from the vents of the handguard made his target seem like a mirage, imagining him getting pulled apart by the Anti Material round but he still stood like a moment of lucidity. Since he still had to deal with Leona, Guo was safe for now, wondering where Sieh was.
I’m a layer above you. Trying to get a bead on him as he and Leona go hand to hand again, through the hidden Weir-wire.
By now, the arena of the battle was one giant crater, the beams streaming in again. But behind them, the roaring applause of settling shards of rock had been joined by a vast, almost musical groaning, a chorus of whales in dissonance, a chainsaw of bass through their marrow. One of the beams that had settled dancing on the ground between Hadak and Malin disappeared. Snuffed out.
It’s falling. Above. How much, how fast, who knew. Tuber Plug is falling.
Does that mean the Lung...?
The Asymmetry Field will hold it together, for now. It’s going to drift down as the rock under it shifts and cracks under its own weight. No idea how far down it will go. How long until it gets this deep.
Sieh ordered Malin and Guo to fall back. Enfield was the only one far enough from the collapse to navigate them out. Malin didn’t even ask what Sieh was going to do but her sigh already said it for her. Maybe it was just the inability to form a solid impression as the Tuber Plug fell apart around them or the debris formed around fractured openings cut off suddenly but this almost seemed like a making of a new apocalyptic world, Sieh, and Hadak were the last ones in it as the latter spotted the former and fired his Desert Eagle, the .50AE round pointlessly embedded itself that wasn’t the target and Sieh crouched moving with the new terrain created from the collapse. This alien world reshaped into a terrifying yet familiar battlefield, its terrains only braved the exertions of bodiless wind, their silhouettes disappeared within it until they were just as opaque, lost within its haze, the same that stretched across space and time.
“So we could just stay here and wait for it? This seems like a good area to secure.”
“Flume’s more important. Hold that and you have a route to most places in this georegion. Head back up to meet it,” Leona stared up at the collapsing ceiling, her gaze switching back and forth with Hadak, who was hovering over the edge of a chasm that had just opened. Knowing who knew what he knew about where it went, and whether a backup was really down there. They couldn’t afford to allocate all their resources to Hadak’s Holy Grail; they couldn’t afford to ignore it either. They could afford one suicide mission, already “backed up”. One Avalon story. Halation retreated down their bodies as her perspective disappears from their version of the saved file, and theirs from hers, if it is ever recovered. “Deliver the message, and take care of everyone as best as you can.”