Crystal Rain (35 page)

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Authors: Tobias S. Buckell

BOOK: Crystal Rain
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“What is this?”
“It will heal you.” Pepper laid John in. “Relax. Don’t fight.” He smiled. “We made it, John. You’ll be back. I’m giving you everything you wanted.”
John dropped his hook between the glass container and the lip to stop it from being closed. “I can’t fight you, Pepper, but please, don’t.”
Pepper shook his head. “I need you back, John.” John saw for the first time that some of the dreadlocks on Pepper’s left had been sliced off in the fighting.
“Please don’t take my memories. Of Shanta. Of Jerome.”
Pepper pushed John’s hook back in and folded his hand over his chest. “Trust me on this, John. You’ll be okay. You’ll have all those memories still, and more. It’s this or death. You can’t hang on much longer like this. We all need you.”
John saw the open need on Pepper’s face.
“I don’t think,” he said, thinking of all the times the feelings had drained out of him, that he’d iced out when things got tense, “I don’t think I might like the old me.”
Pepper didn’t reply. He shut the pod door and knocked the top twice.
A thick goop trickled down around John’s back.
The air in the pod tasted sweet, erased the pain, and lulled him to sleep. He stopped fighting the darkness.
 
 
Pepper let go of the medical pod and stood up. He checked the diagnostics, tapped in a sequence, then walked forward into the tiny cockpit. The soft seats embraced him. It felt disconcertingly comfortable to do that. Sleep threatened to overwhelm him.
“Ma Wi Jung?
” Pepper called out.
From the left of his shoulders came the ship’s soft voice. “Yes.”
“I’m in slight danger of hypothermia and your cabin is cold. Adjust this cabin’s internal temperature to eighty degrees. Do this in slow stages.”
“Adjusting,” the ship confirmed.
“Do you have anything to drink?”
“There is water aboard, and tea. The holds are not fully stocked.”
“Good. I’ll have some tea.” Pepper stood up again. A good cup of tea, then he would make a tour of the ship to see if it was ready to fly. No sleep yet.
That would take a few hours.
He needed to power the ship up fully, bring everything online. Things John could do better than he could, but John was in the medpod until at least much later in the day.
Pepper walked around the cockpit and stretched.
“Something is trying to board the ship,”
Ma Wi Jung
said. “It is using acid to try and eat through the hull.”
“Show me.” The front of the cockpit lit up to show a blue tunnel of ice, and the Teotl’s fuzzy face dripping acid against the side of the hull. “Is there any way to stop it?”
“I have no weapons. My fitting was never completed. But I do have stabilizing jets near this location.”
“Fire them,” Pepper ordered, and watched. The scene didn’t change for several seconds. Then a wall of steam exploded through the tunnel, blowing the Teotl with it. “Did the creature damage the hull?”
“No. The hull remains unbreached.”
Pepper walked out of the cockpit. “Where is the galley?” His tea would be the first small luxury in a long time. Then it was time to try to make the
Ma Wi Jung
fly. Pepper wasn’t a Pilot, just impatient.
“Ma Wi Jung,”
Pepper asked. “Do I have the authorization to fly?” He walked into the small galley and opened the cupboards until he found a mug snug inside a bracket.
“You do not have the necessary implants. You are not authorized.”
Pepper sighed. “What about automatic pilot?”
“This ship will only fly within planetary atmosphere by automatic pilot. The human pilot in recovery is required for any orbital or extrasolar activity.”
Pepper smiled. That would do.
 
 
The first thing Oaxyctl did was grab the sled on his way out. The shotgun could serve no purpose. He couldn’t shoot the
Ma Wi Jung
with it, he didn’t even know where under the ice to shoot the ancient machine. There was no game that he knew of on this icy expanse to shoot, but Pepper had let Oaxyctl grip the shotgun when he’d thrown him out the door, so Oaxyctl pushed the weapon under the sled’s supplies. Oaxyctl limped with the sled out onto the ice and slid around as he pushed with his good foot, the whole time glancing over his shoulder, waiting for his death to come.
After several minutes of slipping around, he paused and looked back at the mound.
An explosion of steam blew out of the ground. Oaxyctl dove for cover, expecting more displays of power from the device they had found.
He waited for the next ten minutes until he realized more explosions wouldn’t come, then he pushed the sled out over to the hole to investigate.
It didn’t take long to find his god. It lay on the snow, mewling, fur burnt off and sheets of skin red and blistered.
Oaxyctl sat on his sled and watched it squirm.
This thing had remade itself into a shape that could live on the snow. Large, padded feet, fur, and blubber. Blubber that had been fried and smelled like meat.
He watched it heal itself.
The process looked almost as painful as the burns. The skin cracked and tried to reform. Goop spilled out onto the snow. It looked clear after several minutes that this god
would not be able to heal itself. It didn’t seem to have the energy.
It stopped mewling and stiffly turned its newly grown face toward him, a fleshy stalk of eyes and nose.
Oaxyctl thought about Pepper’s and John’s unconcern about his heresy. He thought about the gods differing with each other on what to do, and the fact that they depended on men to do their bidding. If he was going to die, he was going to try something first.
Oaxyctl pulled the shotgun out and aimed it at the Teotl’s head.
He pulled the trigger, wincing from the loud sound, and watched the Teotl’s head explode. It dropped to the snow. Oaxyctl fired again, wiping ooze off his cheeks that had splattered back on him from standing too close. Then he went and looked for the ax.
He doubted the god could regrow itself after being hacked apart.
The job wasn’t easy. The creature had bones of metal, and parts that shocked and sparked him. But he kept at it until he could throw pieces of the god out into the snow as he worked.
When he was done, Oaxyctl packed the gun and ax back on his sled.
Covered in the blood of one of his gods, he pushed off the ice and into the deep snow.
The mound behind began to snap and crack. Oaxyctl turned to watch. A five-hundred-foot length of silvered metal broke free of the ice. It looked like a sleek bird, with great wide-open mouths around each of its sides facing eagerly forward into the air.
The
Ma Wi Jung,
he thought.
It rose, hovering with a great rumble that shattered the silence in the air. Then it flew over Oaxyctl, casting a big shadow over him. It sped up until it was no more than the size of his fist, his fingernail, a dot, then gone.
Oaxyctl turned back to trudge through the snow.
He had enough supplies to last for almost a week. Pepper had built shelter out of the ice a little over a day’s walk away. He could live this last week well.
Death didn’t scare him. Nothing scared him anymore.
Oaxyctl walked across the snow, a small dot in the almost infinite expanse. He knew he was trapped in the ice and would die here.
La
Revanche
was too far away by now, using its steam power to trundle away from him faster than he could walk. He’d known it the second he was thrown out.
But he still felt a tiny bit exhilarated, free, and a little bit relieved.
 
 
A simple question: Who am I?
“You are John deBrun.”
What is a John deBrun? What does that mean? What’s happening?
“You are being repaired. You’ve suffered extensive trauma, frostbite, and cognitive impairment: a retrogade amnesia.”
How? Why?
“You ordered it. Your low-level personal nano is being stimulated back online.”
What?
“You will understand in half an hour. Exedyne Bio is not liable for any psychosis or personality fragmentation that occurs as a result of this procedure.”
John lay in a thick soup of some sort.
“Do you remember the last time you were in a medpod?”
The block removed itself. The sensation of being suspended by chemicals, tiny machines roving throughout his body to stitch it back together, returned. Radiation damage reversed, trauma reversed. Saline feeds. Yes, he thought. This is familiar. I’ve done it before.
A survival pod. Extended periods …
“How long?”
John accessed that memory.
He smashed his fists against the pod window and screamed. He heard nothing, fluid filled his mouth and lungs.
He knew why he’d buried those memories.
“Please Mr. deBrun, let me help you. Relax. We will help you manage this.”
His muscles sagged, his throat collapsed.
That’s right, John, let the nice machine help you, he thought. When it’s done, we can get out. We’re not trapped. We’re not in space. We’re still in the
Ma Wi Jung
and Pepper is just outside.
This will only take a few hours.
Not centuries.
He relaxed. A bit. He was a strong, mean little shit. Fuck claustrophobia, he thought. I can handle it just a little more. But someone would pay for all this. Pay hard. He wanted people to hurt, and hurt bad, because that’s what happened when they screwed with him.
No, no, that wasn’t it. He wanted to get back and find Jerome. That was it.
Who?
My damn son!
John lay there, his mind split and groaning under a new, and far more ancient, load.
 
 
Commotion spread through the cavern. Jerome watched several women run to the edge of the water as men broke the surface with scudder-fish.
“Granpa Troy!” someone shouted. “No, no, not him.”
Jerome ran across the sand, water sucking into the spaces of his footprints. The Frenchi men stood around Troy, whom they’d pulled onto the sand.
“You should have seen he,” the nearest said. “Them
Azteca were burning the house, and he left the water. He had fight them with he hand. He were fast. So fast you could hardly see.”
Jerome saw at least ten bullet holes. Slashed flesh was everywhere he looked, peeking through ripped clothing.
“He insist on coming back.”
“Hey,” someone protested. “Get the child out of here.”
With dark looks the women surrounded Jerome, but Troy raised a bloody hand. “Bring Jerome here,” he hissed.
Jerome swallowed. Troy wasn’t like the mongoose-man he’d seen on their table when he’d fallen out of the tree. Troy was still speaking and moving.
People muttered as Jerome stepped forward and sat next to Troy.
Troy grabbed his neck. Water and blood dripped down Jerome’s shoulders and collar.
“You … you like Pepper,” Jerome said.
“Something like him, yeah,” Troy said. “Only Pepper heal, and I don’t.” Troy leaned his head back on the sand. “Remember what I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Everything I know about we history, it in that desk I show you. Just take John, you father, to the desk and have him talk to it. And remember this, the wormhole is being fix. And them Teotl, they ain’t just coming for this world. They coming for all the world-them that have people living on it. You understand? Tell him the wormhole go be fix.”
Jerome looked down at Troy. Blood leaked out of the corner of the man’s mouth. “I think I understand.”
Troy didn’t reply.
Jerome waited another few seconds until the men pulled him away. He sat in the corner of the cavern, away from everyone, quiet. So much blood, he thought. Everyone dies, even the powerful ones like Troy and Pepper.
Was no one safe? Even the old-fathers?
Suppose Dad was dead? If Troy died, what chance did Dad have?
Jerome cried into his knees, muffling the sound so no one could hear him or come find him in the dark.

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