Sly Mongoose (37 page)

Shaken, he pushed himself back up to his feet.

Heat rippled off everything, and just as Timas reached the elevators the power shut off to the entire city.

Darkness reigned. Light spilled in from the atrium, and in the distance through the layers via the edge of the city. But everywhere else, night.

Timas ran toward the edge of the city where he could see what path to take.

Each layer had grand steps leading up to the next at the edge by the city’s shell, like at the mezzanine. He began to clamber up them, struggling his way foot by foot. Condensation dripped from his visor as he panted. He sprinted as best he could in the heavy suit for his life.

He wasn’t going to get as high up the layers of the city as Pepper recommended. He stopped at one point, looking out of the city and realizing that the city wall wasn’t bulging inward like the airships he’d seen fall.

Because it was already holed.

As he realized that, the city broke through the last cloud layer and Timas saw the surface.

Now he ran inward, into the dark, toward the atrium. With every heavy step he scanned for more modified Swarm. Fortunately, no more came. He cut through alleyways, homes, and kept going until he found a garden.

There was a fresh pile of dirt near a half-finished flowerbed.

Timas lay down face-first on it as the entire city started to shake violently. They had hit ground.

He could twist himself to look out the side of his large helmet and see the city, all askew from his perspective on the ground. At first, it shook, like on a heavy turbulence day. But then nearby buildings collapsed, facades falling forward. It was worse than any heavy weather he’d ever been through.

Layers trembled, visibly curving, and roaring filled the air, thudding through his chest.

Pieces of the upper structures started breaking off and raining down around the city’s edges. The walls exploded, compressed as waves rippled through them.

Then the real shock hit. The ground underneath Timas kicked him up into the air. He fell back onto the dirt face-first and smacked his head against his faceplate.

Dizzy, lip bleeding, Timas waited as the world came to a stop. Girders, large chunks of plating, and then a mountain of dirt rained down on his layer’s edges, but the atrium held firm.

The rest of the city was a mess and he was trapped in its maze with hardly any light. But he was alive, and on the surface of Chilo.

Timas fumbled about with his chin and triggered the beacon Pepper had given him. In the sweaty darkness, still feeling rumbles outside, he wondered what to do next.

P
epper sat in one of the round airships that Hulbach Cavern had given to the Ragamuffins so that they could ship people from Aegae down. He hadn’t had time to visit a medical pod; others needed assistance more than he did. But he had scrounged up a fully powered pack for his groundsuit.

He filled out the bulk of the craft’s interior on one side. Someone had removed three chairs for him to sit on the floor, back against the curved wall. Claire rode with him on the other side, free for now of Amminapses’s control. She sat in her chair, staring ahead, deep in thought.

“How’s Aegae?” Pepper didn’t want to sit alone with his thoughts for the whole length of the trip to the surface.

“You were there,” Claire muttered.

“I left the moment the Ragamuffins arrived. I haven’t been back. We just picked you up: talk to me.”

Her eyes darted around the cabin. “The Swarm’s been shoved back into the lower three layers. The survivors there were using an environmental control to vent the air, level by level, then repressurize. They think within a week, between the Heutzin cure, starvation, and brute force, that the Aeolians will have a city of their own again. One that they’ll be sharing with Yatapek’s survivors.”

In orbit Ragamuffin ships clustered, a show of force. Every day more of them arrived. The League had pulled back. No one was interested in a full-scale space war, and the League could ill afford to lose all its ships.

They claimed to have been coming to offer aid.

“There are other cities the Ragamuffins are taking?” Claire said.

“Yes.” From orbit the Raga coordinated a careful action against the Aeolian cities. Any Aeolian cities with tethers to orbit saw them cut, the counterweights deorbited. “Anything in orbit’s mapped by control ships, anything capable of holding a human, destroyed. We have the high ground again.”

And of course, Heutzin’s cure, as it was being called—hopefully to
Amminapses’s annoyance—was spreading to counter the original infection.

“Our luck,” Pepper said, “is that this wasn’t released on a normal planet, with cities and air and roads and land. Here, with each city its own world, it slowed down, and once you have the high ground, it’s somewhat controllable.”

“Are you going down to be involved in the talks?” Claire asked.

The League had always been a threat, but not on this level. Now the talk was on about creating a counter-entity to the League, formalizing the process of getting Chilo defended, and turning the DMZ into something else.

So delegates with the authority to make things happen had arrived. Cousins to the people in Yatapek came from Aztlan on New Anegada and made their way down to Hulbach. From Capitol City in Nanagada more Ragamuffins arrived. Pipiltin from Yatapek’s few sister cities that swirled around the Great Storm joined as well. Though poor and low in population the Aeolians aboard the airships wanted to settle in these safe Azteca cities. Avatars from the Aeolian fleets flew down to Hulbach as well.

“No. The last thing you’ll ever see me do is get involved in that.”

Pepper had heard rumors of the various aliens within Hulbach secretly sending representatives of their own, without the Satrap’s knowledge, to join the conversation. All of them needed to unite against the League and pool their resources, they said.

The League had thought loosing the Swarm on Chilo would break the Ragamuffins and whoever survived on Chilo, and make the ready to be pulled into the greater human umbrella for an undivided front.

Instead, it had prompted something else.

The Ragamuffins had called it a commonwealth, but after the Nesaru and Gahe formally came to the table and asked for representation, one annoyed negotiator, not interested in having aliens at the table, wondered if it shouldn’t be called a
xenowealth
.

The term stuck.

The Xenowealth sprung into creation, born in the high-pressure muck of Chilo’s surface.

“Then what are you coming down here for?” Claire asked.

“Visiting someone.”

She pulled her knees up. “They thought I was insane to come back down. The Aeolians offered me citizenship in the Consensus.”

“You turned it down.”

“Amminapses offers extended life in exchange for a hundred years of service. I have one year left.”

“You could die tomorrow,” Pepper said.

“Big rewards take big gambles.” Claire let go of her knees. “My parents were owned by Gahe, content to parade behind glass for visitors. They were pets. They got fed, they were safe, they were happy. I wanted more. And since then, I got it. I’ve seen so much more than they could have imagined. I’ve seen the three suns of Midhaven set. The crumbling reservation walls of Astragalai. The Dawn Pillars, with suns peeking through the dust.”

“And what are you going to do when you get free? Other than act like a tourist and see more amazing sights throughout the worlds.”

“Undo the damage I may have done these past hundred years. Sometimes I’ve been released, standing in front of people whose lives are ruined. These hands have killed. I didn’t do it, but the blood has been left on them anyway. After that, maybe, I will be truly free. Judging by what I know, I will have two, maybe three hundred years of life after that to see the worlds, and everything else.”

Pepper nodded. “You think it will take a hundred years. I’ve found that redemption drags out longer, because there’s always someone else who needs help, some consequence of something you were involved in that keeps perpetuating.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “You’re one, too?”

“No. But I know blood is never a simple equation. You have to fix the things that cascade from the problems you cause, and sometimes, you cause even more problems doing that. I also know that once you make a compromise of the kind you made, other compromises come just as easily later on.”

The craft fell through the crust of Chilo’s surface down into Hulbach.

Katerina waited for him when the hatch opened. But Pepper had one more question. “Those worlds you’ve seen, what was the most recent one, before Hulbach?”

“Midhaven.”

Interesting, Pepper thought. Very interesting.

“Claire,” he leaned forward. “I would beg you to leave the Satrap. It cannot end well.”

It never did.

T
imas wasn’t sure if he wanted to see Pepper. It still felt like the man had condemned him back on Yatapek. Or at least tried to kill him. But here he stood in the small medical room. The hulking groundsuit Pepper inhabitated was now polished and buffed, gleaming in the cold hospital lights.

By the time he’d been saved, the suit had started to fail and he’d been gasping for air, about to pass out. But all that seemed worlds away, waiting to die inside the ruins of his old city.

So Timas said nothing at first, but took the carefully offered metal guantlet that Pepper still now called a hand, and shook it. “You survived in one piece,” Pepper said.

“So did you. Though people won’t stop talking about what you did.” Pepper had punctured the escape bubble with a sword to fall a hundred feet and land on the airbag of a ship filled with the Swarm. He’d taken it over to land on Aegae.

“You rode a dying city down to the ground,” Pepper said. “They’re talking about you as well. Trust me.”

Timas was embarrassed. “I was lucky.”

“That’s the spirit.” Pepper smiled. “We’re all lucky. Enjoy the gift of life, and love the moments that come next.”

“I will.”

“I wanted to give you my condolences, for your father.”

Timas glanced down and held himself together, gripping a pillow. “Thank you.” He didn’t want to face that right now. So far it had felt like Ollin had gone away on a long trip, and his absence wasn’t an absence, but a temporary hole. Like a blind spot.

“I wanted you to know, if you ever want it, you have a position with the Raga. You could work on a ship, see what worlds they see.”

“Thank you. I’ll consider it.” He didn’t tell Pepper he had made other plans.

Pepper nodded, and then he looked uncomfortable, not knowing
what else to say. “Well, I’ll be on my way. I’ve found some new business on the way down that has my attention.”

When he was gone, Katerina sat on the bed by his side. “Somehow, thinking about him just wandering around, looking for something to do without the Ragamuffins directing him, makes me nervous.”

Timas agreed. “It’s the age.”

“Age?”

“He’s like Van, with those creatures he made. Only Pepper’s project is us.”

Katerina shivered. “That’s just creepy.”

“So.” Timas struggled to sit up straight. “You said you need to talk to me.”

“I’m now speaking as an avatar of the Consensus, do you understand?”

Timas bit his lip. “Yes, I understand.”

“Your application has achieved sponsorship and a successful vote. You are now a citizen of the Consensus, with all the rights and protections that entails.” Katerina shook his hand, her face a frozen mask of formality, her words intoned like a judge’s.

Then she broke into a great big smile and hugged him. “Congratulations.”

Timas grinned back. “Thank you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She punched his shoulder.

“I wasn’t sure I would get in.” He’d filled out the paperwork, and since he didn’t want to fail in front of Katerina, had asked Itotia to take it to any Aeolian she could find.

His mom had kept herself busy, as if trying to work the memory of Ollin away. She’d even taken his spot hovering around the edge of the pipiltin, getting involved in the politics of the survivors, and the newly developing Xenowealth, as it was called.

“Are you sure you want this?” Itotia had asked.

“We need to be involved, and to understand them,” Timas said. “And I’m tired of Kat seeing things that I can’t, or talking about things she is learning as she reads them on the spot while talking to me.”

“But to become Aeolian . . .” Itotia shook her head. “A zombie . . .”

He had always thought the Aeolians were weak, rich, and foppish. But Katerina had been through all the same things he had, and faced them just as fiercely. “They face the same enemy we do: the League. Besides, we’re all foojies now, Mom, you and me, everyone from our city. Foojies no matter whether we go to our sister cities, or back to Aztlan on New Anegada. Or any new Aeolian city. And they’re not zombies; we’ve seen real zombies, I don’t think I can ever call the Aeolians that again.”

“But my own son, with a metal eye.”

“I’m told not everyone has to wear it. It’s something you do to let outsiders know you’re a citizen. Like wearing a badge, or something.”

Itotia had assented, but didn’t look thrilled.

Katerina leaned back, and got serious again, snatching Timas away from memories. “You are also aware, that as part of the Consensus, you have rights, but you also have responsibilities.”

Timas nodded, nervous. “Yes.”

“Your name has been drawn from a limited pool, an unfair civic assignment, but one deemed needed by vote. You are to be avatar to Hul-bach.”

“I’m not even a part of the Consensus yet,” Timas protested.

Katerina grabbed his hand. “I know. We’re just letting you know what’s in store. We’re going to get you wired up for citizenship tomorrow, that’s why you’re still in the medical center.”

“Oh.”

“But, since you can leave for now, do you want to go get something to eat together?” Katerina asked.

“Yes.” Timas felt like he could leap out of the bed, but she still had to help him. He had been badly burned by the inside of his white-hot suit, and the new skin regrown by Hulbach’s advanced medics here still felt stiff.