Sons of the Crystal Mind (Diamond Roads Book 1) (17 page)

24

I walk beside Harlan along a white corridor with a large oval window and pause to look out. A broad surface curves down away from me, moving past diamond walls so high I can’t see their tops.

        So the New Form Enterprise base is a mobile assembly. No wonder Centria couldn’t find it.

We pass enormous mezzanines jutting like shelves over an empty plain. The expanse down there is broken by a few massive but forlorn blocks, which perhaps indicate where something should have been grown but now never will be. There are no buildings or people visible, just unfinished architecture and eerie blue light. The view has a haunted quality born of emptiness and unseen horror.

We are in the Outer Spheres.

I wear my red and yellow jumpsuit again, giffed anew with armour intact. More comfortable and secure than anything I’ve ever worn it seems especially charged next to Harlan, who must recognise the outfit from when we visited Dodge69. Harlan has the same clothes on too. Perhaps he’s trying to tell me something.

Four men and two women all wearing orange jumpsuits jog out of a side corridor. I stop with a gasp. I have been trained to fear and attack anyone in that uniform but I’m too confused to move. The six people disappear down a corridor. I stare after them.

Harlan puts his arm around my shoulders and guides me into an elevator. As the doors close he takes his arm away and my shoulders tingle where he touched them. Faint pressure through my boots tells me we are going up. I look at Harlan, who is uncharacteristically quiet. For the first time since we met I sense tension in him, as if he is apprehensive.

“What does Jaeger want from me?” I ask.

“He’ll tell you. Just be honest. He’ll know otherwise.”

“Anything else?”

Harlan hesitates.

“Best you find out for yourself,” he says. “It’s easier that way.”

The elevator doors open and Jaeger Darwin is right there.

He wears an orange NFE jumpsuit with no insignia to differentiate him from his troops. A big man although not as big as Harlan, Jaeger nonetheless seems incredibly compact. It’s as if his musculature has been built and compressed, then built and compressed again, over and over until he hums with daunting strength. Only Keris has a similar effect but with her it is abstract, almost spiritual. Jaeger looks like a weapon. His intelligence glares from the coldest, hardest eyes I have ever seen.

He is still. He could be a statue but for those grey eyes that seem to take in every detail of me. I sense him work out my depths, like light in a shadowy chasm. It feels revelatory, even soothing, as if Jaeger knows more about me from one glance than I’ve learned in twenty-three years.

I imagine his voice, ruthless and frighteningly reasonable as he evaluates how long I can fight for, my optimum position in an engagement, ideal weaponry for a female my size, whether I would ever give up and if so when… His aura of absolutism, of finality, terrifies me but I already want to follow him.

“Charity,” he says.

Jaeger’s actual voice is quiet and cultured but not that different from how I imagined. It brims with violence. He extends a hand. Inspired rather than cowed I take it, relieved my palms are dry. Jaeger’s hand closes gently around mine with the quiet but awesome strength of the walls holding up Diamond City.

“Jaeger,” I say and smile. “I’ve heard… so very little about you.”

He smiles back. His teeth are even and efficient-looking although his thick chestnut hair seems slightly long for a soldier.

“Please come in,” he says.

I step into a large multi-levelled room full of Old World artefacts.

“Thank you Harlan,” Jaeger says.

The elevator doors close, leaving me alone with the leader of the New Form Enterprise. I resist the urge to look back. Jaeger gestures at a pair of wooden chairs by a floor-to-ceiling window onto the Outer Spheres. I cross the room and sit on the chair to the right. Jaeger arranges himself into a seated position opposite me. His movements are like choreography.

The chairs are slightly uncomfortable. They are Old World so won’t respond to the sitter’s physiology. I think Jaeger has got them because he doesn’t like to be too relaxed. The ornate, beautifully carved wood has a peculiar shiny surface that seems deep, as if I’m staring into the past. I look up. Jaeger’s intense gaze hasn’t left me.

“These chairs are lovely,” I say.

“Thank you,” he says. “May I offer you anything?”

“No, thanks, I’m fine.”

We look at each other for a moment.

“This must seem very strange,” he says.

“Yes. I’ve fought so many simulations against, well, you.”

“Are we what you expected?”

“I didn’t know what to expect.”

“We were just the enemy,” he says with a hint of humour.

“When you say it like that it seems silly.”

“We fought a war against Centria don’t forget.”

“Why?” I ask him.

“To get inside.”

“But you were inside weren’t you? Before? When you were their general?”

He looks out of the window.

“Do you know what a soldier is Charity?”

“A warrior,” I say.

“Partly. A soldier is an extension of another’s will: an amplification of their power. A soldier can’t really question that will, or he ceases to be a soldier. And yet I did question it. Am I therefore still a soldier?”

“No.”

Jaeger looks at me again. Despite his obvious power he is not intimidating.

“Correct. And that was intolerable Charity.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

I watch a subtle play of strange emotion flicker across his lean face.

“Yes,” he says, “you do don’t you?”

“What can I do for you Jaeger?”

“Talk to me,” he says. “Tell me about Centria.”

“I haven’t got any information about Security…”

“I know about Security. Tell me anything else, however random. How is it there? How does it
feel?
”

I pause, conflicted.

“You’re struggling,” Jaeger says, not unkindly. “I understand. I have found that you never really leave Centria, even when Centria leaves you.”

“My parents would have died for Centria,” I say, not so much evading the point as trying to work out what it is.

“Indeed,” Jaeger says.

“You know my parents?” I say.

“Both good soldiers. You’re very different from them.”

“They… Well they are my parents,” I say with the familiar sense of odd disloyalty. “I mean they brought me up. I don’t know who I am really though.”

“A changeling princess,” Jaeger says.

I flush. His interest emboldens me to ask the fundamental question.

“Jaeger… What is the Guidance?”

Crack!

For a second I think I’ve been shot with one of those old guns we train with in Centria and then I notice blood run down Jaeger’s arm. He has snapped the armrest off his chair; the broken strut has dug into his hand. He breathes heavily as if my words have winded him. His eyes are fearsome now and I gulp in fear; it’s like sitting opposite an exploding bomb. I should get away but I can’t move.

Jaeger looks down at the broken chair as if it’s a friend he has lost. He tries in vain to put the arm back.

“Can’t the Basis help?” I say nervously.

“No. This chair is Old World. The Basis can only manipulate objects it has created. Each molecule of everything it grows is marked with the Aerac ID of the person who giffed it. My chair, like any Old World object, has no such imprint. Without the Basis no one knows how to fix anything. We are helpless.”

He gets up, puts the chair arm down and grips his open wound. I wait for him to push his hand into the floor so the Basis can heal it. Instead he stares out of the window at the Outer Spheres, whose vacant crystalline structures are a moving pattern of bleak geometry far below.

“The Guidance,” he says almost to himself. “I haven’t heard that for a while. Who told you about it?”

“Ellery.”

Jaeger grunts. He notices blood drip through his fingers and puts the wounded side of his hand in his mouth. I’ve never seen anyone do that before and lean forward, fascinated. He notices and locks eyes with me. I hold his gaze.

“You should get that healed properly,” I say.

He doesn’t move. Presently, he takes his hand from his lips and I see the bleeding has stopped.

“Often,” he says, “I have to quickly decide whether to trust a person. Other lives depend on those decisions. I have always been good at it and over the years become much better. I want to trust you. Is that wise would you say?”

“Yes.”

“You seem important somehow, as if we’ve met before.”

“I would have remembered,” I say.

“What is it about you? Like you’re part of something…”

He shakes his head and for a moment seems undecided.

“The Guidance is me,” he says finally.

I am numb and astonished at the same time. A weird metallic taste creeps up my throat.

“You?” I whisper.

“Well, I’m part of it,” Jaeger says. “One of twelve people bred to be the absolute best at a specific job. Together we were meant to form the supreme government although that’s rather a quaint idea now.

“Each of us has a different ability. Together we possess all the skills needed to run anything, hence ‘the Guidance’. Obviously I’m the ultimate soldier. Ellery Quinn is the ultimate communicator, Gethen Karkarridan…”

Jaeger pauses as if unsure how to describe Gethen.

“Well, you’ve got to make money haven’t you?” he continues. “Gethen could sell us diamond if he wanted. And then of course you have the leader.”

“Keris.”

“Yes. I can command troops but Keris can lead everyone.”

Something in his voice…

“You and Keris?”

“I’ve loved her for over a hundred and seventy years,” Jaeger says.

It takes me a while to absorb his words.

“How old are you all?” I say.

“More than two centuries.”

“Do you use longevity patents?”

“Even we would struggle to afford those over that length of time. No, with us it’s natural. We were created before Diamond City was built to save a world that no longer exists. So instead we came down here and made the best of it.”

The incredible facts move in my mind like elemental forces. Jaeger watches, allowing me to take it in. I don’t feel obliged to comment or even react and something of this ease reminds me of how well I get on with Keris. As the second vital question forms I notice Jaeger looking expectant and almost guilty.

“Jaeger, are you and Keris my parents?”

His face trembles for the tiniest instant and is then still. He doesn’t speak; I suspect he is not able to. This moment is the longest of my life.

“No,” he says finally. “It’s not possible.”

“Why?”

“Our… creator decided it wouldn’t be ethical to allow the super race to breed and so ensured we can’t.”

There is a very long silence.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“No. I am. That I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

I relax back into disappointment.

“It’s okay,” I say although we both know it isn’t. “Is that why the Ruby War ended the way it did?”

“I didn’t think Keris herself would come at us. That was out of character. She knew I could never harm her.”

“Why did she do it?” I ask.

“Because there is something in Centria she cannot let me have.”

“What?”

“An unlimited supply of kilos.”

The structure of Diamond City is substantial enough to accommodate its own weight, the Basis and all the kilos but… unlimited?

“I don’t know how that would work,” I say.

“All you need to understand is that Centria controls far more than it should, which must change. If that supply is lost then eventually we will starve down here.”

We sit for a while as I consider.

“So the Guidance is you, Gethen, Ellery, Keris… Who are the other eight?” I say.

Jaeger looks troubled.

“In Centria?” he says. “The scientist, Sol Bassa.”

I know the name but I’ve never met him. Jaeger’s eyes narrow.

“What about outside Centria?” I ask.

I keep my voice bright and naïve but I doubt that will fool Jaeger.

“Louis Ruckingham, the artist. The others…”

He frowns again.  There is a long pause.  I take a deep breath.

“Mum said there was something wrong with Centria,” I say.

Jaeger leans forward.

“Wrong?” he says. “Wrong how?”

“She didn’t have time to say.”