The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation (15 page)

The light blinked again. One-two-three. Niko jumped.

A black wing caught his eye as she plummeted. No sound of alarm. No notice in the night. Damn, she was good.

Rix stepped the bike into gear and eased forward. He had practised the route and memorized priority targets. He smiled as his body relaxed into working mode, but kept his attention tightly narrowed. He followed her down.

“When do I get to fly?” he said as he pulled up beside her.

She tossed a package to him and continued bundling her wings into a tight roll.

“When you're old enough, cousin.”

Rix looked down at the package—navy blue uniforms wrapped in clear plastic, name tags, security laminates. He hated it when she called him cousin. They weren't really cousins. They were related by test tube only, and his interest in her went far beyond family ties. He watched the curve of her hip as she worked, her muscles flexing under the skintight black fabric. She was a catwoman, a midnight fantasy.

She noted his attention and stopped moving. He darted his eyes up to meet her gaze, feeling a flush of embarrassment, wondering if she might have guessed his thoughts.

Her shadowed face revealed no clue. She offered no comment, and after a moment she bent to strap her bundled wings to an aluminum frame.

“What did you find?” he asked, thankful for the sound of his voice.

“
T1
fiberoptic in the basement. Direct to the Beast. Couldn't ask for better.”

“No filters?”

She shook her head. “Not till the second floor hub. Any techie could hack it.” She slung her pack up over her shoulder and snapped a clasp above her breasts. “Let's roll, cousin.”

She jumped on the single seat behind him and pressed her pelvis into his back. He edged up to make room for her, but she curled both arms around his abdomen and held him close. He stepped the bike into gear and eased the clutch gently into the quiet night.

Zakariah walked of his own free will into the Alpha and Omega complex on the planet Babylon, far from home and stripped of all confidence. Below an immense umbrella of glass, the photonic phaser sat like a ponderous blue steel beast glinting with promise. The whirling dust of stars twinkled unsuspectingly beyond the canopy, and twin moons hovered above a craggy horizon. The air was still and showed a mist of cloud from waste heat vents around the perimeter. The concrete floor underneath hummed with power, with a dissonant vibration, the cannon itself a giant nozzle for vast forces below, a pistol atop a mountain of energy.

Zakariah stared up at the phaser like a man facing the ancient gallows of pre-civilization, numb with contrition yet dreading the end. The exchange tube on the snout of the weapon, where hyper-c photons of light would be split into both wave and particle in quantum paradox, looked like a bundle of fluorescent columns affixed to a slender silver core of metal, perhaps fifty feet long. The main trunnion was supported by huge metal stanchions that disappeared into the concrete without bolt or seam to unknowable anchors deep below. The ghost of Colin Macpherson looked on from every angle

A wire-cage elevator took Zakariah up several flights to a tiny cockpit that perched like a fruit basket on top of an elephant. He dismounted and climbed into the launch couch without protest. He touched his V-net plug and looked for an interface. He had been promised he would see Mia as soon as he completed his task.

Glass doors shuttered above him and sealed with a hiss of air as he pulled a V-net cable out of the console in front of him. He gave a thumbs-up signal to the technician outside, who replied in kind and rode the elevator back down to the ground.

“No delay to destiny,” he said as he jacked in.

Zakariah Davis stood alone in a cold grey room wearing the well-preserved body of a female white Caucasian from Earth, his eighty-seven-year-old wetware twin.

Can you hear me, Helena?

Yes
, came the faint reply in the back of his mind, filtered and protected by anti-surge hardware and anti-viral software.

So they've got you working now, too?

Apparently I've run up a large debt to Soul Savers Corporation. I'm working it off in trade. Colin Macpherson owns the company.

They call him the Architect.

I can see why. He controls everything.

I tried to warn you.

Zak, if I had known it would lead to this . . .

Never mind, Helena. It's the Source calling us. I see that now. You sure you don't want to come along? For old time's sake?

You hardly need me getting in your way again.

I could use the moral support.

I'll be right here, Zak. If anything goes wrong, I'll pull the plug.

A window of light opened up in the grey wall before Zakariah. A pattern of randomly shifting colours danced.

“Portal's up,” he said, aloud for the record, and placed his hand against it. “No access.”

We're at ninety percent
, Helena told him,
cranking it up
.

Zakariah stalked his plain grey room, pushing on the walls around him, itching to run, to fulfill his final mission. He remembered his first play for access time up Prime, an unknown rookie taking fledgling steps with big corporate interests. He had hacked a Korean test-market version of a new database driver and sold it to a competitor days before the North American release date. Then, after the competitor responded by incorporating portions into their own development program, Zakariah had fast-tracked and sold the whole package back to the Koreans and the Japanese consortium that had licensed the original research, thereby giving everybody the standardized protocol they really wanted and earning a backdoor into three multinational corporations and a nasty pile of loot.

“You can't go up Prime without an angle,” Jimmy had told him a hundred times in preparation. “The V-net eats hackers for breakfast and sends them back with their fingers cut off.” The expression seemed archaic now that retinal print technology had replaced traditional fingerprint records, but the sentiment was timeless.

What would Jimmy say if he found Zakariah now, crashing Paradise without an invitation?

A deep explosion sounded as the subatomic phaser cannon reached sonic thresholds. The grey walls shimmered and swayed slightly. He reached for the window. His hand went inside. “I have access,” he said.

Wait!
Helena screamed above the chaos of background noise.
We're extending the particle stream . . . Slowly . . . Slowly . . . Okay, jump.

Zakariah dove through the window into the blinding light of a burning sun. He shielded his eyes, but the light shone through his fingers, through his eyelids, into his brain, revealing all. He inched his way forward, sensing no landmarks, no distance, nothing but blinding, unyielding light in a shimmering torrent.

Can you hear me, Helena?
he asked.
The light is overwhelming. I have no contact.

He felt no oscillation, no source code at all. He sensed no deep harmonics, no pulse on which to build compatibility. There could be no communication here, no commerce with such pure and violent resplendence.

“Is anyone out there?” he asked. “I only have a few seconds.”

As he said the words, time stopped. He recognized it instantly. His pulse stopped beating. His respiration quit. The light froze around him in a crystalline magnificence that was absolutely still and quiet. He stood inside a scintillant luminosity, a cut-crystal vase with a million gleaming facets. A peaceful tranquillity flooded through him, a feeling that he had always been in this place, that he was coming home after a long absence.

“I'm dead,” he whispered, though he felt no ill effects.

As he studied the silent majesty before him, he began to notice subtle variations in the brilliance, a vague shift of intensity that might be the beginning of a shadow here or there. He narrowed his attention to this minutia of movement, zooming in on every fine detail. Finally, stooping down, he noticed a toe, a bit of skin and bone, a toenail.

“Contact,” he said, and his voice sounded foreign, ridiculous, an impure dissonance in a symphony of excellence.

The toe became a foot after an age or longer, a burning appendage like molten metal on a background of white light, a human foot.

Zakariah felt peaceful, superconscious, with the quick mental agility of infinite access. His physical state transcended emotion with a serene knowledge of joy. This was the way things always were, the way they should always be.

“Who are you?” a Voice sounded from above.

Zakariah fell back in surprise, slowly, gently, and waited for his shoulders to hit the floor. They didn't, and he kept falling, somersaulting backwards, head over heels into the glorious light around him. Without a reference point, he couldn't stop moving. He twisted but found no horizon. He reached but found no handhold, no ladder, no signpost. Nothing but bright white perfection everywhere he looked.

A hand reached out and grabbed his shoulder, and he realized with a start that he hadn't been falling at all. He had been standing completely still in the blinding white stillness of time.

“Why have you come?” the Voice said, and Zakariah felt the meaning on his face like a physical vibration. The sound was light and the light was word, a modulated spectrum of varying intensities that expressed language. The strong hand that held him appeared translucent, shiny, like golden glass. It was as deep as space itself; it had constellations and supernovas glittering inside it like jewels.

An alien arm began to take shape as Zakariah's eyes continued to miraculously adapt. The arm was as long as creation, as long as time standing on end and suns burning to cinders. Zakariah followed the arm to the shoulder, past the life and death of a thousand worlds, and tried to imagine where the face should be. He peered intensely in that direction, looking for simple communication in the hush of heaven.

“Are you the Source?”

“Did you come to buy my blood?” the Voice replied. “What would you offer in return?”

Eyes of fire appeared suddenly, angry orange eyes, and Zakariah cried out in anguish and melted down, cringing, crumpling, to fall at burning feet. He disappeared into himself like a dustmote swirling into a grey funnel. His ego shattered and dispersed, leaving him naked and alone and insignificant on the edge of eternity.

“I'm sorry . . . sorry,” he whimpered. He had to sound warning. He had to tell Macpherson, the Overlords, the World Council, old Jimmy. He wondered with panic what allegiance he might call his own.

“Peace,” the Voice said, as once again the alien hand stretched out to rest on Zakariah.

Peace did come with the word, like a soft blanket of comfort, and Zakariah drifted, content at last.

“This kingdom is not compatible with your own,” the alien said. “Look at your hands and see.”

Zakariah opened his clenched palms and saw that his whole body had become a ghost, ethereal, invisible. He did not exist here; he had no substance, no shadow. Only his veins showed solid, gleaming with the quickened bloodlight of the virus.

A dimension faster than light, a world beyond space and time.

The fiery eyes were framed now with a face, a sad face that had seen a thousand hearts break and more, that had seen wise men die and martyred souls ground underfoot.

“You are a king among thieves,” the Voice pronounced in final judgment, “and unworthy to enter.”

The simple statement brought a curse upon humanity like a physical blow. Zakariah was the chosen representative, the first contact. What excuse could he offer for the sins of all mankind, what penalty could he pay for a race of criminals from the womb?

Overcome with a flood of conviction, Zakariah hunched his shoulders and cried. He sobbed without solace, across all time, across all space, for all humans. He wept for a people destined for extinction. In a world of light, there could be no darkness. Ever.

Helena watched the glass umbrella above the launch stadium melt and drop like rain, as the exchange tubes on the phaser burned cherry red with incandescence. A brilliant diamond of white fire glowed at the business tip, where a rip in the space-time fabric was held a few molecules apart, and light of all spectrums shot out like laser beams glinting off the facets of a revolving jewel. A halo of condensation formed around it like a smoky wreath. A high-pitched whine like an angel screaming cut through the air like a razor, vibrating her to the bone. The photonic cannon glowed with a backwash of heat from the wormhole, the equipment around it scorched and melting. Steam spiralled up from the floor like devils dancing in a burning house.

In the control booth beside her, behind bulletproof blastglass, Colin5 manned his recording apparatus and looked out over a smoking wasteland.

“Fifteen more seconds,” he said evenly. “Pull him back now if you are able, Helena. Gamma rays are reaching a critical level.”

“I've lost him in the brightness,” she cried from under her neural helmet. “It's like the heart of a sun. I can't search for him. The alien will kill us all. His eyes are on fire!”

“Three . . . two . . . one . . . Power out,” Colin5 intoned steadily. A sonic boom sounded that rattled the blastglass and shook them like rag dolls. The fiery diamond of light winked out and the phaser cannon stood silent, steaming hellishly in the frozen air. A soft snow began to fall as clouds of moisture began their slow return to the surface.

“Systems check,” he directed. “All terminals lock down and report.” A series of terse replies echoed among the small team of harried technicians. One by one, green lights flashed on their boards and backup disks slipped into shielded containers.

Colin5 smiled finally and typed in a security clearance. A team of firefighters stormed the stadium floor and began foaming every flame with white powder. He keyed an access code and thumbed on a microphone. “The wormhole is closed, Father. We may safely resume online activity.”