The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (17 page)

“We will not allow this infestation to grow,” Witchlan said, “or to continue even in diminished form. We will wipe out all trace of this biological weapon with our botanical one.

“You may visit the Military Hardware Division for holsters or to engage in target practice, but you are to keep the weapons with you at all times.”

“Do they come in different sizes?” Raus said, holding the weapon between two fingers which made it appear tiny.

“We’ll see what we can do for you, Mr. Kapler.

“You are all to work with the Palace Planning and Infrastructure Division, heading up select sweep teams. I will admit that this work is beneath you, but that fact alone does not exempt you from it. When finished here, report to the Planning and Infrastructure Division for your assignments.”

“Now, as for the Palace, we are making preparations to reengage standard propulsion for passing through this floating junkyard. For all forward-lying obstacles, Tether Launch bays have been stocked with explosive payloads. However, the Astrophysics Division has discovered what may prove to be two separate fleets of sizable vessels. We have encountered such in the past, but not on this scale while this vulnerable. With the Stitch Drive initiated, the Palace would prove to be an impossible target, but we cannot yet engage the Stitch Drive and so are instead a rather
easy
target.

“We see tedium in the foreseeable future, picking through the scrap in our path, but you are all to remain alert and ready should those fleets seek contact with us.

“That is all.”

The Shades received their assignments at the Palace Planning and Infrastructure Division. As they were separating with their respective teams, Hilene made eye contact with Jav, pressed her lips together in a smile, and headed off for the Division jump deck. He hated himself just then. What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he bring himself to open up to her after all this time? He was struck by her tenacity and the obvious depth of her feelings, which was impressive, really, considering his essentially cold response to her. He snorted, becoming aware of a sick irony: he was moved by her efforts, but strangely, not by
her
. He liked her. He found her attractive. There was nothing that
should
prevent them from being together, and yet. . . He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

“We’ll be heading towards levels forty through sixty of quadrant two, sir,” the lead PPID operative of Jav’s team said.

Jav cleared his head, nodded, and went Dark. “Let’s go.”

The breaches in quadrants two and four had been sealed with Vine fiber at the Emperor’s direction. There would still be clean-up to do later, but the priorities right now were to eliminate the glass pig infestation and to clear away the severed struts so they would no longer pose a threat. The latter operation was being handled right now by precision delivery of explosives via Tether Launch.

Jav and his team boarded the Division jump deck, which was larger than most personnel decks and hard-routed to similar service decks located throughout the Palace. They emerged from the service deck into dark clutter. Everyone drew his fan gun at once, in a synchronized motion that made Jav raise his eyebrows in surprise. He self-consciously pulled his own fan gun from the cross draw holster at his left hip. He held the weapon up and examined it.

A face flashed like an exploding sun before his mind’s eye and he bent at the lurch he felt in his stomach, having to stop and rest his hands on his knees. He thought he might be sick right there.

“Are you okay, sir?” the PPID lead asked.

Jav didn’t respond right away. That face. . . It was. . . Jennifer. Jennifer Gordon. He recalled her face clearly now, how beautiful she’d been, how perfect. He remembered how though she’d promised herself to another, she had given herself to him, wholly and without reservation.

Still tottering on the edge of nausea, he smiled unseen beneath his bone helmet. He raised the gun with a shaking hand to regard it once more. Another image burst across the screen of his mind, of Jennifer being being riddled with ragged red holes, of being shot with a. . . with a fan gun.

He saw her clutch at her breast as blood pumped between her fingers. He heard her breath gurgle wetly as more blood spilled over her lips and moved in visible waves down her chin, down her graceful neck, to mingle with the blood already covering her chest. But she wasn’t dead. No, the fan gun hadn’t killed her. Something else had.
Someone
else had. Jav couldn’t get his head around just who this was, but even the vague recollection filled him with a fury he hadn’t known for over a hundred years.

Somehow he knew that, though justified, his fury was at least partially misdirected. This insight, born of time’s passing, gave him pause, and he was torn. Part of him wanted to crush the fan gun between his palms, to lash out and kill every man he could lay his hands on as if somehow this might lessen the impact of Jennifer’s death or perhaps make up for it in some primal, though ultimately false, way. Another part of him him longed for a more complete recollection of Jennifer, as if this would work towards filling the emptiness he’d felt for so long. He half-felt that if he could remember enough, he could simply retreat into his memory of a time when Jennifer was alive and unthreatened and they were happy together. He knew that she and Mai Pardine were the same in their way, echoes, just as Anis Lausden had been. Christ! Anis Lausden. He’d forgotten all about her. How could he forget about her?

He looked at the gun a third time, wondering if it was responsible for teasing out his memories or if something else were to blame. Certainly the gun was helping, and he didn’t want to lie to himself, but it almost felt as if something were approaching—so slowly that he couldn’t be sure the sensation was real—and beginning to fill him with what he could only identify as hope, though that of a prickly sort.

And anyway, who or what was Christ?

He stood straight, apologized to the PPID operative, and they continued on with their assignment.

With the Emperor’s attention no longer occupied with the sealing of the Palace, he could focus on the glass pigs. Simple knowledge of their presence offered a huge advantage in the fight against them, since he could now sift through all the millions of sensations occurring throughout the Palace, isolate potential nests, and direct teams to exterminate them. The fan guns continued to prove their worth to this end over the next several hours.

Word over the public address system echoed through the Palace halls, confirming the elimination of the last of the glass pigs. Along with that announcement was a call for Shades to assemble in the war room.

When all were present, Witchlan nodded his head enthusiastically. “We are clean once again. Our thanks to you and the teams you led. Other matters may be of continued concern, however.

“One of the fleets we’ve been tracking has made steady progress. Long range scans from the Astrophysics Division have provided us with some images.”

On screens throughout the war room, images of ships appeared. These all shared the same basic design: long, roughly cylindrical, obviously man-made and man-occupied, averaging about a thousand meters in length.

Shocked into ignoring etiquette, Jav stood up, and moved to a screen to scrutinize one of the vessels.

“Twice in one day, Mr. Holson?” Witchlan said, cocking his head questioningly. “I do believe you’re turning deja vu into a skill rather than an affliction.”

“It’s the Kalnia,” Jav said, turning to face Witchlan.

“The Kalnia?”

“While I was still learning the Eighteen Heavenly Claws, after training with Kimbal Furst, there was an accident. On my return to Planet 1287, the jump ship slipped from the warp field.”

“We remember. . .”

“I crashed into a ship—the Kalnia—that looked exactly like this ship here, like
all
these ships.”

“Hmm,” Witchlan said. “What were their armaments like?”

“I know they were interested in the jump ship’s shields and wanted to incorporate that technology into their own. I don’t know about their ship to ship capabilities, but,” Jav said, unconsciously touching his chest, “they’ve got the most powerful hand weapons I’ve come across. I think they were called Farmingtons.”

“Farmingtons?” Witchlan said. “They certainly don’t
sound
dangerous. “Energy discharge?”

Jav nodded.

“They are coming too close for comfort,” Witchlan continued. “To compound this worry, the other fleet appears to be approaching from the exact opposite direction. Details on
these
ships are still sketchy, but they appear to be of an altogether different design sensibility. All appear to be spheres and saucers of a mass on par with the ships of the closer fleet.

“For now, we will employ Tether Launch bombs to dissuade further approach. You are all to remain on high alert.

“That is all.”

Salton Stoakes was on the cusp of having a bad day. Whenever he had no specific assignment, and when he wasn’t spending the night with one of his many lady friends, he allowed himself to wake naturally from sleep in his own bed. This morning would rob him of that simple pleasure, however.

Of a sudden, his quarters, isolated from the rest of the Palace, were ripped asunder and half opened to the void of space. He was not in the habit of keeping much in the way of personal belongings here at the Palace—preferring his own retirement home on Planet 1026 for such purposes—but what little he had acquired over his two hundred years of reinstated service was whisked away in a cacophonous instant.

Even through the noise and the chaos, his mind worked swiftly and he was able to save the one item, not really his, that required saving. An alcove in the wall at the head of his bed held the Yellow Diamond Spectacles and these he managed to snatch and retain.

Metal tore through the skin of the Vine and into his room, filling it where empty space did not prevail. He would have been cut into six pieces if he hadn’t gone Dark reflexively. The thick sheets that continued to push into the Palace, squealed, buckled, and ruptured, pushing far past his meager living space. Some of the incoming steel was superheated under the immense pressures at work, melting into splashing pools of white hot slag. Oxygen gushed, threatening to cast him out, and all he could do was find something relatively stable to hold on to. He snaked his Dark arms through seams in the interior wall, around the half-meter-in-diameter support beam he knew he’d find there. He clung to this, thanking whatever providence had decided the form of his Darkened state. If he’d been any more solid, he’d have been split, ripped, gouged, burned, and broken several times over. So far, Stoakes himself had been proof against this calamity, but the wall and the support beam buckled and broke, sending him hurtling through a dark storm of debris, and headlong into unconsciousness.

Stoakes awoke with a start. Despite this, it took some time to clear his muzzy head and for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He was still Dark, and drifting through the substantially weakened artificial gravity. Thankfully he hadn’t reverted to normal unconsciously. If he had, he’d surely be dead.

Though everything was settled now, he had no idea where he was or how far removed he was from what had been his quarters. He was fairly certain he’d been drawn into the object that had collided with the Vine. Metal creaked ominously, strained beyond purpose and design, threatening to snap at any moment.

He cursed audibly. Though communication between Artifacts was possible up to a range of two kilometers, Stoakes was under strict orders not to reveal himself to any of the current Shades. Communication with the Emperor or Witchlan, his avatar, in this way was not possible, which Stoakes had always thought strange. Usually, he was grateful for the privacy this disconnect granted him, but the crash had cut him off. He had no fear of dying, but being left behind, stranded, that was something else.

He took a moment to calm down. Obviously the damage done was great. The Palace wouldn’t be picking up and reengaging the Stitch Drive for some time. First, whatever had penetrated the Palace would have to be sheared away; the breaches would have to be sealed. All of this would take time. The structure was manmade—of this there could be no doubt—and may require investigation, which could mean even more time.

He wasn’t sure which way to go. He could feel the tenuous pull of artificial gravity from two different directions and didn’t know which of these originated from the Palace. There was no sign of Vine fiber anywhere to offer him a clue, either. There was nothing to do but choose one direction over the other. He wasted little time in doing this and set off on his way.

From where he was, the going in either direction appeared to be easy at first, but he quickly ran into severe structural damage that forced him to test several points of entry before finding one that allowed progress. He couldn’t remember ever moving through such a cramped environment for so long. He made his living passing through the impassable, but this usually meant, at most, several meters at a time, and even then these ways often opened into crawl spaces large enough to accommodate him physically for part of the way. What he passed through now was like a contiguous crack through hundreds of meters that thankfully had not yet met with a dead end. He was starting to get concerned, though. He’d never been claustrophobic, and in spite of the fact that he wasn’t actually breathing or in need of oxygen while Dark, he imagined that he was becoming short of breath just the same.

After several minutes more, dim light and palpable warmth were detectable ahead and spurred him forward at increased speed. He emerged into a space that, though far less confining, felt rather like a womb. The irony was not entirely lost on him. He fell to his hands and knees on the floor, which was soft and yielding, and panted with purely psychological relief. He flipped around to lie on his back and stared up at the strange ceiling, bulbous, pulsing, and somehow alive. The floor shifted and his Dark form slipped between to the true floor.